Assault on Attica and the Symbionese Liberation Armythe media histories of state violence restaged in Romero's Dawn of the Dead

"The SLA used the notoriety it had won to spit invective at the country’s corporate leaders. ‘DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE,’ it proclaimed, in what became its signature sign-off.



The ‘insects,’ however, got them first. On May 17, 1974, 410 officers of the law representing the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and its Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Unit, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI and the California Highway Patrol, poured over 5,000 rounds of ammunition and 83 tear gas canisters into a Compton bungalow in which six SLA members, including Donald Defreeze, were holed up. One of the rounds ignited the flimsy building and, pinned down by continuous fire, those inside died of smoke inhalation, caught bullets, or, in DeFreeze’s case, committed suicide.

Before launching the attack, the LAPD marshalled the media into place. The incineration was broadcast live on national television, as though to exercise the radicalism that had been corroding the conservative core of the country. At least some of the police performed their task with the glee of an Old South lynching. One SWAT member quipped of DeFreeze, who had changed his name to Cinque (which DeFreeze pronounced ‘Sin-Q’) Mtume, after the leader of the 1839 revolt on the slave ship Amistad: ‘He may have been Cinque yesterday, but he’s bar-be-que today.’ The message couldn’t have been clearer: anyone ornery enough to challenge the U.S. government – whether a black ex-convict or a white dropout from the University of California – would be annihilated."

Daniel Burton-Rose

Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s

Attica nine-forward slash-nineremembering revolt, rebellion, insurrection, uprising of September 01971

"History which keeps alive the memory of people's resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive.

However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.

Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world."

Howard Zinn
Chapter 24: The Coming Revolt of the Guards