Gang Rape in Seattle
Fanshen Collective
Anna Louise Strong Collective
The Seattle Liberation Front sponsored the Sky River Rock Festival. Three women were gang raped. One woman was stabbed attempting to escape. A fourth rape was prevented by a female "chauvin patrol."
Two days after Sky River, women from the women's liberation movement intruded upon an SLF general meeting. We denounced seven men who had fucked us over, used and destroyed people, and created a white, male supremacist movement in Seattle.
The movement in Seattle is, in many ways, a microcosm of the movement across the country. The men we denounced are not unusually evil, brilliantly manipulative, or exceptional leaders in any sense. All over the country men have defined the Revolution. People who want to act have had to exist in the context these men set up. We feel a responsibility to sisters across the country to explain our action and the history behind it.
It began, in Seattle, with the arrival of a radical Marxist professor from Berkeley. He s et up shop at the University of Washington, and used his classes to inject politics and liberal guilt into his students. But he was not content with the notoriety his yippie-style histrionics and flamboyant hairiness won for him. The Berkeley Liberation Program (with a section on the workers tacked on) was bait for the "groovy people" he wanted to us as organizers.
It worked. A collective was formed, composed mainly of the professor's students. Then, on the 19th of January, a meeting was called, a program was read, and two more collectives began to pull together.
A lot of us hadn't been in the movement before. We had looked into existing organizations and dismissed them. SDS was Weatherman controlled. The only alterntive to SDS, Radical Organizing Committee, spent its time in sterile debates over meaningless agendas.
We thought that SLF would give us a chance to connect; that the collective structure would allow us autonomy, crativity, and self-respect.
We might have harmed ourselves less and recognized sooner the impossibility of achieving anything good in that context if the Sundance gang hadn't arrived;, fresh from Cornell SDS, ready to take over the Seattle movement. Sundance spotted the professor as a man they could use when he spoke with Jerry Rubin at a rally, three days before the first SLF meeting. They contacted him the same day and began their alliance. The professor provided the "base on campus." Sundance provided revolutionary models for hero worship, objects for media infatuation, and much of the direction and energy of the SLF.
We found our energies absorbed in a whirlwind of "organizing" defined and directed by the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of the Sundance center. There was no time for us to find and defend what was important to us. The Chicago conspiracy tgrial was ending - we felt we had to respond.
TDA [The Day After] came and went as a window-smashing melee. We got our riot credentials running through the streets breaking bank windows, pushing people out of the way of the rocks falling around them, while the well-disciplined tac squad arrested 75 people.
The demonstration got the publicity the leaders wanted so much. They were mad SLF in the media, and they were SLF to the people who poured into the organization afterwards.
Sundance had injected some youth culture hype into the program and became the center of the Seattle movement social scene by arranging huge parties with lots of beer, dope, wine, and girls. By procuring money for expensive, multi-colored leaflets and programs, they made an immediate impact on a movement so impoverished that the acquisition of mimeo paper was a hassle. Many established groups, who at first refused to incorporate themselves as SLF collectives, began to succumb to what was happening. And SLF was what was happening. People were afraid to be left out of the Revolution.
To the burgeoning and freaked-out SLF, the Sundance "command collective" made clear the only thing to do was become a "professional revolutionary." So people quit their jobs, dropped out of school, grew their hair, smoked lots of dope, and hun out with people at the Century Tavern.
The mass dropout in the spring made no sense unless we believed in a teenage revolution - people had none of the skills necessary to survive. But it did provide a large pool of unskilled labor to use as shitworkers, and people who depended on the leaders for the direction of their lives.
And the ethic Sundance lived by was not anti-materialistic. The ethic was to rip-off. One leader showed us the way, spending hundreds of dollars hard-pressed collectives had earned for an SLF office, on Sundance rent and beer. "Living Communism" was exemplified by Sundance, who declared that everything most people have to do to survive was "bourgeois," while they exploited people who had money (mainly women) to support their incredibly expensive life-style.
pp. 117-119.
To be continued