---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 20:32:04 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: response to wilkerson review
From Portside
From: john crawford
Subject: response to wilkerson review
I read Cathy Wilkerson's review of Bill Ayer's Fugitive
Days with considerable interest. It appears to me she
has made a real contribution from her experience, rich
and tragic at the same time. Her critique of Ayer's
book addresses its failure to reflect, its desire to
sensationalize, and its willingness to produce a
consumer commodity instead of an analysis, and it's
fitting that someone like Wilkerson should call the
author to account. One wishes she would write a memoir
of the period herself, especially considering the work
of others worse than Ayers who have been willing to
express their views and richly compensated for them as
well.
But I'm moved to criticize the single-paragraph
introduction by Ethan Young. Young takes a serious risk
when he uses what Wilkerson is saying to express his
moral condemnation. Wilkerson asks for a true history
of the period, an examination of actions and mistakes.
While she is certainly not attempting "to recast the
Weather Underground experience as a myth of movement
glory," neither does she characterize it as Young does,
as the "Weather fiasco." It should be remembered that
in the same period other sectors of the movement
entertained controversy about armed struggle: the black
liberation movement, the Puerto Rican independence
movement, the Native American Movement, and so on. Even
the primarily white domestic left, often under attack
from the police, participated in street fighting and
other methods of self-defense, and it often mounted
arguments for the necessity of this response. The whole
matter was made more complex by the presence of agents
provocateurs and unstable personalities who encouraged
others to take inappropriate actions. But to dismiss,
as Young does, a section of the movement as the
"Weather fiasco" rejects the complication of the
situation, exhibits a kind of idealism that has little
to do with progressive thinking, and mechanically draws
a line between violence and non-violence that should
remain open to discussion depending on the situation. I
would much rather listen to Wilkerson, who has learned
the real costs of political mistakes, than what appears
to be a somewhat facile mischaracterization of her
position.
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