Links for October

Terrorists, War, Whales, and Books

I’m stretched thin this month, so this edition of links series will be briefer than usual. Note: I slightly edited this from the emailed version to correct a typo and add some Twitter screenshots.

Days of Rage

My students in the collective violence course recently covered the radical terrorist groups of the 1970s. The required reading was Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, which I’ve already covered on Bullfish Hole (Part I here, Part II here).

Unlike some of the other events we cover (like the Springfield Race Riot of 1908) this stuff is from the time of television, and I was interested to find some contemporary news reports, interviews, and communiques available on Youtube.

For instance, this video on Weather Underground’s Fall Offensive gives us a communique calling for war against the pigs, an interview with Weatherman Bernadine Dohrn’s sister (who approvingly describes big sis is “far out”), and a discussion of the call for new regulations on the sale of dynamite.

This one has a communique from the Patty Hearst boasting of the Symbionese Liberation Army armed bank robbery and denouncing her former fiancé as one of the enemy pigs.

Here’s ABC News coverage of the fatal siege of the SLA in 1974.

And here’s some footage of the aftermath of the Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York in 1975. The Wall Street restaurant was blown up by Puerto Rican Marxist group FALN, killing four.

In terms of fatalities, these radicals were small potatoes compared to the big race riots of earlier decades or the terrorism and rampage killings of later ones. But the scale of the radical ecosystem, its support in legitimate circles, and the sheer wild strangeness of these groups — from revolutionary ambitions to drug-fueled orgies — makes them fascinating.