> Yoko Ono sister, active in the Weather Underground, Shin'ya Ono.
Weatherman "The correct way to deal with... racism and chauvinism in a polarized situation is to confront it directly and show a real alternative. To hand them a leaflet or pamplet or merely to rap, with explanations as to how racism is not in their longterm interest, is not a way to do either. Words, words, words. Mere words, however persuasive, mere ideas, however true, can not make even a dent in an ingrained psychic structure like racism that not only reaches into the very depth of whites' souls, but also has a material basis to sustain it. The only way to make our anti-racist ideas and analyses real is for these white kids to be confronted with a group of other whites who are willing to actually fight on the side of the blacks (and not just talk, hand leaflets, picket, march, or give money for black liberation).... To see a group of other whites willing to fight to the very end on the side of the blacks will be a shocking experience for most whites...
While you confront their racism in this manner, you also must show a concrete alternative by identifying and actually attacking the real enemy, that is, the various imperialist institutions implicated in their class oppression... You also show a concrete alternative by the very existence of a communist fighting force which they can join on various levels of struggle.
The second obstacle to the revolutionization of the white working-class youth is their basic defeatism. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of youths in and out of the Movement have fought against this imperialist system in various ways, but only a handful have become revolutionaries. Why? Because most of us are basically defeatists about our ability to destroy the system. ("You can't fight city hall.") No matter how hard or how often we fight, we slide back to non-revolutionary bourgeois holes, because, at the basic core of our psychic life, we too have internalized the strongest ideological bulwark of US imperialism, i.e, the chauvinist idea that US imperialism, and its social order at home, is permanent and invincible. If most of us radicals and "revolutionaries" in the movement have not overcome this US imperialist-chauvinist myth, how can we expect working-class youth, who are not as familiar as we supposedly are with the experience and the victories of the Third World peoples, not to share this basic presumption about the permanence and invincibility of this social order?"
From "The Weatherman Perspective" by Weatherman Shin'ya Ono. 1969. From the collection, "The Tree of Liberty" edited by Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock. Jr. John Hopkins University Press. http://www.americanbookcongress.org/comments.php?id=621_0_1_0_C8
Michael Pugliese