I’d been looking for this quote!

I will say that it should never be easy for them to destroy us. If you start with Malcolm X and count all of the brothers who have died or been captured since, you will find that not even one of them was really prepared for a fight. No imagination or fighting style was evident in any one of the incidents. But each one that died professed to know the nature of our enemies. It should never be so easy for them. Do you understand what I’m saying? Edward V. Hanrahan, Illinois State Attorney General, sent fifteen pigs to raid the Panther headquarters and murder Hampton and Clark. Do you have any idea what would have happened to those fifteen pigs if they had run into as many Viet Cong as there were Panthers in that building. The VC are all little people with less general education than we have. The argument that they have been doing it longer has no validity at all, because they were doing it just as well when they started as they are now. It’s very contradictory for a man to teach about the murder in corporate capitalism, to isolate and expose the murderes behind it, to instruct that these madmen are completely without stops, are licentious, totally depraved — and then not make adquate preparations to defend himself from the madman’s attack. Either they don’t really believe their own spiel or they harbor some sort of subconscious death wish.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/soledadbro.html

  • LordBullingdon [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Isn’t there a problem with this reasoning that if the average VC could’ve left the jungle to go home to a social democracy in the wealthiest country in the world, some of them at least might’ve done that? I mean that’s basically why Marx’s idea that revolution would begin in the industrialised West never worked out. But there is also the problem, what is a Western revolutionary going to die for? Because a Vietnamese communist might figure, even if I die, at least we have a chance of winning the war and my comrades will be free. Historically slaves have submitted more often than they’ve rebelled, even when their situation is hopeless. Where there’s been organisation and a chance of success, - as with the servile wars in Ancient Rome for example - they have rebelled. What chance of success did communists have in the US?