by hilzoy
For reasons best known to themselves, the NYT has published an op-ed by William Ayers:
“In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. (…)
“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.”
Oh, for heavens’ sake. The Weather Underground might have gotten its new name in 1970, but Weatherman, from which it morphed, was founded in 1969. Starting his narrative in 1970 allows Ayers to omit the time when Weatherman was not trying not to harm people: for instance, the Days of Rage:
“”The Days of Rage,” as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that’s where it’s really at.””
Nor should we forget Bernardine Dohrn’s comment on the Manson murders at the Flint War Council in 1969: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!” At the same meeting, Weathermen “debated the ethics of killing white babies, so as not to bring more “oppressors” into the world, and denounced American women bearing white babies as “pig mothers.”” (p. 159) And they sang songs about a lawyer, Richard Elrod, who had broken his neck during the Days of Rage: “Stay Elrod stay/ Stay in your iron lung/ Play Elrod play/ Play with your toes a while.” (p. 159)
The “accidental explosion” Ayers refers to occurred when three Weathermen blew themselves up while making nail bombs to detonate at a dance at Fort Dix. One was Ayers’ girlfriend, “who was later identified from a fragment of finger.”
After three of their own were blown up, Weatherman tried not to hurt people, though they did blow up property, and seem to have placed a lot of trust in their ability to tell, for instance, whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed. And after that explosion, according to Ayers, the Weather Underground got a new name. But when his co-Weathermen blew themselves up, they were planning to kill a whole lot of people. Weatherman was never nonviolent.
Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground did more than ‘cross lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense.’ They were, by any syandard I can think of, terrorists. As one historian says, “The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence (…) I don’t know what sort of defense that is.”
They say they did it to end the war in Vietnam. But how, exactly, that was supposed to happen is a total mystery. It’s the Underpants Gnome theory of political activism:
Phase 1: Set a bunch of bombs.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The war ends!
That level of tactical idiocy is one thing when you’re collecting underpants. It’s quite another when you’re setting bombs.
Ayers may think that there’s still a debate about the Weather Underground’s effectiveness. And he might also think that he “acted appropriately in the context of those times.” To me, though, he’s just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole.
He has done enough harm already. Now he should do the decent thing and leave us in peace.
Everyone glad to see hilzoy back & at full strength, raise your hand (xanax raises hand).
*Raises hand*
But was I the only one flummoxed by this:
“Starting his narrative in 1970 allows Ayers to omit the time when Weatherman was not trying not to harm people…”
Double negatives, why hilzoy, why? Took me so long to find that second “not”. Literally minutes of confusion.
Forgive me for going OT, but really, Bill Ayers doesn’t deserve any better.
So is the nomination of Eric Shinseki to head Veterans Affairs a flipped bird towards certain parts of the Bush Administration, or is it a cynical maneuver, or both?
Ayers piece was a narcissistic way to try to salvage his reputation. The SDS and the weather underground has done more to stifle dissent in this country than the illegal wiretaps.
I recommend Vida, by Marge Piercy. Piercy was an active member of Students for Democratic Society from 1962 to 1969, when her health began to fail and when SDS began to break up into factions, one of which was the Weathermen (presented fictionally in Vida as “the Little Red Wagon”). I do recommend it to anyone who wants to get a feeling of what it was like then among those most committed and most discouraged.
Well said, Hilzoy. Double points for the South Park reference (which is still funny a decade later)!
“A knight growing old and full of scars from battle
Awaits on the edge of the tournament field
He stands all alone and no-one sees his sorrow,
For he has no-one to be Champion to.”
…Edward Zifran of Gendy
I looked first at “Americanization of Emily” but found nothing. Not worth the time to find enough wit to express the irony (considering the shrine at upper right) in whom hilzoy grants her favours to.
And The Wars Go On. And the Winners write history.
Go Hilzoy!
Life is not a thrill ride or an adrenaline rush especially when others are hurt or killed in the process. How someone with so little sense of responsability becomes an “expert” on education is flabbergasting. What a legacy we boomers bequeath to our children. This financial crisis included.
hizoy,
Glad to see you are well. Now tell me, are you old enough to have experienced those years as a young adult? No, wait. That is not a fair question. Let us rephrase. What is a rational response by a minority to a brutal genocidal and unjustified war conducted by the majority (that would be Viet Nam)? No. Not rational. Let us say justifiable. I mean, we killed three million, ya’ know.
I don’t mean to put you on a spot. So consider a remoter episode, say, Bloody Kansas.
What is sad about Ayers may not so much be his methods as the lunatic juvenile ideological cant, the flight from reality, and the actually quite comical tactical failures of the Weathermen in the 60’s.
Their failure was one of farce. I agree Ayers should never have written the editorial. He should have remained quiet out of embarassment. Maybe he has not yet grown up. But to condemn ‘terror’ oh so casually is oh so careless. Like, tell it to the Algerians, or even to some of our more exuberant revolutionaries in the late 1790’s. OK?
i.e., your rant exhibits some of the same tendencies. I would urge you to trod with care through this moral minefield.
Well said.
His acts have not saved the life of a single Vietnamese (or American soldier, for that matter).
He could have done so many things to make this world a better place: organize peaceful anti-war rallies and sit-ins, set up a grassroots campaign to influence public opinion on the war, raise funds to help wounded Vietnamese civilians, advocate the outlawing of Agent Orange to Congress, just to name a few things off the top of my head.
But no, those things weren’t glamorous enough.
So instead, he chose to use counterproductive violence and turn off many Americans from the anti-war movement. It really was all about him and about wanting to live an exciting life at the expense of others.
agreed. which is maybe why he said he wished he’d done more.
he was young.
he was passionate.
he was right.
when your government is wrong… fuck’em.
civil disobedience.
he was ready to pay his price.
blame nixon.
i wouldn’t repent either…
i too would say knowing what i know now… i’d wish i’d done more.
“To me, though, he’s just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed,”
WHo does that remind me of?
Not that the compariason makes Ayers’s arguments more honest or his crimes less bad. However the fratrat-in-chief has, through his narcisistic selfindulgence, killed a lot more people.
bobbyp: I was a kid during the 60s, but a kid who was very interested in politics, so I do remember it.
I find being frustrated, appalled, and furious about Vietnam completely comprehensible. But before someone decides to e.g. try to kill a bunch of army NCOs and their dates because of that, they ought to figure out how, exactly, their bomb is going to accomplish that. In this particular case, there was no plausible way. Did that stop Weatherman? No. But it should have.
Look: I oppose torture, even though I think that some of the people who did it probably had something good in mind, like protecting the country. But before you move from a good end to action, you have to ask yourself about the means you propose to use. Are they moral? And will they achieve that end? If not, good ends are not a justification.
I don’t see that Ayers et al ever asked those questions seriously. I mind that in the case of Cheney and Yoo, and I mind it in his case as well.
“when your government is wrong… fuck’em.”
Bombings weren’t against abstractions of government, but carried the risks of killing actual people, people who did not make the decisions to carry on an immoral war.
Taking into your own hands the decision to commit explosive violence, and possibly kill people, is right under very very limited circumstances, and whether the cause you’re fighting for being just, or the cause you’re fighting against being terribly wrong, doesn’t change the rightness or wrongness of one’s decision.
“I don’t see that Ayers et al ever asked those questions seriously.”
Well, they did. One doesn’t go from peace marches and sit-ins to bomb throwing on a whim. As you so aptly point out, they just didn’t reach the right answers. Yes, they were hasty, deluded, angry, irrational, and ultimately nihilistic, but I’ll bet they gave it more thought than the guy in McClean, VA, who guides a drone into a wedding party in Afghanistan (the questions you ask pertain here, too). Where does innocence end and guilt begin? Is it always a bright line? I’m not so sure anymore in my dotage.
Means v Ends. Too bad that case hasn’t yet reached the Supreme Court. Lord knows it’s been around long enough.
Hilzoy is right, but he’s actually just scratching the surface. Seriously, the dude co-wrote a book dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan:
http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/
Ayers wasn’t violently anti-war, he was violently in favor of Maoist overthrow of the US government. Which makes him just another irrelevant, impotent 60s kook, so really, after the election, the issue isn’t Ayers– it’s why the New York Times is giving the man such a prominent platform to promote his book and himself with half-truths, lies by omission, and outright lies.
I wasn’t a teen then, but I hear that an awful lot of people were. And somehow almost all of them managed to refrain from setting any bombs, let alone fantasizing about sending their stubborn opponents to death camps by the tens of millions.
Ayers wasn’t just a terrorist, he was a terrorist for communism. That’s like doubly distilled evil.
Also glad to see Hilzoy back and hope your recovery continues well.
I was peripherally involved in the antiwar movement in the sixties, and I completely agree with Hilzoy’s comments. Ayers and his wife are self-centered jerks. If not for his father’s wealth and connections neither of them would be where they are today, and maybe a little more introspection would have resulted. They damaged the entire antiwar movement and allowed war supporters to dismiss the movement by association with these crazies.
For madrigraal, you say “What a legacy we boomers bequeath to our children. This financial crisis included.” I never understand the impulse to blame a whole group (we boomers) for the actions of a distinctly separate group. (I don’t even think everyone involved in creating this crisis is a boomer, and certainly I am not taking any responsibility for it!) And again, how am I or other boomers responsible for the fact that Ayers is an idiot or is regarded as an education guru?
I’m not going to defend the Weathermen or “terrorism” here, but in the face of 3 million dead people, the concern “whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed” seems a bit precious to me.
*both hands raised in the “rock on” gesture*
The ends never justify the means. Not ever. I can appreciate youthful passion and frustration, though those years are behind me, but the ends can simply never justify the means, no matter how great the ends.
I feel this same way about torture. Truth is, no torture that the US has engaged in has saved a single life, but even if it had, nothing can justify the act itself.
Beyond that, actions such as these injure the perpetrator as much as the victim. Violence is always a double-edged sword, and a sharp one at that. I can’t remember the link, but there is a fascinating article written by a soldier who participated in torture all about the terrible effects the torture had on him, as the torturer. My sympathies are more with the torturee, but it is an viewpoint I hadn’t considered before.
Too bad Ayers never considered it.
“I’m not going to defend the Weathermen or ‘terrorism’ here, but in the face of 3 million dead people, the concern ‘whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed” seems a bit precious to me.’
I don’t see any contradiction, or anything “precious,” about being concerned about the murder of innocent human lives, be they millions of Vietnamese, or one janitor, of whatever nationality.
I think lack of concern about murder, both mass, and individual, is wrong.
I’m also capable of simultaneously thinking that many folks not around during the Sixties (I was only born in 1958, mysefl, but I was a newsjunkie by 1967, and obsessively reading on recent history by not long after) aren’t apt to understand the events and motivations of people back then, as of any other time that one is neither well-read upon, or otherwise experienced with, and also thinking that that complex moral adage “two wrongs don’t make a right” is rarely wrong.
I also think that, as on most any subject, it’s easy for some folks to consider the full picture of a complex time in a superficial and one-sided fashion, and to write accordingly.
That, too, is avoidable.
Anybody who hasn’t made a dumb mistake hasn’t done anything. (Yeah, yeah, double negative.) But most of us — even George Bush, the most famous resident of the introspection-free zone — eventually realize that “youthful indiscretions” are “indiscretions.” I’d say bombing buildings that might have innocent people in them is a tad worse than “indiscretions.” Yet Prof. Ayers, even decades after the fact, can’t come to grips with his and his wife’s bad acts. He’s ineligible for parole, in my book. The Times should not have given him a sounding board, at least not without publishing a factual rejoinder, as Hilzoy has.
The Constant Weader @ http://www.RealityChex.com
The ends never justify the means. Not ever. I can appreciate youthful passion and frustration, though those years are behind me, but the ends can simply never justify the means, no matter how great the ends.
I disagree with this. There are very, very few means that can’t be justified by some, logically possible, ends. In looking at Ayers (or anyone else), what’s important isn’t the ends that one wants. It’s the ends that will result from your means. Quite aside from the question of what ends Ayers really wanted (I’m inclined to the Maoist overthrow interpretation myself), there was zero possibility of his means producing any desirable ends.
Combining evil means with no possible good benefit just means that you are evil. End of story. Go away, Bill Ayers. I admit that you were accomplishing some useful things over more recent years, but your effectiveness is now gone. In part, that’s because the Republicans ran a vicious, dishonest campaign that smeared Barack Obama. They didn’t smear you, though. In order for them to have done that, you would have to be repentant. That is your responsibility, and yours alone.
But before someone decides to e.g. try to kill a bunch of army NCOs and their dates because of that, they ought to figure out how, exactly, their bomb is going to accomplish that. In this particular case, there was no plausible way.
To be fair to them, every successful insurgency/revolution/terrorist campaign — of which there have been a lot — did begin with the seemingly quixotic efforts of the few.
Violence remains the most powerful political statement, even if that power is hard to direct. There will always be people tempted to use it, and the examples of its success are far too numerous for us to dismiss the practitioners of political violence, tempting as that may be. Mumbai — clearly an enormous success for those that set it in motion — is just the most recent, heartbreaking example.
I abhor violence, terrorism included. But if we are really serious about stopping terrorism, we have to acknowledge that it frequently works, that its practitioners are far from crazy, and that there is a very fine line (often fine enough only to be discernible with hindsight) between the supposed ‘kooks’ like the Weathermen and those who ultimately prevail in their causes.
Or in other words, underestimate any committed terrorist at your peril.
bobbyp,
What is a rational response by a minority to a brutal genocidal and unjustified war conducted by the majority (that would be Viet Nam)? No. Not rational. Let us say justifiable.
I am old enough to have experienced those years as a young adult (late teens/early twenties). I don’t think it’s necessary to specify what constituted a rational response in order to be able to identify some responses as wildly irrational. There was no way the WU or whatever was going to end the war with its tactics. Its members simply put others’ lives at risk, pointlessly, as part of an insane ego trip.
One doesn’t go from peace marches and sit-ins to bomb throwing on a whim. As you so aptly point out, they just didn’t reach the right answers.
Nonsense. They reached terrible answers – answers that were obviously wrong. If I ask you who the second President of the US was, and you say “Thomas Jefferson,” that’s wrong. If you say “Benito Mussolini,” that’s idiotic. Ayers’ answer was more Mussolini than Jefferson.
Or, what Emma said.
Those who do not learn from history, or in some cases, actually experience the history itself, are doomed to write shallow, lazy rants designed to bolster their own credibility at the expense of others not girded with the absolute clarity of cheap seat hindsight.
Which is easy, yes. But of limited value.
I didn’t approve of Bill Ayers’ actions then, and I don’t approve of them now. But to sweep all the other Vietnam era sins under the rug and focus only on the sins of someone who in a misguided way was young, disillusioned with the extremely corrupt foreign policy of his country, caught up in a revolutionary spirit of the times – a movement in which people had already, for years, tried nonviolent approaches to end the war, is ridiculous. We have forgiven the government officials, soldiers, proponents, who violated international law in the conduct of the war, had a policy of committing atrocities against an untold number of civilians, including bombing. No one held John McCain’s bombing civilians against him; no one holds Colin Powell’s actions in ignoring information about My Lai – we can go on and on about people who took positions during the Vietnam War era which were wrong, destructive, ruined or ended lives (by the thousands). We forgive them because they were associated with the government – even though the actions of the government were demonstrably wrong, and there was an organized effort to stop the wrongdoing. Instead, we’ve turned their stories into “service to country” myths, and despite our feelings about the war, we call the people who furthered that destruction heroes.
Okay, so Ayers was wrong and misguided. Everyone in the antiwar movement should have been pacifists, should have refused the draft and gone to jail, and by filling the jails and refusing to fight, the war would have come to an end. Is there any evidence that such a thing would have happened? It didn’t happen because it would have taken individual courage and commitment and sacrifice of thousands of young people. I wish it had happened that way, but it became obvious to Ayers and others that something else had to happen. Ayers chose a wrong path, but is he more to blame so, so, so many others on the other side, whose sins we have all agreed now to ignore?
It was self-indulgence taken to an extreme, the same extreme to which Bush’s self indulgence took this nation. Both Ayers and Bush seem to very much heros in their own eyes, noble fighters for the good, striking noble blows against the established order. Both seem to think that overpowering emotion justifies bad judgement. Both seem to think that the ends justifies the means even when the means will not logically lead to the end. Not reasoners, either one. Rationalizers, bullshitters, yes, but not reasonable people. Comic book heros in a comic book world. Both came form rich backgrounds and both were rescued from their screw ups by their daddies ( Bush multiple times, Ayers just onec.) bush killed a lot more people. None of this detracts at all from hilzoy’s point with which I totally agree. I’m just pointing out the bias or hypocrisy of those who hate Ayers and excuse Bush. They–Bish and Ayers– seem to me to be remarkably similar in type with Bush the worse in degree.
So I wonder if twenty years from now there will be an effort by rightwing revisionist historians to justify Bush on the grounds that his intentions were noble and his decisions were made during a time of great stress for the nation and the means he used , even if if not effective, were justified given the end he was pursuing…yabbitty yabbitty yab.
Not worth the time to find enough wit to express the irony (considering the shrine at upper right) in whom hilzoy grants her favours to.
I’d just like to point out that Andrew Olmsted died trying *not* to kill the guys that shot him.
To me, though, he’s just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed
That’s my take on it, too.
There are lots and lots of things you can do to make your point without risking other people’s lives.
Thanks –
What is a rational response by a minority to a brutal genocidal and unjustified war conducted by the majority (that would be Viet Nam)? No. Not rational. Let us say justifiable.
Well, it seems that the US has brought about the deaths of well over a million Iraqis through an insane and unjustified war. We could argue over the academic question of whether starting a totally unjustified war that was predicted to cause immense death and suffering due to the sectarian violence it unleashed really constitutes genocide when “only” 1 million people end up dead, but why bother? There are people who look at what we have wrought and feel that they are witnessing a genocide no less strongly than Ayers did when he gazed upon US efforts in Vietnam. So, are those people allowed to do anything now? Is it OK for them to plant a bomb at an Army recruiter’s office? Maybe kill some soldiers at a bar?
bobbyp, I’m curious to hear where you’d draw the line for them today. Is there any limit on the forms their impotent rage may take before you’d say “that’s too much, too unjustified, too disconnected from real grievance, too pointless”?
I do enjoy reading people who lived in the 60s as they ever so patiently explain that those of us born later cannot possibly hope to understand what life was like back then. Imagine, a whole generation of unique and precious snowflakes whose life experiences transcended that of the mere mortals that came before and after them! Surely, the world has never known a generation of young people who watched helpless as their government engaged in a pointless slaughter of innocents in a far off land. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to live in the United States while the US military was busying itself destroying a society across the globe.
Note about what Emma said: I agree that the strategy Emma outlines was the right strategy. Unfortunately, it was tried, and tried, and tried, and tried. I’m not saying that Bill Ayers’ way was the next step. The Weatherman movement was an embarrassment to people who were anti-war, who always had to explain it away. But, in fairness, it was no worse than what the war was all about – unbridled, pointless destruction.
“Nonsense. They reached terrible answers – answers that were obviously wrong.”
Nonsense yourself. They reached wrong answers, answers that were laughably unworkable. And really, being lectured by another one above who claims “the ends never justify the means”. Oh, really? Most of the responses here are pegging my outrage meter.
I would do the j’accuse! thing and rip in to what I see as smug self satisfaction and the blatant moral relativism masked as high moral dungeon in many of these posts. But what’s the use? I thought the wingnut right was the embodiment of pearl clutching! Grab the smelling salts!!! Bill Ayers is not sorry enough!!!
Three million dead. Three million dead. A million more dead in Iraq. But by all means, let us condemn Bill Ayers. Let us be especially nasty about it, too. Let us be vicious in our condemnation. In fact, more vicious than when we condemn Bush and Cheney (“they thought they were right”? My God!!!!) Let us make it known that WE shall NEVER stand for such a thing. Let us shout from the rooftops that “violence never works!” Let us chide each other that “the ends never justify the means”. And by all means, let us pay taxes, go about our daily lives, vote for ‘good democrats’ and not be cognizant that we, too, are a part of this killing machine.
Like Tallyrand said, “It was worse than a tragedy. It was a mistake.”
A million effing dead. You betcha’. If you don’t feel the least twinge of guilt or the least bit of the responsibility for this, you have no call lecturing Bill Ayers about ‘morality’, or means and ends for that matter.
And what byrningman said.
Turbulence,
As hard as it may be to understand, it was a different time, an absolutely crazy time, and in ways that may seem precious to those raised on The Breakfast Club or Buffy. But there is some worthwhile perspective to be gained from having lived thru it. Much as your own expertise re Michael Anthony Hall and Xander will one day be worth greater recognition.
And as for the limits of your imagination regarding destruction across the globe, what you miss is the destruction that was happening at home at the time, including the Draft. When you’re waiting for your lottery number? It sorta takes the fun out of spectating.
Turbulence,
Spare me the sarcasm. Answer the question.
Hilzoy has it right, as she usually does. But..it’s entirely too easy for some to think about this time without sufficient context. There was a whole lot of State violence in the late 50s and 60s, and it wasn’t just in Vietnam. The constant terror visited on civil rights activists was an object lesson for a lot of people who were radicalized. It’s easy for some to gloss over just how brutal that stuff was – the decades of lynching and terror, and then the reaction to MLK et. al. Also fresh in people’s minds was the little matter of the police riot in Chicago in 1968. And, of course, there was the pointless, brutal war in SE Asia, going on and on.
I don’t defend Ayres’ and the other’s humorless, infantile, dangerous political fantasies. But it’s not that hard, if you crank up your imagination a little, to *understand* their rage. I’d also suggest that our contemporary relative docility is not really something to be smug about or proud of.
BTW, Richard Elrod was not just ‘a lawyer’. He was a guy who wanted to be (and became) Cook County Sheriff. He was ambitious and freelancing. He didn’t deserve to get his back broken, but the idea that he was just ‘a lawyer’ is a little misleading.
But to sweep all the other Vietnam era sins under the rug and focus only on the sins of someone who in a misguided way was young
Who exactly is doing this sweeping? Can you cite specific comments please?
We have forgiven the government officials, soldiers, proponents, who violated international law in the conduct of the war, had a policy of committing atrocities against an untold number of civilians, including bombing.
“We” have? Why wasn’t I informed!
In general, conversation works best when claims are narrow enough to justify. “We” did no such thing. Perhaps you did. Perhaps many other people did. I certainly did not, and I know for a fact that a number of other people here did not either.
No one held John McCain’s bombing civilians against him
I did.
no one holds Colin Powell’s actions in ignoring information about My Lai
I did. I even mentioned it in comments to posts on this very blog when Powell’s name came up in the past.
You might have a point if you’re talking about the general public or some subset thereof. I’m not sure. But you have to be specific if you’re going to make these kinds of claims.
“bobbyp, I’m curious to hear where you’d draw the line for them today. Is there any limit on the forms their impotent rage may take before you’d say “that’s too much, too unjustified, too disconnected from real grievance, too pointless”?”
Let us stand this question on its head, sir. I’m curious to hear where you’d draw the line as a citizen of a government committing international crimes? How “big” do the crimes have to be before you will do ANYTHING to stop them? How big?
I guess a million dead is no big deal in your book.
bobbyp, what specific question would you like me to answer?
I’d be happy to answer whatever you like, but I’d like you to answer my question: where do you draw the line on random violence from people who think they’re witnessing a genocide? Is it OK to rape and mutilate a women who happens to be an NCO? What about bombing a PX and killing a few dozen military family members? I mean, that sort of thing would get on the news and might do something, so would it be OK for a modern day Ayers to do that?
How “big” do the crimes have to be before you will do ANYTHING to stop them? How big?
I won’t do something that I don’t think will be effective. I won’t engage in action just so that I can feel that I’m doing “something”. I won’t do that because I’m not a narcissist.
In my view, there is nothing feasible that I can do to staunch the bloodshed in Iraq; that train has already left the station. My biggest fear would be having a President McCain try a do-over in Iran, so I voted a certain way, but that was it. Now, if you can convince me that a particular piece of random violence will save the lives of a million people, I might very well do it, but you have to actually make a plausible case and Bill Ayer’s idiot logic doesn’t cut it.
“I’d also suggest that our contemporary relative docility is not really something to be smug about or proud of.”
Damn. That’s what I was trying to say. Thanks, jonny. Maybe I just need to crank down the volume.
My older brother was an Army paratrooper in the late ’60s and was in some of the worst fighting of the Vietnam war. Years later, he went through an extended phase of spouting extremist right wing rhetoric. I finally hit the wall on my liberal tolerance for free speech and differing points of view when he told my young son that Timothy McVeigh was a revolutionary hero “just like George Washington.” I actually succeeded in cuffing him into line, and by the end of his life (he died of a sudden heart attack a few years ago) he was exploring Berkeley hippie culture and studying Buddhism (I don’t take primary credit for this, but I know I strongly influenced him).
My son is now a a poli sci major at UC Berkeley (he spent the summer in Washington as a DNC intern). From the vantage point parenthood provides of glimpsing things through the younger generation’s eyes, I tell him you can’t really understand what motivated people back then unless you lived through it. It was a truly crazy time in a very different way than what we’ve lived through in recent years.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Ayers flap other than to where it seemed important to defend Obama’s connection to him. It doesn’t sound like he has anything substantive to add to the contemporary dialogue, and I don’t have a lot of faith at present in the mainstream media’s ability to frame things in a historical context that serves to advance understanding of complex issues.
Hopefully that will evolve under Obama’s leadership, because Mumbai is just the latest example of why we accept simplistic explanations offered by the mainstream establishment at our peril.
bobbyp,
Three million dead in SE Asia does not justify one dead in Washington, or Madison, if you prefer.
No matter how much you may oppose the Iraq War, you are not entitled to go into the street and start shooting at random to express your opposition. if you do so you are responsible for your actions, quite apart from the morality of the war.
This is not even a question of means vs. ends. Ayers’ ends were unattainable by the means he chose.
One additional point. Hilzoy did not just decide to criticize Ayers out of the blue. Ayers published an op-ed in the NYT defending his behavior. That justifies a specific response. This is not a question of deciding, arbitrarily, to pick on Ayers. It is a question of addressing the arguments he chose to make in a widely read newspaper. There is no requirement to comment on all the world’s horrors before doing that.
The period of say from 67 to 72 was a dark age, a period of national psychosis, but I don’t think that one should use that to excuse the behavior of one of the major psychotics.
But he was only one psychotic among many and if one is going to start assigning degrees of nefariousness to people who were players back in the day, Ayers wouldn’t be in the top tier.
Change of subject: it seems odd to me that the millenials, who have so much much much more to be outraged about than my generation are so much better behaved. I hope that means that they will be more effective at influencing politics.
I do enjoy reading people who lived in the 60s as they ever so patiently explain that those of us born later cannot possibly hope to understand what life was like back then. Imagine, a whole generation of unique and precious snowflakes whose life experiences transcended that of the mere mortals that came before and after them!
Screw you. Seriously. 50,000 dead in Nam. How many of your loved ones died, were drafted or were seriously traumatized in Iraq?
After the Bush administration, I understand how this generation could know disempowerment and apathy and even hate, but to use that experience to discount what a generation went through in Viet Nam is downright nasty.
My people still remember a genocide of two and three centuries ago, yet yours is already forgetting the travesty of two generations past. Don’t your parents tell stories?
“bobbyp, what specific question would you like me to answer?”
You’re being dense, right? I mean you blockquote it to start your post @ 10:22 above.
As I pointed out to Hilzoy, I find off-the-shelf moral condemnation of ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’ rather tedious, and delusionally abstracted from history. I hold no book for Bill Ayers. He failed miserably as a ‘revolutionary’. He seems to have done some good since then. Good for him I say.
I have read through a lot of condemnatory remarks above, and have yet to see much in the way of forgiveness, or let bygones be bygones. Me? I say it’s a fart in a whirlwind, but a bunch here seem really worked up about a failed 60’s radical who helped drive the New Left off the cliff. And the high moral standard demanded, yes, demanded of poor Bill. Why I doubt any of us live up to that. The bar seems pretty damnned high around here. My. My. My.
But by all means, do lecture me about the 60’s. Buy why stop there? Lecture me about the Haymarket Riot, and the IWW, too. I love it.
“No one held John McCain’s bombing civilians against him; no one holds Colin Powell’s actions in ignoring information about My Lai – we can go on and on about people who took positions during the Vietnam War era which were wrong, destructive, ruined or ended lives (by the thousands). We forgive them”
Beg pardon, but whom else besides yourself are you authorized to speak for in the plural?
“Ayers chose a wrong path, but is he more to blame….”
Which writer here made that assertion?
“I do enjoy reading people who lived in the 60s as they ever so patiently explain that those of us born later cannot possibly hope to understand what life was like back then.”
Cite?
“In general, conversation works best when claims are narrow enough to justify.”
Indeed.
“I thought the wingnut right was the embodiment of pearl clutching!”
The extent of various folks engaging in pearl clutching in this thread, from a variety of “sides,” including yourself, should demonstrate that it’s a common human trait.
“I guess a million dead is no big deal in your book.”
This sort of accusation and presumption is far more likely to generate heat and anger than it is to make for productive conversation. It’s probably best avoided.
(Really, if someone said this sort of thing to you, do you think it would encourage you to take a calm and thoughtful tone?)
But it’s not that hard, if you crank up your imagination a little, to *understand* their rage.
Sure, I agree with that. But so what? There are lots of groups that feel rage today and I understand their rage; sometimes I even sympathize with it. That includes Al Queda members, Timothy McVeigh, people who are horrified at Iraq, people who are horrified at our foreign policy in general, etc. Lots of rage. So what do I do? I still think that killing random people is unjustified no matter how enraged you feel.
Look, there is a lot of rage out there. Some of it is justified, and some of it just isn’t. If we open the door to random killings whenever people feel enraged, well, I’m not sure you’re going to like where that road takes us.
I’d also suggest that our contemporary relative docility is not really something to be smug about or proud of.
Can you expand on this? My sense is that if people today were more willing to kill random strangers in pursuit of political goals, things would be worse not better, but perhaps I’m misreading you.
I tell him you can’t really understand what motivated people back then unless you lived through it. It was a truly crazy time in a very different way than what we’ve lived through in recent years.
I’m sure it was. But can you name a single generation in the last two hundred years that didn’t feel the same way? Stuff happens. That’s life. And while that stuff may seem unique and unknowable to those who were not there, that may just be hubris talking.
Also, I still don’t understand why the special nature of the times changes anything in hilzoy’s argument. No matter how crazy the times were, there is no plausible sequence of events by which killing random NCOs increases the likelihood of ending the war. I don’t know why Americans have difficulty with this concept, but when you threaten to kill people unless they do what you want, they rebel. That’s why our terror bombing campaigns in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and Iraq failed to end the conflicts. Now, if you threaten to annihilate them (and can plausibly do it), things are different, but Ayers didn’t have nuclear weapons.
Turbulence, “if you can convince me that a particular piece of random violence will save the lives of a million people, I might very well do it, but you have to actually make a plausible case…”
Well that’s pretty silly, and I am not trying to make that case. Apparently, you prefer not to listen, or like putting words in others’ mouths. Too bad. You seem like a nice enough fellow, otherwise.
With all due respect,
“I tell him you can’t really understand what motivated people back then unless you lived through it.”
I don’t think that’s true at all. Everyone who “lived through it” lived through only their own unique, fragmentary, limited, POV. While a lot of people lived through experiences unique to the era, few lived through more than a smattering of the crucial events of the Vietnam era. Rather, they were familiar with the times, and otherwise largely read about events, or saw them on tv, or saw distant echoes of them. Endlessly more people were influenced by the events surrounding the Democratic convention in Chicago, or any given assassination or riot, than were actually present for said event.
And most people were distant from all of it, no closer than their tv and newspaper and local impressionable teenager.
So, sure, living through those times is a big aid in understanding them, but hardly a requirement: intense study, via books and documentaries and the like, can do fine.
Forgive me for pointing this out, but I find this commonplace absolute assertion pretty annoying, because it’s very wrong, and dismisses the understanding of untold numbers of people, no matter that it’s vaguely in the neighborhood of a somewhat true far less absolute statement.
And it’s really unhelpful to assert to people that they can’t understand something when, in fact, if they make a considerable effort, many certainly could.
They just have to put in the effort.
This is what studying history (or anthropology) is all about.
(Really, if someone said this sort of thing to you, do you think it would encourage you to take a calm and thoughtful tone?)
Ach! I have been Farberized.
But to answer your question, I like to think that under certain circumstances such a remark just might make my light bulb go on. I mean, when somebody calls you out on a stupid remark (now don’t get angry, I know that “the stupid” often in the eye of the beholder) and you realize it, don’t you get a bit calmer? I should hope so.
“”We” have? Why wasn’t I informed!”
Me neither. Nobody ever tells me anything.
i agree that ayers was/is a smug, hypocritical, ass. however, i can’t hold him responsible for his recent notoriety. that goes to mccain/palin who desperately tried to spin into willie horton redux. take him for what he is, a vain, out of date crackpot. may we never have to hear his name again.
Dear Gary, Turbulence, et al., Again, as I have in other threads, I apologize for being not particular enough in my comments. My point, however about John McCain, Colin Powell, etc., was that they weren’t vilified by the entire country to the extent that they had to make a public statement defending themselves against being a universally condemned pariah. Instead, both have been considered by many in the country to be viable candidates for President. And yet, Hilzoy devotes a column to condemning Ayers for trying to defend himself against the onslaught of vilification that he endured during the election. Do I accept his version of history? Not entirely. But because I respect Hilzoy so much, I wonder about her priorities in choosing to pile on against someone who, in his youth, was motivated by anger and alienation in the face of extreme wrongdoing by his government to do things that were (although misguided and counterproductive) an effort to change the status quo.
There would be no argument from me that Ayers and others started down the road of a mob-like frenzy, much like those that characterized some of the most horrifying social movements of our time (Nazis and Maoists come to mind). I’m glad they didn’t get very far. I forgive them now, and am grateful that they embarked on a more constructive path. But it does all beg a question (asked or suggested by jonnybutter, bobbyp, coyote and perhaps others): how many deaths did we all prevent in Vietnam and Iraq so far by marching on Washington, holding candles in vigils, etc.? I’m glad we all elected Obama recently (finally, someone who’s thoughtful) but it’s a little late… Maybe we should all ask ourselves, Next time our country elects someone who wants to conduct a horrific war, is there anything we can do that will actually stop it? Because it’s bound to happen again. (And no, I’m not suggesting that bombing an NCO dance is the answer.)
“The period of say from 67 to 72 was a dark age, a period of national psychosis, but I don’t think that one should use that to excuse the behavior of one of the major psychotics.”
Bill Ayers wasn’t in the least psychotic, by any remotely accurate definition of the word. “Psychotic” does not mean “person I highly disagree with and disapprove of,” or “person whose morality or decisions shocks me.”
“Change of subject: it seems odd to me that the millenials, who have so much much much more to be outraged about than my generation are so much better behaved.”
Doesn’t seem odd in the least to me; these are vastly calmer times overall, by orders of magnitude. When we have hundreds of metropolitan neighborhoods burned down in riots, multiple assassinations of top political leaders, endless assassinations of neighborhood activists, a COINTELPRO program, endless Jim Crow, endless killings of civil rights protestors, local responses like that of Bull Connor as the absolute norm across much of the country, over 16,000 U.S. troops being killed per year, an unfair draft, a belief on the part of both the government, and many opposed to it, that revolution was imminent, as part of a worldwide revolutionary movement, and the like, things might be remotely comparable.
And I’ve just begun to hint at some of the reasons things were so extreme then. Why anyone would think contemporary times are even remotely the way they are then, or should be, I find difficult to understand.
“…who have so much much much more to be outraged about than my generation….”
Could you clarify what you mean? Because I really don’t see it at all. To what are you referring? Thanks!
“I have read through a lot of condemnatory remarks above, and have yet to see much in the way of forgiveness, or let bygones be bygones.”
I’m fine with Bill Ayers being a professor at the U. of Chicago, and I see little to seriously criticize him for — certainly nothing remotely on the level of being a major figure in Weatherman — in his behavior in the last three decades.
I’m unaware I have an obligation to discuss these, or other, opinions while also commenting on other matters.
I have nothing too substantial to add but a few questions:
1) @ a few of you, including hilzoy: Why is Ayers being so frequently characterized as “spoiled” or “rich” or even “narcissistic” or (ugh) “vain” in condemnation? I think this reinforces a lot of bullshit “elitist” slander flung at the left. Given that large swaths of the U.S. actually supported the Vietnam War, even late into the game after Tet, (and that this is a position far more morally rank than any of Ayers’ misguided tactics, could we call them either “spoiled rich kids” or “stupid poor hicks”? How is Ayers’ any vainer or more pretentious or more self-indulgent than your standard kneejerk nationalist? I think whatever good points hilzoy makes are drowned out by unnecessary rhetoric…
2)A lot of people (including me) seem to condemn Ayers because of his pie-in-the-sky view of how effective such isolated acts of destruction would be. But then is the real problem that a few radicals resorted to violence, or rather that the greater anti-war movement didn’t become more violent after the failure of pacifistic civil disobedience to alter the course of anything? How do you feel about John Brown? Is your opinion of Harper’s Ferry at all tied to the Civil War? If Ayers’ and the WU had more “support”, wouldn’t that make their actions more condonable? If the U.S. instigates another conflict in, say, the next 10 or 20 years, would you even bother to participate in a peaceful street demonstration any longer? Not to say that violence would be the correct strategy, but why waste any more posterboard…
He has done enough harm already. Now he should do the decent thing and leave us in peace.
As highly as I esteem you, hilzoy, I do have to disagree with the last line of your post, quoted above.
Ayers has“[left] the public in peace”; it wasn’t his wish or his decision to become part of the 2008 campaign. Having been dragged out of semi-obscurity by people using him to attack Obama, he’s entitled to respond. (I note that, unlike the Reverend Wright, Ayers didn’t and hasn’t make a self-justifying public spectacle of himself at Obama’s expense.)
The problem for Ayers- and for Dorn, and the other revolutionaries, or wanna-be revolutionaries, from the 60s – is that their moment passed, along with their cause, and left them in the position of having to make some kind of life for themselves. Perhaps there’s a moral case to make that they should stay out of public life out of shame for their past actions, but I can’t fault them for not doing so – for, instead, continuing to seek a meaningful life, involving themselves in causes that are important to them.
And, along with other commenters here, I certainly can’t see the justice in saying Ayers et al. should “shut up and go away” when people who committed far worse enormities, with far worse body counts, continue to enjoy public acclaim and respect – people like, say, Henry Kissinger, and even Nixon himself – whose mea culpas are either non-existent or even more self-pitying and self-excusing than Ayers’.
bobbyp: What is a rational response by a minority to a brutal genocidal and unjustified war conducted by the majority (that would be Viet Nam)? No. Not rational. Let us say justifiable.
I thought I explained my answer but apparently I was insufficiently clear. So I’ll try again. Rational or justifiable responses depend on the situation, so we cannot say precisely what they will be, but we can characterize them by describing what properties they must possess. Any rational or justifiable response must have some plausible mechanism by which it could affect positive change with a relatively high probability of success. So in WWII, killing Hitler is OK. Killing some random German secretary is not OK. I could come up with other properties to make this a complete formal statement of my beliefs, but I won’t bother: I think this one property is sufficient to cover the case at hand.
Look, if Ayers killed a bunch of innocent people while attempting some bold action that might actually have made a difference, things would be different; I might support him depending on the details. But he didn’t.
I’ve tried my best to answer your question so I’d like to ask you again: do you think someone who believes we’ve committed genocide in Iraq is justified in raping and mutilating an NCO or bombing a PX? I’m really curious to see where you draw the lines here.
Crappity crap crap. I could swear I closed that tag.
I invoke The Powers That Be, to make the italics go away.
“Ach! I have been Farberized.”
I’m not at all clear what you mean by that.
“I mean, when somebody calls you out on a stupid remark (now don’t get angry, I know that ‘the stupid’ often in the eye of the beholder) and you realize it, don’t you get a bit calmer?”
You wrote: “I guess a million dead is no big deal in your book.”
First of all, that this sort of comment would make someone “realize” that they’ve been “stupid” seems less than crystal clear.
Secondly, a comment that essentially says “I guess you’re just a stupid and morally blind or indifferent person” does not, by my observation, tend to make most people calmer. Not even a bit. Your Mileage May Vary.
(If I wrote, “I guess you’re just too stupidly dense to realize that,” would that help your calmness level? I’m really dubious. I could, to be sure, be wrong. I just kinda doubt it.)
(If I am, in fact, wrong, and you’re one of those quite unusual people who finds that sort of thing calming, do mention it, so I’ll make a note as to how to best respond to you in future.)
(Or maybe not. But, heck, people do surprise me at times.)
Aw, krep.
“I’m unaware I have an obligation to discuss these, or other, opinions while also commenting on other matters.”
No such obligation has been stated or implied. Furthermore, you can comment on anything you want.
Besides, the guy called me a “snowflake”. You expect me to stand idly by and just take it?
Geez.
“I tell him you can’t really understand what motivated people back then unless you lived through it.”
I don’t think that’s true at all. Everyone who “lived through it” lived through only their own unique, fragmentary, limited, POV.
Sure. They lived through the draft, and the deaths, and the agony of anticipation for that letter in the mail. What the hell could they know about being angry with their government. About being lied to. Your going thorough some bull, so this must be as bad as it gets, right? Who could possibly know something you don’t? What can a person live through and still be whole?
Arrogance is the main barrier to knowledge.
can I make the italics begone?
weee
“And yet, Hilzoy devotes a column to condemning Ayers for trying to defend himself against the onslaught of vilification that he endured during the election.”
I think there are perfectly valid ways of writing about how to better understand the context of Bill Ayers’ foolishness Back In The Day, and to defend Obama from guilt-by-association, and to defend Ayers from more extreme accusations, without giving him a blanket pardon, particularly given that his own statements about his past actions have been inconsistent, and taken a lot less responsibility than he could, or in my view, should, have.
Just because a lot of his attackers are inappropriately black-and-white with their self-righteousness is no reason to mirror them. One can always go with that old liberal standby: a bit of nuance.
“…someone who, in his youth, was motivated by anger and alienation in the face of extreme wrongdoing by his government to do things that were (although misguided and counterproductive) an effort to change the status quo.”
Change out that “his government,” and you have a defense of Lt. Calley, too.
It would be a lot easier to strongly defend Bill Ayers if he’d ever said truly clearly “engaging in violence that could have led to murder, and at least some of which was intended to lead to murder, was wholly wrong, no matter out idealistic motivations, and the great evil we sought to fight against,” or something like that.
Unfortunately — and I wish it were otherwise — his statements have, looked at closely and in detail, been inconsistent, and mealy-mouthed. He’s never fully taken responsibility for his acts and past intentions. That fuzzes up matters to a point.
As I wrote, I think it’s perfectly appropriate for him to be a professor at U. of C. He’s done good work in recent decades. I wouldn’t support punitive action against him.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t note that he simply has never taken full responsibility for his long ago acts and intentions. Neither do I have to give my bona fides as a leftist, or an opponent of the Vietnam war, to make said note.
Look, if Ayers killed a bunch of innocent people while attempting some bold action that might actually have made a difference, things would be different; I might support him depending on the details. But he didn’t.
I agree completely. But if you had been compelled to act, and make a difference in the war, would you have been Ayers or Ghandi?
Or would you have just posted on a blog?
“But it does all beg a question (asked or suggested by jonnybutter, bobbyp, coyote and perhaps others): how many deaths did we all prevent in Vietnam and Iraq so far by marching on Washington, holding candles in vigils, etc.?”
To answer this: in Vietnam, countless hundreds of thousands, if not more. The fault otherwise lies with Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, as well as earlier with LBJ and McNamara and William Bundy, and the leading associates of both Presidents.
But for all that LBJ took years to get the message, and for all that Richard Nixon committed evil of the worst sort by seeking a “decent interval,” purely for political reasons, before settling for more or less the same deal he could have gotten when he was first elected (and he did this utterly consciously), if it weren’t for all the domestic upheaval and protests against the war, the war could have, and would have, gone on far longer.
Since you asked.
It didn’t beg a question, either.
“Any rational or justifiable response must have some plausible mechanism by which it could affect positive change with a relatively high probability of success.”
Turbulence. Have you ever seen that movie, “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”? Have you ever marveled at a John Wayne movie where a small band takes on overwhelming odds? Should Britain have given up in ’40? How high was their probability of success?
When judging whether or not to take an action it would seem there are other variables than “the probability of success”.
And what of the moral dimension? If an action “has a high probability of success” does that alone rationalize it? I certainly do not know. But many here seem to have no problem condemning Ayers because he missed the boat on this.
To err is human. Aw, what the hell. All I said to Hilzoy is that her condemnation of Ayers’ rather innocuous editorial struck me as facily drawing bright moral lines on a canvas of gray.
“But if you had been compelled to act, and make a difference in the war, would you have been Ayers or Ghandi?”
Gandhi. Gandhi. Gandhi. Gandhi.
“Why is Ayers being so frequently characterized as ‘spoiled’ or ‘rich’….”
Because that’s how he grew up?
As a rule, when you grow up the child of a millionaire, you’re characterized as “rich”? What about this strikes you as unusual?
This isn’t rich?
My point, however about John McCain, Colin Powell, etc., was that they weren’t vilified by the entire country to the extent that they had to make a public statement defending themselves against being a universally condemned pariah.
So what? What they did really has no bearing on whether what Bill Ayers did is worthy of condemnation. I don’t let my outrage at one person interfere with my outrage at someone else who deserves it. Bill Ayers actions deserve condemnation. Full stop. George W. Bush’s actions deserve condemnation. Full stop. The latter would be easier to get across if Ayers would shut the hell up, and go away. He’s a distraction, and, as long as he can’t even bring himself to be remorseful, he has no place on the stage, which includes a spot on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
A lot of people (including me) seem to condemn Ayers because of his pie-in-the-sky view of how effective such isolated acts of destruction would be.
No. I am condemning Bill Ayers because he engaged in wanton acts of destruction. This is subtle, but, I think, important difference. I really don’t care what his views of its effectiveness were. Their uselessness is an objective fact.
Having been dragged out of semi-obscurity by people using him to attack Obama, he’s entitled to respond.
He has a right to respond, but no one has an obligation to listen to him. Bill Ayers was not slandered in any way by the Republicans. He is, in fact, guilty of exactly what they accused him of. Barack Obama was slandered, and I care what his response is.
The problem for Ayers- and for Dorn, and the other revolutionaries, or wanna-be revolutionaries, from the 60s – is that their moment passed, along with their cause, and left them in the position of having to make some kind of life for themselves.
No, their problem is that they engaged in pointless, wanton acts of destruction, and don’t seem to think that they did anything wrong. Their moment didn’t pass; it never was.
And, along with other commenters here, I certainly can’t see the justice in saying Ayers et al. should “shut up and go away” when people who committed far worse enormities, with far worse body counts, continue to enjoy public acclaim and respect – people like, say, Henry Kissinger, and even Nixon himself – whose mea culpas are either non-existent or even more self-pitying and self-excusing than Ayers’.
Again, this isn’t relative. Yes, Henry Kissinger should be publicly flogged for his crimes. Yes, it’s a pity that justice will never be served upon. I wish he would go away.
None of that changes the fact that Bill Ayers should also disappear.
Sapient, thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it.
My point, however about John McCain, Colin Powell, etc., was that they weren’t vilified by the entire country to the extent that they had to make a public statement defending themselves against being a universally condemned pariah.
I agree with you on this issue. We Americans suck. We don’t care about the lives of foreigners. Sometimes I wonder at how different we are from other human beings in that regard, but we clearly fail in comparison to our own lofty rhetoric.
how many deaths did we all prevent in Vietnam and Iraq so far by marching on Washington, holding candles in vigils, etc.?
I don’t know. I do think there is a difference between doing things for effect and doing things because you want to make a point. Even if the protests were not useful, I think a lot of people felt the need to publicly take a stand, and that seems like a good thing to me. It is part of how communities establish and prioritize shared values over time.
Maybe we should all ask ourselves, Next time our country elects someone who wants to conduct a horrific war, is there anything we can do that will actually stop it? Because it’s bound to happen again. (And no, I’m not suggesting that bombing an NCO dance is the answer.)
I doubt it. We live in a very militaristic culture and war makes people feel good. By the time we’ve got a President demagoguing for war, things might very well be too late. It is like asking what can we do to stop a committed terrorist who has a nuke downtown. By that time, it is too late. What you should have done is spent lots of time and money reducing the factors that promote terrorism, securing loose nukes, putting time and energy into law enforcement and counterterrorism, etc. So I think we should ratchet down the US’ military capabilities and try to establish institutions that make crazy military adventurism harder. We have some now, but they need more teeth.
I certainly can’t see the justice in saying Ayers et al. should “shut up and go away” when people who committed far worse enormities, with far worse body counts, continue to enjoy public acclaim and respect – people like, say, Henry Kissinger, and even Nixon himself – whose mea culpas are either non-existent or even more self-pitying and self-excusing than Ayers’.
Why do you assume that I don’t hate Nixon and Kissinger and friends with the passion of a thousand burning suns? Because, I do. And since I hate them so much, I don’t really feel I have to apologize for condemning idiots who killed on a much smaller scale.
Screw you. Seriously. 50,000 dead in Nam. How many of your loved ones died, were drafted or were seriously traumatized in Iraq?
Are you seriously asking me, a man from the middle east who has family in Iraq, to enumerate how many of my relatives have been killed, raped, and mutilated? All I can say is that…my hands lack the number of middle fingers needed to give you an appropriate response.
But I would like to thank you for demonstrating once again how very special you are. None of us could possibly imagine what it is like to watch our friends and family die for nothing because the US government is run by madmen.
“But then is the real problem that a few radicals resorted to violence, or rather that the greater anti-war movement didn’t become more violent after the failure of pacifistic civil disobedience to alter the course of anything?”
Could you outline your views on how the latter course would have worked out better, please?
“How do you feel about John Brown?”
That he was an ineffective murderer?
I’m not a pacifist, but I do require that violence, among other requirements to be justified, be effective at creating more good than evil. Brown scared the bejeezus out of slavers, and that accomplished what, exactly?
John Brown murdered random people. Are you for that, if the murderers hate something bad? Should we just go kill random people whom we believe to have supported the Iraq War? If not, what are you saying?
“The problem for Ayers- and for Dorn”
Dohrn.
“They lived through the draft, and the deaths, and the agony of anticipation for that letter in the mail.”
In point of fact, most people during the Vietnam war did not live through any of this. Most people were not, in fact, subject to the draft.
Thus my point. Claiming that everyone, or the majority, of people lived through these experiences is just false. Factually untrue.
“Have you ever seen that movie, ‘The Bridge Over the River Kwai’? Have you ever marveled at a John Wayne movie where a small band takes on overwhelming odds? Should Britain have given up in ’40? How high was their probability of success?”
We’ll have to agree to disagree that these cases are comparable to Weatherman. I don’t know which is more brow-wrinkling: citing John Wayne movies, or comparing Britain’s chances of survival, and moral cause in resisting Nazism, to Weatherman.
“To err is human.”
I’m unclear how this broad a brush couldn’t apply to the perpetrators of the Vietnam War. Why, LBJ didn’t intentionally intend to kill people pointlessly; he genuinely hoped he was doing the right thing. Why not forgive and forget?
Isn’t there some middle ground between utter condemnation, and utterly condoning? What’s with the seeming insistence that there can be no criticism of Bill Ayers, as to say that even the slightest condemnation of random attempted murder is somehow to justify or insufficiently condemn the perpetrators of the Vietnam War? What’s wrong with condemning murder, period? What’s wrong with condeming not taking responsibility for one’s actions, period?
The point of The Bridge On The River Kwai was that Alec Guiness’ character was a moral idiot, btw.
Are you seriously asking me, a man from the middle east who has family in Iraq, to enumerate how many of my relatives have been killed, raped, and mutilated? All I can say is that…my hands lack the number of middle fingers needed to give you an appropriate response.
No. I’m asking how many people you honestly cared about were subject to these things. Folks have lots of family, most of whom they could care less about. Do you sincerely believe that the generation who went through Viet Nam doesn’t know something about lies and war and pain that maybe you don’t?
In point of fact, most people during the Vietnam war did not live through any of this. Most people were not, in fact, subject to the draft.
So what? How many folks had loved ones who were? Who died or came back a different person? Is that in your damn statistics?
“The latter would be easier to get across if Ayers would shut the hell up, and go away.”
This seems a bit off to me, though. He said not a word during the campaign, other than an oblique comment on his blog, and since then he gave a brief interview for a small comment in The New Yorker, and now wrote a single piece for the Op-Ed page of the NY Times. He’s hardly been doing a Sarah Palin, or making a publicity tour, or acting like Jeremiah Wright did, so I’m unclear what you’re protesting.
Moreover, for all that I think it’s fine to point out that he’s never taken full responsibility for his actions, or to condemn his actions, without need to put in a lot of qualifiers about the virtues of his cause, or the evils of his enemies, I don’t see that he needs to disappear from public life; I believe in rehabilitation of criminals, and so far as I know, Ayers has made a lot of contributions in Chicago in the last thirty years or so. I don’t see that he needs to be driven out of that life, or the justice in calling for that, and if you’re not calling for that, I’m unclear what exactly it is you’re calling for.
“…he has no place on the stage, which includes a spot on the op-ed page of the New York Times.”
He was made a huge figure of demonization during the presidential campaign. Huge. It seems entirely just to me that he get a couple of rights of reply. It’s not as if he’s being offered a column in the Times, which I would not favor. (And it surely would be nice to see the hind end of William Kristol there, speaking of.)
Once again, there’s a middle ground between, say, (hypothetically) supporting someone for Senator, and (hypothetically) demanding they change their name and never be heard from again. Why is it so many people seem to argue only for extremes?
“So what? How many folks had loved ones who were?”
Plenty, which is entirely irrelevant to my point, which you seem entirely uninterested in addressing, so I think I’ll bow out of further interchanges with you now.
“Is that in your damn statistics?”
I didn’t mention any statistics, and you appear now to be just ranting, saying stuff that has nothing whatever to do with what I wrote, and so I wish that you enjoy your self-righteous anger-working-out issues.
Turbulence: “Why do you assume that I don’t hate Nixon and Kissinger and friends with the passion of a thousand burning suns? Because, I do. And since I hate them so much, I don’t really feel I have to apologize for condemning idiots who killed on a much smaller scale.”
Ditto. It’s never either/or.
Do you sincerely believe that the generation who went through Viet Nam doesn’t know something about lies and war and pain that maybe you don’t?
Judging by how eagerly this country leapt into a war that made no sense, I don’t think that most people in the Vietnam generation learned shit about lies and war.
So no, I don’t think there is some special knowledge that most people from the Vietnam generation know but that I do not.
“In point of fact, most people during the Vietnam war did not live through any of this. Most people were not, in fact, subject to the draft.”
In fact, most male people of the relevant age group were subject to the draft, or at least had to worry about it. There was a lottery, and if a young man’s draft card had a low number, he was drafted unless he had a deferment. Everyone was worried about it. You might want to look at the Vietnam casualty figures. You missed the draft, apparently, but boys five or six years older than you (and older) spent their youths planning around it.
“Isn’t there some middle ground between utter condemnation, and utterly condoning? What’s with the seeming insistence that there can be no criticism of Bill Ayers, as to say that even the slightest condemnation of random attempted murder is somehow to justify or insufficiently condemn”….blah, blah, blah.
I’m all for middle ground. In fact, there is a line of theological thought that contends we all go to heaven, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hiter, yes, even Bill Ayers. I kinda’ like the logic of it. But I digress.
Like Turbulence, you persist in destroying straw men. If you will take the time to read my first post, I pointed out that the over the top rebuke to one little editorial was imposing bright moral lines when caution is indicated. But no, it seemed to bring out the worst, a race to see who could dennounce Ayers most vociferously. I even threw in a few Ayer insults of my own. The avalanch could not be stopped.
But now we get to the bottom of this thread, and Gary Farber is claiming there was “seeming insistence” that there “can be no criticism” of Bill Ayers.
Like what thread were you reading? Your assertion is absolutely false.
And tell me, Gary. In August, 1940, what chance would you have given of British success against the Nazis? Very little? Should they have then persisted in violent resistance to the nazis? I suspect you would say yes (I guess so would I). Turbulence has another take, since the violence would, if I read his view correctly, not be justified because of the “low probability of sucess”. Obviously, I do not agree this is some kind of universal principle.
You are free to disagree.
I also find the complete silence on McCain’s terrorist to be deafening. We’re supposed to all collectively forget that the war started out for the U.S. as an attempt to keep the French colonialists in power, and we’re supposed to replace images of endless bombs dropped on villages (yes, there were people down there) with patriotic photo ops of young pilots on their aircraft carriers. The sad truth is that the politicians at the time were probably much more responsive to Ayers than they were to people waving flowers in the streets–although in the end, it was the successful violence of the Vietnamese against their American attackers that ended the war. As for janitors, was anyone concerned during the election that McCain didn’t check to make sure that the janitors weren’t cleaning up late at night in the Vietnamese villages before he let his bombs drop? The very idea of posing this question is considered to be ridiculous–a sign of how ridiculous our discourse has become when we get worked up about Ayers.
Gary,
And here I thought that great movie was about the futility of war…little did I know.
Cordially,
“He should leave us in peace” …. Ok, very good, but who brought him up in the first place???
Karlo,
To paraphrase, there is ‘seeming insistence’ here that if only we dennounce Bill Ayers more vociferously, vehemently, and maybe even more loudly, that the stain of John McCain’s war crimes, and maybe even the good senator himself will vanish, even though he has not admitted to having any remorse, which of course, is the ultimate crime against humanity.
But hey, he lost the election, didn’t he?
Maybe they are on to something?
“In fact, most male people of the relevant age group were subject to the draft, or at least had to worry about it.”
In fact, most people in the U.S. weren’t male, and of age. What’s your point of disagreement? Only young men count as people? Presumably not, so?
Is there some compulsion people have to argue for arguing’s sake? Are you really arguing that if you lived in a time, you completely comprehended and personally experienced every aspect of it, but if you didn’t, you can’t comprehend any major aspect of it? If not, what are you with arguing with me about? If so, well, then. Just to argue? Because my only point was, as I stated, that the notion I state here that merely being born in an era gives comprehensive knowledge is nonsense, and that not being born in an era makes one absolutely incapable of understanding events and times.
Are these really controversial views?
“And here I thought that great movie was about the futility of war…little did I know.”
I’m pretty sure. The futility of war? You mean Japan’s Imperial System survived unchanged, and so did the Nazi system. Um, what?
The American Civil War would have been the same no matter who won? The American Revolutionary War wouldn’t have changed anything if the British won? WTF are you talking about?
“We’re supposed to all collectively forget that the war started out for the U.S. as an attempt to keep the French colonialists in power, and we’re supposed to replace images of endless bombs dropped on villages”
Basically, this seems to be made up out of pure imagination. If there’s a cite to anyone in this thread, do give it. Absent that, you’re just making crap up out of voices in your head you want to object to.
“To paraphrase, there is ‘seeming insistence’ here that if only we dennounce Bill Ayers more vociferously, vehemently, and maybe even more loudly, that the stain of John McCain’s war crimes, and maybe even the good senator himself will vanish”
Ditto. It would be nice if people would restrain themselves to addressing actual writing by people here, rather than the voices in their head.
Give cites. If you can’t, talk to your wall to work out stuff with voices in your head, I suggest.
I recognize that lots of folks have lots of issues to work out with Characters They’ve Once Encountered. This isn’t the place. This is a place for debating real people, with cites and quotes. Try working on that, and avoiding rants about People We Once Heard Somewhere We’re Still Mad At, I suggest.
“…avoiding rants about People We Once Heard Somewhere We’re Still Mad At, I suggest.”
Pot. Meet kettle. You’re the one who asserted that some were “insisting” there could be “no criticism” of Bill Ayers. An assertion that is absolutely false in every way imaginable.
WTF indeed.
I’m not going to defend the Weathermen or “terrorism” here, but in the face of 3 million dead people, the concern “whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed” seems a bit precious to me.
People who justify torture in a “ticking bomb” scenario at least offer a minimally plausible explanation of how their action could produce a good result. But how planting a bomb in a building that might kill a random janitor would stop the war is even more far-fetched than the ticking bomb. Ayers’ whole assumption, which you seem to accept, is that the stronger the measure, the better. I would say, the more effective the measure the better, and if it is unlikely to do any good, the stronger the measure the worse.
Even if you are just saying to get some sense of proportion, one bombing is not as bad as a whole war, really that is sort of like saying waterboarding isn’t so bad, why look at the Mahdi Army, they drive power drills through people’s skulls. And for that matter, the worst we did in Vietnam doesn’t even match up to some of the things Hitler did, so why oppose the war at all?
I don’t doubt that no matter how you are, you can always find someone else who is even worse. But that’s a pretty poor justification, either for Ayers or for anyone else who uses it.
Finally, what do you mean we are setting the bar impossibly high? All Hilzoy or the rest of us are asking of Ayers is that he not throw bombs that might kill people. I think it safe to say that most of us can live up to that.
“WTF are you talking about?”
Mr. Farber. I can understand if we see things differently. You may disagree that the Bridge Over the River Kwai was one of the greatest anti-war films ever made. It may, well actually it does, strike you as unbelievable that some critics see it otherwise.
That’s fine, but the heavy handed sarcasm of your “rebuttal” was really poorly done.
Don Rickles you are not.
“I’m unclear how this broad a brush couldn’t apply to the perpetrators of the Vietnam War. Why, LBJ didn’t intentionally intend to kill people pointlessly; he genuinely hoped he was doing the right thing. Why not forgive and forget?”
Unless you lived during WWII, you couldn’t understand why LBJ would support U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
It was just a crazy time. Millions of people died. Congressmen in their early thirties signed up for the war voluntarily, then specifically requested combat duties.
It’s too bad that the people of Ayers’ generation couldn’t understand what life was like for LBJ’s generation.
how many deaths did we all prevent in Vietnam and Iraq so far by marching on Washington, holding candles in vigils, etc.?
Every bit as many the Weathermen prevented with their bombs. But with one important difference. The marches, candellight vigils, etc did not put random lives in danger.
Even if Ayers has rehabilitated himself (debatable) and become a productive member of society (IMO he has) then the most it earns him in my book is “shut the f–k up, lay low, and go about your business” status. I’m not interested in anything the guy has to say if it’s not contrition.
“I also find the complete silence on McCain’s terrorist to be deafening. We’re supposed to all collectively forget that the war started out for the U.S.”
You’re making this up out of whole cloth. Straw is the easiest thing to attack.
“You may disagree that the Bridge Over the River Kwai was one of the greatest anti-war films ever made.”
I might, but as this is a nonsequitur, I don’t. I just go all wtf about it. Maybe you’d like to make an argument rather than saying a film says… what?
“To paraphrase, there is ‘seeming insistence’ here that if only we dennounce Bill Ayers more vociferously, vehemently, and maybe even more loudly, that the stain of John McCain’s war crimes, and maybe even the good senator himself will vanish,”
So far as I can tell, you’re simply making this up 100% out of voices in your head in elsewhere. If not, do please link to the specific comments here you are citing. If you can’t, you lose.
I’d find it educational to find out whom I’m Still Mad at. Identify, please, since you make the claim? Many thanks!
“You may disagree that the Bridge Over the River Kwai was one of the greatest anti-war films ever made.”
I’m competely baffled, is what I am, as to what your point is. Alec Guiness;s Colonol Nicolson was foolish enough to ignore the context of what he was doing. He was wrong. What is your point about BOTWQ? Can you state it clearly, and how it refutes some other point made in this discussion? Thanks! What critics think of the film seems to have nothing to do with anything, does it?
What does a “great anti-war film” mean to you, precisely? Please elaborate?
Meanwhile, it might help to stick to non-imaginary arguments about people’s beliefs, rather than making up crap it makes us feel better to denounce.
Claiming no one has criticisized John McCain’s actions in the vietnam war is, of course utterly imaginary straw. Beyond that, I dunno what we’re alking about.
I’m a big fan of The Bridge On The River Kwai. What you’re trying to say about it, I’m unclear.
Coyote: “…would you have been Ayers or Ghandi?”
Talk about a false choice. And if I recall only one managed to have an impact.
“It may, well actually it does, strike you as unbelievable that some critics see it otherwise. ”
See, purely imaginary and incorrect statements like this only convince me that you are inclined to give false statements in bad faith.
Might want to avoid that. Just don’t tell imaginary lies about what other people think, and you’re off to a good start. Vice versa, not so much.
“It may, well actually it does, strike you as unbelievable that some critics see it otherwise.”
To be clear, this is wildly nonderivable from anything I wrote, and completely false. This sort of reasoning doesn’t help your arguments. It’s just made up out of whole cloth, having nothing whatever to do with reality, or what I believe.
Claiming you know my point of view, when you get it completely wrong, isn’t convincing.
The Bridge Over The River Kwai is one of my favorite movies of all time, a movie I first saw at least 33-plus years ago, an anti-war movie, a movie against the irrationality of following orders without thinking, and a movie that made clear that Alec Guinesses’ lack of consideration for the consequences of what he was doing was immoral and unwise.
Contest any of that you wish.
Bridge on the Wiver Quai?
“In fact, most male people of the relevant age group were subject to the draft, or at least had to worry about it.”
In fact, most people weren’t males, or of the relevant age group. This is a really dumb argument, unless the argument is that only males subject to the draft counted. They didn’t, so that’s wrong, so what’s the effing argument?
Sapient: But to sweep all the other Vietnam era sins under the rug and focus only on the sins of someone who in a misguided way was young, disillusioned with the extremely corrupt foreign policy of his country, caught up in a revolutionary spirit of the times – a movement in which people had already, for years, tried nonviolent approaches to end the war, is ridiculous.
If you’re speaking of the general media focus on Bill Ayers as Teh Evil, I agree. And Hilzoy has demonstrated in the past year that she’s as capable of anyone else of getting caught up in the blogmobbing spirit caused by media focus.
That said, I don’t disagree with anything Hilzoy’s said in this blogpost – except perhaps the first sentence. Bill Ayers became a national figure in the 21st century because of a blogmobbing attempt to link the Weather Underground to Barack Obama. You can certainly argue that he should not have been a national figure – that the attempts to link him to Obama were a complete nonsense, given the dates – but he was, and he decently kept shtum during Obama’s electoral campaign, under what must have been considerable provocation: if he wants to get up and have his say now, well, that’s his business.
The New York Times has given a platform to far more morally despicable people than Ayers – don’t they still have Bill Kristol as a regular columnist? – wouldn’t they likely accept an op-ed from Donald Rumsfeld if he wanted to write one? The notion that Bill Ayers ought not to be allowed to sully their columns with his op-ed because of his terrible past?
Nonsense. The Weather Underground was a stupid ugly faction of a left-wing movement: Marge Piercy and other contemporary eye-witnesses believe it may have been inspired by agents provocateurs: blowing up buildings is a dangerous and wrong tactic: but the three members against whom there is strong circumstantial evidence they meant to kill people rather than destroy property died as a direct result of their actions, and yes, one of the people who was killed was a close friend of Bill Ayers. After nearly forty years, is that tragedy something for which Ayers must still be condemned, even though we don’t know if Ayers was directly responsible for that bomb or if he knew about that group’s plans before the bomb went off?
During the campaign, I asked someone who strongly identified as a Christian and who felt that not only should Bill Ayers not be forgiven, neither should Obama for associating with him, whether this applied to all sinners or just specifically Bill Ayers. (I asked in those terms because he certainly was expressing a very Mr Collins idea of Christianity.) He wouldn’t answer me.
Is Bill Ayers unforgiveable because the things he did were so awful that even after nearly 40 years he ought to be condemned and silenced for what he did? As someone said upthread, Colin Powell’s never apologized or acknowledged wrong-doing over My Lai… Or is it just that the blogmobbing which attempted to turn him into a national hate figure because of his associations with Barack Obama in later life, has succeeded so well that even Obama supporters feel that Bill Ayers is somehow unforgiveable?
God, I hate the Six Apart broken-page comments!
I got to the foot of the first page, and for some reason, didn’t notice the “Next” indicating that there were at least some comments following the first fifty. My comment was written in response only to the first fifty comments: I apologize for not registering that the debate had already moved on….
I don’t see any contradiction, or anything “precious,” about being concerned about the murder of innocent human lives, be they millions of Vietnamese, or one janitor, of whatever nationality.
Good for you, I happen to disagree. I am infinitely more troubled by the 2 million innocents (let’s leave soldiers out of the equation for a minute) who have actually been killed and what made it possible that they were killed, than by Ayers’ concern or lack thereof for the handful of janitors that might have been killed, but weren’t actually killed.
Now, I think in a serious discussion about ethics both hilzoy’s and my position would be defensible as such and by illustrating them with various examples from the philosophical tradition. And if we were both forced to strictly adhere to the principle of charity, I’m sure we would find some common ground. Yet, I have become increasingly doubtful about the possibility of the comments section of a blog providing the right framework for such a discussion.
(And yes, I am aware that these doubts and my commenting here are somewhat contradictory and I am as guilty as anybody else of making such a discussion difficult or impossible).
The point of The Bridge On The River Kwai was that Alec Guiness’ character was a moral idiot, btw.
Guinness
Emma, folks tried all that stuff and it went nowhere.
Ayers is unforgivable because one key component of forgiveness is repentance. And he’s not repentant.
And he hasn’t rehabilitated himself, he’s found a niche where he can do more damage: A generation of youth educated by a generation of teachers taught by an unrepentant terrorist who was fighting for the triumph of evil. (He wasn’t fighting to end the war, he was fighting for the other side to win!) He’s doing more damage today than he ever did with his bombs.
A case can be made that the degree and nature of Obama’s association with Ayers wasn’t such as to taint Obama. But that case can’t rest on Ayers not being tainted.
but in the face of 3 million dead people, the concern “whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed” seems a bit precious to me
I am infinitely more troubled by the 2 million innocents (let’s leave soldiers out of the equation for a minute) who have actually been killed and what made it possible that they were killed, than by Ayers’ concern or lack thereof for the handful of janitors that might have been killed, but weren’t actually killed.
Jesus, I knew being a janitor put me at the bottom of the totem pole, but I didn’t think it made me
The missing word there is “expendable.”
Oh, HTML, you and your capricious whims.
To use a Thersian expression “this is all my bum.” Hello? Violence as a tool of political action? That was the official US policy throughout the world at the time in question. Violence directed at janitors never solved anything? Tell that to the US government that was engaged, happilly, in killing janitors, babies, women, etc… with extreme abandon not only in Vietnam but in the US as well. And tell that to the families of janitors and teens swept up in the draft. I don’t defend the Weathermen but try for five seconds to imagine or remember just how frustrating the complaisance, fear, smugness, and murderous efficiency of the American people and their war machine. Try taking seriously the notion that something needed to be done and that ordinary means of political opposition in a democratic state were not available or effective. As people said way upthread the quiescence of the American people in the face of the Iraq war was simply stunning. To this day I talk to people who opposed it who never for one second thought that protest or even besieging their own congressman with stern letters of rebuke was required of them.
SDS, then the Weathermen, then the WU may have been deluded, childish, angry etc… They may have been, and almost certainly were, infiltrated and manipulated by a government that had no problem killing “problem” people, wiretapping, gassing etc.. in pursuit of a more quiescent populace. But at least, however foolishly, they attempted to turn the war machine around. All of this shrieking about the fate of *janitors who were not harmed* or things Bernardine might have said (might have) about the manson murders is simply absurd.
People, people, people. No janitor was harmed by those bombs, so wailing that someone might have been is simply misdirection. And as for “mean things people say about the various victims of popular culture?” Jeez, get back to me when you have tried to stage a performance of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” and been attacked and pilloried for it. Juvenile and cruel things get said *every day* about people whose deaths make them public figures in a sensationalistic way. (remember the poor first victim of toxic shock syndrome? For a while you couldn’t escape cruel commentary on her fate). Such talk is, oddly enough, not admissible in a court of law as a form of serious impeachment of character because it doesn’t represent anything but a generic human tendency to respond to horrible events with callous humor.
And as for the ceaseless cries that Bill and Bernardine should “repent! repent!” I put those down in the same oubliette with the general right wing demands that all right thinking people are, well, right thinking people. Haven’t we just had eight years of the right wing telling us who to listen to, how to listen, and what is an appropriate measure of rage or grief? Isn’t that just their shtick? We celebrated too much at Wellstone’s funeral? We laugh too much, cry too much, get too angry? Who made Brett Bellmore or any other right wing apparatchik the boundary keeper for human experience and morality? (Roy at alicublog has a searingly apposite little bit up today about the usual right wing cries that we aren’t filled with bloodlust over Mumbai.)
It was a time of torment, a time of fear, a time of extreme violence in the streets and in people’s homes. A guy I know didn’t want to serve but “knew his father would kill him” if he tried to avoid the draft. A woman we know was *strangled* by a returning vet with PTSD and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I spent the tail end of the war in terror that my brother would be drafted. But we were all helpless to affect things. You were either in, or out. Being in meant you were the catspaw of a violent, repressive, chaotic war machine and being out took tremendous guts.
Hilzoy imagines Bill and Bernardine as “entitled” spoiled rich kids. Perhaps they were–certainly Ayres came from wealth and went back to it. But what she fails to grasp is that it is often only such people who, shaken out of their class based securities, can become outraged enough to do something while others merely suffer and do as they are told. There is a reason that radicals and revolutionaries are often drawn from two classes–the lowest and the highest–because it middle and the working class is often paralyzed by cultural traditions of trying to please everyone (either family or bossses). Its not surprising that Ayres et al were “spoiled” or “rich” or whatever–but you have to grasp that among their class they were at least trying to do something political to protect other people, to stop the war, while their co-classmates were simply avoiding responsibility (bush et al) or even profiting from the war.
aimai
By the way, in an interview on NPR, Ayers said, regarding the dance-bombing (which he opposed), that he likes to imagine that his then-girlfriend was trying to convince the other two to abort when the bomb went off.
So for anybody defending his hardcore by-any-means-necessary philosophy, he disgrees with you.
“And the high moral standard demanded, yes, demanded of poor Bill. Why I doubt any of us live up to that.”
Speaking only for myself, I’ve never been involved with a group of wildly incompetent domestic terrorists who tried to kill innocent, low ranking military personnel.
how many deaths did we all prevent in Vietnam and Iraq so far by marching on Washington, holding candles in vigils, etc.?
At least as many as Ayers prevented by blowing stuff up. Most likely way more.
In fact, I think it’s safe to say that not one innocent life was saved by Ayers’ actions.
Broaden that to the Weathermen as a whole, and the opposite is, in fact, true.
Thanks –
Emma, folks tried all that stuff and it went nowhere.
Actually, this is wrong. “That stuff” changed a lot of people’s minds about the war, which is actually what ultimately what led to us getting out. The war became politically unsustainable, so it ended.
What “that stuff” did not do was end the war immediately in a big heroic blaze of glory. FBOW most things in life are like that.
Or would you have just posted on a blog?
Wins the thread for “taking it beyond irony”.
Thanks –
sorry I’m late in answering. At the risk of trying to step into the same stream twice:
Turb:
I’m not disagreeing with you, Turb, although I would say – as per publius’ recent post – that sometimes terrorism ‘works’. It certainly works very well when it’s the State promulgating the terror. And I’d say it has worked pretty well for Out groups at various times, too, ( e.g. Begin/King David Hotel). I don’t condone it even if it ‘works’, but the fact that it often does makes this a potentially difficult question.
I was making a general point in response to the commentor who just wrote off the entire generation. Being less docile does not necessarily mean killing random strangers in pursuit of political goals, in fact it usually doesn’t, thank god. However effective physical protest was or wasn’t, I bristle at people who have never and will never put their own butts on the line for anything other than their own careers/families be smug about people who did.
Just noticed something in the Elrod link:
Thus it was that in 2001, just before the September 11th attacks, Elrod accepted an invitation to dinner with two of the onetime leaders of Weatherman-Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. At a restaurant in downtown Chicago, Elrod and his wife listened as the two former radicals, now long married, with a family of their own, apologized for the heartache and suffering Elrod endured as a result of that day. The pair made it clear that they did not believe Flanagan caused Elrod’s injuries, and that they were not disavowing their militant beliefs. Still, “they were remorseful,” Elrod says. “They said, ‘We’re sorry that things turned out this way.'” (Calls and e-mails seeking comment from Dohrn and Ayers were not returned.)
And no, that does not stand as an excuse for every action taken back in the day. But the decision to ignore it in the post itself, along with the slippery description of Elrod himself, is just another aspect of a thoroughly dishonest piece of hackwork.
(And as for the NY Times and ‘reasons best known to themselves’ — Ayers was made into a target by Senator McCain and Governor Palin for the last several weeks of the campaign, after months of attacks by the usual lackwits — Hannity et al. One doesn’t require partial attendance in a high school journalism class to understand why the editors at the Times may have found Ayers response to all of this newsworthy. I’d like to see the same opportunity extended to Rashid Khalidi.)
But hey, on the plus side? This Sista Souljah moment — a particularly cowardly species of political positioning — will no doubt be met with cheers and knowing nods of approval from some unusual suspects. Got a Reynolds nod yet?)
Taking into your own hands the decision to commit explosive violence, and possibly kill people, is right under very very limited circumstances,
and
I won’t do something that I don’t think will be effective. I won’t engage in action just so that I can feel that I’m doing “something”. I won’t do that because I’m not a narcissist.
This is interesting. How would people characterize the Resistance in WWII? Not trying to Godwin anything here, but that was an example of an effort that, by itself, had very limited effects and, due to reprisals, one could argue caused more harm to the civilian population than to the occupying power. Was violence justified there? How about in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. There it was successful, but arguably at a gigantic cost.
Thank you, Hillzoy.
The man let the very middle class people he recruited into the violence, rot in jail with lifetime sentences, while he and his wife were “rescued” by the same rich Daddy he had advocated killing to begin with. He ran right back to the same American society he had condemned, and bragged about the fact that he got off scot free, the little bastard.
Spoiled rich kids, indeed.
He came to the 1968 convention INTENDING violence, but told only a few of his private friends, and no one else in the SDS, who were interested in peaceful demonstrations. Ayers and his small group brought weapons to that convention, and the violence he smilingly initiated, set back the anti-war movement, gave Nixon a reason to appeal to the “Silent Majority,” and gave Nixon a landslide.
Despicable little rich prick.
Because Bill Ayers was allowed to publish the drivel he wrote in the New York Times, I have removed the NYTimes from my favorites list. For those of us involved in the anti-war movement at the time, Ayers and the NYTimes should not be allowed to rewrite any history at all.
For whatever else about John McCain, he was absolutely right to call Ayers a “washed-up terrorist.”
The greatest irony about Ayers is that the wealth of his politically powerful Daddy, the American society he supposedly despised, is exactly what saved his rich, spoiled little ass, while others without rich Daddies went straight to prison, for life.
But you know, Bill Ayers has a book coming out soon, and his capitalistic character knows he needs to begin plowing the ground for publicity.
Stupid bastard.
Well said, Scott P. I was trying to make the same point, but made the mistake of writing that The Bridge Over The River Kwai was about the futility of war or something, and then was accused (repeatedly it would seem) of bad faith.
I am so ashamed. If I repent, will all be forgiven?
Brett: Ayers is unforgivable because one key component of forgiveness is repentance. And he’s not repentant.
I noticed this in the last thread discussing Ayers: how OCSteve ignored anything anyone could point out to him about Ayers being sorry for the violence he had caused and committed.
Evidently Bill Ayers being unrepentant is a really powerful right-wing meme – the sort that overcomes any and all actual facts.
Could I just say that I’m 57 years old and don’t give a sh*t about Ayers one way or another? GWB, Rumsfeld, and even Laura Bush have killed more innocent people than Ayers has AFAIK. Aren’t there bigger problems to rant about?
It’s hardly surprising that the right-wing Unrepentant Meme has slipped into view. Demonizing Bill Ayers is right wing sport, after all. And pretty effing thin sport, IMO. The kind usually plied by moral absolutists who think nuance is for Communists.
It appalled me to see it during the campaign. It dismays me to see it in here.
TJ: Aren’t there bigger problems to rant about?
That’s crazy talk, TJ. The Republicans and their media lackeys have every right to decide what the big problems are that everyone should be ranting about. That’s how blogmobbing works.
A few random thoughts…
1) Plenty of people, indeed most people, in the Left made more sensible political choices in the late 1960s and early 1970s than Ayers, Dohrn, and Weatherman did. Thus I find appeals to the craziness of the times to be quite insufficient as a justification or even an explanation for their mistakes.
2) I totally agree with Gary Farber (and Jesurgislac and others) that Ayers is not in the least responsible for his current bout of fame/infamy, which was entirely brought about by the smear campaign on Barack Obama. Under the circumstances, a chance to speak up for himself seems entirely reasonable. I have no problem with his being given space in the New York Times. On the other hand, that he has earned such a platform does not mean that he has anything particularly useful to say. Bottom line: it’s fine to criticize the content of Ayers’s op-ed; it’s silly to be outraged at its very existence.
3) This whole conversation suggests that many of us (and I’d actually include myself here) do not have entirely coherent moral views on political violence in general. While I happen to think that pacifism is actually an entirely reasonable political position, most online discussions of pacifism take the form of out-of-hand rejections of it…except when folks like Ayers come up. Suddenly, ends never justify means. Even John Brown is a bit of a red herring here. What does the Obsidian Wings commentariat think of the American Civil War itself? Or the American Revolution? Or U.S. involvement in WWII? Or the Warsaw ghetto uprising? To get back to Ayers, saying that he was a political fool whose actions were futile is very different from saying that the ends never justify violent means.
4) On Ayers wealth and narcissism: I’m still not sure how this is relevant to a criticism of his politics. American political life tends to be filled with wealthy narcissists who are otherwise quite unlike each other. Off the top of my head: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, TR, FDR, JFK, Teddy Kennedy, George W. Bush, among many, many others can all justifiably be called wealthy narcissists. Though doing so helps me understand their biographies, it hardly adds to my assessment of their political successes and failures.
5) Jesurgislac: Is Bill Ayers unforgiveable because the things he did were so awful that even after nearly 40 years he ought to be condemned and silenced for what he did? As someone said upthread, Colin Powell’s never apologized or acknowledged wrong-doing over My Lai… Or is it just that the blogmobbing which attempted to turn him into a national hate figure because of his associations with Barack Obama in later life, has succeeded so well that even Obama supporters feel that Bill Ayers is somehow unforgiveable?
Just had to reprint that because I think it’s spot on. There’s a general “no friends to my left” principle at work on the American “left”…or, as Glenn Greenwald recently put it, we’ve gone from Sister Souljah moments to “Sister Souljahism as an operating principle, a way of life.” I don’t feel moved to defend Ayers in any way, but I find the desire to pile on such a roundly irrelevant figure to be highly questionable. Perhaps I’m an anti-anti-Ayersist.
Ben Alpers: it’s fine to criticize the content of Ayers’s op-ed; it’s silly to be outraged at its very existence.
Thanks, Ben. That articulates what made me uncomfortable about Hilzoy’s post.
Unhelpful
The resort to violence didn’t discredit the Left or the anti-war movement. If resorting to violence discredited political movements in this country, then Nixon and Kissinger would have been several hundred thousand times more discredited than the the Weather Underground by 1972.
The two differences between Nixon and his gang, and Ayers and his, were:
1) the scale of violence they committed
2) the success at getting the electorate to blame the victims rather than the perpetrators of the violence
“Advantage” on both counts overwhelmingly to Nixon et al.
That Ayers and his gang were so wildly unsuccessful at getting 2) to work for them definitely makes it easier to mock, criticize and disparage them. Americans love a winner and despise a loser. But their lack of success also makes it quite unneccessary to pile on. You don’t need to speak truth to powerlessness, reality already has.
It would be far more worthwhile to continue to try to understand how Nixon et al managed to make 2) work so well for them. We’re still living with the consequences, because the Right, unlike Ayers, was never discredited, but got away with its much larger crimes. Doing massive violence to others, whom we then blame for it in order to get elected, remains the safest way to political power in this country. Even Obama found it necessary to go along with big chunks of that dynamc in order to get elected. Even you seem to find it a good idea to join the crowd and pile on the losers.
So yes, it’s really cute and clever of you to characterize the unsuccessful attempt by the Left to commit violence and blame the victims as the Gnome Underpants Theory. Ha. Ha. Now that you’ve had your laugh, figure out how the Right actually has made it work for them, so that we can stop it from dominating our politics.
Brett Bellmore you assert that Ayers has been harmful to a generation of young people educated on his ideas.
1. Let’s make sure tht Nixon hacks and Bushites aren’t allowed to continue to infest universities before worrying about Ayers. They tend to get into places where they teach their political philosophies as viable, responsible, useful theories.
2. I don’t know what Ayers teaches beyond the vague idea tht he is in the field of education. The Anneburg Foundation work he did was bipartisan, sponsored by a rich Republican. Can you provide sites and quotes which would demonstrate that Ayers is using his current position to promote his past political views?
“Let’s make sure tht Nixon hacks and Bushites aren’t allowed to continue to infest universities before worrying about Ayers.”
I suppose that depends on which you consider more odious, mushy centrism or genocidal communism.
Just a couple of observations: first of all, it’s never a waste of time to participate in conversations here – thanks for that.
But I’ve been interested in seeing flashes of generational defensiveness crop up on this thread. I do think that people who were draft eligible, the older “baby boomers”, those who talk about ‘being there”, have a special insight into the Vietnam war years (although it’s obvious that there’s no consensus among those people). That age group experienced a sea change in the way America saw itself: as children of WWII vets, they were brought up seeing their country as “savior of the world”, an image that shifted dramatically for many people into one as “perpetrator of atrocities”. In addition, boys that age were being consigned against their will to die or kill people, or both, for something they, in many cases, opposed.
I don’t understand the hints of generational resentment that seem to characterize the discussion when people that age make claim to special insight.
As someone who has participated in marches and vigils against various wars (in order to take a stand and be counted), I believe they’re worthwhile just as a gesture to stand and be counted. But the Vietnam war didn’t end because of protest. It ended because despite our heavy casualties (and the many more suffered by the Southeast Asians), Vietnam remained a communist country and we elected political leaders who finally wanted out of a losing battle. It’s not surprising that people who were being forced to participate in the war, and who opposed it, were confused about what to do in the face of all their failing efforts to stop it.
Boys were faced with this choice: “It’s likely that I will be forced to die or kill in a cause I don’t believe in. I should: 1) go “do my duty”, 2) go to jail, 3) try to get a deferment, 4) enlist and hope I get a favorable assignment, 5) be a conscientious objector if the government accepts my application, 6) move to Canada, 7) try to do something to stop the war (by whatever means I see available). Women who were sisters, significant others and friends of these boys were thinking about those things too, in a very personal way.
Whatever other crises may have befallen people who were not Americans of that age group, I don’t think it’s too much for them to concede that they haven’t had to face those decisions in quite the same way. (This isn’t to diminish other people’s particular experiences or crises, sometimes even more poignant or courageous.) It’s time to quit judging the people that lived through that time (and forgiving them all), while still considering how ordinary people can best affect the policies of their government when things go terribly wrong.
I suppose that depends on which you consider more odious, mushy centrism or genocidal communism.
How charming to see you dismiss the rampant lawbreaking and overseas warmongering of the Nixon and Bush administrations as “mushy centrism.” You’re a real piece of work.
Maybe my reading of Ayers’ op-ed was colored by having listened to his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, but it seemed to me that Ayers was not trying to justify his radical past. He pretty much said that the Weather Underground did not accomplish any good. He explained why he’d been silent during the presidential campaign (he thought any thing he said would just feed into a dishonest, right-wing smear attempt), he stated for the record that his acquaintance with Obama was superficial, and he categorically rejected the validity of “guilt by association” arguments. Those all seem like legitimate goals to me.
Hilzoy says “To me, though, he’s just a shallow rich kid. . . . ” I think the tense of that sentence explains Ayers motive to speak out. What he WAS is not what he IS, and yet for the past year he’s been repeatedly equated with a characterization of his distant past. I don’t blame him for wanting to publicly reassert his own sense of identity before moving on with his life.
Thank you, Glen Tomkins.
I think what sticks in people’s craw about this post is the dredging up and singleing out of Ayres for attention, a perhaps too energetic, too fastidious deliniation of what an emerging new progressivism shouldn’t be. The fact that ObWi is largely about what progressiveism should and shouldn’t be is what makes it such a vital, excellent blog. But, as someone upthread rhetorically asked, who – in the progressive sphere – really cares about Ayres? How many Maoists are there in Progressive World? The answer is, practically none. It was the RW noise machine who resusitated Ayres in the first place.
Of course people can blog about whatever they want, and I’ve noticed that Hilzoy has a special borgia in her personal Hell for the Weatherman-types (which is fair enough), so maybe that explains it. But, really, how important are they? I think they were less important then than she suggested (and than they themselves thought they were) – the anti-war movement continued to grow despite them – and they are *really* unimportant now.
I think there are other more difficult, more fruitful areas of progressive self-criticism ripe for exploration – like illiberalities in 3rd wave feminism, or in the Church – than the Weatherman, but i guess everyone is entitled to their own pet peeves.
The New York Times has given a platform to far more morally despicable people than Ayers – don’t they still have Bill Kristol as a regular columnist? – wouldn’t they likely accept an op-ed from Donald Rumsfeld if he wanted to write one? The notion that Bill Ayers ought not to be allowed to sully their columns with his op-ed because of his terrible past?
I don’t understand this point at all. I don’t think the NYT should have wasted space on Ayers. I don’t think that they should waste space on Rumsfeld or Kissinger or Kristol. These two feelings are not mutually exclusive.
I’m not disagreeing with you, Turb, although I would say – as per publius’ recent post – that sometimes terrorism ‘works’. It certainly works very well when it’s the State promulgating the terror. And I’d say it has worked pretty well for Out groups at various times, too, ( e.g. Begin/King David Hotel). I don’t condone it even if it ‘works’, but the fact that it often does makes this a potentially difficult question.
I think you’ve hit upon a critical point: the efficacy of terrorism depends a lot on the power of those wielding it. The US government has had some limited success employing terror abroad. Random individual Americans employing terror at home? Fail.
Seriously, did McVeigh’s bombing bring about the social change he sought? Of course not. Ayers must have been aware of the fact that he lacked the power of the US government, and as such, his random terror bombings would be significantly less effective.
How would people characterize the Resistance in WWII?
Which resistance and when? I’d be happy to characterize specific actions, but I need details. I think some resistance actions were justifiable and some were not. I’m pretty sure that, for example, raping random women in the hopes that people would blame the Germans is…unacceptable. The probability of such a thing positively contributing to the campaign seems too low to justify the real harm. Killing German soldiers just because you hate them seems unjustifiable, but killing soldiers as part of a plan to tie up particular elements of the German army so that allies can enter an area unimpeded is different.
I do think that people who were draft eligible, the older “baby boomers”, those who talk about ‘being there”, have a special insight into the Vietnam war years (although it’s obvious that there’s no consensus among those people).
OK. So what is that insight? I mean, insights are only relevant to the conversation to the extent that they help you reach a non-obvious conclusion right? What specifically does this special insight help us understand?
I don’t understand the hints of generational resentment that seem to characterize the discussion when people that age make claim to special insight.
I can only speak for myself, but I find these claims to special insight to be mildly irritating. Becoming disillusioned as you discover the happy myths you were taught as a child are mostly lies? That’s universal. Watching your country kill people half a world away for no reason? Every post war generation of Americans has experienced that.
Beyond that, I don’t see any evidence that the special experience of the Vietnam generation changed them for the better when it came to war. I mean, I would hope that after suffering through so much, they would have internalized some measure of skepticism toward government claims about war and the vital need for war. But polling indicates that boomers were no less willing to support the war than other Americans. Maybe the awful experience of Vietnam really did change a generation, but if that change didn’t manifest in the belief that governments lie about war, how significant was it? I mean, lots of things happen to generations of people, but most of those things aren’t relevant to any particular discussion, right?
The whole tenor of this discussion strikes me as strange. I’m being told that some people have special “insight”. What this insight is no one can say. How it benefits the discussion, no one can say. And now you expect me to privilege voices of people with this “insight”? It seems like these claims of insight have a lot more to do with ritual demands of fealty to the Vietnam generation’s sense of uniqueness and specialness than to any substantiative addition to the discussion. But I could be wrong.
I think there are other more difficult, more fruitful areas of progressive self-criticism ripe for exploration – like illiberalities in 3rd wave feminism, or in the Church – than the Weatherman, but i guess everyone is entitled to their own pet peeves.
I agree, but I think part of the reason people are interested in the Weathermen is that they illuminate a divide on practical ethics that interests folks. I find it curious how many people are willing to suggest that pointless senseless violence isn’t really wrong when committed by people opposed to really bad guys. This isn’t the sort of divide I would have predicted, so the discussion had proved…illuminating for me at least.
Consider the fact that when my wife and I discuss politics, we spend a great deal more time discussing what we disagree about than we do talking over points of agreement.
Hm. Must’ve missed the exasperated posts from Hilzoy asking Rumsfeld and Kissinger to also “go away”. I’m sure it’s just an oversight on my part.
Yes, yes — I realize no blogger is obligated to post about anything and everything. Which is my point: why did you feel obligated/inspired to write the way you did about this particular individual, Hil? Is it really “Sister Souljahism as an operating principle, a way of life”, as Greenwald put it?
I’m asking in earnest, btw — hopefully my respect for you doesn’t need to be reaffirmed. 😉
(Oh, and going back to the first [OT] post, *mattt raises hand* Am immensely pleased to see that you are doing well.)
Also, this isn’t the first time since the election that Ayers has broken his silence. In addition to the Fresh Air interview mentioned by Todd, Ayers also spoke with Salon’s Walter Shapiro not long after the election. Interesting interview, recommended even for those who wish Ayers would disappear (a position I sympathize with, btw–even if I think this post and some of the resulting comments veer towards Two Minutes Hate territory.)
Turbulence: I find it curious how many people are willing to suggest that pointless senseless violence isn’t really wrong when committed by people opposed to really bad guys.
I don’t find that curious at all: it’s the basic rationale for the attack on Afghanistan following 9/11, and for the practice of torturing prisoners because this is a War on Terror, or indeed the fifteen years that the US spent bombing the crap out of Vietnam and neighboring countries because otherwise Communism would take over the world. It was the justification for the violent attacks on the anti-war movement, because the anti-war movement was made up of really bad people, so it was OK to attack them violently. Hell, this was the justification for the attacks on demonstrators outside the RNC this year, remember?
Justifying pointless senseless violence in terms of the purity of your cause is always wrong, regardless of what your cause is. Which is something that Bill Ayers does seem to have learned – in the decades since he was in the Weather Underground – while George W. Bush, in the decades since he was a deserter from the cushiest branch of the National Guard, hasn’t.
I also think that, just as it’s worthwhile understanding why Palestinians resort to terrorism – and why Israelis resort to pogroms against Palestinians – it’s worthwhile understanding why the Weather Underground formed when it did, rather than just assuming “they were bad stupid rich kids, they haven’t changed in forty years, go away!”. Which is why my first comment on this thread was a link to one of the most enlightening novels I’ve read about that period, by someone who experienced that era firsthand.
“How charming to see you dismiss the rampant lawbreaking and overseas warmongering of the Nixon and Bush administrations as “mushy centrism.” You’re a real piece of work.”
Did Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush kill lots of people? Yeah, sure, they ran the government, and that’s part of what governments DO. Why do you think I get so pissy about you folks wanting the government involved in more of our lives? This I will say with utter confidence: Under Obama, the US government will kill many people.
I, being an American, would prefer that as few of them as possible be Americans.
I don’t think Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, particularly want(ed) to herd tens of millions of Americans into death camps. I think Ayers did.
So don’t try to pretend Ayers is made of the same stuff. Presidents do a lot of harm because they’re people of modest evil with a lot of power. Ayers is a person of monstrous evil with very little power. Put him in the same position as Obama, and we’d have a genocide if he could pull it off.
To answer the questions of Turbulence:
What specifically does this special insight help us understand?
The insight I was referring to had to do specifically with their being subject to the draft – the draft was the main point of my post. No Americans born after 1953 really knew what it was like to be faced with the strong likelihood of being sent against his will into a war (and an unpopular and immoral war, at that). I agree with you that the insight didn’t translate into wisdom about the war in Iraq (say) or American foreign policy in general. But I do think they have a better understanding of what motivated Bill Ayers, and the feeling of urgency the anti-war movement faced then.
I would hope that after suffering through so much, they would have internalized some measure of skepticism toward government claims about war and the vital need for war.
I entirely agree (although many of them did internalize such skepticism, but why it wasn’t more universal I don’t know). What is particularly frustrating to me, as I may have mentioned in an earlier post, is the phenomenon of the chicken hawk, those who for whatever reason seemed to feel that they didn’t fully explore their manhood during the Vietnam era, so became particularly enthusiastic about sending other people’s kids to go fight an unnecessary war. No, I’m not taking the position that the entire generation has a special wisdom. I do believe that they have a special insight in (what I believe) was a unique time in the history of the United States, where America’s magnificence suddenly turned really ugly. Maybe it’s because I still buy into the “magnificence” (which, of course, is severely flawed), that I also buy into the fall.
we spend a great deal more time discussing what we disagree about than we do talking over points of agreement
Yeah.
Did Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush kill lots of people? Yeah, sure, they ran the government, and that’s part of what governments DO.
I have read the Constitution and am fairly certain that, in fact, it is not, but convince me.
Why do you think I get so pissy about you folks wanting the government involved in more of our lives?
We’ll leave aside “you people,” and simply point out that, in fact, most of the things you most frequently and most vocally object to would not only in all likelihood not kill anyone at all, but are in fact to stop, say, business owners from killing people. So spare it. “We people” (whatever THAT means) aren’t anywhere near the level of stupid we’d need to be for you to sell that one.
This I will say with utter confidence: Under Obama, the US government will kill many people I, being an American, would prefer that as few of them as possible be Americans.
B-b-b-but the libertarian objection — for example — to labor laws and tariffs and protectionism is that it shouldn’t matter whether a job belongs to an American or Laotian! Now you’re telling me we should be preferentially killing non-Americans? What kind of piss-poor excuse for a libertarian are you?
I don’t think Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, particularly want(ed) to herd tens of millions of Americans into death camps. I think Ayers did.
Of course, he did not, no matter what the fever dreams of Sean Hannity might tell you.
So don’t try to pretend Ayers is made of the same stuff. Presidents do a lot of harm because they’re people of modest evil with a lot of power. Ayers is a person of monstrous evil with very little power. Put him in the same position as Obama, and we’d have a genocide if he could pull it off.
Well, the same would be true if we put YOU in charge, since we’ve tried it your way in this country and it wasn’t very good except for the most privileged few. Nonetheless, let me kindly suggest that you’re kind of full of shit, and that — US universities supposedly being hotbeds, in the psychotic imaginations of the Brett Bellmores, of exactly the kind of genocidal socialism and communism you accuse Ayers of here — we should already have had such a genocide many times over if your feared effects of having Ayers and others like him at universities reflected anything even approaching reality. I mean, where do you think our current crop of leaders come from?
Your comments about Ayers are spot on!! Evidently it never occurred to this chap that the very reason why J E Hoover was infiltrating the “radical” (or stupid) Left with agents provocateur to encourage and help bring about violent acts was to discredit the Left. I feel somewhat the same way about self-styled radicals who delighted in verbally abusing bourgeois folks on the street, calling them obscene names for no reason other than they they were assumed to be pro-war. The only result was to alienate them, not educate them. It must be said, though, that such stupidity was most likely born of the frustration of trying to stop such an obviously wrong policy as the US war against Vietnam when the US government was composed overwhelmingly of either brutal jerks who reveled in the war or moral cowards who lacked the courage to oppose it even though they knew it was either wrong or disastrous. Then, as in the past few years, there was effectively no available channel to oblige our government to do right. Elections? Well, the country got conned repeatedly then. Maybe this will happen again. We’ll have to wait and see. But we also have to keep the pressure on our putative “spokespeople.”
Let me speak as someone who was there and choose a different path than Mr. Ayers. When the SDS split, it was primarily over the question of violence. As a passionate pacifist, I found his position abhorrent. But consider, at the opposite extreme I was willing, if grudgingly so, to allow others to be killed rather than kill someone to stop it, and yes that included my family. Likewise, I was quite willing to die rather than harm my assailant. That philosophy raises the difficult question, if I can stop someone from being killed, but refuse to do so, am I not, at the very least, complicent in their deaths? Our society allows, even encourages, killing in self defense or to save the lives of others. Mr. Ayers felt that any action was justified in order to stop the killing. I felt that no violent action was justified. With forty years of thought, I suspect we were both wrong.
The more serious aspect of Mr. Ayers actions was to cause irreparable harm to the peace movement and, in my humble opinion, slowed the ending of the war thus leading to even more deaths. It is this, even more than the inept acts of violence, that was and is Mr. Ayers greatest blind spot.
As an interesting historical aside, I too refused to cooperate with the draft and fully expected to spend several years with friends in Federal prison. However, my draft board consisted entirely of very old people who had never been put in this position. They just couldn’t find it in themselves to send a young man to prison regardless of how much they disagreed with my action. They found some very ingenious ways to delay taking action against me. Then the draft lottery came and my number was as the very bottom. Believe it or not I was extremely disappointed I was denied the opportunity to help “fill the jails”. That, dear people, was the level of passion and commitment I saw everyday. And no, unless you were there, all the reading in the world will not make you feel that deep in your gut.
Thanks, Giraffe. Your experience with the draft illustrates very vividly the point I was trying to get across.
matttbastard: I’m not sure how to google it, but I think I have, in fact, suggested that the decent thing for Rumsfeld to do would be to find some distant place in which he could devote himself to obscure good works in silence. I pretty clearly recall having an internal debate about whether or not to suggest that the decent thing would be to commit suicide (or maybe that in previous generations, that would have been the expected thing for someone who had a similar track record?); I think I decided against it, on the grounds that I should not even seem to recommend someone’s death.
Kissinger is a different story. There are reasons, which I won’t go into, why I don’t write about him. But it’s not for lack of agreeing with you.
Brett==do you have any evidence that Ayers is taching genocidal communism RIGHT NOW? Or that he has been teaching that content since he got his university gig? My knowledge, which is limited, is that he is interested in ed. reform and interested in current progressive politics. Which in Red State wing nut world might equate to genocidal communism but my assumption is that you are not stupid and don’t make such a ridiculous equation.
On the other hand Yoo is teaching in San Fransico and he is teaching the same crap he peddled in the Bush administration. Right now at Goergetown the dumbest guy on earth is teaching neocon ideas to students who may go on to careers in diplomacy.
Centrist? Only if extreme right is center.
Universities, think tanks, amd tradional media outlets reward rightwing loons with positions from which they can spread their ideas even after their ideas have been discredited and haved caused thousands of unnecessary deaths. Yet you use all this hyperbole–teaching genocide! destroying a generation of students! for one professor who is at worst ( at least so far as I know and you have not provided any other info) is teaching normal mainstream to liberal stuff.-sheesh, get a sense of porportion.
Hilzoy, you’ve written a well-thought out post and your comments throughout the thread are spot on. There were times during the election when I wanted to pull out my hair while reading your posts, but you’ve been on a roll recently. (This is not to say that I agree with all your views, only that you’ve become a lot more interesting a writer to me post-election.)
That said, allow this embittered Generation X-er to make one comment in response to the boomers way, way upthread.
Unless you were placed in suspended animation at age 15, it was impossible to grow up on both “The Breakfast Club” (1985) and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997). [Snark] Of course, you boomers wouldn’t know that because most of y’all were too self-centered to notice what your children were doing between 1984 and 1997. [/snark]*
von
*I have two wonderful, loving, brilliant boomer parents and many, many more boomer friends and associates.** But this whole “it was a different time, man” has got to go. World War II was a different time. The Great Depression was a different time. The roaring 20s was a different time. The booms and crashes of the 1880s and 1890s were different times. The crusades were different times. The establishment of the Ming Dynasty was a different time. The fall of the Roman Empire was a different time. They were all different, unique times … and your children and grandchildren had (and will have) their own different unique times. Get over yourselves: History did not start with you, and the rules of common sense, logic, philosophy, and morality did not get suspended for you.
Actually, it’s precisely because you have in the past expressed loathing for Rummy (this one has always been a favourite of mine) that I was surprised to see his recent NYT op-ed pass by without a little bit of teeth-gnashing on your part. 😉
Re: Kissinger, fair enough. I realize there are conditions that sometimes limit what you can and cannot opine about.
Anyway, I’m not all that concerned with the lack of reflexive hateration directed towards alleged GOP war criminals on your part, but rather what you believe makes Ayers in particular worthy of Rumsfeldian loathing. Were it not for campaign maneuvering and wingnut demonization, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion (and Ayers likely wouldn’t be featured in the NYT op-ed page). So why bother further legitimizing (and, subsequently, burning) the evil straw-Ayers that was originally erected by disingenuous outrage manufacturers trying to tar Obama by (vague) association?
If one really wants Ayers to go away, stop making his ears burn.
Yes, Ayers resorted to despicable means to get his point across. That said, his point is as valid today as it was then. The US foreign policy of that era is utterly reprehensible. We were not for freedom, independence or democracy. History has proven the domino theory to be false. Even the perpetrators of that war have largely agreed that American policy of that time was intentionally misleading and wrong. It is interesting that none of Ayers’ detractors mention that the US actually killed millions of Vietnamese, most of them innocent civilians. Most of his detractors are from the ‘US can do no wrong’ camp. Blind jingoism should not confused with patriotism.
I have to throw in a couple of quick comments.
First is that this has been one of the most interesting threads that I have read in a long time. Many of the comments have an air of self-righteouness (coming from both ends of the spectrum) that I have actually found quite refreshi8ng, in that it shows how little self awareness there is in a lot of people when they are accusing other people of pomposity.
Secondly,as I was in college in the late 60’s and grad school in the early 70’s, there was little of what was happening that I missed. People sometimes forget that a lot of the demonstrating on college campuses had absolutely nothing to do with the war. The rebel for rebellion’s sake was a common mantra at the time.
Finally, I really love the whole let’s look down on the other generations thing rather trite and passe. I don’t know of one generation that has the right to tell another generation that its experiences don’t mean anything.
von, I really appreciated your comment. But just to let you know, although I never really got into The Breakfast Club, Buffy was a major bonding experience between my younger son and me. Even boomers could appreciate the subtle sarcasm and humor of that show.
And no, unless you were there, all the reading in the world will not make you feel that deep in your gut.
OK, but so what? Why is feeling this deep in the gut relevant to the conversation? What exactly does it add? If you make ethical evaluations by reflecting on what your feelings are without any kind of introspection, then I guess feeling the spirit of the times deep in your gut might be really important in analyzing this case. But discussion of ethics has to involve more than reiterating what your feelings are: productive discussion should come down to principles. We can debate principles meaningfully, but we can’t debate your feelings. So, I ask, yet again, what meaningful ethical principles are illuminated by having been there that escape those of us born much later? Alternatively, what facts does your experience bring you that we lack?
People who experienced Vietnam were extremely passionate because it was life and death for them and their friends. I get that. But you know what? Lots of people are extremely passionate about what they consider to be life and death issues today. It is not OK for passionate people to kill random people just because they’re passionate about terrible crimes that are killing other people.
Some people go through this phase in high school or college where they become enraged at the suffering of some large victim group and then contemplate what sort of violent means they might use to put things right, batman like. That’s fine for young people, but you’re supposed to grow out of it. You’re supposed to eventually realize that being really angry about legitimate atrocities does not give you carte blanche to kill people only tangentially related. At least that was my experience. I had assumed it was more widely shared, but perhaps that was foolish.
So why bother further legitimizing (and, subsequently, burning) the evil straw-Ayers that was originally erected by disingenuous outrage manufacturers trying to tar Obama by (vague) association?
Um, while right wingers said lots of crazy stuff about Ayers, the man was a terrorist and a profoundly stupid one at that. He published a piece that claimed he was not a terrorist. Critiquing such claims has nothing to do with the imaginary straw Ayers that right wing folk invented; it has to do with the real Bill Ayers and the real piece that he wrote for the NYT.
Most of his detractors are from the ‘US can do no wrong’ camp. Blind jingoism should not confused with patriotism.
That might be true. But on this comment thread, I’d wager that most of Ayers’ detractors have condemned aspects of US foreign policy quite strongly. You might want to try engaging with the people that are actually here as opposed to the people you imagine disagree with you.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997)
Uh…I think you meant “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)
Maybe not, though. There are probably all kinds of ways that a movie can be compared with a TV series, but on first glance this was kind of one of these things is not like the other.
“In fact, most male people of the relevant age group were subject to the draft, or at least had to worry about it.”
And, as it happens, most people were not, in fact, male, and of the limited, relevant, age group. I’m unclear what’s hard to understand about this. Most people in the Sixties were not, in fact, subject to the draft. Stating otherwise is wrong. Factually incorrect. Not true. Most people didn’t experience it. Quit claiming otherwise.
(Not that my point was remotely limited to such a small falsehood.)
“Well said, Scott P. I was trying to make the same point, but made the mistake of writing that The Bridge Over The River Kwai was about the futility of war or something, and then was accused (repeatedly it would seem) of bad faith.”
Cite?
“So yes, it’s really cute and clever of you to characterize the unsuccessful attempt by the Left to commit violence and blame the victims as the Gnome Underpants Theory. Ha. Ha. Now that you’ve had your laugh, figure out how the Right actually has made it work for them, so that we can stop it from dominating our politics.”
I’m not entirely clear whom this is addressed to, although a good guess seems Hilzoy.
My own response is to repeat, again, that hatred of one set of folks doesn’t remotely interfere with hatred of the morals or acts of another, opposing set of folks.
To condenm Bill Ayers not taking full responsibility for his actions has not a whit to do with the unbelieveably evil actions of, say, Richard Nixon.
And I’m more than a little tired of people implying or saying otherwise. Hahaha, now STFU, YFA.
“I don’t think Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, particularly want(ed) to herd tens of millions of Americans into death camps. I think Ayers did.”
That seems very ignorant.
I don’t hold any brief for the political views of Weatherman folks at the time, and it’s a subject I happen to know a great deal about. But this statement is just moronic, ignorant, stupid, and wrong. In short, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
“Uh…I think you meant “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)”
Probably not, since the tv series was great, and aside from a single death scene, the movie was not.
As a Canadian, reading all the comments has been really interesting. It’s all very US-centric – as if Americans were the only people going through all this during 60s (or even now). While it’s true that the US was the main aggressor in Vietnam and the Weather Underground was fighting (in its own weird way) the US aggression, the whole discussion completely ignores the global context. The Weather Underground was only one of a number of groups that engaged in violent acts against capitalists and the state during the 1970s. They were all inspired to one degree or another by the national liberation movements that had swept much of the global south in the decades after WWII at a time when the US, engaged at it was in the cold war, was supporting people much like Saddam Hussein in numerous countries. It’s not like the Weather Underground were a bunch of loonies or isolated extremist zealots – they were – and they saw themselves as – part of a worldwide movement fighting imperialism, capitalism, racism, etc, much of which had crystallized in the fight against the war in Vietnam. The fact that they (and others) were so frustrated that they felt impelled to violence is not so much an index of their own immaturity as it was of the victory of the US and its allies in over national liberation movements around the world and domestic political opposition at home. Don’t forget that the formation of the Weather Underground was preceded by COINTELPRO and the murder of Fred Hamption.
“I think there are other more difficult, more fruitful areas of progressive self-criticism ripe for exploration… but i guess everyone is entitled to their own pet peeves.”
Hilzoy has a stated interest in ethical philosophy. Maybe that’s it.
“OK, but so what? Why is feeling this deep in the gut relevant to the conversation? What exactly does it add? If you make ethical evaluations by reflecting on what your feelings are without any kind of introspection, then I guess feeling the spirit of the times deep in your gut might be really important in analyzing this case. But discussion of ethics has to involve more than reiterating what your feelings are: productive discussion should come down to principles.”
First, I don’t think the argument was that Ayers’ actions were justified by his experiences or “the times”. The argument was that we non-snowflakes ought not to be so judgemental of Ayers because we don’t know what it was like to live through those times.
So there are a couple of ways that the gut emotions could be relevant:
1. The emotions in question prevented the moral actor from making a good judgement. In this case, the emotions would be something like an excuse for the wrong behavior. If we understood the emotions involved, we might be inclined to be more lenient.
2. Emotions play a proper and important role in forming moral judgements. If this is so, then principles are only part of the story, and we would need to understand the emotions as well in order to judge the moral actor fairly.
What’s interesting to me is the claim that we couldn’t understand the emotions without having experienced them in a particular context. We can understand the facts and the principles and the reasoning from afar in space and time — but not the emotions.
Von!
Praising Hilzoy for her ‘spot-on’ comments throughout the thread would be more convincing if in fact she had made a single comment relating to the post in question. I mention this only becuz the absence of any comment or defense or explanation seemed odd to me. Sorta like throwing a bomb into a room and running from the wreckage.
Maybe you were thinking of some other thread. 🙂
Gary,
You’re wrong, and by an embarrassing margin, about the draft. Almost everyone experienced it. Every draft aged young man, of course. But also? Every parent of every kid who was subject to the draft. Every sibling. Every grandparent and every friend. It had an absolutely pervasive impact.
I’m unclear what’s hard to understand about that.
Maybe this is one of those times when reading about an event leads to a limited emotional understanding of it, particularly when dealing with details not easily gleaned from statistics.
“Maybe you were thinking of some other thread. :)”
Maybe WaMo. She did respond there. It’s interesting (and sometimes frustrating) to read the threads on two different sites.
The Weather Underground were extremist zealots. They weren’t isolated extremist zealots.
They incorrectly assessed that the U.S. was in a revolutionary situation. So did some other activists of the period. The Weather Underground’s own actions, and those of the people who bombed the Army Math Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin, clarified for a great many more people at the time how extremely wrong that analysis was.
I mention this only becuz the absence of any comment or defense or explanation seemed odd to me.
Yeah, we haven’t heard a single word from hilzoy. She’s been totally silent except for her comments here, here, and here. I’m glad to see that your continuing to contribute the high quality comments that you’ve consistently delivered throughout this thread.
Turb,
Your first two links lead to the post itself. Your third leads to Hilzoy’s sole comment on the thread that is actually about the post itself. Which I missed. My bad. (There are two other comments that touch on other subjects; perhaps they were the source for the inept links.)
Thanks for the assist.
It had an absolutely pervasive impact.
That’s absolutely true. The impact of getting called up by a government that consistently lied to kill people far away for no reason or die trying was huge. It was so huge that people who lived through those times believed the current administration’s lies about another war hook, line, and sinker. But boy, the impact was huge. Not huge enough to actually makes them suspicious of more government lies about a war that makes no sense, but you know, really huge.
Have you ever met anyone who survived a genocide? You, know, folks from Rwanda? Ever met anyone whose family was murdered by US backed death squads in Latin America? Those people really suffered and they have every right to be pissed off at the US. In fact, they suffered a whole lot more than the average draftee. Our government did things to them that you can’t even imagine. And yet I don’t see them blowing up buildings or killing random people. Somehow, decent human beings can avoid killing innocent people even when they’re really mad.
Harley, since you’re new here, let me explain this to you: links at this site have been broken since a botched software upgrade a few weeks ago. The links I gave are the original links on the comments themselves. I don’t get paid enough to clean up by hand the mistakes that any marginally competent freshman computer science student would be ashamed of making. If you want to see the comments, I suggest you explore your browser’s search command. Hint: comments written by hilzoy include the text “Posted by: hilzoy”.
Tur,
Thanks! But we’re still locked in at three comments. Only one that relates to the post itself. Which was and is my point. It seems this is the kind of post that warrants defending, particularly given the broad range of response.
As for ‘new here.’ Yeah, sorry. But not completely new.
Harley, since you’re new here… .
Harley isn’t new. He just hasn’t been around for a while.
(He also posts quicker than the average bastard. 😉 )
Heh. You’re no average bastard.
Turb:
There’s a difference between something which is literally life and death for you and your friends, and something you ‘consider to be a life and death issue’! Again (and again and again) I agree with you and Hilzoy that what Ayres et. al. did was simply wrong, and his attempt to partially sanitize his own history is a bit pathetic. But the idea that their reaction to events was somehow uniquely and almost unfathomably stupid and awful actually gives credence to what you say you find irritating: that these boomers thought they were somehow out-of-time Special. They weren’t, of course. Their reaction was really fairly understandable – stupid and morally flawed, but fairly understandable.
von:
I like the last sentence, because I know all about Insufferable Boomers. But the other part of your comment doesn’t have much to do with it. Yes, every different time is…different. I would say that what’s important in the context of this discussion is that the 60s-70s in the US were indeed quite different from now in specific ways. The last 35 years have produced more cultural atomization and domestication – successfully terrorized culture, if you will – than in the previous period. Subsequent generations have been, whether you can see it or not, and for better and worse, much more obedient. Consumerism had not, in the 60s-70s, bloomed and risen to become our salient feature. And there was a good chance then that you or your friend or brother or uncle would be forced to personally confront Vietnam – kill or be killed or flee (and I’m not mentioning the civil rights movement or urban riots, just to save time). It *is* a different world now, for both better and worse. Yes, boomers can be absolutely insufferable – I could scoff at them for a year and never run out of material. But I get mildly irritated sometimes at the fetish-envy-hatred some younger people have for those people and that time. Notwithstanding the narcciscism they are perhaps a little unfairly famous for, they were/are just people and they mostly deserve a modicum of understanding and basic human charity, just like you.
What’s interesting to me is the claim that we couldn’t understand the emotions without having experienced them in a particular context. We can understand the facts and the principles and the reasoning from afar in space and time — but not the emotions.
Which eliminates both the point and the possibility of art.
I dearly hope I won’t be around for it but it’ll be interesting (in that supposed-Chinese-curse way) to see the generational repercussions of the Iraq invasion.
Still a very strange friend for our new president to have had. Especially so since BO initially lied about the relationship.
What’s interesting to me is the claim that we couldn’t understand the emotions without having experienced them in a particular context. We can understand the facts and the principles and the reasoning from afar in space and time — but not the emotions.
I find it interesting that people assume that they can fully understand the experience of those living in an era with a completely different zeitgeist. Although I am fascinated by history, especially the time in which my parents and grandparents lived, it’s never occurred to me that I could appreciate everything about the context in which they lived. My grandparents, living on a subsistence farm during the Great Depression without many of the modern conveniences and communications devices that I take for granted, were no doubt concerned with millions of other subtle issues that I wouldn’t even think to ask about – I mean, isn’t it somewhat presumptuous that one can assume knowledge of another’s life and circumstances? Is the appropriate response to someone whose actions we don’t understand to say “‘Please go away’ – I don’t even want to listen to what you might have to say?”
I read and read and inquire and inquire, but still don’t know enough to judge. I can only have opinions and hope that if I’d lived in Nazi Germany I would have resisted (fat chance?). Or whatever else and time I can imagine.
I don’t get it that so many people, not confronted with issues faced by others, are so quick to judge. I even watched the Robert McNamara documentary with heartache and sympathy. I don’t get it – I really don’t get it that people are unable to put their petty judgments aside to try to understand what people were thinking and why.
Turbulence: The impact of getting called up by a government that consistently lied to kill people far away for no reason or die trying was huge. It was so huge that people who lived through those times believed the current administration’s lies about another war hook, line, and sinker. But boy, the impact was huge. Not huge enough to actually makes them suspicious of more government lies about a war that makes no sense, but you know, really huge.
Turb, you’re just really off base here. My generation, the Viet Nam generation, was in the lead of opposition to the Iraq war. It was a broad-based opposition including all age groups, but there is no getting around the reality that boomers were the key organizers of the earliest, most active opposition.
I honestly don’t know where you get the idea that people 50-65 were any more in favor of the war, or accepting of the Bush administration’s lies, than any other generation.
Nell, I might have gotten the idea from here, as I pointed out in a previous comment. I don’t know whether you’re correct or not in asserting that boomers were the leadership behind the anti-war movement. But I do know that leadership roles, by definition, are few and far between. So even if you are correct (you provide zero evidence to suggest that is the case), it wouldn’t tell us anything about the average boomer, now would it? I can easily understand a few thousand people being deeply moved by their experience with the Vietnam war, but that’s not the claim that is being made here. The claim being made is that a whole heck of a lot more than a few thousand boomers were deeply impacted in such tremendous ways that we can’t hope to understand the tremendous moral burden that folks like Ayers felt. Talking about the extremes isn’t good enough to back a case about the average. You’re a few million boomers short.
they were/are just people and they mostly deserve a modicum of understanding and basic human charity, just like you.
And who is depriving them of that deserved modicum? Not me. Not anyone on the planet. But those of us who follow in their wake are heartily sick of their bullshit.
“I can’t be a racist! I was in a sit-in at Duke!” That’s a direct quote, from my boss. Who’s lily-white, as am I, as are all the people in our department, her husband, their daughter, their grandkids, and everyone I’ve ever seen her with.
Which does not mean that my boss IS racist. I have no idea, and I’m really not interested in finding out. What pisses me off is that she actually thinks that something she did 40 years ago inoculates her from the tiresome burden of thinking about her actions in the present.
I think josefina’s comment illustrates that nobody likes an old fart who rants about the past, especially if the old fart is an annoying boss in a tiresome work situation.
“I don’t get it that so many people, not confronted with issues faced by others, are so quick to judge. I even watched the Robert McNamara documentary with heartache and sympathy. I don’t get it – I really don’t get it that people are unable to put their petty judgments aside to try to understand what people were thinking and why.”
Not to pick nits, Sapient, but your use of the word “petty” implies a judgement on your part. By your own reasoning, you simply don’t understand what those people who are making “petty” judgements are thinking and why.
More generally, can you think of any perpetrators of violence for whom you find yourself unable to feel sympathy? And if so, do you see this as a defect in yourself?
asterisk, did you see the Robert McNamara documentary, “The Fog of War”? What was your reaction? And, no, I don’t see it as a defect that I try to do what my mom taught me: to look for the humanity in people. Sure, I do make judgments about people’s judgments – especially people who make a study of dismissing the formative experiences of a entire generation of people.
@Turb:
I never made any claim about the impossibility of anyone else understanding what my generation experienced, so I’m not part of that argument. That’s not why I responded to your assertion.
I’m specifically disagreeing that my generation somehow forgot or was unaffected by the experience of a war of aggression by our government based on lies and conducted with lies, so that we, as a group, “believed the current administration’s lies about another war hook, line, and sinker”. My experience has been that our generation was substantially readier to assume that Bush was lying from the start — but I acknowledge that because I move in activist circles, my sense of my generation as a whole may be wrong.
Although I’m not ready to accept that on the basis of one poll moment from the summer of 2003 (even in the poll cited, boomers were no more supportive of the war in the fall of 2002 and in the months immediately before the invasion than other age groups), it could be true that once the war began, my generation supported it at a greater rate and/or for longer than others.
If it’s so (which I’m not prepared to believe without much more evidence), that could have something to do with the sentiment Frank Luntz articulates in the linked article: For decades, centrists and rightists have been strenuously trying to discredit left and liberal positions by linking them with the excesses that occurred when we were young. The non-activist, non-left-leaning members of my generation may indeed have been looking for a chance to cleanse themselves of the taint of radicalism and hippiedom.
I’m betting, though, that the fact that those of us “stuck in the sixties” turned out to be absolutely right about the war on Iraq resulted in my generation peeling off support for the war earlier and to a greater extent than other age groups from late 2003 to 2006 (since then, positions on Iraq have remained fairly static).
Still a very strange friend for our new president to have had. Especially so since BO initially lied about the relationship.
At the risk of troll-feeding, I don’t want to let this crap pass uncommented upon (since such smears about Obama are 100% responsible for Bill Ayers taking up so much of our time now).
Why is Ayers a “strange friend” for Obama to have had? Putting aside the fact that it’s not at all clear that the two are “friends,” Ayers has been very involved in politics in Obama’s Chicago neighborhood. And both were involved in an educational reform project sponsored by that notable Maoist-terrorist front group, the Annenberg Foundation. Given Ayers’s place in Chicago political life, it would have been very surprising if he and Obama had had no relationship whatsoever.
And how has Obama lied about his relationship with Ayers?
This being the end of “Messiah” week – two rehearsals and three performances in the last seven days – I have been doing little blog-reading and less commenting, so much has passed me by. But now I’ve managed to read through the entire Ayers thread, and think that perhaps I have something to add.
Not on Ayers himself: others have expressed all of the various views I’ve entertained. Much less on the general principles governing political violence.
But I’m one of the few pre-boomers (by a year or two) in this menagerie, and probably the only one who has not only lived through the “Vietnam War” era, but taught classes on the war, intermittently from the 1970s until this decade. So perhaps some of my thoughts will be considered germane by others.
I will express them in the form of opinions, sparked by the thread, but not linked to any specific comments. If you think I’m criticizing *you*, I’m not; I don’t even remember who said what.
Opinion 1: Yes, all generations differ from those before, and all parents lecture their children, and all children resent their parents, and there is nothing new under the sun. (Classic cartoon: Adam turns to Eve, as they are being expelled from the Garden of Eden, and says “We live in an age of transition.”) Having said that, I believe that for American society over the past 150 years or so the decade from roughly 1965 to 1975 saw greater shifts in the public articulation of ideas and values than any other comparable period. The Vietnam War was part of this, but so was the rise of second-wave feminism and the sex/psychedelic/rock&roll “revolution” and the eventual driving of an American president from office. And much more.
Obviously this view can be disputed, and just as obviously there can be no effective resolution of this dispute, but I do believe it’s worth considering. To have lived through those years – to bridge both the “before” of the Eisenhower era and the post-Woodstock, post-Watergate world – was an experience that was remarkable, to say the least, and hard for anyone not there to imagine (though Gary Farber is of course right that those with the will to study history can invoke most of it).
I’m going to break here, lest the machine refuse my offering, and continue shortly with Opinion 2
The discussion of Bill Ayers embrace of violence ignores the heroes who brought the Vietnam War to an end- US soldiers who defied their orders. Fragging, desertion, “combat refusal”, and drug taking destroyed the US combat readiness and terrified the generals.
Wholesale mutiny was in the air- the only cure was to abolish the draft, get the troops out of Vietnam and start again with a volunteer military.
Peace marches and Congress also played a role, but the troops brought themselves home. And Bill Ayers friends were trying to murder them.
Continuing from above
Opinion 2: Nevertheless, there was nothing even remotely resembling a uniform experience of these years, these events. So the suggestion that the “boomers” all went through the same struggles, and do/should therefore have the same interpretation of them, or evolution beyond them, is nonsense. (I believe it was “Turbulence” who asked whether the argument was that the emotion of the time was a plea for leniency for moral defects, or the basis for a unique moral philosophy; I would definitely subscribe to the former, rather than the latter, view.)
Leaving aside the gap between hippies and squares, or between leftist youth and the Young Republicans, let me advert in particular to the war, which had vastly different impacts on different people, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
As compared with WWII (“The Big One”), the Vietnam War was a relatively small-scale affair. Instead of all-out mobilization, we had “Selective Service,” and a military that was comparably much smaller. Many – I suspect most – Americans did NOT have a close family member in the military, or even if they did, said family member was probably not in Vietnam. It was entirely possible to ignore the war, and many people did, for long stretches at a time.
Militating against this were two primary factors, as I see it. (1) It was the first “Living Room War,” televised on a daily basis, and with much more detail (even in black and white) than Americans had ever seen before, or have ever been able to see since. (One of the lessons the Pentagon learned from VN was how to minimize and control war coverage by the media; we see far less from Iraq than VN.)
(2) The draft, which is of course the huge difference between VN and Iraq. Yes, every male between the ages of 18 and 30 (?) or so was eligible, and we thought about it from time to time, and of course we often started thinking about it even younger, and of course our friends and relatives also thought about it. But for most of us, most of the time, it was not a full-time pre-occupation.
First, some young men either volunteered or simply accepted the draft when it came, whether out of patriotism or some kind of belief that military service was a necessary part of achieving manhood. (The fathers of most of my generation had served, one way or the other, in WWII.) For them, the draft was not really an issue, although the war itself might be, depending on where they were sent and what they were asked to do. (FWIW, only a fraction of Americans in the military actually served in Vietnam, and of those who did go to “Nam,” only a fraction saw regular combat.)
For the rest of us, the draft was a potential threat, but not necessarily a terrifying one. There were many many paths to exemption, of which being a student was the one with which I (like Bill Clinton) was most familiar. But there were also medical exemptions, quasi-religious ones (as a conscientious objector), occupational ones (farmer, teacher), familial ones (“surviving son,” married man [briefly]), etc. AND there were branches of the service that, although they might knock a couple of years out of your life, which was annoying, presented minimum risk of actual combat: the National Guard (hello, Dan Quayle), the Reserves (GWB), the Coast Guard, etc. Even the Navy (if you could stay out of the Marines) and the Air Force were perceived as relatively safe alternatives to being a grunt humping the boonies. And, of course, you could flee to Canada or Sweden if you didn’t like any of the alternatives.
(If anyone wants to read more about these possibilities, and what kinds of people took them, I strongly recommend Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss (Jun 1978).)
So what you did was, you set up a strategy (often involving Plan A, Plan B, &c.) and then saw how it worked. Once you registered, you could request a deferment (on any of the above grounds), normally for one year, so if you got it you could safely ignore the question for another year, most of the time. Of course you kept your ear to the ground and tried to figure out if they were changing the rules, and thus the odds, and perhaps you sounded out the options of marriage or seminary or Sweden or the National Guard, just to see if they looked better than your current Plan . . . but otherwise, you got on with your life. And this is how most Americans lived with the War between 1965 and 1973.
Now there were many notable exceptions, and I do not want in any way to diminish their dilemmas. There were those who actually wound up in Vietnam, one way or another, and I do not envy any of them the choices they then had to make. There were those who failed to “game” the system and make the best of their opportunities to avoid the draft, and so faced imminent peril of conscription. There were those (myself NOT among them) sufficiently principled to oppose the war and try to stop it even if they themselves were not in danger of being drafted: more credit to them.
Thus the Vietnam Era could be a terrible and troubling time, and it was for many people, and I am not suggesting for a moment that they should not have expressed their grief and anger, either at what they themselves (or their relatives) were being exposed to or simply at what we were doing to the Southeast Asians – not just Vietnamese, but Cambodians and Lao as well.
But it is an error, I believe, to think of our entire “generation” as being affected in the same way. Most Americans, even of the target generation, managed to get through the war without directly experiencing crisis or tragedy, and although we all thought we learned “lessons” from the war (vastly contradictory ones, it turns out), mostly we were happy enough to put the war behind us and move on with the 1970s.
Not very heroic, but then most people are not very heroic. I certainly wasn’t. For those who think personal details are relevant (I’m not sure that they are) I “strategized” poorly at first, so wound up in the Army, but then managed to stay out of Vietnam my entire tour (1968-69). I’ve got no moral standing on anyone. But I was there.
I thought by the time I reached the end, I’d have a powerful conclusion, or at least a striking Opinion 3. But I really don’t. Except this: there is no such thing as the “wisdom” of a whole generation, but sometimes individuals from a generation not your own know things that you don’t. Listen to them.
Harley Peyton and Bobby P
You are exhibit A for why the right wing dominated this country from 1968 to 2008.
What you’re saying not only doesn’t persuade me, it repulses me. Your advocates for anarchy based on personal whim
We have a democracy in this country, and free speech rights. What Ayers and his ilk did, is that they tired of trying to persuade people by reasoning with them, and instead tried to violently force them, upon fear of death or injury, to do what he wanted.
You can analogize it to the crime that OJ Simpson is going to jail for a long time for — it doesn’t matter whether he thought those people had his property, there is a legal process for obtaining your property. You just can’t go get it yourself at gunpoint.
What Ayers did, in essence, is say do as I say, or I’ll kill you.
It turns out, that’s not a popular stance.
I was kind of hoping the thread would end with Dr Ngo’s two splendid comments, but I guess we had to have yet another right-wing troll who has eaten the Ayers Is Evil cookies…
Dr. Ngo, thanks for your thoughtful post. I always enjoy reading anything you care to share.
Look, the Vietnam period was a weird time. Crazy and violent. The Weathermen were, frankly, just a small piece of it all.
What I really think is wrong-headed is the idea that the times justified acts of violence against other people.
Ayers’ friends died while building a nail bomb that they intended to use to kill Army officers at a dance. I don’t care what your opinion was, or is, of that war, blowing up a bunch of officers and their dates with a nail bomb is not justified.
A clear and unambiguous statement from Ayers to that effect would be great. No such statement is to be found in his editorial.
So, I’m with hilzoy. It’s great that he stayed out of the picture during Obama’s campaign. He’s had his moment, along with a very public platform, to explain himself to us all.
Now it would be great if he would go back to his previously scheduled programming.
For those who think the non-violent path was simply ineffective, and that extreme, violent action was called for, I offer this thought experiment. Different context, same times, and I think a reasonable analogy.
Who had a greater effect on changing race relations in the US: Martin Luther King, or H Rap Brown?
Thanks –
A clear and unambiguous statement from Ayers to that effect would be great.
Such clear and unambiguous statements from Ayers have been made – and ignored! – years ago.
Clear and unambiguous statements against violence directed at people are made in the Op-Ed he wrote hich you have ignored.
I don’t think Ayers can say anything that anyone who has eaten the Ayers Is Evil Cookies will find acceptable.
“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.”
You can analogize it to the crime that OJ Simpson is going to jail for a long time for — it doesn’t matter whether he thought those people had his property, there is a legal process for obtaining your property. You just can’t go get it yourself at gunpoint.
Can you invade another country?
Clear and unambiguous statements against violence directed at people are made in the Op-Ed he wrote which you have ignored.
I’m generally with you in this discussion, Jesurgislac.
But the problem with Ayers’ op-ed is that he is deeply dishonest about his own past attitude–and the attitude of organizations that he helped lead–toward violence directed at people. hilzoy is right that he gets around discussing these things in the op-ed by only talking about Weather Underground and not Weatherman, by skipping the period between his joining SDS and the explosion in Greenwich Village (the story of which is also narrated dishonestly in the op-ed).
I don’t think I’ve eaten the “Ayers is Evil Cookies” (they were out of KoolAid?), but I would take his pronouncements more seriously if he discussed his own past behavior more truthfully.
“They damaged the entire antiwar movement and allowed war supporters to dismiss the movement by association with these crazies.”
and who did that benefit? Then they magically were never caught, or prosecuted. If I was conspiratorially inclined I might come to the conclusion that they might have served the purpose of a bunch of governing elites quite nicely.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
(SOURCE: http://www.two–four.net/comments.php?id=P1912_0_1_0)
pj,
Sorry about the last forty years. My bad.
Ben, the main point of that op-ed isn’t about the events of 40 years ago – nor is it about the horrible deaths of three of Ayers’s friends in 1970. (Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton were both close friends of Ayers and were both blown to pieces, along with a third member of the Weathermen, Ted Gold.)
It’s about how the media made use of Ayers to pick on Obama.
Ayers isn’t the most evil person in the US: he’s not the person who did the worst and most unforgiveable thing ever.
There are people living now who killed anti-war demonstrators, who were never punished for that: there are people living now who dropped cluster bombs on cities knowing that children would pick them up and die as horribly as Ayers’ friends did. Warren Anderson is still, as far as I know, living out a peaceful and healthy retirement in New York, while the survivors of Bhopal retch their lungs out in penury. Shall we condemn every politician in the US for their evil associations if they spent any time with executives of Union Carbide or Dow Chemical Company after 1984? Maybe we should, but does anyone?
Robert Gates is allowed to continue as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, and both Hilzoy and Publius have written posts praising this decision without feeling the need to even mention that the US military under Bush tortures prisoners and that Gates is irrevocably tainted as Bush’s SecDef becaue of this. These crimes of the US military were not committed thirty and forty years ago, but they are, it seems, to be forgotten even before Obama takes office.
Bill Ayers has expressed regret for what he did, and acknowledged it was wrong. I don’t believe he should be required to condemn his friends for building a nail bomb that in the end killed only them, each and every time he mentions them, when what he is writing about is not the actions of a few decades ago, but the political hate campaign that tried to make Ayers into a national hate figure in order to smear Obama by their association.
It wasn’t just the draft that colored people’s attitudes. That it was indeed a very different time from now does NOT excuse the Weatherman, et al. But, even though this era was not so long ago chronologically, some of the comments here still remind me of people who, for example, dismiss Lincoln as racist because of Liberia, etc – who unwisely and a bit unfairly apply current standards to people in the past.
Turb:
Of COURSE State terror tends to be more effective than the grass roots kind – terror is a pillar of State power! But the bottom line is that terror works best when it’s employed the least. Overt terror, from any quarter, tends to backfire, whether it’s a police riot in Chicago, the National Guard killing students at Kent State, McVeigh blowing up that federal building, or bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks. Internalized, individualistic fear works much better and is much tidier; people stay in line of their own volition. Modern governments and their corporate patrons have figured this out. Suggesting that younger people are more docile and obedient now than in the 60s-70s is not just a cheap sneer. I don’t really blame them. But we today have very little to be smug about vis a vis the 60s. I’m hopeful that we are finally turning the page now. But take a look at American culture as it has changed in the last 30 years: it’s better in some ways, but *much* worse in others. We practically *have* no civil culture at all, for one thing (let’s hope we’re going to start building one now). Phony, overweening hippies and deranged people like Ayres are convenient scapegoats – and they didn’t help matters, to be sure – but are they fundamentally responsible for our current state of spiritual and civic rot? No.
I don’t think I’ve eaten the “Ayers is Evil Cookies” (they were out of KoolAid?)
Cookies are easier to broadcast over the Internet than KoolAid is.
Then they magically were never caught, or prosecuted.
Not “magically” – due to a series of flaws in the behavior of the police/the FBI, which made evidence against them impossible to use in court.
I don’t want to defend Bill Ayers/the Weathermen. I really don’t. I just don’t see that what they did back then was sp appalling compared to what the US military were doing in Vietnam and neighboring countries, or that the US civil authorities were doing to the anti-war movement in the US. Please note my “compared to”: I think it was wrong. I think it was appalling. But set it against deciding to drop napalm to burn up villages, or Agent Orange to destroy foliage, or the massacres of Vietnamese civilians such as My Lai or the tons of conventional bombs dropped on that area of South-East Asia, and if I’ve already called what Ayers did appalling, what do I call that? With what do we compare Ayers, if not how the Chicago police attacked the anti-war protestors in 1968, or the other violent attacks on the anti-war movement?
Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is a good read in this regard. It not only gives a vivid sense of the emotional tenor of the times, but links it specifically to a political strategy. Calling the times ‘crazy’ is probably not enough. Perlstein goes out of his way to list as many of the maimed and murdered as he can, including seemingly ‘unimportant deaths’ — like the hippie shot in the back by Sheriff’s deputies because, you know, he was a hippie. (What an odd sentence to write. Odd because, of course, it’s true.) It does not require a great deal of imagination to understand how some people, however misguided they may have been, felt a violent reponse was not only justified, but necessary. There were two wars underway at the time, in other words. And one of them was here.
As to strategy? That’s what irks me the most about this. The Bill Ayers show trial was never an honest attempt to assess the man, it was a right-wing political strategy designed to defame Obama. I must confess the last place I expected to see that strategy perpetuated, was in here.
And it remains largely undefended by its author. JFTR.
It is an interesting question how bad things have to get before violence is justifiable. And if violence is ever justifiable, how it should be organized in order to be “effective” when it’s (obviously) illegal to organize it. I’m really glad Obama won, because I’m not sure that we haven’t been approaching such a time recently.
I’m a proponent of passive resistance, and general strikes. Not many people (at least not enough) were interested in organizing a nonviolent general strike against the Iraq war – something that was being talked about by a few (including a writer from Harper’s – and I wasn’t reading ObWi, so I don’t know if it was discussed here). It would be great to organize a whole country to do something nonviolent and effective, and that’s what I would support if something other than the normal electoral process were necessary. But a huge number of people have to get behind such a movement, and by the time that happens, a whole lot of damage may have been perpetrated.
I don’t agree with what Bill Ayers did, and I supported the nonviolent anti-war movement. But I don’t think any of that had any effect on our war policy. We left Vietnam because we lost. There was no number of bombs and no lengths of destruction that could convince the Vietnamese people that we were there to bring them a benevolent government.
Props for most misplaced pop- culture reference since the founding of the blog, Hilzoy.
Step 1: argue facts
Step 2: ???
Step 3: incisive and targeted political commentary!
The strange thing is of course how it’s possible to describe Ayers and apparently condemn him for no particular reason. This is necessary, because condemning him for being a violent thug – well, that’s not really something you want to do as a responsible conservative. Condemn him for killing people, or at least lacking moral clarity when it really did count – rather than playing at the populistic streak so painfully present at that time? Once again, a very difficult thing to do. For a reasonably read conservative.
To be perfectly honest, I do not think this argument shows up as frequently as it does because of conscious manipulation and self- suggestion. No, it is always plain to see that the wish is for a certain feeling of discomfort to disappear.
To paraphrase Hilzoy: if they only did. If only one conservative had the balls to actually face up to what these seemingly disconnected arguments spring from.
On second thought, maybe Hilzoy’s post is extremely appropriate: take care not to squander what leverage you do have this time, kids. Forget about stupid and/or dangerous theories – Maoism or hippie-conservatism then, perhaps post-modernism now. Focus on the practical and on developing empathy for anyone. Obama has correctly pointed out that change is going to be neither easy nor fast. Take him at his word. Just having a functional economy again is going to take quite a bit of doing.
I think Gary and hilzoy have covered most of the bases pretty well.
My only contribution is to counter the notion that Ayers has withdrawn except for the nasty Republicans dragging him around. That just isn’t true. First, this NYT essay wasn’t dragged out of him by Republicans. Second, a similar thing wasn’t dragged out of him on 9/11/01 where a similar thing was published. (Sheesh can’t he take a hint? Last time you tried this it was published on the date of the most serious successful terrorist attack against the US.) The reason he is useful to Republicans is because he really is a loud and unrepentant example of crazy 70s leftism.
Such clear and unambiguous statements from Ayers have been made – and ignored! – years ago.
Clear and unambiguous statements against violence directed at people are made in the Op-Ed he wrote hich you have ignored.
I don’t think Ayers can say anything that anyone who has eaten the Ayers Is Evil Cookies will find acceptable.
First, I haven’t eaten any f’ing cookie.
Second, I don’t think of Ayers as evil, not evil, or anything in particular. I don’t think about him much at all.
When I do think about him, here are my thoughts:
1. I’ve never read any statement of his that took any actual personal responsibility for the violence he was involved in, or that actually makes a clear and unambiguous statement that the activities his friends were involved in when they blew themselves up were *wrong*. I find his statements in the op-ed and elsewhere self-serving and mealy-mouthed. My two cents.
2. To my knowledge, the man hasn’t done a damned thing in his life since then that thousands upon thousands of other folks haven’t done, and generally done for far less recognition and compensation.
So I don’t see what the hell is so freaking special about Bill Ayers.
The only reason anyone is talking about Bill Ayers is because right wing slime merchants tried to make more out of the association between him and Obama then was there.
He kept the hell out of it during the election, and I thank him for that. Now that the election’s done, he’s had his fifteen minutes and some column inches on the NYT op-ed page to share his thoughts.
Now I think it would be great if he’d go back to whatever the hell it was he was doing before.
I don’t give a crap how wild and hairy the times were. You don’t blow people up with nail bombs.
And yeah, I know Ayers wasn’t one of the folks actually building the bomb. Lucky him.
Thanks –
Sebastian: My only contribution is to counter the notion that Ayers has withdrawn except for the nasty Republicans dragging him around. That just isn’t true. First, this NYT essay wasn’t dragged out of him by Republicans.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Cookie for you, Sebastian!
Jesurgislac: Ben, the main point of that op-ed isn’t about the events of 40 years ago – nor is it about the horrible deaths of three of Ayers’s friends in 1970…It’s about how the media made use of Ayers to pick on Obama.
Absolutely. But whether or not events of 40 years ago are the main point of the op ed, Ayers is dishonest about events of 40 years ago in his op ed. I don’t think his dishonesty is among the hundred most serious problems facing the republic today. But it does undermine the main point of the op-ed and is worth pointing out and criticizing.
Ayers isn’t the most evil person in the US: he’s not the person who did the worst and most unforgiveable thing ever.
I couldn’t agree with you more. There are thousands (perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands) of unrepentant Americans with more innocent blood on their hands than Bill Ayers. Many of these people are also more politically significant than Bill Ayers; some of them will be members of the incoming Obama administration.
All of which is a very good argument that more effort should be spent criticizing, say, Robert Gates than criticizing Bill Ayers.
But as long the subject is Bill Ayers, the fact that there are others more guilty does not excuse Ayers’ dishonesty about his past. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Sorry for being absent from the thread for so long.
Harley, in my defense, Hilzoy made some comments early in the thread responding to some of the marginal Ayers-love. Maybe if Hilzoy commented more, I’d find more to disagree with …. we’ll never know.
Slartibartfast, you owe 15 Hail Marys and at least seven good works for bringing up the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. It’s an abomination! Joss’ vision was destroyed!
Miller, I tend to think Buffy was appreciated by folks of all ages …. it wasn’t really a coming of age thing for any particular group. (Unlike, say, the Breakfast Club or [let’s be honest] the Porkey’s movies). Maybe that’s because movies like the Breakfast Club, Ferris Buellers’ Day Off, and the others roughly described my coming of age period (Breakfast Club in the theaters was a little before my time, but available on video by the late 80s) …. and I still found myself addicted to Buffy.
Or, consider this: A disproprotionate number of Buffy fans seemed (to me) to be in their late 20s through late 30s. Might Buffy be the “Thirtysomething” of the post-Boomer era? Discuss.
Hmm. What would be the Thirtysomething of the post-Boomer era? (Pause to mention just how awful Thirtysomething was.)
Given the tenor of the times…
Seinfeld
Friends
LA Law
Buffy
Dawson’s Creek.
Okay. Just kidding about Dawson’s Creek.
All in all it has been a most interesting thread but nobody seems to want to answer the underlying question; how great must an evil be in order to justify the taking of innocent lives to stop the evil? I have wrestled with this for forty years and have come no closer to an answer. I have lived a life as a pacifist and I assure you, unless you are a simpleton, the moral turbulence that comes with that decision is with you daily. It is all too easy to reduce it to a Sophomore dorm discussion along the lines of, “Knowing what we know now, would we be justified in traveling back in time to kill Hitler as a young boy?” At it’s most basic, Mr. Ayers felt then, and continues to feel, the evil was so great his actions were justified. I disagree and as I said earlier, found his actions abhorrent. Apparently what angers many people in this thread is he actually USED his right of free speech to defend himself. Hilzoy’s point seemed to be, “You may have the right of free speech, but I don’t want to hear what you have to say, so shut up” Excuse me, but unless you are mentally dead, you are no longer the person you were forty years ago. While I found his article shallow in the extreme, I’m glad I had the chance to read it. I’ve always felt any information is worth having. I’m just silly that way.
how great must an evil be in order to justify the taking of innocent lives to stop the evil?
Pretty freaking bad.
I’d also add the following.
There needs to be no realistic alternative.
There needs to be some chance that violence will actually make something, anything, better.
“Being angry” is not, remotely, enough of a reason.
The thing that I find really wrong-headed is the calculus of “we killed N, but they killed 100 times N”.
Killing is killing. There isn’t a scale whereby it’s morally better to kill fewer people.
Thanks –
But whether or not events of 40 years ago are the main point of the op ed, Ayers is dishonest about events of 40 years ago in his op ed.
In your view.
I don’t think his dishonesty is among the [million] most serious problems facing the republic today.
Fixed that for you.
But it does undermine the main point of the op-ed and is worth pointing out and criticizing.
No, it really doesn’t undermine the main point of the op ed, unless – like Hilzoy – you have joined the other side and believe that Bill Ayers is somehow Teh Evil and the Republican attacks on him and on the “liberal media” for not making a great big noisy fuss about his “connection” to Barack Obama were all 100% totally justified. In which case the op-ed is already undermined, because there’s nothing at all Ayers could say that you would be able to approve of, so there’s no point Ayers trying to target his op-ed to suit you, is there…?
Russell,
how great must an evil be in order to justify the taking of innocent lives to stop the evil?
The very question I asked way, way, way upthread, like in the beginning.
Pretty freaking bad.
Yup.
There needs to be no realistic alternative.
There needs to be some chance that violence will actually make something, anything, better.
Welcome to the moral minefield. Think Algeria. Camus vs. Sartre. Camus was right? mostly?, but things were pretty tough in Algiers.
“Being angry” is not, remotely, enough of a reason.
Few here made that claim, inferred it, well, yeah. Ayers strikes me a guilty as charged on this score, but the times were charged. That’s not an excuse. It’s a statement of fact. There is a case to be made that Ayers was driven over the edge after a debate with somebody from the Progressive Labor Party (if you’ve ever debated a LaRouchie, you would know this feeling), but I jest.
The thing that I find really wrong-headed is the calculus of “we killed N, but they killed 100 times N”.
Agree.
Killing is killing.
Yes. So if you met John McCain and Bill Ayers in a dark alley, and they both held out their hand in welcome, whose would you spit in first?
Thanks –
No. Thank you. You’re one of the best commenters here. Just my 2 cents.
Welcome to the moral minefield.
You know, I actually do get that.
I’m sitting here wearing a Kent State hoodie. I got it while visiting my in-laws a couple of years back. My wife is a KSU alum, and was on campus on May 4, 1970, when four kids, two of them totally unrelated to any protest whatsoever, were shot dead by the OH national guard.
Never mind millions killed on the other side of the world. What is the right response when your own countrymen shoot you and your peers down in cold blood?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I hope that, should I ever be in a situation like that, I’d respond in a way that was constructive, but I really have no idea what I would do. Probably crap in my pants and run away.
But you never know.
My beef with Ayers is his wishy-washiness. His equivocation. He neither stands up and says yes, it was right to take up arms against the government, nor does he say it was wrong. It strikes me as self-serving.
He’s neither fish nor fowl. He’s neither hot, nor cold, so I spit him out of my mouth. As it were.
It’s nice that he does research in education now. Apparently, he’s involved in some constructive things in Chicago. I hope he returns to all of that, and that we don’t hear much from him either way going forward. At least, not about the 60’s. If he wants to talk about education, that might be an interesting conversation.
So if you met John McCain and Bill Ayers in a dark alley, and they both held out their hand in welcome, whose would you spit in first?
I wouldn’t spit in either man’s hand.
Thanks for your kind words about my comments. There are a lot of really fine thinkers and writers here, it’s a privilege to be part of the community. My goal is to not suck too much or too often, and to not be a total ass.
Thanks –
I wonder what freaking bad is. If we can’t count the several million bodies (as opposed to one), how do we determine freaking bad?
And effective? If I’d been a villager in Vietnam, would I have been justified in killing the guy throwing the napalm, even if doing so wasn’t effective (because his buddy would just throw more)? Not that I would have had a weapon or a chance to resist.
I think that some of the people who thought that violence was the answer (and I don’t agree with them) thought that people in this country can claim to be really sad and shocked about the fact that we are burning villages full of people on the other side of the world, but since nobody in the shelter of the “homeland” ever seems to get bruised, things are never “pretty freaking bad”. Some people (wrongly, ineffectively) thought that maybe people here needed to know what bad is.
To the extent that people were killed or harmed, it was all tragic, and for nothing. But if we’re going to think about why and when and who was wrong and what we should do, we should answer all of those questions. Not just the one about who was wrong.
If I’d been a villager in Vietnam, would I have been justified in killing the guy throwing the napalm
IMO, and FWIW, yes.
But nobody was throwing napalm at Ayers.
Look, many thousands of people in this country are in jail for very long periods of time for the heinous act of smoking dope. If you’re a black man, and live in certain places, you’re far more likely to go to jail than to go to college. And many of our jails are violent hellholes.
So, let’s go shoot cops. That’s the answer! Stick it to the man! Off the pigs!
That, to my mind, is the mentality of the Weathermen. It’s puerile.
And last but not least, I find Ayers denials of involvement in any violence against people to be fatuous.
The question of when political violence is justified is a good one. But part of the calculus has to be that you take responsibility, real responsibility, for what you do. Ayers does not do that.
Thanks –
So, let’s go shoot cops. That’s the answer! Stick it to the man! Off the pigs!
That, to my mind, is the mentality of the Weathermen. It’s puerile.
I agree. Many 24-year-old men are puerile.
I find Ayers denials of involvement in any violence against people to be fatuous.
I don’t. I don’t know of any evidence that he was “involved” in violence against people. Speech isn’t violence against people. Property damage isn’t violence against people (although it’s certainly serious, and the law treats crimes like arson and bombing a building as seriously as violence against people because of the risk involved – but that doesn’t mean someone who did those things without hurting anyone has to take responsibility for hurting someone). I don’t like what Ayers did but he has a right to speak.
“I wonder what freaking bad is. If we can’t count the several million bodies (as opposed to one), how do we determine freaking bad?”
What does the ‘badness’ of Vietnam have to do with it? Several million bodies isn’t a justification for killing your daughter in preschool. It isn’t a justification for a killing a cop on the beat in Chicago. It isn’t a justification for risking the life of some female secretary (typing-style) who might stay late and go to the bathroom.
Your justification has *absolutely nothing* to do with the actions Ayers actually took.
Your justification has *absolutely nothing* to do with the actions Ayers actually took
I wasn’t aware that Ayers killed anyone’s daughter in a preschool or anything else you mentioned. What actions exactly you do think that “Ayers actually took”? From what I’ve read, Ayers didn’t actually hurt anyone.
Sapient, I believe this is a classic example of Sebastian valuing the lives of hypothetical people who might have got hurt if things had turned out differently, above the actual lives of actual people actually dying.
(Also, I noticed a right-wing meme going round based on an anecdote from someone who thought that, had the Weathermen succeeded in a particularly nefarious plan, they might have been killed by the Weathermen as a small child: and that this justifies touting themselves as “Ayer’s child victim”. I think that’s it. You know, I was considering taking a holiday in New York in September next year, back in 2000, but in the end I took a different holiday and so wasn’t anywhere near Manhattan on 9/11/01. Does that justify me touting myself as a possible victim of September 11?)
Thanks, Jusurgislac, for helping me cling to sanity.
By the way, I had almost overcome my obsession with this thread when I saw Ayers being interviewed on TV by Chris Matthews, after which Michelle Bernard criticized his appearance – earrings and hippy countenance. No wonder they didn’t want him speaking out, she shuddered, the way he looks. So I looked back here and saw Sebastian’s comment. Best that I go read a book now, and quit thinking about it.
Jesurgislac,
Are you arguing here: a) Bill Ayers isn’t being dishonest about his past; b) if Bill Ayers were being dishonest about his past, it wouldn’t matter; or c) both?
Argument “a” is reasonable, though I disagree with it. But if you want to make it, I think you have to make a more affirmative case for the honesty of Ayers’s tale (hilzoy and others have done a fine job of making the case for the dishonesty of Ayers’s story).
Arguments “b” (or “c”) I still don’t get. Regardless of the focus of an op-ed, whitewashing the past is worthy of criticism and dishonesty in the presentation of evidence makes arguments less effective.
For whatever it’s worth, I accept your “fixing” of my statement regarding the importance of l’affaire Ayers (however snarky your intent). There are probably a million more serious problems facing us today than Bill Ayers’s dishonesty about his past.
But if you want to make it, I think you have to make a more affirmative case for the honesty of Ayers’s tale
Well, as I see it, the key thing that makes the difference about “Did the Weathermen intend to kill people, or were they just intending to cause property damage” is the nail bomb that went off prematurely, killing three of the Weathermen: two of whom were close friends of Ayers.
When Ayers’ friends were killed, he was 25. He had known both Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins for four or five years – an intense period of anyone’s life, and clearly a particularly intense period for the three of them – a time when (I think) people can make more passionate friendships than they can at any other time.
And then they were killed. If Ayers is telling the truth, he didn’t know what they planned. What he’s left with is the knowledge that two of his closest friends are horribly dead, and under the circumstances, he has absolutely no means of ever knowing exactly what they planned to do with the bomb that killed them.
To dismiss Ayers as dishonest because he passes over that part of his life story – the loss of two of his closest friends – in a step that puts as positive a spin as one can on what they did/what happened to them – is, it seems to me, to fail to understand that Ayers loved his friends, they’re dead and can’t defend themselves, and to demand that he denounce them and what they did so that he may be forgiven – well, hell, you know: I wouldn’t do that.
I wouldn’t support a friend, no matter how much I loved them, in their intention to plant a nail bomb (or any kind of bomb – but a nail bomb is intended to kill people, it has no other purpose). I’d inform on them in a hot minute if I knew about it before they used the bomb. But, if they were dead, killed by their own bomb, and I was told “you can buy your way back into public approval by denouncing and reviling your dead friends”… well, I don’t think anything could make me do that. It is possible to have loyalty even to the dead, who are most completely defenseless.
I don’t know if that is why Ayers simply evades the issue of the nail-bombers who were killed by their own bomb. I just see that as a natural, human reaction – you don’t revile your dead friends – and not, as Hilzoy seems to think, evidence that Ayers is lying scum.
Hey Jes –
I appreciate what you’re saying here.
Re: this –
If Ayers is telling the truth, he didn’t know what they planned.
Can you show me where he says this? I’m not calling “cite” on you, I’ve just never heard or read a statement by him to that effect.
To be honest, what I’d appreciate hearing from Ayers is a simple, unequivocal statement to the effect that the folks in the Greenwich Village explosion were planning to kill people, and that he thought was wrong. Period.
Not, as I have heard him say, that *he* would never do such a thing, etc etc etc.
I’d like to hear him say that they were, in fact, planning to kill people, and that he believed that to be wrong.
Not that Bill Ayers owes me a damned thing either way. But if he’s on the record to that effect, I’d like to read it.
Thanks –
Thanks for that, Jes. I certainly agree that it’s ridiculous to demand that Ayers ritually denounce his deceased friends. However, I think he could have addressed the Weatherman period far more honestly without having to do so.
For those still following this discussion, I strongly recommend reading Meteor Blades’s recent diary over on the Great Orange Satan.
MB is one of the more interesting regulars over there. He was involved in SDS from 1965-69, though he was among those who opposed Weatherman.
At any rate, this diary nicely juxtaposes Ayers’s recent statements with those of Mark Rudd, a member of Weatherman who has a rather different take on the lessons of those years. Without in any way embracing the inane and empty ritual denunciations that many are demanding from Ayers, Rudd has a much clearer sense of what a disaster Weatherman was for the left, however noble its members’ intentions.
Also worth noting is MB’s attitude toward Ayers and Weatherman, which is deeply critical but nonetheless respectful.
As they say, read the whole thing!
Can you show me where he says this? I’m not calling “cite” on you, I’ve just never heard or read a statement by him to that effect.
I appreciate your making the distinction. I’ve never heard or read a clear statement by Ayers that he knew what they planned to do, and several that seem to imply that he didn’t. But it is ambiguous – as has occurred to me re-reading this and reading Ben Alpers link (thank you for that, Ben) makes me think again. But I somehow doubt my thoughts are going to lead me to any clear place.
The Vietnam war was evil. The anti-war movement was the right side to be on at that time. Ayers and the other Weathermen were puerile fools at best, terrorists at worst. Pacifism is the right course when opposing the violence of the state… and this all happened a lifetime ago. Nearly 40 years ago.
In a later thread, the attempt to make comparisons between Chuck Colson and Bill Ayers points up for me how pointlessly vicious the right’s attack on Ayers has been during the past year – and how disappointed I am that people who ought to know better joined in.
To refuse to denounce/revile/attack is not identical with expressing support. One may refuse to join in with a lynch mob, even where you are sure the victim is guilty, without this being taken as evidence that you support rape.
Terry Gross interviewed Bill Aters just after the election. He declined to apologize for his actions, BUT his explanations we’re more than adequate for me. His declining to apologize came with the caveat that no one on the other side has apologized, but he would be very interested in a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. My sense is that he more than regrets his actions, but with the understanding that whatever damage he may have done pales in comparison to the damage done by the Pentagon, the government infiltrators who instigated most violence within protests, racist police departments, etc. This country made a mistake when Nixon was not jailed, and whatever advances we have made against racism, unjust war, etc. has been without any punishments for those who perpetuated it. And within a decade Bill Ayers saw the rise of Reagan, the proxy invasions in Central America, etc…and went on to create good contributions to our society. To ask Bill Ayers to “go away” when he never inserted himself in any form is wrong. His history with Obama was a fabrication, perpetuated by individuals who have done far more damage to the world than he ever has, few of whom will ever express any regret in the fashion Mr. Ayers has.
Other than the Vietnam War, I think the thing that made the most indelible impression on me about the 1960s, was how totally un-cool it is to fire up a doobie in a room full of high explosives. –William C. Ayers, 2008
Politicians lie about corruption, deny corruption, and justify corruption until corruption seems not only second nature, but also quite the thing to do. Politicians rarely get punished. They argue that everybody does it. Why single them out? Crime pays for elected officials. What’s a senate seat among friends? Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the political criminal circus (and it is criminal) is that it’s so interrelated, so endemic. According to Slate Magazine: Over the last 30 years, at least three governors, a mayor, and a few dozen local government officials in Chicago have been convicted of criminal offences. From 1994 to 2004, 469 Illinois politicians were found guilty of corruption – more than any other region except Central California.
Located on California’s Central Coast, Fort Ord was a staging ground for American forces during World War II in the Pacific theatre; places like the Gilbert Islands and bloody Tarawa. But during the 1990s, something strange happened to the venerable fort. It fell without a shot being fired. Now the Battle Of Fort Ord has raged for over a decade – a whopping victory to date for the Clintons, the Panettas, and the Smiths. Political scientists attribute this kind of corruption to machine politics and one-party rule. And, the money generated from your tax-dollar will continue to have untold negative repercussions. A lot of good men and women have already been chewed to pieces. Granted, one must pick one’s battles wisely. But good does not automatically triumph over evil: http://theseedsof9-11.com
“Sure. They lived through the draft, and the deaths, and the agony of anticipation for that letter in the mail. What the hell could they know about being angry with their government. About being lied to. Your going thorough some bull, so this must be as bad as it gets, right? Who could possibly know something you don’t? What can a person live through and still be whole?
Arrogance is the main barrier to knowledge.”
I have friends and family who lived through the war (thanks to new technology) but who have traumatic brain injuries and missing limbs, who have been shat on by the VA and who have been ignored by the government. All in the name of invading and occupying a nation for no justifiable reason, and killing untold numbers of brown people in that nation. Don’t you DARE act like your generation is the only generation that has been through something like this. FFS. I can be plenty mad about Iraq, FISA, the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and all that BS and still not kill a few (apparently “precious” and inconsequential) working-class people in the name of the freaking revolution.
That arrogance? You’ve got plenty.
Seriously, coyote? Screw you right back.
Will BILL AYERS please go away and dont ever consiter comming back unless its when your dead then come creamated in a urn