Radicals are Running the Government

All this talk about blaming conservatives for the Norwegian madness has made me go retro – back to the glory days of the 1960s. On the cover of the book Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), the author is shown with a rifle in his hand leaping for joy. Abbie Hoffman’s rhetoric about revolution was just a warm-up. In Steal This Book(1971), he gave instructions on how to build stink bombs, smoke bombs, sterno bombs, aerosol bombs, pipe bombs, and Molotov Cocktails. Hoffman’s updated version of the Molotov Cocktail consisted of a glass bottle filled with a mixture of gasoline and Styrofoam, turning the slushy blend into a poor man’s version of napalm. The flaming gasoline-soaked Styrofoam was designed to stick to policemen when it exploded. Helpful drawings on how to make the incendiary devices were included.

In Woodstock Nation, Hoffman updated his revolutionary tactics. This time, Random House published his book. Next to the publisher’s name on the title page, there is an illustration of a man using dynamite to blow up a house. This same illustration appears in Hoffman’s Steal This Book. The theme of both books is how to blow up the system—literally. “Righteous violence” was rationalized by the front-line New Left leadership in the 1960s: “The use of violence was justified, many in the New Left comforted themselves, because theirs was a violence to end all violence, a liberating and righteous violence that would rid the world of a system that deformed and destroyed people. Such glorious ends justified, even ennobled, violent means.

MORE