“We either had to use shotguns,” Alameda County sheriff Frank Madigan said at the time, “or retreat and surrender the city to the mob.”
The response to what became known as Bloody Thursday got so out of hand that helicopters dropped CS gas—a more intense form of tear gas, the same one used by the FBI against the Branch Davidians at Waco—onto the protesters. Wind pushed it into a hospital.
Fog of War
This is where Matt O’Brien, an Ohio-based historian specializing in 20th century Ireland, sees a similarity to the Troubles: the use in cities of out-of-state National Guard troops and formations from the Department of Homeland Security, who do not have the same training as law enforcement or familiarity with the arenas in which they are deployed.
“A lot of the British soldiers sent over to Northern Ireland were 18-, 19-year-old kids from Liverpool and from Birmingham,” O’Brien says. “Some of them were of Irish descent, and they were expected to carry out police duties, and they were woefully unprepared.”
In the US, federal immigration officers and National Guard troops remain in cities they did not sign up to police, with no clear end in sight. Where the administration takes this campaign from here is unclear, particularly in the context of court rulings which have prevented them from moving as aggressively as the administration would like.
For Pape, the uniquely American and Trumpian nature of the problem makes it harder for us to grasp. Or, at least, harder to grasp compared to those seeing this unfold from abroad.
“I think it’s basically hard for everyone here—and I’d put myself in this too—to get analytic distance when the violence is happening right in our country, right next door,” says Pape.
With things so dire, I want to end on a positive note. I reached out to Bill Ayers to talk me through this moment. Ayers knows a thing or two about militant armed resistance from his time in the Weather Underground during the 1970s, and just how dangerous it can get. His group, which opposed the Vietnam War and viewed the US government as an imperialist entity, targeted federal buildings with homemade bombs in the 1960s and 1970s. Three members of the Weather Underground were killed in an accidental explosion in 1970. Ayers was a fugitive for the next decade before he and his wife turned themselves in around the time that the federal charges against them were dropped. He ended up becoming a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
