Political violence, especially when committed by agents other than established states, summons strong passions and invites blunt assessments. Much of the commentary on Weatherman and the RAF has been organized around extreme binaries that suggest that the groups were necessarily one thing or the other, with the negative view clearly dominating most historical commentary. This divide is evident in basic choices of terminology and possibilities of judgment: Were the Weathermen and RAF members “terrorists” or “urban guerrillas”? Villains or heroes? Crazed or courageous? Was their violence, in the last instance, wholly unjust or in any sense justified? Yet these stark polarities, rather than providing sound options for judgment, obscure the complex and even paradoxical nature of the meaning and legacy of both groups. The events of September 11, 2001, by deepening the antipathy of Americans to all violence labeled “terroristic,” have likely made the impulse to categorically condemn the antigovernment violence of the 1960s and 1970s swifter and more severe.
