If you have a problem with me citing Soul on Ice as an important text worth wrestling with, check out Henry Louis Gates's foreword to the Cleaver collection Target Zero and get back to me. I've read Hugh Pearson's book and Soul on Fire, among other things. Re: Pearson, if you quote something, I want to see a citation with page numbers before I accept it as legitimate. See note on the Dissent review you posted below.
MP: So Eldridge Cleaver should have been prosecuted by a war crimes tribunal?
AS: Surely, in all your searches, you could have googled "rape" and "war crime" if you were genuinely interested in this issue, and not merely using it in an effort to discredit someone's politics. Here are the first things that come up when I google:
"Rape as a War Crime" http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/arape.htm
and various things from Human Rights Watch, including "Documenting Rape as a War Crime" and "HRW Applauds Rwanda Rape Verdict." http://www.hrw.org/women/docs/rapewarcrime.htm http://hrw.org/english/docs/1998/09/02/rwanda1311.htm
Accusations of rape against black men in the U.S. have to be considered within the legacy of white supremacy and the slavemaster which saw the lynching of Emmett Till for looking at a white woman. I don't know the particulars of Cleaver's conviction for rape, and I've never seen any claims that it was a Till-job, so I assume it's legitimate. I don't agree that the crimes of U.S. imperialism or the blood of Vietnamese peasants invalidate a rapist's individual responsibility for rape, and IF Cleaver argued that rape is a tool of revolutionary praxis--I would want to re-read passages in Soul on Ice before accepting this as true--I oppose that, too. If a soldier rapes someone, they should be prosecuted--just like Steven Green and cohorts in Haditha.
MP: Your support of the NPA/CPP include defending the murder of "Renegade"guerilla comrades?
APS: Ridiculous. I posted a statement from a Labor Day march; it was the most concise statement I've seen linking issues such as immigration, war, and free trade. That's it.
A brief comment on the Dissent review you posted... Wellington's emphasis on the lumpen--with zero mention of such basics as the party's Ten Point Program and community survival programs such as the free breakfast program (which I've heard preceded the U.S. government's creation of such a thing)--is wack. Wellington doesn't even specify the black lumpen; from reading his review, you'd think the Panthers believed in organizing all members of "the class beneath the workers."
The Tenth Point of the Program states--and I'm quoting from Brian Glick's "War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It" here (p18)-- "We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny." Very different from what Wellington's suggesting here. COINTELPRO is an afterthought for him; for activists, it's a daily, lived experience.
This review is the first time I've ever encountered the claim that the BPP was organized as an alternative to robbing banks. Wellington certainly uses this to discredit the Party from the root, writing "There is something wrong with social movements that begin as schemes to rob banks." Where does he get that from?
First, he misattributes the quote. It's not from "On the Ideology of the BPP." It's from an anecdote in Cleaver's "Farewell Address" before leaving California for exile (p189 in "Target Zero"). Second, Wellington drops arguably the most interesting part of the nearly paragraph-long quote. The booktext is, "So later for one jive bank. Let's organize the brothers and put this together. Let's arm them for defense of the black community, and it will be like walking up to the White House and saying, 'Stick 'em up, motherfucker. We want what's ours.'"
Now, why did Wellington make changes here--he ends the quote after "community", for one--that drop what's essentially an argument about reparations? And why is the quote misattributed? To shore up a Panthers-as-born-criminals thesis?
Wouldn't be the first time bad information circulated about the Panthers.
aaron
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