BA: It’s easy sitting in America with all of our wealth and privilege, and all of our layers and layers of denial. It’s easy to say, to point to all the evil out there in the world and say but we’re good people, we’re good people. And of course, the problem there is that we fail to actually look at our history and our impact on the world. And so if you say something, if you point out what’s happened in the last two weeks, oh, that’s an aberration, and un-American. I love that. Donald Rumsfeld says it’s un-American. When this began, George Bush said we’re going to go in there and shock and awe.  

JR: Right. 

BA: What the hell is shock and awe? It’s murdering innocents, it’s humiliating people, it’s devastating a country, and so we’re doing it now up close and personal. 

JR: Well, it’s interesting, I think that a lot of people, a lot of liberals are galled by George W. Bush, and have a more visceral hatred for him than they did even Richard Nixon, because he is Nixon with a bit of telegenic charm, which Nixon lacked.  

BA: Well, he’s very charming, and charm does get you pretty far in American politics. It’s kind of frightening.

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BA: I don’t think our move was so much towards violence. I think that what we did was to look at this situation of 2,000 people a day being murdered and try to figure out a couple of things. One is how can be effectively resist the war when we thought our charge was to convince the majority of the American people to oppose it. We did, and still the war went on, and still the murder went on. So what do you do? And in that moment, SDS and every other organization came unglued, and people went different ways. Some people joined the Democratic Party, tried to build a peace wing within it, some people went to factories, some people ran away to Europe, some people ran away to the hills of California. What we did was try to build the capacity to survive what we saw was an impending American fascism. We didn’t want to, we looked at the conspiracy trial, which we were very close to, and we didn’t want to spend two years defending ourselves. That seemed like a complete waste of energy and time. And so we said to ourselves, what are we going to do?  

JR: Which, by the way, Mitchell was responsible for, I mean, had authorized in a way that Clark had specifically declined to bring. 

BA: Right, exactly. And so this is what we saw. We saw the movement either being targeted like Fred Hampton and shot in the head, or targeted like the Chicago 7, dragged into federal court where they had to spend zillions of resources and energy and people hours defending themselves against this completely corrupt government, and this completely corrupt Justice Department on this completely corrupt charge. So yeah, we found that an appalling alternative, and so we set about building a clandestine organization. And the whole point was to survive them, and then possible to take the fight to them against the war and against empire generally.

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JR: Would you say that the, what the lesson of Days Of Rage was, was that this could not be accomplished by a direct confrontation? 

BA: No, I don’t think there was, I don’t think we concluded that exactly, but I think we were moving in a direction that said demonstrations, you know, we’ve tried to demonstrate, we’ve tried to petition our government, we’ve gone door to door and knocked on doors, we’ve talked to our neighbors, we’ve talked to, you know, our parents, our Republican parents, and everybody agrees with us. But we can’t stop the war. So what do we do? And I think the Days Of Rage was, in many ways, mis-calibrated top to bottom. I mean, I think we thought that, you know, the militants had to have their day in the leadership, and that we had always provided the shock troops for the big demonstrations, but we’d never actually set the terms and the tone and the slogans, and so on. But I think we had, by that time, so isolated ourselves and alienated ourselves from our allies that it was pretty much an empty exercise.

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JR: Is it your understanding that the only people who ever died as a result of any of the WU’s activities were the three who died in the townhouse?  

BA: Absolutely.  

JR: Is that true? 

BA: Absolutely true. 

JR: Okay.  

BA: And no one else died, and that was both, you know, you could say it was a happy chance, but it was also by design. And I describe in some detail the struggle within us about, within each one of us as well as among us, about how far, how are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence. And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse. And I try to imagine what went on there, but the reason I don’t completely buy your thing about violence is because I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so restrained, and I don’t see it as a big deal. I mean, the Catholic left, when the Berrigan Brothers climb into nuclear silos and hammer on the warheads, is that terrible terrorism and violence? I don’t get it. 

JR: Right. 

BA: I don’t see where the equivalency is. Yes, they’re crossing a line. Yes, they’re breaking the law. Yes, they’re using weapons. But they’re also not hurting anybody. They’re not killing anybody. Meanwhile, in the background, 2,000 people are being lined up in a pit and shot.  

JR: Right. 

BA: And where those things become equivalent is, just boggles my mind.

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JR: What were your own emotions as you saw the Pentagon, which for you has been for many years a symbol of this kind of horror, you know, when you saw a plane slam into it or… 

BA: Well, I never saw that actually, because I don’t think that was broadcast. 

JR: That’s true. They had some still photographs, but not…yeah. 

BA: The World Trade Center was, I mean, I think my reaction was much like yours unless you, I mean, I don’t know you, but I mean the only group of people that I know who weren’t weeping for the next several weeks were the people who were busy typing legislation into their computers.   

JR: Well, and Palestinians were seen dancing in the streets about the two, yeah. 

BA: You know, I think that was also a bit overwrought in the American press. I think that’s…but I think there is an indication, I mean, you know, in Chile, there was a demonstration that day about the overthrow of Allende. And you know, we have a bit of, well, everybody in the world knows that Americans are geographically challenged, and historically challenged. We don’t have a sense of who we are or where we are. So I think every American that I know was weeping over the next several weeks and devastated and shocked. And was that an act of pure terror? It absolutely was. And there are many other acts of terror carried out by our government, even recently, that are comparable. And there are other acts of terror that have gone on in places like Bosnia that we forgot to notice. So I have very mixed emotions about how it’s been…well, put it this way, I have no mixed emotions about terrorism being always evil, always wrong. But what I think is crazy is to use that moment to advance a right wing agenda that, on every front, every uterus must be examined, every tree chopped down, every oil well dug. I mean, it’s absolute madness, and September 11^th is the answer that’s given to anything that these fanatics would like to do.

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JR: When you become so heavily, emotionally, intellectually and physically invested in a goal such as we must stop this war, we must stop the killing… 

BA: Right. 

JR: …and you fail to achieve it, or at least in a certain time frame, how do you go on living? You know, how do you not succumb from just a complete heartbreak? 

BA: Well, I think that that’s a good question emotionally, but I think that, you know, what…one of the problems I think that Americans have, all of us, is that we feel that we ought to be able to have a simple solution to a complex problem, and we ought to be able to cure a virus with a pill, or stop a war because…I mean, one of the things I feel like I’m combating today with young people is the feeling of disappointment and heartbreak that after the largest anti-war mobilization in history on February 15^th, 2003, we failed to stop him from going to war. And so the feeling is oh, we were a completely failure. I don’t quite see it that way. I think that in the Vietnam period, that we built a robust, complicated, multi-tiered, multi-faceted anti-war movement. It actually played a very powerful role in limiting the options of the war makers. Had there not been an anti-war movement, I think there would have been nuclear weapons used in Vietnam.  They would have flooded the dykes. That was on the drawing boards. General Haig wanted to bomb the dyke system and kill millions more. And I think the anti-war movement both in the United States and in Europe limited that option. So I don’t take it as a complete defeat. The war lasted ten years. That’s ten years longer than it should have lasted. But it didn’t last thirty years. It didn’t last forty years. Three million people were needlessly killed, but not thirty million, and not three hundred million. So you know, it’s horrible, and I was completely invested, I lived and breathed it day and night, and I think I was on the side of justice, and ultimately I think it’ll be seen that way.