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Once upon a time I was an Emma Goldman anarchist. There was a reason. Well, a couple-few reasons. Among them, my father, who though he belonged to the Communist Party for a decade or so, was really an anarchist all along. But I went to anarchism on my own, as a young adolescent. I'd chosen The Haymarket "Riot" as a history research topic knowing it had something to do with labor or something, and while I was doing one of the most thorough research jobs I would ever do on the subject (partly because my father was excited that I was doing that and took me to the library as much as I wanted, and was happy to have me discuss my findings with him), I fell in love with the immigrant anarchists of the time. I thought they were the bravest, most passionate, most compassionate, most intelligent, and most fun figures I had ever encountered, alive or dead. I drank them up.
To celebrate my efforts, my father gave me a first-edition copy of Living My Life, Emma Goldman's autobiography, which I still have.
(No, my daughter is not actually named directly after Emma Goldman, She is named after Emma Kemnitzer, my great-grandmother, a woman with -- as my father said -- "a whim of iron" -- who taught her husband how to read and sed to get financial advice from her dead brothers and had a collection of angel figurines including one made by Pablo Picasso just for her. But I contemplated Emma Goldman when we chose the name, and later I contemplated Emma, Queen of the South Pacific, as well. Also, I thought it was a nice, normal, sturdy name for a girl)
Emma Goldman was in favor of people taking up arms as appropriate. She went to some uncomfortable lengths to raise money to arm her friend Alexander Berkmann when they thought it was appropriate (it clearly wasn't, he had a stupid plan for his project, it was a dumb project anyway, and he was not adequately prepared for it).
Later, I was in a small left-wing Communist party. art of its platform was no gun control, on the gorunds that people need guns to protect them from the police state. No, we weren't a gun-toting sect. But we thought that it was important to hjold out that option, should it become appropriate. And I guess some members knew how to shoot, and probably there was a person here and there who actually owned a weapon. I never saw one. But I heard stories about how the in the early Soviet days a man who was retiring from a factory job or whatever would be given a rifle as a retirement present, so he could hunt and also so he could protect the people from invaders (the early Soviet Union was invaded often and brutally, many times by the US, and also by other Western countries, so this was not a paranoid fantasy on their part, if it is true that they did this).
Readers, please let's not devolve into a discussion of everything awful about the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks, or left-wing Communist parties, okay? I'm not here to have that discussion. Really I'm not. I've already had it a bunch of times and I am bored with it.
And I've retained a bit of concern about that thing -- the state police being armed while the rest of us aren't -- but I've lost that concern altogether. There's a reason for that. The Black Panthers wsere armed. It didn't save them one whit from being murdered by police: from being destroyed by the machinations of the state: from being suborned, crushed, seduced into drugs and bad behavior and selling out. Their guns didn't do them any good whatever -- I think, actually, that their guns made it more difficult for some of them to hold their own in the face of the garbage that was thrown at them. (I can't figure out how to construct this paragraph so that it doesn't imply that none of the Black Panthers lived on in righteousness, without being destroyed or seduced or killed)
And can you think of anyUS revolutionary who would have been saved from police murder, or imprisonment, or more subtle neutralization by holding a gun in their hands? Can you think of any who was ? I'm not sure I can think of any armed revolutionary inthe US who wasn't destroyed --literally or figuratively -- in connection with being armed. I'm sure there are a lot of them, but I'm probably not thinking of them because the fact of their being armed isn't the salient thing about them.
Salient is a word I learned to overuse when I was a left-wing communist. I still love it.
So anyway, what I'm saying now is that I don't think that the proliferation of sophisticated weapons has in any way advanced revolutionary thought, action, security, or organization in the United States. I don't think it has helped with the transformation of society. I don't think it has helped build revolutionary consciousness. I don't think it has preserved the lives and work of young revolutionaries. If anything, I think it has been a factor in the de-socialization of US culture and politics.
You might think other things. I don't know if I'm up to a full-fledged argument about any of this, even though it was me a couple days ago saying we should be talking about it a lot.
To celebrate my efforts, my father gave me a first-edition copy of Living My Life, Emma Goldman's autobiography, which I still have.
(No, my daughter is not actually named directly after Emma Goldman, She is named after Emma Kemnitzer, my great-grandmother, a woman with -- as my father said -- "a whim of iron" -- who taught her husband how to read and sed to get financial advice from her dead brothers and had a collection of angel figurines including one made by Pablo Picasso just for her. But I contemplated Emma Goldman when we chose the name, and later I contemplated Emma, Queen of the South Pacific, as well. Also, I thought it was a nice, normal, sturdy name for a girl)
Emma Goldman was in favor of people taking up arms as appropriate. She went to some uncomfortable lengths to raise money to arm her friend Alexander Berkmann when they thought it was appropriate (it clearly wasn't, he had a stupid plan for his project, it was a dumb project anyway, and he was not adequately prepared for it).
Later, I was in a small left-wing Communist party. art of its platform was no gun control, on the gorunds that people need guns to protect them from the police state. No, we weren't a gun-toting sect. But we thought that it was important to hjold out that option, should it become appropriate. And I guess some members knew how to shoot, and probably there was a person here and there who actually owned a weapon. I never saw one. But I heard stories about how the in the early Soviet days a man who was retiring from a factory job or whatever would be given a rifle as a retirement present, so he could hunt and also so he could protect the people from invaders (the early Soviet Union was invaded often and brutally, many times by the US, and also by other Western countries, so this was not a paranoid fantasy on their part, if it is true that they did this).
Readers, please let's not devolve into a discussion of everything awful about the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks, or left-wing Communist parties, okay? I'm not here to have that discussion. Really I'm not. I've already had it a bunch of times and I am bored with it.
And I've retained a bit of concern about that thing -- the state police being armed while the rest of us aren't -- but I've lost that concern altogether. There's a reason for that. The Black Panthers wsere armed. It didn't save them one whit from being murdered by police: from being destroyed by the machinations of the state: from being suborned, crushed, seduced into drugs and bad behavior and selling out. Their guns didn't do them any good whatever -- I think, actually, that their guns made it more difficult for some of them to hold their own in the face of the garbage that was thrown at them. (I can't figure out how to construct this paragraph so that it doesn't imply that none of the Black Panthers lived on in righteousness, without being destroyed or seduced or killed)
And can you think of anyUS revolutionary who would have been saved from police murder, or imprisonment, or more subtle neutralization by holding a gun in their hands? Can you think of any who was ? I'm not sure I can think of any armed revolutionary inthe US who wasn't destroyed --literally or figuratively -- in connection with being armed. I'm sure there are a lot of them, but I'm probably not thinking of them because the fact of their being armed isn't the salient thing about them.
Salient is a word I learned to overuse when I was a left-wing communist. I still love it.
So anyway, what I'm saying now is that I don't think that the proliferation of sophisticated weapons has in any way advanced revolutionary thought, action, security, or organization in the United States. I don't think it has helped with the transformation of society. I don't think it has helped build revolutionary consciousness. I don't think it has preserved the lives and work of young revolutionaries. If anything, I think it has been a factor in the de-socialization of US culture and politics.
You might think other things. I don't know if I'm up to a full-fledged argument about any of this, even though it was me a couple days ago saying we should be talking about it a lot.
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