Setting Sights

Description

Decades ago, Malcolm X eloquently stated that communities have the legitimate right to defend themselves “by any means necessary” with any tool or tactic, including guns. This wide-ranging anthology uncovers the hidden histories and ideas of community armed self-defense, exploring how it has been used by marginalized 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 defense efforts and its place in larger efforts toward the creation of autonomy and liberation.

Featuring diverse perspectives from movements across the globe, Setting Sights includes vivid histories and personal reflections from both researchers and those who participated in community armed self-defense. Contributors include Dennis Banks, Kathleen Cleaver, Mabel Williams, Subcomandante Marcos, Kristian Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, Ashanti Alston, and many more.

Sujets

• Anarchism
• Firearms

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629634661
• Langue: English

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 Theory, On Violence, Disasters, Defense and Transformation: Setting Sights for the Future, Sometimes Stories Reveal Themselves, 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 Rodr guez
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 D hring 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 Acci n : 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
Sim n 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 film Apocalypse Now
This 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. (The people in Lawrence did the heavy lifting on the project, for which I am grateful.) The subjects varied from self-reflection 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 leftist, radical, or anarchist groups talking about the use of firearms at all, except in historical settings or some far-off revolutionary future. I was part of an anti-fascist defense caucus that trained on firearms 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. That 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 find 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. The 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 The 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 rifles, 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 definition 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 often or savagely indigenous peoples might attack, they can only be seen as defending their own communities against the genocidal onslaught they were suffering. It follows that, irrespective of the white supremacist hypocrisy imbuing the outlook of those who enshrined it in w