THE street is the stage," says the American Yippie Jerry Rubin in Do It!, his handbook for the modern revolutionary. In cities throughout the non-Communist world, that stage is alive with alarming activities: politically motivated arson, bombing, kidnaping and murder. Closely related to these is the phenomenon of skyjacking, for just as the highly complex 20th century city is the most vulnerable point in man's terrestrial sphere, so is the thin-skinned, 600-m.p.h. jet the most vulnerable in the atmosphere. The terrorist activity is worldwide, and most of it is carried out by a new type in the history of political warfare: the urban guerrilla.
In Belfast and Londonderry, barbed wire, sandbag bunkers and helmeted troops have been fixtures since Northern Ireland's ancient religious antagonisms flared into violence last summer. In Calcutta and its industrial satellites police have been loath to venture off major arteries since Maoist Naxalites stabbed three of their colleagues to death in dark alleys as part of a deliberate campaign of terror. Heavy guard details have trailed diplomats in Montevideo since July, when Uruguay's Tupamaro guerrillas shed their Robin Hood image and wantonly murdered a political hostage. Canada was still tense following the brutal murder by fanatic Quebec separatists of a government official; a small band of terrorists, trying to blackmail the government, succeeded in frightening the entire country and forcing the suspension of some civil liberties.
In Washington, officials were frankly worried about the possibility that a radical group might try to kidnap or assassinate a U.S. official or a foreign diplomat. Rarely has the capital been so security conscious. "I'm sorry, but we've got to think paranoid," said one of the government's top security officials last week. Secretary of State William Rogers and other high officials have been urged to vary the routes they follow to and from their offices. The Secret Service is rapidly adding 300 more men to a recently created 550-man Executive Protective Service assigned to guard the embassies of other countries, and Washington police are getting bomb-disposal training at the Army's Aberdeen Munitions Center.
Disproportionate Power
Unlike the fortified towns of old, the besieged cities of 1970 are threatened not from without but from within, by armies that are hardly ever in sight. Nor are the troops preparing for anything so vast as the great popular upheavals that swept the revolution-torn capitals of mid-19th century Europe. The cities are threatened in each case by a few hundred or at most a few thousand men. But, as the Canadian example showed, small numbers can affect a whole nation, if the right pressure point is found. In the late-20th century, minuscule bands possess disproportionate power to render a society immobile.
To what end? The new urban guerrilla talks in vague terms about building a new world. When pressed, he usually describes that world in Marxist terms (although Marxism considers itself "scientific" and by and large holds "romantic" terrorists in contempt). Beyond some immediate goals, like preserving a particular piece of real estate from "exploitation" or "imperialism," the urban guerrilla has little to say about the shape of the future. Says Political Scientist Richard