"The Belfast of North America"
Of which city could I be speaking? Well, this San Francisco Chronicle quotes an FBI terrorism expert who says that during the early 70's...
Dang, gave it away, didn't I?
Mark Rudd, one of the SDS leaders, said Tuesday from his New Mexico home that the tenor of the times back then, was that "the U.S. government was murdering millions of people in Vietnam and was murdering black militants here. There was a war going on in this country. Mass riots in the streets, ghetto uprisings, the FBI targeting black militants. At some point, it seemed like kill or be killed. That was the tenor of the times."The whole piece is pretty even-handed, and gives some necessary context to the arrest of several Black Liberation Army members for the 1971 murder of SFPD Sergeant John Young in a raid on a police station. Much more on that here.Yet Jim Lassart, who spent more than 10 years as a San Francisco prosecutor, said there is another way to think of the BLA. If they were operating today, they would simply be branded as "classic domestic terrorists. They were just another set of killers," he said.
It also gives a little background for why the first few Dirty Harry films were such a cultural event. What look like caricatured villains in, say, the Enforcer weren't made up out of whole cloth. The San Francisco of Bullitt(1968)--cool, elegant, a little bent--actually concealed a violent, dysfunctional playground for some sinister elements. Anarchic terrorism really did flourish there, abetted by the sort of feckless pro-criminal bureaucracy that came through so strongly in the original Dirty Harry. The "Scorpio killer" in that film was actually based on a real-life (still at large) Bay Area serial killer, dubbed the "Zodiac Killer". (The film wasn't originally set in SF, by the way, but according to the film's Wikipedia entry, Clint Eastwood made them shoot it there when he was cast.)
Hmmm...paramilitary violence, bombs, raids on police stations, breakdown of civic order...perhaps we should have abandoned Sna Francisco then like they say we ought to do with Baghdad now? Well, it's all moot now. That was then, this is now.
November 2005, via Zombietime, and yes that cop's on fire from a protester's Molotov cocktail.
PS There's another anti-war protest set for Saturday in San Fran. If frustration over the Vietnam war inspired San Francisco's violence in the 1970's, as Mark Rudd's quote above suggests, what's stopping them from doing more of it now?