Creating A Movement With Teeth

Description

Bursting into existence in the Pacific Northwest of the US in 1975, the George Jackson Brigade claimed 14 pipe bombings against corporate and state targets, multiple bank robberies and the daring rescue of a jailed member of the organisation. Collected in one volume for the first time, Creating a Movement with Teeth makes available their entire body of propaganda, shining an illuminating light into this diverse group.

Sujets

• Washington (U.S. state)
• Terrorism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604864618
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Creating A Movement With Teeth: A Documentary History Of The George Jackson Brigade Edited by Daniel Burton-Rose This edition © PM Press 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60486-223-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927765
Cover design by Josh MacPhee/ Justseeds.org Interior design by Josh MacPhee/ Justseeds.org
10987654321
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Contents
Permissions
Acknowledgments
Preface, Ward Churchill
Introduction, Daniel Burton-Rose
Conventions
I. PROFILES OF THE GEORGE JACKSON BRIGADE 27
i. Law Enforcement Perspectives
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act Document, “Domestic Security”
Seattle Police Department Intelligence Division, “George Jackson Brigade”
Federal Bureau of Investigation, “ RE: GEORGE JACKSON BRIGADE ,” January 4, 1978
ii. Difficult to Digest: The Corporate Media on the George Jackson Brigade
Walter Wright, “Ed Mead: Two Faces of a Dangerous Man”
Walter Wright, “Pages in the Life of Bruce Seidel: Two Sides of a Revolutionary”
Neil Modie, “Janine and Jori: The Two Faces of a Jackson Brigade Suspect”
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: Chris Beahler et al., “Open Letter To Dr. Jennifer James”
John Arthur Wilson, “Sherman—‘Ready When the Time Comes’”
iii. Invisible People: A Working Class Black Man and a White Dyke
Michelle Celarier, “Does the State Conspire? The Conviction of Mark Cook”
rita d. brown, “a short autobiography”
II. COMMUNIQUÉS
Olympia Bombing, June 1, 1975
Capitol Hill Safeway, September 18,
“We Cry and We Fight”
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: Left Bank Collective
New Year, 1976
Communiqué Fragment, “On the Weather Underground …”
International Women’s Day, March
“We’re Not All White and We’re Not All Men”
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: snapdragon, “A Letter to the George Jackson Brigade”
May Day, May 12, 1977
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: The Walla Walla Brothers
Summer Solstice, June 21, 1977
Capitalism is Organized Crime, July 4, 1977
“Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories,” July 4, 1977
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: Vinegar Beard Collective
C OMMUNITY R ESPONSE: Stagecoach Mary Collective, August 10, 1977
Open Letter to the John Brown Book Club, September 1, 1977
Bust the Bosses, October 12, 1977
Letter to the Automotive Machinists Union Local 289, October 16, 1977
You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can’t Kill a Revolution, November 1977
An Open Letter to Bo (Rita D. Brown), November 1977 “To Bo Wherever We May Find Her”
Open Letter To Jailers Spellman and Waldt, December 23, 1977
Bust the Union Busters, December 24, 1977
Our Losses Are Heavy … Easter Sunday 1978
III. THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS THE SOURCE OF LIFE
The Power of the People Is the Source of Life: Political Statement of the George Jackson Brigade
     History and Summation of Brigade Unity
     The Left
     Weather Influence
     The Police (and Other Backward Elements)
     Terrorism
     The Road Forward—Strategy
     Tactics
Anti-Authoritarian Statement
“Serve the People—Fight for Socialism”
Chronology of Brigade Actions
C OMMUNITY RESPONSE: The Valerian Coven
IV. WHEN IS THE TIME? SEATTLE’S LEFT COMMUNITY DEBATES ARMED ACTION
John Brockhaus and Roxanne Park, “Ed Mead Speaks from Prison”
Roxanne Park, “Terrorism and the George Jackson Brigade”
Michelle Whitnack, “On Armed Struggle: A Continuing Dialogue”
Left Bank Collective, “We … Support Armed Action … Now”
Ed Mead, “Ed Mead Replies”
Roxanne Park and Emmett Ward, “Grand Jury: Three Who Refused to Speak”
Papaya, “More Than ‘Critical Support’ for GJB”
Bill Patz, “Captured Members Explain Their Politics”
V. PROCESSING 251
Daniel Burton-Rose, A Collective Interview with George Jackson Brigade Veterans Bo Brown, Mark Cook, and Ed Mead
Notes
Selected Newspaper Articles on the George Jackson Brigade, 1975–1978
Selected Bibliography
Index
Permissions
Walter Wright, “Ed Mead: Two Faces of a Dangerous Man,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission.
Walter Wright, “Pages in the Life of Bruce Seidel: Two Sides of a Revolutionary,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission.
Neil Modie, “Janine and Jori: The Two Faces of a Jackson Brigade Suspect,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission.
John Arthur Wilson, “Sherman—‘Ready When the Time Comes,’” copyright Seattle Times. Reproduced with permission.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due first of all to Jamie of Abraham Guillen Press in Quebec, whose reprinting of the Brigade’s Political Statement and communiqués precipitated this expanded collection. Dan Berger prompted fuller editorial comment with his pointed queries on the manuscript, as did André Moncourt, who also read through, corrected, and commented on the manuscript. Moncourt and J. Smith’s monumental documentary history of the Red Army Faction also inspired fuller annotation.
I am grateful to Alyssa, Ava, Lauren, Sha, and Trinh for keying in the communiqués, articles, and editorial commentary. I realize it’s a blast from the sexist past to thank a number of women for typing services, but as an e-gimp with a persistent repetitive strain injury, hiring assistants was better than suffocating silently.
Josh MacPhee provided the engaging cover, and more than a decade ago played a catalytic role in putting me on the path of encountering former Brigade members. Thanks as well to Ramsey Kanaan and Craig O’Hara, who enthusiastically greeted this project. I am also indebted to Ward Churchill for his preface. Despite the slander campaign directed against him after his essay “Some People Push Back” attracted the attention of Fox News et al., he remains one of the most careful and knowledgeable scholars of 1970s social movements and the repressive forces arrayed against them.
Preface
R E V ISIONING A M OVEMENT WITH T EETH
Ward Churchill

The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end. We have the means to this end; the problem is to develop acceptance of their use.
—George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
T here was a time, not so long ago, when an appreciable segment of those professing opposition to the policies pursued by U.S. élites proved capable of transcending the banality of liberal analysis, arriving at a genuinely radical understanding both of what they were up against and what would be required to transform it. Thus were the obtund constraints of “responsible” protest discarded in favor of armed struggle undertaken not only by such iconic organizations as the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), but also a host of other groups around the country, many of them tiny, highly localized, and now all but forgotten.
Considered in light of Santayana’s famously irrefragable observation that those unknowing of their history are doomed to repeat it, the “forgotten” dimension(s) of the armed struggle waged against the domestic status quo during the late 1960s and early ’70s represents a problem of genuine significance. If we may agree that to draw reasonable conclusions from or about any phenomenon, historical or otherwise, it is essential to have as complete and accurate an apprehension of it as possible, the nature of the deficiency should be clear. Its ramifications are no less apparent in the discourse of the few who might presently assert that armed struggle constitutes the signifier of revolutionary purity and the sole means through which fundamental change can be precipitated as it is in the anodyne catechism mouthed by the multitudes who smugly dismiss recourse to arms as being both “unrealistic” and “self-defeating.” 1
While much good work, and no shortage of bad, has been done in documenting and assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and potentials of the Panthers and Weather Underground over the years, 2 nothing of the sort can be said regarding the welter of autonomous entities that followed more or less comparable trajectories during same period. Indeed, it is arguable that the degree of attention afforded the former has to some extent precluded anything resembling a proper analytical emphasis being placed on the latter. The result has been, and remains, a decided skew in how the interplay of sociopolitical elements in the struggle has been perceived by those seeking, often urgently, to discern its meaning. They have in a sense been placed in the position of the proverbial three blind men attempting to determine and describe the physical characteristics of an elephant.
The magnitude of the imbalance is indicated, though by no means defined, by the facts that during the fall of 1968, there were at least 41 political bombings on U.S. campuses alone—an undetermined number of others occurred off-campus—and that this nearly doubles the number carried out by the Weather Underground during the entire seven years of its operational existence. The spring of 1969 saw a further 84 on-campus bombings, making a total of 125 for the school year. During academic year 1969–1970, the tally of bombings on U.S. campuses rose to 174. 3 At least seventy off-campus corporate facilities were also bombed in 1969, as well as several military facilities; on November 11 that year, a small, non-Weather-affiliated collective in New York—Having already bombed the Whitehall Military Induction Center, the Federal Building, the offices of United Fruit, and a Midland Marine Bank earlier in the fall—hit the corporate offices of Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, and General Motors, all on a single day. 4
From 1970–1975, while the number of political bombings attributable to “the Left” underwent a noticeable decline, there was an equally-noticeable rise in proficiency, both technically and in terms of target selection. Such efforts were, moreover, sustained at relatively high levels through the end of the decade. Since the WU