Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again . . . till their victory; that is the logic of the people.

-Mao Zedong, Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle

After 8 months of effort, of speakouts and protests, thousands of posters, tens of thousands of leaflets, and hundreds of hours on the street, we failed in the audacious goal that we set for ourselves: to shut down the Democratic National Convention/Death and Nakba Coronation (DNC). This summation will take an unflinching look at our own shortcomings and mistakes alongside the objective difficulties that we faced. What it will not do is make any apologies for raising the demand that the DNC not come to Chicago in the first place, or for trying to shut it down. The criminals waging a genocide came to our city, and settling for anything less than trying to shut them down would have been a massive betrayal of our mission.

Behind Enemy Lines (BEL), our members, volunteers, and supporters, and the organizations who worked with us leading up to and during the DNC have a tremendous amount to be proud of. We politically raised the stakes for the genocidal criminals in the Democratic Party, and we led hundreds of people to confront the genocidal Zionist consulate and deliver a clear message in support of the people of Palestine. We brought hundreds of Chicago residents across 6 different neighborhoods out against the convention, and put posters up in dozens more neighborhoods. We hounded the DNC at public events, brought dozens of volunteers to Chicago, and can confidently assert that we were the only organizations that consistently and regularly went to the people: talking to tens of thousands of people across the city about Palestine and why the DNC represented the Gaza genocide.

Most controversially, we provided an alternative to compromise-with-the-city-work-with-the-cops-lie-to-the-people-peace-police march that tried to present itself as the only real resistance to the DNC. We boldly challenged people to do something more than the permitted and approved by the rulers protest, and unapologetically exposed those opportunists.

Part 1: Timeline

January–April: Cancel the DNC! From the first city hall protest to the capitulationist wind in BEL

In the summer of 2023, BEL took up a campaign against the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), working to expose their connection to the ruling class Crown family, the Chicago philanthropists who are the principal shareholders of weapons contractor General Dynamics. Demanding that the Art Institute and other Chicago institutions cut ties with these ghouls was certainly a just demand to raise, and at its best exposed the deep, everyday complicity between prominent politicians, cultural and education institutions, and the US-Israel war machine. It also was, before October 7th, an attempt to kick some shit off, to try and build anti-imperialist resistance during an ebb of struggle.

For several months after the Al-Aqsa flood on October 7th and the beginning of the US-Israel genocide on Gaza, we continued to focus on the AIC campaign, in addition to joining protests and distributing posters. During this period, BEL grew modestly, but steadily, off to the side of the main protest movement. That main protest movement largely saw its tasks as “more of the same,” holding the same boring protests over and over again, with the occasional flash of civil disobedience. We attempted to influence those protests in a positive direction and play more of a national role through mobilizing contingents and publishing one polemical document, but largely contented ourselves with doing our thing off to the side, holding some interesting events, and mobilizing some students.

We started 2024 by attempting to close that gap and play a more decisive role in initiating protests against the upcoming DNC. We distributed posters, started agitating against the convention on social media, held a kick-off protest one morning in front of City Hall, and held a series of mass meetings around the initial demand, “Cancel the DNC!” This period culminated in issuing a call for youth and students to come to Chicago for the summer and join us in the effort to fight the convention, a series of well-attended mass meetings, a city council disruption, and an infamous protest in front of Chicago’s City Hall on the anniversary of the Iraq war.

That protest in particular ignited a firestorm when an Afghanistan war vet burned an American flag (a flag that had literally flown over the US occupation of Afghanistan) and a Chicago Alderman gave a speech at the same rally. The ensuing media controversy and reactionary farrago drew attention to the anti-DNC demand and the clear link between the DNC and genocide in Gaza. It helped to open up the contradiction between our firm anti-imperialist politics and the protest as usual and tactical maneuvering of the opportunist “March on the DNC” coalition, who refused to issue a single word of criticism against Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson while he was actively welcoming the convention to town.

For a moment, it felt that we had the wind at our backs. Unfortunately we were building a house of sand. The people who had joined BEL following October 7th, or attended our events and mass meetings, were largely students and Left-adjacent activists. By positioning ourselves as critical and adjacent to the Left, but not actually in opposition to it or challenging it for leadership, we attracted people who wanted to be a part of the Left, or make a slightly better Left. And while we succeeded in pushing people to go to the masses and step outside of the well-worn path of boring events and even more boring protests, we did not actually succeed in training or steeling people to go up against opportunism. Our mass meetings, even when well attended, were politically marred by the near-constant questions and discussion of “why don’t you join the Coalition?” or “Why aren’t you organizing with this or that Leftist group?”, and largely failed at involving new people in our ongoing political work.

The weakness in our organization and the failure to politically train our new members was revealed when we released our call for young people to come to Chicago and shut down the DNC, with its now infamous line: “Make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back to school Fall fashion!” One BEL member saw that post and the online backlash it generated as a chance to substantially alter the political line and trajectory of BEL. They attempted to orient BEL towards working with Leftists and away from our politics of going to the people and building the most militant resistance possible. They used the classic techniques of opportunism (lying, gossiping, twisting half-truths) to attempt to wreck BEL. In the course of the ensuing struggle, it became clear that this one individual, who had been playing an active role in our organization, was a self-interested snake, and someone who we should not have been allowed into BEL in the first place. Unfortunately, given the low level of political training in BEL, and the resulting low level of actual unity, a number of people stepped away as a result of this struggle.

With hindsight, it’s clear that we made a number of mistakes, including too low standards for BEL membership and a lack of serious political training for new members. It’s much better for people to honestly struggle out questions and admit that they disagree than to stay in an organization whose politics they disagree with. Political organizations like BEL are not meant to be social clubs, much less opportunities for social climbing. While it was a setback for us to lose members last spring, we emerged with a much firmer political unity, a clearer strategic outlook, and a core of people who had proven themselves in the political struggle against US imperialism and in the internal struggle against opportunism.

April–July: To the people! A spring and summer of speakouts

BEL emerged out of the first period of struggle against the DNC and our own internal struggles quantitatively smaller, but qualitatively stronger, with a higher level of unity and resolve. A key move was to orient ourselves more fully to going to the people and not the Left, and we organized a series of anti-DNC speakouts in neighborhoods around the city. We hit Albany Park, a diverse neighborhood on the Northwest side, to build the first of those speakouts. That first speakout proved to us that our approach was correct: we brought 40 people of different nationalities and ages out to stand with Palestine and denounce Genocide Joe and the DNC in English and Spanish. This proved to us that, not only was there a potential reservoir of support for Palestine and against the convention across different classes and nationalities, but that it was significantly more important to mobilize the masses of people on the street than to pitch ourselves to Leftists and the social media crowd.

After that successful Albany Park speakout, we set out to build an anti-DNC neighborhood committee there, envisioning a group of people from the neighborhood taking responsibility for holding regular speakouts, keeping neighborhood stores stocked with posters and flyers, and building connections to neighborhood religious leaders. We found some enthusiasm among our contacts in the neighborhood and among people who attended the speakout, but we were not able to consolidate the neighborhood organization. While we were bulldog in our agitation and consistent in our followup, we were not able to build the core of neighborhood residents to take up the struggle against the DNC as their own, and our decision to focus on citywide organizing against the DNC meant that we couldn’t deploy a few dedicated activists to solve the day-to-day problems of building a neighborhood committee.

We were able to take the template from Albany Park and apply it in different neighborhoods: maintain a regular, consistent and agitational presence on the street, put up posters in storefronts, and recruit advanced contacts to join the speakout. And we learned through practice to include interactive elements in our speakouts, strong participatory elements that gave people real time ways to demonstrate their revulsion at the genocide. In total we held 10 neighborhood speakouts against the DNC. These speakouts successfully demonstrated a broad, popular revulsion across Chicago against the convention and in support of Palestine.

In Pilsen, the crowd was addressed in English and Spanish, and attendees smacked someone dressed as Genocide Joe with a pool noodle. On Devon Avenue, neighborhood children led us in chants in support of Palestine, people spoke out in a variety of languages, and dozens of people picked up shoes dipped in red paint to throw at images of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanayhu, and Genocide Joe Biden. On the southside in Washington Park, our speakout was greeted by loud honks from passing cars. In Uptown we rallied through the rain, gathering neighborhood residents, Palestinian families, and students, and in Humboldt Park, we chanted in English and Spanish and were joined by Puerto Rican activists and a family whose children had recently evacuated from the West Bank.

While building ties around Chicago, we also made attempts to join and influence the campus encampments in the spring. A comrade from the NYC chapter of BEL was part of the Columbia University encampment and contributed a summation that we broadly distributed on campuses across Chicago and in student encampments. BEL members were present at all of the Chicago area encampments, and were able to hold a teach-in about the fight against the DNC at the University of Chicago encampment. However, we did not take enough advantage of the encampment movement to swing people, especially the newly activated layers of students, to join in efforts to protest and shut down the DNC.

In general our our approach to the encampments overemphasized being on the ground in the midst of struggle, and didn’t take up enough the responsibility to provide overall political leadership and build a stronger organization in the midst of an unprecedented upsurge. For many of us in BEL, the encampments crystallized our summation that the rhetoric and practice around safety in the protest movement was holding the movement back from effectively disrupting business as usual. But we failed to write a polemic against safety politics until much later, rather than sharply engaging in the midst of the campus upsurge. We saw the very real problems in the student movement—postmodernist politics, placing safety above militancy—as insurmountable obstacles rather than as the principal, negative aspect of the contradiction to contend with and try to transform. Consequently, we failed to produce a timely political summation of the encampment movement assessing both its real contributions and its shortcomings. Such a summation could have encouraged the more advanced elements in the student movement to reject safety politics and make the DNC the next target of mass militant protest.

July–August: Come to Chicago and Shut Down the DNC! Mass outreach and Saturday speak-outs

In July and August, we undertook a significant effort to bring dozens of people to Chicago in response to our call for volunteers, secure a storefront space to serve as an organizing center, and plan and program for two weeks of political education, going to the people, and resistance to the DNC. This was a significant logistical undertaking, made even more difficult by the overall degeneration of activist and protest culture in Chicago and the US more generally. Previous generations of protesters, especially the anarchists and anarchist-inspired protesters of the 1990’s and 2000’s generations, built an infrastructure and culture for protesters gathering in different cities, organizing housing and food for out of town visitors, alongside physical centers for debates and political presentations and discussions. We found that we had to build out much of our own infrastructure “on the fly”, taxing our members, and pulling them away from other urgent political tasks.

Those objective difficulties were compounded by us being late to the game in putting forward our concrete plans for the two weeks of the DNC. Although we reached large numbers of people with the call to come to Chicago and take up a week of mass agitation and a week of street protest, we needed to paint a clearer picture earlier of what those two weeks would look like, especially given that going to the masses with anti-imperialist politics and making a real effort to shut down a major ruling class event are foreign concepts in the US.

Despite the logistical difficulties, we did bring dozens of people from around the country to Chicago to take up the urgent tasks of going to the people and trying to shut down the DNC. We utilized our storefront space to host a series of educational events, training our volunteers on agitation, summation, and leading them to practice those skills in real time, by hitting the trains and the neighborhoods to get posters up and organize people to speak out against the DNC. We were able to use our storefront space to feed our volunteers, distribute posters and flyers and other materials, and host a series of educational discussions and movie showings with other serious political organizations: The ReBuild collective, Samidoun, and Dare to Struggle.

These events helped to develop an overall politicized atmosphere and culture of resistance around Behind Enemy Lines. They also, with the benefit of some hindsight, revealed that there was a serious gap between the small number of serious people we were gathering around us, and the overall crowd that was protesting the DNC but not at all interested in throwing down, taking risks, or even seriously considering what it would take to delegitimize the genocide convention.

Those serious people around us that we were able to gather proved themselves on the ground. At its best, our agitation was electric: gathering people around our activists and volunteers, challenging reactionaries on the spot, inspiring people to take the Palestine Vote Pledge on the spot and jump in to help distribute posters and flyers or contribute money. One highlight was catching a CTA car full of DNC delegates off guard, and exposing their complicity with the genocide. In the neighborhoods where we had existing contacts and strong support, we were able to physically and visually represent opposition to the DNC. In other neighborhoods, especially on the southside, we struggled to make breakthroughs.

The influx of volunteers culminated in a Saturday of resistance, where we held four simultaneous neighborhood speakouts on the eve of the DNC. We believe that, like the series of speakouts that preceded them, these speakouts proved that there were deep veins of opposition to the DNC among everyday people in Chicago, and that while too few people were willing to struggle to bring those people to the forefront, where BEL was successful in doing that we held events of a much more serious and higher quality than any other political organization. The masses are the makers of history.

While building these speakouts and hitting the streets hard, we also tried to intervene in larger ideological and political debates with a series of DNC dispatches. These 5 dispatches took up key questions before people who were serious about shutting down the DNC: the selections of Killer Kamala and Tim Walz as the Democratic ticket, the role of various grifters simping for that ticket, and most controversially: “Who says protesting should be safe”, a dispatch taking up the widespread dissemination of cowardice and religious thinking around “safety” that has shackled and hampered protest movements in the US over the last 4 years—especially the last year. While criticizing Killer Kamala and analyzing her support is a necessary task, it’s a relatively uncontroversial one among Palestine protesters. The most successful of the dispatches was the one that caused the most polarization and controversy, not because it was controversial for the sake of controversy, but because it sharply polarized the responses, forcing people to either rethink their assumptions or expose themselves as opportunists who were satisfied with the current state of affairs.

August: Here we do what must be done! DNC invades, Leftists betray, we fight anyway

The first day of DNC protests happened on Sunday, August 18th, with the bizarrely named “Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws”rally and march, a protest in support of abortion and LGBTQ rights. Unlike the leadership of the main opportunist coalition, the “Bodies march” organizers had been willing to publicly criticize the city of Chicago and Brandon Johnson during their permit fight, and were publicly declaring that their event, on the eve of the convention, was to “Crash the party”. We deployed different teams of people to that protest to hand out flyers for our Tuesday protest and to distribute posters and stickers, and a crew of people hoping to turn up the protest and push forward any militancy. Among the usual suspects gathered for the protest, we hoped to find a dozen or so people who were willing to push the protest beyond the bounds set by the city, and perhaps dozens more excited about throwing down on Tuesday. What our volunteers found instead was a dull and self-satisfied march that was both smaller and less militant than we expected.

That initial march would have barely been worth mentioning, except that it was also an opportunity for Brandon Johnson’s Chicago Police Department (CPD) to vamp on protesters, as BEL volunteers were targeted for arrest after leaving the protest and attempting to walk to public transit. One of these arrests was so brutal that it resulted in a protester having to be hospitalized. While some opportunists and Leftist shit-talkers have spread the rumor that “BEL doesn’t do jail support”, we immediately mobilized to support the people arrested, securing legal support, and organizing people to wait outside of the jail that evening, be present the next morning at their court hearing, and again outside of the jail until they were released.

The Monday that the convention opened was the date of the long planned “March on the DNC”. This rally and march had been organized for over 8 months, as the organizers assembled a coalition of Leftist organizations, played footsie with the city of Chicago over permits (while assiduously avoiding criticism of Brandon Johnson), and promised numbers of attendees ranging from 25,000–50,000 people who would march “within sight and sound” of the convention. As we have pointed out in a number of other writings, it’s notable that the opportunist-led coalition march was happy to deploy some radical sounding rhetoric or signs, but never, ever said that the DNC itself was illegitimate and should be run out of town, or that no person of conscience should cast a vote for Kamala Harris. They extended every effort to making sure that their march was open and welcome to their social base of NGO and union staffers who didn’t want to alienate their friends who were safely ensconced in the convention center.

Monday’s march opened with an interminably long and dull rally, followed by an interminably long and dull march, that was notable for not being in sight and sound of the convention, as well as the phalanx of CPD leading the march hand in hand with the coalition’s own peace police safety marshal team in hi-vis vests. Those ridiculous high school hall monitors were trained and actively prepared to push anyone attempting to militantly confront the convention out of the march and into the waiting arms of the CPD.

BEL sent two teams into this march, one which fanned out through the crowd to promote our Tuesday protest, and another which agitated throughout the march about the need to confront the genocide convention rather than stick to what the ruling class deemed to be acceptable protest. The response to the latter team sharply revealed the limitations present in the march and the milieu that came out to oppose the DNC: the majority of attendees either ignored that agitation or were downright hostile to it, especially the peace police who attempted to silence us (for more on this, see our statement “Rumors and Reality about Behind Enemy Lines and the DNC Protests“, and the video from Unicorn Riot). Outside of the organized Leftist groups who showed up to the protest, we did find a minority that was receptive to our agitation and the need to turn things up, especially Arab youth who aren’t part of the organized Left and some anarchist-leaning protesters.

Two moments from Monday’s march give a a sense of the contradictions present: at one point while the real police and the peace police were steering the march away from the United Center where the convention was being held, some BEL volunteers agitated that the crowd was moving the wrong way, shouting through a megaphone that “the DNC is that way!” Advocating even a slight challenge to the negotiated march route was a step too far for most attendees and the peace police. The most dramatic and clarifying moment of the march was when some brave people actually broke through one section of the barricades that separated the march from the convention, and the peace police led the crowd away from that confrontation, ensuring that the convention would be unchallenged, but leaving the courageous ones to the police to be arrested.

The coalition should have been embarrassed by their absolute failure to turn out the numbers that they claimed would come, and embarrassed again after being exposed as collaborators with the city and police by BEL and other protesters who actually wanted to shut down the DNC. Instead, the coalition and the organizations leading it (especially those associated with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization) ran the typical opportunist playbook, simultaneously telling lies and claiming easy victories, by issuing bombastic statements about how successful their march was and slandering and denouncing BEL and other protesters who weren’t satisfied with an afternoon stroll. We have answered the slander before (in the Rumors and Reality statement) and won’t rehash the arguments here, except to say one thing. In the slanderous statement against BEL, the lies and rumors spread online and in real life, the coalition and its member organizations, especially those associated with FRSO, claimed the postmodernist mantle of the community or the nebulous “Chicago forces that lead the Palestine liberation and the Black liberation movement,” who disliked our actions. We never did and never have heard a defense of how the March on the DNC coalition contributed one iota to challenging the DNC, standing up for Palestine, or ending the fucking genocide.

On Tuesday evening, we got a chance to do what needed to be done. We thoroughly summed up this event a month ago in a report called “Report Back from the Make it Great Like ’68 Protest at the DNC.” In short, we gathered hundreds of people in front of the Israeli consulate on the second night of the convention. In contrast to the previous two marches, people came through prepared to make a statement, to the gathered media, to the war criminals throwing themselves a party a few blocks away, and especially to the people of Palestine: there are people in this country who have your back and are willing to take risks to prove it. Even as hundreds (at least 500, maybe more) of CPD gathered in a massive show of force and intimidation, our people stood defiantly, denouncing the genocide, denouncing the DNC, burning the flags of the imperialist US and its Israeli attack dog.

Refusing to let us march to the DNC, Brandon Johnson’s CPD staged a police riot, brutalizing protesters, arresting over 50 people including journalists, and kettling protesters: an Orwellian practice where the police issue dispersal orders and then refuse to let people leave, arresting them instead. The police riot in front of the consulate that night was personally supervised by CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling, a clear message from the city of Chicago that they had no problem brutalizing protesters or violating free expression in defense of the genocide convention. Despite being hounded by cops, Zionists, and white supremacists from the beginning, and not even being allowed to march, our rally make a profound statement: there are people in the US willing to stand up and go beyond politics as usual and protests that are acceptable to the rulers. Powerful speeches were delivered from Behind Enemy Lines and Samidoun, and people from the crowd stepped forward to speak their bitterness. Most importantly, the City of Chicago and the DNC could not say that the convention met smoothly and unopposed.

Following the police riot and mass arrest, we immediately mobilized to support the arestees and go on the political counter-attack. We issued our first statement in response to the police riot early in the morning of August 21st, written on the front lawn of the police station while waiting for comrades to be processed, and gave a series of interviews exposing the Snelling-supervised riot by Brandon Johnson’s thugs. Behind Enemy Lines members were present outside the police station within an hour of the protest ending, and our presence remained until the last protester was released. We sat in the court for all of the hearings held that morning to monitor the proceedings and support the protesters.

From the lawn in front of the CPD precinct, we started to cook up a Drop the Charges campaign, and one of our volunteers drafted the first leaflet before the sun came up on Wednesday morning. While simultaneously strategizing with the National Lawyers Guild, supporting people as they were released from jail, and speaking out in the media, we also deployed a group of volunteers to start to go to the people on Devon Avenue, to talk to the masses about the police riot and our demand to drop all the charges. On Thursday, we came together with many of our volunteers, including some who had gone to jail, and officially launched a campaign to have all of the charges dropped on all DNC defendants, and deployed street teams out into the neighborhoods to start to build support for the campaign.

Fittingly, we ended the week of the DNC on Thursday night with a deeply moving presentation from Dare to Struggle on the struggle against police brutality and their organizing to rebuild October 22nd as a national day of protest against police brutality. Meanwhile, a few dedicated activists tried to take the last night of DNC protests and push them forward to take a more militant stand. At least one person told us that they were directly inspired by the courage of our protest on Tuesday evening to stand up to the Chicago police on Thursday.

The DNC ended on Thursday with the successful nomination of Killer Kamala. As we launched our Drop the Charges campaign, had our summation meetings, and saw our friends and comrades from outside Chicago off, the other side also launched their summation. Larry Snelling and Brandon Johnson took their victory laps, complete with accolades for the March on the DNC coalition and their marshals, and purposeful attacks on Behind Enemy Lines. Snelling outed himself to the media as a mind reader, baselessly claiming that we had some “intention” of doing violence at our Tuesday night protest, during which his pigs did violence against us. Brandon Johnson, who had spoken at the genocide convention, claimed that the week of the DNC was a model of “constitutional policing”.

August–Present: Drop the Charges!

Despite the best efforts of the city, on behalf of the Democrats, and the sellout, collaborationist coalition organizers, every day of the convention some people tried to push protests to take a more militant stand, and the CPD responded the way they do. According to the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the “CPD conducted a total of 76 arrests from Sunday through Thursday—two on Sunday, thirteen on Monday, 59 on Tuesday and two on Thursday—which resulted mainly in municipal citations for disorderly conduct, but also several people charged with misdemeanors, as well as four felonies.”

The NLG deserves praise for deploying legal observers to protests and a team of lawyers to support the people while they were held in jail, and for their continued legal defense of arrestees. For our part, we know that the main fight against repression is the political fight to defend everyone under attack. When we first wrote the Behind Enemy Lines mission statement, we made a point to say that we would promote and defend courageous resisters against the US empire, and our Drop the Charges campaign is a key expression of that principle, defending our members and volunteers and others arrested at a protest that we called, but also defending everyone arrested during the DNC.

Since the DNC ended, we have had a physical presence at each and every court date of a BEL member or supporter who wanted people in court for them, and held multiple press conferences and rallies demanding that the charges be dropped. (To the Leftists claiming we don’t do jail support: how come you’ve done nothing to support those arrested?) We’ve hit the streets with flyers and posters exposing police brutality at the DNC and demanding the charges be dropped, flooded the office of the mayor, city law department, and state’s attorney with phone calls, and held a people’s tribunal of Johnson and Snelling, which found them guilty of staging a police riot, systematic suppression of pro-Palestine expression, and complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Part 2: Responses

The people

Oftentimes when people schooled in Leftist ways of thinking from social media come to Behind Enemy Lines, they’re shocked or dismissive of our approach of going to the people. There’s an assumption that regular people, especially working people, immigrants, poor people, and other proletarians, somehow won’t be receptive to anti-imperialist agitation, or that anti-imperialist agitation somehow needs to be tailored to tailing after people’s perceived immediate interests. What we have found is that the opposite is true. There is a ready audience for agitation against the Gaza genocide, and a great well of support for Palestine in every corner of the city.

We put up posters declaring that “We choose the world! The DNC is not welcome in Chicago” in barber shops, halal grocers, cafes, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and cell phone repair stores. We raised funds for our volunteers storefront to storefront in immigrant neighborhoods, and at a gentrified farmers market. We brought children, parents, grandparents, and students out to our speakouts, people who delivered prayers and poems, and we had our materials translated into both Spanish and Urdu. We’ve had deep conversations and long arguments about the role of US imperialism in the world with down on their luck people smoking weed in the park.

All of this rich experience, especially the concentrated efforts the weeks before the DNC this August, prove to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re absolutely right to go to the people and not the Left. However, that doesn’t solve the knotty problems of how to turn both ambient and organized mass support into coherent and viable mass organizing projects, and of bringing people who often live difficult and complex lives into open struggle against US imperialism.

We found reservoirs of support among the masses but objective difficulties in mobilizing and organizing those reservoirs of support. By contrast, among people involved in the protests, we encountered nearly an opposite problem: too few people had come to town to protest in the first place, and among them too few even wanted to engage in debate and struggle over the way forward. While this was always going to be a difficult problem, there were serious shortcomings in our practice in the spring and summer, especially our failure to try and win more people from the encampment movement to come to Chicago. Overall, we should have given greater emphasis to struggling with people to commit to coming to Chicago for the DNC, and been bolder, earlier with our plans for the DNC.

The pigs

From the beginning of our efforts, Behind Enemy Lines was singled out by the repression and surveillance apparatus of Brandon Johnson and Larry Snelling’s CPD. On August 7^th, the hack ABC-7 Chicago reporter Chuck Goudie laundered a “joint threat assessment” from law enforcement that would have been clownish and buffoonish if it weren’t the precursor to further repression. That report claimed that a May disruption that we proudly organized at a DNC volunteer event was the precursor to us “targeting” the DNC. This was based on outrageous lies about that May disruption that were comically refuted by the video that we ourselves put online. But that report did successfully lay the groundwork for the further targeting of BEL by the CPD leading up to the convention.

The storefront office that we opened on the Northwest side was under constant surveillance from the CPD, including marked and unmarked cars and one incident where a group of CPD in civilian clothes loitered in front of the office for 30 minutes, just so we knew that they were there. Our street teams were routinely under surveillance by the CPD for doing nothing more than passing out flyers and talking to people on the streets, and in one instance a BEL volunteer was detained and nearly arrested after a false Zionist complaint to the police. CPD harassed our Albany Park speakout, and spread rumors on Devon Ave. to try to prevent people from attending.

A BEL volunteer was targeted after the Sunday night march with an arrest so brutal that it required hospitalization. They had to wait hours to speak with a lawyer and were denied a sweatshirt to wear in their cold cell. After the police riot on the Tuesday of the convention, people arrested spent hours in dark vans before being held overnight in unhygienic jail cells, where people were denied clean drinking water. Muslims had no food offered to the them that wasn’t ham. Women did not have access to trash cans, and used menstrual products had to be disposed of on the floor of jail cells.

The Left (the other pigs)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, after the armed enforcers of the state, the single biggest obstacle to shutting down the DNC, to waging a political struggle against the convention that actively delegitimized Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala, was the organized Left. And unfortunately, while BEL volunteers and a few other people came to Chicago understanding what needed to be done, most of the people who came out to the protests were Leftists, who were satisfied with not challenging the DNC at all, instead taking a few walks in the park escorted by the CPD.

It is a great disappointment and should give pause to anyone who still calls themselves a Leftist that the majority of people who came out to the protests were perfectly fine—and even smugly self-satisfied—with the pathetic coalition marches, with their drawn out speeches, peace police, and hostility towards militancy. It’s a failure of BEL and other people who genuinely believe in the need to escalate that we weren’t able to bring more of our people to Chicago, either to roll with BEL or just to bring the missing spirit of escalation. It was a particular error on our part that we weren’t able to struggle with those from the militant end of the student encampments to see the DNC as a particularly imporant arena to delegitimize the war-makers.

There were some attempts outside of BEL to turn things from a 1 to a 3 at least. Various crews held noise demonstrations and harassed delegates leaving the convention, although no one at these noise demonstrations, as far as we know, was willing to face arrest. Some brave people made sure that a group of delegates were appropriately served maggots for breakfast at one downtown hotel. And we would be remiss not to shout out our anarchist comrades who understood the assignment the whole week.

But overall, the Left and Leftists stood in the way of any attempts to shut down the DNC. While we can diagnose a myriad of causes for the morbid symptoms of collaborationism, social pacifism, and postmodernist identity politics and the willingness by Leftists to do the job of the police for them, the underlying cause is the rotten careerist opportunism of the groups leading the March on the DNC Coalition: FRSO and their affiliated organizations. The leadership of the Coalition declared from the beginning of their organizing that they were the main force organizing protests against the DNC, they would treat anyone attempting to call for the DNC to be cancelled or shut down as hostile, and they would do everything in their power to keep the DNC protests friendly to the “left” wing of the Democratic Party and especially to Brandon Johnson.

For all of the signs that said “Victory to the resistance” and the chants about Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala, the fact is that the Coalition leadership was happy to be the approved by the rulers escape valve for any opposition to the Democrats at their own convention. That explains why they didn’t have a single point of unity that said “this march is opposed to people voting for Killer Kamala”, and why their lead banner was carried by Chicago Aldermen who endorsed Genocide Joe in the last election. Many of the leading and member organizations of the Coalition are foundationally committed to not rocking the boat in any way because their careers, financing, and social capital all rely on close to ties to the Democratic Party.

It’s precisely because of their near-hegemony among the established Left, and their deep social ties to elements of the ruling class (through various unions and NGO’s), that the Coalition was able to project themselves as the leading and even main force in the DNC protests, and to cynically weaponize identity politics against anyone criticizing their lame collaborationist march. To prove their ultimate fidelity to the rulers, they made sure that all of their marches were patrolled by a ludicrous group of hall-monitor-ass safety marshals, whose job it was to push anyone trying to be defiant out of the protest and into the arms of the police.

To further prove their ultimate fidelity to the rulers, a number of organizations associated with FRSO publicly denounced Behind Enemy Lines (of course without having the courage to name us). That cowardly, slanderous statement repeated the same “outside agitator” lies about BEL that were actively being told by CPD Superintendent Snelling, and was issued while people were still being held in jail after the 8/20 police riot. To draw a clearer picture: one of the organizations that co-signed the slanderous statement was the FRSO-led Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization that advocates the fantasy of “community control of the police”, worked to get Brandon Johnson elected, and campaigned for a new police review board that has given Superintendent Snelling its blessing. The head of the police review board, Anthony Driver, has been one of the most strident supporters of Snelling, giving him “left” cover to repress protest movements. So, while members of BEL were in jail after being beaten and arrested by Johnson and Snelling’s cops, the anti-repression organization that helped to elect Johnson and select Snelling was echoing the same lies that Snelling was telling about BEL. We still don’t know what community control of the police is supposed to mean, but maybe it’s just Leftists in hi-vis vests working hand in hand with the real pigs.

The real reason these opportunist hacks hate BEL and singled us out for so much derision, including vitriolic harassment of Palestinians who publicly work with us, is because our agitation and action actively expose their complicity with the system that is committing genocide. The fact that there is an organization and a force willing to do what needs to be done, and not afraid to call out the “left” wing of the Democratic Party, embarrasses those people who, for more than a year, have been saying that escalation is not possible. We need to take that embarrassment further and completely delegitimize all the collaborationist and opportunist organizations and “leaders” out there for anti-imperialist resistance to flourish.

The media

After months of being absolutely ignored by the local and national media (except for a flattering attempted take-down in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal), once the convention rolled into town there was a lot of media interest in BEL that dissipated immediately after the convention ended. Our experience dealing with the national and local media outlets is that nearly every journalist will attempt to befriend you and even cultivate you as a source of quotes or information, and then have no problem misquoting or slandering you when it serves their purpose. In our experience, this was true of both mainstream and supposedly sympathetic journalists, although there are still a handful of honest reporters working who we could build longer term relationships with.

In our experience during the DNC, people working for local print and radio outlets were interested in deeper conversation with background, context, and follow-up, while the local TV news was particularly noxious, uncritically parroting the lies of Larry Snelling and going out of their way to doxx individuals who are facing charges from protests. We worked, on the fly during the DNC, to develop the skill of being bulldog in getting our message across to the media, even and especially when their questions were inflammatory or outrageous.

Since the DNC ended we’ve actually tried to get media coverage for our campaign to the Drop the Charges and have received very little. The lesson to us is that when you have something to say, no matter how obnoxious the media is, you need to speak to them and use them to project to the people. Given that we now know that there are small windows when we have access to the media, it’s critical that we develop a few media spokespeople who can function as a press team so that we can seize the next opportunity that come our way.

Our people

One policy that BEL established when bringing volunteers to Chicago was that people who were members of opportunist-led organizations had to quit them before they could come. It’s a point of pride for us that as part of this tremendous effort, a few people stopped working with the PSL and FRSO. Beyond just people quitting those organizations, we saw that the tremendous effort that we undertook bore fruit in the transformation of ourselves and of the people who came to volunteer. We saw people who had never gone to the masses before, and were even skeptical about its efficacy, step up and initiate conversations after a few days. When we came under social media attack from the Left, we saw people reaffirm their commitments to anti-imperialist politics and lose friends along the way.

Combining weeks of political training in agitation, summation, building speakouts, and going to the people on street teams, we were able to bring into being, for a short time, a vision of what we believe Behind Enemy Lines could be: a serious, determined, multinational force against US imperialism inside the belly of the beast, dedicated to the masses and steeled by facing down the police and opportunist attacks.

Appendix 1: Some responses to our anarchists friends

There are several things to commend in the DNC summation from the Lake Effect Collective (LEC), Seattle Is Never Coming Back. First, we appreciate that the authors took the time to write something for public consumption and debate, rather than engaging in gossip or shit-talking (and credit where credit is due, they are more timely writers than we are). Second, they are correctly unflinching in their criticism of the FRSO-led Coalition and the role of their marshals in serving the CPD. Where we disagree is in their characterization of BEL. While we certainly welcome criticism and strive to learn from it, we do also have an obligation to respond to it.

First, the authors call us “a previously marginal, politically-vague but outwardly ‘militant’ group called Behind Enemy Lines”. While we won’t comment on whether or not we are marginal, or if our militancy has earned scare quotes, we find the allegation of being “politically-vague” an unusual one. We have a mission statement that clearly articulates our politics (found on our website), have held dozens of public events where our members can be met, and have written tens of thousands of words of analysis, polemic, etc. During the DNC, we rented a storefront organizing center where anyone could walk in and ask us questions. So we think we can defend ourselves, at least, from the allegation of vaguary: we’re an anti-imperialist organization who believes in doing what must be done to stand with the people of the world against US empire. And if people want to know what we think and why we do what we do, they can always just come ask us, rather than relying on internet gossip. Our guess is that Lake Effect Collective has trouble making sense of an organization that doesn’t fit into the existing Left, and that’s why they find us “politically-vague”.

The LEC authors write that the 8/20 protest at the Israeli consulate was disastrous, because there were mass arrests and no “tangible windfall” for the movement. Taking stock of the whole week of the DNC, we still believe that the 8/20 action outside of the Israeli consulate delivered the most politically coherent and most militant message of all of the protests, and that the mass arrests were entirely worth it to send the message that some people won’t go along with the program.

We also have to seriously disagree with the strategic prescriptions from the LEC, with their faith in turning Leftist movement functionaries into spontaneous militants through the exact right combination of tactics (these are the people who tried to hand us, and presumably you, over to the cops), and reaffirm our position that the force that can actually bring down US imperialism is the masses of people, and that our obligation is go to them and bring them into struggle. The reason we ran around all summer and struggled with people to join us in shutting down the DNC had nothing to do with proclaiming how “hard” we were, and everything to do with trying to live up to that responsibility.

Appendix 2: Still against the vibe shift

In the first of our DNC dispatches, we described the switch at the top of the Democratic Party ticket as a “vibe shift”, one that was noticeable up and down society. Although street level enthusiasm for Killer Kamala has receded since the convention, our unfortunate conclusion is that the vibe shift largely worked. A number of people who could not bring themselves to vote for Genocide Joe have been successfully disciplined into agreeing to vote for, if not actively supporting, Killer Kamala.

We wrote in that dispatch, “In light of the effort to prop up Killer Kamala, the protests against the Chicago DNC become more important to burst the bubble, and crash the genocide party. If there are not militant protests determined to actually disrupt and shut down the convention, the pliant media will have no problem saying ‘These protesters have some problems with the Democrats, but they’ll eventually fall in line.’ Instead, we must aim to delegitimize Killer Kamala and give people a concrete vehicle to express that they refuse to fall in line.” Unfortunately, and despite our efforts, the protests at the DNC spectacularly failed to do anything of the sort. In fact, the lackluster attendance of the milquetoast protests combined with the wholesale sellout of the uncommitted movement and the endorsement of Killer Kamala by prominent progressives signaled that the vibe shift is real, and has worked.

It’s a critical task between now and the election to do everything possible to delegitimize both Donald Trump and Killer Kamala. BEL offers its Palestine Vote Pledge as one key tool in that struggle, a simple declaration that people won’t vote for any candidate that supports the genocide. The “progressive” politicians, from AOC to Bernie Sanders to Brandon Johnson, joining the Killer Kamala campaign should be be treated with the same scorn and derision as Harris herself.

Part 3: Lessons

The fight against the DNC was the most significant project that Behind Enemy Lines has taken up by a mile, from the hours on the streets agitating and struggling with people, to the logistical efforts to feed and house dozens of volunteers, print thousands of flyers and posters, obtain an office space, etc., all the way through to the people still fighting charges. The number one lesson that we can draw from these months of effort is that we were profoundly correct in fighting to shut down the DNC, and that all of our efforts weren’t enough. In the face of everything that has occurred since the convention: the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the slaughter of thousands in Lebanon, the repeated bombing of Yemen, the revelations of widespread torture and sexual assault in the IDF’s concentration camps, everything done to shut down the DNC and delegitimize Killer Kamala was morally justified, and we should have done more.

While lowered sights, opportunist fuckery, and the vibe shift all contributed to keeping numbers and militancy down, the fact that there were dozens of people from around the country willing to come to Chicago and roll with BEL and hundreds willing to stare down 500 of Brandon Johnson’s thugs proves that there were other pockets, crews, and individuals who we could have tapped into to make our efforts even more significant. We’ve tried to focus our agitation on the imperialists and their lackys, but we should have been more openly combative and polemical against the opportunists earlier. Since the opportunists were always going to lie about us and slander us, we might have been able to establish the distinction between our approach and theirs even earlier had we been more willing to face the Leftist backlash. Given the urgent responsibility in front of us, we cannot be satisfied with just being an alternative to the opportunists; we need to actively provide leadership to people who do want to do something more.

Next steps

BEL members on the ground in Chicago have been thick into the campaign to drop the charges, going to court to support people, hitting the streets to build support, holding rallies and a people’s tribunal, and confronting the mayor. Fighting back against the repression brought down against DNC protesters is a critical next step after the convention itself, to support the people arrested and make sure we get their backs, and to make it clear that we won’t stop fighting for Palestine in the face of repression.

We have learned a good deal about the political challenges of waging these larger political struggles, and are working to build Behind Enemy Lines into a truly national organization, so we’re even better equipped to take up national political struggles and interventions. That means developing our national membership, building toolkits for people to take up anti-imperialist agitation in their own areas and build organization, and taking responsibility for leading through political line: developing statements, materials, posters, and organizational forms that can bring people into political motion against US imperialism.

The DNC reinforced our commitment to move further away from the Left and to the people where the greatest potential reservoir of struggle against US imperialism lies: among proletarians and oppressed people, especially immigrants and youth who are outraged at the Gaza genocide and not amenable to politics as usual. As we learned firsthand from the DNC, the organized Left is content to walk away from the war-makers, and we’re on a mission to find and organize the people who want to go confront them.

It’s right to rebel against genocide!

The empire is the enemy. From the belly of the beast, we choose to resist it!