The Real Bill Ayers Kind Of Sucks
I thought that a lot of the ire directed at Bill Ayers by conservatives during the campaign was pretty ridiculous. Not only in terms of the transparently ridiculous efforts to “link” him to Barack Obama, but in terms of the level of outrage directed at his misdeeds. When I tally up all the Vietnam-era wrongdoing in this country, Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their absurd terrorist plots don’t come to the top of my list. The architects of the war are responsible for the deaths of many people.
But being the target of unfair criticism does not, on its own, exonerate a person. And Ayers’ odd little New York Times op-ed only re-enforces one’s sense that unfair criticism can certainly be directed at a guy who very much deserves to be the target of criticism. An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.
118 Responses to “The Real Bill Ayers Kind Of Sucks”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
December 7th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
yes. self-righteous hippies always suck, but they’re worse if they were those who were willing to blow up people who were not responsible for the war, in the name of stopping the war.
Those rotten hippie craps who still see themselves as better than the subsequent generations because they were spoiled enough so they could spend all their time protesting, or because they were willing to cross the line into violence against their fellow Americans in the name of thinking they could rebuild the world into some ivory tower of haight-ashbury bullshit… Fuck em.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
During the general election, he was described as an “unrepentant terrorist”. Only the second part of that phrase would appear to be hyperbole. It’s probably more accurate to describe him as an “unrepentant, toothless ex-radical”.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
They wanted to stop the wars.
40 years on and million newly dead in Iraq, I keep waiting for the “within the system” folk to show the persistent success that would justify their smug moralism.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Bob: So their desire to stop the war have them the right to blow up people who didn’t have anything to do with the war, like city police? Or any night cleaning crew in the buildings they bombed?
Or to paralyze people in brawls (i.e., Dick Elrod)…
The “within the system folks” have been out of power for 8 years because of the protofascists. We beat them fair and square without violence in this election, and come January, we get to stop the war. Without having rich shit student terrorists murdering even more innocents.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Ayers is an irrelevancy. So what if he’s a dull-witted historical revisionist? He or the Weather Underground were no more or less effective in stopping Vietnam than the Left was in stopping the Shock and Awe of Iraq. With few exceptions – American leftists are woefully inadequate to whatever the task is. To cite a small example – does anyone believe that “J Street”is anything but a joke?
December 7th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
The clearest thing seems to be that the worst thing you can say about people who worked within the system is that they failed to stop the Vietnam War. The worst thing you can say with certainty about the Weather Underground is that they quite easily could have killed innocent people, seriously injured several, damaged property AND failed to stop the Vietman War.
Killing or hurting innocent people to stop the Vietnam War could perhaps be morally justified. Killing or hurting innocent people while not stopping the war, or indeed following any plan which could conceivably stop the war, is pretty unambiguously wrong.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
“we get to stop the war.”
We’ll see about Iraq. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Colombia. And who knows where down the line.
It wasn’t only about Vietnam. LBJ had, IIRC, his own little military adventures in Latin America. Guatemala? Santo Domingo? Hard to keep track. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in recent memory. America had millions upon millions of servicepeople overseas. Cold War tensions were everywhere. Biafra, I/P, Saddam’s coup was late 60s? Cultural Revolution?
It had been, to a greater or lesser extent, a world at war for almost 60 years. We were fricking tired of it.
And 1968, in Paris, in Prague, in Mexico the good guys got stomped everywhere. We freaked out. Baader-Meinof, Red Brigade, PLO, Khmer Rouge…a lot of people got weird as the 70s got strange.
You think it’s over? The good guys have won, once & for all? No more wars again, forever? It’s their humility that make the kids so lovable today.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
That obsidian wings post is misleading and thinly-sourced.
It makes a lot of hay out of that Ayers quote (”..kill your parents…”). That quote was made in jest. Ayers said those words in exasperation, reacting to popular caricature of the Weathermen. It is not a serious statement of goals. It is, however, a useful cudgel, whose relevance is on par with the bullshit “Ayers said he didn’t do enough on Sept. 11!” story.
The obsidian post also parrots the “they were gonna bomb an Army dance at Fort Dix!” line. The truth is nobody knows what the hell tht bomb was for. The Fort Dix story was surmised by one journalist, based on sources who weren’t at the bomb site. It was one of several theories, others of which didn’t involve human beings and fit Ayers’ version of events. Obsidian even links to a wikipedia page acknowledging as much.
Throw in the bullshit ad hominem attacks (rich kid!) and you have a pretty wingnutty post. Matthew doesn’t exactly cover himself in glory with his uncritical endorsement.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Ayers never killed innocent people or seriously injured them (don’t know about property), but his colleagues did and therefore he is guilty.
Inside the system people never killed innocent people or seriously injured them, but the system did in vast numbers, therefore they are not guilty.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I’m not sure what posts like this are supposed to accomplish. Ayers starts an organization that was probably counterproductive to his cause — though it’s hard to envision what would’ve possibly been productive in context — and then goes on to be a major education scholar and activist. Yet because he’s not “repentant” enough, he’s a terrible person. Meanwhile, LBJ’s reputation is now more a matter of the Great Society than the Vietnam War, and he’s increasingly remembered as one of our greatest presidents. On their respective scales, did LBJ’s harm to good ratio really come out a ton better than Ayers’?
It’s a consistent pattern — people on the left and people with very little real power and influence must always be abjectly repentant when they do something even questionable. Non-radicals and people with a great deal of power get to have all the excuses and blindness they want.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Could someone please define “the system” and explain to me how its existence somehow morally justifies or excuses the making and intent to be placing pipe bombs on civilian targets?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
What.
Oh, I get it. You live in an alternate reality.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.
It’s really not hard to grasp at all. By all accounts, Ayers has gone on with his life and done something different and more productive. Being able to do that requires one to pretty much stop fighting your old battles. It’s not that he hasn’t seen what the Weather Underground really was, it’s that he simply hasn’t spent the last 30 years thinking much about it. Lots of people need to rationalize away their past so that they can concentrate on their future. I’m not saying this is an intellectually honest or intellectually moral thing to do, but it is how people think.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
11:”Could someone please define “the system” and explain to me how its existence somehow morally justifies or excuses the making and intent to be placing pipe bombs on civilian targets?”
Your foot on my neck.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The system is panels at the Brookings Institution where you treat insanely stupid suggestions as worthy of polite debate.
The system is deferring to a President on torture, war authorization, funding, telecom immunity for poltically expedient reasons.
The system is allowing John Yoo to teach at Berkeley because calling him to account for his war crimes would endanger academic freedom.
… and on and on.
Just a few examples. NOT the system would be saying FU loudly in each of these cases instead of pretending that the system, in its infinite wisdom, would allow war to end because that’s the rational response to insanity.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Meanwhile, LBJ’s reputation is now more a matter of the Great Society than the Vietnam War, and he’s increasingly remembered as one of our greatest presidents.
On what planet?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
They wanted to stop the wars.
40 years on and million newly dead in Iraq, I keep waiting for the “within the system” folk to show the persistent success that would justify their smug moralism.
So did the people working within the system. But at least they had a fucking plan. The logical connection between “insanely reckless vandalism; lucky it wasn’t murder” and “war in Vietnam ends” is utterly fucking nonexistent.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Please get to the point where somehow that justifies terrorism.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
The Weather Underground NEVER blew up anyone except themselves — though in the early days it wasn’t for lack of effort. And that’s the part of Ayers that kind of gets under my skin — before the Greenwich Village explosion, they definitely were trying to kill people. Tactically, it was doomed to fail, and morally it wasn’t right. I think my reaction is bit more muted than Matt’s — there is a role for radicalism in political debate and that’s something that I can tell Matt’s uncomfortable with. However, while there are worse things in the world than Bill Ayers (particularly Bill Ayers 2.0, college professor), I also don’t think Ayers and the Weatherman can be seen as either effective or conscientious radicals.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
The issue–during the campaign wasn’t about him, it was about Obama (at least the Republicans–and Hillary earlier–wanted it to be); so why does Ayers think he’s relevant now? He’s not, but want’s to sell some books. I was around for the 60s and the draft, so I understand him, but am not really interested anymore.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Please show me the terrorism which Ayers is guilty of.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Listen to a few more of those Nixon tapes, and you might ‘get’ why the Underground was around.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Do you dispute that Ayers was part of a terrorist organization?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Matt,
Do you include Ho Chi Mihn among you architects of the war — the dictator who was willing to send two million (there’s that word) of his soldiers to their deaths to spread a fascist political regime with disastrous economic system to the peaceful south. Which success in turn set up the accession of Pol Pot in Cambodia — when a million and a half (there’s that word again) round eyes are murdered we call it a holocaust.
Are we to blame for the two million refugees who left Vietnam by boat alone after Ho won — a million of whom ended up here? Maybe the latter two may plausibly be laid at the feet of the not so best and brightest who had us withdraw all but the most rudimentary financial and air support in 1972 once we got the South Vietnamese Army to take over all the bloody ground fighting — leaving them to fight on without weapons for three years until they finally caved in.
In 1965, the decision year, 20 years after two little countries with one time zone and no nukes almost took over the world, the two big nations the little countries could not bite off were coming after us — led by super militant leaders (if Khrushchev had led Russia in 1945 he would very likely have marched the Red Army to the Atlantic).
Russia was graduating twice as many scientists and engineers, its economy was growing almost twice as fast as ours — looked like super-nuke Japan. The idea in Vietnam was that if we did not hold off the most overreaching communist dictator all the less motivated ones would come out of the wood and see how much they could bite off while communism was at high tide. By 1975 we had won globally so we (if not the shamelessly abandoned South) could afford to lose locally — seemed reasonable at the time.
Does anybody object to the defense of Korea which had the same cost/benefit ratio only squeezed into three years — and we won — while Russia was still on its back under the leadership of a non-militant?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
In his revisionist history, Ayers claims,
“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.”
I don’t know enough about the Weather Underground to know how much of that statement is BS, but I have heard him speak and read some of his writings and he seems much more honest than you in assessing these things.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Second thought: fuck you. I’m not going to argue with someone 60’s retread who thinks engaging in violence against civilians and civilian targets can be justified because of “the system” (maaaaaan). Instead I’m going to go about my relatively happy life and wait for this country to get even better when the baby boomers, this country’s worst generation, finally succumb to their own clogged arteries.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
hey wanted to stop the wars.
40 years on and million newly dead in Iraq, I keep waiting for the “within the system” folk to show the persistent success that would justify their smug moralism.
Dear Bob McManus,
I really wish you’d stop masquerading as some sort of anti-war lefty. Or do I have to go search for your many bloodthirsty rants circa 2003 calling for escallation of the war in Iraq to engulf the entire Middle East?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
I get the feeling that Ayers does realize how stupid the whole thing was in retrospect, but doesn’t really want to publicly admit that – perhaps out of personal/selfish reasons, and perhaps out of a desire not to give the other side any kind of propaganda victory.
Ayers is what he is; his crimes, in the context of the 1960s especially, were decidedly minor. If you are going to get outraged at every mention of his name, I hope you do the same for people who are guilty of acts of “terrorism” that are much, much worse than Ayers’s, including LBJ, the man most responsible for the Vietnam War, and people like John Kerry, who (by his own admission) participated in war crimes in Vietnam, and people like Colin Powell, who helped engineer the crime of the Iraq war, and any number of “respectable” figures who did more harm than Bill Ayers ever dreamed of, and haven’t even begun to redeem themselves the way Ayers has done over the last few decades.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
The Weather Underground NEVER blew up anyone except themselves — though in the early days it wasn’t for lack of effort. And that’s the part of Ayers that kind of gets under my skin — before the Greenwich Village explosion, they definitely were trying to kill people.
But didn’t you read Ayers’ op-ed? He helped found the Weather Underground after the explosion. See, that other group, the Weathermen (totally different), why bring them up? Why make it complicated?
What a joker this Ayers guy is. Go away. Shame on the Times — not for publishing him, but for allowing him to include such a baldface misstatement of fact as “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.”
December 7th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I thought both Ayers’ op-ed and his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air were worthwhile. He pretty much said that nothing he did with the Weather Underground accomplished any good. He also explained why he hadn’t tried to say anything during the presidential campaign (he thought that would only accentuate the dishonest, right-wing smear attempt), stated that his acquaintance with Obama was only superficial, and pointed out that guilt by association arguments are wrong in any case. After having been repeatedly equated over the past year with a characterization of his distant past, who can blame him for wanting to say “hey, that’s not who I am”?
December 7th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
How quickly this brings out the Vietnam-war revanchists who think that if only we had kept bombing civilians throughout Indochina, ‘we’ woulda won in Vietnam, and our big mistake in Cambodia wasn’t bombing and carpet bombing from 1965-1973 and thus (in the CIA’s analysis) turning the lunatic fringe guerrilla movement into a peasant-driven national government, but not bombing them enough.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Your post seems to say that Bill “kind of sucks” because he does not understand that his actions in his movement were too extreme, but actually, towards the middle of his op-ed, he says he does:
“No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.”
December 7th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Lyndon Johnson successfully killed several million Vietnamese for an evil cause. Bill Ayers failed to kill any Americans for a good one. They hardly are comparable, are they?
There’s definitely a place for radicalism in the political scene, and if if Will Ayers had lived in a different country, and his methods had been successful at ending the thoroughly evil adventure of the Vietnam War, we might remember him entirely differently today. Sadly, he learned that Chicago in 1968 wasn’t Cordoba, or Havana, or Saigon, or even Belfast, and hoping for imminent revolution in America was neither reasonable nor responsible. Just war theory tells us that it is criminally irresponsible to make war without a reasonable hope of success.
Still, given how fundamentally malignant monopoly capitalism and the Vietnam War were, I can’t help feeling a bit of pity for Ayers and his companions. He was wrong, and gravely so, but there were other people back then who were much more wrong, the architects of the Vietnam War among them.
On second glance, I see we have a scumbag defender of the Vietnam War in Denis Drew. It shouldn’t need pointing out at this late date, but south Vietnam, like the Confederate States of America or the putative statelet that Marinkovic and his crew are trying to create in eastern Bolivia right now, was a totally artificial state with no right to exist other than to allow a parasite oligarchy to maintain their privileges by exploiting other people. It deserved to be defeated and ground into the dust every bit as much as the Confederacy did. The blood of those Vietnamese civilians and soliders, every drop of it, is the fault of the U.S. and its South Vietnamese oligarch clients.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Your post seems to say that Bill “kind of sucks” because he does not understand that his actions in his movement were too extreme, but actually, towards the middle of his op-ed, he says he does:
I think a lot of people have a hard time processing regret unless it’s drenched in soul-baring and self-flagellation. It’s the same reason why Clinton drove Republicans insane: he admitted he had done something wrong, he apologized, and he moved on. Some people want to watch you squirm first.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I don’t agree with what Ayers did, but I wonder if people would be equally fierce in their condemnation of a hypothetical Ayers-equivalent who bombed government buildings in Nazi Germany. Certainly it would be equally true in that case that the action would be purely symbolic, and would carry some risk of harming innocent people, but I think symbolic actions against a government doing evil things have at least some value. If you treat the two cases differently, that suggests your objection is not really to blowing up stuff for symbolic purposes in general, but rather has to do with the fact that you don’t think the government’s actions in Vietnam were all that bad (and I don’t think they were nearly as bad as Nazi Germany myself, but the careless killing of massive numbers of civilians was still pretty bad, and I suspect Ayers would have seen them as comparable).
December 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Everyone’s speaking of Ayers –but Ayers risked his life to fascism instead of merely making snarky comments on a blog.
Whatever Ayers faults he wasn’t a Harvard careerist holding his finger in the breeze and waiting for his competitors to fuck up so he can swing into his appointed/entitled saddle.
Frank Rich reminds us this morning that it was a lot of allegedly bright guys from Harvard who really stepped deeply in shit in running the Vietnam War — and notes the similarities of those men to the people Obama is appointing to economic high positions: Larry Summer and Timothy Geithner– as well as their patron Robert Rubin.
Except that Robert Rubin has drawn $115 Million from Citigroup since 1999 — the Citigroup that is now being bailed out by the Taxpayers. I don’t think even Mcnamara had that amount of gall.
Frank Rich also reviews some history that needed reviewing — and delivers a bitch-slapping to some people badly in need of it.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
See Rich’s column at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/opinion/07rich.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1228680357-Tg5VYt9V8OY9dmzeROSgXQ
Also, a correction. Above should have read “Ayers risked his life to FIGHT fascism”
December 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Denis Drew, I’m not sure MY was refering to the Vietnam War on the whole so much as he was refering to its execution: body count quotas and area bombing, etc. He was talking about the “architects,” not the political leaders who made the decision that containing communism in Southeast Asia was a worthy geopolitical strategy.
The problem with New Left radicals like Ayers is that they looked at murders like Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevera as heroes. They all deserve each other, as they were all spoiled rich boys who thought violence against any establishment figures, be they part of a corrupt nationalist government or – for Christ’s sake! – a police officer.
Now, as it turns out, Ayers was a wuss who couldn’t have handled working in the re-education camps with his heroes, so he, as I believe he is entitled to, has been taking advantage of a second chance by working on education reform in Chicago. He’s a joke, but the monsters he idolized are still monsters.
But he probably still gives cover to Uncle Ho and Che by saying they were just nationalist democratic revolutionaries rather than stone-cold violent Marxist-Leninists. But that’s exactly what they were.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Yikes, I need to learn how to complete a sentence.
“They all deserve each other, as they were all spoiled rich boys who thought violence against any establishment figures, be they part of a corrupt nationalist government or – for Christ’s sake! – a police officer, as a worthwhile political goal so long as they could become the establishment” is what I meant to type.
Kind of an off-centered thought, however. (Shrug)
December 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
The NY Times op-ed page does normally have such stringent standards for truth, as illustrated by its weekly publication of Bill Kristol’s nonsense.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
On another topic, I wonder how American history might have been different had hippies been less annoying. Imagine people pursuing all the goals hippies did, except they wore business suits and pomade all the time.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Give me a break. I understand that you wouldn’t have enjoyed being required to go cut sugarcane in the evenings or actually do something useful, but the fact that you appear to be a lazy and flabby creation of a lazy and flabby society isn’t a justification for trying to throw feeble insults at Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara. Guevara’s name is still revered throughout Latin America in particular and most of the rest of the developing world as well, and for good reason. Unlike you and Mr. Yglesias, he actually believed in something more important than comfort and freedom. (Even the Archbishop Charles Chaput, hardly a liberal, recently said something nice about him.) Of course, many Americans make a profession out of thinking the rest of the world doesn’t matter, so you can just go ahead and do that.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Intended for Mr. Struhar, by the way.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Sorry Matt, you next geners dont’ get it. What was “… wrong, counterproductive, and insane” but not hard to grasp as such was the horrendous Vietnam War. It was a much worse, much more murderous useless debacle than the Iraq war. The Weather Underground was misguided and poor strategy tactic — but as Ayers says, they never killed anybody.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I think anyone born post-Vietnam, like MY, can’t understand how deeply that war infected US society. Twenty-somethings have no other context than to equate Vietnam to Iraq. In that equation, more radical attempts to end the war are ‘wrong counterproductive and insane’. The Iraq war, for all its horribleness, simply isn’t on the same scale as Vietnam. But in the context of a war that had gone on for 10 years, killed millions of innocents, swallowed a generation of young american men, killing 60,000 of them — and shown no signs whatsoever of stopping — there was a level of desperation to get it ended that justified violence in some people’s mind.
As cliched as it is to say, the difference was the draft. There hasn’t been the same level of passion to end the Iraq war, because society as a whole isn’t fighting it. People like Matt, who never had to worry about a draft lottery that would see him in uniform, can’t relate to the level of desperation of people caught up in that system.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
The NY Times op-ed page does normally have such stringent standards for truth, as illustrated by its weekly publication of Bill Kristol’s nonsense.
Touche.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I disagree. People demonize him because he saw something disturbing happening. We can question the tactics he used not the merits of his mission. None of his critics were willing to step up for call of action, at the time it was necessary. It is much easier for you guys to sit back and criticize I guess.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Matt’s post is pretty rich, coming from a guy who supported the invasion of Iraq and now thinks the road to better education is to get rid of the teacher’s unions.
Ironically, having shaken off the taint of the ‘terrorist’ Bill Ayers, Obama will soon be the Commander-in-Chief of death squads, targeted (sic) bombs, and US infantrymen bursting into Afghan homes and machine-gunning women and children. Ain’t it grand what you can do when you’ve totally cowed a nation of 300 million?
If it weren’t for the extremists of the 60s, right now there would be a draft and we would be sending another 300,000 troops to Iraq. Wouldn’t that be fun?
December 7th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I grew up during the period Ayers was active. I was a hippie, I registered for the draft, was against the war, had high school friends killed or napalming from helicopters, all for lies. To have lived through that time e.g. Nixon tapes, FBI/Hoover, assasinated leaders (MLK, JFK, RFK), the Watts riots, etc. I worked in detroit during the riots. It was sobering to see the 101st airborne with bayonets patrolling the streets with the city burning beyond and curfews, gas rationing. Shock and awe indeed. For the Cheney’s and those too young to remember, it was an insane time and drove many to insane acts against the govt or against the vietnamese for the govt. I regret that we no longer have “activists” who risk speaking out. Despite the condemnation, those who protested and demonstrated did end that tragic war. So go ahead and judge. But please no sanctimonious pious judging.
Michael Canfield
December 7th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
D. Williams is right. Whatever Ayers’s sins – he didn’t cheer on American imperialism in the run-up to the Iraqi War, and he never characterized the righteous Palestinian fight for self-determination (”The most noble struggle of our time”- Nelson Mandela) as an overweening”yen to kill Jews.” If swimming where you think the tide is (praising Michael Chertoff and condemning Bill Ayers) is its escutcheon- it ain’t nuthin’to brag about.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
The Republican attacks on the Obama/Ayers connection were disgusting and idiotic. That does not mean for a second that Ayers is a sympathetic figure. He is, in fact, disgusting, idiotic, and EVIL. For those that haven’t seen it, pls. see the wonderful documentary on the Weather Underground:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P3v207gPGE
December 7th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
http://www.vietnammemorial.com/vietnam-monk-self-immolation.jpg
This is a serious protest to the insanity in Vietnam. There are several remarkable things about it. First, it wasn’t about the war, but was instead about the way Buddhists were treated by the Catholic regime there. (They were accused of harboring communists and their temples were raided in the search for them.) Second, it didn’t have much effect other than to instill horror. (Diem was overthrown soon after, but not because of the Buddhists’ protests.) Third, it drew intense and pointless criticism: the man who did it was dead, and followers of his example are tough to come by.
Fourth, in this picture he’s completely ablaze and yet maintains his meditation posture. I wince and curse when hot bacon grease spatters on me. There isn’t enough morphine in the world to mute fire on 100% of your body. He’s doing that through will and/or selflessness alone. The photograph has to be some time after the immolation began. Maybe by this point in the proceedings the monk is actually dead, but I don’t think so. He doesn’t look dead to me.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
newhavendan, it’s odd that you would point to that documentary to support your notion that Ayers’ is “disgusting, idiotic, and EVIL”, since the documentary portrays the Weather Underground members in a pretty sympathetic light. The real question I have about Ayers was whether he was in any way involved in the planned bombing of Fort Dix, which was intended to kill and injure people (not to mention the firebombing of Justice Murtagh’s home, although the wikipedia article on “Weatherman” notes that it’s not clear that the Weathermen were actually behind this). If he wasn’t involved, I’d say he had good intentions but just not very smart tactics; but if he was involved and has never admitted any regret, then I’d agree he’s a nasty character.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
It’s not an accident that one of the most recognizable of provocateurs’ strategy is to join a leftist or other margical liberation group and then try to press for some sort of vandalism or violence as soon as possible.
I was in a group when one of these obvious stinkers came along, within weeks of being involved he’s throwing out how we gotta ‘take it to the cops’ and ‘get mean like on the streets’, so we got him to leave pretty quick.
So, although I think the Ayers and Weatherman types were indeed genuine self-absorbed nitwits, you can understand why so many people doing a lot of organizing and work at the time assumed it was another government provocateur operation.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Re El Cid’s comment “although I think the Ayers and Weatherman types were indeed genuine self-absorbed nitwits, you can understand why so many people doing a lot of organizing and work at the time assumed it was another government provocateur operation ”
————–
So what did they think Kent State was?
December 7th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
For those too young to remember:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Of course, the anti-war movement had a lot of types. Some of whom were largely “organizing” how to get into the pants of protest babes.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I had the misfortune of knowing a guy who claimed to be an ecoterrorist. He was the most self absorbed, miseducated, little prick I’ve ever known…and surprise, came from a wealthy family. Self-righteous bastards, left or right, they are the ones ripping this world apart.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
The Real Bill Ayers Kind Of Sucks
No kidding. He dances like a loon, his allegedly mad rap skillz are just cringe-worthy, and his bombs drop like eggshells! I’m totally voting for Steve Luchemann unless he just bombs out on next week’s show.
…
Hmm. Ayers is not an entertainer or Paris Hiltonesque tabloid celebrity. Something approaching gravity should probably be brought to moral evaluations of persons who have engaged in destructive acts which they allege were for “the good of all.”
December 7th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Hector, I’m pretty sure I was calling Uncle Ho and Che murderers. Hardly a petty insult.
How many people were executed in the Re-Education Camps?
I’m not saying the Vietnam War was a worthwhile endeavor, or that all 60s New Left radicals idolized these men, or that I don’t admire some New Left figures are William Ayers (I quite enjoy reading Todd Gitlin). But it’s not like Ernesto Guevera, growing up in the upper-middle class and going to medical school (he really took that Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” to heart I tell ya), worked on a cane plantation.
Systemic poverty sucks. Che was right to realize that. He was right to want to do something about it. He thought people like Mao (how many millions died from the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward?) had the answers and was willing to kill – and did kill – to see those “solutions” put in place.
How many people were killed in the re-education camps?
Do people realize that the torture of POWs almost totally ended after Uncle Ho died?
The Vietnam War wasn’t a worthwhile effort for many reasons stated above – tens of thousands of young men, many conscripted into service against their will, were being killed for a war that couldn’t be won, partially because of a strategy that encouraged killing civilians. But Ho Chi Minh isn’t the good guy here. The strategy wasn’t to rollback communism and Ho’s regime out of Vietnam. It was to keep it from spreading to South Vietnam. The U.S. failed to do that, and at no point in the history of one of the indigenous populations in the world did so many thousands of South Vietnamese leave their country than after the fall of Saigon.
December 7th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Mr. Struhar, you must be new around here. Hector doesn’t have a big problem with murdering people to get the society he wants, as long as they’re the sort of people who deserve it.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Mr. Struhar,
Um, we aren’t debating China here. If you were talking about China you’d have a point. We were talking about Cuba, and there’s never been any solid evidence that any innocent person was knowingly executed under Guevara’s tenure as head of the military tribunals in Cuba. Of the 5,000 or so people that were executed in Cuba during the 1960s, the vast majority were officials and soldiers of the overthrown regime that were guilty of individual crimes such as torture and bombing civilian villages. The executions in Cuba were exactly as justified as the (about twice as numerous) executions of Nazi collaborators in France in 1945. And Che Guevara did work nights on the cane plantations after he got done with working at the National Bank. That’s pretty well known….what are you smoking>?
I suppose you’d be crying tears for the Nazis as well, or is that different?
As for the Vietnamese, there’s credible evidence from American sources that the torture that went on in Viet Nam during Ho Chi Minh’s tenure was due to the influence of Maoist advisers, who were much more hard-line than Ho. Ho Chi Minh was personally opposed to torture, he admitted that there had been excesses, and he strove to correct them. Unfortunately, people like you had forced him into the arms of the Russians and Chinese, and he wasn’t in a position to tell them to f— off.
Again, not every Vietnamese executed by the North was an innocent victim. Most of them were agents of a truly evil oligarchy that had committed grave crimes of their own, as well as collaborating with foreign invaders. It’s true that innocent people were executed as well, and that’s a tragedy. But it doesn’t discredit Ho Chi Minh as a leader any more than the fact that no doubt some innocent people got swept up in the 1945 reprisals discredits De Gaulle.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
“Kind of Sucks”??? Hey, thanks for reducing the transforming event of a generation to the banter of 14 year olds. What’s next? “The Holocaust was, like, so gay!”
Translation from Pussyspeak: Henry Kissinger was a co-conspirator in the MURDER of three million people, and is free to write all the books and op-eds he likes to this day.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Wow. I actually find myself in agreement with Hector. Will wonders never cease?
That said, I’ll tell a story. It’s not my story, it was told to me by my driver in Hue. His mother was a rice farmer and his father was in the US Navy. And he hated the Communists.
I asked him to just drive me around the countryside around Hue. We stopped for lunch, and a very strange thing happened that I’ll leave for later. But after that, I asked him what he thought of Ho Chi Minh. Much to my surprise, he said: “Uncle Ho was a great man.” And I said: “Really, why is that?” And he said this: “Look around you, you see prosperity. You see nice houses with satellite dishes. You see nice cars and motorcycles parked in front of them. Ho Chi Minh gave us these things. Before Ho Chi Minh, we had one rice crop a year here. Now, we have three. Ho Chi Minh recognized that four months a year, we had the right amount of water. But for four months, we didn’t have enough, and four months we were flooded. He proposed a reservoir system to supply us with the right amount of water all year long. The French didn’t do that, and neither did the Americans. When the war ended, the Communists followed Ho Chi Minh’s plans. And now we grow so much rice that we can become rich. And that’s why Ho Chi Minh was a great man.”
That’s pretty amazing coming from a guy whose father fought against Ho Chi Minh. I’ll add that this man’s father was killed by a sniper two months before the war ended after having fought in Vietnam for 25 years. I don’t even know what to say about that.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
“Henry Kissinger was a co-conspirator in the MURDER of three million people, and is free to write all the books and op-eds he likes to this day.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one who will criticize Kissinger. But you forgot about Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Chile. Oh, and Cyprus. His crimes in Vietnam are bad enough, but it doesn’t end there. I can assure you, there’s plenty of Cambodians who would love to string his ass up. Not so much in Laos, they are very forgiving.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
‘An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.’
Dude, where were you during the Vietnam war?
The anger toward the war and Nixon in 1969 was omnipresent.
By 1969 civil disobedience in all its forms had reached a saturation point.
There were the large gatherings and the local protests.
Woodstock, the love-ins, sit-ins and of course the university protests.
Frustration was building, thousands were dying.
It was the most photographed and publicized war to that point in history, the stories and images where only too graphic and too frequent.
I was just a paperboy then. I sat in my drive way reading the news of the war
and reaction to the war everyday. Even for a 14 year old it was overwhelmingly
sickening.
I remember having to deliver mail to a home that accidentally came to my families box. I knocked on the door. A women answered it, opened and read the letter and handed it to me. Her son had died in combat.
In 1969 the anti war movement was boiling over.
Irrational reaction was coming from all sides. Do you forgive the National Guard for Kent state shootings or the officers responsible for the extreme Chicago convention beatings?
The domestic bombings seems wrong to me at the time but I understood the hate and frustration that was leading the people of on all sides to grow more extreme in their actions.
Pinheads like you too easy throw out these smug judgements.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
No, I didn’t forget any of those things. The body count errs on the side of caution since I am such a fair minded fellow.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Too many steves,
I rarely comment here, but I am a long-time reader of MY’s blog.
Hector, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a nationalist who was forced into sleeping with the Soviets and the Chinese because of our rejection. He was the co-founder of the French Communist Party when he studied in Paris. The guy was a committed Marxist-Leninist. The Re-Education Camps I was asking about, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, were instituted in South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Granted, that was after the death of Uncle Ho, but those communists were no more or less responsible for the prosperity of Vietnam than was Uncle Ho. I don’t want to take away anything from the success of the Vietnamese in the past few decades, and I commend that country’s opposition to the Khmier Rouge, but those who resisted communism paid a high price.
And, seriously, SERIOUSLY, you’re going to compare Batista’s thugs, as bad as they were, to Nazis?
To be honest, however, as an opponent of the death penalty, I do find the executions of Nazi collaborators to have been deplorable. Nevertheless, there is a legal distinction here. Batista’s thugs didn’t commit treason.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:34 am
“and I commend that country’s opposition to the Khmier Rouge”
Umm, that wasn’t exactly meant with good intentions. The Vietnamese hate the Cambodians, and the Cambodians did invade Vietnam. They were hardly being altruistic. In fact, they treated the Cambodians like shit when they controlled Cambodia. Ask the Cambodians if you don’t believe me.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:38 am
“No, I didn’t forget any of those things. The body count errs on the side of caution since I am such a fair minded fellow.”
Fair enough. I stand corrected. But maybe you’re being a little too fair minded. Here’s where I stand: I think Kissinger should have his eyes gouged out and be forced to beg on the streets of Saigon. Maybe I’m not being fair enough. But there are lot of Vietnamese with no eyes who would agree with me.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:49 am
“A women answered it, opened and read the letter and handed it to me. Her son had died in combat.”
Wow. That’s got to be hard to take. It’s obviously harder for her, but what do you say to her? The whole thing was just a mess. I live with a Vietnam Vet, and he lost a lot of his friends. He lived, but now he has cancer from Agent Orange exposure. Now I get to watch him die. But it’s still easier for me, isn’t it?
December 8th, 2008 at 1:24 am
To the apologists above who have tried to justify the idea that no one knows what the Greenwich Village bomb was for… it was a nail bomb. Nail bombs are only for one thing, and that is killing people. If you just wanted to destroy property, you wouldn’t need the nails. God almighty, how anyway can be that willfully oblivious is beyond my ability to comprehend.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:48 am
In fact, they treated the Cambodians like shit when they controlled Cambodia. Ask the Cambodians if you don’t believe me.
OK, but “like shit” was a hell of a lot better than the Khmer Rouge treated them.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:49 am
This is just great.
To this day, we have pinhead sh*t bags who would have the U.S. have intervened in Vietnam all over again to prevent Vietnamese independence from French colonialism on terms other than that preferred by the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
The slaughter of millions throughout Indochina is still justified for these people because some talking sh*t bags said it was about rolling back communism, and as the sh*t rolls out of their mouths they still expect, to this day, anyone to believe they gave the slightest sh*t about civilian lives over there. Hey, as long as some pack of freaks says they smell too much Marxism-Leninism around somebody, then, we obviously got to slaughter the f*** out of ‘em to make sure they choose the correct government.
It’s almost as darkly comic as those who eagerly supported the bombing and carpet bombing of Cambodian villages from 1965-1973, which drove the peasantry into the hands of the lunatic Khmer Rouge guerrillas, then looking afterwards at the horrors of both the Khmer Rouge regime and the nation-wide utter starvation their bombing caused, and then these revanchist, soul-less freaks expect someone to believe their crocodile tears about the Cambodians who were slaughtered or died under the Khmer Rouge.
No surprise, since about 28% of our country would have kept voting Bush Jr. back into office perpetually.
In fact, the last 8 years shows me that at least 25% of our population eagerly want as close to the equivalent of a Pinochet style dictatorship as possible, albeit with a nice dosing of redneck Southern U.S. neo-Confederate twang to it.
It’s unfortunate, but not surprising, that when the nation is so clearly lead by such murderous and slaughter-cheering policies, a relatively small number of people get involved with self-aggrandazing nitwits who become enchanted with the thrills of ‘revolutionary’ violence.
But outside the direct threat to those they either intended to or didn’t intend but likely would murder, the greatest threats of nitwits like that is giving a reason for the 25%-ers to get the Good Patriot American neo-Confederate fascism they slaver for.
December 8th, 2008 at 5:00 am
“OK, but “like shit” was a hell of a lot better than the Khmer Rouge treated them.”
Not so sure about that. I tend to think the Vietnamese were a little better, but the Cambodians have a mixed opinions about that. They are certainly biased against the Vietnamese, but it really did suck under Vietnamese rule. I certainly wouldn’t say it was a hell of a lot better than the Khmer Rouge. What’s crazy is the first year of Vietnamese rule. Most Cambodians spent that year wandering around trying to find their families. From the stories I’ve heard, that was probably the freakiest year of Cambodian history. Talk about Year Zero. They were trying to rebuild from absolutely nothing. And cope with the fact that a third of their family was dead. No modern culture has had to face what they faced. Yet somehow, they are optimistic. Cautiously, of course.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Ayers never killed innocent people or seriously injured them (don’t know about property), but his colleagues did and therefore he is guilty.
Did you know that that’s how the criminal law of conspiracy actually works? And don’t you see how that makes sense?
So what if he wasn’t a direct physical cause of the deaths? If he was helping a group of people that committed murder, he’s guilty of murder too — or would have been if his case hadn’t been thrown out for procedural reasons that have nothing to do with actual guilt.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:11 am
The balance of suck
Ayers can’t see where he went wrong yet with his version of violence in politics because the version of violence in politics implemented by Nixon et al was so widely successful that it continues to dominate our politics today.
Whether we’re talking about continuing a war in Vietnam that he clearly recognized as unwinnable before the 1968 election, just to reap the political benefit of anti-anti-war hysteria, or unleashing police riots to benefit from “law-and-order” hysteria, Nixon found it to be of immense political value to repeatedly implement this simple plan:
1) commit an act of senseless violence
2) blame the victims
3) reap the political benefit
This worked so well for them that the dynamic continues to dominate our politcs to this day. Ayers differs from Nixon and his innumerable imitators since, in these two respects only:
1) the violence was so much less
2) he never could make the reaping part work
So what’s wrong with condemning both? Nixon and Ayers, both believe in the same three-step program outlined above, both wrong, both condemned, case closed. The only problem with that is that Ayers does not stand in the least need of condemnation, (no one needs to speak truth to powerlessness, history having done that already) while the spiritual and practical heirs of Nixon still rule our world. The case can’t be closed until and unless committing acts of violence, then blaming the victims, ceases to be the surest path to political power in this country.
To say anything against Ayers is to ignore the huge imbalance of injustice between these two versions of our national insanity is to help the greater injustice continue to dominate the lesser. The imbalalance is such that it makes no sense to breath even one syllable of mild disapproval of Ayers until after we have tried, convicted and executed thousands of the wildly successful polticians of both parties who differ from Ayers only in the magnitude of their crimes and the success they have hitherto enjoyed from them.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Hector,
If Ho was such a great “humanitarian” why did he send a couple of million of his soldiers to their deaths (worse than England’s First World War loses adjusted for population) merely to supplant capitalism (was not much capital in the South, mostly rice paddies) with communism. Do you think southern peasants really wanted to join a guerrilla army to fight for the right to give their private plot to government communes (Lenin and Mao both killed millions of peasants to enforce communes)?
No; southern villagers were recruited to join Ho’s effort by the treat of disemboweling village chiefs and killing their children. Hue? Wasn’t that the town in which 2000 teachers, village officials, etc., were killed in cold blood during the temporary guerrilla occupation in the Tet offensive — briefly alluded to in the film Full Metal Jacket?
Part of the definition of a just war is that the benefit be proportional to the costs. What benefit (even if communism were superior) could justify dooming a giant chunk of the North Vietnamese male population (soldiers) Ho killed achieving his goal? The North did not impose communes after all (not sure about this)? Then what was it all about after all?
*******
fostert,
Properity? Satellite dishes? What will they have next, cell phones. Sounds like they are ready to pass Africa by any day. Get rich growing rice? You get rich making Kia’s and Samsungs like, er, South Korea.
******
Struhar,
According to the book Decent Interval by former CIA operative Frank Snepp, we had a guy on the North Vietnamese politburo who said that after the last Nixon bombing of Hanoi Ho called it quits — but — that when the North found out that we were limiting our financial support for the South’s efforts to the extreme they even had to ration bullets (we also withdrew air support) they decided to start up again. True or not, the South fought on for three years after we abandoned them. What might they have achieved if we gave them full support. Fact may be that we won and threw it away. Maybe.
We lost 60,000 lives and the decided it wasn’t worth a little money to see it through.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:04 am
See? And this is the type of 25%-er that will be with us forever.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:58 am
If Ho was such a great “humanitarian” why did he send a couple of million of his soldiers to their deaths (worse than England’s First World War loses adjusted for population) merely to supplant capitalism (was not much capital in the South, mostly rice paddies) with communism.
Kind of a simplistic way to look at it – it was very much a war of national liberation against imperialists. If you refuse to consider it in any other terms except as “merely to supplant capitalism … with communism” then you’re looking at it with the exact same blinders as “the Best and the Brightest” that lead to the whole tragedy in the first place.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Hector,
If Ho was such a great “humanitarian” why did he send a couple of million of his soldiers to their deaths (worse than England’s First World War loses adjusted for population) merely to supplant capitalism (was not much capital in the South, mostly rice paddies) with communism.? It was not Ho Chi Minh who had the 1956 elections cancelled, it was us. We chose war over peaceful reunification, because we didnt’ like the way the Vietnamese were going to vote.
Do you think southern peasants really wanted to join a guerrilla army to fight for the right to give their private plot to government communes (Lenin and Mao both killed millions of peasants to enforce communes)? The Viet Minh were immensely populary among the South Vietnamese peasantry, and they would have won the election easily. That’s why WE had them cancelled.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:19 am
PS – the South Vietnames peasants already worked on collective farms, whether they were village-owned or plantations.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:49 am
PPS – In 1944, Ho Chi Minh sent a letter to the US State Department, asking that Vietnam be made an American protectorate after the war.
We decided to back the French effort to re-assert their colonial perogatives.
It’s a damn shame – you look back at the Cold War, and you see all of these local anti-colonial, anti-plantation, anti-feudal revolutions, from Vietnam to Central America to Africa, and they could have been ours, they could have easily been democratic, liberal revolutions, but our political elite had too many economic and political ties to the people being rebelled against, so the Soviets got to swoop in as the noble benefectors of the downtrodden.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I’m not an apologist for the Vietnam War. I’m just saying there’s a mora justification for wanting to contain communism, but little moral and strategic justification for the conduct: body count quotas, carpet bombings, etc. The anti-war movement, minus Weathermen-types, was not necessarily inherently incorrect to oppose the war, especially since many in its generation were conscripted.
The people who are wearing blinders, however, are those who think Uncle Ho was nothing more than a national liberator, that South Vietnam was culturally and politically indistinct from North Vietnam and that the political arrangements created after the French left were imperial holdovers. None of that is true. South Vietnam had its own government, as corrupt as it was, and had a distinct culture and growing distinct identity from North Vietnam. The people who were trying to take over a sovereign country were the North Vietnamese.
Again, I’m not saying the war was a good decision. I’m certainly not saying the conduct was justified – much of it was not. I think McNamara’s management philosophy led directly to civilian casualties. But just as opponents of the Iraq War, as I was and still am, can’t deny that Saddam Hussein was horribly cruel, opponents of the Vietnam War really should stop giving cover to cold killing Marxist-Leninists like Ho Chi Minh.
Honestly, it’s like conservatives (and many liberals) consistently giving cover to Pinochet and, to use an already exhausted example from modern American history, Henry Kissinger.
Finally, Drew, I get what you’re saying. A professor I had was involved in Operation Frequent Wind, so he saw a lot of this happen up close, and he certainly had similar thoughts as you have expressed. Nevertheless, I’m skeptical of how much of a game-changer we were. We could have stayed indefinitely and, as a result, would have imposed indefinite stalemate. That would have been undesirable for all parties involved (except for the South Vietnamese perhaps).
December 8th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
joe from Lowel,
Last I heard (it’s a little late to cite sources; though I always thought is was common knowledge; try the book Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall maybe) it was Ho who, like any self-respecting communist, declined elections in the north. BTW, I seem to remember the number was two million (there’s that word again) Vietnamese who went south after the communists won in the north. Who would want to live under a political system where your kids are obligated to turn you in for the concentration camp if they hear you joking about the government — with a crackpot economic system to boot.
Struhar,
I don’t like the much of the way the Army waged the war in the populated areas against the indigenous guerrillas — fighting against main force invading divisions is another matter. The Marines (and some of the more enlightened Army) know the way to go: living with the people; defending them against local intimidation and outside invasion. Even the CIA had a “motivated man program” (see the book Sub Rosa) which built local defense forces from a core of dedicated individuals — but Westmorland came in and turned it into a mass production conventional force and ruined it.
It was under consideration (saw this in the book The Astronaut Who Would Be President) to call up the reserves and put two million men into Nam instead of half a million. That is what Colin Powell is talking about when he says use overwhelming force if you have it. That would have ended things real quick or rendered the enemy basically harmless — more money and sweat; much less blood.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Ayers never killed innocent people or seriously injured them (don’t know about property), but his colleagues did and therefore he is guilty.
Ayers never dropped any bombs on AND killed innocent people in Vietnam but his fellow American, John McCain, did and, therefore, he is just as guilty of war crimes.
Could someone please define “the system” and explain to me how its existence somehow morally justifies or excuses the making and intent to be placing pipe bombs on civilian targets?
If The President says it’s okay to bomb civilians, it’s okay to bomb civilians.
I’m not going to argue with someone 60’s retread who thinks engaging in violence against civilians and civilian targets can be justified because of “the system
You’re right. Why waste time on the 60’s? We have plenty to justify in the present but the system still works: If the President says it’s okay…
December 8th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
It was wrong (and really stupid) to get involved with bank robbers who killed policemen. That’s what Kathy Boudin did. Boudin was unbalanced, something that it true of many young people. She has paid (and still is paying) her dues for her lack of judgment, as is her entire family.
But both the left and the right (the CIA) got involved with (and glorified) punks and criminals. The CIA used them as allies in the war against leftists and unions (ruining Italy among other things). The “left” did so in its flirtation with certain macho ex-prisoners and criminals. That was the spirit of the times. And it is still with us, vide, the Sopranos.
That said, I think Matthew Yglesias is merely trying to do a bit of burnishing of his career-oriented centrist credentials by joining the throng in attacking someone who is absolutely no threat to him or anyone, namely Bill Ayres. It is unseemly.
By their fruits ye shall know them. At the end of the day.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Matthew Struher,
There had never at any point in history been a South Vietnam/North Vietnam division until the end of WW2, when it was decided that the British would accept the surrender of Japanese forces on one side of an arbitrary line, and the (was it the French of the Americians?) would accept it on the other.
My former profession, Ambassador Miller, formerly the American ambassador to the South, concluded that our failure was to try to contain communism behind an indefensible line – the one dividing Vietnam in half – instead of behind a defensible one, ie, the Vietnamese border. There were centuries of political and cultural history that made the border between Vietnam and Laos/Cambodia meaningful, and we could have contained Vietnam and stopped the spread there.
Dennis Drew,
Last I heard (it’s a little late to cite sources; though I always thought is was common knowledge; try the book Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall maybe) it was Ho who, like any self-respecting communist, declined elections in the north. Then you need to read up more on the 1956 elections, because you are wrong on the facts. The UN organized nationwide parliamentary elections, the Viet Minh supported them, and we had them scotched because we knew he was going to win.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The UN organized nationwide parliamentary elections, the Viet Minh supported them, and we had them scotched because we knew he was going to win.
Okay, but that was back in the fities, we would never make a mistake like that now.
BTW, I think Bill Ayers should just say the killing in Vietnam drove him crazy back in the sixties, but he got over it.
December 8th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Joe from Lowell,
Thanks for bringing some clarity and truth to the debate. A minor correction: while Ho Chi Minh would easily have won elections in a unified Viet Nam, the Soviets as well as the Americans were against the idea. The Soviets, in spite of the popularity of socialism in Viet Nam, didn’t want to set the precedent of having unified national elections since they were worried (correctly) that they would have lost elections if they were held in a unified Germany.
Mr. Struhar,
I don’t know why I’m still arguing with you, but whatever. A “committed Marxist Leninist” can mean many things. It could mean someone who believed in the economic and messianic ideology of communism, or it could mean someone who liked Lenin’s brutal methods of dealing with his opponents. Ho Chi Minh was certainly a believer in communism, but he was personally opposed to torture, attacking civilian targets, and things of that nature, and he tried to persuade his government to abstain from them. What torture did exist in North Vietnam (and it happened plenty in the South, too, as well as under U.S. rule in the Philippines) was due to the nefarious influence of Maoist advisers.
Batista’s thugs were legally sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, and Castro and Guevara explicitly cited the precedent of the Nuremberg Trials as their legal justification. (As well as saying things like ‘How dare the butchers of Hiroshima sit in judgment on us.”) I’m not saying that Batista was as bad as Hitler. He was bad enough though. The people who served his regime made a moral choice, as did the Germans who voted for Hitler, and in 1961 it was the decision of Castro, Guevara, and an estimated 93% of the Cuban people that they should pay for that choice with their lives. I am not going to gainsay them, but apparently you are. Moreover, if you insist that innocent people were executed by Guevara’s hand, please supply some names. Many people have tried and failed to find examples of unambiguously innocent victims that were executed at La Cabana.
Denis Drew,
I could just as well ask why you would want to live under a socieconomic system that values greed and self-interest over the collective good. The fact is, that people do- you apparently among them.
I’m not defending the regimes in Russia, China, or Cambodia, and so I refuse to be drawn into a discussion about them. What I deny is that either Ho Chi Minh or Che were any sense their moral equivalents. Actually, the regime Ho created was the one that ended, in Cambodia, the worst genocide since World War II, although you won’t see Struhar and his ilk give them credit for it.
December 8th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Interesting, Hector, I did not know that about the Soviets’ involvement in getting the elections cancelled.
December 8th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Hector, you make too many assumptions about me. I did give credit to the Vietnamese for ending the genocide in Cambodia.
I’d love it if you would read what I wrote before replying to it.
December 8th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Hey, this is great. I’m going to dig out my VCR and tapes of China Beach!
December 8th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Ayers: The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense.
Yglesias: An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.
Ayers: I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else.
What’s really hard to grasp is, if you aren’t referring to the same Ayers op-ed you linked to here, which one did you read?
December 8th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
WeWereThere, post #44, says it for me. Try to imagine Iraq going on for a decade, with napalm and carpet bombing, with half a million US soldiers, and the draft. Vietnam made all of us crazy. You did not have to agree with Ayers and Co. to sympathize with how they got where they were.
And try to imagine, Matt, explaining these times — Bush, Obama, all the rest — to a young person forty years from now.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:40 am
50 thousand Americans died and 5 million Vietnamese, we had a corrupt & criminal president, attorney general, and head of the FBI, L Patrick Gray (who collaborated in the Watergate coverup). But thought crimes and crimes against property are worse than these, or so goes the dominant paradigm (or trope).
December 9th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
White kids blowing up Americans and American property will not stop the war.
Iraqis blowing up Americansa and American property will.
Helicopter exit, anyone?
December 9th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Ayers was at best an ineffective anti-war strategist. He made a series of poor choices in the 1970s which led to him spending a huge portion of that decade on the run. The Vietnam war eventually ended and he had nothing to do with it.
But, people like him were easy to caricature, and probably did a lot to help the Nixon/Kissinger types look relatively sane to the average American. Thanks for nothing, Bill.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:46 am
laptop battery
laptop batteries
February 8th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
laptop battery
March 1st, 2009 at 5:43 am
viagra
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
March 1st, 2009 at 6:35 pm
cialis
Incredible site!
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:10 am
levitraGreat site. Good info
March 10th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Those collage adminasreators who hired BILL AYERS shoulad all be hanged from a tree
March 11th, 2009 at 4:41 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:23 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
xanax
March 17th, 2009 at 2:28 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:14 am
tramadol
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 am
buy viagra online
Incredible site!
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:18 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:15 am
I want to say – thank you for this!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 6:05 am
thanks !! very helpful post! viagra