Death To The Fascist Insect: The Strange Case Of Patty Hearst And The S.L.A.

By Genova Jett

The S.L.A. or Symbionese Liberation Army was one of America's most feared 1970s terror groups, grabbing the nation's attention with two high-profile crimes: the murder of black school superindendent Marcus Foster, followed by the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The ensuing months, during which Hearst apparently adopted the revolutionary name Tania and joined forces with her captors, form one of the most controversial and high-profile episodes in 20th century US history. "Death To The Fascist Insect" provides an in-depth analysis and history of the S.L.A. and the Hearst case, plus many of the S.L.A.'s radical manifestos and screeds of guerilla warfare against capitalist society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781908694966

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1. INTRODUCTION

The so-called Symbionese Liberation Army rose into world renown on the basis of two crimes. In the communities which surround San Francisco Bay, neither of the crimes was very atrocious, or even very uncommon. The region manages to accept many hundreds of murders every year, plus tens of thousands of rapes, mutilations, beatings, armed robberies, and non-fatal knifings and shootings. Moreover, the characteristic crime of violence in the Bay Area is social, or racial, in that it typically involves a black as the criminal and a white as the victim. Unless the details are particularly scabrous, such crimes are given only a few column-inches in back pages of newspapers, and not even reported on the electronic news media. Mere murder is not news.

When the crime is especially appalling, and gets wider notice, it commands headlines for only a few days. Typical instances of this heavy but brief notoriety were grouped all around the crimes that made the Symbionese Liberation Army a name to conjure with. Thus on the evening of January 28, four whites were shot down on San Francisco streets in a coordinated symbolic act by four young blacks; in the night of January 30, three whites were slashed to death by a young black already under sentence for crimes of violence; on the afternoon of February 7, two young career policemen were murdered by a black gunman in an Oakland school building. Not one of these killings enjoyed more than a few days of press coverage; not one was regarded as philosophically or socially significant. The fact that murder, even socially adjusted murder, is among the Bay Area norms, gives special interest to the marvellous success of the SLA in getting and keeping its audience. Never before has so little crime bought so much fame.

The triumph of the Symbionese in this respect developed from a set of isolated potentials cleverly put together by SLA theoreticians, and thoroughly recorded in their letters and other documents. In these writings the SLA provided something for every appetite. In killing the loved and admired Black educator, Marcus Foster, and killing him on the maxim that he was a traitor to his race, they elicited not only horror, but widespread discussion and challenge. In kidnapping Patricia Hearst, a pretty young heiress, and holding her hostage in some unimaginably secret headquarters, they added responses of sex, sentiment, and class, to those of caste and race. These crimes alone, once admitted or claimed, would have brought them into the limelight for a week or two, especially in the excitable communities around the Bay. But by their literary programs the SLA writers carried their renown much farther.

Delivered one by one, carefully, to the media, the SLA documents forced the constitutional and philosophical identity of the SLA into the consciousness of thoughtful people, and successfully presented the SLA soldiers as friends and benefactors to thousands or tens of thousands of such Bay Area people as manage to believe that good things can be had for nothing.

Here as elsewhere, the SLA got much result from little input. Even if the Hearst food program had proceeded at the grandiose level in which the SLA first envisaged it, the costs it would have involved would not have equalled the sums spent in a single day for the regular social and welfare operations in California. But the food program completed the SLA publicity program, adding the curiosity and admiration of people who could be reached by no other means. If earlier deeds and words had earned the attention of intellectuals, sensation-hunters, and responsible citizens, the new deed with free food added the attention of the dispirited, calloused, and cynical. Thus the whole society, from top to bottom, was drawn in.

The most important of the beliefs that swept through the articulate circles of the Bay Area was the belief that the terrorist formulas actually worked, that they produced quick and useful results, and that society and its laws had no way of countering them. And this amounted to a belief in terror itself as a mode of politics. Thus the Symbionese had an early success beyond their wildest dreams. They silenced the voices of responsible people, they thwarted the press; and for whatever reasons, they