Editor’s note: The following message from White Panther Minister of Defense in exile, Pun Plamondon, was read by his wife Geni at the Eastown Theatre, Jan 25 as part of the Free John Sinclair Day benefit.
“The beginnings will not be easy; they will be extremely difficult. All the oligarchies’ powers of repression, all their capacity for brutality and demagogy will be placed at the service of their cause. Our mission, in the first will be to survive….”
—Che
Here we are in the first hour, and it’s most difficult, most difficult indeed. Since I’ve gone underground I’ve been traveling somewhat & talking to our people. I’ve had my mind blown time & again. Our people are everywhere, I mean everywhere! Every place I go I’ve been welcomed, fed, housed, loved, hid.
I’ve found some things that are not good, that are holding us back and could prove to be disastrous. There is an unnecessary separation between the people in the cities and those in the country. I’m talking about our people, our cultural brothers and sisters, Freeks. The freeks in the cities are very much aware as to what is going on. They are arming themselves and getting a political direction. This is very good.
However our brothers and sisters who live in the countryside are pretty much out of touch with what is going down. For instance, I’ve talked to many country communities about revolution and armed self-defense & armed struggle & a common statement that I hear is, “Didn’t someone tell you we’ve already won.” Too many of our Brothers & Sisters have this outlook and it comes from an incorrect analysis of the situation.
Now, most freeks living in the country come from white middle class backgrounds and so their thinking is marked with that of the petty bourgeoisie, they have not really sided with the most oppressed people. Their analysis says, “Fuck, the system is falling apart anyway, so if we just drop out and do our thing and take our energy away from the system it will fall apart all the sooner.”
But what these brothers & sisters don’t understand is that the poorest and most oppressed people in this country and in the world cannot wait for the system to fall apart. You cannot tell the Vietnamese to just drop out and let the system fall apart, you cannot tell the black people in this country to drop out & wait for their liberation, they need their liberation now! They need their liberation yesterday!
Of course most of these brothers and sisters are stone pacifists, they say, “You can’t fight violence with violence.” To that we have to say, “in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun.” I call these pacifists the OMers; they’ll OM their life away as the pigs & right wing burn their houses down & herd them like cattle to the camps, and don’t think for a minute that those pigs aren’t capable of throwing long haired dope smoking rock & roll fiends into concentration camps—they are! We’re witnessing a rising tide of fascism Right Now!
They chained & gagged Bobby Seale, they put Sinclair in the slam for 9-1/2 to 10 years for possessing two joints, they’ve been trying to put me in prison for 20 to life for giving a roach to an informer back in 1968. The pigs are moving toward fascism and an armed mass of people is the only thing that can stop this tide.
Anyone who has been around OMers at all will know that it’s most difficult to change their mind, and if you stop and look at who most of the OMers are you will see that most of them come from a group of people who are materially free, they want & need very little materially, they want spiritual freedom on the other hand. The broad mass of the people the world over need to have their material needs answered before they can look toward the spiritual side. Surely the OMers must know that they cannot be free spiritually until all the people are free from material want.
The OMers must not be sold short, though. They can & do fill an important role in the revolutionary movement. They carry on & develop our culture, they make babies and carry forward the word of love, and the shooters can do the same, only we be talking about armed love.
I just saw a poster Adolf Hoover put out of me, I must say I’m truly flattered, I didn’t know I was that much of a threat to them. Now my next goal is to get a price on my head, or a poster that says “Wanted Dead or Alive.” I’ve been working for this for 24 years, I finally made it; far fucking out.
I think what we need now is a huge contingent of city brothers to consciously start working with and searching out our brothers and sisters who live in the country and start working together, cause we need outlaw communities, where all the outlaws of Babylon can assemble and strike blows against the empire.
Outlaws forever, forever outlaws.
FREE JOHN, HUEY & ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
STOP THE WAR, STOP THE TRIAL
BRING THIS MOTHER DOWN
Pun
Jan. 12, 1970 Second Year of Zenta