Ayers Op-Ed
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| Sun, 12-07-2008 - 4:53am |
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html?_r=1&em

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I never claimed he was "innocent."
I see them as a casualty of the anti-war protesters as follows:
1.
I saw the footage of Bush live on CNN. Maybe it wouldn't have been so pathetic if he did a decent job of leading the country and had a measure of gravitas in international settings.
But he led the country into financial chaos, unending war, belated incompetent response to natural disaster, and inexcusably enough--a totally feeble/completely ineffectual attempt to capture Osama bin Ladin. And he's just never gotten it through his head that frat boy antics don't have any place in the comportment of a POTUS, particularly when heads of state gather.
Does anyone on this board know why we went to war with NV?
Guild Member since 2009
I see things very differently, and I look back way before WWII when the land was "occupied" only
Yes, believe it or not sometimes our government lies and manipulates the public to get to their means.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later
Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/
Guild Member since 2009
If the US government had honored the committements that it undertook the the South, the boat people and the re-education camps (to say nothing of the Khmer Rouge next door) wouldn't have happened.
Not true. The Khmer Rouge arose in the power vacuum that reulted in the US sponsored coup against Prince Sihanouk.
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On February 9, 1969, US military intelligence reports suggested there was a significant NVA base just inside Cambodia - the Central Office for South Vietnam, Headquarters, or COSVN HQ as it was known. General Creighton Abrahms, commander of US forces in Vietnam, was confident that a series of precision B-52 bomber strikes would do the job of eliminating the base, assuming he could convince the new Nixon administration to go along with him. B-52s airstrikes were one of the most lethal non-nuclear forms of attack in the Air Force's arsenal, as they could be used to carpet bomb large swaths of land, targeted in "boxes" of approximately two miles by one half mile square. In a memo to General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Creighton argued
The idea was pitched to Nixon, who quickly approved the bombing with the assistance of his national security advisor Henry Kissinger. The first airstrikes were set for March, barely one month after the initial intelligence reports. In honor of the breakfast meeting at the Pentagon that led to Nixon's approval of the strike, the assault was codenamed Operation Breakfast.
As suggested by Kissenger, Nixon ordered that the attacks occur in secret, and all attempts to expose the bombing should be stopped. General Wheeler informed his staff:
On the 9th of March, 48 boxes - approximately 48 square miles of Cambodian territory - were carpet bombed for Breakfast.
Over the course of the next 14 months, the US conducted 3630 B-52 bombing raids in Cambodian territory. Each major operation followed on a tradition set out by Breakfast; subsequent plans included Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, Supper. It had taken a change of presidential administrations to start these attacks, but once the bombing began, a new routine of escalation fell into place. As William Shawcross explains in his seminal work Sideshow, "(O)nce the decision had been made in principle that Communist violations of Cambodia's neutrality justified aggressive reciprocal action, it was not difficult to repeat the performance." (Shawcross, p 26) And to this day, there is still debate whether Sihanouk himself approved of the bombing of his own territory; Sihanouk denies it entirely, while Kissinger has stated otherwise. In a sense, though, it didn't matter whether Sihanouk approved it or not, for as was the case with Hanoi's initial placement of troops inside Cambodia, Sihanouk lacked the military might to prevent it.
dablacksox
Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.---Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.
Having lived in both the occupied Gaza Strip and
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