The SLA: Gangsters Playing Pretend Politics

We will soon see whether prosecutors have a strong case against four former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army who were arrested last month and charged with a 1975 murder and bank robbery in a Sacramento suburb. Perhaps the evidence has gone stale after nearly 27 years, and the prosecution is simply availing itself of a terrorism-averse political climate. But it’s a safe bet that many will mislabel the case and tell us that a generation of activists is going on trial.

A few on the left will agree with some on the right that the prosecution of the SLA “soldiers” for the murder of Myrna Opsahl, who was counting church dues in the Crocker National Bank, is really a prosecution of the left as a whole. These sentimentalists will halfheartedly acknowledge that the SLA’s tactics were extreme, but contend that its members’ hearts were more or less in the right place, that they thus deserve the sympathy of those who peopled the radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. This quarter-truth matches the right’s attempt to turn the SLA into poster monsters for left-wing politics of every stripe.

But tenderness must be tempered by recognition of the sheer senselessness--and worse--of the SLA, whose obscurantism (“Symbionese”), vagueness (“liberation”) and chutzpah (“army”) were of a piece with the vileness of their tactics. The group was the offspring of the fantasy that black prisoners were the vanguard of a coming revolution. This was a not uncommon delusion in the early ‘70s, as remnants of the civil rights movement were midway toward becoming a mainstream political force, and yet some militants were still entranced with revolutionary fantasies.

Having missed the high tide of militancy, the SLA did not even try to convince large numbers of cadres that its way was the right way. Language for its soldiers was like a secret handshake--meant to boost morale. A few recruits would do, as long as they had guns and were ready to use them. Accordingly, the SLA members were stupefyingly incoherent. With no detectable grasp of political ideas, they spoke in self-parodying claptrap (“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people”). This is the way people talk when they have no real following or any serious intention of organizing one.

It was only the SLA’s actions that made its words worthy of notice. Its soldiers embraced a lunatic theory: They could make their actions mean whatever they said by simply declaring they had big ideas and daring anyone to disagree with them. Not for them the moral requirement of making a reasonable case that their means might conceivably lead to desirable ends.

The SLA announced its existence by taking credit for the murder of Marcus Foster, Oakland’s first black superintendent of schools, claiming that he was working with the police to violate the rights of children by requiring them to carry identification. Having landed with a bang at the outer edge of the political map, the SLA then took a shortcut to greater glory. In 1974, they kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, which guaranteed that the group’s slapstick tragedy would have marquee value--all the more so when, in a soap-operatic turnabout, she joined the SLA’s cartoon revolution.

From then on, bank robberies seemed logical. So did shootouts. Inevitably, the SLA’s surrealist adventure collapsed. Nothing was left behind but some headlines and Paul Schrader’s unrevealing movie. Roy Lichtenstein should only have painted Field Marshal Cinque, Hearst, Bill and Emily Harris and the rest of the gang.

So, what do SLA soldiers represent? Gangsters pretending to politics. Specifically, they celebrated the romance of some white radicals for some black prisoners--the tougher and more audacious, the better. The Symbionese Liberation Army did operate in a tradition, though it was not the main tradition of the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even after nonviolence wore thin, most movement violence was spasmodic, impulsive and targeted on property--smashing a window during an antiwar demonstration or torching your neighborhood. This was usually stupid, but it was, in some sense, sane.

The Black Panther Party took the destructive mood further. Their shootouts with the police were criminal and indefensible, episodes of a “war” they could not come close to winning. But you could say the Black Panthers had some legitimacy, insofar as they reflected the ferocity of the ghetto. They had a sizable following and produced some effective leaders once they overcame their romance with violence. Still, the Panthers had been resoundingly defeated by the police by the time the SLA came along, cold-bloodedly murderous, to dress up as an army and claim to act in the name of the oppressed.

Former Black Panther Chairman and co-founder Bobby Seale has been quoted as saying, “The SLA was a clear government setup to discredit the positive revolutionary movement we were leading.” This is fantasy upon fantasy. As for Seale’s “positive revolutionary movement,” Hugh Pearson, in “The Shadow of the Panther,” amassed much evidence that Panthers’ co-founder Huey Newton was far from a “positive” fellow. To blame the government for the likes of the SLA in order to protect a glamorous Panther myth is staggering cluelessness.

In truth, there were never more than a score of SLA’s “soldiers.” But a little ugliness can smear a good deal of beauty. Like the Latin American urban guerrillas from whom the SLA and other such gangs took inspiration, the soldiers predictably drew down the wrath of the armed state and left nothing behind but the blood of their victims and of themselves. In its farcical, nightmarish way, the SLA helped inter the dreams of a decade. Whatever our political persuasion, it is worth remembering for two reasons: to remind us that murder, however adorned, is murder, and to remind us that whoever professes politics is also required to make sense.

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Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, is the author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage” and the about-to-be-published “Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives.”