Bill
Ayers
Courage and Conviction
In Praise of Bill Ayers
By DAVE
LINDORFF
(From
CounterPunch)
The
pundits are having a heyday with Hillary Clinton's sleazy McCarthyite attack on
Barack Obama during the April 16 debate, trying to link him to the Weather
Underground because of his having served on a charity organization board with
one of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, who is currently a distinguished professor
of education at the University of Illinois, and who is married to Bernadine
Dohrn, another Weather Underground veteran.
What has them in a lather is Ayer's
comment, made a few years ago, that he has no regrets for the organization's
having set off several bombs back in the early 1970s, and that in fact they
"should have set off more."
(Incidentally, as Robert Parry notes, those comments were made before
9-11, not, as Hillary Clinton charged duplicitously in the April 16
In fact, it's important to remember
that while three members of the Weather Underground died at their own hands
because of a failed bomb they were constructing, no one else died at their
hands. The group scrupulously worked to make sure that their attacks were on
property, not people.
It's also important to remember that
they were targeting a government that was engaged in a criminal war against a
peasant country half a world away, that had killed nearly two million
Indochinese people, most of them civilians, and that was well on the way to
pointlessly sending 58,000 American troops to their deaths.
The actions of the Weather
Underground may have been misguided and quixotic, but they were not terrorists
in the sense of trying to cause mass terror among the American public, in the
way that Al Qaeda terrorists or other terror groups indiscriminately attack
civilians. They were much more carefully targeting the levers of power, and in
effect, trying to "bring the war home."
While many in the anti-war movement
condemned the actions of the Weather Underground, I would argue that they, like
the militant Black Panthers, performed an invaluable role by sending a loud,
clear message to the nation's ruling elite that if they continued the war,
things would get worse at home.
Their actions made the peaceful mass
protests against the Indochina War far more potent, because they forced the
ruling elite in the
Ayers has long since earned the
nation's respect, whatever one may think of his youthful radicalism, by
devoting his life to the challenge of helping educate those who have a hard
time breaking the cycle of poverty and ignorance, which makes it obscene to
criticize Obama for sharing a boardroom with him (Obama was 8 when Ayers was in
the Weathermen back in 1970).
But Ayers and his comrades should
also be honored for having been willing to go the extra mile and put their
lives on the line to end a criminal war.
We could use that kind of courage
and militancy today in the anti-war movement-if not in the form of another
underground bombing campaign, then at least in the form of a willingness put
bodies on the line to blockade and undermine an American imperial war machine
that has chewed up the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans and killed
over a million innocent Iraqis.
Five years into a war with no end in
Dave
Lindorff is the author of "Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death
Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal". His book of CounterPunch columns titled
"This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by
Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com