Terror, not terror.
In “The Real Bill Ayers”, America gets a chance to read about the human side of former terrorist William Ayers in his own words, unfiltered by unfair right-wing MSM bias. And, because the New York Times published it, one can bet on it being free of any intentional disclosure of any previously classified intelligence operations.
Professor Ayers writes:
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?”
Um, the most remarkable asapect of the historic Obama campaign was its distinct lack of content. Indeed, it is difficult challenging something that doesn’t exist. A record can be challenged, but this candidate was blank enough to let both his admirers and detractors write his narrative for him. The upside to this is the (proven) immunity to criticism. The downside? His reasonable critics all get to have valid points.
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.
That was the kind of criticism that arises because the man had no relevant background. No epic senate battles or alliances to debate. No controversial stances to defend or budget decisions to criticize.
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.
Good call. Must have been easy to sit out when you were likely asked to keep low.
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,
In particular, the international socialist (and internationally-funded) fringe factions of the civil rights movement.
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.
WU was founded after the Greenwich Village explosion?
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.
Except when they actually disrepected human life.
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.
Why not? You just said it wasn’t ‘terrorism’. How daft.
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 don’t recall Professor Ayers being at the forefront of the anti-abortion debate. Do you?
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.
So, then you’re acknowledging more people could have been killed? SO WHICH IS IT? WERE THEY ACTS OF TERROR or NOT ACTS OF TERROR? This is a level of nuance missed only by Type A – Progressive chumps.
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.
How much did your side petition the forces allied against the West before and after that 10-year conflict? You clearly chose sides then and your clearly choosing sides now.
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.
We all wished we knew him better, Professor.
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.
Conservative’s disgust with this aspect of Obama’s background doesn’t entirely fall at your feet, Professor. It is Obama’s burden that now, only after being elected President, he will show the same eagerness to listen to conservative viewpoints as he did the broad marxist, socialist, maoist, and social democratic coalition that was the Chicago social and educational reform movement.
But just ‘listening’ doesn’t count. What will he do after giving face time to his opponents? Will he endorse a view that runs counter to his broad political base? I sincerely doubt it.
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