posted on December 12, 2008 09:15:06 PM new
The Real Bill Ayers
By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008
Chicago
IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.
Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”
Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.
I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.
With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.
I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.
I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.
The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.
The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.
President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.
William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”
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Now there's a well reasoned, factually based reply if ever I've heard one.
Thanks for posting that Roadsmith, reminds me again how heartening it is to know that the American people finally saw through the hate of those who have kidnapped the republican party. Two elections too late, but better than never.
posted on December 13, 2008 09:41:51 AM new
Double BS.
The most hilarious aspect of liberals is the ability to embrace murderers of all stripes. Whether it is the murderer recast as "freedom fighter" (Che, your fav Blk Panther), the "reformed" murderer (your fav inmate turned author), or mass murder (Mao, Stalin), they never met one they couldn't have lunch with.
posted on December 13, 2008 09:58:15 AM new
"Now there's a well reasoned, factually based reply if ever I've heard one."
It is well reasoned and factually based. The guy and his group were nothing more than thugs and terrorists, who saw fit to create destruction and mayhem in our country.
Who gave them the right to do so? Not every American thought he and all his ilk where correct in what they did. While these criminals were out destroying buildings, and creating fear, most Americans were working hard to raise their families and obeying the law.
He should be behind bars. That article is nothing more than revisionist dribble.
As I originally posted. BS
[ edited by kozersky on Dec 13, 2008 09:59 AM ]
posted on December 13, 2008 03:09:51 PM new
"The guy and his group were nothing more than thugs and terrorists, who saw fit to create destruction and mayhem in our country.
Who gave them the right to do so? Not every American thought he and all his ilk where correct in what they did."
Bill: What you wrote, above, could just as easily have been written in a 1700s British-leaning newspaper about the "thugs and terrorists" who dumped precious, expensive tea into Boston Harbor.
Civil disobedience is a lonnnnng tradition in this country. Back then, no one was killed in that tea attack. Ayers didn't kill anyone, either.
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posted on December 13, 2008 07:40:57 PM new
Let's see, if I remember correctly, "In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government." How does that compare with dumping tea in the ocean?
They were terrorists, thugs, and those bombings were intended to intimidate those who did not agree with their leftist leanings. Were you one of those unfortunate people who were forced to flee a building, just prior to the bombs placed by these thugs? The fear and panic must have been overwhelming, for those at the scene.
The last time I checked, we were and are a nation of laws. In the 1700's our form of government and guarantees were not in existence. Bill Ayers and his cohorts should not be praised - there should be continued condemnation.
I am saddened to read that you are sympathetic to their past actions.
posted on December 13, 2008 10:41:39 PM new
Bill: We were married in 1959, pretty ignorant of U.S. politics. Husband went to grad school (chemistry ph.d.) at Berkeley, and I taught near there. We watched the House UnAmerican Activities Committee at work in San Francisco, saw the Berkeley students protesting, etc., and we were somewhat radicalized by living there at that time. We lost our political virginity and, to our horror, found out our government can be right OR WRONG. It's everyone's duty to protest, one way or another, when the government is going in the wrong direction.
The Boston tea party was no flimsy thing. The thugs-some-of-whom-became-our-founding-fathers destroyed nearly a shipload of very expensive tea. If they'd had explosives, I have no doubt that they'd have done what they could back then.
In the American Revolution, Americans were not only protesting against unfair British practices (remember they were our government then) but were shooting and killing. Would you say they did the wrong thing?
Lincoln sent troops to keep the South from seceding, and many on both sides were killed. Was that wrong?
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posted on January 4, 2009 05:54:07 PM new
I agree that terrorists are terrorists and even though the tea party aided in overthrowing British rule, I don't condone it for overthrowing the US government. Tensions ran high during the unauthorized Vietnam war; it was also a time of racial unrest. Many lost patience with peaceful protests and went one or more steps beyond. Dr Martin Luther King's sanity and vision during this time kept the country from imploding. People working for peace and time corrected what bombings could not. Should Ayers be held accountable for his illegal actions during the Vietnam war even though he has led a contributing and peaceful life since then? Perhaps, but no more so than a pardoned president who conducted illegal acts ( an unpopular pardon by a truly heroic President Ford who placed his country's healing above his own political ambitions) or other Vietnam-era criminals given amnesty.
The most appalling aspect of bringing this up in 2008 is the depths the Republican party was willing to sink to in order to win the presidency on unfounded fear. Did a 7-year old Obama conspire to blow up the Pentagon? Palin would have us think so - McCain, I'm convinced, was embarrassed by the guilt-by-association- everyone who served on a committee with Ayers is guilty of the same crime and left the argument to the lip-stick smeared pitbull.
posted on January 4, 2009 09:36:12 PM new
"Should Ayers be held accountable for his illegal actions during the Vietnam war even though he has led a contributing and peaceful life since then?"
Absolutely, unless ygive every dirtbag a freebie.
By having laws that are written down you can do away with stuff like say, tracking down ex Nazi's on one hand and on the other saying "Oh gee, that was 40 yrs ago". Laws say you can't blow up or murder even "bad" people.