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Inflammatory Rhetoric
Still, a growing number of bombings and attacks on police are the work of the left extremists. There are roughly a dozen extremist groups bent on revolution in the U.S. Operating with no apparent central direction or any attempt at coordination of tactics, they can, according to official estimates, muster about 4,500 members. There is the "New Year's Gang," a group of University of Wisconsin students who claim credit for bombing an Army-supported research center last August and killing a physics researcher. The gang has warned that if its various demands are not met by the end of this week, it will initiate "open warfare and kidnaping of prominent officials." There are the Weathermen, with a long, possibly inflated list of bombings to their discredit.
Like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, with perhaps 1,000 members, may well be taking the blame for more terrorist activities than they have actually carried out—so far. Though 13 are on trial in New York on charges of a conspiracy to bomb buildings and railroad tracks, no Panther has been convicted of killing a cop or blowing up anything. Some have fired at officers raiding their headquarters, but only Panthers have died in such exchanges. By its own accounts, however, the organization stockpiles arms and ammunitions in "self-defense," and its literature features cartoons in which blacks are shown machine-gunning porcine police. The Panthers' rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible, and it is impossible to say how many people take their "off the pig" injunctions seriously. By their own testimony, the Panthers consider themselves urban guerrillas and in solidarity with revolutionary movements outside the U.S.
The ethnic and racial diversity of the U.S., and its relative youth as a country, have much to do with its social unrest. But terrorism occurs in some of the oldest and most settled societies. Europe's oft-revised map—and its tribal feuds—have given rise to many terrorist movements. In the province of Alto Adige on the Italian-Austrian border, German-speaking separatists set off 200 bombs and killed ten policemen over a five-year period to punctuate their demands for reunification with Austria. Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons have been at each others' throats for 50 years, toppling 18 governments in their attempts to gain primacy. The Breton Liberation Front blows up a police station occasionally by way of reminding Paris of the long-smoldering separatist movement in Brittany, "France's forgotten province." Young Protestant and Catholic toughs are still fighting the 1690 Battle of the Boyne in Northern Ireland, and the old Irish Republican Army, whose terrorist tactics of bombing and assassination prefigured today's urban guerrillas by a generation, is showing signs of stirring.
The Continent's major cities are quieter than they were during the Marxist student upheavals of