B0ycey wrote:You have been arguing for liberal guns laws today.
No.
Gun laws are an irrevelance.
ingliz wrote:Orchestrated violence [terror] is always important.
The populist Left Social Revolutionaries alone, although greatly uncoordinated in their efforts, carried out approximately 2,000 political assassinations in the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution. The anarcho-communist Chernoe-Znamia groups organised raids on police stations, gun shops and arsenals and stole their stock; robbed banks and used the expropriations to buy more weapons; fought pitched battles with the police. Sticks of dynamite were thrown into factories or mansions of the most loathed capitalists. Bomb labs were set up, etc, ect.
To cap it all in March 1917 the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party.
What's the problem?
Terror is inadmissible because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. the anarchist ‘propaganda of the deed’ has shown every time that the state is much richer in the means of physical destruction and mechanical repression than are the terrorist groups.*
It provokes reaction but is absolutely harmless as far as the social system goes.
So why are such acts important?
The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.*
Such acts are counter-revolutionary.
"
The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organisation and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle."
- Lenin
If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister." - Trotsky
* Trotsky
"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia" Orwell
E l/r -10 : L/A -7.64