Gerald Priestland on Angries and middle-class 'revolution'
Some months ago that surely authoritative journal Labour Weekly denounced a book on violence by the present reviewer as "An hysterical attack on revolutionary action . . ." Which is certainly one way of describing the bombing and machine-gunning of shoppers and pilgrims. Later, Leila Khaled (the Palestinian Joan of Arc) was telling an interviewer: "There are two kinds of violence: reactionary violence and revolutionary, human violence." And according to Gordon Carr's new book The Angry Brigade*, the so-called Stoke'Newington Eight (and please call me in future The Hampstead Garden Suburb One) would sit round debating "the violence of the production line, of the high-rise flat, state violence perpetrated on people in their everyday lives."_ All of which is dangerous nonsense. There is cruelty, coercion, inhumanity, callousness, selfishness, but there is only one kind of violence, and that is physical violence that bruises and sheds blood and takes life. Unless we stick to that we arrive at a state of mind in which everything the subject does not like is "violent," and the special horror of bodily brutality unreasoning, unloving and bound to breed more violence is lost. But this is an important part of revolutionary technique. Language must be redefined to support the revolutionary thesis, make real understanding impossible and thus leave no other form of communication but violence. Violence gives the illusion of doing something, not just talking. It forces the authorities to pay attention to people they have hitherto despised and rejected. Above all, violence baptises the revolutionary into the faith.
Gordon Carr, who specialises in the production of BBC TV News crime documentaries, has had a remarkable success in persuading almost everyone in the case from the Angries themselves to the Special Branch to confide in him. It is a very personal and valuable gift. But by far the most interesting part_ of his book, to my mind, is the early chapters which describe -the origins of the Angry Brigade movement from the Situationist theories of Raoul Vineigem and
Guy Debord back in the later 'fifties. Life, they taught, is just a Spectacle that the Proletariat has been conditioned to see not the real world at all. This bourgeois Spectacle is always being Recuperated from Alienation by the encouragement of Participation. (The reader now has enough cards to play a complete hand of Revolutionary Rummy.) Carr takes us on through the first experiments in situationist Scandalisation at Strasbourg in 1966 and on through Nanterre to Cambridge and dear old Essex. On the way, the term "Les Enrages" was borrowed from the French Revolution and translated into the Angry Brigade.
The Stoke Newington Eight (originally Ten) were a group for whom one must feel a certain compassion, particularly since they never actually killed anybody. Almost without exception they were bright middle-class misfits who went to university too soon, lost contact with their parents and teachers and tried to take a short cut to social justice through the fantasy-land of revolution. They really did care about the squatters, the homeless and bewildered welfare claimants they tried to hell)."
The "events" of Paris 1968 thrilled them like Rupert Brooke in 1914, when to be young was very heaven. As Carr remarks: -No matter how bizarre, how absurd the ideas might seem, no matter how puerile, thousands of young people recognised in them their own kind of radicalism, a radicalism which was no longer reflected by the traditional political groupings." Thus the birth of Libertarian socialism was the result of the failure of the Left, as much as of the Right and Centre.
If I have a criticism of this book it is•that Gordon Carr, having interested us in his characters, does not go nearly deep enough into their individual personalities and backgrounds. If it were not for their photographs, they would hover in the mind as little more than blankfaced cut-outs. But perhaps it is asking too much, that a piece of excellent journalism should command the character analysis of a first-rate novel as well.
At any rate, Carr has a wonderful passage in which the Angries, having found that full-time revolutionary "works' leaves them no time to earn a living, justify the cheque and credit-card frauds that eventually betrayed them: "If we're
conspiring to overthrow the state, we might as well refuse to permit it to exploit half our active lives ... We must get rid of the legality fetish." And so they helped themselves not to the purses of the rich, but to the pockets of their fellow students. The line between high-minded revolution and sordid criminal activity very soon becomes blurred, as the IRA Provisionals have found, too.
In retrospect, the twenty-five bombings of which the Brigade was accused were pretty feeble; though I dare say Mr Robert Carr (who experienced two of the most spectacular) found them unpleasant enough. The Old Bailey judge, Mr Justice James, who blamed their "warped sense of sociology" accepted that the Brigade only intended to damage property. I wonder. Judge James probably prevented the Eight. from becoming revolutionary martyrs by his generous handling of the trial throughout. In particular, he allowed an American-style challenging of jurors which ultimately produced a solidly working-class jury, five of whom had been living on Social Security (one of the Angries' favourite causes) and two of whom, to the end, refused to contemplate conviction. Class warfare was emphasised throughout: 1.vhatever the Prosecution said, it had to tie 'maile a political trial a trial of the 171,0TE,le,-ORtAng.r}es who were finally sent to p'riSon seexn,orq to, have been convicted after a jury-idoth 'deal" in which leniency was recommended and the other four accused were acquitted. Their tactics were 50 per cent successful.
So were the remaining Stoke Newington Four really guilty? Unless the police did do a large scale and risky -plant" on them, they were caught with two sub-machine guns and a newly delivered shipment of thirty-three sticks of French dynamite. But is was never proved that any of the eight had actually made or set one of these twenty five bombs. To convict them involved a descent into the murky waters of conspiracy law. To the end, the police admitted they were still looking for four more members of the Brigade. One is reminded of the current search for "Carlos"; and it is pretty certain that the Angries had their French, Spanish and Irish connections. The Irish seem to have concluded that they would do better without the help of half-baked English intellectuals (for whom the IRA uniquely has never had any use). The devastating Old Bailey car bombings three months after the trial belonged to a totally different and more professional school. Once the Eight were arrested. Angrytype bombings practically vanished. I have no doubt they, or something worse, will reappear.
So what does this teach us? Not least that there are real (as well as phoney) injustices in our society that conscientious young people very properly will not tolerate. Next, that we must provide worthwhile social functions for young people of this kind. It is not enough to pour them out of school into overcrowded universities where the big name dons don't want to know them. On the practical side, it is necessary to put a great deal of money and talent into police counter-subversionary work: and it must be the police, not the SAS or MI5. Above all, the ordinary citizen must keep his wits about him, and the ordinary parent and teacher must take time to listen to the young, not just lecture them. Communication is the key, not discipline.
If by this time my reader is feeling a trifle hysterical himself, he should get a copy of Maj. Gen. Dr Richard Clutterbuck's admirable handbook Living With Terrorism**. These people can be beaten, says the General; just keep • calm and don't over-react and we'll survive. So we shall, I believe. But there may have to be some martyrs among the goocl_gqys_.
** Living with Terrorism Richard Clutterbuck (Faber and Faber £3.50) Gerald Priestland has most recently written The Future of Violence.
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