PRESS RELEASE
LPAC on Ayers:
The Weatherman Case Today
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
October 17, 2008
Oct. 18, 2008 (EIRNS)—This release was issued yesterday by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
Chicago's Bill Ayers has currently uttered what is, in itself, a wildly tendentious account of his own, and implicitly, Dohrn's roles in the Weatherman terrorist operations of that grouping within SDS during the 1968-1970 interval and beyond. For any relevant historian, Ayers' statement is implicitly his confession of everything which I know to have been recently charged against him. I have relevant eyewitness and related expert witness in this area.
In late June 1968, I wrote a relevant, substantially eyewitness assessment of those events, at Columbia University which had just occurred during the interval of March-June 1968. The title of that piece, contained within a rather widely circulated publication at that time, was The New Left, Local Control & Fascism, in which I likened the circles then associated with Mark Rudd as being an echo of the "purgative violence" dogma of Benito Mussolini's fascists, and also expressed in the way in which avowed Communists and Nazis swapped large portions of their forces, back and forth, during action on the streets of Berlin during the pre-Hitler period of the trolley-car "mass strike."
By the Spring of the following year, the official Students for Democratic Society (SDS) organization fractured, producing what became known as Mark Rudd's "Weatherman" organization in which Bernardine Dohrn came to play a widely publicized role. The most crucial of the relevant points to be made on the subject of Bill Ayers' current piece, is that he expresses the same, systemic form of fascist ideology for today, which was expressed by the Weatherman terrorists, such as his companions Rudd and Dohrn of yore.
However, there is a more important connection of relevance for today, in this matter. The crucial historical fact about the case of Ayers et al., is that they were a creation of the type of sponsorship from within the financier community which we associate with the expression "Wall Street law firms," or with the Wall Street backers of Adolf Hitler's cause, such as President George W. Bush, Jr.'s grandfather, Prescott Bush (then of Brown Brothers Harriman) together with the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, back during the early 1930s.
Thus, when a putative "former terrorist" such a Bill Ayers, turns up in a notable law firm or kindred institution, we ask ourselves, "Has he, a terrorist, returned to his native roost?" Which is Ayers? Is he a repentant sinner, or is he out of the same stall as when he served with Mark Rudd's terrorist band during the 1969-70 interval?
To answer that question, we should compare the "fingerprint" which Ayers presents in his putatively exculpatory piece now, and that of his actions during the 1968-1970 phase of the emergence of the "Weatherman" terrorist group. His own currently uttered piece is fairly described as nothing but an indelibly Sophist defense of the terrorism he practiced back then, and as anyone associated with the kind of firm with which he is associated knows that.
Sophistries such as his construction of Sherman's march, reveal more evidence than they purport to conceal. I have the benefit of relevant experience, that I understand mentalities such as those of Dohrn and that of the mentality of Ayers' attempted swindle very well.
The British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham and Bentham's protege Lord Palmerston had conspired to break up and subjugate our United States through a massive barrage of operations, including often overlooked genocide against the Cherokee nation, and the massive infusion of African slaves into the U.S.A. through Britain's puppet, the Nineteenth-Century Spanish monarchy. The U.S. leaders of the conspiracy which was the Confederacy plot were agents of the same British Foreign Office which thrust the Habsburg tyrant upon democratic Mexico through combined British, Napoleon III's, and Spanish monarchy forces, all as part of the British empire's scheme in using Foreign Office puppets such as Napoleon III and the Spanish slave-trading monarchy in the effort to conquer both Mexico and the United States itself.
War is war, and the British monarchy and its French, Spanish, and Confederacy tools were fully guilty of the crime which Sherman's actions aided greatly in defeating. Thus, Ayers makes himself a defender of enslavement of persons of African origin: not exactly what any Presidential candidate, including Obama, should desire anywhere near his camp.
There is nothing inconsistent with his a.) past offenses. b.) the specific kind of Sophist mentality shown in his currently uttered apology, and his lack of loyalty to the United States expressed in his reference to Sherman,
Otherwise, as I repeatedly presented the relevant, conclusive argument, the mentality of the Weatherman was, as I foresaw the trend in June 1968, fascist. That is the same mentality I recognize in Ayers' apology today.
Presidential candidate Obama must repudiate that association publicly now, that for the good of our nation in this perilously trying present time.
Ayers' Version:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/?s=fantasy Episodic Notoriety Fact and Fantasy April 6, 2008
Day in and day out I go about my business, I hang out with my kids and my grandchildren, take care of the elders, I go to work, I teach and I write, I organize and I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful movement for peace and social justice; now and then (and unpredictably) I appear in the newspapers or on TV with a reference to my book Fugitive Days, a memoir of the revolutionary action and militant resistance to the Viet Nam War the years of miracle and wonder and some fantastic assertions about what I did, what I said, and what I believe. The other night, for example, I heard Sean Hannity tell Senator John McCain that I was an unrepentant terrorist who had written an article on September 11, 2001 extolling bombings against the U.S., and even advocating more terrorist bombs. Senator McCain couldn't believe it, and neither could I.
My e-mail and my voice-mail filled up with hate, as happens, mostly men with too much time on their hands I imagined, all of them venting and sweating and breathing heavily, a few threats "Watch out!"; "You deserve to be shot"; and from satan@hell.com, "I'm coming to get you and when I do, I'll waterboard you" all of it wildly uninformed. I've written a lot about the Viet Nam period, about politics, about schools and social justice, and I read and speak about all of it. I encourage people to argue, to agree or disagree, to discuss and struggle, to engage in conversation. I believe deeply in the pedagogical possibilities of dialogue of listening with the possibility of being changed, and of speaking with the possibility of being heard and I believe in revitalizing the public square, resisting the eclipse of the public and expanding the public space, searching for a more robust and participatory democracy. Talking to one another can help.
So in that spirit here is another attempt at clarity:
1. Regrets. I'm often quoted saying that I have "no regrets." This is not true. For anyone paying attention and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I'm sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say "no, I don't regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government." Sometimes I add, "I don't think I did enough." This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.
The illegal, murderous, imperial war against Viet Nam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese, a disaster for Americans, and a world tragedy. Many of us understood this, and many tried to stop the war. Those of us who tried recognize that our efforts were inadequate: the war dragged on for a decade, thousands were slaughtered every week, and we couldn't stop it. In the end the U.S. military was defeated and the war ended, but we surely didn't do enough.
2. Terror. Terrorism according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N. is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten, or coerce a population toward some political end. This means, of course, that terrorism is not the exclusive province of a cult, a religious sect, or a group of fanatics. It can be any of these, but it can also be and often is executed by governments and states. A bombing in a caf in Israel is terrorism, and an Israeli assault on a neighborhood in Gaza is terrorism; the September 11 attacks were acts of terrorism, and the U.S. bombings in Viet Nam for a decade were acts of terrorism. Terrorism is never justifiable, even in a just cause the Union fight in the 1860's was just, for example, but Shernan's March to the Sea was indefensible terror. I've never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently.
3. Imperialism. I'm against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good must win.
We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary. We need to bring our imaginations together and forge an unbreakable human alliance. We need to unite to transform and save ourselves as we fight to change the world and save humanity.
