In The Time Of The 1960s Ebb Tide-The Patty Hearst Case And The Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA)

In The Time Of The 1960s Ebb Tide-The Patty Hearst Case And The Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA)  

Link to hear an NPR Terry Gross interview with the author of a book on the subject of 1970s Patty Hearst case and the fate of the Symbonise Liberation Army

http://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488373982/whose-side-was-she-on-american-heiress-revisits-patty-hearst-s-kidnapping

By Frank Jackman

It is funny what you will see or hear that will provide a subject for comment. Mostly these days I find myself writing about the fate of the segment of the ever decreasing baby-boomer generation that had been driven by idealism, self-sacrifice and a bit of hubris thrown in to try and smite down the monster known then and now as the American government and its addiction to endless wars and endless waste of resources on programs other than social programs that might help some folks out. That fate had, and has, not been kind to those of us who are still standing and still tilting at windmills against the monster. We lost, lost badly, when you consider that we have been fighting a long forty plus years of rearguard action against the assorted night-takers who we have run up against since that time. 

The stuff that I have been writing about though had generally been about how far removed a lot of the generation that I came of age with, the so-called generation of ’68, a significant year in the chronology of the times, from that old youthful fervor, how they have either dropped away from political struggle or have retired to the laptop and other technological wonders to give them all. They have abandoned the streets, the streets where you sometimes have to be to fight the good fight. I have also chronicled some of the efforts of my old comrades and street politicians like Josh Breslin, Sam Lowell, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris who are still punching away, although in ways that they would have never assumed back in the day.

Today though I don’t want to discuss personal memoirs but want to step back a little to the ebbtide, the early 1970s, to the time when we more or less were caught up in the counter-offensive started by the American government trying to take back the offensive after the long losing war in Vietnam burned a lot of bridges for a lot of people who could not go back to the old ways that they had been expected to do coming out of the 1960s high schools and colleges. As the Vietnam War ground on and domestic minorities were still being ground down despite the endless promises of the civil rights movement earlier in the decade the more radical, one might even say revolutionary elements of the “movement” began to chaff under the idea that all one could do was continue to march and continue to seek redress of grievance from the government, put pressure on public officials to do the right thing (whether they gave a fuck or not)     

Of course a generation whose only apparent progressive veneer was the Democratic Party, the party of many of their parents really who grew up in the hard-bitten 1930s Great Depression and slogged through World War II, their fight against fascism as they saw it and whose hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no access to something like a labor party or viable communist party to attach their loyalties when those very Democrats were ankle, no let’s take an expression from folksinger’s song, were waist-deep in the Big Muddy called Vietnam and other repressive policies at home. So whole layers of that radicalized milieu began drifting in many different direction-some to the dope fields, some to “music is the revolution,” some, some city kids who wouldn’t know a turnip from a tomato, to the land, some out of politics in general taking shelter from the storm. That is the incomplete list of those who gave up the struggle against the monster-called a truce- just leave me, us, alone. The group I want to talk about today though were the mostly young people who stayed with radical opposition to the government but had righteous given up as a lost cause begging establishment politicians to do the right thing-had given up trying to “hold their feet to the fire.” They kept fighting but in the end lost their way, we lost our way.         

A great dividing line is that 1968 that I have for convenience given the name for the generation who continued the fight against great odds. The debacle of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a city presided over by a Democrat, was a keystone in the turn away from electoral politics as many saw how raw the workings of a government that thought it was under threat reacted to what were at worse some silly pranks. The organizational component of that understanding came at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention in 1969 where a couple of radical factions (turn to the working class and massive actions and the fashionable post-Cuban revolution guerilla warfare factions far removed from poll booths) brought almost decisively from tradition pressure politics. Some, maybe some of the best if misguided elements wound up under the various banners of the Weathermen in their struggle to build a second front, a military front, in support of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. You can look up their various actions some of them dangerous and some maybe criminal but guided by an overwhelming desire to stop the damn war and other governmental policies. Whatever their shortfalls in policy, and despite their substituting themselves, sometimes heroically, for decisive mass action they had come out of the left, were known quantities, had names on the left and as long as they were directing their actions against military-industrial targets were worthy of political and legal defense. (Unfortunately a lot of the left-the “holding their feet to the fire” left did not defend the groups that morphed into what would turn into the Weather Underground).              

With the decisive defeat of the street left on May Day in Washington after taking massive arrests trying to shut down the government if it would not shut down the Vietnam War and the demobilization of American troops from that benighted country the radical left, hell, anybody, who wanted to continue to struggle got waylaid. Moreover out on the hinterlands, out in little unknown collectives, and who knows what other kinds of formations people, isolated people left adrift after the great social movements of the 1960s had run their courses began to get weird. And that is where this discussion is leading. What do you do about groups that had no history, had unstable and unknown leaderships, had frankly odd-ball programs and demands. Were they also to be defended under the same umbrella that one covered the various SDS factions with, the Weather Underground? That was a question that the diminishing organized left (and various independent radicals) had to contend with. I know the organizations I was close to had many arguments about whether to support this thing called the Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA) that gained widespread notoriety with its kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Most of us, and I was one, did not support the actions of this organizations as acts against the American imperial state. Angela Davis and Ruchell McGee yes. SLA no. Yeah, I know sometimes politics gets weird, gets you in some strange situations but there you have it for what it is worth. Enough said.