THE IDEA OF SELF DEFENSE IN MINORITY COMMUNITIES

OF AFRO AMERICANS AND FIRST PEOPLES FOR INSTANCE

WAS SYMBOLIZED  BY THE REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST LEFT

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/poetry-written-in-gasoline-black-mask.html

WITH THIS PICTURE OF GERONIMO WHICH BY THE EARLY

SEVENTIES WAS ALSO ASSOCIATED WITH AIM,

THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, IT REMAINS ONE OF

THE ENDURING SYMBOLS OF RESISTANCE THEN AND NOW

AND IT IS STILL RELEVANT TODAY


Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on ... - scott crow
Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self Defense
An anthology by by scott crow.
This wide-ranging anthology uncovers the hidden histories 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 20th and 21st 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, Mable Williams, Subcomandante Marcos, Kristian Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, Ashanti Alston, and many more.

Center for a Stateless Society » Review: Setting Sights
May 7, 2019 - Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense. Edited by Scott Crow, with Foreword by Ward Churchill (Oakland: ..
On top of all that, US gun culture — as you might expect, given its overwhelming whiteness — is also associated with a lot of other toxic baggage. This culture is not informed by the history of legitimate armed resistance, but by American Exceptionalism, settler history, all the messianic weirdness coming out of the Second Great Awakening that makes America a travelling religious carnival freakshow, and the whole Scots-Irish “culture of honor” thing, as well as with the amazing level of violence in American society.
So fuck the so-called gun rights movement up, down, backwards, and sideways, every day of the week — and twice on Sunday.
Against this background, Setting Sights is an especially great achievement. Setting Sights, as editor Scott Crow writes, “covers people and communities who have resorted to armed self-defense as part of their struggles for liberation, justice, or basic human rights.” It’s an anthology of commentaries on the issue from representatives of the marginalized groups whose voices are usually drowned out by mainstream American gun culture: People of Color resisting police abuses, women, workers, and the LGBT community.
As American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill argues in his Foreword, the “founding fathers” who wrote the Second Amendment, and the white slavers and settlers who are so centered in the historic gun culture, were themselves the government tyranny against which armed self-defense was and is needed, right up to present-day Y’all Qaedists like Cliven Bundy:
It can be argued, and rightly so, that since the society on behalf these principles were set forth was composed all but exclusively of white settlers — this is to say, invaders — it was everywhere and always the aggressor, and consequently had no basis upon which claim [sic] a right to self-defense, armed or otherwise.
In every case, it was the other side — the Natives killed or driven off their land, the African-Americans hunted down by slave patrols or terrorized by white paramilitaries under Jim Crow — who had the right of self-defense, and the side celebrated in the mythology of America Westerns who deserved to be shot down like dogs.
Churchill also raises the question of how armed self-defense ties in with diversity of tactics in contemporary justice movements. These two themes — the historic legacy of armed resistance by marginalized groups, and their role in present-day resistance to structural oppression — are the themes of most of the writings collected in this book.
But armed resistance is only one half of the picture. The other half is building, here and now, the counter-institutions that will grow and coalesce into the successor society. Armed resistance exists only as a means to an end: protecting our right to engage in the act of building, and protecting our counter-institutions from the capitalist state’s attempts to destroy them. This process of construction is that end.  READ ON