#title Yipanther Pact #author Eldridge Cleaver, Jerry Rubin, Stewart E. Albert & Abbie Hoffman #authors Eldridge Cleaver, Jerry Rubin, Stewart E. Albert, Abbie Hoffman #lang en #pubdate 2023-03-05T18:13:06 #subtitle 1968—the year of the pig #date October 17–30, 1968 #source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/64-october-17-30-1968/yipanther-pact][Fifth Estate #64]] #notes Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb The death of the ballot, the birth of the bullet—here is the choice—contemptuously thrust in our face by this decadent racist power structure: racist pig Humphrey, racist pig Nixon, racist pig Wallace for President! So where do we go from here? Into the streets! Into the alleys! Back of town! Onto the rooftops! Behind whatever shelter remains for a black person here in Babylon! This is the nightmare election year of the American dream. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have told black people to kiss the ass of the elephant and the donkey. They have done this in no uncertain terms. It is time for black people to tell the elephant and the jackass to go fuck each other—political and moral cretins that they are. Yet we cannot sit idly by and allow these vipers to run their game on us without even raising a dead finger in opposition. It is very clear that there is no way left for us to offer any opposition through the traditional political machinery. These merciless demagogues have so firmly grasped this machinery in their clutches that even the white supporters of McCarthy and Kennedy got all the fat whipped off their heads in Chicago when they tried to oppose the mad dog power play of meathead Humphrey. Our only recourse is to join in a second Boston Tea Party in order to blow their game. In order to blow their minds, we must chart our own course, a new course designed to Manifest how we feel about the insufferable political manipulation and chicanery that has made the national election into a circus devoid even of the saving grace of humor. This shit is not funny. These pigs are plotting our death. These vicious reprobates, conniving scoundrels are plotting genocide against us. What do you think this featherweight, featherbrain Alabama racist, George Wallace, has up his sleeve for niggers? Extermination. The final solution to the Negro problem. We don’t have to go for that. That’s not our issue. That is not the goal towards which black people have been struggling, dying, for these painful four hundred years. Our fight is for freedom, for liberation, by any means necessary, as Brother Malcolm put it. Brother Malcolm also said that it’s gotta be the ballot or the bullet. The pigs of the power structure have taken off their masks and revealed themselves to be precisely what we have always known them to be. Murderers, liars, miserable genocidal wretches. These pigs themselves have already closed down the polling places, the ballot boxes, in so far as any meaningful solution to the black man’s problems is concerned. Right on! Are we to lie down and grovel on our bellies, on our knees, like a begging Lazarus, hoping that these fiends will toss us a few crumbs when they introduce another bullshit four year program into the pigpen of the United States Congress? Fuck these motherfuckers! Let’s go for ourselves. Let’s go for what we know. And what do we know? We know, in the words of Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of’ the Black Panther Party, that the spirit of the people is greater than the pigs’ technology. They seek to deprive us of life, of our human rights, of a future, through their rigged technological political crap game. Only snake eyes are on the loaded dice for us within the confines of the American political system. So there’s nothing left for us to do but to break up this crap game, to pick our money up off the wood and demand a brand new pair of dice from the house. Let the pigs dance a jig to the star spangled banner. Let us do the dog in the streets. Let the pigs of the power structure put each other through these asinine charges and let us put all the pigs through a final change. Let us join together with all those souls in Babylon who are straining for the birth of a new day. A revolutionary generation is on the scene. There are men and women, human beings, in Babylon today. Disenchanted, alienated white youth, the hippies, the yippies, and all the unnamed dropouts from the white man’s burden are our allies in this human cause. The entire anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist world of mankind is with us. Let us manifest our solidarity with them. Let us say loud and clear that we are not going to accept four more years of Slavery, Suffering and Death under the hooves of racist pigs. Until this house is set in order, let us plant our tent on the fighting words of Brother Robert Williams: “America is a house on fire. Freedom now or let it burn, let it burn.” Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information, Black Panther Party; Presidential Candidate, Peace and Freedom Party
Stewart E. Albert
Abby Hoffman
Jerry Rubin