Something tells us the violent radicalism decried by US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
yesterday is not the violent radicalism of Northern California detailed in this 1975 Time magazine
article:
Within this array of leftist activity hide the underground revolutionaries. They strike and burrow underground again in such places as the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles and the Mission District in San Francisco or the squalid slums of East Oakland and Sacramento. In addition, many terrorists are believed to be hiding among the students and transient street people of Berkeley's South Campus section. Furtive meetings between the underground and aboveground activists undoubtedly take place in the area's many coffeehouses, bars and parking lots. Other good meeting places are the parks known to students as People's Park and Ho Chi Minh Park.
State and federal law-enforcement officials admit that they know little about California's revolutionary underground. Charles Bates, chief of the San Francisco FBI office, points out that the groups are small, tightly knit, deeply suspicious of strangers, and thus virtually impossible to infiltrate.
What is known is that the groups are growing increasingly violent. FBI officials suspect that radicals have committed some of the state's recent unsolved murders. Among these is the slaying of Wilbert ("Popeye") Jackson, a black activist who the FBI believes was killed because radicals suspected—incorrectly—that he was a squealer. Last year the radicals claimed responsibility for 19 bombings in California; so far this year they have set off 50.
Many California radicals follow the teachings of Mao, Che Guevara, French Revolutionary Regis Debray and Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian terrorist tactician. Marighella advocates violence as a way to encourage government authorities to overreact. He theorizes that a government will inevitably impose harshly repressive measures that will "radicalize" nonviolent citizens and thus bring on the revolution.
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