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Promoting the. Decline
of the Rising State:
Documents of Resistance and Renewal from
the Alternative Community: Buffalo, 1965-76
by Elwin H. Powell
Sidney Willhelm is right about the "Rise of State
Rule". Capital is receding to a secondary role as the State assumes
command of contemporary society. Social control, not production, is
the main aim of this statist system. In the 1920s President Coolidge
could say, "the business of America is business." Today, the
business of America is war.
As
an institution, the State has the task of preserving peace by waging
war. Confronted by the dual threat of invasion and insurrection, the
State deploys military force to ward off external attack, uses police
power to suppress rebellion.1 But coercion alone is never enough to
maintain order. To be effective the State's violence must be legitimated
by value-consensus, naked power turned into authority. Like other
institutions the State is an embodiment of an Idea shared by a collectivity
of people. "What makes governments (States) exist?" asks Alexander
Berkman:
The armies and navies? Yes, but only apparently so.
What supports the armies and navies? It is the belief of the people,
of the masses that government is necessary; it is the generally accepted
idea of the need of government. That is the real and solid foundation
of the State. Take that idea or belief away and no government could
last another day.2
Why then do people feel a need for government, what
function does the State perform? People turn to the State because it
provides protection. Historically speaking, the social unit which affords
security becomes the political State. For instance, as the Roman empire
crumbled (circa 3rd to 6th century A.D.) uprooted people began to cluster
around the country houses (villas) of wealthy Romans; there they found
a shield from marauding bands of Roman soldiers.' Eventually the villa
became the castle, the nucleus of feudal society. Around the 11th century
the walled town reappeared as an urban commune, a virtual city-state.
A liberated zone, the walled city offered protection from both barons
and bandits. From the 14th to 18th century castle and town give way
to the territorial State.
On the circumference of the territory is a ring of fortresses: beyond
the border rages the Hobbesian war of each against all but within this
defended space, peace prevails.' Never secure, always anticipating war,
each State strives for greater sufficiency by enlarging the area under
its control: thus the inevitable clash of arms. The nation-states
of the 19th century in pursuit of total security produced the disastrous
wars of the 20th century and finally a suicidal military technology
which, renders obsolete traditional defense structures, by-passes
the protective shell of the state. Paradoxically utmost strength now
coincides in the same unit with utmost vulnerability, absolute power
with utter impotence . . . nothing short of global rule can satisfy
the security interest of any one power . . . each superpower's logical
objective is the destruction of the other. But this is not practical
since thermonuclear warfare would involve one's own destruction, the
means defeat the end. If this is so, then the short term objective of
states must surely be mutual accommodation . . . Now that destruction
threatens everybody, the common interest of all mankind is in sheer
survival.'
By
the mid 1950s others sensed what John Herz so well articulates: arms
are not protective but self-threatening.
With nuclear testing the State poisoned its own people as well as
the 'enemy'. The empirical evidence was indisputable and in 1959 Linus
Pauling collected signatures of 1500 scientists calling for a ban on
the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear bombs. Thus the Peace Movement
was born.
The
State's effort to suppress the Peace Movement facilitated its growth.
Pauling was attacked as a subversive: the FBI announced ominously that
it was investigating to determine whether members of the Communist Party
had signed or helped circulate Pauling's petition. Petition-signing
in the 1950s was dangerous business, enough to cost the security clearance
of a research worker - but by 1963 a million people had petitioned
for a test-ban. Though harassed by Senator Thomas Dodd's Internal
Security Committee, threatened wit1f legal action, smeared as a "Stalinist",
purged from the board of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, Pauling
persisted in his one-man crusade to awaken the public to the dangers
of the arms race. Along with other Nobel Prize winners Pauling was invited
to dine with President and Mrs. Kennedy in 196 1. Before dining with
the dignitaries, Pauling picketed the White House, carrying a huge sign
calling for a test ban - a shocking breach of social custom in
1961 when proper people did not picket, parade or demonstrate. Passed
by the Senate and signed by the President in July 1963, the test-ban
treaty was the first official act of cooperation between the American
and Russian government since 1945. The treaty symbolized an attenuation
of the Cold War, and there are those who believe John Kennedy wrote
his death warrant with it.
Gradually
people were moving out of their private pigeon-holes into public
space, into the streets. A trickle of people opposing war in the 1950s
would become a flood in the '60s. As people stood up and said No! to
the State an alternative community called the Movement emerged. A support
system and a counter-culture, the Movement legitimated defection
from the dominant society, the Establishment. Through antiwar protest
people discovered each other, developed a new solidarity whence came
a new consciousness. Peace demonstrations changed the demonstrators,
if not always the decision makers who were watching them. And the demonstrations
of the decade are a barometer of a changing socio-political climate.
Washington as the prime symbol and locus of State authority drew the
monster demonstrations. But even a provincial city like Buffalo, typical
of the vast urban hinterland of this country, saw anti-war activity
of a magnitude not known for half a century. Consider the simple statistics
of Table 1:
TABLE I
Anti-War
Demonstrations: 1959-1969
Date; Theme; Number
| Buffalo, N.Y. |
| May, 1959 Test
Ban 25' |
| May, 1965 Stop
War, Vietnam 85** |
| Oct. 15, 1969 Stop
War, Vietnam 5,000 |
| Washington, D.C. |
| April, 1965 SDS,
March on the Capitol 2,000
to |
| Nov. 15, 1969 Moratorium Day 1,000,000 |
| ** My count |
| * FBI count |
An
Intelligence Agency would see in the statistics a rising tide of war-resistance.
Not absolute but relative numbers are important: no antiwar activity
in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, 1920s, except for small flares of pacifist
agitation.' Only the 1910-20 decade would show mass protest comparable
to the 1960s. This hypothetical Agency would also notice qualitative
changes: in the 1950s the potential protester could be silenced by the
insinuation that the FBI was watching. But by 1970 surveillance by the
FBI was regarded as a sign of success - and a source of amusement.
(Radical newspapers delighted in publishing photographs of agents perched
in trees photographing demonstrators).
During
the 1960s the Movement was undermining the legitimacy of the State.
Vast numbers experienced the State not as a Protector but as an Enemy:
the state sent young men to kill and die in Asia, jailed them for possessing
a harmless vegetable, billy-clubbed them for wearing long hair.
The young discovered the lie of the State in the innocent pastime of
smoking marijuana: if authorities lied about the danger of pot perhaps
patriotism too was a fraud? (Buffalo police busted people for possessing
cigarette papers made in the form of an American flag, but that came
too late to restore the honor of the State). And the seminal lie of
the decade - that we were protecting democracy in South East Asia
- was documented with Dan Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers
in June, 1971. In his Introduction to the Pentagon Papers, Senator Mike
Gravel quotes H. G. Wells:
The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in
armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly
open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that
standard, it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,'
and its days are numbered .7
In
bearing witness to the truth, the Movement compelled the State to reveal
its lie. Complex, variegated, international in scope, the Movement has
changed the spirit and even the structure of this country: eventually
it brought an end to the draft and the war in Vietnam, it exposed the
emerging police state, perhaps in time to avert '1984. Mitchell Goodman
writes of the Movement as the "Beginning of a Long Revolution".
Essentially the contest is between State and Community, an ongoing struggle,
an evolution which can be seen in the four portraits of resistance from
the city of Buffalo between 1965 and 1972. The first case involved the
surveillance and harassment of a student leader, Rich Salter, one of
the creators of Catalyst, who has continued to build the revolution
in Canada after being driven from this country by the secret police.
Next we deal with the epic struggle of Martin Sostre, a black bookseller
who was framed, jailed, tortured for nearly nine years - and prevailed.
Then we deal with the collective portrait of the Buffalo-9, a
concerted effort of war-resistance, the symbol and nucleus of
two years of defiance of State authority. And then the case of the BUFFALO,
a pioneer effort in anarcho-pacifism, which undermines the State
by the non-violent liberation of documents. Finally we consider
"the reprieve from history" - from fascism - which
these and other opponents of the State have won for us, temporarily.
C. The Buffalo-9 ... Organizing Resistance to
State Authority (1970)
Strange
alliances were forming in the mid-60s. After issuing a leaflet
calling for "Revolutionary Reform", an outlaw motorcycle gang,
The Road Vultures, held a "Psychedelic Summit Conference"
with U.B. intellectuals, proclaimed solidarity, announced their commitment
to the Supreme Value of Love, and declared war on the State in September,
1966.1' Students were picketing for wildcat steel strikers at the Bethlehem
plant . . . Street blacks from the ghetto were coming to the campus,
educating white radicals. 1966 saw sit-ins against the war and
the draft on campus; SDS was building anti-draft unions throughout
the country. In the summer of 1967 an estimated 30,000 students were
working against the war in over 700 cities. On the UB campus in 1967-68
SDS meetings normally drew 100 to 300 people. And in 1968 liberals were
pouring into the streets to work for Gene McCarthy.
In
Buffalo, summer 1968 was a joyously ominous one. People were in the
streets and actually talking to each other. The democratic convention
had radicalized the McCarthy liberals. New Parties, organizations were
emerging. There was a Peace and Freedom Party, overlapping with a small
IWW chapter; there was YAWF and a flourishing SDS chapter, plus a strong
Draft Resistance Union, Bruce Kline and Bruce Beyer took sanctuary in
the Unitarian Church at Elmwood and Ferry. During the following 12 days
several hundred people gathered around the church, talking, educating
themselves, holding workshops, singing (Judy Collins appeared twice).
But mainly people were talking. Elmwood is one of the few streets in
Buffalo with a heavy walking traffic, and even a-political people
were drawn into the church grounds and involved in the Vietnam dialogue.
A virtual Wallacite, Ray Malek, came to jeer and left a member of SDS.
Old and young, black and white, mingled. Right wing pickets advertised
the sanctuary with signs: "Napalm Hanoi" . . . and "Keep
Marx out of Church". Concealed on the third floor across the street
cameramen from the FBI filmed the whole proceeding.
Had
the State ignored it, the sanctuary would have withered away in boredom,
September cold would soon drive the people from the church yard. Why
not let the two draft-resistors rot? Or arrest them on some pretext
after the crowds had melted away? But no; that solution was too simple.
Instead of patiently waiting, federal marshalls with chains stormed
the sanctuary on August 19. They violently arrested Beyer and Kline
and seven others who just happened to be local radical leaders: Jerry
Gross of YAWF; Karl Kronenberg of Peace and Freedom Party-, Bill
Berry who had recently burned his draft card in Boston; Ray Malek, the
new recruit to SDS.
Thus
the Buffalo-9 was born out of a common police attack: that alone
unified these disparate elements. These people had apparently been targeted
for arrest before the marshalls invaded the sanctuary. For two years
the case of the Buffalo-9 would be a cause celebre and an integrating symbol
of the local resistance movement.
Making
a political trial out of their case, the Buffalo 9 took the offensive
in court. They tried to put the government on trial, hoped to make the
community of Buffalo and ultimately the court speak out on an already
absurd, immoral, illegal war. The Nine were first tried in February,
1969 and then re-tried the following October. On March 21, 1969
the principal figure in the Buffalo-9, Bruce Beyer, was sentenced
to 3 years for "assaulting a federal officer" not of course
for refusing to answer or honor a-draft-board summons. At
his sentencing Beyer said prophetically to Federal Judge John Curtin:
"There are going to be more people like me standing
be
fore you - and I can only draw the analogy between
this situation and the German courts of World War 11, who were sentencing
pickpockets while genocide was being committed against 8 million Jews"
(UB: Spectrum, March 21, 1969).
After
Beyer's sentencing, 400 supporters carrying signs and banners marched
to Lafayette Square, burned an effigy of the judge. New arrests were
made, two of whom were to become leaders in the 1970 UB strike. On campus,
the Defense Departments Project Thernis was attacked in reprisal for
Beyer's sentence. (Some $2,000 damage was done to a Thernis tool shed.).
Several hundred students occupied Hayes Hall, renamed it Beyer Hall,
flew the Black Flag of Anarchy from the belfry. A brilliant, unsigned
Spectrum editorial of March 21, 1969 tells the tale:
Ring Dem Bells
"The
Butler bells, dangling in the pinnacle atop "Beyer Hall",
rang all night Wednesday. 150 helmeted Buffalo blueshirts silenced them
Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon the bells - donated ironically
enough by the owner of the Buffalo Evening News and WBEN - began
ringing again. The clock remained stuck at twelve, its bells ringing
uncontrollably, unable to move its hands, not knowing whether it was
noon or midnight, darkness or day.
That's
how we feel, like that big weatherbeaten clockface, looking with that
same blank inscrutability in all four directions.
The
cops finally came. Didn't prove too much. We knew that if we pushed
hard enough, the blueshirts would eventually appear. The response to
the 'demands' never came. We knew it most likely never could.
Actions
speak louder than words: the destruction of Themis; the smashing of
a window; a building renamed; panic in a crowded room; the block long
line of police; the police escort of a president; the issuance of a
court order.
The
revolution has still not come; we realize now that it is something which
has been happening and will continue to happen; it was felt before it
was thought.
Two
days' activity has not polarized people; it has rather brought closer
to the surface the polarities within us and among us.
We
must accept' the fact that order is a thing of the past, that stability
is an obscenity.
Braking
actions can only be viewed by a movement as repressive, and it is therefore
not surprising that liberals end up using repressive mechanisms to "slow
things down a little". Wednesday's lesson, however, is that repression
actually functions as an accelerating, rather than a decelerating force.
So
the pig~ have come and gone - perhaps to return another day.
It's
not a stable place they have left. Neither is it particularly promising,
except that it is certainly active. We must embrace this energy and
realize its exciting potential for within it les our only hope.
Before, as a friend once said, it makes pigs of all 67 us."
No
longer the 'play life' of the class room. For choosing to defy, the
authority of the State these people, the principal actors in the case
of the Buffalo-9, would face jail, exile, even the threat of death.
Two months later Bobby Lee would be wounded when the police killed Fred
Hampton in Chicago. Ray Malek and Bill Yates would do three years in
federal prison, another Brother would do a month in Attica, Bruce Beyer
would do years in exile in Sweden and Canada. All would be harassed
and hounded by the police. One Buffalo-9 defendant, Karl Kronenberg,
was arrested and the police carved a peace symbol on his stomach, or
chest (or so my notes read; I have not verified the story).
Extraordinary
time, October, 1969. My notes read:
Oct.
15. Incredible day. 9:15 cycled to school, to Project Themis adjacent
to Capen Hall, Medical school building. SDS people had asked me to talk.
Fred Shell had already spoken. I climbed up on a woodpile and took the
bullhorn, nervous, not like a lecture hall before captive students.
Tried to say that University and Thernis directors had committed violence
to truth last year . . . told us the project had nothing to do with
war then Gabriel Kolko revealed that they justified themselves to the
House Appropriations Committee on grounds that the project was militarily
useful . . . this was a greater violence than people tearing down a
shed last year at the project. But be grateful to Thernis as a concretization
of the military-industrial complex, let this pile of stone stand
as a monument to official stupidity, a reminder of the violence of the
State which would someday be changed by the People. But the next speaker
thought Thernis should be blown up like the statue of the cop in Haymarket
Square. This young guy from Chicago tells of being kicked in the balls
by the pigs in Chicago and concludes with the slogan, "The only
direction is insurrection; The only solution is revolution. "
Then
to town at noon. Niagara Square is full of people . . . 5,000 or so,
a sea of Red flags. The Red flag had even flown briefly from the top
of city hall. We march, circling the Courthouse and then the old Federal
building, the Post office. I run into my lawyer, a liberal Republican,
establishment type. What did he think? Extraordinary. What would he
estimate the crowd? 5,000. Would it do any good, I asked. It was bound
to, he said.
Student-friend
tells me at lunch that the "cadres" are ready to move this
afternoon, to be on campus around 5. Had no idea what he meant.
I
go to Norton Hall around 3. Notice a throng at TV set, then shouts,
we won, we won. I said to Sid Willhelm, "My God the Viet Cong won
the war." But it turns out that it was the Mets winning the World
Series.
To
movies in the Fillmore room. The radicals are showing films made by
the ROTC . . . 82 per cent of officers in services are ROTC grads; U.S.
Armed Forces can't survive without ROTC. Audience cheers. Another film
on Vietnam. but I am afraid I slept through it.
Then
an SDS leader is talking of love and honesty and how now he is forced
to act, that they were going to smash ROTC, so about 100 of them start
for the ROTC office in Clark Gym, a block away, across campus. Sid and
I stroll out the north door of Norton; no hurry as we only expected
more speeches. When we reach the quadrangle in front of Norton we see
a puff of black smoke. Young guy in the quad reading a book looks up
and says, "Oh, wow, they're burning ROTC. Incredible . . . and
then returns to his book. Sid and I walk over to the ROTC, watch campus
cops put out the remains of the fire. ROTC files had been taken out
of the building and set afire. Looked like secondary file - only
printed matter, brochures, etc. I notice a half burned copy of Ramparts
magazine. Makes you wonder . . .
Around
8 this evening we go to Delaware Park . . . truly beautiful, inspiring
experience. Candies, soft singing, warm feeling, solidarity. Ray Malek
made a good speech about how he had gotten involved, had no politics
before the Buffalo-9. Then the leader of the Grape Boycott. And
a guy from Revolutionary Youth Movement, praising ROTC burnings. Then
a campus SDS leader with the same rap. Apparently they hadn't wanted
him to speak but he quietly took the mike anyway.
Then
a march down Lincoln Parkway to Delaware to Ferry to the Unitarian Church.
In-the windows of almost all the houses on the way were candles
as a sign of approval of our march. Bruce Beyer spoke at the Church.
Chatted with L., who is bitching because people could not understand
that imperialism is the enemy. He was depressed. But if he could have
seen Buffalo ten years ago. As Professor K said in the line downtown,
"This sure as hell beats those Easter Sundays with SANE, doesn't
it?"
The
Movement is creating a new community. Everyone is talking to everyone.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in my home town, Plainsview, Texas. News commentators
are saying the country has not been so divided in 110 years. I doubt
that Buffalo has ever had this much mass action, street action on a
political issue. And this is happening all over the country, literally
millions of people in the streets protesting the war, as even the banner
headlines of the Buffalo Evening News concede. So the war is uniting,
not dividing, the people; uniting them against the ruling class. And
the ruling class itself may be dividing. Media and official spokesmen
are digging their own graves by distorting the news, underplaying the
significance.
The
Movement is drawing out the creativity of people . . . The Buffalo Mime
Troupe, the new conceptual theatre so called . . . was performing improvisations
on war in front of the Albright-Knox Museum when I stopped by
there at 11.30 tonight. A black and white acting out the themes of violence
and love surrounded by a circle of 15 young men and women acting as
a chorus.
When
I left the park at midnight I passed the Lincoln statue and fifty candles
were left burning in front of it. The park empty and dark now and the
night the loveliest of the autumn and tears of great joy came momentarily
to my eyes.
I
had been looking for my son Jim (aged 12) and when I got home I found
him bursting with pride. He had marched in the first line and hollered
himself hoarse with Peace-Now chants.
Did
this outpouring of the people into the streets influence decision-makers
in Washington? Probably not. But it influenced the participants. 5,000,
maybe 10,000 people were in the streets that day, some of them for the
first time, ever; some of them were older, straight people who had never
demonstrated before.
On
campus the attack on ROTC brought perfunctory condemnation from officials
but no sense of outrage. "Blackest day in university history"
said one Vice President. But SDS easily turned that definition around:
"Black is Beautiful". The ROTC burning was the work of Mad
Vandals, said another university official; the radicals tried to turn
the idea into a self fulfilling prophecy, as revealed in this leaflet:
GETTING OUT OF LIMBO
We've been in limbo at UB for a long time.. In learning
to accept our classrooms, in learning to accept the legitimacy of the
institutions that we live under and the labels that accompany them (Professor,
Administrator, Leader . . .), in learning to accept the purposelessness
that pervades any stay in the prison-like space of Norton Union,
it becomes almost effortless to accept the presence of ROTC on this
campus as normal, its destruction as insane.
We
can no longer let these definitions stand. We must define for ourselves
what is liberating, what is destructive. Women Against ROTC's (W.A.R.)
showed that realities can be reversed, that we can invade an inhuman
reality. The raid of the Mad Vandals showed concretely that we can stop
the functioning of ROTC on this campus. We must all become Mad Vandals
until inhuman and brutal realities are abolished. joining the struggle
of the Vietnamese as true brothers and sisters, we must aid that struggle
in a real way, By Any Means Necessary!
Out of the libraries stride the slaughterers. The mothers
stand Clutching their children, and Stare searching the skies numbly
for the inventions of scholars.
Bertolt Brecht
The
State, however, is not quite ready to capitulate. On October 21 the
verdict came in on the Buffalo-9. Rose, Berry and Kronenberg,
acquitted; Gross, hung jury; Malek and Yates, convicted. A former English
instructor and now a full time radical, Bill Yates, 40ish, was arrested
eight months after the sanctuary at the church. He was arrested in the
courthouse immediately after testifying favorably for Bruce Beyer in
the first trial of the Buffalo-9. Jerry Gross was the young radical
who had published the letters of Martin Sostre, worked so valiantly
to mobilize support for Sostre. Because I am ashamed of my fear I quote
directly from my notebook of Oct. 21, 1969:
Because I am ashamed of my fear I quote directly from
my notebook of Oct. 21, 1969:
"Large crowd - 100 ish - picketing
federal building immediately after the verdict. I marched with them awhile,
then went in for coffee in a cafe on court street, sat at a window where
I could observe. Saw plainclothesmen come up and quietly take Jerry Gross
away - all very official. Jerry (freed by hung jury) was doing nothing
at all but chanting with the rest of the crowd. After his removal, the
crowd started chanting, "Free Gross, Off the Pigs".
Watching
the removal of Gross I had that helpless feeling of good men in fascist
states. My impulse was to walk up to the officers - how dare you!
Or at least, "Please, officers, you can't take away a fellow citizen"
. . . Then remembering Jim Crotty's bruised back I realized I could be
arrested too, made the target for future harassment. Then the rationalizations:
really I am more useful to the Movement on the campus . . . and after
all Jerry does have a good lawyer, Bill Myers, as well as a wife and party
(YAWF) to look after his interests.
What
was Gross booked for? Possession of a dangerous drug. Pot? No, Dristram,
a nasal decongestant sold without prescription. As a 'good liberal' in
1969 1 could not see the connection between the drug police and the political
police, but recent FJ31 documents tell the story. A memo from J. Edgar
Hoover himself tells the story:
Since the use of marijuana . . . is widespread among
members of the New Left, you should be alert to opportunities to have
them arrested by local authorities on drug charges. Any information concerning
fact that individuals have marijuana . . . should be immediately furnished
to local authorities and they should be encouraged to take action"
(The Militant, Feb. 6, 1976).
And
if they don't use marijuana like Jerry Gross? Then bust them for Dristran
or plant heroin on the premises, as in the case of Martin Sostre. Will
absurdity undermine the State? Let me reconstruct the Zeitgeist
by unedited quotation from my journal in 1969:
October 29. Yesterday 100 demonstrators attacked ROTC and broke up the drill session with non-violent ridicule. The demonstrators marching beside the ROTCs, inviting them to join the demo, had even the cadets laughing so that finally the unit could not function. The 'attack' was led by a long haired, bearded Yippie named Amos who came with a bow and a sheaf of arrows. Ridicule is more effective than violence because it causes the actor to question what he is doing and thereby immobilizes him.
Two Panthers talked at a rally for Sostre last night
. . . Everyone is colonized in this country (they say) but the pigs Rockefeller
and Hunt, the big bourgeoisie . . . Robert Williams' return to Babylon
had won him respect. Panthers were sacrificing themselves to teach the
people; going to be ripped off, either dead or put in the joint by J.
Edgar Hog . . . Local black woman, tells of the indictment of a 17-year-old
black guy who had come forward to testify for Martin Sostre.
November
1. White radicals mimic Panther
styles; post guards at their meetings in Norton. Guerrilla theatre but
needlessly provocative. Guards wear armbands with slogan ARMED LOVE. Communist
slogans sprayed in red paint on all the buildings. Super-proletarians
want to "Smashthemotherfuckingrulingclass'. But my favorite is a
neatly lettered anarchist sign in College A: FUCK HATE.
Nov.
10, 1969. Saturday night heard
Abbie Hoffman in the Fillmore Room. Marvellous. Overflow audience -
2,000 . . . says the Chicago 8 was convicted because there is no evidence against them, thus their conviction would be even more
intimidating to others. Deterrent theory; makes sense . . . same patterns
as the Buffalo 9 locally. Hoffman warned that there was little hope in
appeal; political cases are never reversed - the Rosenbergs, Sacco
and Vanzetti. His only hope is to get people into the streets. Trials
have nothing to do with justice; only power . . .
Monday
morning went to sentencing of Bill Yates and Ray Malek. Both got 3 years;
will appeal. Both made speeches to the court. Bill said that he had given
up his white skin privileges to identify with the oppressed of the world,
said that he was not a criminal but a revolutionary . . . POWER TO THE
PEOPLE, and a strong clenched fist to the court, answered by the spectators
in the court room rising and repeating the gesture.
Ray's
speech was angry, less controlled. Said the charges were ridiculous -
which they were, of course - denounced as a 'slimy pig', Marshall
Alvin Grossman, who had arrested the people at the sanctuary. Ray explains
that the pigs are corporation executives, cops, etc., and ended by saying
that the most eloquent denunciation of the system had come from Bruce
Beyer on August 18, 1968: "The system stinks."
So
Ray and Bill would spend 3 years in Allenwood Federal Penitentiary for
the awful crime of impeding arrest. Their real crime was refusing to stand for the
judge, and thus a contempt-of-court citation. Strong State
indeed! "Stick and stone will break my bones, but words will
never hurt". Wow. That is what really terrifies the State, especially,
it seems, the word Pig. Ray Malek had called Judge Henderson a pig, and
for that he got three years. None
of the Buffalo-9 were
ever charged with damaging property or injuring a person. Not
even the prosecution charged that the arresting officers had been physically
hurt by the resisting Peaceniks at the church. But the State could
not allow itself to lose face either in Buffalo or Vietnam.
As
the State loses authority it turns increasingly to violence and fraud
to sustain its rule. Caught up in the grand themes of geopolitics radicals
were not paying enough attention to the linkage between the University
and the Police Intelligence system. Observing rightist professors taking
names of students at campus demonstrations, I wrote in my notebook of
November 5, 1969:
Is it better to have university personnel . . . playing
cop, or to have real cops on campus? Not an easy question. I fear the
real cops - and the people behind them, FBI, the Federal Department
of Justice - may be planning a push against college radicals. Today
at MIT they moved in on demonstrators, apparently in opposition to the
will of the school . . . If we knew just what the police-establishment
was up to, in the way we knew what the military establishment was up to
when the Vietnam war was escalating, we might forestall dire consequences.
Knowledge is power. How then do we get knowledge of the police system
. . . The military system is actually more accountable, less secretive
than the police system. The press forces them to explain their views;
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has smoked out a lot of information.
The military has to explain itself to Congress and Senate to get its money.
But there is no comparable surveillance of the police apparatus. Public
outcry against the military in part derived from the fact that 'innocent'
Americans were being drafted and killed. But no one will rise to the defense
of 'guilty' Americans - and the guilty are those who have police
records. People who break the law deserve no sympathy. Last year there were 4,000 arrests on campuses
- mainly drug busts. But public approves of drug laws. If you
don't -want to get arrested, don't smoke pot. You are free to smoke
pot, but you must pay the consequences. A different logic than "if
you don't want to go into the army, don't be 20 years old." If you
don't want to get arrested, don't go to demonstrations. Resist the draft
and you go to coum resist the police and you go immediately to jail.
Still,
the only antidote to police repression is exposure. It will take more
courage to face the police than the military. It will produce anxiety
because we will not know what we face. The uniformed police are not hard
to face; they're like an army. But the secret police, the informer -
that is the real deterrent, the real terror. Get one person to publicly
inform on the movement and distrust will spread. Make people feel it is
their duty to inform and they will inform on themselves. Trick them into
informing and then they will never trust anyone - not even themselves.
The
trick will be the prime symbol of the Nixon years.
Nixon
will try to goad the left into violence. How can the silent majority prove
its patriotism? By attacking the left. Lunatic YAFers are already talking
about occupying SDS offices; probably sending out threatening
letters, like the ones received here. The Minute Men will be unleashed.
No problem there; just fail to restrain them. Orders do not have to come
down saying to attack the left. It will be enough merely for high officialdom
of the FBI, etc. to send out directives on the grave dangers of revolution
and the need to step up surveillance. Already there are recommendations
for increasing police appropriations to 10 billion a year.
Above
written yesterday (Nov. 5, 1969) is confirmed by news hints today. Officials
say parade permit may be withheld on November 14-15 in Washington
because of the danger demonstrators might surround the White House. The
Pentagon is said to be alarmed and will have 28,000 troops standing by.
In 1969 there was no solid documentation that the FBI
was acting as a political
told me he had received a threatening telephone call
over the Themis thing. With students he had discussed holding a seminar
inside the Themis grounds on Oct. 15. Several planning sessions were held;
they finally rejected the seminar idea because it abetted others to violate
the law. While X was in one of the sessions his wife called to him about
the phone call she received. The caller said to her, "Tell your husband
not to follow up on the Themis plan or we will kill him." X told
the other people in the session about the call. He told me he had thought
about taking it to the FBI, asking where is my protection. My guess is
that the call came from the FBI. X seemed . . . to think it was a crank
call. But would cranks know about X? How can this be checked out? Are
other people getting crank calls? Must be someone in Fred's group passing
info to FBI. How would FBI know of earlier Thernis plans?
But
in November, 1969 it was still an Open Revolution. On the 15th a million
protestors flooded the streets of Washington, waved Red Flags at the Justice
Department. Martha Mitchell said it was just like the Russian Revolution,
which delighted everyone but her husband. In Buffalo everything was being
overthrown, even the Sociology Department - an educational experience
for all concerned. December 1969 was one long caucus; tension mounts in
January and erupts in late February, 1970. From my notes:
March 5, 1970.
For nine days the conflict
has been escalating toward chaos. On Feb. 24 Blacks and white radicals
stopped a basketball game, literally ran on to the court and grabbed the
ball. Police then cleaned out Norton Union arresting 12 to 20 people injuring
Janet Cohen badly enough to require a weeks' hospitalization for a slipped
disc. The next day, Wednesday, 100 police returned, but retreated before
a semi organized group of several hundred students. Billed as tactical
victory for the student radicals. Strike meetings followed. I went to
two in Tower Hall, with some 2 to 3,000 in attendance, where there was
some wild talk of, in effect, burning the place down. Windows were smashed
during the week. Monday afternoon Mar. 2 there was an assembly of some
5,000 in Clark Gym. The Strike leadership almost blew it by refusing to
let the opposition speak. After opposition was heard the group voted almost
unanimously (5,000 to 100) for the strike. Peaceful pickets went on the
next 2 days and today, Thursday, 5 Mar., pickets blocked Hayes Hall -
it was called a peaceful blockade - refusing access to administrators
and students. The strike had about petered out at this juncture. But now
the administration is out for blood. Announced suspension of 20 students
in violation of an injunction. Some 20 to 30 of us in Radical Faculty
Caucus cancelled classes in support of strike.
March
13. . . the attack on capitalism
is growing but capitalists themselves do not know it, like the Czars who
thought people loved them. But I am not sure capitalism is the enemy.
I rather live under Nixon than some of the 'revolutionaries' I know around
here . . . The capitalist class - the ruling class of the US -
may itself be losing touch with reality. If you've got power you don't
need brains; hence you misread the real situation and lose your power
- is that the dynamic of Pareto's circulation of elites? The University
of Buffalo may be a microcosm of the larger society. Here the 'rulers'
thought the majority of the people, i.e., students, were on their side;
that the trouble was caused only the 'vicious few' as UB President Reagan
put it. Hence the police were called on campus last Sunday morning -
March 7 - 400 of them. This brought mass meetings of students and
faculty
liberal faculty people I had not seen all year
around Norton showed up that Sunday afternoon. After speeches and grave
nervous talk the entire assemblage of some 5 to 6,000 people marched around
campus and around Hayes Hall, a solemn protest against the police invasion.
Who called the cops; rather, why were they called? Peter
Reagan the acting President was made the fall guy for the decision, but
he was only obeying higher authorities . . . somewhere in the Castle in
Albany . . . or Washington even? By March 7 the strike was melting away,
students were leaving for Spring vacation; the local crisis did not warrant
400 policemen to control it. The police presence did not pacify but aggravated
the turmoil. Blue uniformed patrols in groups of 12 or so marching around
campus all day and night for several weeks. Cops were decent guys, individually,
not pigs - the pigs were the decision makers who put them in this
lousy role. Their presence was a provocation. All that week from March
7 to 15 there were battles between police and students. Jerry Rubin spoke
on campus on Tuesday; the situation was cooled for fear of getting him
in trouble for inciting to riot. But on Wednesday night violence broke
out again. Thursday, Friday and Saturday were quiet, but on Sunday 45
faculty were arrested at a peaceful sit-in at Reagan's office.
March 16 . . . The radicals see it as class war, the conservatives
as classroom war. Liberals and conservatives (as distinct from radicals)
delude themselves with the hope the trouble is located exclusively with
a handful of unruly school boys (and girls). Harmony can be restored,
they think, by the elimination of the radicals . . . The Sociology Department
is afraid of epitaphs and insults, more concerned with dirty words than
police on campus.
The
rhetoric of violence is pervasive. Slogans are scribbled all over Norton:
"if you want peace, prepare for class war." The slogans -
Off the Pigs - are fading, new ones appearing. "Burn a bank
and save a village."
But
I can't seem to locate the source of the violent talk. The radical leadership
from last fall - those who are still around -are trying to
cool it. X was arrested on a Molotov cocktail charge - totally false,
I'm sure. The leader of YAWF was arrested at 3 a.m. yesterday morning.
A warrant is out for Bruce Beyers' arrest; he has gone underground I hear,
never stays in a single place, is constantly on the move. Supposedly there
are over 100 warrants for arrest out now - the exact date of these
notes is not known, it's sometime in late March:
In talking with leftists I implore them not to lie,
even about capitalism, even about militarism. We cannot afford to misrepresent
either ourselves or the other side. If we do not retain an Absolute commitment
to truth we will all go mad. Here again I think of Sid Willhelm's emphatic
refusal to indulge in the pleasures of self deception.
Leftist
melodrama, the silly talk of violence from the Weatherpeople has predisposed
the whole country to believe the left is behind every bombing which occurs.
Thus the left is set up for a monumental frame up. The English Department
buildings were fire bombed two weeks ago. No one on the left could understand
this; English is the one department which has overwhelmingly supported
the strike. Innocents! Probably done by police provocateurs . . . The
Faculty Club was fire bombed. Why assume this comes from the left rather
than the undercover police . . . Downtown the Lafayette Hotel is bombed,
and everyone on campus is asking, why would the left do that? Makes
no sense. The building has no symbolic meaning, like a bank or a corporate
headquarters. It could have been done by the lunatic right, or the police,
of CIA, or counter-insurgents of some kind, who wanted to create
an incident, further alarm the public so as to build a consensus for the
suppression of the left. Norton Union was subject to several bomb threats
during the day. Roger Cook and I were talking about it in the Rathskellar.
The bomb threats are now so common at Norton that most people do not even
bother to leave the building when warned to do so.
Radicals
were the targets but not the perpetrators of violence. The radical leadership
consistently opposed violence as tactically incorrect and pragmatically
unwise. No radical on campus was indicted for the commission of a violent
crime. In countless hours of informal conversation we never heard anyone
seriously propose the use of violence as a strategy in the current conflict.
None of the UB radicals identified with the Weatherpeople. Nor were the
radicals into anonymous phone
calls. Since we now have evidence that the FBI used the anonymous letter
as a weapon against dissidents, it is easy to believe that employees of
that organization could be responsible for the Norton bomb threats. And
to make the threat credible why not lob a fire bomb into the Faculty club,
or the buildings of the English Department? We have fairly persuasive
oral evidence of one case where a Treasury department agent attempted
to induce a local, half-demented right-winger to store sticks
of dynamite in his house.
How
much did the Intelligence apparatus of the State know about the "revolution"
on campus in spring 1970? It knew nothing - but it was inundated
with information. For instance, Military Intelligence (MI) had one agent
travelling in each of the some 30 police cars patrolling the area, and
local law enforcement agencies passed to MI some 1,000 names of 'alleged'
campus militants. In June and July, 1970 Grand jury investigated the campus
uprising, took testimony from 57 witnesses. Curiously, no indictments
came down; not a single radical was charged with unlawful activity. Perhaps
because a court trial would expose the Intelligence network?
May
1970 saw the Cambodian incursion, murders at Jackson State and Kent State,
which sent thousands of UB students surging down Main Street, breaking
bank windows. Provocateurs stirred up trouble at Kent State; were they
also at work in Buffalo? In June 1970 Buffalo police would disrupt and
disperse the crowds of the Allentown Art Festival in the downtown Hippie-Bohemian
area, which was sprayed with tear gas like the campus earlier. The 'culture
war' was underway: the police as the internal army of the Dominant Society
easily defeated the hippie vanguard of the counter-culture on the
field of battle. But the freaks wrote the history - a small book
called Frustration Politics - which pinned the blame on the cops,
and thus drove one more nail into the coffin of State authority.
Summer
1970. Two years and a 'revolution' since a couple of young 'draft resisters'
took sanctuary in the Unitarian Church and with the help of the cops created
the Buffalo-9. What had been accomplished?
(1)
People were beginning to live in communes and collectives, build 'food
conspiracies', co-ops, free schools, even free stores. The Free
Store in Allentown where people could deposit and pick up clothes, furniture,
miscellaneous goods, was built by young IWWs and later burned to the ground
by the cops. Why would they care, we wondered at the time . . . and still
wonder, though perhaps it was the work of the Commune and New Left Division
of the FBI.
(2)
People were learning to talk to each other, to write leaflets, publish
underground papers, organize.
(3)
They had learned how to stop an institution - the University -
from carrying on small business as usual. Radicals compelled the university
to take a stand on the war - the University officially endorsed
Moratorium Day November 15, 1969 and finally voted ROTC off campus in
Spring 1970 - and to communalize bureaucratic procedures. Students
gained representation on university committees, and there was a brief
revival of the vision of the university as a Community of Scholars, of
Faculty and Students as equal participants in the pursuit of learning.
(4)
People learned to confront the violence of the State, without panic, tested
their courage; had watched 400 cops patrol the campus for weeks on end.
Despite macho talk of Armed Love it was plain that the State had all the
big battalions -and after Kent State no one doubted that the functionaries
of the State would shoot even their own children. The violence of the
State proved the efficacy of the Non-Violence of the Movement.
By
autumn 1970 the amateurs were becoming pros. Rhetoric subsided. Many new
left revolutionaries moved into old left (marxist) formations. SDS died
though the corpse was preserved by Progressive Labor Party. And the anarchopacifists
were developing the subtlest strategy to come out of the antiwar movement.
"You
don't destroy government by setting fire to the White House," said
Alexander Berkman in 1929. "To think of revolution in terms of violence
and destruction is to misinterpret and falsify the whole idea of it. When
Bakunin speaks of revolution as destruction, he has in mind the idea of
authority and obedience which are to be destroyed. it is for this reason
that he said that destruction means construction, for to destroy a false
belief is indeed most constructive work." 20
Government
is an idea, not a thing. Not the building but the document contains the
idea, which runs the machinery of State. When the State is losing legitimacy,
when it is no longer supported by the consent of the governed, then it
resorts to secrecy and deceit. Document the duplicity of the State and
paralysis will ultimately follow.
Thus
a group, calling itself the BUFFALO entered the offices of the draft board
and military Intelligence to liberate the documents of the State, and
thereby moved the Revolution to a higher plane.
NOTES:
1.
Elwin H. Powell, The Design of Discord:
Studies of Anomie (New York: Oxford University
Press,
1970), ch. 9 "Anomie and Arms: Toward a Sociology of War", pp.
135-42. el passim.
2.
Alexander Berkman, The ABCs of Anarchism
(London: Freedom Press, 1971), p. 35. First published in 1929.
3.
Elwin H. Powell, "Anomic and Force: The Case of Rome", Catalyst (Summer, 1969), pp. 79-101. of.
Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the
Roman Order: Treason, Unrest and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 192-96.
4.
Frederic C. Lane, "The Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,"
Journal of
Economic History, 18 (December, 1958), pp. 401-17.
5.
John H. Herz, "The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,"
World Politics, 9 (July 1957),p. 473.
6.
However, antiwar people within the establishment became chief targets
for harrassment by Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in
the late 1940s: namely, Alger Hiss, a Quaker and Director of Carnegie
Peace Foundation, and Senator Millard Tydings, a strong advocate of disarmament.
Both had been connected with the Nye Committee of the 1930s which investigated
war profiteering (Merchants of Death)
in World War 1. Hiss was felled by Nixom Tydings by Joe McCarthy.
7.
The Senator Gravel Edition, The
Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department Hislorjv of United
States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol.
I (Boston: Beacon Press, 197
1), p. IX.
8.
Mitchell Goodman, The Movement Toward
a Aleu, America: The Beginnings of a Long
Revolution, (New York, 1970), p. xi.
9.
Pat Watters and Stephen Gillers, eds. Investigating
the FBI (New York: Ballantine Books,
1973)p.251.
10. Terry Pollack, "Slow Leak in the Pentagon (and
the CIA and the State Dept. and the White House and . . . )" Ramparts
(January 1973), pp. 21-26~ pp. 49 50.
11. Letlersfrom
Prison A compilation of Marlin Sostre's Correspondence from Frie County
jail, Buffalo, New York and Green Haven Prison, Stormville, New York,
(Buffalo: Philosophical Society of SUNY/B, 1968), pp.
29- 3 1.
12.
Ibid., p. 25.
13. Ibid., p.
23
14.
Ibid, p. 32.
15.
]but., p. 55-56.
16.
Ibid., p. 57.
17. Don Shamblin, "Brotherhood of Rebels: An Analvsis
of a Motorcycle Outlaw Contraculture" (Buffalo: Unpublished Ph.D.
Dissertation, 1970) for a fascinating studv.
18. John T. Elliff, "The Scope and Basis of FBI
Data Collection," in Watters and Gillers, Investigating the FBI, pp. 247-53.
20.
Berkman, op. cit., P. 44 1.
2
1. Peter Kropotkin, TbeSlale. lis
Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1969), p. 56.
22.
Robert Wall, "Why I Got Out of It," in Investigating the FBI, pp. 336-350.
23. Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory, (New
York: Basic Books. 1965).
24. Winslow Peck, "U.S. Electronic Espionage: A
Memoir", Ramparts, (August,
1972), p. 50.
See also Ellsberg's co-conspirator Anthony Russo,
"Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My
Story", Ramparts,
(April, 1972) pp. 46-55.
25. Pollack, op. cit.,
p. 24-25.
26. Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1972), pp. 39; 277;
285.
27. Ibid.
28. Joe McGuinniss, "The Ordeal of Daniel Ellsberg,
Playboy, (October, 1972), pp.
97-98; 192Ÿ
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