The Movement Terror Won't Help

LET ME SAY at the outset that I do not like the CFIA. From what I have been able to find out, it seems that its work is largely devoted-under liberal cover-to perpetuating and supporting archaic and oppressive regimes among the United States client nations. That, however, does not mean that I was glad to see it bombed.

But the bombing at the CFIA has little intrinsic importance. By great good luck, no one was hurt or killed. And given that, the fact that there was a bombing at Harvard becomes only a part of the question of bombings in general.

The government reports that there have been over 2,000 bombings in 1970. A large part of them were done by persons calling themselves leftist revolutionaries. It is certainly not accidental that the upsurge of terrorism comes at a time when most of the Left is in tatters.

The bombers propose by action one answer to the question of how to create a moral response to a situation in which all sanctioned alternatives for seeking change seem at best futile and at worst pernicious. But their answer is one which serves to create the conditions which would justify it, and not to grow out of a sane evaluation of the situation.

For the historical situation to which many on the Left compare the present state of the nation is Nazi Germany. For a morally aware German, terrorism must have seemed the only means available to him to stop evil-perhaps the greatest evil in human history.

But the objective situation in the United States is not the same as Hitler's Germany. The news from Canada provides dramatic testimony of what real fascism will be like here: suspension of all rights of trial and appeal, mass arrests, omnipresent military rule. Although it seems obvious that we will face these conditions here before three years are over, the United States is currently a facsimile of a liberal democracy. Rights of free speech and assembly-although subjected to increasing pressure-are still defensible and those who can muster attention and an adequate defense may still employ the tricks in our legal system to shield themselves from repression. The trial of the Chicago Eight, though disgraceful, is still a long way from the Nuremberg Trials in pre-war Germany.

Thus fascism may exist soon in America, but does not now. It would seem the first task of those concerned with human freedom to fight the onrush of dictatorships, to preserve the liberties which are allowed us, to live to fight another day. Terrorism, however, contemptuously rejects this argument by saying that what liberties we do have are unimportant when compared with the injustices which the government is committing, and that a move toward fascism will "expose" the enemy and make him easier to fight.

THIS REACTION is one of pure frustration. The current movement is a very young one, and for much of its history it has been the property of an elite. White radicals are graduates of the 1967 march, the McCarthy campaign and the battle of Chicago. Looking back at the peace movement, one can see that many of its aims were highly elitist: to construct a coalition of anti-war politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, writers, students and intellectuals and form a moral witness which would force the rest of the nation into an admiring submission. The Civil Rights movement-probably the closest thing the sixties saw to a "poor people's movement"-created a perhaps unavoidable fear in the poor white Southerner's mind that he was being singled out by a Northern elite as a target and scapegoat. All but the best of the nonviolent leaders of that decade allowed their view of situations to lapse into a "we/them" view with most of the American people occupying the role of them.

In the last two years, people have begun to realize that social change-decent social change, preferably to some form of socialism-means a better life for everyone; that it means decent jobs, food, housing, and medical care for white and black alike. But by the time that a reasonably coherent estimate of what should be done began to be possible, many of those who had come up through the disappointment of the movement in its infancy had begun saying that no social change was possible, that the entire nation must perish at once rather than continue its unjust rule of much of the globe and its murder of the Vietnamese people.

Any political response to our current despair must include some real answer to the agony of Vietnam. But the Left owes some responsibility to the American people, too: to put forward some ideas of how their lives can be improved and how their nation and planet can be kept livable. It is not a moral act to bring the nation crashing down upon their heads.

It is not enough, however, to condemn bombers. Those of us who object to bombing as a strategy for social change must begin to construct some real response to the injustice of America: a strategy that can include everyone in the United States who is being ripped off by poisoned air, poisoned food, rotten housing, larcenous doctors, racism and militarism.

Oh, Jesus, we have mucked it up. Let us start again.