You Do Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows by Shin’ya Ono (1969)

1946-1989, Date, Defining the Enemy, God, Country, Property, Tactics of Disruption

This essay by Shin’ya Ono was printed in Leviathan in December 1969. She writes, “What I
would like to go into here is how the Chicago action, and the Weatherman logic behind it,
made, and still makes, compelling sense…”

You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows by the Weather Underground (1969)

1946-1989, Capitalism, Date, Defining the Enemy, White Supremacy

The Weather Underground was a radical left militant faction of the Student Group Students for a Democratic Society. This position paper was distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969.

The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world. The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys.

Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (1970)

Capitalism, Defining the Enemy

The accidental explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse during a bomb-making session in 1970 left the Weather Underground– a radical left organization formed in 1969– distraught. In an attempt to reunify under their original goals at the time of formation, the group published a book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism. The book was intended to make a plan for organizing not just within the WU, but also with other radical left groups, and share ideologies, tactics, and lessons, all under the umbrella of anti-imperialism.