There is a romantic image attached to political rebellion.

Young people standing against an enormous state. Students challenging an establishment they believe has become corrupt. Radicals refusing to accept the comfortable assumptions of their parents. Individuals prepared to sacrifice careers, security and respectability for ideas they believe are greater than themselves.

I understand the attraction of rebellion.

But rebellion contains its own temptation.

Once someone becomes convinced that the existing system is fundamentally illegitimate, another question quickly follows: What are you entitled to do about it?

America confronted that question dramatically during the upheavals surrounding the Vietnam War. Among the most extreme answers came from a small revolutionary organization that emerged from the American student movement: the Weather Underground.

Its story deserves attention today, not because we should romanticise political violence, but precisely because we should understand how intelligent and politically committed people can travel from dissent to revolutionary certainty, and from revolutionary certainty to violence.

For me, there is also a National-Anarchist lesson in this history.

Opposition to the state does not automatically produce freedom.

Sometimes it merely produces people who want to become the next state.

 

From Protest to Revolution

The Weather Underground emerged from Students for a Democratic Society, one of the major organizations of the American New Left.

By the end of the 1960s, America was experiencing extraordinary political tension.

The Vietnam War was killing Americans and Vietnamese in enormous numbers. Racial conflict was tearing through American cities. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Riots, demonstrations and confrontations with police became familiar images.

Millions opposed the Vietnam War without embracing political violence.

But within the radical movement, some concluded that demonstrations were no longer enough.

The faction originally known as the Weathermen emerged in 1969. The FBI describes the subsequent Weather Underground as a small, violent offshoot of SDS influenced by communist revolutionary ideology. (FBI)

The argument was essentially revolutionary.

America was not merely pursuing bad policies. America itself was understood as an imperialist system. Capitalism, racism, American military power and existing political institutions were treated as parts of the same oppressive structure.

If the system itself was the problem, reform appeared inadequate.

Revolution became the answer.

And that is where political thinking can enter dangerous territory.

 

The Days of Rage

In October 1969 the Weathermen organized the Days of Rage in Chicago.

Their ambition was revolutionary confrontation rather than conventional political lobbying. The organization increasingly rejected the idea that change could come through elections, parliamentary politics or peaceful protest.

Soon afterward, parts of the organization moved underground.

Then came the moment that demonstrated just how far revolutionary rhetoric had travelled.

On 6 March 1970, an explosion destroyed a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York.

Three members of the group were killed.

Investigators subsequently discovered 57 sticks of dynamite, completed bombs, detonators and timing equipment at the site. (FBI)

The revolution had ceased being theoretical.

 

Bombing the Symbols of Power

The Weather Underground subsequently conducted a bombing campaign against institutions it associated with American political and military power.

Targets included the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, police facilities and other government buildings. The FBI says the organization had claimed responsibility for 25 bombings by 1975. (FBI)

In January 1975, for example, an explosion struck the headquarters of the U.S. State Department in Washington. Nobody was injured, although substantial damage was caused. (FBI)

The targets were deliberately symbolic.

They represented the institutions the revolutionaries regarded as responsible for war, repression and imperial power.

It is tempting for political radicals to see something heroic in attacking symbols of authority.

But there is a fundamental problem.

Who gave the revolutionary the authority to decide which violence was legitimate?

That question matters regardless of whether the revolutionary comes from the Left, Right, religious fundamentalism or any other political tradition.

Declaring the existing state illegitimate does not automatically make your own authority legitimate.

 

The State Was Not Innocent Either

Yet the story becomes dishonest if we simply divide history into terrorists on one side and a benevolent democratic state on the other.

The American government was itself conducting extensive surveillance and disruption operations against political movements.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeted organizations across the political landscape, including communists, the Socialist Workers Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panther Party and elements of the anti-war and civil-rights movements.

The FBI now acknowledges that agents sometimes infiltrated organizations, attempted to create internal discord and tried to discredit activists even where there was little or no evidence of unlawful activity. (FBI)

These activities eventually became part of the investigations of the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee.

The committee investigated abuses involving several intelligence agencies and examined covert FBI efforts designed to disrupt and discredit groups and individuals considered threats to the established social order. Its investigation involved hundreds of witnesses and more than 100,000 documents. (US Senate Investigations)

This does not justify the Weather Underground’s bombs.

Nor do those bombs justify abuses committed by government agencies.

That distinction is important.

Too often political tribalism demands that we excuse wrongdoing committed by our own side because the opposing side has behaved worse.

I reject that logic.

 

The National-Anarchist Problem With Revolution

This is where I see a particularly interesting lesson from a National-Anarchist perspective.

The Weather Underground correctly understood something that many mainstream political movements prefer not to discuss: political power is not confined to elections.

Power exists through institutions, bureaucracy, policing, economic structures, culture, education and control over territory.

But recognising the existence of concentrated power is only the beginning.

The more difficult question is what replaces it.

Many revolutionary movements throughout history have suffered from the same contradiction.

They oppose centralised authority while simultaneously constructing an ideology that supposedly gives them the right to determine how everybody else should live.

The revolution therefore becomes another project of centralisation.

The flag changes.

The slogans change.

The ruling class changes.

The individual still receives instructions.

That is not my understanding of National Anarchism.

My attraction to decentralisation is based upon almost the opposite principle: people are different, communities are different and there should be space for different ways of living.

I do not want one revolutionary ideology imposed upon everybody any more than I want one bureaucratic ideology imposed upon everybody.

 

A Thousand Communities Instead of One Revolution

The alternative I find more interesting is not capturing Washington.

It is making Washington less important.

Imagine political power moving downward rather than simply changing hands at the top.

Local communities could exercise considerably greater autonomy. Different communities could develop different cultural identities, economic arrangements and social rules, provided individuals retain meaningful freedom to leave and communities do not impose themselves upon unwilling outsiders.

One community might be conservative.

Another might be socialist.

Another libertarian.

Another religious.

Another ecological.

Another culturally homogeneous.

Another deliberately multicultural.

I do not have to approve of every community.

That is precisely the point.

Tolerance becomes meaningless if it only applies to people who choose the same lifestyle and values that I do.

The objective should not be creating a perfect society.

Human beings have been attempting that particular trick for thousands of years, usually with unfortunate results.

The objective should be creating enough political space for different communities to pursue different visions without requiring everyone else to participate.

 

Violence Creates the State It Claims to Destroy

There is another lesson in the Weather Underground story.

Political violence almost inevitably strengthens the security state.

Bombings produce police powers.

Underground organizations produce intelligence operations.

Political assassinations produce surveillance.

Terrorism produces counterterrorism.

The revolutionary may believe he is weakening the state while simultaneously providing the state with its strongest argument for expanding its authority.

This does not mean governments should ignore genuine violence. Protecting people from bombings and murder is one of the most basic functions citizens expect government to perform.

But history demonstrates the danger of the cycle.

Radical violence creates fear.

Fear creates demands for security.

Security creates additional state power.

Additional state power produces additional resentment.

And resentment creates new radicals.

Everyone involved can then point toward the other side as justification for what they are doing.

The machine feeds itself.

 

The Seduction of Moral Certainty

Perhaps the deepest problem exposed by the Weather Underground is not communism, anarchism, capitalism or even terrorism.

It is moral certainty.

Once I convince myself that my political objective represents absolute justice, anyone opposing me can easily become an enemy of justice.

And once my opponent has been transformed from another human being into an embodiment of oppression, almost anything can eventually be justified against him.

This mentality is not confined to the radical Left of the 1960s.

The Right can do it.

Nationalists can do it.

Religious movements can do it.

Governments can certainly do it.

And anarchists can do it.

Nobody receives immunity merely because his intentions are supposedly noble.

That includes National Anarchists.

 

Rebellion Without Becoming the New Master

I have spent much of my political life questioning established political structures.

I have little interest in defending institutions simply because they are old, powerful or respectable.

But questioning authority must also mean questioning the authority claimed by revolutionaries.

That is where the Weather Underground remains relevant more than half a century later.

Its members believed America was engaged in profound injustice. Opposition to the Vietnam War was hardly irrational, and subsequent revelations about government surveillance demonstrated that distrust of state power was not simply revolutionary paranoia.

But none of that answers the fundamental question:

When does resistance become domination in another form?

For me, the answer cannot be another ideological elite seizing the machinery of government and announcing that this time the correct people are in charge.

A genuinely decentralist politics should seek something more difficult.

Not the victory of one tribe over all others.

Not enforced conformity.

Not ideological purity.

And certainly not bombs intended to frighten society into accepting political transformation.

Instead, it should seek the dispersal of power.

Smaller political units.

Voluntary association.

Local responsibility.

The right to build communities reflecting different values.

And, crucially, the right to walk away from communities whose values we reject.

The Weather Underground wanted to destroy an existing political order.

The more interesting challenge is different:

How do we build a society in which nobody needs to conquer the entire political order in the first place?

Perhaps the greatest revolutionary act is not capturing the state.

Perhaps it is making the state increasingly unnecessary.