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Message To The People Of Woodstock Nation

Message To The People Of Woodstock Nation image Message To The People Of Woodstock Nation image Message To The People Of Woodstock Nation image Message To The People Of Woodstock Nation image
Parent Issue
Day
4
Month
July
Year
1970
Editorial
OCR Text

"The only way to support a revolution is to make your own." -Abbie Hoffman, WOODSTOCK NATION.

Brothers & Sisters:

It is time for us to realize a number of very important things. We are a people, we recognize each other as brothers and sisters united in a common struggle for freedom, for our survival, and we recognize each other because we share a common culture. We do the same things, we live the same way, we listen to the same music, smoke the same sacraments, we are united by our age, our common values, our common lifestyle. We want the same things-freedom, self-determination, peace, justice and equality for all people. This is not to say there are not differences among us-the beauty of our common culture is that it has room for all our different expressions and manifestations of freedom-but that despite our beautiful differences, despite the beautiful diversity or our culture, we are all united in our desire to be free, to make a better world, and to make that freedom available to all the people in the world.

We are united in our opposition to the war in Vietnam-to all wars- because it is our brothers who are sent to die, because it is our brothers who are sent to kill our Vietnamese brothers and sisters in our name, to keep them from determining their own destiny; we are united in our opposition to racism in Amerika, to the oppression and actual slaughter of our black brothers and sisters in the black colony of the mother country here in Amerika; and we are united in our opposition to the plastic consumer culture which keeps not only our selves and our brothers and sisters oppressed, but which also keeps our mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles oppressed by chaining them to stupid jobs and worthless plastic products, which keeps all people oppressed by eating up all the natural and human resources on the planet and spitting them back in the form of nuclear armaments, pollution, millions of ugly polluting automobiles, ugly plastic THINGS to buy and consume, ugly plastic buildings and housing developments, ugly repressive schools and jails and prisons, a whole ugly plastic death-culture which is set up to perpetuate itself not only in Amerika but throughout the world. We are united in our opposition to these things, but what is more important is that we are united in our POSITIVE commitment to change this obsolete social order and to build a beautiful alternative culture, a whole new social order, which we know will soon replace the Death culture altogether.

Our ranks have been growing and spreading out all over the planet. and especially throughout the mother country, Amerika, and the highly industrial westernized countries of Europe, the USSR, and Japan. Now there are MILLIONS of united in our day-to-day activities, in our common culture, in our common yet diverse expressions of individual freedom. Each day there are more of us, because each day more and more people see and FEEL the hopelessness and futility of trying to live within the confines of the death culture. We can't stand it, more and more of us each day can't STAND it anymore, and we move out of the death culture to build a new life, a new life-style, a new people and a new social order which will be given shape by our common visions of freedom, justice and equality for all people.

There are millions of us, but until now we haven't fully realized our strength because we have most of us been primarily concerned with our INDIVIDUAL freedom, our freedom as individuals in the West, and we haven't been really aware of the need for our freedom AS A PEOPLE. We have given too much attention to our individual selves, which is right on, but we have to go beyond individualism and start thinking about the freedom of ourselves as a people, as a vast nation of free brothers and sisters who unite themselves in a struggle for COLLECTIVE freedom and self-determination. We have let ourselves be separated out from each other by the forces of competition, capitalism and consumption, and we have not realized that we ourselves, as individuals, can only be free when ALL the people are free- and not just all the people of our culture, but all the people in the world. We have to realize that if people are being oppressed in Vietnam, or in the Black colony in Amerika, or if our brothers and sisters somewhere in the youth colony are being oppressed, then we can't possibly be free. If we think we're free while this oppression is going on, then we're just being used as a tool of oppression by the people who are doing the oppressing. Dig it. Eldridge Cleaver put it plainest when he said, you're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution, one or the other, and we have to relate to that. We have to relate to that, and we have to move from there to become the solution itself.

There are millions of us, we are a people, and as we unite we will become a powerful force for liberation of all the people on earth. But we have to get ourselves together. we have to unite or to join together, come together, emerge together as a powerful new political and social force. We are already a powerful cultural force, but it has to be more than that-or our culture won't be able to survive. We have to develop POWER for our people, so we will be able to determine our own national destiny AS A PEOPLE. And in order to do that, we have to build our strength and realize our strength and deal from our strength, and start moving to make our strength felt in the camp of the oppressor, in the camp of the "ownership" clique which controls the mother country, and through it the people of the world.

We have been doing it all wrong. We have been asking and begging the established order for our freedom, and for the freedom of the people everywhere on earth. We have been asking for freedom as a favor from these people and we have failed to realize that freedom is won by the people through struggle, it is not bestowed on anyone a favor.

We have been asking and pleading and begging long enough, we have marched and demonstrated and chanted and prayed and gone to jail, but things have just gotten worse instead of better. The politicians of the established order don't listen, they just spout off more and more sadistic invective- they call us bums, they call us ideological criminals who should all be in the penitentiary like I am, they tell us when their troops massacre our brothers and sisters that we asked for it, they call for more repression and more subjection to the whims, they spread vicious lies about us through the mass media, they do everything but listen to what we are trying to tell them, to save them as well as ourselves. Or if they listen, if they listen to us they just tell us that we have to work 'through the system', that we have to cut off our hair and wear dogcollars and monkey suits and go out and try to get people to vote for impotent creeps like Eugene McCarthy or opportunistic "peace" manipulators like Sam Brown, people who are committed to the death culture but just want the man in the driver's seat. And we can't go for that, because we know that the whole death culture has to be abolished, that the whole consumer/war economy has to be demolished, that a whole new social order has to be built up based on the needs of the people, based on all power to the people, and not all power to the "owners". We know what has to be done, and we can't settle for any less. And we have to realize that we are not going to get what we have to have- our freedom, the freedom of our people and of all peoples of the earth-we are not going to get our freedom by begging our oppressors for it. They are not listening to us, and as long as we keep begging them for things they are going to keep treating us like beggars, throwing us a few scraps once in a while and laughing at us like they do for being so pathetic. If we are good,  they tell us we might get to vote one day, those of us who are over 18, we might get a so-called voice in the bourgeois political system-although we know that the people who vote NOW don't have any "voice" in the way things are run. If we are good we might get to have our sacrament legalized, or at least made less ''illegal" so we don't have to go to prison for 9 1/2-10 years for getting high. If we're good we cut our hair and don't get out of line we might get to see the war in Asia end in five or ten years, we might get to see the United States troops-our brothers-reduced to only 300,000 men in combat a year from now. That's what they tell us when we say we want the war ended, and the repression and terror stopped, and power put in the hands of the people so we can determine our own destinies. And we will only get those things that they offer us IF we keep begging.

We have to realize that we have to change the terms of the so-called dialogue we are trying to carry on with the established authorities. As long as we put ourselves in the position of beggars, we will be treated as beggars. As long as we continue to address ourselves as supplicants to the almighty power structure which rules Amerika, we will be treated as lepers and beggars and will be spat upon and reviled more than we will be satisfied. As long as we keep asking the authorities just to give peace a chance, just to let it be, just to please give us what we want, we will be entirely at their mercy. And it should be apparent to us by now that mercy is one thing they have very little of. Mercy and justice.

There is a saying of Huey R. Newton's that I keep repeating, but I will repeat it once more here because it very important for all of us to understand these words of wisdom laid out by the Minister of Defense. Huey said, "Power is the ability to DEFINE phenomena, and make them act in the desired manner." Now I always emphasize that one word, DEFINE, because that is the key to power. We will not have any power for our people and our culture until we start to define things for ourselves, in our own terms and put the dialogue in our own language, with our own definitions foremost in our rap. Because when the established order says "peace", they mean only that no shots are fired, that the forces of imperialism, or international "law and order", are in control and there is no open threat to their rule. When then say "freedom," they mean the freedom for a tiny minority group of "owners" to exploit and manipulate the masses of the people in furthering the interests of the "ownership" clique. When they say "justice" they mean "just-us", when they say "law and order" they mean keeping the people in line through massive police repression and murder and, failing that, through kangaroo court "trials" and ridiculous prison sentences from which all appeals are denied and appeal bonds are not allowed. When they talk about "equality" they mean that people are permitted equal access to consumer products if they can get the money to buy things with, or at best they mean that all people are equally able to be enslaved in the factories and armies and offices and schools and jails under the control of the "ownership" gang. And when they say "culture", they mean honkie operas and phony books and films and weird museums and low-energy death concerts, they mean debutante parties and country-club consciousness and the Daughters of the Amerikan Revolution, who actually represent the purest form of COUNTER-revolution, and the cosmetics counter at that.

But we can't accept these definitions, because this isn't what we mean when we talk about peace and freedom and equality and justice and the people's culture. When we say peace we mean PEACE, people being at peace themselves and with each other, recognizing the humanity of all people and the sovereignty of all peoples and the need for all people to determine their own destiny without fear of military terrorism and warfare and harsh economic reprisals directed against them. When we say freedom we mean again, the freedom for all people to determine their own highest destinies in peace. We mean the freedom of all peoples to develop themselves and their cultures along the highest and most human lines possible, so that each person on earth will be able to reap the fruits of his or her own labor. We mean the free exchange of energies and materials, free access to all information media and to all technology for all the people, a free educational system that will teach each man, woman and child on earth exactly what each needs to know to survive and grow into his or her full human potential. We mean free structure, free land and buildings for all people to use in their own best interests and in the interests of the people as a whole. We mean freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, freedom from unjust military conscription (impressment for other purposes than defending the people's homeland from invasion), freedom for all political prisoners (and under the present system ALL prisoners are political prisoners, since their crimes derive from the oppressive economic conditions in Amerika, and their punishments from the oppressive police, courts and corrections departments of the various states and the federal government). To sum up, we mean free land, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free music, free medical care, free education, free media, free technology, free time and space, everything free for every body!

What is beautiful about right now is that this kind of freedom is now available for all people on earth-but the people will not have this freedom UNTIL we wrest control of the world's resources and materials and means of production from the hands of the (From page 7) "ownership" clique, until we dismantle the consumer war economy and establish the free economic (something) all needs until we create and nurture and use the political power we need to bring these changes about. And the only way we can do that is by starting from where we are right now and moving for change clearly and directly. And the first thing, the first step to power the people, is to start re-defining in our own (something) terms which will bring about the desired result-Freedom.

Our (something) so far mostly (something) AGAINST the established order-we have accepted its definition of reality for (something) and (something) objected by moving to challenge its control of reality but only in its own terms. In other words, we have been fighting on the enemy's seal, we have let the established authority, yet the terms of the struggle, and have responded to its (something) by REACTING against it. It is now time for us to change the whole mode of engagement and bring the battle to our territory, time to reject the terms of the established power completely and to advance our terms so we will be able to determine the theme of the struggle. For a new way of defining things will we be able to create real people's power. Only by defining the terms of our struggle will we be able to fight our way to ory on our own territory. As long as we permit the established authority to define the struggle for us, we also permit that authority to define the outcome. It's like if somebody asked the wrong question, you can't give him the right answer, you know what I mean? The question determines the answer. The correct statement of a problem CONTAINS the solution to the problem. That's what Huey was talking out when said that "power is the ability to DEFINE phenomena [things] things and make them act on the desired manner"; that's what he meant and we have to be clear on that.

We know what we want, but (something) we hear it. (The next part of the paragraph is unreadable).  consistently misrepresented (something) movement, our culture and our people not only to the masses of the people (something) the mother country, but also own people. We don't know who we are because we get our information on ourselves from the pig. We are unsure of ourselves, we are unsure of our numbers, we are unsure of our strength, and we are unsure because we are subjected to countless lies about ourselves and our people in the mass media, which are precisely controlled by the established order. And if you can't relate to that, just take a look at the Boards of Directors for CBS, NBC, ABC, the newspaper trusts, and will see that these few interlocking people, who is also common members of a cultural group, not only the mass media but their in-laws and classmates and cronies, they also control (something) of power (something) country, the government, the CIA, the schools, colleges and universities, the iRrial corporations like GM, Ford, Chrysler, ITT, Standard Oil, United Fruit,

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We are forced to accept the ugly death culture of the mother country under pain of imprisonment or death; if we try to say anything about it, how rotten it is, we are beaten or arrested and jailed by the mother country's troops. Or else we getaway, but we still have to worry about getting beat up or arrested or locked up, because we know that is what's happening to our brothers and sisters, and we're bound to be next. Or we might get shot down for trying to demonstrate the death culture, we've seen our brothers and sisters gunned down for being on campus, walking across the campus to class or carrying a sign saying end the war in Cambodia, or for calling the troops names fitting their functions. Some of us were carrying and throwing rocks maybe, but not the ones who got shot down. They weren't doing anything. Dig it. And if we try to build an alternative to the death culture, if we try to create a new social and cultural expression of our visions and feeling it's even worse.

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We have had advanced "educational" opportunities and know what that means, we have had material possessions and products (or our parents have had them, and pressed them on using what we had what the mother country politicians call "freedom" and we know how phony that whole thing is too. We had it, and we've rejected it, and we will keep on rejecting it until all the people can have the same advantages that we have, and until the death culture is junked and the life culture is created to take its place. Because we know, finally, we know that no matter what, these "owners" and parents and government officials say, we are not free, and we will not be free, until ALL the people are free, and people will not be free, and people will not be free until they enjoy all the conditions of freedom.

We are a people, we are a nation, and we are still repressed but we have started to move for our freedom, we have started to move for self determination, we have taken up the struggle for national liberation of our people, of the Youth Nation, and we are prepared to take the station of a free and independent nation among the powers of the earth. We are making our revolution now, and we know that as Che said, "Every people that frees itself is a step won in the battle for the freedom of all people". We are people of the Youth Nation, and our people are the youth of the industrial western world, and in the wider sense our people are finally, all the people on earth. We will contribute to the international liberation struggle by coming out for- and winning- the liberation of our own Nation.

There is another distinctive characteristic of our Nation, and that is that the mother country depends upon our subservience much more than it depends on the subservience of any other colonized people. We are the expected heirs and successors of the mother country "ownership" class, and we are the heirs and successors of the mother country's working and management class. If the mother country's social/economic order is to survive, we have to be forced or persuaded to step into the shoes of our fathers and mothers. There are no replacements for us. If we refuse to toe the line, if we refuse to step into the roles we are expected to play in the mother country system, then that system must collapse. Check it out. It will collapse without us. That is why our secession is so important, above and beyond the fact that we must have our freedom because we are indispensable to the economy of the mother country, we are indispensable, they have to have us as workers and as consumers. If they don't have us, their system crumbles. No other colony had enjoyed this great distinction in the contemporary form of economic imperialism which is for the survival of international capitalism, all colonial peoples are necessary as MARKETS-not as peoples with their own beautifully unique cultures and civilizations-for the consumer economy. The "owners" can't afford to let peoples who reject consumerism decide and determine their own destinies, since all peoples will decide to follow the highest and most beautiful path when they have the free choice to do so and consumerism is just the opposite of that. Consumerism is ugly and degrading. and it has been forced on us and on other peoples all around the World- we have not have a chance to decide whether we want to live as consumers or not, and we will not have that choice until we liberate ourselves from the grip of the consumer death culture. And they will fight relentlessly to keep that grip on the people, but the people will finally emerge victorious, just as the Vietnamese people are winning their victory against the same death-culture. 

We have to realize that the war is being carried on with such tenacity by the death merchants against the heroic Vietnamese people  because the deaths merchants know that Vietnam and its people will not choose the consumer culture for themselves unless they are forced to. Southeast Asia is seen by the death merchants as the next big target area for the consumer society-imperialism has to keep expanding its markets in order to survive, that is an iron law of economics -and if the Vietnamese people are allowed to reject the capitalist economic system and the consumer-death culture it has spawned and upon which it depends now totally, their example will be followed by all the people of Asia, and all colonized people of the earth.

Our colony, our rising youth Nation, was the first testing ground for all-out consumerism, and we have begun to reject and to destroy the consumer culture. Our culture, in its purest and highest manifestations, is an ANTI-CONSUMER culture first of all. We don't want to sit back and consume all the junk we are supposed to take in. We know that our lives are more important, that our energies are deserving of higher and more beautiful possibilities than consumerism. We want to take part in the world we live in, we want to INVOLVE ourselves in our world and shape it along the high-energy lines of our people's revolutionary culture-creative, beautiful, high-charged lines. We want our world to be based on natural laws, nor on the plastic principle. Plastic is death. Consumerism is death. We have created a LIFE culture, a high-energy anti-plastic culture which can only destroy the death culture and drive it to the death it craves. WE want to see the death culture ITSELF. Then and only will it be unable to force other peoples around the world to accept its twisted version of reality, its phony consumerism, its perverted world-view, in the interest of more profits for the (See page 28 Sinclair From page 7) Amerikan "ownership" class.

So we will certainly strike a killer blow for the freedom of all the peoples of earth when we win our liberation from the death culture. Our struggle is their struggle- their struggle is our struggle- we are all one people- we are all one humanity. And as Fidel put it, "This great humanity has said: ENOUGH! And has started to move forward." Just as we draw inspiration from the struggle of the Cuban peoples, just as we draw inspiration from the heroic struggle of the black people and other oppressed colonial peoples within the mother country of America, just as we draw inspiration from the struggles of all peoples around the world fighting for their liberation, so do these peoples draw inspiration from us. We have to remember that, because some of us have had the tendency in the past to downgrade and depreciate our own liberation struggle, to say that our revolution is not important, to say that our liberation struggle must be subordinated to the struggles of other peoples who are more materially oppressed than we are. And this is a mistake. It is a mistake and we have to realize that it is a mistake, that our struggle is as important as any other people's struggle, if not more important, simply because we are within the belly of the beast itself, and if we break free then the beast collapses and dies.

The thing we have to remember is that [1] the primary struggle in the world is the struggle between THE PEOPLE AS A WHOLE-all the masses of peoples in the world- and the oppressive, exploitative, reactionary "ownership" class of people, which is a tiny, tiny minority compared to the masses of people who don't own the means of production in the world. And [2] that all liberation struggles being carried out by national peoples within the broad category of THE PEOPLE are equally important, and they support each other equally. As Abbie Hoffman has written, and this is what I quoted to begin this message to you, "The only way to support a revolution is to make your own." And Che Guevara, because I know some of us don't relate to our own brothers from our own colony. Che Guevara said essentially the same thing when he said, "To wish the victims (of imperialism) success is not enough, the thing is to share their fate, to join them in death or victory." And I don't think I have to remind you that I'm talking about the people's VICTORY here, not our death. We will emerge from this struggle victorious, free at last, and not just us, not just the people of the youth Nation, but all the people in the world. Right on!

Now I hope these things are clear: that we are a people, that we are an oppressed colonial people, and that we are moving now to make our struggle a NATIONAL struggle, a struggle for national liberation for our youth colony. WE ARE Á NATION, we have declared ourselves, and we must move to establish ourselves as a separate Nation among the peoples of the earth. We can do this, we can DO this, it is important for all of us to realize that it is certainly possible for us to do this. Our struggle from now on out must be a struggle of national liberation for the youth colony, and it must be a political struggle as well as a cultural struggle, and it will also have to take on some forms of the military struggle as well. But the cultural struggle and the political struggle must be first, primary, because as far as we are concerned that is the only thing we are interested in. And the cultural revolution is the political revolution finally, in its highest form, the cultural revolution IS the political revolution, and the political revolution IS the cultural revolution. There is no separation. So I will say that the political struggle here, but we have to remember that they are the same thing, they are not separate.

What we want is peace and freedom, peace and freedom, peace and freedom. We don't want war. We want peace, we want freedom, and we have to remember what Malcolm said, we can't have peace until we have freedom, there can't be peace until all the peoples of the earth have their freedom, to determine their own destinies in peace. We want to determine our own destiny as a people, we want to build the alternative culture, the new order, the New World of our holy dreams and visions. This is what we want. We don't want war, we HATE war, we want to eliminate all wars, but on the other hand we know that liberation is not possible without struggle. We don't want war, but we are aware that we have to deal with war, and we can't be afraid of war. We can't be afraid to fight for our freedom, because if we don't fight for it we won't get it. We have a slogan which expresses this reality, it says, "IF YOU WANT TO GET HIGH, YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO FIGHT", because the people who are in power now will not permit colonials to just go ahead and do what they want to do. They will fight to retain their power, we have to expect that and prepare for it, we have to realize that they will not step off the stage of history of their own accord. They just won't. They never have in history, and they aren't about to start now. So we have to relate to that.

We have to make it clear to all the peoples of the world that if there is war in the mother country, it will be at the instigation of the established order. It will be THEIR war against the revolutionary people of the youth colony, and we will defend ourselves, and we will strike out for our liberation by any means necessary, even if it means war. We are ready for it, because we know that we have to fight for our freedom, it will not be given to us as a favor. We might wish that they will just give peace a chance, but if you look at it objectively, if you look at history, if you look at Vietnam right now, and South America, and Africa, and the oppressed colonics within the mother country of Amerika, you will see that they are not going to give peace a chance at all. They are not going to do it. So we have to prepare for the other thing, we have to prepare to fight for our freedom, and we will have peace when we achieve our freedom- not before.

As far as I am concerned, as far as I can see right now, that war against the youth colony has already started. It has already started. And we have to realize something else in this connection, that war is not like they show it on tv, or in the movies, or in the comic books. It's not a sudden thing. It doesn't take place overnight, or all at once. It takes place over a period of years, and most of the time the people who are at war don't even realize that it's happening until the action comes within their specific territory. Battles are fought all over, one at a rime, and there are lulls and quiet periods in between. It's not an apocalyptic thing like we tend to think it is. Remember that, because people will try to tell you that there is no war going on here because they don't see any fighting, or because the armed battles aren't continuous, or something like that. But that's not the point. The point is that war is a protracted struggle, which takes place over a period of years usually, and is made up of a lot of individual battles, a lot of individual victories and defeats for both sides, and the outcome is usually decided not on the battlefields but politically, at the conference tables. Remember that. Because war is just an extension of politics, it is not a separate thing- As Chairman Mao teaches us, "war is politics with bloodshed; politics is war without bloodshed." They are not two different things.

And another thing along this same line is that we have to realize very clearly that the Revolution is more than just an apocalyptic armed struggle which comes in a big flash, is fought out and decided on the spot. The Revolution is the entire scope of the people's efforts to achieve self-determination; armed struggle is just a tool of the revolutionary people. It is a tool, and it should be picked up and used when it fits the specific task to be undertaken, and then it should be put down and replaced in the people's hands by other tools of liberation: revolutionary technology. Please remember that. The Revolution is the whole scope of the people's efforts to achieve self-determination-no less. And the military struggle, when it occurs, is merely a small part of the Revolution. Merely a tiny part, but important as all parts in a whole are, or else there is no whole. So it can't be ignored, it can't be down-graded, but on the other hand it can't be blown up all out of proportion as we tend to do. Can you dig that? And too, we have those notions of the Revolution as simply an armed struggle because the people who control the information we get don't want us to know that the Revolution means more than just a fight. They don't want us to know that, because if they can keep us at that puny level of consciousness they can control us. They can defeat us in an armed struggle plain and simple, but they can't defeat the people's Revolution in which armed struggle is only an integral part of the whole, is only the people's politics extended one more decisive step.

Now what I was trying to say, that the war is on right now m the mother country, and it is a war directed against the people of the youth colony. We have already had casualties, fatalities, in that war. Maybe the first fatality was Dean Johnson, who was murdered in the streets of Chicago by mother country troops in 1968, when he carne to Chicago to take part in the Festival of Life. Dean Johnson was a fatality of our nation. And James Rector was a fatality, James Rector who was shot down in cold blood by the mother country forces in Berkeley, where he took part in the movement to build a beautiful People's Park. He was murdered in this war. He is a casualty, one of our war heroes. And the latest casualties are the two brothers and two sisters who were shot down, who were massacred by mother country troops at Kent State University for protesting the war in Cambodia, or for walking across campus on their way to class. And the two brothers who were murdered by mother country troops at Jackson State University, in Mississippi, they are casualties in our war or in the war of the black colony for its liberation. I don't know if their allegiance was to the black colony or to the youth colony-I don't know if their culture was black culture or youth culture- but I do know that they were our brothers, and they were murdered by the same power that struck down our brothers and sisters at Kent State.

There have been these casualties, and more, and there will be a lot more casualties before we win our victory over the oppressor. The people will have a lot more heroes before the war is over. We can't pretend otherwise. Because war involves bloodshed by definition- "war is politics with bloodshed"- and you don't have war without people being killed. But the important thing is that the people will win their struggle against the oppressor, and we will win our struggle because many of our brothers and sisters will have given their lives for their people, to advance the people's cause, and to bring about the people's liberation. They are going to kill us, and we are going to have to inflict some heavy casualties ourselves, but it can't happen any other way. It can't happen any other way. The people win their freedom through struggle. Some of us will die, but the people as a whole will win in the end. And those who die will be the people's everlasting heroes, just as James Rector and Dean Johnson and the brothers and sisters at Kent State and Jackson State and Augusta are our heroes now. Long live their memory in the hearts of the people!

NEXT ISSUE: BUILDING THE NATION.

-John Sinclair, Chairman, White Panther Party