Memoirs of a Weatherman

After a bomb that was meant for a military officers' ball at New York's Fort Dix exploded prematurely, killing young WUO members Diane Oughton, Teddy Gold and Tim Robbins, the group scrupulously ensured that nobody else was killed or hurt in its six-year bombing campaign, which targeted property, not people.

Cathy Wilkerson's memoir of her life, both before and after her time as a "Weatherman," depicts unnervingly familiar social realities - a brutal war and occupation of an impoverished country, the failure of mass demonstrations to sway supposedly representative democratic institutions, ever-increasing surveillance of anti-imperialists and communists and attacks on basic civil rights in the name of liberty and justice.

The WUO, like many supposedly Leninist urban guerilla outfits that sprang up in imperialist countries in the late 1960s in response to the perceived impotence of traditional left parties, confused Blanquism - conspiratorial "propaganda of the deed" - and Leninism.

Wilkerson herself still does, but she does recognise that the WUO goal of "bringing the war home" was sectarian, serving to alienate it from the wider peace movement.

She makes it clear that militant anti-war activists such as herself only turned to armed struggle after the apparent failure of established politicians and the mass anti-war demos to stop the war, which was, by then, being displayed in all its napalm-dripping horror on TV news bulletins. Back then, the journalists were not embedded.

Wilkinson herself was active in grass roots anti-racism activism from 1962 and looking back at the early SDS literature is a humbling experience, packed as it is both with scholarly analysis of the military-industrial complex alongside blow-by-blow accounts of earnest community organising among oppressed black communities in the deep south.

Wilkerson reminds us that the US government killed scores of mostly black anti-imperialist militants and imprisoned thousands more at home under the FBI Cointelpro programme, as well as having a hand in the assassination or deposing of progressive leaders such as Mossadeq, Allende and Lumumba abroad.

It was the cold-blooded murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by armed police as he lay in his bed that led the militants who went on to form the WUO to believe that offence could be the best form of defence.

Flying Close to the Sun indicates what can happen when avowedly democratic governments shred the social contract by relying on repression rather than representation - and when self-proclaimed revolutionaries substitute propaganda of the deed for consistent, broad-based organising.

Wilkerson's lingering sense of guilt over her role in the accidental deaths of three of her comrades pervades Flying Close to the Sun.

She has written this memoir as if her conscience will relent if progressives manage to learn anything from her mistakes.

THOMAS MELLEN