Review of <i>Direct Action</i> by Ann Hansen

Sasha Ethiopia writes: "
Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla, Ann Hansen (AK Press/BTL, 2001)

I spent years thinking about picking up the gun. Growing up in one of the most conservative areas of the country, I spent my teenage years reading Emma Goldman and meditating to Crass. I could only envision the complete destruction of this wasteful, arrogant and genocidal way of life. Anything short of that seemed ethically wrong. I devoured the scant information then available about armed leftist groups, which mostly referred to the Marxist-oriented German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades. Paradoxically, the anarchist group Direct Action, with their roots in the punk rock scene and location in North America, was both much closer to where I was coming from, and well beneath my radar.

In fact, I finally came to know Direct Action mostly through punk rock. Like a whole generation of activists, a lot of my initial knowledge of politics came via the Dead Kennedys. Jello Biafra kept up on things far from the consciousness of most rural and suburban communities; he distilled this information into nuggets of lyrics which had the qualities of Zen koans or Nietzschian aphorisms. Who was Pol Pot? Why were Reaganomics slavery? And who blew up a Cruise missile plant in Canada?

While studying leftist armed resistance groups, I was also collecting Conflict and Bikini Kill records. There was a certain similarity between political bands and armed cells - a small group of people who joined together for a common purpose, created a collective name, a symbol, an identity… we all knew what Crass, or Conflict, or Fugazi stood for, in the same way that we knew what the Red Army Faction did. Complete resistance to the System. The difference was that one was aesthetic and one was explosive. I wanted to be explosive.

Punk rock was explosive in my mind - it certainly helped blow up some concepts that had been planted there by our culture. And the Vancouver Five helped bridge the gap between the two, the aesthetic and the combustible. They were legendary, part of the punk rock trivia game because one of their members had also been the bassist of Vancouver, Canada's Subhumans (not to be confused with the other, also political, English band). Of course, it took me years to actually get hold of one of their records, which, like many of the early gems, was out-of-print in the late '80s and into the '90s. When I finally heard them, I thought them (and still do) inspired musically, even if their lyrics were political in only a crude sense.

Obviously, they thought otherwise. Gerry Hannah quit the band to join the group which went on to blow the living fuck out of a Cruise missile components plant. This gained them the notoriety which led to their enshrinement in the DKs song, "Where Do Ya Draw the Line?" from Bedtime for Democracy. Jello, in one of his classic composite nuggets, sang:

In Toronto someone blew up a Cruise missile warhead plant

Ten slightly hurt, four million dollars damage

Why not destroy private property, when it's used against you and me

Is that violence - or self-defence, you tell me?

I had no idea what he was talking about in the late '80s, barely a teenager in the rural South, but I was sure that he was right.

A decade-and-a-half later I'm travelling and randomly browsing through a used bookstore in Berkeley, and this title pokes out of the shelf at me. Someone must've bought it immediately on publication and just as immediately dispensed with it. I'm on a travelling budget, but so drawn to it that I have to come back later just to get it. When I'm done, though, I understand why it was consumed and discarded so quickly. It's overly long and, as a narrative account, the writing lags and then completely breaks down towards the end..

But what do you say to the person who is willing to sacrifice their life to do the absolutely right thing and their sacrifice turns out to be meaningless? And, as a final irony, when they have acted in complete and total opposition to the ruling apparatus, they get what amounts to a slap on the wrist and a waggling of Control's finger? Especially when compared to the assassination policy the US government implemented for domestic Black and Yellow radicals in the '60s, similar to the one West Germany had (and still does) for RAF members. Is it even right to say your prose needs work? One just sounds trivial.

Hansen’s struggle was against a political intercourse and way of life so soulless and corrupt that, looking back only 20 years later, it is almost inconceivable that that system’s international leadership (both "Communist" and Capitalist) was willing to toy with nuclear war to defend what soon revealed themselves to be very temporary political edifices. It looked different at the time, though, and Hansen sets out the personal motivators and sense of extreme helplessness that drove the ethical justification for her sacrifice in this struggle.

If you just want to know the short history of the Vancouver Five (you Canadians will know them as the Squamish Five, but they were actually self-titled Direct Action and the Wimmin's Fire Brigade), I recommend Jim Campbell's article 'Vancouver 5,' which appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of the Canadian anarchist periodical journal Kick It Over. It's a handy and short summation of their career, closely resembles Hansen's book, and is available all over the web.

Hansen's longer, 500 page version details the origins of the group in the early '80s radical cultural milieu in Vancouver, Canada, which apparently consisted of unrecuperated ultra-leftists from the '60s and '70s, radical feminist elements and a nascent punk rock scene. Nursed by an illegalist lifestyle paralleling the some of the more extreme crusties you know - in addition to supplementing welfare payments with shoplifting, dumpstering and the old dine'n'dash, they would used rented cars to help steal shopping carts of food from supermarkets - they soon abandoned their aboveground political activities for a more extreme praxis.

Their initial releases were two trashings of the offices of Amax. The provincial government had granted this company a special exemption from federal environmental standards. This allowed them to dump a high level of toxins in the Pacific, much to the chagrin of environmentalists and the local native people. After scant publicity, Hansen and her compatriots also threw paint and flares into the Ministry of the Environment building in Victoria in protest to their perceived collaboration with the dumping.

The group mixed their illegal politics with the just plain illegal. They learned how to steal cars, pulled off an armed robbery of a supermarket's money drop, and stole a private arsenal from a gun-collector’s home. They created elaborate fake IDs, partly by dumpstering US embassy documents, and successfully pilfered dynamite caches on two occasions, netting over 2,000 pounds the second time. By comparison, the Weather Underground - an elaborate network of 300 people with a large base of popular support, who successfully bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the NYPD headquarters – possessed only 125 pounds.

Ideologically, Direct Action lacked nuance and depth, but wove many issues together. They focused on the continued militarization of Canada during the Cold War, the expansion of capitalism into the still-undeveloped wilderness, the oppression of native peoples, and embraced a radical feminism shot through with anti-pornography and lesbian separatism, most commonly associated with now out-of-favor theorist Andrea Dworkin. Hansen says she studied Marxism in college, but demonstrates none of the subtlety or complexity that Western Marxists direct towards a critique of cultural, economic or political systems. Direct Action's views, in fact, are championed by Anarchy magazine (in #53, the Spring-Summer 2002 issue) as being forerunners of anarchist Primitivist beliefs, usually associated with Eugene's John Zerzan, which holds that Industrial civilization is inherently destructive to the earth and to humanity. It cannot be reformed. Anything short of its complete abolition is futile, and any means of achieving this end are acceptable. Primitivism rejects urbanity and technology, and heavily romanticizes hunting and gathering cultures.

But by the end, Direct Action end up driving cars, eating at Wendy's and shoplifting from co-ops while trying to bomb Industrial civilization into submission. What does this mean? It is uncomfortably similar to the stories one hears about radical Islamic cells in the West, where the men are said to drink and fuck and immerse themselves in all manners of Western decadence, because tomorrow they will die for Allah.

The Vancouver Five had their two greatest hits in 1982: the bombing of B.C. Hydro's Cheekeye-Dunsmuir power transmission substation on Vancouver Island, and their break-through Toronto smash, Litton Systems of Canada. The transmission station was part of a project to promote resource extraction in previously undeveloped areas. It was funded by taxpayers and was ultimately meant to sell hydro-electric power to the States. After legal and civil disobedience strategies by environmentalists and native peoples failed, Direct Action leveled a substation on the line with a fuckload of dynamite.

They then turned their attention across the continent to the Litton Systems plant near Toronto. Litton manufactured the guidance system components for the Cruise missiles (those handy devices which delivered nuclear warheads) and sold them to the US government. I can only imagine what it must have been like - I can still only image it, even after reading her description - to drive a truck full of explosives across the Prairies of Canada, listening to the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., the Doors and Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. I suppose if there's any lingering doubt in cultural critics' minds that music can inspire political action, here is its banishment. After going to concerts by P.I.L and the Who, they parked a truck full of dynamite against the Litton Systems plant. Tragically, their phoned-in warning wasn't understood, the police and plant security failed to evacuate the building immediately, and the bomb's timer malfunctioned and exploded early. A building unconnected to the Cruise components manufacturing was completely trashed, and a lot of people almost died. In the end, it was just dumb luck that no one did.

Our intrepid bombers made it back to the West Coast and continued their discussions and thoughts. Plans were devised to rob a Brinks guard and to bomb Primrose Lake airbase in Cold Lake. Before any of this could happen, the group came under surveillance by the authorities via their links with the editor of Resistance, a magazine dedicated to covering armed resistance groups. The police proceeded to watch as Direct Action members joined others to release what would be their swansong, the controversial Wimmin's Fire Brigade firebombings of several Red Hot Video outlets in Vancouver.

These actions must have made some sort of sense in the feminist politics of 1982, long before Riot Grrrl and the (predominately West Coast) anarchist-feminist sex worker culture of today. The porn chain carried videos which depicted women being raped and tortured, sometimes by armed men, and then begging for more; however, I think it is fair to point out that Hansen does not document that the stores had either child porn, snuff films or bestiality, which I have sometimes heard.

Although Hansen does not specify her beliefs about pornography in general, there are negative comments made in the book about the store carrying S&M and B&D films, and she quotes the statement of one feminist group who supported the action, which ended with the slogan, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Local feminist groups had already attempted to have the stores prosecuted under a law prohibiting the advocacy of "genocide," defined as an act "committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group." After this failure in the legal arena, Hansen and friends torched a few outlets.

The group didn't have much time to engage in discussions about the validity of such actions, as the police arrested them soon after. In order to not compromise their legal cases in the other bombings, the authorities had not stopped the RHV actions. Hansen makes a big deal out of this, complaining in her court case, and in the book, that the police broke the law to prosecute her. It's hard to have any sympathy for this argument though, and it's the only time in the book that I think she's weak. Are her people above the law because they are ethically right? Did she expect the cops to play fair, when Direct Action and WFB are acting far, far, far outside the scope of acceptable legal, liberal-democratic politics? If activists think things are so bad that they are forced to engage in illegal struggle, one would think they could only realistically expect the same in return. One law for them and another law for us, indeed.

In the end, I didn't pick up the gun after doing a lot of support work for the Zapatistas. They were a successful armed movement, but I wasn't an indigenous farmer in rural Mexico, I was a dropout urban American. Similarly, Hansen struggled with the guerillas of El Salvador who had inspired her and the others. She eventually admitted that what they were doing was a fundamentally different thing. Even her small band's theory that they were not engaged in a revolutionary war themselves, but rather working to inspire others to take up arms against the capitalist state, could not bridge the gap. It just wasn't working - no one had joined them. In a recent interview, she said, "The most important error was in not realizing that without a revolutionary social movement in place urban guerrilla tactics won't work--there is no continuity. These links between social movements and radical actions are strategic political questions that must be addressed." But by the time she came to this realization, it was all too late.

The five were caught and given sentences that ranged from 6 years to Hansen's life sentence. Astoundingly, she was out in only 8 years. Total resistance had garnered, not a martyr's death in a hail of bullets, but relative leniency.

Direct Action forms a nice counterpoint to Fugitive Days, the recently published memoirs of Weatherman Bill Ayers. Fugitive Days is a dreamlike rollercoaster ride about how a group of people who love children and want to live an ethical life are transformed into an underground army. It's poetic and exhilarating, and provides almost no details. Direct Action is a meticulous accounting of every detail that Hansen could reconstruct for two years. I was fascinated at first but became bogged down after a hundred pages. She attempts to make the narrative more interesting by adding what she presumed the police and other activists were saying and doing; it's a good idea, but those scenes seem clunky and contrived.

She spends three pages describing a haircut, and a good bit of the end is consumed by the meticulous details of a planned of a Brinks robbery which never happens. While I suppose the interpersonal dynamics of an underground cell and the considerations one has in mind when planning a heist are interesting to those who are going to, or have gone-through, such an experience, I could only conclude that she was an author desperately in need of an editor.

Ultimately, one can criticize Ann Hansen for wanting to expunge her life publicly in an overly long book, or for failing to get the editor she needed (and, indeed, deserved), But maybe that's still too harsh - she does has a fluid and readable style. One can even take the high ground, if one dares, and charge her with participating in reckless political action. But I don't think it's possible to assail someone for their willingness to give everything for what was so transparently right.

As Jello sang about her and the others, "Where do you draw the line? I'm not telling you, I'm asking you."

- Sasha Ethiopia"