Bill Ayers Whitewashes History: The Weathermen Were Not Just A Bunch Of Idealistic Young People

Bill Ayers Whitewashes History, Again
The Weathermen were not just a bunch of idealistic young people.
by Katha Pollitt
The Nation

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left.

"I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "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." Right. Those people belonged to Weatherman, as did Ayers himself and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife. Weatherman, Weather Underground, completely different! And never mind either that that "accidental explosion" was caused by the making of a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix.

"Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war," Ayers writes. " 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'm not so sure that terrorism necessarily involves intentional attacks on people, but okay, let's say Ayers wasn't a terrorist. How about thuggish? Vainglorious? Egomaniacal? Staggeringly irresponsible? And illogical, don't forget illogical: as Hilzoy points out, the idea that because "peaceful protest" hadn't ended the war, bombs would is missing a couple of links. It's like a doctor saying, Well, chemo didn't cure your brain tumor, so I'll have to amputate your leg. It's not as if there was nothing else to try, after all. While Ayers and Dohrn were conveying their outrage, other people were doing the kind of organizing work that the Weather Underground despised as wimpy. Today Ayers blends himself into that broader movement, the "we-- the broad we" that "wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at inductions centers" etc., but at the time, Weatherpeople had nothing but contempt for the rest of the antiwar left. Writing letters? Off the pig! you might as well... become a community organizer!

I realize this is ancient history. As a friend who doesn't see why I am raking this all up argues, it's not as if today's left is bristling with macho streetfighters. It's hard to imagine anyone now applauding the Manson murders, as Dohrn notoriously did in l969, or dedicating a manifesto to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan. But just because it's ancient history doesn't mean you get to rewrite it to make yourself look good, just another idealistic young person upset about the war and racism. We were all upset about the war and racism. I knew people in the Progressive Labor Party who were so upset they joined the army to radicalize the troops. A freshman in my dorm was so upset she quit college, joined the October League, and went to organize in an auto-parts factory, where last I heard maybe a decade ago, she was still at work. Of the many thousands of people involved in the movement one way or another, only a handful thought the thing to do was to form a tiny sect and blow things up in the service of a ludicrous fantasy : ie, creating a white-youth fighting force that would join up with black nationalists, end the war and overthrow capitalism. Oh, and anyone who didn't see why that was the right,necessary and indeed only possible course of action was a sellout and a coward.

I wish Ayers would make a real apology for the harm he did to the antiwar movement and the left. Not another "regrets, I've had a few," "we were all young once," "don't forget there was a war on" exercise in self-promotion, but one that showed he actually gets it. I'd like him to say he's sorry for his part in the destruction of Students for a Democratic Society. He's sorry he helped Nixon make the antiwar movement look like the enemy of ordinary people. He's sorry for his more-radical-than-thou posturing, and the climate of apocalyptic nuttiness he helped fuel to disastrous results, of which the fatal Brinks robbery, committed by erstwhile comrades who became even crazier than Ayers' crew, was only the most notorious.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing/388681/bill_ayers_whitewashes_history_again?rel=hp_blogs_box

I thought Ayers was rehabilitated and that it was unfair of Palin to paint a bull's-eye on Ayers' back and virtually invite her mob to do violence to him.

However I clearly remember the Weathermen, Bernardine Dohrn's name, and that hideous explosion. When those stupid kids blew each other up by accident it was such a violent explosion that they took out practically an entire building. The CSI folks found what something blocking a radiator that they thought was a sodden piece of carpet; on closer examination it turned out to be someone's back. I've never been able to forget that piece of descriptive journalism.

And they were going to set that off at a dance?!

Ayers should have maintained silence rather than try to whitewash the history of the Weathermen and Weather Underground.

Hekate

That's what he was born, that's how he was raised, and that's how he still lives. If his daddy hadn't been CEO of Com Ed, not only would he not have come out of his youthful escapades so unscathed, he might not have been so arrogant as to pursue them in the first place. The worst thing about his recent notoriety isn't that Obama was smeared by association with him, but that he got another soapbox to spout off from.

The man is no role model or hero, and gets no respect from me.

Plenty of people dedicated their lives to ending the war without resorting to violence.

out of the hundreds of thouands who were active in the anti-war movement.

ideology, dichotomy and idioms of the times, you can place no judgments on us who were there. We had a knowledge base and personal experience that dictated our actions and our understanding. 20/20 hindsight is always dead wrong.