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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 119-125



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The Limits on Fighting Injustice:

Bringing the Question Home

Jeremy Varon. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xii + 394 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

In the burgeoning literature on the protest movements of the 1960s, few monographs offer something radically new in focus or interpretation. By these measures, Jeremy Varon's work is refreshing, original in its focus and intriguing in its approach. Varon's concern is assessing the political violence of the New Left in two countries in the late sixties and early seventies. His work is not strictly comparative, however, and while the book is solidly researched, Varon draws lessons less from historical evidence than from critical theory. While the book has serious shortcomings, the author should be commended for his sophisticated engagement with his topic and for turning our attention to important questions that will help shape the historical agenda in the foreseeable future.

Varon's stated purpose is "to restore a stronger measure of rationality and moral purpose to Weatherman and RAF in order better to understand both their political histories and the complex nature of political violence more generally" (p. 17). His account, while critical, is clearly sympathetic, at least where the Weather Underground is concerned. Ironically, however, Bringing the War Home fails to present a strong challenge to the declension theory that dominated early works on the 1960s. Thus, while arguing that the New Left's turn to violence is understandable, Varon does not dispute the fact that it was still ultimately a destructive rather than a creative force. This leaves the "good sixties/bad sixties" dichotomy virtually unchallenged in the end; an idealistic, nonviolent movement becomes unhinged when it allows ideology to take precedence over reality and in the process glorifies violence. What becomes obscured in such a narrative are the other developments of this period that carry on the idealism of the sixties in new and different ways. In Varon's reading of the period, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism—each [End Page 119] significantly indebted to the New Left—remain distractions to the main event, the anti-imperialist struggle against the U.S. government.

Varon's search for a usable past dictates the structure and method of the book. He did not set out to write a narrative history of the New Left in the United States and West Germany. Neither is this study intended to offer a direct comparison of the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction. Instead, it is an account of the political and historical context in which both organizations emerged, their origins, activities, and ideologies, and a series of ruminations on the subject of revolutionary violence itself.

As Varon states it, with both organizations, "my strongest accent is on the mutually informative relationship between research and theory" (p. 18). This method serves to clarify the aim, and the uses and abuses, of revolutionary violence.

The Weather Underground has received much public attention recently, with the publication of memoirs by former members Bill Ayers and David Gilbert and the film by Sam Green. At the same time, the international character of New Left rebellion is receiving more scholarly attention; for instance, two international conferences are scheduled to be held in Germany in 2005, one exploring the connections between the New Left in the U.S. and West Germany, the other comparing the activities and experiences of peace movements around the world since 1945. Varon's work makes an important contribution to the historiography of the international New Left, thus it merits close scrutiny.

As Varon himself points out, Bringing the War Home complements the recent film on Weatherman (later called Weather Underground). Both emphasize the political context in which the Weather Underground emerged and give former members a platform to talk about their own experience and what it meant to them, while at the same time illustrating their distance...

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