Jeremy Varon Read Online Free PDF

combating domestic dissidents, particularly the Black Panthers. The FBI aggressively pursued the Weathermen and other New Left fugitives. Yet its campaign against them was nothing in scale and intensity like the West German state’s assault on left-wing violence.
    Partially, this was a consequence of Weatherman’s restraint. Avoiding injury to persons, Weatherman never inspired the diffuse public fear that would doubtless have prompted even greater governmental wrath. In part, the Weathermen were granted a kind of preferential treatment relative to black radicals, who remained objects of fierce pursuit. But the Weathermen also benefited from a broad shift in the national climate in the mid 1970s. In the wake of the strife of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, attention turned to the reestablishment of public trust in government and to reconciliation. Congress exposed abuses of power by the FBI in its pursuit of dissidents and acted to constrain its activities. Under this scrutiny, security agencies curtailed their campaign against the Weather Underground and generally let the group—now considered more a nuisance than a threat—fade into obscurity. Only a few underground Weathermen were ever captured, and those who surfaced voluntarily in the late 1970s and early 1980s served little or no time in prison.19
    The RAF and other violent German groups were objects of relentless vilification and police action. As in the RAF’s excesses, the fascist past figured heavily in the state’s response. The government and its supporters insisted that the terrorists were the authentic heirs of fascism, who, like the Nazi SA during the Weimar Republic, threatened a fragile democracy. Fear of communist subversion enhanced the imperative the state felt to use extreme measures to preserve what it saw as the integrity of Germany’s postwar democratic experiment. The means the state chose had mixed results. Though effective in capturing the RAF’s early leaders, antiterrorist measures only deepened the RAF’s view of the West German state as fascist and its determination to attack it by violent means.

Introduction
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    Students, intellectuals, and others extended sympathy to the RAF as victims of repression, fearing that antiterrorism threatened to turn West Germany into a police state, where the mantle of constitutionalism was used to mask an unreconstructed authoritarianism. In short, West German terrorism was a tortured form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung —a symptom of Germany’s difficulty in confronting and working through its Nazi past.
    Rather than shedding light on the conflict, the antifascist rhetoric of the RAF and the government contributed to excesses on both sides, demanding a new process of reconciliation.
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    A final index of the different impacts of Weatherman and the RAF on their respective societies is the degree and kind of commentary devoted to each group. Neither Weatherman nor the violence of the American New Left more broadly has generated a distinct historiography. Scholars most often discuss such violence as a small part of larger contexts and movements: antiwar protest, SDS, and the New Left as a whole. The dominant attitude toward Weatherman has been a highly critical or even dismissive one, reflecting both widespread antipathy to the group, then and now, and its limited resonance in American politics and culture. Many Americans who lived through the 1960s have few particular memories of the Weathermen, whose actions can easily fade into general recollections of turmoil.20 For small groups of mostly young rebels, the Weathermen have exerted an enduring fascination over the past two decades, though the group’s activities have typically been appreciated more as lore than as political history. Only with the recent release of the documentary The Weather Underground has the group emerged from the shadows of history into the light of public memory and popular culture.21
    The RAF, in contrast,