The View From 1776

Doug Welsh on his Twitter site posted a link to Larry Grathwohl’s reply to Ayers.

Mr. Grathwohl, from his personal knowledge as an FBI infiltrator in the Weatherman underground in the late 1960s and early 70s, confutes the self-serving, hypocritical rationalizations that Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn are now peddling.

In the same vein, read Bill Ayers: Unrepentant Terrorist and Hypocrite and Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism In Schools.

Organized anti-American student anarchism began with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Tom Hayden’s 1962 Port Huron Statement. More violent, radical members of SDS, among them Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, broke away from SDS to form Weatherman.

The ethos of this violent, anarchist student-activist movement is preserved in Weatherman, a 519-page compilation of articles and speeches by members of the group published in 1970 by Ramparts Press and “Dedicated to the Vietnamese people.”

A typical statement was in The Real SDS Stands Up, an article by Andrew Kopkind that appeared in the June 30, 1969, issue of Hard Times, a student radical publication.  Mr. Kopkind said,

But the most significant ideological force with SDS was a group of 11 New York and Midwestern activists and intellectuals who had drawn up an analytical and programmatic thesis called, simply, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” (the title is from Dylan...).  “Weatherman” was a 16,000-word paper which made the first and crucial attempt at defining an ideology and a program for SDS...it was the first major overhaul SDS has had since the “Port Huron Statement” and “America and the New Era”

…the paper presented this argument: Opposition to US imperialism is the major international struggle today……Those who are leading the fight are the guerrillas of the Third World (principally, now, the Vietnamese and the Latin American guevaristas) and those of the “internal” black colony within the US…

That central idea implies several consequences.  First, the black liberation movement in the US is the most important element of the whole process...Second, the way in which the various foreign and domestic colonies arrive at the revolutionary stage is through their own fights for “self-determination.”...Third, the youth movement did not spring full-blown from abstract idealism, but is a specific response to the black movement and the worldwide “war” against the American empire; it must now reach out of its middle-class origins to a base in the white working class and the permanent drop-out culture...Fourth, the several community “movements” should begin to think of themselves as cadres and collectives in the first stages of formation of a revolutionary political party.

From the same volume, Look At It: America 1969, which appeared first in New Left Notes, August 1969, amplifies on this outlook:

What’s new is that today not quite so many people are confused, and a lot more people are angry; angry about the fact that promises we have heard since first grade are all jive; angry that, when you get down to it, this system is nothing but total economic and military put-down of the oppressed peoples of the world.  And more: it’s a system that steals the goods, the resources and the labor of poor and working people all over the world in order to fill the pockets and bank accounts of a tiny capitalist class. (Call it imperialism)...

No longer will we tolerate “law and order” backed up by soldiers in Vietnam, and pigs in the communities and the schools; a “law and order” that serves only the interests of those in power and tries to smash the people down whenever they rise up…

We are expressing total support for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam...We moved from individual acts of moral protest – remember the spring before, the draft card burning had been considered the very limit of the Movement – to massive attacks on the centers of military power in this country.  The Pentagon and the vast Oakland Induction Center were real; in Oakland the slogan changed from “:Hell No, We Won’t Go” to “HELL NO, NOBODY GOES.”

We had begun to realize that to stop the war we had to stop the United States government...Columbia transferred to a single campus the ideas of the Pentagon: Bring Home the War.  We hit where it hurts.  We had moved from individual protests to attacks on the centers of power, attacks on the home ground of the war machine.

Revealing in his own words that he is a liar, Bill Ayers wrote in A Strategy To Win, appearing in New Left Notes of September 12, 1969,

...we’re going to bring the war home, we’re going to create class war in the streets and institutions of this country, and we’re going to make them pay a price...people have come to see the need to build collectives that can fight, the need to build collectives that are strong and tough, and in order to do that a lot of individualism has to be worked out of every one of us...we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun, should have a gun in his house.