“The war of the urban guerrilla is likely to develop into the most prevalent form of political violence in the decades of the 1970s, and it may spread to many Western cities which were formerly considered immune to the contagion,” Mr. Moss writes. Had this been the opening of his book, one would have read on with interest, whether one accepted his forecast or not, to see how he proposes dealing with the dangers. Unfortunately, the sentence quoted is the last in the book.
It is, I suppose, a truism that any writings tell at least as much about the author and his milieu as they do about the subject matter; The War for the Cities is certainly no exception to this rule. Mr. Moss is the archetypal liberal Englishman—and your anglicized Australian is the most English of all. He sees through the urban guerrilla’s pretensions and wishes them defeated: “The political tags matter less than the psychological impulse. The glorification of action over intellect is characteristic both of the prewar fascists and the postwar New Left. … it is no accident that men who exalt violence have so often turned out to be more authoritarian and intolerant than the governments they set out to overthrow.” Yet he accepts many of the presuppositions on which they are based, and fails to ask at any point whether the revolutionary, nihilistic, authoritarian Left, which he outspokenly and unreservedly opposes, can indeed be separated so sharply from the allegedly reformist, moderate Left, whether there is indeed not a continuum (as left-wingers themselves would claim) and whether the urban guerrilla, Weatherman or Tupamaro is not the reductio ad absurdum of socialism generally.
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