[lbo-talk] Left Behind: Race and the Second Amendment

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Sun Jul 18 14:22:49 PDT 2004


On Jul 18, 2004, at 1:57 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:


> If politics in the u.s. ever moves towards serious violence, the first
> few years will involve death squads, not pitched battles.

At about 2:00 am on the Saturday before the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago (which I and my colleagues were planning to start driving out to later that day), I and other members of CNVA (the Committee for Nonviolent Action) were attacked by a squad of about a dozen Minutemen at the farm which served as our headquarters, near the Connecticut/Rhode Island boarder. Being nonviolent types, we of course were not ready to fight them off violently.

Judging from the equipment they carried, they were prepared to kill us and burn down the farm. The fact that I am here typing these words is directly due to the intervention of several dozen members of the Connecticut State Police, who had laid a trap for the Minutemen by hiding in the woods surrounding the farm (unbeknownst to us), and they were able to carry out this action because they had been tipped off by the FBI, which had infiltrated one or more informers into the Minutemen.

Since then, I have been rather skeptical of the position that the police, FBI, military, etc., are always on the side of the Right, and the only hope Leftists have is to arm themselves for battle. In the summer of 1968, in the midst of one of the most politically contentious periods in American history, at least a fairly large segment of the FBI and a major state police force cared enough about civil liberties (yes, and the First Amendment) to save the bacon of some wretched peaceniks who I'm sure most of them had fundamental disagreements with on political issues. (Several of the state cops remarked to us after the action was over that it was ironic that they had participated in arresting CNVA members for civil disobedience actions.)

Things are not always what they seem.

One other moral: successful revolutions do not depend on amassing more firepower than the "pigs." They depend on changing the minds of the police and armed forces so that the major part of them will desert and come over to the ranks of the revolutionaries. At this point, IMHO, intelligent revolutionaries should be about the business of developing an attractive and sensible ideology and vision of the future which will minimize, if not make unnecessary, the serious violence Carrol is foreseeing. But when I look about for leftie revolutionaries who are putting forward such an ideology and vision, it's awfully hard to find them.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax



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