A Criminal History of Mankind (99 page)

The drugs Marcuse was recommending were not opium derivatives, but ‘psychedelics’ like mescalin and LSD, which are non-addictive. Significantly, these seem to operate by paralysing the normal ‘repressive’ function of the left brain, and allowing perception to be shaped by our far richer right-brain awareness. In the late 1950s, Timothy Leary, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard, began controlled experiments with ‘psychedelics’ (he invented the word) and became convinced that they could become the instrument of a new, enriched consciousness. He summarised his doctrine in the phrase: Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ Sacked from Harvard in 1963, he became a guru of the new generation. He would later be sentenced to ten years in jail for drug-smuggling.

In the autumn of 1966, a number of ‘Situationist’ students at Strasbourg University founded a society for the rehabilitation of Marx and Ravachol, and printed a pamphlet urging revolt against authority; they were all expelled. This was counter-productive; students all over France took up the protest. They became known as ‘enrages’. At Nanterre University, they shouted down lecturers and painted obscene graffiti on the walls. The police had to be called in. In May 1968, the violence spread to Paris; students built barricades and hurled paving stones, while the French police reacted with their customary lack of finesse. For a while, it looked as if de Gaulle’s government was about to come crashing down. But, in fact, the workers themselves found all this talk of revolution rather silly, and declined to take over the factories. Slowly, the French revolt faded away. But in England, in West Germany, in America, it smouldered on. When the Shah of Persia came to Berlin in June 1967, students protested about his repressive regime; the police reacted violently, and a student named Benno Ohnesorg was killed. This convinced the young that terror had to be met with terror. Two of the most active organisers of protest were Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. In London in October 1968, student protesters in Grosvenor Square were treated roughly by the police. Some of them began to speak of founding a more ‘active’ organisation, something along the lines of the French enrages - a word they decided to translate as ‘Angry Brigade’. In America, a group of ‘urban guerrillas’ who called themselves the Weathermen were already trying to undermine the capitalist system with bombs placed at military installations, banks and the offices of big corporations.

In San Francisco, this idea of total revolution was taken very seriously by a group of ‘hippies’ who had formed around a charismatic little guitar player named Charles Manson. Born in 1934, Manson spent his first term in reformatory school at the age of nine. By the time he drifted to San Francisco in 1967, Manson had spent most of his adult life in jail, mostly for such offences as car theft and credit-card fraud. He found himself in the midst of the new ‘psychedelic’ culture. The hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district took LSD, smoked pot, and called themselves ‘flower children’. No one cared that Manson had been a jailbird; on the contrary, it was regarded as being greatly to his credit. Manson was older than most of the ‘drop-outs’, and girls seemed inclined to regard him as a father-substitute figure. Runaways began to gather round him, and soon the Manson menage in the Haight district seemed to be full of emotionally deprived girls and admiring youths (Manson seems to have been bisexual). If they had never read Marcuse, they nevertheless practised his idea that sex could be used as a form of ‘unrepressive sublimation’ to unfold our higher possibilities.

By 1968, Manson was trying hard to move into the pop music business; Manson’s ‘family’ even moved for a time into the luxury home of a member of a successful group called the Beach Boys. Manson’s lack of success seems to have made him increasingly embittered. The ‘family’, now numbering about thirty (and including children) moved out to a ranch owned by an old man named George Spahn, and lived there in exchange for cleaning out the stables.

With so much drug-taking, violence was inevitable. In July 1969, Manson shot a negro dope-dealer named Bernard Crowe in the chest; in fact, Crowe recovered and decided not to go to the police. Later that month, Manson and his friend Bobby Beausoleil tried to persuade another drug-dealer, Gary Hinman, to finance a move to Death Valley; when Hinman refused, he was tortured, then stabbed in the chest and left to die. On the wall above his body, Beausoleil wrote ‘Political piggy’ in blood - intended to lead the police to the belief that the Black Panther movement was responsible.

Manson’s plan was to cause a revolution by setting whites against blacks (whom he detested). On Friday, 8 August 1969, four Manson disciples - three girls and a man - drove out to a house in Benedict Canyon which had been rented by a man in the pop music business against whom Manson had a grudge; in fact, it was now occupied by the film director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate. Polanski was in London, but Sharon Tate had three guests to supper, two men and a woman. Afterwards they took a psychedelic drug and went into various states of dissociation. As the Manson family members entered the drive, they encountered a youth who had been visiting the houseboy; he was shot in the head. Then they went into the house and killed Sharon Tate and her three guests. The men were shot, the women stabbed to death. The word ‘Pig’ was written on the hall door in blood.

The murders created the sensation Manson had hoped for; the following day, the ‘family’ watched the television newscasts with satisfaction. By that evening, every gun and guard dog in the Los Angeles area had been bought up by frantic householders. Manson decided to strike again while the iron was hot. That evening, after taking LSD, he led six followers to a house in the affluent Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, the home of a supermarket owner, Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and tied them up, then sent in three followers, who stabbed the LaBiancas to death. They wrote ‘Death to pigs’ in blood on a door, and ‘Helter Skelter’, Manson’s code word for the revolt that would occur when the alarmed whites rose up against the blacks. But the rising failed to occur; Los Angeles was too accustomed to mass murder to over-react. In the following month, the ‘family’ moved out to the remote Death Valley. When Manson set on fire a bulldozer belonging to the State rangers, the police raided the ranch and arrested all the hippies. And after more than a month in jail, a family member named Susan Atkins, who had taken part in both sets of murders, told her cell-mate about the killings, and word leaked back to the police.

The trial that followed was one of the longest and most expensive in Los Angeles history, and Manson did his best to turn it into an indictment of society and of his judges, explaining that the murders had been committed out of love. Asked if she thought the killing of eight people was unimportant, Susan Atkins retorted by asking whether the killing of thousands with napalm was important. President Nixon denounced Manson even before he and his five co-defendants had been found guilty, and, predictably, Manson became a hero of the west-coast ‘underground’ network. But the trial had the effect of convincing the rest of the world that the whole movement of social revolt was a form of mindless emotionalism whose arguments defied logic; it produced, in fact, precisely the kind of revulsion against the left that the McCarthy witch hunts had created against the right. In America, at least, the Manson family had discredited ‘revolution’.

On the other side of the Atlantic it remained alive, largely as a result of wider social conflicts. The Palestine Liberation Organisation had been formed in Cairo in 1964 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat; its aim was to recover Palestine from the Israelis. In 1967, the Arabs, led by Egypt, launched an attack on Israel; but the Israelis quickly went on the offensive, and had virtually won the war within six days. The fading Palestinian hopes of a military victory led to a change of tactics. In July 1968, three members of another Palestinian group - the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) - took over an Israeli airliner flying from Rome to Tel Aviv and made the pilot land in Algiers. The Israelis agreed to free sixteen Arab terrorists in exchange for the release of the plane and the Israelis on board. (The old Prohibition term hijacking was soon being used to describe this new form of aerial terrorism.) In September 1970 the PFLP hijacked three planes at once (an attempt on a fourth was frustrated by security guards at Amsterdam) and blew one of them up on the Cairo airport - an American Pan Am jumbo jet costing millions - the terrorist spokesman said that this was to give the Americans a lesson for supporting Israel. Meanwhile, a British VC-10 had been hijacked in Bahrein, and the terrorists demanded the release of the commando woman Leila Khaled, jailed in London for an abortive hijack attempt. The three remaining planes were blown up in Jordan, but not - as the guerrillas threatened - with passengers aboard. Seven terrorists were eventually released in exchange for passengers. These attacks had the initial effect of turning world opinion against the Palestinians; but as the media also allowed a certain amount of space to Palestinian grievances, there was a slowly increasing awareness that the Palestinians had a genuine cause for anger. Over the course of the decade, world opinion swung slowly but surely to the view that the Palestinians deserved a homeland of their own.

1964, the year in which the PLO was formed, also saw a break between the old fashioned IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Dublin, with its Marxist orientation, and the Provisional IRA whose sole aim was the unification of Ireland. In 1968, the dissatisfaction of Irish Catholics with the Protestant Ulster government - which, they alleged, treated them as second-class citizens - led to widespread riots, and the beginning of a wave of terrorism in Northern Ireland. After many violent clashes between Protestants and Catholics, British troops were sent to Ulster in April 1969, at first to defend the Catholics. Within weeks, the troops themselves were under attack from terrorists, mostly ‘Provos’. The Provos inaugurated the use of the car-bomb; a bomb placed in the boot of a stolen car and parked in some area in the centre of a city was virtually undetectable until it exploded. Some Catholic districts became IRA enclaves, ‘no-go’ areas for the police and troops. Belfast became a battleground.

In 1968 there were also an increase in terrorism in South America - the death of guerrilla leader Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 had turned him into a symbolic figure of revolt - new measures in Spain against Basque separatists, riots in Belgium about the Flemish language, and even bomb explosions in Wales by Welsh nationalists. It was also the year that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal regime of Alexander Dubcek. In America, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. As French students rioted in Paris, it seemed to many that 1968 might well be the start of the revolution predicted by the Situation-ists. But the outcome of the student riots provided a more reliable pointer to the underlying mood of ordinary citizens; the Gaullists were forced to call a general election, but swept back into power with an increased majority.

Nevertheless, the rise of terrorism encouraged idealistic leftists in Europe and America to hope for the advent of Marcuse’s ‘non-repressive society’. In England, a group of students - mostly from Essex University - called themselves the Angry Brigade, and began selective acts of ‘social sabotage’ - such as incendiary bombs in big London stores. In 1971, two bombs exploded at the home of the Conservative employment minister Robert Carr, another at a police computer centre, another at the home of the Secretary for Trade, John Davies, another at the top of the Post Office Tower. No one was injured. The British police tracked down the bombers to a North London commune, and four of them were sentenced to ten years in jail. But in West Germany, a number of bombings attributed to the Baader-Meinhof group, led by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, killed and injured many people in May 1972. The three leaders were arrested a few months later, and their lawyer, Horst Mahler, was sentenced to twelve years in jail for helping to found the group. But other members of the group continued terrorist attacks. Peter Lorenz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, was kidnapped in February 1975 and released after the government freed five leftist anarchists. In April 1975, another Baader-Meinhof splinter group took over the West German embassy in Stockholm, demanding the release of all Baader-Meinhof terrorists under arrest, and killed the military attache. When their demands were rejected, they set off an explosion; after a siege, the terrorists surrendered. In May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her prison cell; the inquest found that she had committed suicide, but leftists alleged it was murder. In April 1977, the chief federal prosecutor, Siegfried Buback, was assassinated in his car; nevertheless, the three remaining leaders, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Karl Raspe, were sentenced to life imprisonment later the same month. In July, Jurgen Ponto, chairman of the Dresdener Bank, was killed at his home by terrorists, and in September 1977, an industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped; the ransom note demanded the freeing of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe. While Schleyer was still held, four Arab terrorists seized a Lufthansa jet airliner and held it at Mogadishu airport, in Somalia, threatening to blow it up with all passengers unless Baader and his companions were released. After five days, West German commandos stormed the plane, killing three of the four hijackers and releasing the eighty-six passengers. A few hours later, Baader, Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin were found dead in their cells in Stammheim prison. An inquest decided that they had committed suicide; but there was widespread speculation that the German authorities had decided that this was the only way to prevent further attempts to free them through terrorism. The body of Hanns-Martin Schleyer was found in the boot of an abandoned car the following day.

In America, the terrorist coup of the decade was the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who was abducted from her flat in February 1974. The kidnappers called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, and their leader, ‘Field Marshall Cinque’, demanded that her father, Randolph Hearst, should provide the poor with millions of dollars’ worth of free food. The demand was, in fact, unrealistic, since the Hearst newspaper empire had suffered heavy financial losses in recent years. Nevertheless, Hearst distributed two million dollars’ worth of food. The SLA promptly announced that this was not enough and demanded far more. But further argument was avoided when the kidnappers released a tape of Patty Hearst in which she denounced her family as capitalist oppressors and declared that she had become a ‘freedom fighter’ under the name of Tania. When she was photographed by a bank camera during the course of a hold up, carrying a sub-machine gun, she was declared a fugitive from justice. In May, the police traced six members of the SLA to a hideout in the suburbs of Los Angeles; in the shoot-out and fire that followed, all six died, including the leader Donald DeFreeze - ‘Field Marshal Cinque’. Patty Hearst was not in the house; she remained on the run for another sixteen months, and was finally arrested in September 1975. At her trial, her defence alleged brainwashing, and it became a point for passionate discussion whether a kidnap victim could be blamed for saving her life by adopting the opinions of the kidnappers. She was sentenced to seven years in jail, but on appeal this was reduced to probation.