heh. i was thinking your other post had to do with not making universalizing statements about how to proceed, but I see here you've pretty much made one anyway, so i guess my defense would have been a huge misinterpretation!
From reading Berger's book, _Outlaws of America_, it seems that what statements like this obscure was that, for them, it wasn't about violence for the sake of violence.
The point was to do a few things:
1. Make the government go after _white_ people. Tie up the government in chasing after them, beating them, trying to undermine their movement: bring the war home.
2. They were precursors to what would become critical race theory in their analysis. They believed they had to be "race traitors" and give up their white privilege -- even while using it. They could get away with casing a police station or a bank because no one questioned white people being in those buildings. Hence, they used their white privilege, but they did so, nearly always, in acts that were supposed to be communications about racist and imperialist atrocities -- such as the murder of George Jackson.
3. Related to both 1 and 2 is the idea that it would only be when white people betrayed solidarity with white privilege -- by refusing to do nothing -- that imperializing racializing structures would start to crack.
4. The early statements had to do with what i mentioned before: the idea that white solidarity had to be broken up by forcing people to take a side.
You're right that they did stupid stuff, especially early on, but that would be making the mistake you'd worried I'd made with the PL: freezing their behavior to once period, rather than examining how they changed -- and by ignoring their clear statements about what they were doing -- in communiques, in Prairie Fire, and in their newsletter, Osawatomi, which was named after the town in Kansas where John Brown's small band did battle with pro-slavery forces.
I do find it interesting that Dennis has so much bile for them. Like him, they weren't satisified with streetcorner protests and marches. Later on, they argued you needed it all: marches, negotiation, armed actions, etc. Like him, they had unremitting bile for the jocks of America, for street racist street toughs, for the Boston racists they spied on and exposed during the Boston Busing Crisis.
And yet, if the old peace lovin' hippies aren't doin rite, neither were the armed actions of the WUO. They are all juss doin it rong!
shag
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws