We knew in our bones that the carpet bombing of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam was pure and simple genocide. We knew My Lai was not an isolated incident. For people of my generation, it went like this: if the cold-blooded murder of innocents at My Lai was how the United States waged the war in Vietnam - in which, let’s not forget, the likes of me were expected to serve - then, forgive me, but Mao looked good. It has been said, of Germans suffering the hyperinflation of the Weimar period that if a loaf of bread cost a billion marks in the morning and two million in the afternoon then even the nonsense spouted by such a schmuck as Hitler might help explain things. What gives the nuttiness essential context, though, is that city after city in the United States was going up in flames that leader after leader with any genuine authority was being murdered (JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm) and above all, that the war in Vietnam was being waged. Nutty, huh? Completely and absolutely nutty, for sure. Nor, thinking back, is it easy to imagine that members of Weatherman, no doubt the best known and most documented of the groups covered in this book, would adopt the Maoist practice of “criticism/self-criticism, essentially a marathon all-night interrogation in which members were accused of very conceivable human weakness.” The goal of grueling crit/self crit was to eradicate individuality, so as to create soldiers of a Red Army, who would be to Amerika what the NLF and the Viet Cong were to the war in Vietnam. But it’s also possible to read the tale told in Days of Rage differently and entertain the notion, however fleetingly, that we, the rest of us, might be described as SLA lite. It occurred to many that the SLA was everything nutty about the rest of us distilled into a single group, as in the SLA was crazy, we were not. True, even back then, that slogan struck many people as a mite peculiar.

That, in case you’ve forgotten, was the slogan of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), notorious for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It’s not easy, for those who weren’t there and perhaps even for many, like me, who were, to think yourself back to a time when slogans like “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!” made any sense whatsoever. How can you act sanely when your country is brazenly committing genocide? Many of us didn’t.ĭays of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the First Age of Terror by Bryan Burrough.

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough