Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence

Rethinking the Legacy of 1968

Sarah Colvin, Katharina Karcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351203777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This volume presents and interrogates both theoretical and artistic expressions of the revolutionary, militant spirit associated with "1968" and the aftermath, in the specific context of gender.

The contributors explore political-philosophical discussions of the legitimacy of violence, the gender of aggression and peaceability, and the contradictions of counter violence; but also women's artistic and creative interventions, which have rarely been considered. Together the chapters provide and provoke a wide-ranging rethink of how we read not only "1968" but more generally the relationship between gender, political violence, art and emancipation.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of protest and violence in the fields of history, politics and international relations, sociology, cultural studies, and women's studies.

Part I
On the (gendered) political legitimacy of violence

1 On the legitimacy of violence as a political act

Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Ulrike Meinhof, and Bernadine Dohrn

Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey
Translated by Dierk Helmken

Prologue

New York, 15 December 1967: the USA has been engaged in open warfare in Vietnam for more than three years. More than half a million soldiers are stationed in South Vietnam. The US Air Force is bombing North Vietnam, using chemical weapons among others. Parallel to the escalation of the war in Vietnam, opposition is growing at home. The student organisation Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which support the anti-war movement, exhorts opponents in early 1967 to move from protest to resistance. In the ghettos of the big cities there is violent unrest. Under those circumstances, in 21st Street’s Theatre for Ideas – a small but central forum for the intellectuals of New York – a discussion is taking place about the legitimacy of violence. ‘Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be legitimate?’ asks Robert S. Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books (Arendt et al. 1971: 97).

Hannah Arendt, opening the discussion, declares the differentiation between ‘power’ and ‘violence’ crucial for the answer to his question. Violence, she claims, is a marginal problem in constitutional states, incorporated by the police and by the army. In that context, violence is legitimate as long as it is deployed to maintain a structure of power whose aim is to defend citizens against criminality from within and aggression from without. Violence, argues Arendt, expresses the impotence of power, where power ‘proper’ stems from the ability to communicate and act collectively. To demonstrate her point, she cites Vietnam, where one can observe the ‘superiority of power of the guerrilla to an enormous and disastrous display of violence’. Without any doubt, ‘American violence could destroy “native power” ’, but it could never replace it. ‘Nothing will be left after destruction but destruction’ (Arendt et al. 1971: 99). Arendt considers power and violence opposites. She rejects three justifications of violence: Marx’s thesis that violence is a necessary component of the revolutionary birth pains of a new society, Sorel’s thesis that violence is creative by nature, and Sartre’s thesis that violence is essential for the creation of man (as a creator of man, or man recreating himself) (Arendt et al. 1971: 100–01).

After Arendt, the Irish author Connor Cruise O’Brien, the American poet Robert Lowell, and Noam Chomsky join the discussion. All three talk about justifications for the application of violence, using historical examples. Only O’Brien defends the application of violence as a means to effect basic social change. As examples, he refers to the various revolutions in Third World countries. Following the 19th-century Irish agitator William O’Brien, he formulates the thesis that ‘violence is the best way of insuring a hearing for moderation’ (Arendt et al. 1971: 104).¹

Susan Sontag silently listens to the debate that evening before she decides to intervene to express her disappointment about the course the discussion is taking. She reproaches participants for treating the topic ‘as if they were sitting in judgement on history as a sort of theatre in continuous performances’. In her view it is not the past but the present that counts. ‘It’s personally hard for me to understand how in December 1967 in New York the discussion has at no point turned actively the question of whether we, in this room, and the people we know are going to be engaged in violence’, she comments (Arendt et al. 1971: 121). In the Theatre for Ideas, consensus is reached that the protest movement against the Vietnam War should stick to non-violent actions, for strategic reasons. Only one voice in the audience expresses a different opinion. Tom Hayden, a leading figure in the SDS and chairman of the National Mobilizing Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), argues that ‘until you can begin to show – not in language and not in theory, but in action – that you can put an end the war in Vietnam, and an end to American racism, you can’t condemn the violence of others who can’t wait for you’ (Arendt et al. 1971: 127). Hayden claims that the opposition to the Vietnam War should not be seen as a peace movement, but as a protest movement; and he introduces the slogan of the SDS, to move from ‘protest to resistance’, into the intellectual circles of New York.

While the debate in the Theatre for Ideas in New York was taking place, the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund – Germany’s SDS – was planning an International Vietnam Congress in West Berlin, under Che Guevara’s slogan ‘the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’. In the Federal Republic of Germany, too, the protest against the Vietnam War was undergoing a radicalisation at the turn of the year 1967–68: on both sides of the Atlantic, a student New Left had emerged to criticise the state of society and protest against the Vietnam War. One of the participants in the Vietnam Congress, which would take place in West Berlin on 15–17 February 1968, was the journalist Ulrike Meinhof. The slogan ‘from protest to resistance’ was introduced into the Congress by a representative of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a black student organisation, and Meinhof (1968: 5) took it as the title for one of her high-profile columns for the left-wing journal konkret.

In the USA, the ‘protest to resistance’ strategy of the SDS would culminate in the campaign ‘Ten Days to Shake the Empire’ at Columbia University in New York in April 1968. A participant in that campaign was the lawyer Bernadine Dohrn, who, like Ulrike Meinhof in Germany, would be declared public enemy no. 1 at the beginning of the 1970s. Both would become ‘most wanted’ persons in their respective countries.

These, then, are the four protagonists of this chapter: Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Ulrike Meinhof, and Bernadine Dohrn. Only two of the four ever encountered each other: Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag, who met in the Theatre for Ideas and also privately (Mary McCarthy, who knew both women, warned Arendt that Sontag would try to ‘conquer’ her; that she had fallen in love with her).² The four have in common that they intervened in the political debate on the legitimacy of violence as a political act, and offered possible paradigmatic answers. This chapter outlines their positions on violence in the context of the transnational protests against the Vietnam War in the years 1967–70. It offers an overview of their commonalities and differences, illustrated by a multi-field panel addressing the questions: who did they consider to be the aggressor in the Vietnam War? What causes did they name as triggers of the Vietnam War? Which action strategies did they propose to stop or overcome the violence? And finally, what was their concept for transforming society?

A trip to Hanoi: Susan Sontag

Born in New York in 1933, Susan Sontag hardly intervened in political issues in the first 30 years of her life. As a literary critic and author, she differentiated sharply between art and politics, and her continuous political commitment only began with the Vietnam War (Isernhagen 2015: 149–72, 2016: 294–324). She participated in events against the war, gave speeches, joined the so-called ‘read-ins’, and pondered the role of an artist in protest movements. Soon her life was dominated by thoughts about the war. She felt personally injured by a war waged in the name of her country, the USA, but faced a situation in which nationwide protests did not seem to affect the politics of the government in the slightest (Sontag 2013: 465). ‘Living in the United States hurts so much’, she declared in front of the press in London in July 1967. ‘It’s like having an ulcer all the time’ (Isernhagen 2016: 297). ‘It is our war’, she told the public in the US, attributing the causes of the war to the American way of life, which suffocated any subversive seed and systematically curbed social change. With that appraisal she was in agreement with Herbert Marcuse. Sontag saw US Americans infested with a deep-rooted chauvinism. ‘They really do not believe that other countries or other ways of life exist’, she commented, concluding: ‘Whatever challenges this chauvinism, is good’ (1965: 656). The adequate answer to the Vietnam War was, from her perspective, a change in the American way of life. But how could it be changed?

Sontag found the answer during a two-week journey through North Vietnam in the spring of 1968. Invited by the Vietnamese government as a well-known opponent to the Vietnam War, she exposed herself to the air attacks of the US Air Force. She set out on her travels full of self-doubt. Others – among them Mary McCarthy and Tom Hayden – had travelled the country before her (Lynd and Hayden 1966). How could she help drive the opposition movement against the war? Her travel report Trip to Hanoi can be read as an answer to the question posed in the Theatre for Ideas about the legitimacy of violence as political act, five months after that debate. Her essay assesses who is to blame for the initial aggression, the causes of violence, and strategies for overcoming the structures that produced violence, as she saw them.

Violence is attributed by Susan Sontag only to the American side. Three out of four usages of the word ‘violence’ in her travel report relate to the US as a nation that exported violence (Sontag 2013: 514). On the North Vietnamese side she observed the contrary: an absence of violence. Sontag uses the word ‘violence’ to describe state activities, an unusual usage in the Anglo-American context in the 1960s: ‘In the established vocabulary’, Herbert Marcuse (1969: 72) points out, ‘violence is a term which one does not apply to the action of the police, the National Guard, the marshals, the bombers’. Sontag – who, with her then-husband Philip Rieff, was friends with and even temporarily shared a house with Marcuse – thereby took the term used by the state to describe the actions of its opponents, and turned it on the state-sanctioned actions of the police and the military. This procedure, called détournement by the French Situationists, breaks with the conventional understanding of terms and charges them with new meaning. Within the act of détournement, the ‘stealing’ of terms and disturbance of their conventional meanings is perceived as an act of violence, which deranges the existing order (see Bohrer 1970: 32–61; Greil 1989: 163ff). Susan Sontag applied the Situationists’ technique in her Trip to Hanoi.

Sontag’s depiction of the everyday life of ordinary people in North Vietnam destroys the prevailing picture of the enemy entertained by the US American public. It is turned on its head: the North Vietnamese are classified neither as violent, nor inhuman, nor as beasts or subhuman beings (compare Marcuse 1969: 75). Instead, they are shown as profoundly human, especially in their treatment of captured US American soldiers (Sontag 2013: 508). Her own immersion in the culture of Vietnam challenged, in her account, the image of US Americans and also the image of Vietnam she herself had adopted as an opponent of the war. Before she flew to Hanoi, her perception was that America was ‘strong’, North Vietnam ‘weak’ (Sontag 2013: 518). At the end of her journey, that binary opposition had been reversed. But what made the Vietnamese so strong? In Sontag’s eyes, it was their holistic way of living and looking at things:

The Vietnamese are ‘whole’ human beings, not ‘split’ as we are. Inevitably, such people are likely to give outsiders the impression of great ‘simplicity’. But while the Vietnamese are stripped down, they are hardly simple in any sense that grants us the right to patronize them.

(Sontag 2013: 512)

Sontag delegitimises the ‘violence’ executed by the USA by negating the idea of the supremacy of US American culture as the leading and justifying reason to wage this war. She reverses the hierarchy of the cultures, whereby Vietnam becomes the ‘ideal Other’ of US American culture (Sontag 2013: 519). By stressing this ‘ideal Other’, she offers opposition to the Vietnam War at the same time as a transformation strategy to overcome the causes of the violence. Her strategy begins with people in the West. They do not represent, she argues, the only possible development of humanity. It is therefore necessary to reconsider ‘the human type that gradually became ascendant in the west from the time of the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution to modern post-industrial society’ (Sontag 2013: 520). A psychic change is needed to achieve a ‘new version of human nature in this part of the world’ (Sontag 2013: 520). That could lead to real knowledge in conjunction with the discontent that is a trait of the Western human type: ‘knowing that leads simultaneously to action and self-transcendence’ (Sontag 2013: 520).

Sontag’s transformation strategy was aimed at the interior of human beings: the level of emotions and sentiments whose alteration engenders new human relations and thereby has the potential to transform society as a whole. She attempted to stimulate people to scrutinise themselves and their everyday routines in order to initiate a process of self-awareness (Isernhagen 2015: 164). The transformation of individual human beings and of human relations was seen by Sontag as the conditio sine qua non for the kind of transformation of society that would stop the export of violence by the USA.

Like Sontag, Bernadine Dohrn proposed a basic transformation of society in 1968, but in the face of the Vietnam War she offered a different strategy.

‘Up against the wall’: Bernadine Dohrn

In 1968, Bernadine Dohrn was 28 years old and practising law in Chicago. As a lawyer, she supported the American SDS in legal matters. She was elected Interorganizational Secretary of the SDS at the Union level, and in that role she travelled abroad in 1968 and 1969 to speak with representatives of the North Vietnamese government. She met them at international conferences with representatives of liberation movements in the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic and Cuba, in Bratislava in 1968 and Havana in 1969. Like many adherents to the student New Left, she saw in the Vietnamese liberation movement an agent of social change on a global scale.

Central to talks with the North Vietnamese was the creation of a ‘second front’ to support the Vietcong liberation movement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I On the (gendered) political legitimacy of violence
• Part II Creative resistance
• Part III The contradictions and limits of emancipatory violence