MOVING THROUGH THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND Hello. I’m going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR. We’ve known that our job is to LEAD WHITE KIDS into ARMED REVOLUTION. Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and The Chicago police / FBI murders of Black clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark political and economic, cultural and military, Clark in Chicago on December 4, 1969, gave where all forms are developed in harmony new urgency to the already escalating relation- with armed struggle. ship with authorities. I tremble at Fred’s murder, as I trembled then. I trembled with rage, it’s true, Without mass struggle there can be no and fear. I trembled with uncertainty: What could revolution. we do to survive? How could we help the remain- Without armed struggle there can be no ing panthers? Never again will they fight alone. victory. Thirty-three BlacK DEMonstrators WERE SHot We never intended to spend the next five or twenty- BY POLICE during the barrage of gunfire, five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became Three died of their wounds… It was clear that revolutionary, we’ve been trying to show how it is black activists were suffering a response to possible to overcome the frustration and impotence protest that was different from whites. Maybe, that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids I wondered, it was only a matter of time before know the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all they would be shooting at us as well. of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary These are hard conditions to live through. But they violence is the only way. All over the world, people are favorable for the people and for revolution. Our fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s intention is to disrupt the empire…to emancipate it, youth to use our strategic position behind enemy to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire. out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the Black people have been fighting almost alone inside. Our intention is to encourage the people… for years. to provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness, to stir the imagination, to popularize power, to agitate, We psyched ourselves up for what was a disgusting to organize, to join in every way possible to people’s romanticization of violence. Being a pacifist, day-to-day struggles. Our intention is to forge an anywhere in the world, was the beginning of underground…a clandestine political organization the conversation. engaged in every form of struggle. I want to keep it complicated, to defend complexity (I find all of this incredibly constricting and false, against the distorting labels that come to us in for us to be able to express who we are and I think it neat packages and summary forms — apologizing could be better if we were talking to each other.) in general is asking too much. … activities were unruly, impolite, urgent, and Was pacifism a philosophy, a religion, a strategy, insistent. They involved breaking doors and or tactical alternative? shattering expectations. Protesters broke the law, they anticipated arrest. In my reading of Marx, the mode of production was the sum total of all the relations of production, of all In the context of two thousands live each day, the key ways production was organized. So national how do we define violence? How do we appor- liberation struggles weren’t some peripheral theatre, tion responsibility? Most of the New Left did always secondary to workers in the U.S. and Europe. not exclude all political violence. Its historical Rather, because imperialism subjected the economies roots were saturated in the traditions of John of whole nations, those struggled were crucial to how Brown and Harriet Tubman, the IWW and capitalism was organized on a global scale. In a way Emma Goldman. If we supported the African these theoretical positions affirmed what was already National Congress in their efforts to overthrow at the heart of our politics: racism and sexism are apartheid in South Africa, if we recognized the far more than bad ideas; white and male supremacy imperatives that led to the principle of armed are deep, fundamental structures, which, along with self-defense, if we knew the rules were different class, are central to defining the system. for blacks and whites, how could we justify American exceptionalism? It is an illusion This was totally true of those who died in the that imperialism will decay peacefully. New York townhouse explosion. Under the Imperialism has meant constant war. thin burnt orange carpeting, my bare feet felt Imperialists defend their control of the the old, wood floor vibrating with escalating means of life with terrible force. intensity. A blast reverberated through the house and in place of the ironing board, a (I don’t feel like the words we’re shying away mountain of splintered wood and brick rose from are really rhetoric. Just because large up all around me. I could only open my eyes numbers of people are not comfortable with, off and on, so that the tears could momentarily say, a word like imperialism, doesn’t mean clear off the dust that grated like sandpaper it’s rhetoric. It means we have a job over the beneath my lids. I cried out “Adam,” Terry’s long run, which is to find somehow to explain nom de guerre, and scrambled to the edge of what imperialism is. We have no choice but the crater, only to be blinded now by brightness. to use the word. The same is true for racism. The third person who was killed there was So rhetoric is only rhetoric if you can’t find Terry Robbins, who led the first rebellion at a way to explain it, to make it make sense.) Kent State less than two years ago. Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy Denunciations of struggles of the sixties of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy as a failure do the enemy’s work. Weak- of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the nesses are plenty but lessons won’t be most technically advanced country in the world. drawn apart from the context. Like most The development of guerilla organization and armed clichés and myths they fail to heal and activity against the state is most advanced in the even to inform. Each has a thread of Black community, where the tradition and necessity truth to hang itself on, while each for resistance is highest. Armed actions push forward dissolves complexity and destroys people’s consciousness and commitment. Revolution- contextual content. Our analysis of white ary action generates revolutionary consciousness; supremacy seemed to require that we act growing consciousness develops revolutionary action. to reject our position of privilege, that Weather reduced that move from resistance to revolu- we put our bodies on the line, that we inter- tion down to tactics. This heated discourse downplays vene to open a new front in the struggle the gritty, critical work of organizing, educating, and with repressive forces. Weather made participating. It sounds as if the complex, layered, a decision to not injure or kill people, any and dense manifestations of liberatory change could people — and reaffirmed that decision be summarized solely as struggle and war. over and over again. Ché taught us that “revolutionaries move like fish in Yes, the sea.” The alienation and contempt that young let us wail and weep together, people have for this country has created the ocean so that our lament for this revolution. Young people devoured the becomes — also — a weapon writings of Frantz Fanon, Ida B . Wells, Eduardo which we direct against the vicious demons Galeano, Simone de Beauvoir, Ho Chi Minh, C. L. R. who haunt our world today. James, Jane Addams, Albert Camus, Che Guevara, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Lessing, W. E. B. DuBois, Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are Herbert Marcuse, and Nelson Mandela. We looked freaks. IF YOU want to FIND US, THIS IS WHERE WE ARE. to the Third World, the Global South, to small In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, nations, revolutionary liberation struggles that barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, were anticolonial and egalitarian. smoking dope and loading guns — fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go. WE LIVE IN A WHirlwind; nonetheless, time is on the side of the guerillas. We’re not hiding out but This is the way we celebrate the example of we’re invisible. Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired Underground is not the right word us by their fight behind enemy lines for the it makes it seem too simple, liberation of their people. as if there is an easy way to disappear a place to go… For Assata And when you were captured, sister, For Fred I wept For Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, For all of us. and for all the revolutionaries who are still on the move here, there has been no question for a long time now—we will never go back. WE MUST ARM OUR SPIRIT. When the sprit is armed, the people are strong..