File under "someone had to say it, we just didn't think it would be her." I have read Katha Pollitt only on occasion, and she always struck me as one of the more strident feminist intellectuals. She writes a column for The Nation, which I also read only on occasion for the same reason I read National Review only on occasion. Neither has many surprises in store. Pollitt's recent column on Bill Ayers is a major surprise. Here is a lengthy passage, but I couldn't bring myself to cut any of it.
"I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "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." Right. Those people belonged to Weatherman, as did Ayers himself and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife. Weatherman, Weather Underground, completely different! And never mind either that that "accidental explosion" was caused by the making of a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix.
Ayers writes that Weather Underground bombings were "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." That no one was killed or injured was a monumental stroke of luck-- an unrelated bombing at the University of Wisconsin unintentionally killed a researcher and seriously injured four people. But if the point was to symbolize outrage, why not just spraypaint graffiti on government buildings or pour blood on military documents?
Spectacular violence, and creating fear of it, was the point. Along with beating people up and ridiculous escapades like running naked through white-working-class high schools shouting "Jailbreak!" It was what the Weatherpeople were all about.
"Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war," Ayers writes. " 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." I'm not so sure that terrorism necessarily involves intentional attacks on people, but okay, let's say Ayers wasn't a terrorist. How about thuggish? Vainglorious? Egomaniacal? Staggeringly irresponsible? And illogical, don't forget illogical: as Hilzoy points out, the idea that because "peaceful protest" hadn't ended the war, bombs would is missing a couple of links. It's like a doctor saying, Well, chemo didn't cure your brain tumor, so I'll have to amputate your leg. It's not as if there was nothing else to try, after all. While Ayers and Dohrn were conveying their outrage, other people were doing the kind of organizing work that the Weather Underground despised as wimpy. Today Ayers blends himself into that broader movement, the "we-- the broad we" that "wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at inductions centers" etc., but at the time, Weatherpeople had nothing but contempt for the rest of the antiwar left. Writing letters? Off the pig! you might as well... become a community organizer! [My emphasis]
Wow. I posted on this topic, but I didn't write anything as good or as on target as that. She is certainly right to point out that Ayers's "we only bombed things" excuse is obscene. There is no way that someone planting bombs on public targets can be sure that no one will be injured or killed. The truth was that the "attacks on property" were play terrorism, "monkey warfare," as Abbie Hoffman called it in Steal This Book. The bomb that killed three Weatherpeople in the Greenwich Village townhouse, on the other hand, was intended to kill people. Ayers now claims that he refused to go along with this turn and decided to get out, but I agree with Pollitt that this is pure whitewash. Did he take steps to stop his colleagues from carrying out their murderous plans?
But what Pollitt shows is that Ayers was not only a terrorist (for all practical purposes) but that he was just as contemptuous of the real anti-war Left as he was of America in general. Ayers was the kind of Leftist who, if he had ever got his fingers on real power, would have rounded up his former friends along with all the regressives.
It's okay to have Ayers as an esteemed professor of education if you wouldn't mind an endowed chair for, say, a would-be Mumbai gunman who didn't manage to make the boat and years later claimed that he suddenly got scruples. Ayers is one of the Sons of Mary. Wealth and privilege and dumb luck smiled on him. That's alright. The world is like that. But it is important to know what it is. Well done Ms. Pollitt.
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