Setting Sights

Description

This wide-ranging anthology uncovers the hidden histories and ideas of community armed self-defence, exploring how it has been used by marginalised and oppressed communities as well as anarchists and radicals within significant social movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Far from a call to arms, or a 'how-to' manual for warfare, this volume offers histories, reflections, and questions about the role of firearms in small collective defence efforts and its place in larger efforts toward the creation of autonomy and liberation.

Sujets

• Activism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629634661
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense Edited by scott crow Essays by scott crow—“Liberatory Community Armed Self-Defense: Approaches toward a eory,” “On Violence, Disasters, Defense and Transformation: Setting Sights for the Future,” “Sometimes Stories Reveal emselves,” “Introduction: As Rare as Flowers Rising through Concrete: Why Liberatory Community Armed Self-Defense?”—are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License 2017

All other essays © 2018 by the named respective authors. This edition © 2018 PM Press

PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Cover design by John Yates /www.stealworks.com Cover photo by Leon Alesi /www.leonalesi.com Interior design by briandesign ISBN: 978–1–62963–444–9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942918 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

This book is dedicated to those who have exercised power for collective liberation on their terms by any means necessary.

Dream the future Know your history Organize your people Fight to win

Contents

PREFACE scott crow FOREWORD Ward Churchill INTRODUCTION scott crow

ANALYSIS AND THEORY Liberatory Community Armed Self-Defense: Approaches toward a Theory scott crow Politicians Love Gun Control: Reframing the Debate around Gun Ownership Neal Shirley/North Carolina Piece Corps Gun Rights Are Civil Rights Kristian Williams and Peter Little Notes for a Critical Theory of Community Self-Defense Chad Kautzer Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Anti-Fascism and Armed Self-Defense J. Clark The Liberation Gun: Symbolic Aspects of the Black Panther Party Ashanti Alston Desire Armed: An Introduction to Armed Resistance and Revolution Western Unit Tactical Defense Caucus Mischievous Elves: Defending a Broader Concept of the Self Leslie James Pickering Antagonistic Violence: Approaches to the Armed Struggle in Urban Environments from an Anarchist Perspective Gustavo Rodríguez Ten Ways to Advance Liberatory Community Armed Self-Defense North Carolina Piece Corps

HISTORIES OF THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

Russian Anarchists and the Civil War, 1917–1922 Paul Avrich Not Only a Right but a Duty: The Industrial Workers of the World Take Up the Gun in Centralia, Washington, 1919 Shawn Stevenson

The People Armed: Women in the 1930s Spanish Revolution Anti-Fascist Action UK Schwarze Scharen: Anarcho-Syndicalist Militias in Germany, 1929–1933 Helge Döhring and Gabriel Kuhn Other Stories from the Civil Rights Movement: A Spectrum of Community Defense Lamont Carter and scott crow Negroes with Guns: Oral History Interview with Mabel Williams David Cecelski Self-Respect, Self-Defense, and Self-Determination: A Presentation Kathleen Cleaver and Mabel Williams with an introduction by Angela Y. Davis Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party Akinyele Omowale Umoja Drifting from the Mainstream: A Chronicle of Early Anti-rape Organizing and WASP Nikki Craft Oka Crisis of 1990: Indigenous Armed Self-Defense and Organization in Canada Gord Hill We Refuse to Die: An Interview with Dennis Banks scott crow Ampo Camp and the American Indian Movement: Native Resistance in the U.S. Pacific Northwest Michele Rene Weston Mujeres en Acción: Indigenous Women’s Activism within the EZLN Laura Gallery Twelve Women in the Twelfth Year: January 1994 Subcomandante Marcos On Violence, Disasters, Defense, and Transformation: Setting Sights for the Future scott crow Gut Check Time: Violence and Resistance after Hurricane Katrina Suncere Shakur Breaking the Curse of Forgotten Places in Mexico Simón Sedillo Feminism, Guns, and Anarchy in the Twenty-First Century: A Southern U.S. Story Mo Karnage Defending Communities, Demanding Autonomy: Self-Defense Militias in Venezuela’s Barrios George Ciccariello-Maher Toward a Redneck Revolt Dave Strano Defense in Dallas in the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club Interview by scott crow

Trial by Fire: Democracy and Self-Defense in Rojava Alexander Reid Ross and Ian LaVallee Bibliography Glossary Acknowledgments Contributors Index

Sometimes Stories Reveal Themselves scott crow

In … war, things get confused out there—power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity. —General Corman, in the filmApocalypse Now

is book grew organically out of conversations between people in Lawrence, Kansas, and Austin, Texas, which evolved into a collaborative pamphlet called Desire Armed: An Introduction to Armed Resistance and Revolution , released in 2006. (e people in Lawrence did the heavy liing on the project, for which I am grateful.) e subjects varied from self-re/ection and theory, to the history and basics of gun use. As a text, it was limited, but powerful. When that pamphlet was written there were at most a handful of leist, radical, or anarchist groups talking about the use of rearms at all, except in historical settings or some far-off revolutionary future. I was part of an anti-fascist defense caucus that trained on rearms use, safety, and tactical considerations together as part of our organizing within the Anti-Racist Action network. In Lawrence their organizing was largely around Kansas Mutual Aid and the John Brown Gun Club, which both focused on working with rural and low-income whites as part of food, housing, and other organizing programs. Once released, the pamphlet took on a life of its own and now appears worldwide in many DIY and small press editions. I knew there was much more to be written, more histories to uncover, analyses and theories that needed to be heard and discussed by more people. at’s when the idea to expand the zine into this book, Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense , germinated. Over the next several years I researched materials, interviewed people, and collected new or undiscovered essays and articles from around the world on the subject of community armed self- defense. Almost twelve years later, this book is the culmination of that work. I hope you nd it engaging and thought-provoking. Dream the Future Know Your History Organize Your People Fight to Win scott crow From the concrete jungle in the Gulf Coast Basin 2017

Gun Control Means Being Able to Hit Your Target Ward Churchill

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. —Milan Kundera,The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Once upon a time, believe it or not, the right inhering in all communities to defend themselves by force of arms against the violence of external assault was so well understood that it was not thought worthy of serious discussion. Notwithstanding the contentions of Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America , guns were as common as axes on the North American frontier during the period leading up to the thirteen colonies’ armed struggle for independence, and far more essential to survival. Hence, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution acknowledged the right of citizens to keep and bear arms and placed it quite solidly on a military footing having nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to preserve certain “sporting” indulgences for posterity. e character of this provision is readily apparent in the framers’ explicit reference to the necessity of “a well regulated Militia” in defending the U.S. “free State” against armed aggression by foreign powers. Indeed, as John Grenier ably demonstrates in e First Way of War , the country’s military capacity remained almost entirely contingent upon the existence of local militias well into the nineteenth century. No less clarifying are the numerous observations of Jefferson and others among the “founding fathers” to the effect that an armed populace embodies the most effective barrier to the domestic state itself evolving toward a “tyranny.” On both counts it’s obvious that the types of arms envisioned were not of the variety used for hunting rabbits, squirrels, and deer, but those employed by modern armies. In contemporary terms, this would equate to real military-issue assault ries, not the semiautomatic “civilian” models commercially available to the public. It would also be well to remember that it was not especially unusual for local militias, to say nothing of corporate entities like the American Fur Company, to equip themselves with their own artillery, and that the central government did little, if anything, to question—and less still to curtail—their right to do so until the 1860s. It can be argued, and rightly so, that since the society on whose behalf these principles were set forth was composed all but exclusively of white settlers—this is to say, invaders—it was by denition everywhere and always the aggressor, and consequently had no basis upon which claim a right to self- defense, armed or otherwise. Put another way, no matter how oen or “savagely” indigenous peoples might attack, they can only seen as defending their own communities against the genocidal be onslaught they were suffering. It follows that, irrespective of the white supremacist hypocrisy imbuing the outlook of those who enshrined it in written form, the principle holds. American Indians had every right to ght back with every weapon available to them, and one can only wish that these had included rocket launchers and machine guns. To be sure, the same applies with regard to the black chattel slaves imported from Africa and later commercially “bred” in the U.S. by white settlers who purportedly “owned” them and formally classied them as a subhuman species. Plainly, the indigenous West African communities from whence the slaves were forcibly taken had a natural right to defend themselves by all possible means against this genocidal “enterprise,” while those engaged in it had no corresponding right at all. By the same token, there can be no valid claim to the “right to self-defense” against slave revolts in the U.S., either by the slave owners and traders themselves or by the broader white supremacist society that condoned, enforced, and accrued economic benets from chattel slavery. Conversely, the slaves were inherently and undeniably vested with a right to slit not only the collective throat of their “masters” but also the throats of those of whatever who’d comported themselves as either enablers or tacit complexion beneficiaries of “the peculiar institution.”