Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? Virginia Wolfe!Virginia Wolfe... Seriously, when I saw Bill Ayers give a reading at Modern Times bookstore in S.F. (Bernadine Dohrn sat right behind me) he was somber about 9/11. In the Q&A, the NYT story came up. He said he had been quoted out of context and that the interview had been many months ago.
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi?_OUGHTON_DIANA_ Kathy's Father, lefty lawyer. Grandfather, member of the American Socialist Party, wrote, "The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, " around 1908 or so and, "Government by Judiciary, " in the mid-30's. http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi?_BOUDIN_LEONARD_B Heh, Viacom, Inc.! What does Sumner Redstone have to do with the Weather Underground!? http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi?_VIACOM_INC_ Michael Pugliese
>From the issue dated October 12, 2001
Chronicle of Higher Education
The Left's Self-Destructive Extremism
By ALAN WOLFE
"The barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings on September 11 has in an instant transformed the complex landscape of American consciousness," one professor recently wrote. "I'm filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed, for their families and for all affected forever."
The words were very much like those expressed by people all across the United States. But the writer was anything but typical. For Bill Ayers, professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who expressed those sentiments in similar letters to The Chronicle and The New York Times, had been a founding member of the violence-oriented faction of Students for a Democratic Society. His group, the Weather Underground, proud of its determination to smash the institutions of bourgeois society, took its name from Bob Dylan's line that you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Not only that, Ayers recently published a book about his life as a revolutionary, Fugitive Days, that contains few if any regrets for the violence of his past. A few weeks ago, reading The New York Times with breakfast, somewhere between a bite of granola and a peach, I turned to Dinitia Smith's article about Fugitive Days, to find Ayers quoted as saying that "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."
Muttering to myself about radical leftists incapable of growing up, I drove to my office -- and discovered that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I know that you can never control the timing of your appearances. But justifying violence on the most violent day in American history cannot be written off as Ayers's mere bad luck. On any day, his comments would have been remarkably insensitive to the victims of violent acts. On that particular day, they seemed like poetic justice, as if the gods had somehow conspired to remind Ayers of what any good weatherman could have predicted: When turbulence hits the atmosphere, there are no easy ways to control it.
"It was a time of transgression," Ayers describes the 1960s in his book, "and I was of a generation guided by the precept, Break as many rules as you can." When Chicago police unleashed their attack on demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Ayers discovered that breaking the rules was not enough. "The system was death; defiance and insubordination was life itself. Go further, we said. Shock, offend, outrage, overstep, disturb." Ayers's revolutionary cell did all those things. One of its members, Terry Robbins, studied The Blaster's Handbook, published by the explosives department of DuPont, and started to accumulate dynamite. "He saw airplanes in the sky," Ayers writes of his comrade's drug-induced fantasies of violence (providing today's reader with an uncanny reminder of the events of September 11). "One night he woke me up at 3 a.m. and showed me his design to burn the First National Bank building in downtown Chicago -- all 57 floors of it ... -- to the ground, and, simultaneously, how to torch the Christmas trees in Rockefeller Center and the Mall in Washington."
Ayers claims in the book to have called Robbins an idiot, an assertion that can neither be proved nor disproved, but if he did, that did not prevent him and his comrades from acting out their own revolutionary fantasies in what they called the Days of Rage. Running madly through the streets of Chicago, armed with "steel pipes and slingshots, chains, clubs, mace, and rolls of pennies to add weight to a punch," Ayers, Robbins, and Ayers's then-girlfriend, Diana Oughton, imagined themselves to be a guerrilla army and threw everything they had into destroying property, smashing any office windows or cars they found in their way.
Before Robbins, Oughton, and another revolutionary, Ted Gold, blew up any people, they blew up themselves and the brownstone in New York in which they were living -- and assembling bombs. Ayers went into hiding, accompanied by America's most famous white revolutionary of the time, Bernadine Dohrn, to whom he is now married. (Dohrn is remembered by many as the person who said, in response to the brutal killing of actress Sharon Tate and others, "Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.")
During this period, Ayers also got involved with bombing the New York City police headquarters, in 1970, and the U.S. Capitol, in 1971. (In his book, Ayers claims six bombings for his group, although the number may have been higher.)
In 1972, the Pentagon became a target. One of Ayers's group, knowing from previous attempts how lax Pentagon security really was, simply walked in, opened a grate, and left a two-pound bomb that went off, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage. No one was hurt or killed, but Ayers also says that, when it came to dynamite, he had no taste for math, leaving the implication that, but for that, there might well have been a few deaths produced by their act.
Firmly persuaded that the end justifies the means, Ayers rejects the term "terrorist" for his actions. "We came close, it's true," he writes, "for whenever there are guns and bombs, the line narrows between politics and terror, between rebellion and gangsterism." But, having conceded that much, Ayers concedes nothing further. "Terrorists terrorize," he writes, "they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate. No, we were not terrorists."
But by Ayers's own account, he and his comrades were terrorists through and through. Their rage in Chicago was completely random. They explicitly tried to intimidate rather than educate. And, if they killed no innocent civilians, that was thanks only to chance. In trying so hard to convince himself that he has nothing in common with other perpetuators of political violence, Ayers fails to convince the reader.
It is refreshing to know that Bill Ayers is filled with horror at what happened on September 11. But Ayers not only has a loose regard for property and human life, he also has little respect for truth. In a note at the beginning of the book, he writes that "this story is only one version of events." He adds: "Is this, then, the truth? Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." Dohrn, Ayers's wife, now insists, contrary to the memories of everyone who recalls the expression of revolutionary fervor on her face, that her comment on the Manson murders was a joke meant to mock the American propensity toward violence.
To a revolutionary, it appears, honesty is just another bourgeois convention to be violated in the name of a political cause. It never seems to occur to Ayers that his open contempt for the truth is likely to lead his readers to conclude that the Bill Ayers who actually lived through the 1960s was, in all likelihood, even more violent than the Bill Ayers portrayed in his memoir. Nor does Ayers show much recognition of the fact that his breezy approach to fact undermines his effort to express regret for events like those on September 11.
"My book explores one person's struggle with the intricate relationships among social justice, commitment, and resistance," Ayers writes in his letter to The Chronicle. "It is an unambivalent criticism of the glorification of violence. It should not be used now to suggest that any of the Vietnam-era protesters would endorse acts of terrorism such as those we have just witnessed in horror. The intent of my book was -- and is -- to understand, to tell the truth, and to heal."
Alas for Ayers, his book can be read by any and all. And what the reader will find is the story of an unrepentant New Leftist who casually justifies violence and praises a series of violence-prone people, whom he insists on calling "freedom fighters," like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), and Leonard Peltier. Fugitive Days is self-serving rather than searching, an apologia for extremism rather than an apology for arrogance.
The question of terrorism in the 1960s was very much in the air even before September 11. Within just a few short months in the summer and fall of 2001, Ayers published his book; The New Yorker ran a profile of Kathy Boudin, a '60s radical involved in a 1981 Brinks robbery and murder; and Antonio Negri, who is serving prison time in Italy for his own violent acts in the 1960s and 1970s, was featured prominently in many newspapers and magazines as one of the two authors of Empire, an attack on globalization published in 2000 by Harvard University Press. Some people are hoping to win the release of Negri and Boudin. Others find Ayers and his actions full of "integrity," the word of choice from a book blurb by Columbia University professor Edward Said (who himself was photographed in what he called a "symbolic" act of throwing a rock at Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon in July 2000).
Alas for all those people, the real and brutal terrorism at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon serves as a reminder of why those who commit violent acts, even when they believe their cause just, ought to be properly punished for them.
Now, more than before September 11, the American left needs to come to terms with its most self-destructive tendencies. It ought to repudiate its habit of blaming the United States for all the world's ills; it ought to recognize, as it has consistently failed to do, that liberalism is more open to diversity and tolerance than are the closed minds of the fanatics the left tends to romanticize. The American left must renounce its fatal attraction to the notion that any ends are justified so long as the cause is deemed good. And it must not be afraid to join with others, whatever their political views, in taking appropriate actions to punish those who commit brutal crimes against humanity.
Bill Ayers shows no signs of engaging in any such rethinking. He wrote his book to celebrate his days as a revolutionary. And he wrote his letters to the editor to avoid taking responsibility for both his actions then and his words now. Many people of Ayers's generation, myself included, broke a few rules in our anger at the Vietnam War and American racism, although few of us ever went as far as Ayers. But most of us eventually realized that the United States has the resources to correct some of its worst faults and that, even when it does not, extremism of the left can easily beget an even worse extremism from the right.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
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