Katha Pollitt wrote:
> You
> wrote "I never owned a gun and never will," you said you had no
> illusions that "we are going to bring about an armed revolution."
Incidentally, you don't need guns particularly (and certainly not hand guns) for an "armed revolution." Engels made this perfectly clear over a century ago. Neither an armed nor an unarmed force of civilians can in strictly military terms defeat a modern army. But as Iran showed, civilians (mostly without arms, but outside Teheran not wholly without arms) can as it were disarm a modern army under the right conditions.
This is another of the crimes of the militia -- their stupidity in fact: their utter confusion as to how one can in practice either defend oneself against or overthrow the state.
A bit of clarification. All the criticisms made of Cockburn on this list (including mine) do not disprove a larger fact: he and Counterpunch are both of immense service to the left (or, rather, leftists and the potential left, since there is no left at the present). I think he's just plain silly about the Militia rather than sinister. And to use all the information he and *Counterpunch* feed us we don't have to swallow his silliness. And he may (often does I think) put the wrong specific individuals into his category of "pwogs," the category remains useful.
Carrol