Days of rage
author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these and other groups as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. In Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them “nice middle-class kids,” smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. The FBI’s fevered response included the formation of a secret task force called Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down and rolling them up. But Squad 47 itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice, and its efforts ultimately ended in fiasco.
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11recommend
17mentions
17people
2013–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Go read the book Days of Rage. This is nothing.
- > People have gotten the message
The generation of young people in the 1960s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1970s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1980s thought this, and so on. I'll be 50 this year, I've gotten to see it twice myself. I've started reading about it historically (Days of Rage by Burrough is informative and neutral tone).
Capitalism isn't a cancer. It's just a framework that gives you enough liberty to succeed or fail. Many fail. Many who fail spend years pouting about it, waste what little time they might have for any second attempts.
> They're going to learn the hard way now.
"They" won't learn anything. They don't have to learn anything, but if they did, you don't have any leverage anyway to be able to force the issue. They're out there busy creating a world, right now, right this very minute, in which they don't need you or other malcontents at all. They're satisfied that they can create this world and soon. And they're not penciling in a place for you or those like you to exist within it. And you have no leverage. What leverage you might have managed to squirrel away before, you rejected it. You reject it now, even in this comment. There's that nagging little thought in the back of your mind, that if you were to try to fix the system from within the system, you might discover you no longer worry so much about fixing it, right?
- Anyone unfamiliar with the Patty Hearst kidnapping may want to read the excellent book Days of Rage [0]. I started reading it after it was recommended by another user on this forum a long time ago.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Rage:_America%27s_Radi...
- You should read Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage”. The latter part documents how the new left ripped itself apart in the 1970s in precisely this way. The language is strikingly similar. It might be a cautionary less for contemporary progressives.
- To everybody interested in all this I will strongly recommend Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage. Too few know just how much left-wing terrorism there was during that time, how much they got away with, and just how much support they got from mainstream society.[0]
Lennon came to regret much of his left-wing activism later in life.
[0] Cf. Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: https://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
- My personal favorite example to get some perspective is from the book Days of Rage. During the 1970s domestic bombings were a daily occurrence, and at the peak there were over 2000 a year. Even the massive amount of violence in modern day Chicago is nothing in comparison to what was happening as recently as the 90s.
