Man, these are some sensitive issues, if I knew you personally I’d set up a face-to-face to discuss them, a public forum is not really the arena for such discussion. I will answer, but you must forgive my lack of depth and detail.
- The right time for armed conflict is when you can do maximum damage to your enemy while sustaining minimum damage to your forces. This is a direct quote from Kwame Ture, and has held consistent throughout military history and tactics. You don’t provoke an attack when you do not stand to gain more than you lose. But that’s offensive violence or retaliatory violence, not defensive or subversive violence, which has a different set of standards and tactics.
- Blacks have organized systematic attacks against local police and military; those attacks have been individualistic like when Mark Essex took up arms, or collective, like when the Black Liberation Army took up arms against the police. There were entire FBI divisions dedicated to this type of guerrilla and retaliatory violence. These efforts are not part of our common knowledge because we don’t emphasize those events and tactics, we are afraid to be seen as “glamorizing” Black violence against the State.
- You are not extreme for asking valid questions, or for even feeling like seeing such acts carried out, but anyone who acts on such impulses is purely Reactionary not Revolutionary. Revolutionary violence is (almost) never Reactionary or Spontaneous. “A revolt ain’t a Revolution.”
- Violence is omnipresent in the Black community and across the world. We are fully saturated with violence and the immediate threat of violence; anyone who says that they are non-violent is lying to you and themselves. Everything we have from our computers to our clothing, to the gas for our cars comes to us through violence. So the necessity of violence is not really relevant, what’s relevant is; How do we master and direct the violence. Can we organize the internalized violence and redirect it to our true enemies, can we secure our enemies from the external violence brought against us. We have to determine how we will deal with violence, how we will master and control violence; not waste time arguing about violence and non-violence, because non-violence is not an option, you have non-self defense, because violence is touching all of us at all times.
We need to study violence as a people, we need to stop fearing and mystifying violence, we need to stop internalizing violence, we need to, as you are doing really think about violence and our relationship to the forms of violence that we have to deal with.
I’m sorry I could not give you a better or more detailed answer.
