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[Hide] (8.1KB, 200x255) Reverse >October 28. Last night I had to do the most unpleasant thing that I have been called to do since joining the Organization four years ago. I participated in the execution of a mutineer.
>Harry Powell was Unit 5's leader. Last week, when Washington Field Command gave his unit the assignment of assassinating two of the most obnoxious and outspoken advocates of racial mixing in this area-a priest and a rabbi, coauthors of a widely publicized petition to Congress requesting special tax advantages for racially mixed marned couples - Powell refused the assignment. He sent a message back to WFC saying that he was opposed to the further use of violence and that his unit would not participate in any acts of terrorism.
>He was immediately placed under arrest, and yesterday one representative from each unit under WFC-including Unit S- was summoned to judge him. Unit 10 was not able to send anyone, and so 11 members-eight men and three women- met with an officer from WFC in the basement storeroom of a gift shop owned by one of our "legals." I was Unit l 's representative.
>The officer from WFC stated the case against Powell very briefly. The Unit 5 representative then confirmed the facts: Powell had not only refused to obey the assassination order, but he had instructed the members of his unit not to obey either. Fortunately, they had not allowed themselves to be subverted by him.
>Powell was then given an opportunity to speak in his behalf. He did so for more than two hours, interrupted occasionally by a question from one of us. What he said really shook me, but it made our decision easier for all of us, I am sure.
>Harry Powell was, in essence, a "responsible conservative." The fact that he was not only a member of the Organization but had become a unit leader reflects more on the Organization than it does on him. His basic complaint was that all our acts of terror against the System were only making things worse by "provoking" the System into taking more and more repressive measures.
>Well, of course, we all understood that! Or, at least, I thought we all understood it. Apparently Powell didn't. That is, he didn't understand that one of the major purposes of political terror, always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists. And the other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population's sense of security and their belief in the invincibility of the government.
As Powell continued talking, it became clearer and clearer that he was a conservative, not a revolutionary. He talked as if the whole purpose of the Organization were to force the System to institute certain reforms, rather than to destroy the System, root and branch, and build something radically and fundamentally different in its place.
>He was opposed to the System because it taxed his business too heavily. (He had owned a hardware store before we were forced underground.) He was opposed to the System's permissiveness with Blacks, because crime and rioting were bad for business. He was opposed to the System's confiscation of firearms, because he felt he needed a gun for personal security. His were the motivations of a libertarian, the sort of self-centered individual who sees the basic evil in government as a limitation on free enterprise.
>Someone asked him whether he had forgotten what the Organization has repeated over and over, namely, that our struggle is to secure the future of our race, and that the issue of individual freedom is subordinate to that one, overwhelming purpose. His retort was that the Organization's violent tactics are benefiting neither our race nor individual freedom.
>This answer proved again that he didn't really understand what we are trying to do. His initial approval of the use of force against the System was based on the naive assumption that, by God, we'll show those bastards! When the System, instead of backing down, began tightening the screws even faster, he decided that our policy of terrorism is counter-productive.
>He simply could not accept the fact that the path to our goal cannot be a retracing of our course to some earlier stage in our history, but must instead be an overcoming of the present and a forging ahead into the future-with us choosing the direction instead of the System. Until we have torn the rudder out of its grasp and thrown the System overboard, the ship of state will go careening on its hazardous way. There will be no stopping, no going back. Since we are already among rocks and shoals, we are bound to get scraped up pretty badly before we find any clear sailing.
>Maybe he was right that our tactics are wrong; the reaction of the people will eventually answer that question. But his whole attitude, his whole orientation was wrong. As I listened to Powell I was reminded of the late-19th century writer, Brooks Adams, and his division of the human race into two classes: spiritual man and economic man. Powell was the epitome of economic man.
Ideologies, ultimate purposes, the fundamental contradiction between the System's world view and ours-all these things had no meaning for him. He regarded the Organization's philosophy as just so much ideological flypaper designed to catch recruits for us. He saw our struggle against the System as a contest for power and nothing more. If we could not whip them, then we should try to force them to compromise with us.
>I wondered how many others in the Organization thought the way Powell did, and I shuddered. We have been forced to grow too quickly. There has not been sufficient time to develop in all our people the essentially religious attitude toward our purpose and our doctrines which would have prevented the Powell incident by screening him out early.
>As it was, we had no real choice in deciding Powell's fate. There was not only his disobedience to consider, but also the fact that he had revealed himself to be fundamentally unreliable. To have one of us-and a unit leader, at that-talking openly to other members about trying to find a way to compromise with the System, with the war just beginning… There was only one way to deal with such a
situation.
>The eight male members present drew straws, and three of us, including me, ended up on the execution squad. When Powell realized that he was going to be killed, he tried to make a break. We tied his hands and feet, and then we had to gag him when he began shouting. We drove him to a wooded area off the highway about 10 miles south of Washington, shot him, and buried him.
>I got back a little after midnight, but I still haven't been able to get to sleep. I am very, very depressed.