Ever since the Republicans lyingingly implied that Barack Obama is a terrorist because of his "association" with Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of the Weather Underground, there has been a big hole in discussions about Ayers and the radical politics of the 1960s.
This hole has not been filled by recent television interviews with Ayers, including the one highlighted in Al Giordano's Diary now on the Recommended List here, nor Ayers's December 5 Op-Ed in The New York Times. In fact, there's a lot of skating going on.
What would be instructive is for Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd to sit across from each other on some television venue to discuss that period, 40 years ago, when the two of them were SDS leaders, and subsequently leaders of the Weather Underground.
I pointed out my own third-tier leadership and organizing in SDS from 1965-1969, and my break with the organization over factionalism, a good deal of it led by those who would become Weathermen, when I wrote Palling Around with Terrorists.
As others have observed, palling around with terrorists has a long and sordid history in America. Just take the six decades I’ve been alive. Venerated Senators and Representatives made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, whose murders were the ultimate backstop for maintaining American apartheid. That system, you may recall, rested on ruthless white rule over the portion of the United States which allegedly lost the Civil War. It reinstituted slavery in a visible but widely ignored form, and for 90 years it destroyed every civil right of African-Americans, enforcing this with terror, including lynchings and other murders.
Fast forward to Henry Kissinger, the architect of raining terror on Cambodia, a policy that led to tens of thousands of dead civilians and contributed to the ascendance of the previously minuscule Khmer Rouge. Their astounding butchery and terrorism against their own people was not enough to persuade the United States to stop supporting them in their effort to keep control of Cambodia’s U.N. seat after their cross-border aggression was defeated, government overthrown and genocide stopped by Vietnam. Not to mention Kissinger’s role in Indonesia and Chile.
Ronald Reagan continued the hoary U.S. policy of supporting (and installing) surrogates who were expected to and trained to and funded to keep the populace in line in the interests of American corporadoes, as the much-quoted Marine General Smedley Butler pointed out nearly 75 years ago. With or without fake elections, terror was the preferred technique for this keeping-in-line process in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, causing guerrilla movements to arise.
There's more detail in the original for those who care about such things.
I also noted:
In fact, most members and leaders of the 400 autonomous local SDS chapters disagreed intensely with the Weathermen and rejected their blatant coup d’organisation and elitist leadership. They were even more were adamantly opposed to the Weathermen’s campaign of bombings: for moral reasons (the possibility people would be killed despite advance warnings); and for strategic and tactical reasons, most notably that the campaign would be counterproductive and alienate the vast majority of Americans rather than persuade them of the need to seek profound changes in business- and government-as-usual. Part of the original message of SDS, after all, had been that principled activists do not seek change by divorcing tactics, strategy and morality from each other.
Within months of the dissolution of SDS after its final national convention in 1969, the bombings began. Soon, in a Greenwich Village townhouse, three Weathermen killed themselves while making nail-studded dynamite bombs they meant to plant at a soldiers’ dance at Fort Dix and in Butler Library at Columbia University. Two others, including Kathy Boudin, escaped. The Weathermen issued communiqués and their own manifesto, blew up what it considered relevant targets and, like the rest of the left at the time, shed members and splintered.
Let me make clear that I don't for a moment doubt the political commitment and powerful intelligence of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and the many others in SDS (and other radical organizations) of that era. What we were up against was monstrous, and it was bolstered by monstrous lies, some of which are still repeated today by the powers that be. The media have made a caricature of the 1960s and those who objected, sometimes at great risk, to the wars, both overt and covert in Southeast Asia.
Our efforts up to the late '60s had not succeeded, so it was natural to look for new methods.But the approach taken by the Weathermen was not only wrong, it was hugely counterproductive.
Mark Rudd, an SDS leader who became the spokesman for the Columbia University student strike in 1968, was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a group that sought to make the antiwar movement more militant. Out of that, eventually, came Weathermen, which went underground after the "townhouse bombing" in which Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold mistakenly blew themselves up instead of planting a bomb that would most certainly have maimed or killed several people. Subsequent to the bomb's premature explosion, the Weathermen went underground and began the bombing campaign that has been much discussed. By 1980, most of the Weathermen, including Ayers and Rudd, had "surfaced."
Here's an excerpt of what Rudd had to say in February 2007:
Alas, with all the best intentions of promoting revolutionary solidarity with the people of the world, the Weatherman faction by killing off SDS did the work of the FBI for them. Assuming we weren’t in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.
Obviously this is a harsh critique. But it gets even worse: our hyper-militancy and armed struggle line created a deep division which weakened the larger anti-war movement and demoralized many good people. This was totally unnecessary. Also we provided a gold-plated gift to the media and the government enabling them to characterize the entire movement as violent and therefore deranged. As a tragic coda, three of our own beloved comrades were accidentally killed by bombs they were making just two blocks from here, in the townhouse on West 11th St.
The subsequent Weather Underground did not, of course, lead to the growth of a revolutionary movement in this country. It led to isolation and defeat. The guerilla foco did not help build either a revolutionary army or a mass movement. One thing I’m absolutely certain of, having learned the hard way, is that political violence in any form can never be understood in this society.
No amount of rhetoric around revolutionary heroism and solidarity with the Third World can mask the Weather strategy as anything other than sure revolutionary suicide. Revolutionary suicide may serve some psychological or existential function, but politically it produces nothing.
So the greatest lesson I draw from my disastrous history is the left must absolutely stay away from violence or any talk of violence. The government is violent, we oppose their violence.
Let’s jump ahead almost forty years to the current war on terrorism. Right now six people are in prison for violation of the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the forerunner of a law which last year was broadened and renamed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, related to PATRIOT II. Their crime was advocating an economic boycott and direct action against companies doing business with the Huntingdon Life Sciences Lab, which does animal testing. Under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, terrorism is defined as causing $10,000 or more economic damage to a company dealing in animals, including even loss of business. Look how the government and the corporations it serves have narrowed legal political activity: classical nonviolent tactics, such as a boycott, which have been used for generations in the labor and civil rights and national liberation and anti-nuclear and feminist and gay and disabled and environmental movements are now labeled as terrorism. And the confused public doesn’t say a word.
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that elements of both the animal liberation and earth liberation movements have insisted on their right to destruction (or liberation) of property. The FBI, thrilled with this gift, has labeled them the #1 domestic terrorist threat, which is utter nonsense of course, but useful for the purpose of repression.
Another case: two broken windows at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, one at a Nike store, the other at a Starbucks, constituted the entire justification for fifteen million dollars of anti-terrorist police funding and for a complete city-wide lockdown during the Free Trade Area of the Americas demonstrations in Miami in 2003. The New York Times for years repeated the lie of violence and mayhem in the streets of Seattle, even when shown evidence to the contrary.
It's good for the nation to see and hear and read the real Bill Ayers instead of the caricature presented in the past nine months. But understanding what happened in the 1960s-'70s to one of the most radical of the antiwar organizations, and understanding what the fallout from that organization's devolution was, cannot be accomplished by hearing from only one of the participants.