Guerrilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst
Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 15, 2006
Recently on the Maxism list I
moderate, where all my film reviews are initially posted, there was a
discussion about the Symbionese Liberation Army.
There was a consensus that this terrorist group of the mid-1970s was completely
disconnected with the broader radical movement, even more so than the Weather
Underground. There was even a suggestion that the SLA
was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the FBI created to wreak havoc on the left.
After viewing Robert Stone’s very fine 2004 documentary “Guerrilla:
the Taking of Patty Hearst” (originally titled “Neverland:
The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese
Liberation Army”), I am quite sure that the SLA was
simply the product of a deadly logic that was rooted in the experience of
middle-class radicals and not a government conspiracy. As is made clear in
extensive interviews with Russ Little and Michael Bortin,
two SLA members serving life imprisonment, the decision to launch the SLA was
motivated by a sense of outrage over the continuing sins of American imperialism
after the end of Vietnam war--and concomitantly a sense that mass action to
oppose it was futile.
Russ Little was a college student
from Florida who was radicalized
by the war in Vietnam.
In the documentary he explains that his radicalization was partially inspired
by the example of anti-imperialist fighters but also by the popular culture he
grew up immersed in. He remembered the television show “Zorro” fondly, which
depicted a swordsman in a kind of one-man rebellion against Spanish tyranny in 19th
century Southern California. He also was influenced by
the example of “Robin Hood,” especially in the movie that starred Errol Flynn.
(Russ Little was probably unaware of Flynn’s Nazi
ties. In a letter to a German intelligence agent Hermann Erben
written in 1933, Flynn complained, “[A] slimy Jew is trying to cheat me ... I
do wish we could bring Hitler over here to teach these
Isaacs a thing or two. The bastards have absolutely no business probity or honour whatsoever.”
But above all, these radicals were captivated by Costa-Gravas’s “State of Siege,”
a 1973 film that dramatized the kidnapping and murder of CIA agent Dan Mitrione in Uruguay
by the Tupamaros, an urban guerrilla group.
Essentially, the SLA was an attempt to adapt the model
of such groups to the USA
just as groups like the October League and the Revolutionary Union were
attempting to adapt the Maoist example at this very time.
After the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst,
they demanded that her father Randolph Apperson
Hearst, a fabulously wealthy press baron and the son of William Randolph Hearst
whose life was dramatized by Orson Wells in “Citizen Kane”, dispense millions
of dollars in groceries in poor neighborhoods as a partial ransom payment.
Their inspiration for this “Robin Hood” tactic came from
guerrilla groups in Argentina,
including the quasi-Trotskyist People’s Revolutionary
Army (ERP). The ERP was backed by Europeans, while the American Socialist
Workers Party and its allies backed a rival Trotskyist
group that favored mass action in what they considered the orthodox Bolshevik
mode.
The story of Patty Hearst’s involvement with the SLA
is extremely dramatic. Not long after her capture, she gave all the appearances
of being recruited to the guerrilla cause. She adopted the name Tanya, in honor
of Che Guevara’s compañera
in Bolivia.
Initially, commentators explained this in terms of the “Stockholm Syndrome” in
which kidnapping victims begin to identify with their captors, mostly out of a
sense of fear. Unfortunately for Patty Hearst, she remained attached to the SLA
even when she was off on her own. As one interviewee from the police force
noted, there were numerous times in which she could have gotten into a cab and
driven off to safety but she never did. After being convicted of bank robbery,
Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison. Jimmy Carter commuted her
sentence after 3 years.
Stone’s documentary allows Hearst and her father to largely
speak on their own behalf but their words cannot do justice to the complexity
of their relationship. This is a human drama that gets to the very heart of how
class society operates and how it will begin to unravel as the contradictions
of capitalism deepen. It was clear that Patty Hearst was not just a victim of
the Stockholm Syndrome, but was in many ways a typical
19 year old Berkeley student who
sensed that there was something deeply wrong with American society. It is
doubtful that she would have joined anything like the SLA
on her own accord but her conversion was not that much different than the one
other “Robin Hoods” of her generation underwent.
In 1909 Leon Trotsky wrote:
“A strike, even of modest size, has social consequences:
strengthening of the workers' self-confidence, growth of the trade union, and
not infrequently even an improvement in productive technology. The murder of a
factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of
proprietors devoid of any social significance. Whether a terrorist attempt,
even a ‘successful’ one throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the
concrete political circumstances. In any case the confusion can only be shortlived; the capitalist state does not base itself on
government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves
will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to
function.
“But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working
masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm
oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one's goal, why the efforts of the
class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is
enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed
personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why
meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the
ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?”
The same social factors that drove middle-class radicals to
pick up the gun against Czarist officials drove the SLA’ers
to kidnap Patty Hearst and to kill the African-American Superintendent of
Schools in Oakland, a singularly
counter-productive act. While there are few signs of terrorism in the USA
today, except for the occasional outburst by deep ecologists who have the good
sense to only attack property, it is not ruled out that such acts will become
commonplace once again. In a society that is marked by a large degree of apathy
and despair in the working class, young radicals will always feel tempted to
substitute themselves for the masses. As part of the necessary education for a
new generation of radicals, it will be necessary to read what Lenin and Trotsky
had to say on the topic. Robert Stone’s very effective documentary, which is
available on line and at your better video stores, will also play a part in
this education.