Book Review - Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask by Nick Henck

Subcommander Marcos:

The Man and the Mask

by Nick Henck

It was the night of New Year’s Eve, 1994 in San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in the Mexican state of Chiapas. An army of guerilla warriors blocked off all roads to the city and seized the town square. Their spokesman emerged, wearing a green army uniform and a black ski mask. He smoked a pipe. He called himself Subcomandante Marcos and his image would soon spread around the world. Marcos’s army was called the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional or the EZLN, though they commonly came to known as the Zapatistas. Since it was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Subcomandante Marcos declared this to be an uprising against the establishment, one that would put the rights of Mexico’s Indios in the spotlight in a bid for higher living standards and greater political autonomy. Nick Henck’s Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask gives a comprehensive history of the EZLN movement and the most in depth biography of its leader to this day.

After the uprising in 1994, and a few years into the 2000s, Subcomandante Marcos’s identity remained a mystery even though his image and message spread rapidly around the world due to media coverage. Nick Henck did a bit of digging around to find out who he was and where he came from. The first third of the book gives as much biographical information as he could find. Marcos’s true identity was that of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente. He came from a middle class background, got a college education at a liberal arts university, worked as a philosophy professor at another university, and got drawn into left wing politics. Initially he was a Marxist and joined a radical activist organization called the FLN. Their plan was to overthrow the Mexican government and establish a new socialist state. This section on the early life and radicalization of Marcos wears a little thin at times. The author gets sidetracked into some long discussions about the political climate of Mexico and its history that don’t help to clarify or add much to the overall story of Marcos and the EZLN. The narrative picks up again in the second section.

By the mid-1980s, Marcos had had enough of revolutionary theory and decided he wanted action. The FLN assigned him to the jungle highlands of Chiapas to prepare for guerilla warfare. He attracted a loyal army of Mayan Indios and landless agricultural workers. Marcos learned to speak their language, lived according to their lifestyle, and ate only the food that they ate. Critics of Marcos have accused him of exploiting the Indios and luring them into a political conflict they otherwise would not have engaged in. His supporters have countered this accusation by pointing out that he completely integrated into their society and became one of them. He still lives a humble existence with the Mayan people to this day. In any case, he spent ten years preparing the EZLN army for the uprising of 1994.

One interesting problem Marcos encountered along the way was related to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communism. Marcos had been teaching Marxist and Maoist political theory to his followers for some time when the Iron Curtain came down and suddenly the politics of the Left looked irrelevant. The FLN realized they had to change their message or else they would never be taken seriously so Marcos eventually phased out the Marxist jargon and began emphasizing the need for stronger representation of Indigenous people in the Mexican government. He came to advocate for the Mayan people to have their own semi-autonomous government, acting as a sub-nation within the nation of Mexico.

The third section of the book explains what happened after the initial uprising of 1994. After some minor skirmishes that resulted in a small number of Zapatista deaths, Marcos realized his guerilla army was outgunned. The uprising caught the media’s attention and he seized on the opportunity to bring the cause to the public. The Mexican middle classes came out in strong support for the Zapatistas and as long as they stayed in the eye of the press, the EZLN maintained their support. Subcomandante Marcos also pioneered the use of the internet as a tool of revolution. He reached a worldwide audience by writing communiques that were witty, imaginative, and a bit fantastical. Some of his supporters even claim they had valid literary merit though only time will tell if that is true. Pro-Zapatista activist groups sprung up on every continent and suddenly the subject of post-colonialism and the rights of Indigenous people around the world filtered into a new Leftist reorientation, carrying over into the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 and Occupy Wall Street a few years later.

Subcomandante Marcos was winning a war of wits with the Mexican government. This probably was aided by the widespread opposition to Mexico’s PRI party that had been ruling the country since the 1930s. With minimal violence, a high profile media campaign, massive street demonstrations and conferences of varying success, the Zapatistas managed to establish their own alternative government based on traditional Mayan principles in Chiapas and also got their cause brought up in a Mexican congressional hearing. Finally they succeeded in striking a deal with the government that was beneficial to the Indios of Mexico. In the end, Marcos hed led a semi-successful political movement with minimal bloodshed. Subcomandante Marcos has since remained reclusive, living with his people in the highlands of Chiapas. He remains a mysterious figure and actually sounds like a pretty decent guy. One thing you can say after reading this biography is that he was authentic and sincere.

There isn’t much to critisize in this book. There are some slow parts in the beginning that border on irrelevancy, but everything else is clearly written and sufficiently explained. There are some missing pieces that could have been included though. A brief description of Mayan culture would have enhanced the context and a little more description of the jungles and mountains would give it an added depth. It would also be helpful to hear more from the Mayan people themselves about the EZLN; it would be interesting to hear what they thought of the outsider Marcos considering he was a middle class mestizo who came to them from Mexico City. Although it is beyond the scope of this book, it would also be interesting to learn about the long term effects of the EZLN uprising and whether or not it continues to make a difference in the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous people.

This is the best book about Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas, and the January 1, 1994 uprising I know of so far. It’s also inspirational. Marcos spent a decade preparing for a guerilla war. Once it started he realized that bloodshed would lead to nothing but mass suicide for his followers. He was quick-witted and pragmatic enough to see how he could influence public opinion without having to resort to further violence. More than ten years after the initial siege of San Cristobal de las Casas, the EZLN were able to get something they wanted. Patience, adaptability, and communication were their greatest allies. They proved that change doesn’t have to be immediate or even grandiose. There is a lot for future activists to learn here. The fact that this political movement happened fairly recently in Mexico makes it all that much more interesting.

 

Book Review: Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico by Bill Weinberg

Homage to Chiapas:

The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico

by Bill Weinberg

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a ragged army of soldiers seized San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in Mexico’s poorest state Chiapas. Wearing ski masks and homemade army uniforms, the rebels carried rifles and pistols, though many of them were actually carrying wooden sticks made to look like guns. The rebel army was the EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas, and they were primarily made up of Mayan Indians. Some people took them to be a low-level threat and some tourists weren’t happy about the uprising disrupting their travel plans. Some might have even said the EZLN were quaint. But the Zapatista uprising shook Mexican society to its core, sparked a few other insurrections, and brought attention to the problems faced by the poorest people in the country. Although incomplete in ts scope, Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas puts the rebellion into context and looks at its short term consequences.

The book starts off with a whirlwind tour through Mexican history going back to pre-colonial times, detailing the relations between the indigenous Mayans and the Uto-Aztecan empire that conquered and assimilated them. By Weinberg’s account, rebellion has been a part of Mayan heritage from the beginning. After the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic church arrived to do the dirty deeds of the Castilian empire, the tradition of Mayan uprisings continued. Some elements in the church had humanitarian sympathies and defended the Mayans against the excessive cruelties of the colonialists and this alliance between Catholic activists and the indigenous people of Mexico continues to this day. Weinberg’s history of Mexico is brief and serves the purpose of setting a historical context for Mayan and Indian political resistance in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He strongly emphasizes the history of the Mayan people. If you’re familiar with Mexican history, this part of the book might feel incomplete. If you’re not, it might feel a little muddled and confusing. But this book isn’t about the grand scope of Mexican history and the opening chapters do serve their purpose of drawing a connecting line from the Mayan past to the present.

The same can be said for the chapters on modern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution gets explained, especially the cause of land reform heralded by Emiliano Zapata, the guerilla fighter that inspired the EZLN in the 1990s. A lot of attention is also drawn to the domination of Mexico by the American government and multinational corporations during the industrialization and modernization process. Weinberg goes into great detail about how outside interference in Mexico’s culture and economy led to the widespread environmental damage, economic displacement, and loss of ancestral lands for Indians and campesinos. He brings us up into the 1990s when the corruption of Mexico’s dominant PRI political party and American free trade agreements under Reagan and Bush, like GATT and NAFTA, were ratified and exacerbated the unresolved problems the Mexican Revolution was meant to correct. These chapters are heavily detailed and the reader may feel lost in the weeds, especially in sections detailing environmental sciences and economics. Weinberg overdoes his explanations in a way that could alienate his audience.

Then we come up to New Year’s Day of 1994, the day that the NAFTA treaty went into effect, giving oil companies and other multinational corporations sweeping rights over Mexican natural resources, manufacturing in the maquiladoras along the border, and industrialized agriculture that killed off varieties of traditionally grown produce and further disinherited Mexicans from privately and publicly held land all for the sake of making money for American businessmen.

A decade previous, in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandon jungle along the border of Guatemala, a mysterious figure arose and began preparing armies of Mayan people to fight the Mexican government. His name was Subcomandante Marcos and no one knew who he was at first since he hid his identity behind a black ski mask. The New Year’s uprising of 1994 led to some small skirmishes with a small amount of casualties, mostly EZLN fighters. The Zapatistas realized they could not fight Mexico with arms so instead they captured the media’s attention and Marcos reached a global audience by posting dispatches on the internet that gained worldwide sympathy. The Mexican middle classes took sides with Marcos and the Zapatistas and their message caught on in all continents and regions of the world. Their message was simple: they wanted land, they wanted self-governance, and they wanted all the material benefits of modernity. They wanted political participation in the Mexican government and desired to be like a semi-autonomous nation within the nation. They eventually built a parallel government in rural Chiapas and refused to recognize the official governments run in the urban municipalities of the state. The conflict between the EZLN and the government was unresolved at the time this book was published. Weinberg is successful in defining the goals of the EZLN, but falls short on writing about their history. A lot of his account is bogged down with descriptions of his travels into Zapatista territories, hidden in the mountains and jungles, and his attempt at getting an interview with Subcomandante Marcos himself, which eventually happens but doesn’t lead to any great insights.

The next section of the book looks at other indigenous uprisings that happened parallel to or after the EZLN uprising of Subcomandante Marcos. The most interesting chapter gives an account of indigenous people rebelling against oil companies in the state of Tabasco who wrecked the environment and contaminated their drinking water making farming almost impossible and causing a wave of health problems. The author again bogs the reader down with excessive details. You might need to be an expert in chemistry or biology to fully understand everything he writes. He could easily make the point abut environmental destruction and its impact on the agricultural economy without going into such fine, technical details. But it is a good section because it documents some attempts at revolutionary activism that probably will otherwise be forgotten due to lack of attention from other writers.

The rest of the book moves sideways into accounts of the intersection between the Mexican government, landowners, the military, law enforcement, and the drug cartels in the North, especially in Sonora. The Tarahumara or Raramuri Indians get caught up in this mess due to poverty and lack of political power. These chapters get to be frustrating because the author introduces a lot of government officials, law enforcement officers, military generals, and hacendados who made the mistake of involving themselves in drug trafficking. Most of these people get assassinated soon after they enter the narrative and a lot of this just reads like lists of people you know close to nothing about getting murdered. It barely has any connection to the EZLN, indigenous people, or the state of Chiapas. It should probably have been left out of the book altogether.

Bill Weinberg gives us an interesting glimpse into the world of indigenous political activism in Mexico. As mentioned before, the main issues of the narratives get somewhat obscured by too much extraneous information. A lot of the information gathered by Weinberg is incomplete which isn’t entirely his fault. The historical roots of these indigenous uprisings, especially those of the Zapatistas, was not well known at the time of writing. Furthermore, he also wrote this too close to the time of the events themselves. There isn’t enough historical distance on his part to give these uprisings the clarity they deserve. But still it’s good to read about how indigenous people can organize and challenge the injustices of the Mexican political and economic system.

Despite all its many flaws, including sloppy writing and a thick jungle of arcane details that is hard to see through, Homage to Chiapas is worth reading once just because it draws attention to struggles that are not well-documented elsewhere. On a final note, the title should probably be changed as very little of what takes place in these pages happens in Chiapas. Besides, it is more of an homage to Mayan people and the EZLN than it is to Mexico’s poorest, but also one of the most fascinating, states. The dense jungle, the highlands, its ancient temples, its history, and the culture of its peoples make it a place worth visiting and learning about all on its own. 

 

Book Review: Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

by Margot Harry

      By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.

In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.

The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.

There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.

Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.

Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.

So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.

 

Book Review

The Movement:

A History Of the American New Left 1959-1972

by Irwin Unger

     Ah yes, the 1960s...that was the big hinge in American society during the twentieth century. Despite all the social divisions of the time, it was also an era when the American public collectively entered puberty, lost its innocence, possibly lost its mind, and still came out of the experience being chronically naive and immature, a problem that afflicts us to this very day. Among the changes of that time was a political shift to the far left among some segments of the youth culture. Irwin Unger’s The Movement chronicles this change of direction in a way that is both sympathetic to the cause and critical at the same time.

As the book opens, we get a quick run-down of the history of left wing activism going back to the free love communes of the nineteenth century, the brief rise and decline of the American Communist Party, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, and the bland maintenance of the status quo by liberals throughout the same time. After white students from UC Berkeley went to the American South to support the Civil Rights activists, they came back to find the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, just beginning. Then the Students For a Democratic Society entered the scene. The SDS actually had its roots in the 1930s; traditionally anti-communist and anti-authoritarian, their vaguely stated objective was to increase citizen participation in the democratic process. They were hardly radical and in fact shunned the company of activists farther to the left of them. They were also a bit boring and unpopular. By the mid-1960s, their leaders saw that agitation against the war in Vietnam was becoming a trend, so they decided to latch onto that and came to be at the center of what was dubbed the New Left. Eventually they collaborated with the Black Panthers, but then split into three separate factions, one of which became the violent terrorist group known as the Weather Underground.

Unger’s book is effective because he takes a sociological approach in the beginning to examining the root causes of student rebellion. He properly identifies the demographic of white, middle-class teenagers and young adults as the as the core group of New Left activists. He questions why these people, presumably living in relative comfort would rebel so strongly against the system that sustains them and the answer he comes up with is a plain and simple one: boredom. Too much comfort without enough conflict leads to social anomie. Too little noise in a social system doesn’t lead to more efficiency, it leads to chronic agitation. Too many young people had seen their parents go to work for corporations, buy suburban houses and cars, then sit around doing nothing but watching TV in their spare time. The kids were hungry for life and excitement.

A lot of people have criticized the New Left and the counter cultures of the 1960s for being nothing but spoiled kids. Those critics fail to take something into account. Living a comfortable life does not mean that people who do so are required to check their humanity and morality at the door. Living comfortably does not mean you have to have an inhuman tolerance for racism or war. Nor does it mean you are obligated to slavishly accept the lifestyle the dominant society says that you have to accept. When we are told we live in a free society, we ought to be allowed to make choices about what we support and how we live our lives. If having enough money to live comfortably comes at the expense of our freedom of choice, we are nothing but a totalitarian society. The youth movements had every right to challenge American society and they were right to do so.

But anyhow, Unger goes on to examine the SDS and their relations with other groups like SNCC, CORE, the hippies, the Yippies, the feminists, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, and eventually the commune movements that continued on into the 1970s. What emerges is a portrait of the SDS as a group that had no real central purpose or direction, yet somehow they operated as a central motivational force that kept all the other leftists and counter-culturalists moving in the same direction. They weren’t channeling the New Left into any definite direction, but they were the momentum and catalyst that kept the fire burning for as long as it did. Unger rightly points out that their lack of true purpose caused their disastrous splits in the end, while also maintaining the government’s change in policies towards the war in Vietnam caused the anti-war movement to fizzle out. Then finally the violence of the Weather Underground, the Kent State Massacre, and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Wisconsin turned activists away from hardcore radicalism and back towards a more moderate and traditional liberal progressivism.

The Movement was written in the early 70s before the war had actually ended. Some historians say that a proper amount of time and distance are needed to write an accurate and effective history of a political or social movement like this. In Irwin Unger’s case, I have to disagree. His observations are sharp, realistic, and accurate. Being so close to the history he writes about gaves him a clear picture of what was happening around him. He was also detached enough as a writer to point out the flaws in the thinking and tactics of supporters of the New Left, even though he sympathizes with their plight. This may even be one of the most engaging accounts of this subject I have read so far.

The book ends on an interesting note. The author questions whether the uprisings of the 1960s would lead to any lasting change. His answer is that, as he saw it in his time, no, they didn’t. I have to disagree with him as it might not have been so obvious at the time. The 1960s initiated a series of social changes that are still being discussed today. The drug culture has become a mainstay of American society and the hedonism of the hippies eventually turned into things like disco. Issues of feminism, free speech, the rights of ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people are still being discussed. The rebellion of hippies morphed into punk rock and other related things. Black Power resulted in hip hop culture and the influx of African-American people into the middles class. The Sexual Revolution has led to mass tolerance for most forms of sexual expression. And despite recent attempts at censorship from people on both the right and the left, there are no longer any taboos, given the proper time and place, on what we are allowed to discuss because of the leftist Free Speech Movement. The New Left may not have solved these problems directly within the time frame of their movement, but they laid the foundation for the America we live in today. The decade of the 1960s ended, but the forces it unleashed took on new dimensions, many of which benefited us immensely.       

 

Vintage Book Review

Rads:

The 1970 Bombing Of the Army Math Research Center

At the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath

by Tom Bates

     How did the 1960s end? Conventional perceptions point to the Manson Family murders and the stabbing of a concert-goer by a Hells Angel at the Altamont Speedway during a free Rolling Stones concert. The “end of the 60s” is actually more nuanced and complex than conventional perception will allow. For one thing, there were other events and disasters that contributed just as much to the darkening of that era’s optimistic mood. Take, for example, the bombing of the Army Math Research Center on the University of Wisconsin’s campus in Madison. Rads by Tom Bates gives a thorough and accessible account of what happened there in the summer of 1970, reminding us further that history is more complicated than the mainstream narratives, mostly fueled by the irresponsibility of the media and the entertainment industry.

The central, and most prominent figure in Rads is Karl Armstrong, a college dropout and hippy who joined the anti-war movement in 1968. He had come from a rough, working class background but did well enough in high school to make it to college. He wasn’t much of a student. With low grades and lack of enthusiasm, he dropped out before re-matriculating and dropping out two times subsequently. During his off-and-on college studies, he worked at a string of blue collar jobs and quit all of them, his own personal trend that continued up until the time of his arrest. Karl Armstrong actually loved the college life, or, at least, he loved everything about college but going to classes and doing homework. He made a lot of friends on campus and spent a lot of time hanging out there, even when he wasn’t enrolled. He also got involved in the drug scene and the political demonstrations put on by the New Left which was thriving in Wisconsin just as much as it was in San Francisco and New York City.

That is when things began to get dark. Karl Armstrong attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where the police began beating non-violent demonstrators with billy clubs and tear gassing them. In fact, two of them seized Karl and threw him in the river. After that, the peace movement began to turn violent. At first, Karl was dismissive of terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, but then after police brutality continued to be a problem at demonstrations held on the University of Wisconsin campus, Karl gave in and embraced terrorist tactics to end the war too.

Of other importance in this story is Karl’s younger brother Dwight who idolized him and followed him into one insane scheme after another. With assistance from various people, the two brothers set out on a bombing and arson campaign. Most of their attacks were miserable failures, but they did catch the public’s attention and Karl maintained clandestine relationships with two underground newspapers in Madison. They became known as the New Year’s Gang even though Karl preferred to be called by the gimmicky and pretentious title of Vanguard Of the Revolution. They became heroic figures in the activist community even though no one actually knew who they were.

While the police became more violent towards the demonstrators and the war in Vietnam seemed like it would never end, Karl and Dwight decided to do something more drastic. With the help of two other activists, they made a car bomb out of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and blew off the side of a building on campus, a building that housed the office of the Army Math Research Center which was a think tank that calculated probabilities to maximize America’s kill-count in Vietnam. A deeply moral question hangs over the entirety of this story: Is the bombing committed by the New Year’s Gang, a crime that mistakenly killed one innocent man, such a terrible crime in light of the hundreds of thousands of people killed by US troops in Vietnam whose only crime was being born citizens of that small Asian nation? Who are the real criminals here?

After that, the story follows the escape of the New Year’s Gang, their trials, and the effect the bombing had on the activist movement at the time.

One of the great things about this book is how well Karl Armstrong and his associates are brought to life. The author follows them around and describes them so they seem like people you can get to know. Karl was such a laid-back and peaceful person that he appeared to be incapable of ever blowing something up. In fact, he comes off as such a loser that it is hard to believe he ever pulled the bombing off. Being the loser that he was, he was also a friendly, kind-hearted young man that people felt comfortable to be with. The contrast between his persona and his crimes is starkly drawn and a little bit troubling. Just think of the calmest and nicest person you know and then picture them carrying out acts of terrorism.

Another thing that is great about this book is the way it is is written. It reads like a novel, especially in the way it describes the settings and the characters, and also in the way it switches between depictions of Karl, his family, the political scene, the university administrators, and law enforcement. It is one of those book where you feel like you are there watching things as they happen. In that regard, Rads is also an excellent depiction of a particular time and place. Bates does a great job of capturing the feel of the Midwest city of Madison and the feeling of its college town life with the bars, the frat houses, the student ghettos, the hangouts, and the drug scene. So much has been said about the hippies and the anti-war movement in the more populated urban areas of the country that a lot of people don’t realize it was happening all over, even in the flyover states.

Rads by Tom Bates is a great book in the way it depicts its time and place. It gives a lesser-known angle on the era of the late 1960s, further helping the reader to understand what happened then and why. It also makes you wonder if the 1960s really did end. More likely, they transformed as the radicals of the time entered the work force and brought new values to the American public. Psychedelic music turned into progressive rock, anarchist politics were turned upside down and embraced with anger in the Punk movement, and young people continued to do drugs. But after the bombing at the University of Wisconsin, political demonstrations returned to non-violence and activists became more confrontational as educators, lawyers, journalists, and in all kinds of other ways too. Rads will not only enhance your understanding of the 1960s, it will also enhance your understanding of the vast and complicated fabric of American society.