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"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 X-Apparently-To: [log in to unmask] via web803.mail.yahoo.com X-Track: 5: 40 Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 16:15:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: Political query From: "B.T. Maude" <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] X-Unsub: To leave, send text 'leave poetryetc' to [log in to unmask] Reply-To: [log in to unmask] Sender: [log in to unmask] 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? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ ===== "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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%