Program about the Weather Underground Organization

My name is Jennifer Dohrn and this is Johnny Lerner trying to figure out exactly what happened in Washington during the last two weeks and where we go from here. It's important to kind of put it into some kind of historical perspective if we can. Looking at the past year and young to see to understand our strength a little better in how we can build something off of it. For one thing the situation with the war in Vietnam is is more critical than it's ever been. I know last fall when I was in Algeria I met with the Vietnamese and they felt that at this point they are really unable to move any further ahead in victory unless the offensive is on two fronts which means in this country as well as in India China. And even know that the last two weeks had an incredible effect I think as far as showing a real.

A real fighting spirit a real building of a revolutionary force in this country. Their situation is still certainly critical at the same time the situation exists in this country that more than ever before the huge huge majority of the American people. Are really against the war that almost no one believes what Nixon says anymore about what's happening in India China and it's like a real open space that we have to do a lot of work to get a lot of strength especially with election year coming up next year which means a lot more freedom for us before and after elections when there's a consolidation and there'll be a lot heavier repression. In the last year our movement has really grown on the one hand by the existence and the building of a really solid underground

living then underground. Which has had its first birthday I guess it was in March. So it's a. Very you know. Underground. Which is really the strength that we have to move. Which of the sisters and brothers. Making a conscious decision to build a network underground that could move in time struck a. Kind of. A sign of their strength is the fact that they could go into the capital and place a bomb and say Here we are in America fighting. What better way to show a victory for the Indo-Chinese fighting. And it it seems that it's really important to me that a lot more people understand it is our underground. You know it's not something that's isolated or removed to some people but they're people just like us. And it's hard for me in a lot of ways to

understand that people turn to to look at them as being very unreal because with my sister Bernadine being one of the leaders in the underground it's obviously very very close to me and trying to have more of a consciousness that we have another arm to move from you know really strong arm that can move and strike and be gone and not be found. Which is a real thing to be excited about. In so far as people like us go I think the past year was a real time of people going deep into their communities of there being no kind of mass organization no kind of national network for people to relate to and a real sense of people saying you know wait a second I have to see how I'm living and.

How I'm relating to people what our lives are about. Kind of a period of people taking a breath here and dealing with day to day struggles of how we're going to survive how we're going to build all kinds of institutions on the land and in the cities that are going to enable us to be in new kinds of women and men which is what being revolutionary is really all about. And I think that though there were some despair that the movement wasn't really visible. It was just for those who were only superficially related to it that saw it as such because what happened was that when we came out this spring and especially the last two weeks there was a real deepening of our struggle because of the past year of people having you know really gone into areas where they lived and built up much better base. So that when people came to Washington amidst all the confusion and the lack of leadership there in that what seemed a lot of us like strange politics being put

out politics based a lot on guilt and not dealing with us is a revolutionary movement. Even out of all this chaos of real strength and a kind of. A lot of enthusiasm for here we are in much stronger even than we thought we ever had been in our you know talking about about what went down in Washington in the last couple of weeks. In the talking that that we've done since the demonstrations are over since we went into tactical retreat as people talked about it. We've really been amazed you know to understand the myriad ways that people strengthen creativity came out in the situation because people who are there will know that coming into that scene was really mind blowing and shocking and just about everybody that I know came into Washington and spent the first 10 or 12 hours or the first day that they were there

completely zapped out because here here seem to be this huge massive but also out of control kind of situation with with a whole tactical conception of disrupting traffic in the city that had been on the one hand published before hand very publicly and openly and also when people got into looking at the particular targets in particular the real plans that had been made people found out that they really were lacking in terms of a real sense of how to move and how to be able to survive and not get busted or not get whatever it was that people wanted to do and the thing that is that's amazed us that constantly through the experience was the way that thousands and thousands of kids who were calm with with a whole range kind of consciousness in their own heads about what they were coming to and what it meant and how how complex or how together an action mayday was. People just rose to the occasion

and and. Just assume leadership for themselves and for the people that they come with. Right. In that vacuum of leadership and in that vacuum of. Organization and there's a there's a lot of stories that are kind of important stories their stories about different groups of people that came in more or less together regional groupings of of a couple of hundred people who came and came into the land at West Potomac Park where we were for a week and realized that the park itself was this kind of huge and amorphous situation and just set themselves up put their tents around in a circle around a campfire and began to do reconnaissance in the city about the targets a lot of regions came and discovered really what their targets were like and pitch those targets and developed a whole new tactical sense about how to move people in the situation. Tell me in the beginning in the beginning in the first couple of days in the land there was this argument that was

going on with this kind of. Philosophical problem or something about about nonviolence and militancy sitting down in the streets versus tactics and stuff like that. And what we discovered is that by and large when people actually got into the situations in the streets people realized that they didn't want to sit down they really didn't want to be busted and people developed right there in the context of that battle right there in that city that was under siege for a week and I had a whole sense about how to move how you really disrupt the city how you build a functioning kind of organic groups that can move in the streets and the kind of tactics that people develop. Well really it was a whole like strong kind of product that happened in people's minds you know there was there was a lot of fighting that went on in Washington but it was it's important for us to like understand it and gauge it because it was it was fighting that that wasn't directly hand-to-hand combat with the police because people people understand at this point that that is

something that that doesn't lead to preserving ourselves you know and that's something that gets people something gets people busted. But people instead understood all kinds of ways to disrupt the city by stopping traffic by turning over cars in the streets by setting barricades on fire by going to places where there weren't any pigs deployed and and pulling disruptive actions there in those places. And the other thing that about the way that people came in in regional organizations and it didn't happen universally in the action. But it's like a sign it was a sign in the sense of of what has to happen in the future and the importance of people coming to national actions. You know in groups of people that have worked together and know each other is that people really dealt with all the total heavy problems of survival in that situation collectively and in their in their groups of who they came from when we were kicked off the land on Sunday morning and all of a sudden it was 25000 of us that had no place to

go. People just dealt with people different groupings of people decided they were going to just go and take the different universities or go to different churches that had been arranged to be movement centers for like 50 or 100 people but instead groups of two or three thousand people would just go and decide that we needed and we had to do it you know. And people the way the people rescued each other from the pigs when people were busted in the way that people were after the bus it started happening you got on to the courthouse and you would run into hundreds of people who were there each one with a list of five or 10 people that they knew that they'd worked with that they came to D.C. with that who they were arranging for collectively and really taking care of their own and it's a real it's a real sign of it's a real product of what this last year has been this year of quiet entrenchment and and deep kind of work you know and. The kind of changes that went on in people's heads at every point in the in the course of the two weeks in Washington are just just fantastic kinds

of kinds of changes in terms of people's spirit in the jail's that I never see people Spirit higher in the jail's there's one story about a group of 300 men who were being held in a precinct house fifteen or twenty two people to a one man cell which is really basically impossible situation where people have to take turns standing up for hours and sitting down because it's just not enough room for everybody to sit down. And then the pigs weren't allowing people to have medication or food or anything like that and so it was a very tense kind of situation and what happened was that people decided to all like be quiet. You know everybody all these 300 people in this one cell block just were quiet and one by one through the whole night one by one they went around and each person in the quiet so that they could be heard told stories to the rest of these 300 people just about how they got busted or where they came from or what they were doing and what their who they were in the revolution you know just real

like exchange in a real kind of spirit that came out of people's. There was I mean there were numerous instances in the jails of people who were ripped off or attempted to be ripped off by the pigs and put into solitary for either attacking militantly or whatever you know and people really responded and pulled together around those kinds of things. It's it's that it's that kind of stuff it's those kind of those kind of strengths and that kind of creativity that we saw all the way through the experience that really leads to to a sense about the future you know leads us to it understanding that really where we have to go is by continuing to build links and networks among people at a at a level at the local level at the level where people work constantly in live and kinds of ties that are going to enable people to continue to build strong regional networks and structures and programs and stuff. And also coming into situations of a

large national focus and run and operate in those situations in those national situations also in a regional way and taking care of each other taking care of people you know. It's as if Washington was really a very cruel first battle of the People's Army in this country you know it was very crude and it was very haphazard in a lot of ways but it's really it's when you look at all the strong things that came out of people in that situation you get a sense of where we have to move to and struggle. One of I think really hard positions during that time in Washington was a consciousness about women and about liberation. The first week that we were on the land I know there was about 75 percent man 25 percent of the scene such that a woman could not walk on the land.

And we tried it first just set up women center and two to bring women into it to plan the women's march which happened on Sunday and there was an incredible amount of frustration that we weren't able to reach most of the women on the land and deal with any of the chauvinism at all that was there and it was really becoming a very divisive thing for people. I think what really pulled everything together was the fact that when we were kicked off the land much ahead of when anyone had planned. The first thing that happened was an offensive thing and that was the women's march which began in it all up and down the streets of Washington. And really shook up a lot of people who were surprised that that women came together in a real strong way. And we're not afraid and in knew how to protect each other and how at that at that moment it was real important that we strike a blow even if it meant

walking arm in arm with a couple of thousand sisters in the streets. You know that was I was saying look we're not afraid of you you know we're angry and we're here to stay and fight. But I think looking back. At the first week on the land in particular like the problems around women our general attitude at first which I think was completely wrong in our part was that these aren't the political people. You know these are just people who came to crash with a rock concert. In fact I think the people that were there the whole week on the land and that were still there last Thursday marching on the South Vietnamese embassy were the same people you know that in effect they are the people that we always refer to is. As the sea. You know that we see is is the basis for building revolution in this country. And one of the things that I think a lot of us learned out of in particular in the women sisters that we really haven't been the

way yet to talk to those sisters and brothers that were on the land to really build up. Need to get out of our rhetoric to really behold you know a base because those are the people that we're fighting the hardest on the streets and they were fighting because of the whole way their lives are. And how they view the state and thousand other things. But at the same time they were not going to comment on any of the forms that we set up. No. We stayed in Washington until yesterday and what happened this weekend was that there was a retreat that was held by the so-called May Day collectively with on to the left of it. And people who had stayed in Washington. To really go over for a couple of days the whole. Thing and what had happened and trying to understand where to go from here and what essentially came out of that. First of all was the idea that any other action that happens has to be

one which says that we are meant. Which in effect will increase the consciousness about the war. That isn't going to be one issue. You know the war in bringing people to Washington by any means possible by guilt by whatever just getting in to get numbers but instead has to be a kind of Baltics that talks about our culture that talks about black consciousness. You know that is everything that we are trying to fight for. And if those all have to be brought in because. We don't want to repeat you know it is good as it was we were trying to repeat the same kind of thing and have to be on a higher level. Also things like the fact that the action which happened and found almost 14000 people getting arrested which says a lot about the whole strategy of filling the jails. You know that all these things are being talked about now in what essentially was decided by the group in

Washington was that a call would be put out that there would be some. Some kind of meeting within the next three weeks. People from regions and in essence the mayday collective was dissolved that it didn't exist because it would have to come out of the people who went there. You know the forming of a new kind of thing to plan some kind of national focus to keep up to sustain the energy that we started in Washington. But I think that it really any other event that happens or any other form that's creative has to come out of where people live has to come out of the very basis that we're not the time when we can say well let's form a national organization because it's not there yet. You know it's going to come because of our communities have been going strong and starting to link up with each other. And it's a real hard thing to talk about regional representatives when in fact we don't have regions you know they're really just

maps in lines that were drawn on a map and people who've never even seen each other are suddenly supposed to elect a representative. You know all of the structure that was in a day didn't fit into how our lives are you know how we're building things. But the fact still remains that another thing is going to be built. You know and it's up to us to somehow through this summer really sustain with the things that we learned in Washington in bringing them back to the areas that we live in so that we can really create you know a second a day that more militant that is more US. And it really comes from the people who went there you know comes from the real base and that's like a huge responsibility for people to take in their own areas. It means having a very definite consciousness about starting to find out who are those people in the other cities that you suddenly were running in the streets with and we're supposed to have to be able to put your life in their hands.

That is it's really. A very hard time for us because there's an incredible amount of work that we have to do and we have to learn how to do it in a in a very new way because none of us really have any kind of blueprint for how you go about building new connections and new networks of people in an area let alone in terms of the nation of. The people. By the way Washington which I watch for lately with people in the city who are I think what you what your working life. There's no distinction between talking about.

A general that is against the war in this country that includes all kinds of people which isn't what in essence I did. Reaching everyone from the very straight past people to what you call the growth to every kind of people. Which is why in essence the politics of the day with the coalition of people all different kinds of politics coming together because they hated the war. Here's an. Incredibly important this time in history that it's many people it can be turned on. But I think at the same time with you know the framework. You have. To do that. That. All life building revolution. And. The success of any kind of large coalition of different kinds of people depends on

how strong we are. And how strong the revolutionary movement. Is. Built. On. Which I see for example the revolutionary leadership in this country is. Yes. Essentially one. Third. With this drone this issue bores you. And you. I don't think you can limit it to just but I think what you know about is that. You call me a revolutionary prophet. No. I'm. Going to educate people. They are different in different ways. Most of the great. Great ambitions of the professional people are. Thank you so much. Yeah. And because of the

time we did it in first learning about war and many about how. The right. Not. The revolution. Yeah. We were living with it. You know I think. People on the left like lately haven't paid enough attention to things like the Gallup poll and what the position of the left is in this country right now. When when 73 percent of the people in this country want a date set for withdraw from you know just angry about the war and respect in massive numbers working people and middle class people and our parents and all kind of people are into a whole new kind of perspective of the militancy of the movement and the anger that that those of us have

been struggling against for years had been had been struggling from that and that's been that's been the basis of our energy you know. At this point the potential for really opening up the left is like greater than it's ever been and the fact also the next year is an election year and the and as we learned very well and I think 68 election years are times when people are even more open than ever. You know when when. When we have much more of a kind of leverage with the government because of the way that the American imperialist politics is so malleable just in terms of who they think is going to get the vote. You know that on the one hand there's a major kind of objective which is building the strongest and most militant anti-war movement possible in this country and in a fucking war you know that's a major primary but also

short range in the sense of maybe the next year or two kind of objective. But that that's not separated from building a kind of an also a very very broad movement in this country that is that feels connected to and is very much in support of the revolution you know will will be will will always support or will always feel connected to the struggles of those people black people and brown people I knew and young people those people that are into the most militant and the most left wing kind of politics. And it's. The understanding of how we have to reach out in every possible kind of way to all people in this country. Is like. Understanding that the revolution is about all people in this country and that it's in and finally it's going to be all people who build it and create it in the in. Based on the values that they want you know in the way they want to live and stuff like that. And it's

you know I don't I don't think it's possible at this point to look at this country and make some kind of class analysis of this country and. You know the way that it's been done in a classical Marxist way or something like that. You know I think it is very difficult to define in a simple sense like the layers of society and the working class and stuff like that everything is so much complicated by the questions of nationalism black and brown nationalism the Chicano in the southwest and I mean all the different things that exist and also that the struggle of young people which in certain ways is a nationalist kind of struggle as a cultural struggle and a struggle of people trying to be a people you know and trying to be self-conscious as a people. I don't I think it's that that the old kind of breakdowns that that. We will meet at different times really really lack you know they're like very two dimensional kinds of things they don't embody the real complexity and and

and like fascinating spectra of what this revolution is really about and what change and movement in motion in this country is really about. And it's a it's a you know it's not a question of like trying to build an anti-war movement in the way that the trots building anti-women if you like just only talking to people about ending the war we have to always be talking to people about the fact that what we're into is building in our society what we're concretely doing right now is building that new society you know. The point that I'm trying to make about that is that if it's open in a way that it's not that people are like embracing the left at this point but people are open to us in a way that they haven't been. You know people just the responses of the citizens of Washington during May Day was were amazing. You know people like this one one story

of some kids who are like panhandling at Dupont Circle and they got bus they got stopped by a bunch of pigs who are going to bust and then all of a sudden this group of kids and police was surrounded by 20 people office people who said let those kids go they have to get money they have to eat those you know in people's responses to the vets actions which are really heavy kind of things you know it's not like people are joining the revolution right and people who aren't you know are not already like revolutionaries but people are very much open to the kinds of things that we're saying now. That. Is. International. You know and not just how. That's. What it meant to be like in the China that you know there are 20000 people on the streets in Washington. It had an incredible fact because it was and he was saying that people here are ready to fight are starting you know that it's happening here. And that's incredibly important to them.

And not huge demonstrations in London and Paris not to mention the money crisis in Europe which has apparently relates to the fact that all the newspapers and stuff in Europe showed pictures that made Washington look like it was completely under siege and insurrection and suddenly the dollar's lost three and a point seven percent of its value in the last two days. That's a serious blow. And a lot of what's happened that maybe broke out of was that certainly we have to be aware of repression you know because it's a real thing to white kids for the first time. You know over the past year but it's not like you Bill you can never build a revolutionary movement if you know your whole outlook is on how much repression is it going to bring down the whole idea of having an underground you know which which begins bombings and learned you know is learning the technical skills of bombings which you know as they said in communiques have done as little damage as a bee sting you know that it's not like being able to blow up huge military installations you know. But it

is a process whereby more and more people in this country are understanding how we can move you know in it could have been called adventurist for them to go underground to begin doing this. But in fact you know I think more and people for example people who read carefully the communique that came after the bombing of the of the Capitol building you know it was addressed in such a way that almost anyone who was against the war no matter how much they hated what actually happened you know and would condemn it had to partially understand that this was done out of real outrage of what's happening in Indochina mission. And it was just so much. It's certainly a very different question from that there is a very he was in the men's actions. We weren't. It's different then also then too it's less than a

go go commercial in the US because it's just every new action that you know. Consciousness. Where we. Invite. You to. Be only similar situation in terms of M.S. that ever happened in Washington with the 68 riots and even though the conditions were just ridiculous and the confusion the sample itself in the courts we were able to get out faster. She wears them in that situation there's no doubt that the privileges that come along. What's still with us if you continue using it. As much. But they're also you know we're getting less and less. This is the more far out the heavier we get the more seriously taken by the more that that's the case. I think just a little example of that whole same thing of like being able to

understand that we still have an incredible amount of movement and yet we're not always going to have it is what happened with women in Washington because the first well the first day on Monday when I was running with a group of women it was like we were invisible. You know first we got kind of mad you know because this really I mean we've been really out there trying to do stuff you know and they would just run right by I think that any man that had you walking by which we very quickly you know this is a great thing that we could use you know because we were almost invisible and we were able. The whole women's group running together like 15 to 20 women you know and busted and being able to to do a lot of things for two hours. But by Tuesday when we had a group of 40 women go out you know we had a helicopter over us from the time we left the women center. I was like Hey very quickly I understand they were not afraid to beat us you know. But it was a real they are understanding and that's kind of the thing of what's happening to the

whole movement. At the same time I really still think even the second day when they were interesting us that on first glance just looking and seeing a woman in a white woman we still had an urge to move off of you know into be able to get away. You know what. Well I mean I can't give a line that says that this is the weatherman line you know because the minutes are underground. But I think you know

I think I can speak just from my situation of being in Algeria and being with Mary and being with the Panthers there that there's a lot that was right and there's a lot that was wrong in what happened between Eldridge and Larry. You just want to put it to nearing it to those to that. On the one hand the changes that Larry has gone through is the fact it leads to the fact of why he was freed by the Underground and why he was seen as being important. That in effect he had he was a real part of our history. You know in changing thousands and thousands of kids in this country is a beginning step of understanding about the society and about our parents and about relationships. You know what happened to him in jail. And what was further developed the time that he lived with the underground in this country and then

being in Algeria was his realisation that his cult his following alone which just believed in turning on and dropping out was very degenerate. You know was in essence just continuing the society is it as it exists you know and was not in any way that there's no really such thing as internal freedom and if you can't change the system outside you know which is a lot we're leery was that when I was there I was just like after three weeks and I came home I suddenly realized that we had never once talked about taking acid you know which like seems strange and looking back at it because you think you want to relate your troops to him you know and really find out what happens when he trips you know. But our whole mind through this he had this incredible thirst to understand everything that's happened you know in the past 10 years and really put it into some kind of perspective and really. What's so funny.

I mean like you going to if you had the time he and Rosemary were living in this in this hotel in Algiers and you go and I went to their room and it's a totally psychedelic room you know with the incense and the colors and the posters you know and there he and rosemary on the bed reading Kim Il-Sung you know in wanting you to sit down and go over and really talk you know and that's really where they're at. And I think a lot of the condemnation that came out on them by Eldridge was was not understanding that people have learned to respect and respect drugs in understanding the difference and roles that it's played in the black community and in our culture you know that I don't know anyone that's that's moved to the point of of seeing themselves as having a revolutionary consciousness that can just that just goes and trips all the time and understands that if you trip you could have a revolution.

You know people have developed a real respect for for things like acid you know that it's a thing that is not in itself going to you know allows us to allow us to have a revolution. That I don't think was expressed in that statement a lot on the other hand. It comes out of a real intensity a real urgency that the Panthers in Algeria feel because the first thing that hits you when you go to Algeria is how incredibly hard it is to survive in exile. You know that the feeling of being removed in isolated from what's happening in this country is just overwhelming. When we got there in October the last Panther paper they had gotten was in June you know which was because of the mail being ripped off and stuff but just you know saying what's happening. You know we want to be there you know. And a lot of that came out of the whole thing of we must be cold blooded

revolutionaries or whatever the statement was comes out of that you know which is in in a lot of a lot of it's right you know that we do have to have a new seriousness that I think came out in Washington a real seriousness that that you know having a revolution is not a game you know like it's much fun is as people paint the fact of being for example undergrounds country and how great it is that you can live like you want to and walk by the pigs and still like living under a daily tension and you know in my going to get caught today you know that real seriousness is something that is just starting to come out. You know our movement. This is about what you see. Right. Right. Yeah I think.

Right. I think a lot of those people the rock concert were actually in the streets because I don't think that you know there must have been. You. Very sad very people are right. That's when he came on the stage. Looks like there's no. You know there's no doubt that there's tremendous kind of tensions and contradictions and. Shallowness in certain facets of youth culture but there's also no doubt that the fact that we are excessive building a culture that's different that is very much at least in our highest kind of aspirations about it is very much counter to the culture that we come out of in

this country. It's an incredible So a source of strength for us and it's really when I feel that that people who understand themselves to be revolutionaries have to understand a responsibility to change and shape that culture and deal with the sexism and the racism and the looseness and and seriousness of that culture. But there's also that you know in in in in the most raw and unsophisticated terms that culture in bodies all the values that all of us in our you know are just earliest personal kinds of rebellion against our parents in our schools and stuff like that it went through you know I have gone through are going through. And it's. It's you know there's constant problems when you when you're doing organizing or whatever you know any kind of level there's constant danger yet you know the hassle between the mellow heads and the politicos and how you how you have to hide you know the fact that we want to have revolutionary music but also the total freakout that even people who sing songs that are very political and very much about what the struggle is

about do it via Columbia Records and our billionaires you know I mean that's a that's a drag and it's a hassle and a song that has to be worked out but it's existence of US culture in the broad way that it exists and isn't something to despair about so much as something to understand how we can move into it ourselves all be like artists and all the creators of that culture too much and help shape it.