"I wonder how much you know about the Black Panther
Party and "what they achieved" in American
neighborhoods. In this passage you speak with
authority, but on what evidence to you base your
valorization of the Black Panthers."
The Panthers were the first organisation to show that
working class blacks could organise themselves
effectively, without the help of white liberals or
petit-bourgeois Southern blacks like Martin Luther
King. One example of how they harnessed the (very
limited) resources of a community is the Food in
Schools programme they set up in the late 60s. This
was the first such venture of its kind in many places
. The Panthers were wiped out by a concerted FBI
campaign of assasination. They lost at least 29
members to security force bullets. Noam Chomsky has
commented: 'Watergate is nothing, compared to this
state-sponsored assasination campaign'
The Panthers today act as an inspiration to many young
black and white activists, who recognise that
non-violence and soft left social democracy are
difficult paths to pursue to justice in the age of
monopoly capitalism and shrinking states (note: I'm
not slagging off people who believe in non-violence
and social democracy when I say that).
Of course, not every aspect of the Panthers' practice
is commendable today. I recently wrote an article on
the group's legacy which I can post here if anyone
wants further comment.
"the militias that have
developed along these lines in the last few years have
all been right-wing & fundamentalist in nature,
whether you look at North America or the Balkans."
Both these types of organisations are parodies of
militia. In Bosnia, they are mostly the excresence of
traditional national armies, with all the hangups that
that implies.
The American militias consist of a few wackos hiding
out in Idaho, as far as I can tell from this distance.
They are not mass organisations composed from and
democratically controlled by a community: nor are they
democratically run internally. No contest with the
anarcho-syndicalist people's armies of revolutionary
Spain, or the Panthers.
"And I wonder if you would also approve of Panthers
founder Eldridge Cleaver's advocacy of rape as a
political tool?"
Cleaver wasn't a founding member of the Panthers. As
far as I know, he wrote that stuff in a book called
Soul On Ice, which was a sort of prison journal,
before he joined the Panthers. Lots of people came
into the Panthers with reactionary ideas - what can
you expect, considering the amount of alienation they
felt? There is the story of a 16 year-old would-be
Panther arriving at the group's national HQ and saying
'Gimme some guns, I wanna kill whitey, I wanna do em
in etc etc". Eventually a senior Panther took him over
to a desk and said 'Do you want to be armed, young
man?' The kid nods and says 'Yeah yeah I wanna kill
whitey'The Panther leader opens a desk and starts
digging into it...the young kid, relating the scene
decades later, remembers thinking 'Oh boy, he's
digging real deep he must be pulling out a big weapon
for me' Eventually the hand comes out with a pile of
books and lays them on the desktop. ..'Oh man, I
thought you waz gonna arm me' 'I am' Nice story, and
true to boot.
Cheers
Scott
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Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 16:15:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Political query
From: "B.T. Maude" <[log in to unmask]>
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Scott Hamilton:
" . . . a ban on firearms gives a monopoly to the
state. It hurts groups of people who may need to
organising to protect themselves against abuses by the
state, or rather by the class that controls the state.
The Black Panthers, who patrolled ghetto
neighbourhoods with legal firearms in an effort to
stamp out police brutality, would never have been able
to achieve what they achieved under Australia's gun
laws."
I wonder how much you know about the Black Panther
Party and "what they achieved" in American
neighborhoods. In this passage you speak with
authority, but on what evidence to you base your
valorization of the Black Panthers.
Scott Hamilton:
"History shows that when the state comes under strain
and/ or under the control of extreme political
elements it often becomes necessary for groups
oppressed by it to organise themselves into militias
to defend themselves."
There is of course a perverse logic to this argument,
though it must be said that the militias that have
developed along these lines in the last few years have
all been right-wing & fundamentalist in nature,
whether you look at North America or the Balkans.
And I wonder if you would also approve of Panthers
founder Eldridge Cleaver's advocacy of rape as a
political tool? That's another one that's been popular
lately among ". . . oppressed [groups]" for whom it
has "become necessary [. . .] to organize themselves
into militias to defend themselves." For instance, in
Croatia & Rwanda. As they say in American football,
the best defense is a good offense. That's what
"history shows," eh?
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"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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