We have grown up in a climate of competition between
people, teams, departments, divisions, pupils,
schools, universities. We have been taught by
economists that competition will solve our problems.
Actually, competition, we see now, is destructive. It
would be better if everyone would work together as a
system, with the aim for everybody to win. What we
need is cooperation and transformation to a new style
of management.  (W. Edwards Deming)


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::


The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)[0] was the first
of a number of domestic terrorist organizations that
engaged in violent resistance against a United States
government and corporate America that they saw as
working against the interests of minorities in
particular and the interests of nearly the entire
population.  The SLA engaged in kidnapping, torture,
brainwashing, assassination of innocents, robbery, and
other crimes, leaving them hardly a sympathetic
group.  They truly were domestic terrorists despite
the goals that they claimed.

The SLA were a strange product of the turbulent,
violent 1970s[1], a misguided reaction to the
desperation their membership and many other Americans
felt in the face of government atrocities and secrecy,
violation with impunity laws meant to restrain
govenment it with impunity and the predatory, amoral
actions of corporations.

The SLA were no less messed up than the environment
that produced them, and ultimately ineffective and
self-destructive.  They serve as a truly spectacular
negative example of the futility of armed resistance
without good leadership.  More and more, peaceful
resistance appears to be the effective solution to
authoritarianism in any case and the SLA are a warning
sign tacked onto history for those tempted to
stockpile firearms, build homemade bombs, kidnap or
murder political foes and take up arson.

It is also perhaps important to point out that while
violent revolution is a double-edged sword and often
ushers in only another round of the same dictatorship,
totalitarianism, mass killings and other atrocities it
tries to replace, that in fact purely legal means are
often insufficient in uncovering and rooting out
authoritarian actions and government cover-up. We only
learned about the worst systemic abuses of rights by
J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation
through a break-in by anti-war activists working
against the American war in Vietnam.[2]

We only learned about similar abuses by the NSA and
others in government more recently through the actions
of people like Edward Snowden who illegally stole
secrets from them and offered them to the public to
consider, and is now in exile from the US to avoid a
life in prison for doing it.[3]  Snowden had to work
from the inside to get those secrets because breaking
into an office and grabbing files from a cabinet is no
longer really feasible.  What would we know if there
were no such whistleblowers?

Despite being an especially flawed messenger at best,
the SLA motto rings true for me in an American nation
in 2026 that is being corrupted at its heart in both
government and the accumulating power of corporations,
as legal protections built in the '70s to protect the
public and the environment are whittled away by
corrupted politicians.  It echoes to us as a warning -
as relevant today as it was in 1973:




DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS

UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!





[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army
[1] https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Pubs/Scanlans.web.pdf
[2] https://www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260302289/the-secret-burglary-that-exposed-j-edgar-hoovers-fbi
[3] https://apnews.com/article/57af1e21c0c14309a3684fc7695605c6

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