Defiance
Am reading Defiance #2: a paperback magazine of the US revolutionary left, published in 1971, edited by Dotson Rader. Pretty interesting stuff.
Articles include:
- Rader’s introduction, which recommends abandoning electoral politics in favor of joining the imminent revolution.
- A piece by two young white men who were part of the NYC branch of Weatherman (aka the Weather Underground), talking about their experiences trying to recruit white youth to take up arms against the US government (aka “Pig Amerika”), in solidarity with various POC organizations. Also about their experiences trying to teach themselves to unlearn sexism, homophobia, and racism.
- A piece by Vine Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux, about some of the multitudinous ways in which the US government has betrayed and failed Native Americans, especially wrt reservations.
- “Gay Liberation: Out of the Closets and into the Streets,” by Jonathan Black, about Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Front.
- “The Irish Struggle,” by Bernadette Devlin, who describes herself as “leader of the civil rights struggle among Irish Catholics in British-occupied Ireland.”
And a bunch more, including a couple of poems and three small crossword puzzles.
Oddly, it was published by Coronet Communications, which appears to have been a fairly major and fairly mainstream book publisher, though I could be wrong about that. It even has copyright and trademark notices on the back of the title page.
Anyway, I have no real conclusions here; just finding it both an interesting artifact of its time and culture, and an interesting reflection of where we are today.