The author, Dan Berger, a Ph.D. candidate at Penn in his current incarnation, was inspired in his own youthful activism by people like David Gilbert, a figure from the Weather Underground. He begins his book with a quote from Gilbert about the lessons of history "to fight for a future that affords all people the conditions for survival and the opportunity to make a positive contribution." Not values emanating from our so-called leadership these days. This study of the Weather Underground deals with people like Gilbert whose idealism and commitment is lifelong. The book's introduction is about the ride to Attica prison to interview Gilbert.
The strength of the book lies in the extensive interviews with the participants in the struggle. One line that accidentally caught my eye says it all: "'You can't park there,' yells a voice from the guard tower" as Berger rolls into lovely Attica. Sounds like a line from a rock-n-roll song. Just as there was a rock-n-roll imperialist war going on during the sixties and early '70s, there was a rock-n-roll revolution. Indeed, the peculiar involvement of WUO in Timothy Leary's escape from prison to Algeria provides one of the few near-comic moments in this otherwise very serious epic. Because it isn't just another dry, onerous study — though thorough and scrupulous. It is clearly a labor of the heart.
Recently, on OPB, there was another re-run of "The Sixties," a show of seemingly endless appeal to its aging audience. In it, Todd Gitlin notes the years of youthful hopefulness ruined by the seemingly willful self-destructiveness of the Weather Underground. It is this moldering view of the '60s as separate that Berger particularly addresses and attempts to displace. The privilege of OPB's audience was built on white supremacy. One has only to look at the Gulf Coast (either one) to see that this ongoing American dilemma was neither peculiar to the '60s nor remedied by anything accomplished by activists during the '60s. Accomplishments now, of course, being determinedly rolled back by the Tom-DeLayed Congress and the Cheney/Rove White House.
White supremacy remains as entrenched and virulent as ever. If not more so. Berger's book is a wealth of detail substantiating its powerful story of ongoing solidarity. Much of it is familiar territory but well-presented for the arrival. Moreover, in speaking of feminism, for example, he includes the indispensable role of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan in opposing not only the Taliban but the Northern Alliance and Karzai/U.S. occupation. And a number of other similarly pointed updates, all serving to describe ongoing resistance and solidarity.
Extracts from David Gilbert's interviews, and his famous SDS tract of '67 on U.S. Imperialism introduce each new chapter. As Gilbert notes, quoting Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet and former political prisoner: "Being captured is besides the point. The point is not to surrender."
"Outlaws of America" is well-written, with extensive footnotes which make for excellent reading in themselves. Following the main body, there are useful bios of the participants interviewed and a concise, useful timeline of the events discussed, as well as a useful bibliography. Simply well-composed as far as accessibility.
From the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Mississippi and Louisiana to the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee to the following quote, it is an attempt to make history's lessons available and usable for the people. A welcome addition to the anarchist canon from the AK Press collective: "The task for the people in the United States is, for example, to unite the democratic possibilities of the World Social Forum with the anti-racist militancy of the prison movement; to join women's activism against fundamentalism with the emerging networks of transgender health and safety; to connect support for the popular rebellions in Latin America with support for Africans fighting the AIDS crisis; to link opposition to the wars in and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq with the ongoing struggles for justice led by people of color within this country.
Bernardine Dohrn identifies this challenge as "how to be internationalist and yet grounded here in organizing work with a real radical critique of American power and inequality."
"The Weather Underground and others from the U.S. anti-imperialist Left of the '60s and '70s don't offer the answers … [b]ut they do present a legacy of constantly raising and grappling with these questions … that the new generations can use to develop both a vision of a better society and the means of creating it."