Collective, armed self-defense is needed to protect our community against the dual threat of an expanding police state and right-wing vigilantism.

Our community is creating collective institutions upon which our lifestyles and politics can be realized. We are building a Tenants' Union to deal with housing conditions, a Free Clinic to deal with health problems, a Food Conspiracy to meet nutritional needs and a Peoples' Architecture to deal with environmental needs.

Our community includes living communes and work collectives. Among our brothers and sisters are ecology activists, women's liberationists and gay liberationists. Telegraph Avenue, the main street of our USA is a common turf for cultural revolutionaries and revolutionary socialists.

None of these energies are yet satisfied, none of these projects are yet complete. The non-exploitative society is not yet reality for us or our brothers and sisters throughout the oppressed world.

But however unfinished the growth of our community may be, it is a new beginning in the belly of the Amreikan monster. It is a beginning worth defending.

When the Federal Regime put the Chicago Conspiracy on trial the Regime attacked us, the Berkeley community. When the national power structure convicted the Conspiracy, they attacked our lifestyle of personal liberation and our politics of collective liberation from worldwide Amerikan imperialism.

When the Man imprisoned the Chicago Conspiracy he attacked our right to survive and create social change.

The Day After street action in Berkeley responded to that attack. The Day After we informed the businessmen and the bureaucrats that for every attack they made on us, we would make them pay a price.

Now these businessmen and their regime are agitating for the destruction of our community. Their goal is to create a police state in Berkeley powerful enough to crush our community.

Toward this end the local businessmen have already begun to clamor for one final Krackdown. They are even attempting to cover their fascist tracks with the democratic facade of a "People's Committee"-the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and the Berkeley Board of Realtors with their faces rearranged.

This clamor for Fascism Now! has already resulted in a gestapo invasion of the Free Church Wednesday night.

Faced with this developing crisis, self-defense is quickly becoming our primary need.

Those who profit from racism and imperialist wars in Vietnam and Laos, those who hoard the power from the people to satisfy their own greed, those who put the pigs on our streets will not allow us the choice of peaceful co-existence, even were we willing to accept it.

There is one weapon which has enabled the pig to daily trample over our rights, our dreams and our bodies-the gun. To defend ourselves against mounting pig terror, we must take up the gun.

An armed People's Militia can provide collective self-defense for our homes, our gatherings, our land and our lives.

In Berkeley and throughout Amerika we are a new people. We must survive.

The Tribe advocates the speedy formation of a People's Militia for Self-Defense in Berkeley.

The Tribe will begin next week to publish information relating to the use of firearms and other practical aspects of self-defense.

Free Berkeley!