Bryan Burrough: Days of Rage, Penguin Press
Risvolto
From the bestselling 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 stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. 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—radicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice—often with disastrous consequences.
Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage is filled with revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. The result is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal agents alike and weaves their stories into a spellbinding secret history of the 1970s.
From the bestselling 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 stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. 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—radicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice—often with disastrous consequences.
Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage is filled with revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. The result is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal agents alike and weaves their stories into a spellbinding secret history of the 1970s.
Terroristi Usa, più figli dei fiori che di Lenin
1 set 2015 Corriere della Sera Di Marco Gervasoni © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA
Il non foltissimo pubblico del film di Robert Redford La regola del silenzio ricorderà i Weathermen, il gruppo terroristico a cui la vicenda si ispira. E proprio con loro si apre il libro di Bryan Burrough Days of Rage («Giorni di rabbia», Penguin Press). Fu infatti quella la prima organizzazione a votarsi alla lotta armata e agli attentati, negli Usa a cavallo tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta. Ispiratisi, oltre che alla tradizione anarchica statunitense, ai guerriglieri dell’America Latina, alternarono all’esplosione di bombe tipiche dei primi, gli attacchi in stile tupamaros e le azioni di guerriglia urbana come il «giorno della rabbia», nel 1969.
In buona parte provenienti dai migliori campus, i Weathermen professavano un marxismo-leninismo in salsa maoista e castrista. Per il resto però erano figli della controcultura affermatasi negli anni Sessanta: il rock (il loro nome si ispirava a una canzone), l’uso di droghe, il linguaggio dei comunicati e il sesso di gruppo. Se all’inizio l’organizzazione carente li favorì perché l’Fbi era meglio preparato a reprimere i gruppi gerarchizzati come il Partito comunista che quelli spontanei, sulla media distanza ciò si rivelò fatale, e i Weathermen furono rimpiazzati, nella storia della lotta armata, da sigle che scandirono il decennio successivo, dalla Black Liberation Army, di cui una degli esponenti principali era Silvia Baraldini, a The Family fino a United Freedom Front all’inizio degli anni Ottanta: tutti affermavano di lottare per gli afroamericani, anche se tali non erano la maggior parte di loro.
Rispetto al terrorismo europeo di matrice rossa, quello statunitense produsse pochissime vittime, i suoi leader (tra cui molte donne) erano più freak che leninisti e la società li visse, tranne forse nei primissimi Settanta, come degli alieni: pur tuttavia rappresentò un reale pericolo, a cui non a caso l’Fbi dedicò tutte le sue, diciamo così, amorevoli cure.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento