Friday, November 14, 2008

Bill Ayers on Weather Underground, McCain, Obama & the Peace Movement

Posted by Justin Jeffre

The distinguished Professor and his wife (who’s also a professor) were members of the militant anti-war group the Weather Underground. In their first joint television interview, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn discuss the McCain campaign attacks, President-elect Obama, the Weather Underground, the legacy of 1960s social justice movements, and more. 

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says:
15 Nov 2008  at  10:55 am | #

OMG Justin sometimes I think you are just trying to get my blood boiling. “Distinguished Professor” - you are smoking crack, distinguished as in corrupt Chicago(or Berkeley/Seattle/Minneopolis/Boston) or other left wing socialist refugee enclaves from the 60’s.

You are to young to remember, but there is blood all over Ayers and Dohn hands. They are TERRORISTS that should have spent their lives in jail. (Yes, guilt by association with their fellow terrorist - dead police).

There is no way those two should be allowed in anyone’s house or become aquintances with them until they apoligize to the family’s of their victims, and to all of the Viet Nam Vet’s. Even then I would never even talk to either of them.

Next post I expect you will try to tell us that the SLA wasn’t a terrorist band of thugs but merely freedom loving protesters.

The anti war leftist of the 1960’s did real harm to this country, not to mention the people of Viet Nam and Cambodia. ( 2 - 3 million dead after the democrat’s craved in to the Anti War protesters and had us leave in 1975).

Let us hope that the people of Iraq don’t suffer the same fate of American turning tail and running under Obama’s administration.

says:
15 Nov 2008  at  01:01 pm | #

Mark, Distinguished Professor is an honorary title at many universities for faculty who are recognized by colleagues throughout the world as leaders in their fields. He is one.

According to Ayers,

I was not a terrorist. I never was a terrorist. And the idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense. We never killed or hurt a person. We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam. And by contrast, the war in Vietnam really was a terrorist undertaking. The war in Vietnam was terror on a mass scale, with thousands of people every month being murdered, mostly from the air. And we were doing everything we could to stop it.

If you read the interview you’ll see him say.

And in no way do I think, or in my book do I rationalize or argue, that what we did was the best thing or the only thing. But what I do say is it was understandable in its own terms. “Is it terrorism?” Juan asked. No, it’s not, because terrorism targets people and intends to intimidate and murder people in order to get a political—its political way. We never did that. We never intended to do it. And no one was hurt or killed. So that’s an important distinction.

They are TERRORISTS that should have spent their lives in jail. (Yes, guilt by association with their fellow terrorist - dead police).

As a lawyer, I’m surprised you support guilt by association. It has a large a tragic history in this country. The truth is the government was killing a massive number of people including US citizens like Fred Hampton. They murdered him in his sleep.

The anti war leftist of the 1960’s did real harm to this country, not to mention the people of Viet Nam and Cambodia. ( 2 - 3 million dead after the democrat’s craved in to the Anti War protesters and had us leave in 1975).

Many Viet Nam Vets were leading the anti-war movement. It was Nixon that pulled out and it was the US that is responsible for millions of deaths, not those against the war based on lies.

The people of Iraq want us out of their country now. It was another war based on lies.

cincysuz says:
15 Nov 2008  at  02:45 pm | #

Well I’m not too young to remember The Weathermen, SDS, The Panthers, black and brown, and the other groups that didn’t beg on their knees for justice, they demanded it. It’s been a downhill slide since then. Some of their tactics were revolutionary. Tough times called for tough measures.

Mark T. don’t speak for Vietnam or any other war veterans. If you want to know what vets are thinking, visit the sites of Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families4Peace. Justin is absolutely correct that vets were leading the anti-war movement. The war ended in large part because our soldiers refused to continue to fight. They didn’t have the heart to kill kids, bomb civilians and die themselves for no reason. Do you know that we never cleaned up the tons of agent orange dropped and still today so many vietnamese children are born with horrible deformities as a result that there are special schools just for them? Friends tell me it’s a shocking sight to behold. Still today. Sure wish a 60s anti-war group could have prevented that, don’t you?

This world would be a different and better place if people were still as idealistic and determined as the political and social justice movements of the 60s. You’re so far removed from the truth that bringing you up to speed would be impossible.

says:
15 Nov 2008  at  07:22 pm | #

Justin: Read the NYT 9-11-01 interview with the Terrorist. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63
Also, Ayers has been qouted saying that killing black people as collateral damage was justified in the Weatherman bombing.

As to Nixon, he left office with Viet Nam divided, the communist thugs held the North thanks to USSR and China. The South was a democratic nation, being attacked by the communist, but holding its own. The US Congress voted to cut our military funding in late 1974, and the regular NVA attacked in 1975, and the south crumbled without our support. Tens of thousands were put in re-education camps (like Ayers wanted to do in US) and thousands died fleeing or by the communist.

CincySuz - I had members of my division desert in 1974 when we left S.F. , I understand how 18 and 19 year olds can be swayed by propaganda. I remember the fall of Cambodia and Viet Nam, as I was part of the forces pulling out our troops and the civilians. That, along with the 1st amendment, gives me the right to say what I want about the war - which was a just war and a war worth dying for as an american service person.

says:
15 Nov 2008  at  09:55 pm | #

It’s an interesting date for that report. Look at what also was reported on that day.

Relatives of Slain Chilean Military Commander Sue Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger is a real terrorist and he was being sued for his role in the US backed coup which overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende and installed a brutal dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. The coup happened on Sept. 11th 1973. It was part of Kissingers OPERATION CONDOR which imposed dictators all over Latin America.

Also, Ayers has been qouted saying that killing black people as collateral damage was justified in the Weatherman bombing.

Where? That doesn’t seem to be the case if you read this.

From wiki:

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since 2000 stems from an interview he gave to The New York Times on the occasion of the memoir’s publication.[25] The reporter quoted him as saying “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”, and, when asked if he would “do it all again,” as saying “I don’t want to discount the possibility."[20] Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer’s characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: “This is not a question of being misunderstood or ‘taken out of context’, but of deliberate distortion."[26] In a November 2008 interview with The New Yorker, Ayers said that he had not meant to imply that he wished he and the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence. Instead, he said, “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more shit.” Ayers said that he had never been responsible for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in Vietnam in which “thousands of people were being killed every week.” He also stated, “While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme radicalism against property,” and “We killed no one and hurt no one. Three of our people killed themselves.”[27]

In the ensuing years, Ayers has repeatedly avowed that when he said he had “no regrets” and that “we didn’t do enough” he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as “. . . inadequate [as] the war dragged on for a decade."[28] Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs.[28][29]

The interviewer also quoted some of Ayers’ own criticism of Weatherman in the foreword to the memoir, whereby Ayers reacts to having watched Emile de Antonio’s 1976 documentary film about Weatherman, Underground: “[Ayers] was ‘embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.’ “[20] “We weren’t terrorists,” Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “The reason we weren’t terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."[3]

In a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune, Ayers wrote, “I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official”. He also condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks in that letter. “Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."[30]

Views on his past expressed since 2001
Ayers was asked in a January 2004 interview, “How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?” He replied:[31] “I’ve thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it’s impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful? ... I don’t think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable.” On September 9, 2008, journalist Jake Tapper reported on the comic strip in Ayers’ blog explaining the soundbite: “The one thing I don’t regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being.... When I say, ‘We didn’t do enough,’ a lot of people rush to think, ‘That must mean, “We didn’t bomb enough shit.”’ But that’s not the point at all. It’s not a tactical statement, it’s an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, ‘we’ means ‘everyone.’”

Given your sources like whack job Anne Coulter, I question that alleged quote.

LBJ lied us into the Vietnam War. We were never attacked and we destroyed that nation, secretly bombed Laos and Cambodia with Kissinger and Nixon’s escalation of the war (what they called a peace plan). Children are still dying from the agent orange. Vietnam Vets testified about the massacres that were part of US policy. These are serious war crimes.

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