(2 of 4)
Berrigan: Well, I look upon the Weatherman as a very different phenomenon because I have seen in them very different resources and purposes. I believe that their violent rhythm was induced by the violence of the society itself —and only after they struggled for a long time to be nonviolent. I don't think we can expect young people, passionate young people, to be indefinitely nonviolent when every pressure put on them is one of violence—which I think describes the insanity of our society. And I can excuse the violence of those people as a temporary thing. I don't see a long-term ideological violence operating, as in the case of the Klansmen.
Coles: This issue is a very important point, and I find it extremely difficult to deal with because—in my opinion and I'll say it—you're getting close to a position that Herbert Marcuse and others take: you feel that you have the right to decide what to "understand" and by implication be tolerant of, even approve, and what to condemn strongly or call "dangerous" at a given historical moment. You feel you have the right to judge what is a long-term ideological trend, and what isn't, and you also are judging one form of violence as temporary and perhaps cathartic and useful or certainly understandable, with the passions not necessarily being condoned, whereas another form of violence you rule out as automatically ideological. It isn't too long a step from that to a kind of elitism, if you'll forgive the expression—to an elitism that Marcuse exemplifies, in which he condones a self-elected group who have power and force behind them, who rule and outlaw others in the name of, presumably, the "better world" that they advocate. There is something there that I find very arrogant and self-righteous and dangerous.
Berrigan: O.K. Well, let's agree to differ on that, maybe from the point of view of a certain risk that I am willing to take in regard to those young people —a risk that I would be much less willing to take in regard to something as long-term as the Klan. But there is always danger in taking these risks, and the only way in which I can keep reasonably free of that danger is by saying in public and to myself that the Weatherman ideology (for instance) is going to meet up with people who are going to be very harshly and severely critical of it, as I have been and will be; in fact, at the point in which their rhetoric expresses disregard of human life and human dignity, I stand aside and I say no, as I will say no to the war machine. But I discern changes in our radical youth, including the Weatherman. And again I have hope for them, hope they will not be wedded to violence.