Showing posts with label Peter Trumbore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Trumbore. Show all posts
Peter Trumbore ✍ I have been following Anthony and TFW’s conversation sparked by John Crawley’s recent book, The Yank, with a great deal of interest. 

That conversation, taken with Crawley’s surprise at the lack of military professionalism within the IRA and his contention that some in leadership actively thwarted his and others’ efforts to improve the operational effectiveness of the IRA, provides new context to some of the remarks that Tony Catney made in an interview I conducted with him in February 2013.

Some of the following material has been published before, either in my academic writing or online here at TPQ and my own blog. Nearly all of the quotes are verbatim from my transcript of our conversation. Some have been very lightly edited for clarity. Commentary and analysis are my own.

Throughout our interview, TC repeatedly returned to the brutality, or “viciousness” of the IRA’s campaign after 1969, especially compared to earlier periods of republican armed struggle.

So you conduct an armed struggle in a fashion that is fundamentally different from the way in which the IRA have approached all other campaigns because the campaign from 1969 through to I think in ’94 was more vicious and barbaric than anything the IRA had been engaged in. And when you take things like Coshquin, the use of proxy bombs. It was a degree of ruthlessness that the IRA had never engaged in before.

Speaking as an academic rather than an activist or supporter, this reads as an indictment of the IRA’s campaign, one that characterizes it more in terms of terrorism than as legitimate military action. But it also squares with Crawley’s expressed frustration with the inability of volunteers to effectively take on the British military in the field, despite the availability of the kinds of weapons that would have made it possible, and the unwillingness of the organization to develop the capability to do so.

The responsibility for this, TC repeatedly argued, consistent with Crawley’s story of his own experience, lies with the leadership, not the volunteers themselves.

[I]n 35 years of armed struggle, the membership of the IRA never let the leadership down once. Anything that the leadership asked for they got. They might not have got it to the degree or as quickly as they wanted but they got it to the best of the ability of the volunteers within the IRA. What happened from 1994 onwards was a failure of leadership not a failure of the IRA. It was a failure of the people who made the decisions as opposed to the people who were prepared to honor their commitment to the liberation of Ireland and were quite prepared to do it in a different fashion.

TC’s suggestion seemed to be that the horror and brutality of the IRA’s campaign became the point, because it would make any subsequent peace, no matter how incomplete from a traditionally republican perspective, look good by comparison. This, he suggested, was in the mind of leadership from early on.

Now, if you’re someone who is sitting with a blueprint of how you want to move the thing forward, you need the period of war to be so stark and so horrific that that then becomes the benchmark that everything after that gets judged by.

And many volunteers, TC said, himself included, went along, despite their qualms.

[S]peaking as an IRA volunteer, I can tell you that I remember clearly the night of Enniskillen and the night of … and really feeling that this is a bridge too far. You know, so I mean those events – Kingsmill, although I was probably a lot younger then and it didn’t really register with me as forcefully as it should have, but when you look at things like that and then you sort of – you compare them with the basic tenants of republicanism and what you stand for, you have to – I mean it takes a massive leap to be able to square that circle. A lot of us done it and we squared that circle almost on the basis of the ends will justify the means, and boy were we wrong.

What made squaring the circle possible, TC continued, was the volunteers’ trust in leadership’s strategic vision and the ends it was supposedly serving. This would also, eventually, pave the way for most volunteers’ acceptance of how their armed campaign ended and what it failed to deliver.

[A] common view is that the views that we had as developing IRA volunteers of leadership were so out of kilter that it made us easy prey for what came afterwards, because it was almost a line of – I mean [Gerry] Adams affectionate name was the Big Chuck – and that was an indication of the belief that he wouldn’t willingly do anything wrong.

Militarily, however, such operations had no prospects of delivering the IRA success on the battlefield, even in geographical areas where, as Crawley argues, the IRA enjoyed considerable advantages over their opponents. Moreover, TC suggested, these operations were deliberately designed not to produce such results.

[E]verything else that has gone for military opposition to the British presence has been deliberately constructed in a fashion that means it’s doomed for failure.

For TC, this was what made the March 2009 attack on Massereene Barracks, in which two British soldiers were killed and two more wounded, stand out, at least from an operational perspective. It was the first time in decades, he maintained, that IRA volunteers directly engaged the British military.

[Y]ou need to go back as far as Loughall for the last time that the Provisional IRA walked up to a barracks, occupied by armed members of the security forces, and took them on. Now, those two volunteers that walked up to Massereene had no way of knowing how much fire power there was behind that gate.

[S]o in terms of the quality of the operation, Massereene, even if you take it, if you even ignore the disjuncture from 1994 and look at the history of the Provisional IRA, the operation that was conducted at Massereene was a very clinical, calculated, well conducted military operation, more so than most of the military operations that the IRA put out after 1983 because after 1983 the standard of IRA operations was atrocious. The IRA relied more and more on bombings rather than on face-to-face encounters with the enemy forces.

After 1983 or so, he argued, the IRA turned almost exclusively to soft targets, off-duty members of the RUC and RUC reserve, off-duty UDR men, a judge on the way to mass, and so on. But this, he said, was not out of a concern by leadership to avoid losses of volunteers. Instead, he said, it could be viewed as part of larger strategy on the part of leadership to convince its own volunteers that military success was not possible.

[Some] will argue with you that part of the process of getting rid of the IRA, which people had in their head from the late ‘70s, necessitated winning the internal argument that we’re just not good enough.

Once again, this is consistent with John Crawley’s narrative in which IRA volunteers came to believe that British military vehicles and body armor were completely resistant to small arms fire, or that weapons like rocket propelled grenades were unreliable and prone to failure. Such misinformation, which leadership failed to disabuse despite some volunteers like Crawley knowing better, and saying so, became a potent argument against the operational wisdom of engaging security services directly. And it served to undermine volunteers’ own sense of what it was they were doing.

So if you constantly then give clearance for operations that fall below a standard that you would expect from a revolutionary military organization, then even if people go along with it in terms of carrying out the operations there’ll always be a wee bit in their head of like this isn’t really meeting the Brits toe-to-toe. You know, this isn’t looking into the whites of their eyes.

For TC, as for Crawley, the undermining and ultimate dismantling of the IRA’s military capability was necessary for the leadership’s political strategy to move forward. If the IRA were strictly a military institution, TC said, then it would certainly make sense to disband it once peace were achieved, just as it would make sense for the British military to likewise stand down. But, he said, the volunteer ranks of the IRA were more than that. It was an organization committed to a political project – for Crawley it’s genuine and complete Irish sovereignty, for TC it was that with a decided socialist bent – at variance with the partitionist compromises its leadership eventually settled for in the Good Friday Agreement. And as such, it was a threat to that leadership.

[The] IRA shouldn’t be seen just as a military organization. When it’s seen just as a military organization then in the interest of peace you do need to get rid of it the way in which you would need to get rid of the British army.

But the IRA is not a conventional army. It is a volunteer army and it works on a completely different basis, and for me the IRA was the embryonic form of a vanguard party, very much in the theory or the theoretical paradigm of Lenin and that’s the way the IRA should be used. You have a cadre of people who were – who had demonstrated their discipline, their loyalty, and their commitment, and for me you should keep that together. You shouldn’t throw that away. But, if you’re in a position where you actually fear that rather than embrace it then I can see how it becomes a threat rather than an aid.

For me that’s where it went for this particular leadership.


Dr. Peter Trumbore is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Oakland University

IRA Strategy Deliberately Constructed For Failure

Pete TrumboreTonight marks the final night of teaching my course on terrorism and political violence, and so this will be the last of this series until the next time I teach the class. So I’ve decided to wrap things up a little differently than usual.

6-December-2021
When I started this series I decided that I would do two things differently than before. First, I’d focus only on terrorist incidents that occurred in the United States, and second that I’d choose the examples from the years 1970 to 2000. Both of these were intended to drive home to my students, and those of you who read this, that the United States’ experience of terrorism long predates the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that, in the vast majority of cases, attacks were carried out on Americans, by Americans, in pursuit of goals deeply embedded in the political and social culture of the United States.

Anti-Semitic extremists attacked a kosher market in
Jersey City,  killing 3, Dec. 10, 2019.
In short, our terrorism problem has historically been a domestic one, not one rooted in foreign attackers coming here to strike American society in the name of causes foreign to our soil. The dozen posts in this series (which began here) make that point pretty clearly. When we talk about the experience of terrorism in the United States, we are generally talking about Americans at war with America.

For this final installment in the series, I decided to look at the week Dec. 5-11 for every year from 1970 through 2019 (the Global Terrorism Database has been updated to include all of 2019). What I found was interesting, and not terribly surprising. In all I found 55 separate incidents, 40 of them from 1970-2000, and a further 15 from 2001-2019. The most active decade was the 1970s, accounting for 19 incidents. The fewest attacks occurred in the 1990s (seven incidents) and 2000s (three incidents).

Ominously, things start to escalate in the mid-2010s, however, with 15 separate attacks in the week of Dec. 5-11 from 2014-2019. This is consistent with the overall pattern we see if we look at all attacks in the United States from 1970-2019. The Global Terrorism Database records 3,004 over this timeframe, with peaks in the 1970s, and a steady state through the 1980s and 1990s when incidents averaged around 50 attacks a year, give or take. There is a big decline after 2001, approaching low double digits in some year. But starting around 2012 or 2013 the number of attacks begins to dramatically tick upwards.

The trends become clear if we break it down by 5-year periods. From 2005-2009 there were 65 separate terrorist incidents recorded. From 2010-2014 that number rises to 96. But from 2015-2019 that number soars to 316 separate terrorist incidents, a whopping 386 percent increase from 2005-2009.

The takeaway is clear, and chilling. If these kinds of increases continue, we are looking at the possibility of terrorism in the United States rising to levels we haven’t seen in nearly a half century. That worries me.

And now, for this week’s final look back, we turn to the most recent representative week available in the GTD, Dec. 5-11, 2019.

  • Dec. 5, 2019 — El Paso, TX: Unidentified perpetrators broke into and set fire to St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church. It was the fourth attack on an El Paso church that year. No one was injured in the incident, but damage to the church was extensive.
  • Dec. 5, 2019 — Memphis, TN: A cellphone tower was set afire in the Hayden Place neighborhood of Memphis. While no group claimed responsibility, law enforcement officials believe the fire was set by extremists who embrace the conspiracy theory linking 5G radio waves to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Dec. 5, 2019 — Memphis, TN: In the second arson attack on a cellphone tower in Memphis on the same day, unknown perpetrators set fire to a tower in the Binghampton neighborhood. As with the other attack, 5G conspiracy theorists were suspected. No one was injured in either attack.
  • Dec. 6, 2019 — Pensacola, FL: A member of the Saudi Arabian Air Force opens fire on a classroom at the US Naval Air Base in Pensacola. Four people, including the attacker, were killed and another eight were wounded. The Islamist group Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility. The attacker posted criticism of US wars and praise of Osama bin Laden on social media just hours before the shooting.
  • Dec. 7, 2019 — Fayetteville, AR: A gunman ambushed and opened fire on police officer Stephen Carr while he was standing outside a police station. Carr was killed instantly and the gunman was killed by responding police. No group claimed responsibility, but the attacker was identified by sources as an anti-police extremist.
  • Dec. 10, 2019 — Jersey City, NJ: Two gunmen opened fire on the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City. Three people were killed and three others were injured in the attack. The gunmen, anti-Semitic extremists, left a note in their vehicle which said: “I do this because my creator makes me do this and I hate who he hates.” The two were subsequently connected to the killing of a police detective earlier in the day, and a taxi driver the previous week.
  • Dec. 11, 2019 — Franklin Lakes, NJ: An assailant set fire to the Roman Catholic Church of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Franklin Lakes. The assailant was injured in the attack, which destroyed the church. In his trial a year later, the attacker was described as trying to achieve “religious purity” by setting fire to the church.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✑ Dec. 5-11

Pete Trumbore ✒ This week’s look back at the recent history of terrorism in the United States hits pretty close to home for me.

29-November-2022
And I mean that literally. The two attacks that will be described below both took place in Michigan, the state where I hang my hat.

Burned school buses in Pontiac, MI.
The aftermath of a 1971 Ku Klux Klan firebombing.
It got me thinking about the extent to which Michigan has been the site of terrorist incidents over the last few decades, and so I dove into the Global Terrorism Database for some answers. Here’s what I found.

From 1970 through 2018, the time period the GTD covers, 47 separate terrorist attacks were recorded in the state of Michigan. Geographically, there are few areas of the state which aren’t represented in the data, from Escanaba and Houghton up in the Upper Peninsula, Grand Rapids on the westside, Mesick in mid-Michigan, and Detroit in the southeast.

Detroit, in fact, was the location of the most recorded attacks, 14 in all with the most recent in 2009. Coming in second was Ann Arbor, the scene of six attacks, followed by East Lansing with five. In the cases of both Ann Arbor and East Lansing, incidents there are most likely a function of their status as home to the state’s two largest universities, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University respectively. The connection to the universities emerges when we look at the perpetrators of Michigan attacks.

Of the 47 incidents captured in the GTD, 27 percent, the largest fraction, are attributed to leftist militants, including so-called “student radicals,” and occurred during 1970 and 1971. The second largest fraction of attacks is attributed to the Earth Liberation Front, at 23 percent. That percentage rises to 27 percent if we combine ELF attacks with those attributed to the Animal Liberation Front and other radical animal-rights groups. Most of those incidents occurred between 1999 and 2003.

Rounding out the rest of the perpetrators, anti-abortion militants accounted for 12 percent of attacks, white supremacists 10 percent, jihadists 2 percent, others (such as the Jewish Defense League, the Black Liberation Army, and anti-technology militants) account for 8 percent, and in the final 12 percent of cases attribution could not be determined.

To summarize, Michigan is no stranger to the phenomenon of domestic terrorism. We’ve experienced it since 1970, long before the self-proclaimed Wolverine Watchmen plotted to kidnap and murder Gov. Gretchen Whitmer just year ago. Now on to this week’s examples:

  • Dec. 1, 1986 — Kalamazoo, MI: Militant anti-abortion activists carry out an arson attack against the Reproductive Health Care Center of Planned Parenthood in Kalamazoo. There were no casualties, but the building was destroyed in the fire.
  • Dec. 4, 1986 — Lathrup Village, MI: A bomb is planted in front of the Woman’s Care Clinic of Southfield in Lathrup Village, a Detroit suburb. The bomb was discovered by a clinic employee and defused by state police. Anti-abortion radicals were blamed in the attack.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✑ Nov. 28-Dec. 4

Pete TrumboreViolent ethnonational liberation and separatist movements are common across the terrorism landscape and have been for decades.

22-November-2021
The examples are well known, from the FLN in Algeria to the Provisional IRA and its successors in Northern Ireland, ETA in the Basque regions of Spain, to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The Grito de Lares flag, flown during an unsuccessful 1868
Puerto Rican uprising against Spanish occupation.
What we might not realize, however, is the experience of domestic terrorism in America includes attacks against the United States in the name of national liberation. Puerto Rican separatist groups, fighting for the independence of the territory from the U.S., have been among the most active. In a 1986 report produced for the Department of Justice, noted terrorism expert Bruce Hofmann wrote:

For more than three decades, Puerto Rican separatists have waged a sporadic, but persistent campaign against U.S. possession of their island. Their goal is to establish an independent and sovereign Puerto Rico. Their first operation, the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman, occurred more than a quarter of a century ago, in 1950. Four years later, separatists attacked the House of Representatives Chamber in Washington, D.C., injuring five Congressmen.

According to a 2014 report produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 31 percent of the groups carrying out domestic terrorist attacks in the United States between 1970 and 2013 were motivated by an ethnonationalist/separatist agenda. Many of these were the work of Puerto Rican nationalists, the bulk of whose attacks were occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. The most active of these groups was Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN), responsible for 120 attacks between 1974 and 1982.

This week’s look back at the history of terrorism in the United States features two attacks carried out by one of the precursor organizations to the FALN. The Armed Commandos of Liberation (Comandos Armados de Liberacion) organized in 1969, launching its first attacks against U.S. businesses in Puerto Rico. By 1974, police on the island had dismantled the organization. But remnants of that group and a second, the Armed Independence Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Independencia Revolucionario en Armas) regrouped and united to form FALN later that same year.

The Armed Commandos of Liberation were responsible for 13 attacks, all on the island of Puerto Rico, over their five-year lifespan. Their deadliest attack came in April of 1971, when two bombs detonated at a shopping center killing three and causing extensive damage to the complex. The group was also implicated in the March 1970 assassination of two U.S. Navy personnel. That attack was believed to be in retaliation for the killing of a student protester by police the day earlier at the University of Puerto Rico.

Now on to this week’s look back.

  • Nov. 21, 1970 — Portland, Oregon: Suspected left-wing militants bomb a replica of the Liberty Bell located behind City Hall. The bell was destroyed and the building damaged. A janitor was injured by flying glass.
  • Nov. 21, 1970 — Chattanooga, TN: A bomb was thrown through the window of the chief of security of a TNT manufacturer. At the time, the company was embroiled in a bitter labor dispute. Striking workers were suspected. No one was injured in the attack, but the home suffered extensive damage.
  • Nov. 22, 1970 — St. Petersburg, FL: John Allen Brown, described as a left-wing militant, planted a high explosive bomb in the waterfront Shore Acre/Snell Isle neighborhood of St. Petersburg. The bomb failed to detonate due to a faulty timing mechanism. Police believe Brown was also responsible for the bombing of a St. Petersburg police car several days earlier.
  • Nov. 23, 1970 — San Juan, Puerto Rico: The Armed Commandos of Liberation carry out a bombing attack against the Dominican Consulate, the diplomatic offices of the Dominican Republic in Puerto Rico. No one was injured in the attack.
  • Nov. 25, 1970 — New York City: The Jewish Defense League is blamed for a bombing attack at the offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet Union’s national airline. No one was injured.
  • Nov. 25, 1970 — New York City: The Jewish Defense League is blamed for a second bombing attack, this one directed against the offices of Intourist, which organized tours to the Soviet Union. It was the primary travel agency for foreign tourists to the USSR.
  • Nov. 25, 1970 — Berkeley, CA: A bomb is discovered in the men’s restroom of a gymnasium at the University of California, Berkeley. The bomb was disarmed by a US military bomb squad. Student radicals were suspected.
  • Nov. 25, 1970 — San Juan, Puerto Rico: A bomb was planted in the R.O.T.C. building of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. The fragmentation device was discovered and removed thirty minutes before it was set to detonate. The Armed Commandos of National Liberation were suspected as the attempt came two days after the group’s bombing of the consulate of the Dominican Republic.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✑ Nov. 21-27

Pete Trumbore  In my experience, many Americans have the unfortunate tendency to think that the story of terrorism in America begins with 9/11 and continues in the years since with one episode of jihadist-inspired terror after another.

15-November-2021
Of course, as I’ve long argued in this space, this narrative is about as far from reality as you can get.

What it ignores is the extent to which Muslims, and especially Muslim places of worship, have themselves been the target of domestic terrorism.

The Falls Church Islamic Center was the target of a terrorist attack, this week in 2015.

A few years ago, after a series of high-profile attacks on churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I wrote a post looking at the record of attacks on places of worship here in the United States over the 20-year period from 1998 to 2017. What I found was not surprising. Overall, the pattern fits with the larger trends in domestic terrorism here.

There were 80 such attacks during that 20-year period, most targeting places where minority communities worship. Mosques were the most frequently attacked, followed by synagogues, and then Black churches. In all, two-thirds of attacks on places of worship were directed against religious and racial minorities.

Mosques continued to be in the crosshairs in the years after 9/11. The Global Terrorism Database identifies 37 such incidents between September 2001 and the end of 2019. This is in marked contrast to the period prior to 9/11. My quick look through the data allowed me to identify only a single obvious case of a mosque being the target of attack.

One June 22, 1985, two bombs detonated in the prayer room of the Daar Us Salaam mosque in Houston, Texas, about an hour after worshippers left the mosque. There were no injuries, but the building suffered extensive damage. Three men, all Houston residents, were convicted of building and detonating the bombs. They claimed the attack was carried out in retaliation and anger over the holding of American hostages in Beirut, Lebanon by Shiite Muslim militias. The bombing came in the midst of a series of threatening phone calls to several area mosques and Islamic society offices after the hostage situation in Beirut.

This week’s look back at terrorism in the United States highlights two more such attacks, Falling on the same day, but occurring hundreds of miles apart.

  • Nov. 15, 2015 — Falls Church, Va.: An attacker, identified as Chester H. Gore, was arrested after throwing firebombs at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center. He was also accused of planting a fake bomb at the mosque. No one was injured in the attack, though the building suffered structural damage.
  • Nov. 15, 2015 — Meriden, Conn.: Ex-Marine sharpshooter Ted Hakey, Jr. fired several shots into the Baitul Aman Mosque on Main Street in Meriden. No one was injured in the attack. According to news reports, Hakey’s attack was in apparent retaliation for attacks by ISIS-affiliated terrorists in Paris, which killed 130 the day before. He posted on social media the day of that attack: “What is gonna be the breaking point to go ‘weapons free’ against Islam.” Investigators found other anti-Muslim diatribes on his computer, including a message to a friend in which he wrote, “”If we all kill just 1 Muslim each tonight it will make a dent!” Hakey was sentenced to six months in federal prison in the incident.
Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ➖ Nov. 14-20

Pete Trumbore ✒ Yes, I’m talking about Dune, but don’t worry.

2-November-2021
No spoilers here for the brilliant film adaptation now out in theaters (see it in IMAX) and streaming on HBO Max. The movie treats religion as little more than background or set-dressing, one of my few quibbles with it.


No, what I’m talking about is the way author Frank Herbert weaved religion into the fabric of the universe he created in his masterpiece of science fiction, first published between 1963 and 1965 in serial form. In fact, the central protagonist of the novel is very obviously a savior, a prophesied messiah figure, though, in the words of one writer, one imbued with a “blighted messiahship.”

To be clear, Herbert is in no way proselytizing. This is not a “religious” novel. Rather, he accomplishes two considerably different feats.

First, He presents an utterly fascinating glimpse of the end results of millennia’s worth of the social evolution of religious thought and theology. In a fascinating discussion of religion in Dune, Chris Bateman wrote at his blog:

Dune doesn’t merely include religion as part of its background, it is central to it. Herbert doesn’t imagine a future world bereft of religion, but one that shows religious traditions as having been transformed over millennia. …

Herbert himself was raised as a Catholic, but became a Zen Buddhist in adulthood, and in envisioning the transitions of religion in a post-Earth society, Herbert imagines the doctrinal effect of a synthesis between Buddhist and Abrahamic faiths. A fastidious note taker, details of the setting for Dune had been worked out in much greater detail than ever appears in the narrative, and it is possible – just from examining clues in the text – to unravel some of the religious changes Herbert imagines. Although he does not suggest a single unifying faith, religion in the 102nd century has one major holy book, known as the Orange Catholic Bible, which contains books from the Talmud, the Old and New Testaments, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, and the Vedas, as well as Zen koans and Taoist analects. …

Herbert imagines a future history that has been influenced by many different schools, including Mahayana Christianity (a fusion of the numinous, worship-focussed religions Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism) and Zensunni Catholicism (a fusion of Zen Buddism, Sunni Islam and the Catholic church). Other Buddislamic sects are mentioned, including Zensufism – a merging of Zen Buddhism and Sufism, the Islamic mystical religion (these two religions are not hard to interrelate, as each deals with quite similar themes but from wildly different perspectives).

To my mind, this by itself makes Herbert’s works noteworthy. It is rare to find a work of science fiction that bothers to contemplate such matters, let alone turn them into the backbone of the story’s grand narrative. If anyone knows of another example, please let me know.

The second accomplishment, however, is just as interesting and probably more important. Herbert makes religion central to his story in order to deliver a damning commentary on the merging of religion and politics and the leveraging and manipulation of faith to acquire and maintain political power. There are true believers in the Dune universe, but there are also those who both spread and then take advantage of those beliefs to advance their own agendas.

Beth Elderkin, writing at Gizmodo, explains:

Of course, the biggest question of all might be: What is religion in Dune? That depends on who you ask. For some, like the Fremen, it’s a way of life. But for the people in power, it’s a political tool. Many of the folks in the upper echelon of Dune’s world—like the Spacing Guild, which controls all interstellar travel–are agnostic. Even the Bene Gesserit doesn’t consider itself to be a religious group, but its members fuel belief in others to serve their own ends. That’s because Frank Herbert’s series was designed to examine the intersection of religion and politics, partially inspired by growing up in Catholicism.

In the novel, Herbert relays a Bene Gesserit proverb which captures what can only be the author’s own perspective on the risks of bringing religion and politics too closely together:

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.

It is the dangers inherent in this interface between religion and politics, Bateman writes, that Herbert wants to warn us of. And it is a lesson well worth paying attention to.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

Science Fiction That Takes Religion Seriously

Pete Trumbore ✒ When looking back at the recent history of terrorism in the United States, the 1970s never fail to disappoint.

8-November-2021

This week we get a look at one of the most prolific, and probably least remembered, domestic terrorist groups in American history.

The cover of the first issue of the NWLF’s journal The Urban Guerrilla

While some leftist radical groups of the 1970s, like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, are still well known today, thanks to numerous books, articles, and films about them, the subject of today’s look back dwells in obscurity, despite waging a four-year bombing campaign across the western United States targeting government offices, businesses, and utilities. The New World Liberation Front, from 1974 to 1978, carried out nearly 90 separate attacks, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A 1977 article in the publication Open Road, described the group this way:

The New World Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization which has carried out an uninterrupted urban guerilla offensive around the Bay Area and Northern California for almost three years, may well be the most tactically advanced guerilla group in the United States.

The NWLF first appeared … with a bombing in September, 1974, directed against a San Francisco stock brokerage firm. From the beginning, the NWLF has distinguished itself from most other guerilla organizations in the U.S. by two characteristics. First, although the bomb has remained its primary weapon, the NWLF’s attacks have been focused mainly on local, concrete political issues rather than abstract symbolic protest; and, second, the group has made extensive use of a demand strategy, that is, revolutionary extortion.

As far as its paramilitary activities are concerned, the NWLF has a record of success which verges on the astonishing. The organization has carried out almost fifty successful bombings, including power stations, banks, office buildings and motor vehicles, without causing a single injury to anyone. Even more amazing is the fact that in the process of all these actions, not one underground member of the organization has ever been identified or apprehended.

This is one of the enduring mysteries surrounding the NWLF. Federal and local law enforcement were baffled by the organization. They had no idea how large the organization was, how it was funded, or how it acquired the explosives used in its attacks. While the group remained steadfastly underground, it did have an above-ground public facing outlet for its frequent communiques and statements. This was dubbed Public Information Relay-1 (PIR-1), which published its own journal, The Urban Guerrilla, competing against other leftwing media to be the go-to mouthpiece of the Bay Area radical left.

Interestingly enough, the core group of the NWLF, whoever they were, may have operated on something like a franchise basis, allowing other leftist terrorist groups to carry out operations under the NWLF name. A long discussion of the NWLF published several years ago at the blog acromaticonline, put it this way:

This suited the agenda of the NWLF perfectly. One of the primary drivers of the group had been to make itself appear bigger than it was. Any radical guerilla operating on US soil was free to utilise the NWLF [name] provided that its goals were in accord with those of the group.

It is also not entirely clear why the group ceased its activities. The Open Road article from 1977, however, may provide some clues. Apparently the NWLF was making itself increasingly unpopular among the ranks of the radical left through its strident communiques and pronouncements on revolutionary theory by its Central Command. These were often highly critical of other leftist radical groups and especially their unwillingness to fall into step behind the NWLF’s leadership.

Then, as the radical left began to embrace new causes in the post-Vietnam War period, NWLF denounced them, at the cost of sympathizers and potential supporters:

The NWLF particularly outraged large segments of sympathizers, though, with a series of statements in mid-1976 on the role of feminism and homosexuality in the revolutionary movement. These edicts, passed down from the Central Command, relegated feminism and the struggle against sexism to a position subordinate to the economic struggles of poor and working people. The gay movement was essentially denounced as being entirely reactionary, the outgrowth of a petit-bourgeois sexual perversion. This “more oppressed than thou” position met with almost total condemnation from other revolutionary people and organizations.

In short, the NWLF had hoped to be the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, but few people were willing to join the revolution. And now today’s look back.

Nov. 10, 1977 — Rodeo, CA: Members of the New World Liberation Front carry out a bombing attack against Union Oil’s San Francisco refinery facility. No one was injured in the attack, and the extent of damage done to the refinery is not known.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✑ Nov. 7-13

Pete Trumbore ✒ The Global Terrorist Database records the first terrorist attack against an American abortion clinic, abortion provider, or other abortion-related target as coming at the beginning of November, 1977.

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By the end of 2018, there had been a total of 256 such attacks.

For this today’s look back at the week in US terrorism history, I’m departing from the pattern I’ve adopted this year in which I report on attacks occurring during a single randomly chosen week between 1970 and 2000. Instead, I’m going to focus anti-abortion terrorism.

The Rev. Michael Bray, Army of God (Copyright Jenny Warburg)
And it turns out the first week of November has historically been an active time for attacks on abortion-related targets. I’ll provide details on seven such incidents below. But before I do, I want to make a couple of points here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I bring this regular feature of the blog back whenever I teach my course on terrorism and political violence. This week’s look back fits especially well with both the purposes of the course, and specifically what I’m going to be talking about in the classroom tonight.

Generally when I teach my terrorism class I have two overarching objectives:

  • I want to challenge my students’ preconceived ideas about who terrorists are and why terrorism occurs.
  • I want my students to understand that terrorism is a tactic that may be employed in pursuit of social or political goals that they themselves support or for causes they sympathize with.

Focusing on the violent anti-abortion movement serves both of these objectives. First, by making it crystal clear that not all religiously motivated terrorists are Muslims. Just as Islamist terrorists draw on their own idiosyncratic interpretation of holy scripture and teachings, and have clerics who offer religious justification for their violence, so to do Christian anti-abortion terrorists. Second, by demonstrating to staunchly anti-abortion students that there are those who are willing to kill in the name of a “pro-life” agenda that they themselves support.

The Army of God, a Christian terrorist organization, is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. This group, according to the GTD, carried out 26 attacks between 1982 and 1998, including assassinations of abortion providers, and bombings and arson attacks against clinics and health centers. Two of its leading figures were ordained ministers. Paul Hill, a Presbyterian minister, was executed in 2003 for the assassinations of an abortion provider and a clinic escort. Michael Bray, a Lutheran minister, was convicted in 1985 in connection with a series of bombings of abortion facilities in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The current spokesman for the Army of God, Donald Spitz, is an ordained evangelical minister. He maintains the organization’s website.

Now on to this week’s look back.

  • Nov. 1, 1977 — Cincinnati, Ohio: Anti-abortion extremists set fire to the Cincinnati Planned Parenthood clinic housed at Christ Church. No one was injured in the attack.
  • Nov. 3, 1984 — Washington, D.C.: Three members of the Christian anti-abortion terrorist group the Army of God, including the Rev. Michael Bray mentioned above, bomb the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union. There were no casualties. Four months earlier, the same three perpetrators bombed the offices of the National Abortion Federation, down the street from the ACLU office.
  • Nov. 2, 1990 — Fort Wayne, IN: Anti-abortion extremists firebomb the Fort Wayne Women’s Health Organization, an abortion clinic. There were no casualties, but the clinic was forced to close down due to the damage inflicted in the attack.
  • Nov. 2. 1992 — Westmont, Ill.: Anti-abortion extremists set fire to the Concord Medical Clinic. Heavy rains extinguished the blaze before significant damage occurred. Investigators subsequently discovered a large puddle of gasoline inside the clinic, which had been the scene of months of protests prior to the arson attack.
  • Nov. 3, 1994 — San Rafael, CA: Anti-abortion extremists bomb a Planned Parenthood clinic. There were no injuries and the building sustained minor damage.
  • Nov. 2, 1995 — Pensacola, FL: The All Women’s Health Center is hit with an arson attack. There were no injuries. Pensacola was an epicenter of anti-abortion terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, including the 1994 assassination of an abortion provider and clinic escort by the Rev. Paul Hill, and multiple clinic bombings.
  • Nov. 1, 1996 — Hannibal, MO: Anti-abortion extremists firebomb a family planning clinic. No one is injured in the attack.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✏ Nov. 1-6

Pete TrumboreWhite middle-class revolutionaries you say? Welcome to 1972!

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Both of the incidents described below comfortably fall into the category of New Left revolutionary terrorism, which I mentioned last week. Generally speaking, leftist terrorism of this sort was intended by its perpetrators to be a means to reform (if possible) or destroy (if necessary) an existing social or political system so that a new, more just, system can be built on its ashes. In this regard it is both future-looking and idealistic if not utopian.

White middle-class revolutionaries” Charles, Bryce, and Jonathan Tuller

Of course the problem here was that there weren’t all that many folks interested in signing on to such a revolutionary venture. Exploited classes, the revolutionaries argued, don’t necessarily recognize the extent of their own exploitation. This was an insight that New Left groups garnered from writers like the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and particularly his influential 1964 book One Dimensional Man. In it Marcuse argues that capitalist society creates manacles of privilege that keep the public docile and content. Here’s a representative passage:

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

Under such conditions, the people are blinded to their own oppression. They willingly buy in to a system that controls them. The more comfortable they become in material terms, the more enslaved they are to a system that exploits them to maintain an unjust and unequal status quo.

It was this logic that allowed middle-class college students, and other seemingly unlikely revolutionaries, to justify their violent activism. In short, they were rejecting their manacles of privilege and fighting in common cause with oppressed peoples and other revolutionaries worldwide.

In short, New Left terrorists saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard, who, through violence, could create the conditions that would lead to the political awakening of the masses who, under the leadership of the terrorist cadres, would then sweep away the corrupt and oppressive old world and create a new, and better, one. This is an old idea. We can trace it back to Italian socialist and revolutionary Carlo Pisacane, who wrote in 1857:

The propaganda of the idea is a chimera; the education of the people is nonsense. Ideas result from deeds, and not the latter from the former; it is not the case that the people will be free once it is educated, rather it will be educated once it is free. The only work a citizen can undertake to benefit his country is to contribute to the material revolution: conspiracies, plots, insurrectional attempts, etc.

Which brings us to Charles Tuller and his sons, Bryce and Jonathan, who in 1972 embarked on a years long spree of revolutionary violence, beginning with the incident described below. Charles Tuller, a 48-year-old native of Alexandria, VA and employee of the US Commerce Department, enlisted his teenage sons and one of their high school friends to form a revolutionary cadre aiming to fundamentally transform American society. A 2018 story posted at Boundary Stones, the history website of public TV station WETA, explains Charles’ rationale:

Concerned with systemic racism and poor socio-economic conditions in many strands of American society, Charles envisioned a grassroots movement that would upend existing power structures and establish a new, more equitable, and communally-based system of governance.

Some years later, in a jailhouse interview, Charles laid out the group’s vanguard strategy:

We decided to form a group and equip ourselves so we could eventually break with our government or what is called law, and try to do something about reconstructing a new system … we would be very security conscious and extremely mobile … able to get to any part of the country, where we would talk with local people and find indigenous leaders … we wanted to latch onto local situations and get people to take some kind of direct action (to) act as their own government, as their own political force … we wanted to act as catalysts …

The first step in their revolution, having stockpiled weapons and camping gear, was to raise the money necessary to live a life on the road while waging war against the status quo. That brings us to our look back at this week in US terrorism history.

  • Oct. 25, 1972 — Crystal City, VA: Four self-described white middle-class revolutionaries (the Tullers and friend William Graham) attempt to rob a branch of the Arlington Trust Company. Two of the perpetrators cut the branch’s phone lines, and then, dressed as telephone repairmen, entered the building asking to speak with the branch manager. When they told him they intended to rob the bank, the manager refused to cooperate. A struggle ensued in which the manager was shot to death. An Arlington police officer, responding to a report of the phone lines being out, was also shot to death, though one of the perpetrators, Bryce Tuller, was wounded in an exchange of gunfire. The four escaped the bank without managing to steal any money. Four days later, on Oct. 29, the group stormed onto an Eastern Air Lines flight at Houston Intercontinental Airport and hijacked it to Cuba. An Eastern ticket agent was shot to death, and another airline employee was wounded.
  • Oct. 26, 1972 — Houston, TX: A police officer is ambushed while leaving a restaurant by two reported members of the Black Panther Party. Officer Jerry Spruill was shot six times in the back, later dying of his wounds. One of the perpetrators, Marvin Fentis, was arrested in 1973 after a shootout with police in Garland, TX. He was paroled after serving 14 years in prison.
Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History ✏ Oct. 24-30

Pete TrumboreThis week is all about New Left and Black revolutionary terrorism. That’s 1970 for you. The key group in the spotlight is the Black Liberation Army.

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The BLA was an underground Black Power revolutionary organization active from 1970 to 1981. Its membership was initially drawn from former members of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika. 


Black Liberation Army recruiting poster, circa 1981.

It emerged, in part, as a consequence of a split in the leadership of the Black Panther Party and a dispute over “reformist” rather than “revolutionary” nature of the party’s social programs. It’s aim was to wage war against the United States with the stated goal of taking up arms for Black liberation and self-determination.

The Black Liberation Army carried out a range of attacks including bombings, the assassination of police officers, jail breaks, and robberies, which the organization characterized as “expropriations.” The organization ultimately collapsed after the robbing of a Brinks armored truck, assisted by former members of the Weather Underground, resulted in the killing of a guard and two police officers.

  • Oct. 18, 1970 — Irvine, CA: An unknown group, though suspected anti-Vietnam War protesters, detonates a bomb at the Stanford Research Institute, a lab facility owned by Stanford University. SRI, which was largely funded by the US Department of Defense, had contracts for work on chemical and biological agents with military applications. It was a regular target of violent anti-war activism during the 1970s.
  • Oct. 19, 1970 — Irvine, CA: A second bomb targets a virus research center at the Stanford Research Institute. As in the attack the day before, no one was injured in the bombing.
  • Oct. 20, 1970 — Cairo, IL: Black militants set fire to the Veterans of Foreign Wars building and then open fire on police and firefighters responding to the blaze. Police fired hundreds of rounds into the neighboring Pyramid Courts housing project, taking more than an hour to secure the area. No one was injured in the gun battle, but the building was destroyed.
  • Oct. 21, 1970 — Cairo, IL: In a second day of racial violence, black militants armed with automatic weapons open fire on the Cairo police headquarters from locations in and around the Pyramid Courts housing project. Police returned fire in what would turn into a three-hour gun battle. No one was injured in the attack.
  • Oct. 22, 1970 — San Francisco, CA: Members of the Black Liberation Army plant a time bomb outside St. Brendan’s Church, which was packed with mourners attending the funeral of a San Francisco police officer killed in the line of duty while responding to a bank robbery. The bomb detonated, but none of the worshippers were injured.
Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism history ✑ Oct. 17-23

Pete Trumbore Sometimes when I’m teaching my terrorism course the stars align to provide a historical example that is directly relevant to what I’m covering this week in the classroom. This is one of those occasions.


This week we’re talking about the connections between terrorist organizations and political parties and/or non-violent political movements. Such ties, whether formal or informal, are more common than you might think, including here in the United States.

An Oregon lumber company’s offices burn after an ELF arson attack.


In an article originally published in 1991, political scientist Leonard Weinberg argues that terrorism and terrorist groups emerge in situations when an alienated and highly motivated elite confronts the indifference of the population they hope to lead in challenging those in power. In short, terrorism can emerge from the failure of non-violent politics to produce a desired change in the status quo.

This is key to understanding why terrorism is so common to democratic societies. The political scientist Ted Gurr argued that campaigns of terrorism in democracies grow out of larger political conflicts, and that they reflect the political beliefs and aspirations circulating within a larger society. Under these circumstances, some may lose patience with conventional politics and look for new tactics that will have greater impact. This, Gurr argues, may include experimenting with terrorism.

Given this, how do links between political parties and terrorist groups happen? Weinberg argues there are several common patterns:

  • A party deliberately forms a violent subsidiary to pursue its goals by terrorist means.
  • A terrorist group promotes the formation of a political party to pursue its goals above ground.
  • Factional split, where some segment of a party, dissatisfied with the direction leadership is taking it, breaks away to pursue its goals independently through violence.
  • Strategic shift, where a violent group concludes its operations and reconstitutes itself as a political party participating in normal electoral politics.
  • Origins in a shared political movement, where some of the movement’s followers favor legal, political-party means to achieve their goals while others, who doubt the efficacy of this approach, choose the terrorist alternative.

It is this later kind of group that is our focus this week. The Earth Liberation Front grew out of the radical Earth First! environmental movement in Great Britain in the early 1990s. As sociologist Paul Joosse explains in a 2007 article in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, ELF emerged out of a burgeoning ideological cleavage within Earth First!, with those who would become ELF committed to advancing the cause of radical environmentalism through “direct action.”

There is a terrific 2011 documentary which tells the story of an Earth Liberation Front activist in the Pacific Northwest and his pathway into and back out of violent radical environmentalism. I’ll be showing it to my students this evening, and you can watch it by clicking on the link below.

Now on to this week’s look back at the recent history of terrorism in the United States.

  • Oct. 11, 1998 – Rock Springs, Wyo.: In a joint operation, seven members of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation front free horses and attempt to burn down the federal Bureau of Land Management wild horse corral in Rock Springs. The perpetrators placed incendiary devices near buildings and vehicles, specifically targeting a truck used to transport horses, but while the devices were being planted, one of the perpetrators prematurely opened one of the gates, and the horses started running loose, at which point, the group aborted the plan, and left behind sponges, gas cans, buckets of fuel, and some timing devices before fleeing the scene. The perpetrators were part of a group which called themselves “The Family,” which was responsible for some 20 cases of arson and eco-sabotage over the six year period.



Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History: Oct. 10-16

Pete Trumbore Before getting into this week’s look back, it is worth noting some terrorism news that came to light over the weekend here in Michigan.


In incidents reminiscent of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s decades-long bombing campaign against industrialization in general, and big tech in particular, two explosive devices were discovered outside cellphone stores Michigan’s Upper Peninsula late last week. According to the FBI, the devices were in USPS priority mail boxes and sealed with black duct tape. They were accompanied by threatening notes addressed to Verizon and AT&T.

The logo of the Puerto Rican nationalist terrorist group Fuerzas Armadas Liberacion
Nacional (FALN). The slogan roughly translates to “Struggle Until Victory”


The letters “CMT” were written on the outside of both boxes. The FBI and Michigan State Police believe the bombs are connected to a series of letters found last month at multiple telecommunications tower sites across the Upper Peninsula. According to the FBI the letters, signed by the “Coalition for Moral Telecommunications,” make specific demands to the telecommunications companies. No details, however, have been released.

The planting of bombs at cellphone stores is similar to two of the attacks carried out by Kaczynski. In December 1985 a Sacramento, Calif. computer store owner was killed by a nail-and-splinter bomb that Kaczynski had planted in the store’s parking lot. In February 1987, the owner of a Salt Lake City, Utah computer store was severely injured by another of Kaczynski’s bombs.

Kaczynski is currently serving eight life sentences in federal prison in Colorado. The University of Michigan Special Collections Library houses correspondence between Kaczynski and more than 400 others since his arrest.

And now on to this week’s look back to the week in American terrorism history.

  • Sept. 20, 1976 — San Francisco: The residence of the Consul General of South Africa is targeted in a bombing attack carried out by the New World Liberation Front, a small California-based militant revolutionary anti-capitalist terrorist group. No one was injured in the attack. The NWLF formed in 1970 and was responsible for nearly 90 separate attacks in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the American West between 1974 and 1978.
  • Sept. 21, 1976 — New York City: A bomb explodes on the 24th floor of the Hilton Hotel. An hour later, a caller to the New York Post claims responsibility for the bombing in the name of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican nationalist group. In a note taped to a phone booth near the hotel, FALN stated that the blast was an attempt to protest the appearance of Rafael Hernandez Colon, the Governor of Puerto Rico, who was attending a political fund-raising dinner at the hotel. Between 1974 and 1982, the FALN carried out 120 separate attacks, mostly in New York City, Chicago and in Puerto Rico itself.

Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.

This Week In Terrorism History: Sept. 19-26