Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ important qualities in the urban guerrilla are the following,’ it advised. ‘To be a good walker, to be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger, rain or heat. To know how to hide, and how to be vigilant. To conquer the art of dissembling. Never to fear danger. To behave the same by day as by night. Not to act impetuously. To have unlimited patience. To remain calm and cool in the worst of conditions and situations. Never to leave a track or trail. Never to get discouraged.’ Very like Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, but with a rather different purpose. ‘The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives,’ Marighella wrote, ‘is to shoot.’^* Metropolitan malcontents loved the book. Why should peasants bear all the burden, or have all the fun?

      Come to that, why only Latin Americans? By the end of the 1960s there were plenty of itchy young urban radicals in North America and Western Europe who yearned for deeds rather than words – and deeds rather more incendiary than simply joining a protest march or hurling insults and cobblestones at ‘police pigs’ – but they jibbed at the idea of abandoning their basement flats and trying to radicalise yokels. Hadn’t Marx himself sneered at the idiocy of rural life? The Tupamaros and similar armies elsewhere in South America had shown what could be done without either peasant soldiers or a political party, so long as one had no qualms about planting bombs, assassinating politicians and kidnapping diplomats.^* What mattered was making a noise, seizing attention, scaring the wits out of the ruling class; and where better to do it than in a big city? As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin wrote in Do It!, his handbook for modern revolutionaries: ‘The street is the stage.’ America’s Weathermen, Italy’s Red Brigades and West Germany’s Red Army Faction (aka the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof Group) all read Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla in preparation for taking to the stage. (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Marighella’s Italian publisher, was so enthused that he promptly went underground into a ‘Partisan Action Group’; in March 1972 the poor ninny blew himself to smithereens while planting a bomb under an electric pylon.) Small is Beautiful, the title of Erich Schumacher’s best-selling book, was their credo too: even the tiniest band of desperadoes could paralyse a nation. In a public plea for clemency on behalf of Ulrike Meinhof in 1972, the German novelist Heinrich Böll described the struggle of her group as that of ‘six [people] against sixty million’, and he wasn’t far wrong: the entire Baader-Meinhof membership at the time numbered no more than thirty, and fourteen of them were in jail.

      Although these Western guerrillas differed in style and intensity – the Red Brigades killed scores of Italians, the Angry Brigade killed nobody – the common feature is that they took up arms at the same time, between the spring of 1969 and the autumn of 1970. All, in short, were gestated after the defeats of 1968, when for a few weeks the New Left convinced itself that the revolution had begun. ‘London, Paris, Rome, Berlin,’ soixante-huitards chanted. ‘We will fight and we will win.’ They didn’t, though Paris was a close-run thing, and when the tide receded the revolutionary street actors and situationists were left high and dry. Where next? Some knuckled down to their accountancy exams, or tiptoed away into mainstream politics. Some withdrew from the barricades to rural communes where they grew vegetables, smoked dope, got into the I Ching and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: if they couldn’t change the world they could at least change themselves by fleeing from it and raising their own consciousness – or, just as likely, falling into a blissed-out trance. For others, however, the lesson of 1968 was that they hadn’t been militant enough. Rampaging through Grosvenor Square made for exhilarating street theatre, but the authorities would always win any such confrontation because of their superior force and firepower. A long-haired, denim-clad, unarmed student had no chance of victory against a baton-wielding policeman on a horse, still less a posse of National Guardsmen firing real bullets. Fanaticism, it has been well said, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have lost sight of your objective; and this was the route they now followed. ‘Doubts about the cause were not allowed,’ says Astrid Proll, one of the few founder members of the Baader-Meinhof Group to outlive the decade. ‘You were either with them or not … We idealised the resistance of the Vietcong and the liberation movement in Latin America and Palestine: we wanted to act like them so we got hold of guns. As we didn’t know how to use them we went to a training camp of El Fatah in Jordan, where we crawled in the sand and climbed over barbed wire fences – which was pretty useless as we were urban guerrillas. We’d only gone there to learn how to shoot a gun.’

      By the early 1970s, the cities of the non-Communist world were alive with the sound of explosions and police sirens. ‘The terrorist activity is worldwide,’ Time magazine reported, ‘and most of it is carried out by a new type in the history of political warfare: the urban guerrilla.’ From Naxalites in the alleys of Calcutta to Provos in the streets of Belfast and Derry, underground armies were everywhere. The all-comers’ record was held by Mexico, where student demonstrations in 1968 had been savagely crushed by the army. Young Mexican radicals now abandoned protest and took up the gun; and whatever your political affiliation (so long as you were either a Maoist or a Fidelista) there was sure to be a battalion that suited you – the Armed Brigade of Workers’ Struggle of Chihuahua, perhaps, or the Armed Forces of National Liberation, the Armed Commando of the People, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Revolutionary National Civic Association, the 23 September Communist League, the Zapatista Urban Front, the People’s Union, the Revolutionary Student Committee of Monterrey, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, the Nuevo Léon Group, the Revolutionary Student Front of Guadalajara, or the Spartacist Leninist League. Much of their violence was directed against one another, the narcissism of small differences assuming far greater significance than such trifles as campaigning for democratic reform. ‘In three years the student movement adopted a discourse that had nothing to do with what was upheld in 1968,’ said Gilberto Guevara, the leader of the ’68 protests. ‘It was the inverse discourse: democracy was persecuted … Whoever demanded elections was satanised.’

      In Washington DC, senior members of the Nixon administration were advised to vary their routes to work. ‘I’m sorry,’ a top-security official explained, ‘but we’ve got to think paranoid.’ In London, Cabinet ministers had to check for bombs underneath their cars before starting the engine. Even placid, harmless Canada wasn’t immune: in October 1970 the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped the province’s labour minister, and then strangled him when the Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, refused their ransom demands – the release of twenty-three ‘political prisoners’, safe conduct to Cuba or Algeria, and $500,000 in gold bullion. The Canadian parliament voted by a majority of 190–16 to invoke the 1914 War Measures Act, which had never before been used in time of peace. A government spokesman informed reporters that the FLQ was planning further urban mayhem, of a kind ‘so terrible that I cannot even tell you’.

      Low-level terrorism swiftly became such a familiar background hum in everyday life that much went unreported, to the chagrin of those who perpetrated it. In a cover story on urban guerrillas published in November 1970, Time magazine reassured its readers that ‘events in the US still seem relatively tame’, a remarkably sanguine assessment given that there had been three thousand bombings in the US since the start of the year, and more than fifty thousand bomb threats – mostly at police stations, military facilities, corporate offices and universities. In Cairo, Illinois, only a few days before Time’s report appeared, twenty rifle-toting black men in army fatigues attacked the police station three times in six hours. ‘You hate to use the word,’ said a police chief in San Jose, ‘but what’s going on is a mild form of revolution.’

      Unlike fortified medieval towns, the besieged cities of the Seventies were threatened not from without but from within, by battalions that were seldom seen and often had no more than a few dozen combatants. Like the bomb-making Professor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), they understood that the anonymity of a modern metropolis makes it both the most vulnerable target and the safest refuge. As the Tupamaros had said in their first official manifesto, published in 1968: ‘Montevideo is a large enough city with enough social unrest to shelter many commandos.’

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