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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Ann Hansen, Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2001) |
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ALTHOUGH 20TH-CENTURY Canada was hardly Lower's "peaceable kingdom," political violence by non-state actors has been sufficiently rare that this account of a group of self-styled urban guerillas is bound to be of interest to students of social movements and the left. The author and four others comprised a group calling itself "Direct Action" that engaged in a series of politically motivated bombings in 1982. Arrested in January 1983, they received sentences of between ten years and life (Hansen herself); all were out on parole by 1990. Based on her own recollections, police documents made available to defence lawyers, and newspaper articles, the book tells the story of the three years during which Hansen changed from a graffiti-painting revolutionary into a gun-toting urban guerilla. |
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This does not pretend to be a scholarly book, and the publisher has provided terms for its review as "Politics, True Crime, Autobiography." (back cover) The 160 pages of Part II, "Going Underground," are the most autobiographical, as we learn there about her involvement in prison rights and international solidarity movements, growing interest in urban guerillas, support work in Paris for Germany's Red Army Faction, and move from Toronto to Vancouver, where she joined a small network of anarchists. We follow the emerging urban guerillas as they acquire the skills and resources of their trade — the skills (of car theft, weapons handling, bomb-making) mainly from books, pamphlets, and magazines such as Soldier of Fortune and Guns and Ammo; the resources (guns, dynamite, money, vehicles, false identities) mainly through theft, including their first armed robbery. Hansen's motives emerge as a mixture of idealism, a quest to realize a romanticized self-identity as a revolutionary, and an emotional need to feel that she is doing something important and dangerous. This section of the book can be tedious, the level of detail sometimes overwhelming (e.g., two pages on disguising her hairstyle). |
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As "true crime" the book shines in Part III, "Doing Cheekeye-Dunsmuir and Litton," and Part IV, "Under Surveillance." First, Ann and Doug bomb a substation on the environmentally contentious BC Hydro line under construction between the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island. Later she, Brent, Julie, and 550 pounds of dynamite travel to Toronto, where they bomb a building at the Litton Industries factory manufacturing components for American Cruise missiles. Parallel to their own story, Hansen also tells the story of the police investigation, providing a surprisingly sympathetic account of the feelings and actions of the "composite" fictionalized police investigator in Vancouver. Whatever one's opinion of the morality and wisdom of the group's actions, these parts of the book are gripping. |
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The "politics" of Direct Action occur throughout the book. They can be summed up in what might be called "Ann Hansen's Lessons for Aspiring Urban Guerillas." First, becoming an urban guerilla will isolate you from previous social contacts, including contacts with the radical community from which you emerged. This will have both political and personal consequences. The political consequence is that, cut off from movements and their constituencies (and disdainful of those who do not share your militancy), your group will become increasingly self- referential, imprisoned by your own ideologies and revolutionary delusions. The personal consequence will be that the interpersonal emotional and sexual dynamics within the group will become very intense. It will become very difficult to quit once you have begun, because so much of your identity will be tied up with your activities and group, and you will find doing "actions" addictively exciting, despite the accompanying anxieties, fear, doubts, and despair. The political consequences of isolation are shown in the generally simplistic quality of political analysis by Direct Action: their strategic goal was to stimulate others to more militant activity, but they displayed little sense of the context and likely effects of their actions. Politically, their most successful action appears to have been the firebombing of several Red Hot Video outlets selling violent pornography; the one action undertaken with people outside their group (under the name "Wimmin's Fire Brigade"). |
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Don't underestimate the police, is the second lesson. They have more resources than you do and they are a lot smarter than you think. Furthermore, the police will consider you as frightening and inhuman as you do them (both of you are armed and dangerous, after all). The former is exemplified in an amusing passage where Doug, who unknowingly has been under police surveillance for weeks, and whose room is bugged, states: "The cops really do seem more incompetent than you think." (448) The latter appears most vividly in the opening pages of the book, where Hansen and her friends are arrested on the highway between Vancouver and Squamish: the police fear a gun battle, and Hansen believes she will be killed on the spot. |
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The third lesson is that actions have unintended and unwanted consequences. Even when you intend only to damage property, you are putting others' lives at risk, and accidents will happen, such as the premature explosion at the Litton factory, injuring ten people. Your actions will also have unintended political effects, including splitting moderate and militant factions of the movements you are hoping to energize. You may blame the moderates for this, (471) but it will happen regardless, and the activists using techniques such as civil disobedience will bear the brunt of "hard" protest policing after your actions. In Germany and Italy, the Red Army Faction and Red Brigades emerged after a wave of protest and high levels of state repression (including violent neo-fascist counter-movements in Italy). In contrast, Direct Action emerged in Canada in a period of heightened mobilization of the peace movement in the face of the war-mongering Reagan presidency. Perhaps because of the underlying political analysis in which all states and corporations are equally oppressive, the book does a remarkably poor job of conveying the threatening political atmosphere of that time. As a result, Hansen overestimates Direct Action's impact (e.g., on growth of the peace movement, (288)), and fails to provide the context that would render her own actions more understandable. |
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The lessons emerging from Hansen's book (and from academic studies of underground groups) are unlikely to win her endorsement. She is unrepentant, echoing the "diversity of tactics" line of anti-globalization protesters and eschewing responsibility for police repression after her group's actions. Barrington Moore Jr.'s observation from a similar period comes to mind: "The nineteenth-century anarchist whom the desperate young imitate was actually the policeman's best friend. The anarchist managed to do just enough to frighten respectability without being able to cripple any vital social institution. To paraphrase Tallyrand, that is worse than criminal; it is mistaken." (Reflections on The Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972, 176–7) |
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Jim Conley
Trent University
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