We've just received this communication from our friends and comrades
Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn of the
Weather Underground Organization.
Every day is a day to honour the dead and fight for the living - but today is a special one.
Cyprus IndyMedia Collective* * *
MARCH 6 1970-2010 A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970 announced: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas” at about noon on Friday, March 6.
The body was later identified as belonging to 23-year old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.” Over the next several days two more bodies were discovered—Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had both been student leaders, civil rights and anti-war activists—and by March 15 the Times reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about thirty blasting caps in the rubble,” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.” That awful event announced widely the existence of the Weather Underground, in some ways the most notorious, but far from the only group of Americans to take up armed struggle as a protest tool at that moment—the story took off from there, growing, changing, and accelerating every day
A few days after the Townhouse explosion Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants," associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to Time magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington D.C. to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. The Black Liberation Army leapt onto the national scene, and other organized groups—Puerto Rican independistas, Native American first nation militants, and Chicano separatists— emerged demanding self-determination and justice.
Violent resistance to violence was far from an isolated phenomenon: Time noted that in 1969 there had been 61 bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other war-related targets, and 93 bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent ten years ago.” According to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there were 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary, attacks, meaning that on average, two bombs planned, constructed, and placed, detonated every day for more than a year. Our national history includes times of anarchist resistance, labor militancy, massive unreported (and still largely unacknowledged) slave rebellions, and the armed abolitionism of John Brown; the late 1960’s and 1970’s was becoming one of those times.
How had it come to this?
Empire, invasion, and occupation always earn blow-back. In 1965 most Americans supported the war, but by 1968 people had turned massively against it—the result of protest and organizing and a burgeoning peace movement, and of civil rights leaders like the militants from SNCC, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. denouncing the war as illegal and immoral. Even more important, veterans came home and told the truth about the reality of aggression and occupation and war crimes. The US government found itself isolated around the world and in profound and growing conflict with its own people inside its own borders. The Vietnamese themselves were decisive: they refused to be defeated. The Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed any fantasy of an American victory, and when President Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March, 1968 that he would not run for re-election, it seemed to us we had won a victory.
But peace proved to be a dream deferred, for the war did not end—it escalated into an air and sea war, expanded into all of Cambodia and Laos, and
every week the war dragged on another
six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death that had been constructed by our own government. The war was lost, but the terror continued. All Vietnamese territories outside US control were declared “free-fire zones” and airplanes rained bombs and napalm on anything that moved, destroying crops and live-stock and entire villages. John McCain, an unremorseful war criminal, flew some of those missions. As a young lieutenant, John Kerry testified in Senate hearings at the time that US troops committed war crimes every day as a matter of policy, not choice.
No one knew precisely how to proceed, for the anti-war movement had done what it had set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any sure-fire way to stop the killing; millions of people mobilized for peace, and our project, our task and our obsession, was so simple to state, so excruciatingly difficult to achieve: peace now. The war slogged on into a murky and unacceptable future, and the anti-war forces splintered then—some of us tried to organize a peace wing within the Democratic Party, others organized in factories and work-places, some fled to Europe or Africa or Canada, others to communes, the land, and hopeful but small organizing projects. Some began to build a vehicle to fight the war-makers by other means, a clandestine force that would, we hoped, survive what we thought of as an impending American totalitarianism. Every choice was contemplated, each seemed a possibility then—and we had friends and family in every camp—and no choice seemed utterly beyond the pale.
The Weather Underground carried out a series of illegal and symbolic attacks on property then, some 20 acts over its entire existence, and no one was killed or harmed; the goal was not to terrorize people, but to scream out the message that the US government and its military were committing acts of terrorism in our name, and that the American people should never tolerate that. Some felt that our actions were misguided at best, off-the-tracks, indefensible and even despicable, and that case is not impossible to make. But America’s longest war itself, with all its attendant horrors, was doubly despicable, and while many stood up, who in fact did the right thing; who ended the war; who transformed the world?
We began to think of ourselves as part of the Third World project—revolutionary liberation movements demanding justice and freeing themselves from empire, we believed, would also transform the world. We thought that we who lived in the metropolis of empire had a special duty to “oppose our own imperialism” and to resist our own government’s imperial dreams. Eventually we came to think that we could make a revolution, and that in any case it was our responsibility to try. It was a big stretch, but every revolution is impossible until it occurs; after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.
All of that was forty years ago—lots of water under the bridge since then, raging rivers and cascading falls, rapids and torrents, chutes and ladders—a long time in the life of a person—the young become the old, and stories get retold. But it’s also a matter of perspective: the meaning of any historical event will always be contested, and the more recent the event, the fiercer the contestation. The last word has not been written about the radical movements of youth in Europe in 1968, and certainly the meaning of the Black Freedom Movement or of the US invasion and occupation of Viet Nam and the various American reactions to that catastrophe—from mindless jingoism to sincere patriotism, from reluctant participation to gung-ho brutality, from protest to armed resistance—are far from settled. We’re reminded of the Chinese premier Chou En Lai responding to a French journalist’s question many years ago about the impact of the 18th Century French revolution on the 20th Century Chinese revolution. He thought for quite awhile and finally said, “It’s too soon to tell.” Forty years is less than the blink of an eye.
The big wheel keeps on turning: events and actions and adventures plunge relentlessly forward and nothing withstands the whirlwind of life on-the-move and history in-the-making. No single narrative can ever adequately speak to the diversity and complexity of human experience, for meaning itself is in the mix, always contested and never easily settled. Because meaning is made and remade in the present tense, our backward glances are now necessarily refracted through the US defeat in Viet Nam, the steady decline of empire, the hollowing out of the economy through militarism, the destruction of our political system, the environmental catastrophe that capitalism wrought, the terror attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions and occupations and wars that continue as defining features of our national life. There is no sturdy accounting of distant times: everything must change, no one and nothing remains the same.
Many who knew and loved them 40 years ago, choose to remember Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ralph Featherstone, and Che Payne every day as beautiful and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and freedom, believed further that all men and women are of incalculable value, and thought that they had a personal and urgent responsibility to act on that deep belief. We think of Brecht: a smile is a kind of indifference to injustice. And then we turn to Rosa Luxemburg writing to a friend from prison: love your own life enough to care for the children and the elderly, to enjoy a good meal and a beautiful sunset, to embrace friends and lovers; and love the world enough to put your shoulder on history’s great wheel when required.
We have not forgotten our fallen friends, not for a moment. March 6 is for us a time of more formal remembrance. Their deaths and all that followed offered us an opportunity to reconsider and recover. We were able to recommit and to see that the first casualty of making oneself into an instrument of war is always one’s own humanity, that, in the words of the poet Marge Piercy, “conscience is the sword we wield. Conscience is the sword that runs us through.” We remember our lost comrades, their many brave, as well as their damaging last acts, and we continue to vibrate with the hope and despair they
embodied then.
Bill Ayers,
Bernardine Dohrn~~~~~~~~~
Editorial Note:
We reproduce here the
first communication from the Weather Underground to show the spirit of the times - and because we still embrace the political and moral validity of that path, as well as its slogan: "
Arm the Spirit!"
Communiqué #1 From The Weatherman Underground
From /The Berkeley Tribe/, July 31, 1970.
The Red Mountain Tribe.
Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn.
I'm going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.
This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground.
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We've known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five or twenty-five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we've been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.
Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world.
Ché taught us that "revolutionaries move like fish in the sea." The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.
The hundreds and thousands of young people who demonstrated in the Sixties against the war and for civil rights grew to hundreds of thousands in the past few weeks actively fighting Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the attempted genocide against black people. The insanity of Amerikan "justice" has added to its list of atrocities six blacks killed in Augusta, two in Jackson and four white Kent State students, making thousands more into revolutionaries.
The parents of "privileged" kids have been saying for years that the revolution was a game for us. But the war and the racism of this society show that it is too fucked-up. We will never live peaceably under this system.
This was totally true of those who died in the New York townhouse explosion. The third person who was killed there was Terry Robbins, who led the first rebellion at Kent State less than two years ago.
The twelve Weathermen who were indicted for leading last October's riots in Chicago have never left the country. Terry is dead, Linda was captured by a pig informer, but the rest of us move freely in and out of every city and youth scene in this country. We're not hiding out but we're invisible.
There are several hundred members of the Weatherman underground and some of us face more years in jail than the fifty thousand deserters and draft dodgers now in Canada. Already many of them are coming back to join us in the underground or to return to the Man's army and tear it up from inside along with those who never left.
We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.
Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go.
For Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, and for all the revolutionaries who are still on the move here, there has been no question for a long time now—we will never go back.
Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.
Never again will they fight alone.
May 21, 1970~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rick Ayers is a university instructor and founder of the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School. He is an adjunct professor in Teacher Education at University of San Francisco and Mills College. He blogs at the Huffington Post and writes for other publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Teachers College Record. He has worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, as a teacher trainer for the Bay Area Writing Project, as a fellow at the Institute on Media and American Democracy, Harvard University, and as a core team member of the Diversity Project.
William Ayers is a school reform activist, distinguished professor, and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University, Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is currently the vice-president of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association, and a member of the executive committee of the UIC Faculty Senate. He is the author of many acclaimed works on social justice. Find him at: http://www.billayers.org/
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