Be careful when you read "history" "Criminalizing the History of US Radical Underground Movements"

[jtuck004]

"Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence"
Penguin Press, 2015

...
As Black Lives Matter continues to disrupt business as usual, a number of observers are judging the movement against the history of Black radicalism. As often happens in an era of renewed activism, we look to books about previous movements to tell us something about the uprisings of our own day.

That is what makes Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage not just disappointing but dangerous. Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, The FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence is a history as "true crime." Burrough chronicles six revolutionary underground organizations from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s: The Weather Underground, which emerged out of Students for a Democratic Society; the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party; the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose best known act was kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst; the New World Liberation Front, a curious sequel of sorts to the SLA; the Puerto Rican independence group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional; and a New England group of working-class white radicals that ultimately called itself the United Freedom Front. Despite a growing legion of memoirs from partisans of the underground - especially the Weather Underground, which receives the most attention in Burrough's book - as well as scholarly histories of these organizations, Burrough is the first to bring all of these groups together in the detail that he has done.

But these groups and the young people in them, seen through Burrough's "America's Most Wanted" lens, are not activists seeking to rebuild a racist, bellicose country from the ground up. They are naïve bad guys and narcissistic thugs. In his eyes, their goal was not revolution so much as it was "killing cops." Burrough provides hackneyed depictions of one-dimensional human beings with the kind of deluded stereotypes that everyday lead police to stop and frisk, lock up or kill Black people across the United States. To render them as history provides a dangerous justification to such violence.
...
It is easy to criticize from the safety of historical distance. Yet this history is an active part of our present. Burrough notes that, for all the bombings, the revolutionary underground killed few people. The same cannot be said for the protagonists of Days of Rage: the police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that police have killed at least 38,000 and perhaps as many as 52,000 Americans since 1973. "The Counted," a new database maintained by the Guardian newspaper, reports that police have killed 572 people in the fist six months of 2015 alone. Put another way, US police kill more people in a week than six underground groups did in more than 20 years. Days of Rage profoundly misses both the source and substance of violence.
...

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32429-criminalizing-the-history-of-us-radical-underground-movements

The book doesn't sound worth paying for, but this article made some very good points.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. A bit of perspective: the US was killing somewhere around 4000 people per week in vietnam for 10

years and the weekly death toll was much higher at the height of the radical anti-war movement. Most of the violence from the left was simply mass protest in the streets. If we should be criticized, it is for not doing enough to stop the slaughter.