INTRODUCTION
The so-called Symbionese Liberation Army rose into world renown on the basis of two crimes. In the communities which surround San Francisco Bay, neither of the crimes was very atrocious, or even very uncommon. The region manages to accept many hundreds of murders every year, plus tens of thousands of rapes, mutilations, beatings, armed robberies, and non-fatal knifings and shootings. Moreover, the characteristic crime of violence in the Bay Area is social, or racial, in that it typically involves a Black as the criminal and a white as the victim. Unless the details are particularly scabrous, such crimes are given only a few column-inches in back pages of newspapers, and not even reported on the electronic news media. Mere murder is not news.
When the crime is especially appalling, and gets wider notice, it commands headlines for only a few days. Typical instances of this heavy but brief notoriety were grouped all around the crimes that made the Symbionese Liberation Army a name to conjure with. Thus on the evening of January 28, four whites were shot down on San Francisco streets in a coordinated symbolic act by four young blacks; in the night of Janury 30, three whites were slashed to death by a young Black already under sentence for crimes of violence; on the afternoon of February 7, two young career policemen were murdered by a Black gunman in an Oakland school building. Not one of these killings enjoyed more than a few days of press coverage; not one was regarded as philosophically or socially significant. The fact that murder, even socially adjusted murder, is among the Bay Area norms, gives special interest to the marvellous success of the SLA in getting and keeping its audience. Never before has so little crime bought so much fame.
The triumph of the Symbionese in this respect developed from a set of isolated potentials cleverly put together by SLA theoreticians, and thoroughly recorded in their letters and other documents. In these writings the SLA provided something for every appetite. In killing the loved and admired Black educator, Marcus Foster, and killing him on the maxim that he was a traitor
to his race, they elicited not only horror, but widespread discussion and challenge. In kidnapping Patricia Hearst, a pretty young heiress, and holding her hostage in some unimaginably secret headquarters, they added responses of sex, sentiment, and class, to those of caste and race. These crimes alone, once admitted or claimed, would have brought them into the limelight for a week or two, especially in the excitable communities around the Bay. But by their literary programs the SLA writers carried their renown much farther. Delivered one by one, carefully, to the media, the SLA documents forced the constitutional and philosophical identity of the SLA into the consciousness of thoughtful people, and successfully presented the SLA soldiers as friends and benefactors to thousands or tens of thousands of such Bay Area people as manage to believe that good things can be had for nothing.
Here as elsewhere, the SLA got much result from little input. Even if the Hearst food program had proceeded at the grandiose level in which the SLA first envisaged it, the costs it would have involved would not have equalled the sums spent in a single day for the regular social and welfare operations in California. But the food program completed the SLA publicity program, adding the curiosity and admiration of people who could be reached by no other means. If earlier deeds and words had earned the attention of intellectuals, sensation-hunters, and responsible citizens, the new deed with free food added the attention of the dispirited, calloused, and cynical. Thus the whole society, from top to bottom, was drawn in.
The catholic appeal of the SLA, projected through its writings as well as its deeds, grew out of the catholic make-up and broad literary experience of its personnel. Two highly volatile elements joined in its creation. One of these consisted of young or youngish social reformers, the children of prosperous middle-class families, students or graduates of good universities, and veterans of heavy talk and moderate action in the late 1960's, the golden age of youthful militancy. They had enjoyed wide publicity and wide acceptance as members of the anti-Vietnam movement, and afterwards gone off into clusters and constellations of lesser movements, for love, for greening, for mild drugs, for price-control and rent-control, for the head-counting kinds of equality, for acceptance of homosexuals, hiring of women, and so on. Very importantly, they had gone into theories of law and penology, and reached the conclusion that every prisoner in every jail was a victim of society rather than an enemy of it. As their documents show, they thought of all prisoners as political prisoners, referred to the prisons of California as concentration camps, and described all police as political police. For some or most. of them, the notion of reform was bedded intimately with the notion of violent action. Their early thoughts in the direction of prisons consequently became thoughts about helping prisoners to escape.
The other salient faction in the SLA is even more definable. Its nucleus was formed by two Black men, both scions of self-respecting Black families, both bright and literate, both criminals with long records, both escapees from the California prison system. Through them a few other Blacks, including Black women, were attracted to the movement. Though not the originators of the SLA, these Black men and criminals, with their better experience of real violence and terror, were arbitrarily denominated its leaders. Eventually their dominance in the making of SLA documents brought to these a language and philosophy especially directed towards Black have-nots, and it was to Blacks and Black organizations that they mainly looked as their supporters and allies. To the organization, these men brought a new simplicity, narrowness, and one-sidedness of image and idea. Text prepared by them often reads parallel to the literature of Black-oriented consciousness groups, Black Prisoner clubs, and race-hating school classes in such subjects as Black Pride and Black Identity.
Both the white collegians and ex-collegians and the Black criminals had been supported all their lives at the expense of society, and were not workers in any Marxist or Maoist sense. In honesty, the SLA made scarcely any claim to represent the workers, but only "the people", "the poor", and other groups defined only by a putative victimization. Here was developed an early weakness. As a California organization, the SLA was obliged to make an appeal to Spanish-Americans as well. But in California, just as in the Latin nations, Spanish-American militancy has been keyed to real working-class concerns. As represented by the Venceremos of California and other western states, radical Chicanos cleave to the classic Socialist and Syndicalist patterns of European tradition, and demand tight goals and reasonable tactics. The dream-ridden SLA appeal to this important minority was consequently hopeless from the first.
The clientele of the SLA was expanded beyond Blacks and Chicanos by means of umbrella clauses meant to cover every minority or pseudo-minority which has captured public attention in recent years. The intimacy between the interests of the SLA and the interests of the mass media is well demonstrated by this paralleling of clients. As summed up in Screed 4, given below, SLA clients and potential allies include Asian, Black, Brown, Indian, White, Women, Gray, and Gay, the last two terms signifying the old and the homosexual. In the food program originally envisaged by the SLA, and described by them in Screed 15 and other documents, food recipients would include all people who could show "welfare cards, social security pension cards, medical cards, food stamp cards, disabled veteran cards, parole or probation papers, and jail or bail release papers. Over five million Californians, the majority, not minority, of California adults, would thus have been beneficiaries of the Robin Hood part of the SLA program.
Publication of the two lists of beneficiaries led to an overwhelming rejection of the SLA program and the whole bloodmoney concept by individuals and organizations of the "minorities" mentioned. In the end, only the noisy splintergroup AIM (American Indian Movement) stayed officially neutral. The other Indian organizations rejected the program at once, as did Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and other hyphen-style minorities. Not only the Church and proletarian organizations of the Chicanos, but even the quasi-revolutionary Venceremos, who have been nearer the Tupemaro thinking than any other group, drew away in disdain. Many Black organizations also denounced the SLA and its tactics of terror, though in the end it was Black groups which cooperated with the food program, and Blacks who took most of the food.
III
As Black organizations, and a few others, rallied round to help with the Hearst food program, they generated wide publicity of their own. By early March, the food program and the arguments
which accompanied it were more important to the newspapers and electronic media than the kidnapping, while the murder of Foster was totally lost in history and seldom mentioned at all. Attempts to get public attention back to the issues of politics and terror were made by the SLA, and forlornly by the still-captive Patricia Hearst herself. Screeds 19 and 20, with their headnotes, record these efforts. But except for terror and free food, there was little in the SLA program that was capable of attracting admiration, or even continuing attention, from any broad public. Most articles of the program recorded in the screeds represented the ordinary desiderata of a prosperous and civilized society, and could have been promulgated as easily by General Grant as by General Cinque. In the Bay Area, home of so many manifestos, it seemed like only one more of the same.
It is above all a lazy program. Its tenor is keyed to the dreamy good-will and "love" philosophies so often written up by food stamp kids, illustrated by line drawings of flowers and hearts, and distributed as fliers along Telegraph-Avenue. It offers free love, commune living, child-care centers, easy abortions, and the rent control dogmas engrained in such perfectly legal political thinking as that of the Berkeley City Council. It is, that is to say, a catalogue of the hopes and fancies of young people who do not recognize the need to work, or plan, or push, or feel out politics of democracy. It is fundamentally destructive, since it proposes to destroy "forms and institutions" of the present society, but specifies no "forms and institutions" capable of replacing them. Few students of revolution will conceive of its leading to anything beyond the violence and distortion which brought it into the news in the first place. Most must fear the program as counter-productive, since it inevitably invites reaction and repression. It was not a program worth dying for.
But that is not the last word, for the successes of the SLA have brought into question the ability of society to react and repress. Mature participants in American movements thought radical in their time have profited from the ability of American society to accept slow and measured changes, and by its concomitant ability to resist opportunities of quicker change through violence and coercion. Our radicals have been protected from violence at the small cost of eschewing violence themselves. The responsible thought and stable laws of the nation have conditioned all their progress. But the equations brought into play by the SLA criminal and publicity programs seem to be skewed in a different way. To many, it has almost seemed that the venom of the seven cobra heads was real, and that it poisoned all the thought and the law which it touched.
The SLA venom certainly paralyzed responsible discussion. From the very first night of the Hearst kidnapping, the only concern expressed by individuals, police spokesmen, or California public voices, was to get Patty back. All considerations of law and law enforcement, of public priorities, of precedent and example, were put to one side. Members of the family, a family of the highest historical distinction in California, and a family long identified with orderly society and the rule of law, repeatedly promised not to prosecute the SLA, or to assist law officers or courts in any way, not only for now but for ever. Miss Hearst's father professed to think of the SLA people as his friends; Miss Hearst's mother praised the SLA objectives. Miss Hearst's fiance, Steven Weed, who saw the SLA kidnappers and was beaten by them, but managed to run away, said in the very first hours that he would never identify them in court, and repeated this irresponsible pledge in many subsequent public statements. The law, the society, and the public order were simply ignored.
The media also collapsed in the face of the SLA threats. A newspaper blackout began at once, settling down to the refusal of Bay Area editors, not only of papers but also of radio and television, to publish any kind of opinion or comment on the events, either by their own personnel or by their clients and readers. Soon the SLA domination of the media was total. Early in the game, in Screed 11, spokesmen of the SLA threatened to "execute" any person who aided law enforcement officers, or the FBI, or who criticized the SLA program in the media, or who refused to print exactly what the SLA sent them, a successful coercion which peaked in their demand that the two "comrade soldiers" accused of the murder of Marcus Foster be presented to America on nation-wide television. The media performed as directed. In this lapse from attitudes of public responsibility and orderly function, the journalism of the Bay, and to a degree of the country, proved itself no match for the dozen or so young outlaws of the SLA.
In the absence of leadership and the blackout of educated comment, the people of the Bay Area generated whispers and rumors of all kinds. Such rumors still arise and spread, and will undoubtedly continue to get credence until responsible voices are dominant again, and the society with its laws resumes its orderly functions. And what are these whispers, these rumors? In many of the Black communities it is currently believed that either Steven Weed or Patricia Hearst, or both, engineered the kidnapping and were accessories to the murder. It is generally thought, perhaps by a majority of all races, that the police and FBI learned the whereabouts of Patricia Hearst at the beginning. Embroidery beyond that belief is complex, for many reasons are assigned to the failure of the police to go and get her back. In one line of thought, the police feared that the death of Miss Hearst in such an attack would be blamed on them; in another, they were afraid of upnsings in Berkeley and in Black neighborhoods, where many voices and many grafitti presented the SLA and its Marshal Cinque as saviours of the race The notion that the SLA was established as an agent-provocateur arm of the FBI itself is widespread among young radicals in Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury, with other locales of that genus. And on the simplest level, the failure of the food giveaway to work smoothly was blamed on the FBI, the police, the Hearsts, and others. In this theory, the riots and thefts which occurred on giveaway days were deliberately staged to provide bad press publicity for Black people, or "the people", or "the poor". This line of thinking was taken in several Screeds by SLA spokesmen and in Screed 20 by Patricia Hearst herself, but it was common on the streets before the screeds were written.
The most important of the beliefs that swept through the articulate circles of the Bay Area was, however, the belief that the terrorist formulas actually worked, that they produced quick and useful results, and that society and its laws had no way of countering them. And this amounted to a belief in terror itself as a mode of politics. Thus the Symbionese had an early success beyond their wildest dreams. They silenced the voices of responsible people, they thwarted the press; and for whatever reasons, they successfully postponed police and legal action. Although they repelled most of the organizations on which they had called for
support, they got active support from many Black organizations, and got the sympathy and appreciation of many people, the recipients of food, mostly but by no means entirely Black.
If the SLA soldiers affected the course of society on its economic or political sides, they did so by awakening the counterforces of reaction and repression which they ostensibly hated and fought against. But in the final analysis, the Symbionese demonstrated the fragility of our leadership, the weakness of our media, and the softness and confusion of our social self-image. Not through their two crimes, neither of which was unusual and neither of which could have been unexpected, but through their program as registered through their screeds, they had paralyzed the law and courts, shocked and distorted public opinion, performed the greatest feat of showmanship since the rise of Hitler in Germany, and earned the guerdon of a great place in the attention of our world-wide Western culture, as well as their little place in its history. History shows that many men and women have died for less.
