There is a reflex—perhaps it already tickles—to call this whataboutism: a defense of the indefensible on the basis that the other guys did worse. But all war is whataboutism. What about your enemy, what about your conditions, what is it about the state of the world in which you live that justifies armed struggle? Between 1955, when Bernardine Dohrn was 13 years old, and 1977, when Dohrn and Ayers were expelled from the Weather Underground in a fit of unavoidable leftist infighting, the United States murdered roughly two million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It sprayed over 18,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange over Indochina, causing some 400,000 additional deaths and some 500,000 birth defects in children. In March 1968, the Mỹ Lai Massacre alone saw roughly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians—mainly women, children, and the elderly—executed by American forces. The CIA’s Phoenix Program is conservatively credited with the assassination of over 20,000 people. In 1965 and ’66, the State Department provided kill lists to the Indonesian military, resulting in an anticommunist purge that produced some million bodies. In 1971, President Richard Nixon backed the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, selling arms to the perpetrators and blocking international action while mass rape and murder produced several million refugees and another million dead. The CIA overthrew the government of Chile, installing a dictator who killed around 3,000 dissidents and tortured thousands more; it coordinated with dictators in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to assassinate and disappear tens of thousands of left-wing dissidents. Beyond Hampton and Attica and Orangeburg, beyond the dozens of suspect encounters during traffic stops, the murders and lynchings gone unsolved by half-motivated law enforcement, the American police beat and murdered protesters in Selma, Alabama, and Chicago, at Kent State and Jackson State, at Southern University. “I was in a rage,” Dohrn told her son decades later in an interview for his book, “at the absolute stench of American life.” If you cannot smell it, you need only imagine these bodies—these millions murdered, maimed, and tortured—not as some distant casualties of “necessary” realpolitik, but looking up, mangled in their graves, each bearing the face of your mother, your husband, your child. To ask whether or not it was morally justified—whether it was, in fact, a “moral catastrophe”—to respond to all of this by making a spectacle of bombing empty buildings, one simply has to imagine the Iraqi government, suddenly possessed of the military power to avenge itself on the United States, flattening your neighborhood, setting fire to your city, poisoning your drinking water, sending armed men to execute your aging parents in their home—they voted for Bush after all, didn’t they? Then imagine that somewhere in Baghdad, some disaffected teenagers setting off a protest bomb in an empty office park. How strenuous your objection? How tightly might you clutch your pearls before some invading soldier ripped them from your neck as a trophy before setting fire to your home? One must imagine if the Weathermen had killed a million people in the New York Tristate area with a decade’s worth of bombs. Would it have been better if the Weathermen had worn medals and planned their actions from the Pentagon?
A Better World Is Not Possible
Did the Weather Underground have a point?
By Emmett Rensin
