Self-defense

Laid out in the 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is the bold and ambitious idea that when a government is unjust, it is the right of the people to change the oppressive system: “. . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security” (Newton 6).

For Newton, this system denies blacks any semblance of rights, denying their agency, their potential and their power. For this reason, “the oppressor must be harassed until his doom” (Newton 84) and this must be done through armed self-defense, for the basic tool of liberation is the gun. Newton’s idea of power does not come through non-violence or other civil disobedience, a method which he finds debilitating, useless and degrading; rather, power comes through facing the enemy on equal grounds. The oppressor must be fearful, and armed self-defense forces the government into this fear. The power to change the system then, comes from the power wielded through weapons and brute force, a force which will require that the government recognize blacks for their worth, or be woefully sorry they didn’t.

While Newton advocates armed struggle, his ideology does not mean that the end product will be a world in which violence reigns. Rather, blacks must use guns as a means to a peaceful end. He quotes Mao Tse-Tung: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we don’t not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun” (cited in Newton 86).

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