---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 11:10:13 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Dont Need a Weatherman
Don't Need a Weatherman
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/267rdlhy.asp>
The clouded mind of Bill Ayers.
by Ronald Radosh
POOR BILL AYERS. His timing could not have been worse. Just when his widely
publicized memoir of his days as a terrorist was coming out, our nation
suffered its worst terrorist assault ever.
Indeed, the very morning of the attack, the New York Times printed a
fawning profile of Ayers and his comrade
in terror, Bernardine Dohrn. Under the headline "No Regrets for a Love of
Explosives," accompanied by a large
color photo of the couple, Ayers boasts that he bombed New York City's
police headquarters in 1970, the
Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972and proudly adds, "I
don't regret setting bombs. I feel we
didn't do enough." Asked whether he would do it again, he answers, "I don't
want to discount the possibility."
Or, as he puts it in Fugitive Days: A Memoir, "I can't imagine entirely
dismissing the possibility."
Given the timing, the New York Times may have regretted printing the piece,
but worse was to come, for, five
days after the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists, the
newspaper printed yet another flattering
interview with the terrorist. (The story appeared in the Sunday magazine
section of the paper, which the Times
had printed before the attacks.) In this second interview, conducted by a
writer whose parents were comrades
of Ayers in the Weather Underground, Ayers lets us know that America "is
not a just and fair and decent place."
This, from the man who is now a distinguished professor of education at the
University of Illinois, Chicago, and
who brags at the end of Fugitive Days that he is "Guilty as hell, free as a
bird, it's a great country." As for those who might believe without irony
that America is a great country, Ayers has one reaction: "It makes me want
to puke."
Bill Ayers belonged to a late offshoot of what began in 1962 as a protest
group, the Students for a Democratic
Society. SDS subsequently held the first student antiwar rallies in
Washington, D.C., and organized large
chapters in nearly all major American universities. By June 1969, it had
split into two distinct groups, those
with a traditional Marxist approach aimed at organizing the working class,
and those spurred on by visions of
revolution in the Third World. This latter group, inspired by Ho Chi Minh
and Mao Zedong, opted for a
homespun guerrilla army of covert terrorists. Deciding to become warriors
who would, as they used to say,
"bring the monster down" by using violence against those living in "the
belly of the beast," they named
themselves "the Weathermen" (after a line in a Bob Dylan song: You don't
need a weatherman to know which
way the wind blows).
All that was more than thirty years ago, but Bill Ayers still looks back
with fondness on the violence of what was called in those days the "New
Left." Indeed, in Fugitive Days, he attempts to bring his readers to share
his reasoning. He and his comrades were moved, he insists, by the most
decent of motives to undertake, not
terrorism, but a restrained and purposeful form of "resistance." Terrorists
seek to harm average people, men,
women, and children, without regard to the target. For the Weather
Underground, "the symbolic nature of the
target" was paramount. They were only trying to prove "that a homegrown
guerrilla movement was afoot in
America," and thus they bombed police stations, statues to those they
considered oppressors, ROTC buildings, draft offices, and corporate
headquarters.
OF COURSE, THEIR DECISION TO MOVE to bombing came at a cost. On March 6,
1970, a bomb they were
constructing in their Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally exploded,
killing Ayers's girlfriend Diana
Oughton and his Weatherman comrades Ted Gold and Terry Robbins. Ayers
begins his book with a portrait of
how he heard the news, waiting by an isolated phone booth for his weekly
report to be phoned in. Shattered,
Ayers realized that they were destroying themselves and the time had come
to quit.
What Ayers does not mention is that the bomb that killed his friends was an
antipersonnel bomb meant for an
army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had it exploded at its chosen target,
thousands of soldiers and their
dates would have been killed. "Terrorists destroy randomly," he writes,
"while our actions bore...the precise
stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to
educate." Somehow, the GIs his
comrades aimed to kill, or the policemen he might have murdered had a bomb
he planted in a Chicago
station gone off, do not count. And the GIs' dates, and the civilians
working at the police station, also do not
count. Their deaths would simply have been a way of educating people, as
Bill Ayers continues to educate
them at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Despite his numerous disclaimers that he was never a terrorist, Ayers often
emotes about the mystical wonder
of bombs. He reprints a verse in praise of dynamite by the
nineteenth-century anarchist Johann Most: "Stuff
several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch of pipe,...plug up both
ends, insert a cap with a fuse
attached,...and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will
follow." Throughout the book, he often
ends with such words as "Bombs away!" After witnessing riots and a
shoot-out between police and black radicals in Cleveland, a murderous
assault he calls a "loving attempt...to change so much of what was
glaringly, screamingly wrong," Ayers writes:
"Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so
terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently
fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no
longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a
bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked
down."
The extraordinary mau-mauing that convinced the New York Times to print not
just one but two obsequious
profiles of Bill Ayers was only part of the publisher's plan for promoting
Fugitive Days. Had the events of
September 11 not taken place, Ayers would have embarked on a twenty-city
book tour. Ron Rosenbaum,
writing in the New York Observer, found some merit to the "terrible logic"
of the terrorists' "convictions," praised them for having "emerged from the
underground without betraying their principles." Edward Said, Columbia
University's own radical intellectual, blurbed the book for "its marvelous
human coherence and integrity." Studs Terkel called it a "deeply moving
elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent
world." Thomas Frank declared Ayers a man who took a "quintessentially
American trip," and Scott Turow in his blurb regrets that Ayers's "critical
point of view" is one we are "barely able to recall."
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SEEMS to show that we are able to recall it all too
well. In its press release after the attacks, Beacon Press printed a
statement from Ayers (also printed, in shorter form, in the New York Times,
though the Times has not printed any of the scores of letters it received
protesting Ayers's double appearance in its pages). In the statement, Ayers
refers to "the barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings" as a
"nightmare" and claims he is "filled with horror and grief." Noticing that
his memoir is "now receiving attention in a radically changed context," he
asks that we not "collapse time" and imagine that his words apply to the
United States today. Fugitive Days, Ayers says, is simply his effort to
explore "the intricate relationships between social justice, commitment,
and resistance"and "to understand, to tell the truth, and to heal."
Not surprisingly, to read Fugitive Days is to discover that Bill Ayers
intended precisely the opposite when he
wrote it. "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the
Pentagon," he rhapsodizes. "The sky was
blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get
what was coming to them."
Ayers and his comrade (and now wife) Bernardine Dohrn were merely "ordinary
people," he recently explained
to the Chicago Tribune, "trying to do our best in extraordinarily extreme
and violent times." But Ayers remains, in fact, a man in love with his
years of violence. In his account of the "Days of Rage," the October 1969
riot the
Weathermen organized in Chicago, he describes Dohrn admonishing her troops
to violence wearing a "short
skirt and high stylish black boots....Her blazing eyes...allied with her
elegance,...a stunning and seductive
symbol of the Revolutionary Woman." (Ayers also reminds us that it was at
the Days of Rage that Tom Hayden,
one of the founders of SDS, told the rioters, "Anything that intensifies
our resistance...is in the service of humanity. The Weathermen are setting
the terms for all of us now.")
CURIOUSLY, YOU WON'T FIND IN AYERS'S PAGES an account of the "War Council"
held by the Weather
Underground in Flint, Michigan, in December 1969, at which he and Dohrn
were key players. It was at the Flint War Council that Dohrn admonished the
four hundred delegates to stop being "wimpy" and "scared of fighting," and
to "get into armed struggle." Invoking the example of Charles Manson, who
had killed Sharon Tate and all her houseguests in the Los Angeles hills,
Dohrn declared, "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner
in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's
stomach! Wild!" She closed her speech by holding up three fingers in what
she called the "Manson fork salute." Dohrn was followed by one of Ayers's
friends, John Jacobs, who told the crowd, "We're against everything that's
'good and decent' in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy." The
delegates then discussed how to get weapons, make bombs, and rent "safe
houses," after which they broke into a nearby Catholic Church to engage in
group sex.
Similarly, Ayers never acknowledges that later terrorism followed directly
from his example and his policy. After the Weather Underground collapsed,
many of his old comrades joined the new May 19th Communist
organization, which became a support group for the ultra-violent Black
Liberation Army. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, for instance, ended up in
prison for life for their role in the Black Liberation Army's 1981 Brinks
Robbery, in which a black cop was murdered. (Ayers and Dohrn took in Boudin
and Gilbert's child after their imprisonment.)
Ayers ends with the scene of rejoicing as he and Dohrn watched the
television images of America's defeat in
Vietnam. "We were overjoyed," he writes, and they "spent several days
celebrating, laughing and crying." Today, they still go every March 6 to
put flowers on the site of the Village townhouse where their own bombs
destroyed their comrades' young lives. They also traveled to Vietnam, to
pay homage to Ho Chi Minh at his grave.
In perhaps the most disgusting pages of the book, Ayers describes the brave
American soldiers who, coming
upon the My Lai massacre in 1968, landed their helicopter and tried to save
Vietnamese civilians from other
American troops gone mad. This action was finally acknowledged by an
official government ceremony in 1998.
But Ayers mentions these soldiers only to compare them to Diana Oughton,
Ted Gold, and Terry
Robbins, who died making a bomb meant to blow up other American soldiers at
Fort Dix. "How much longer"
will it take to honor "the three who died on Eleventh Street?" he demands.
"How much longer for Diana? When
will she be remembered?"
BILL AYERS HAS LEARNED NOTHING in the years since he was a terrorist. He
still thinks he and his
comrades should be forgiven, because their terrorism was "propaganda of the
deed" meant to "blaze away the
masters of war," a cause for which he used "explosive words at first,
slowly replaced by actual bombs." He still thinks that America "shatters
community everywhere"and intends the publication of Fugitive Days to
encourage another generation of terrorists against the United States,
however much he has tried to deny that
intention in the days since the attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Preparing for his book tour, Ayers posed for a publicity photo
with the American flag crumbled in weeds underneath his feet. This man
still hates America and seeks its destruction.
----------
Ronald Radosh's most recent book is Commies: A Journey Through the Old
Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, published by Encounter Books.
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