The Weatherman action in Chicago was important because it was the first time in the history of the anti-Vietnam War movement that large numbers of radicals committed planned acts of violence.

By acts of violence, we mean:

1) Destruction of property-mainly breaking store, apartment, and automobile windows.

2) Unprovoked assaults on persons-mainly police and city officials.

What happened in Chicago was real violence, not what has been called "violence" in other demonstrations. Last April, for instance, people talked about "the violent takeover of University Hall." That was not violence. The students did not intentionally hurt anyone. No property was intentionally destroyed (people got carried away and wrote things on walls and messed up the carpets, but it was not a concerted effort to do damage).

And what happened in Chicago was different from the scuffles (as they are called) that break out between demonstrators and police, when police try to remove demonstrators from places they are not supposed to be.

The Weatherman action was not merely a provocation-like the name-calling at the Chicago Democratic Convention or the Columbia sit-in-which, intentionally or not makes police react violently (and then the demonstrators react to the police).

And, finally, what happened in Chicago was not a riot, in the sense that the destruction in Watts and Newark was called a "riot." What happened in Chicago was carefully planned. The demonstrators knew before each action that they were going to destroy property and hurt people.

The Weatherman action, then. was a very serious escalation in the tactics of the anti-war movement. Essentially, it was an act of war-which is a very good term. since Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn is fond of saying the Weathermen are "the new Red Army fighting behind enemy lines."

If the violence of Chicago was an act of war then it has to be judged like a military encounter. If it is judged that way, the Weathermen lost. Three-quarters of them were taken prisoner and their casualties were easily double that of the other side.

But it was not quite an act of war, because the battles were "events," which were publicized long before they happened.

They were events for the media to cover. and the Weathermen realized they had to get big coverage to achieve their main self-proclaimed goal: to show Third World people (the non-whites in America and abroad) that white people were joining them in their fight against white imperialism. The Weathermen talked frequently about how the people of Bolivia and Panama would see pictures of white kids fighting cops and how it would inspire them.

John Jacobs. one of the leaders of the Columbia revolt and Weatherman's top ideologue, told the troops before Saturday's march: "We don't have to win here... just the fact that we are willing to fight the police is a political victory."

If destruction were the only goal, sabotage would have been more effective.

So it is not quite all-out war yet. The Weathermen are primarily conscious of the symbolic uses of violence, and then conscious of its destructive uses.