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Police are a prime target of black and white revolutionaries. There were two attempted bombings of police stations in Detroit earlier this month; both failed. A blast during last October's Weatherman rampage in Chicago toppled a statue commemorating policemen killed in the 1886 Haymarket Square riot and ensuing disturbances—all of which was triggered by an anarchist's bomb. While many of the attacks are clearly aimed at property and publicity rather than people, some seek to maim and murder. A bomb that ripped through the Park Precinct house near Haight-Ashbury on Feb. 16 killed a policeman when an industrial staple taped to the weapon shot through his left eye and brain.
Psychotic fads have a way of becoming contagious, and the political left has had no monopoly on bombings. Bank robbers in Danbury, Conn., recently set off three blasts to divert cops. In Detroit, rival motorcycle gangs with nary a trace of political ideology between them dynamited each other's clubhouses. In Denver, where a battle over busing for integration rages, 38 school buses were bombed last month. Three cars were recently destroyed there in separate explosions; the only link is that all were red and foreign-made.
Cops and Robbers. The most frightening aspect of the political bomb-throwing is the cool acceptance of terror as a tactic by educated people. Mainly young, often college-educated, many are guilt-ridden offspring of middle-class affluence. Others are black militants devoured by despair. What they share is an apocalyptic and conspiratorial view of society and an arrogant, elitist conviction that only they know how to reform the world. They have only a vague, romantic idea of overthrowing the "Establishment" and ending the Viet Nam War. Thus, their goals cannot be achieved through traditional means of reform within the system. As Berkeley Police Chief Bruce Baker points out, they are "playing a very tragic form of cops and robbers, seeing themselves as modern-day revolutionaries."
Some inkling of the bombers' psychology appeared in a letter mailed last week just before the New York office bombings by Revolutionary Force 9: "All three [companies bombed] profit not only from death in Viet Nam but also from American imperialism in all of the Third World. To numb Amerika to the horrors they inflict on humanity, these corporations seek to enslave us to a way of 'life' which values conspicuous consumption more than the relief of poverty, disease and starvation. In death-directed Amerika, there is only one way to a life of love and freedom: to attack and destroy the forces of death and exploitation and to build a just society —revolution."