Guerrilla USA : The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s

From the publisher: > “We are cozy cuddly/armed and dangerous/and we will/raze the fucking prisons/to the ground.” In an attempt to deliver on this promise, the George Jackson Brigade launched a violent three-year campaign in the mid-1970s against corporate and state institutions in the Pacific Northwest. This campaign, conceived by a group of blacks and whites, both straight and gay, claimed fourteen bombings, as many bank robberies, and a jailbreak. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George Jackson Brigade, Guerrilla USA provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s, revealing the whole era in a new and more complex light. It is also a compelling exploration of the true nature of crime and a provocative meditation on the tension between self-restraint and anger in the process of social change. "We are cozy cuddly/armed and dangerous/and we will/raze the fucking prisons/to the ground/. In an attempt to deliveron this promise, the George Jackson Brigade launched a violent three-year campaign in the mid-1970s against corporate and state institutions in the Pacific Northwest. This campaign, conceived of by a group of blacks and whites, both straight and gay, claimed fifteen attempted bombings, as many bank robberies, and a jaibreak. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George jackson Brigade, Daniel Burton-Rose provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s, revealing the whole era in a new and more complex light. Guerrilla USA is an engaged and engaging work, an intimate account of a buried piece of American history. Daniel Burton-Rose combines exhaustive scholoarship with passionate partisanship to create an excruciatingly honest portrait. Tacking back and forth between the tiniest of local details and the concentric circles of economic condition, historical flow, and cultural context, he captures with precision and immediacy the contradictions at the center of a recent radical upsurge. Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. In this astonishing microhistory, Daniel Burton-Rose Captures the pathos of the new Left's bizarre sequel; the gang who bombed Seattle. Mike Davis, author of in Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire and City of Qartz: Excavatin the Future of Los Angeles. The members of the George jackson Brigade speak for themselves through interviews with the autor or through their written statements and diaries. The motives, emotions, and commitment of the young self-described revolutionaries come alive, and the era is revealed as in no other work that I have read. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman: A Memori of the War years, 1960-1975 and Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico"--BOOK JACKET Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George Jackson Brigade, this book provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s. It is also a compelling exploration of the true nature of crime and a provocative meditation on the tension between self-restraint and anger in the process of social change.