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We've moved to TheRagBlog.com and we're having a Launch Party this Friday in Austin! Please join us for The Underground Goes Overboard, with special guests Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of SDS and the Weather Underground. Plus live music from the Melancholy Ramblers.

It's all happening at the 5604 Manor Community Center, 5604 Manor Drive in Austin, on Friday, January 17, 2014, from 7-10 p.m. There will be beer and snacks available. There's a $10 suggested donation that goes to support the New Journalism Project, the Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes The Rag Blog.

If you aren't in Austin and can't join us, you can still help us produce The Rag Blog and Rag Radio by donating here.

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Alan Wieder : Bill Ayers' 'Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident'

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In his ongoing journey, and with his new memoir, 'Public Enemy,' Bill Ayers continues to bring the radical 'spark' forward.

Image from Uprising Radio.

By Alan Wieder | The Rag Blog | January 7, 2014

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn will speak at "Underground Goes Overboard," a launch party for TheRagBlog.com, at 7 p.m., Friday, January 17, at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin. They will also be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio earlier that same day, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live. Go here for other stations and times, and for podcast information.

[Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident by Bill Ayers (2013: Beacon Press); Hardcover; 240 pp; $24.95.]

“They just don’t get it.” Yes, the phrase is overused, yet, all too appropriate when addressing the continuing critiques, from both the left and the right, of Bill Ayers.

The recent publication of the second phase of his memoir, Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident (Beacon, 2013), was followed on the “SDS and ‘60s Leftists” page of Facebook by an unthoughtful conversation on Ayers, his comrade and wife Bernardine Dohrn, and the Weather Underground (WO).

Facilitated by George Fish and responding to a negative book review by Jon Wiener, 43 comments followed Fish’s post. Mostly sour, bitter, and ahistorical in tone, the comments provide the antithesis of Ayers’ book and life, that of learning from the past and continuing, in a human and life-affirming way, the ongoing struggle that began for Ayers in the civil rights movement, antiwar movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and then the Weather Underground.

When confronted by a radio interviewer who referred to the subtitle as snide, Ayers softly replied that the entire title was chosen for its irony. Missing both the breadth and depth of Public Enemy, the interviewer, as well as Wiener and other critics, fail to acknowledge the thoughtfulness and energy that Ayers brings to struggle, both past and present.

In this particular book, we alternate between the author’s recollections of first, his experience in the 2008 attempt to demonize Barack Obama because he “palled around with terrorists,” and, second, the years after he surfaced from underground beginning in 1980 from where Ayers left off in his previous book, Fugitive Days.

There are both multiple and complex events, issues, and ideas presented in Public Enemy. A sampling will be discussed in this review.

Recently, South African anti-apartheid struggle leader and Constitutional Court Justice (comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court) Albie Sachs spoke at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. Talking about his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Sachs emphasized the importance of acknowledgement for both personal and political healing.

Acknowledgement causes me to return to the radio interviewer’s portrayal of Confessions of An American Dissident as snide. In fact, irony aside, Ayers responded by talking about acknowledging one particular flaw during his time in WO. He asserted that neither he nor his comrades ever doubted their positions and that by not being skeptical they were arrogant and without reflection.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission. In both the book and current media interviews, Ayers has continually repeated that neither he nor the WO ever killed anyone in the bombings of buildings.

Not only did I never kill or injure anyone, but in the six years of its existence, the Weather Underground never killed or injured anyone either. We crossed lines of legality to be sure, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense, but it was restrained, and those are the simple, straightforward facts.

The correct term for Weather Underground bombings, in correspondence to the armed struggle in South Africa, is “armed propaganda.” And like Umkhonto We Sizwe underground soldiers in South Africa, Ayers would welcome the opportunity to answer queries about his WO activities at an American TRC.

In Public Enemy Ayers writes:

America, it seemed to me, was in urgent need of some kind of truth and reconciliation process… We needed a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more balanced future… Everyone together would have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering, and the victimizers would be asked why and how they created that misery. Society would have the opportunity to witness all of it in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us and moving forward. In that setting and standing with Kissinger and McCain, McNamara and Kerry, Bush and Cheney, I’d be happy to say exactly what I did, take full responsibility, and bow deeply. But without any chain of culpability whatsoever, I’ll stand on the record, or just stand aside.

While five chapters in Public Enemy present the threats and blacklisting Bill Ayers experienced during and after the 2008 presidential campaign, I will address the topic with brevity as it has already been explored in other reviews. An in-depth description and analysis is portrayed in Maya Schwenwar’s Truthout review, “Bill Ayers Weighs in on Democracy, Selfhood, and His ‘Unrepentant Terrorist’ Alter-Ego.”

Besides endless email threats and having someone actually come to his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Ayers was banned from talking on college campuses throughout the country. At the time my colleague at the University of South Carolina, Craig Kridel, the Curator of the Museum of Education, posted a page titled “The Bill Ayers Problem” on the Museum webpage. The page title, like Public Enemy, is ironic and at the time I wrote:

The inequality, unfairness, violence, and global greed are what Bill Ayers has fought against for many years. The fight is every bit as important today as it was during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War. And while some people might call me insensitive because I refuse to enter a debate on Bill Ayers as a terrorist, I choose not to speak back to the cries of O’Reilly, Hannity, and Colmes and their nameless comrades because the work Bill Ayers is doing does not need defenders but, rather, supporters and allies that fight for a more just world. Finally, as an academic who works with teachers who fought against apartheid in South Africa, I can’t help but think that the same people who define Bill Ayers as a terrorist would have given that label to Nelson Mandela and his less known comrades during the struggle against the apartheid regime. We know now what history says about that – we can only hope that Bill Ayers and many other people continue their work as progressive educators and activists.

But Bill Ayers does not rail against his detractors in his writing. Rather, while he is critical in a political/personal way of their harassment and silencing and analyzes their actions, his emphasis is a celebration of people who continue the struggle. While the story of the cancellation of his talk at the University of Wyoming is politically important, from Ayers we learn more about the woman who fought for his right to speak. More accurately, she fought for her own free speech.

"I’m going to sue the university in federal court," she told me during our first conversation. "And I’m claiming that it’s my free speech that’s been violated – I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you." She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used – no fear, no regret. I liked her immediately. Meg’s approach struck me as quite brilliant – students (and not I) were indeed the injured party.

The University of Wyoming student won the case and Bill Ayers spoke on democracy and education with over 1,000 people at the University. In discussing the event, he also honors his sister’s father-in-law, a retired United Church of Christ minister who drove a couple of hours to Laramie for the talk and told Bill: “‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways,’ he said with a wink and a smile gesturing with his Bible. ‘If any of the crazy Christians get out of hand, he wants me to set them straight.’”

Ayers writes of other cancellations at places throughout the country. The University of Nebraska stands out but only because he was in Tapai at the time and was woken with the news from a dean at three in the morning.

In contrast to Nebraska, there are brave academics at Millersville University and Georgia Southern University where Ayers was welcomed. At Millersville administrators explained that it was their “duty and honor” to have him speak. “It’s not about you personally, it’s about the mission and the meaning of the university.”

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy.

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy. One of the funniest yet potent tales is the reaction of Ayers’ comrade and friend, Michael Klonsky, when he was invited to give an education conference keynote address. The organization told Klonsky that they had intended to invite Bill Ayers but that he was “too controversial and too radical.” Klonsky scolded the inviter saying: “How dare you ask me to scab on Bill Ayers?” When Ayers thanked him, he replied: “Defending you? I wasn’t defending you, I was defending myself – I was deeply and personally offended when they said that your were too radical, and by implication that I wasn’t too radical. I’m as radical as you are, motherfucker.”

Bill Ayers’ book is about issues, ideas, actions, and people – it is not solely about Bill Ayers. Epsie Reyes was a colleague at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She supported Hillary, not Barack, in the 2008 democratic primaries, and she was one of many people who consoled Bill Ayers after Hillary Clinton first demonized him in a primary presidential debate.

Reyes sent strong emails to both Clinton and the Democratic National Committee “detailing how much money she’d donated and how many weekends she’d devoted to organizing on her behalf, explaining who I really was in her ‘humble opinion,’ and encouraging, then demanding that the campaign apologize to me personally and denounce the smears – or else she would have to rethink her commitments.”

Close friends and colleagues, of course, also came through in both 2001 and 2008. Mona and Rashid Khalidi were both supportive and insightful as were dozens of others. In 2008 there was a surprise call from Edward Said: “Of course it’s painful for you personally, but cringing and going quiet is the worst thing you could do at this moment. Your kids are watching you and your students too and a lot of others. Don’t let them down.”

Said’s message corresponds to the entirety of Public Enemy. Ayers celebrates political struggle and the people who try to sustain the fight. Two quotes come to mind, the first from a speech by Paul Potter referred to in the book. “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” Margaret Meade’s words correspond to Potter’s connecting the personal to the collective. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In addition to the 2001, 2008, and more recent stories, Public Enemy includes portraits from the time Bernardine and Bill came up from underground in 1980. Ayers writes admiringly about his childrens’ pre-school teacher at the time, BJ, whom he refers to as “an inspired early childhood educator.” “She was one of a kind, and everyone knew it.” Ayers’ portrait of BJ brought a response in Ron Jacobs’ Dissident Voice article, “Get Bill Ayers”: “Indeed, the truest hero in the book is the family’s New York child care provider, BJ.”

On Bill’s journey we meet Bernardine’s lawyers Eleanora Kennedy and Michael Kennedy and various other people including Ellie and Robby Meeropol who were Bill’s friends at the University of Michigan. Robby was the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and he was three years old when his parents were executed.

Bernardine and Bill had just adopted Chesa Boudin whose parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had been sentenced for murder in the Brinks Robbery in Nyack, New York. Robby explained that there was no road map and that times would be rough for Chesa – honest responses are very much a part of the many vignettes that Ayers presents throughout Public Enemy.

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family...

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family – Bernardine Dohrn and their sons Chesa, Malik, and Zayd. The book depicts seriousness and humor and mostly respect and admiration. There is a story from the early above ground days that I must include in this review.

Leaving swim class one day, we were swept up into a raucous women-led march heading from Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street toward Times Square. "No more porn! No more porn! No more porn!" we chanted ecstatically, fists pumping and voices rising as we entered the pornography district. It was a feisty and colorful crowd, our attendance just a happy accident, but with Zayd cheerfully perched on my shoulders we were in high spirits and quite pleased to be in cahoots. Soon we spotted a pizza stand along the route, and Zayd was famished from swimming and ready for a slice, so we settled into a booth. Zayd reflected on the parade we’d just left: "That was fun," he said. "Why don’t we want more corn?"

Ayers tells the story of all three sons advising him during 2008 and the respect appears to go both ways. Pages 129 to 131 serve as an illustration as Malik, Zayd, and Chesa join Bernardine in coaxing Bill not to speak with the media – a disposition alien to his being. Malik warns him of ambush and it recalls Mailer’s self-admonitions of never talk to the press – they control the story.

The consensus from them, in line with Bernardine’s steady and consistent basic instinct, was that whatever happened on the web or in the press, we should simply turn away. No comment, no elaboration, no clarification, no response. "Be completely quiet," they said, "and stay calm." "It’s harder then it sounds," Zayd added, looking right at me, "especially for you." True, too true: I tend to have a lot on my mind – who doesn’t? – and I’m genetically wired to speak up and speak out, and not always with considered judgment. My default position, no matter what, is to say something… "You’ll get flattened," they now said in unison.

Bill Ayers remained silent through 2008, but of course, “palling around with terrorists” quietly lives on. There is an ethos throughout Public Enemy, consistently present in the ideas, issues, actions, and people portrayed in the book, amidst everything else – this book is homage to Bernardine Dohrn.

Her strength, thoughtfulness, commitment, and humanity is the spirit of Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident. Whether it is gently chiding Bill with their children or being warmly welcomed back by the judge in Chicago when she surfaced from underground – her humanity is ever present. Political commitment is obvious in Dohrn’s first above ground statement: “This is no surrender. The fight against racism and war continues, and I will spend my energy organizing to defeat the American empire.”

Ayers writes of her actions and dispositions when she was imprisoned at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York for refusing to give Grand Jury testimony on the Brinks Robbery. The emotion of being away from her kids but at the same time focused political commitment. There is also a great story of her mother passing on contraband when she visited the prison – a chocolate chip cookie!

There is much more to Public Enemy than the samples that I present. Bill Ayers critiques the Weather Underground and provides much more breadth to the ideas, issues, actions, people, and events he portrays. He also pushes his story to the present and therein lies the further message. Ayers, Dohrn, and many of their WO (and beyond) comrades continue to work for the same issues they have pursued beginning in the sixties.

For Ayers it is education and more and the latter includes working with young activists who continue the fight for the end of racism, class disparity, and imperialism. First in the civil rights movement, then SDS and WO, Ayers was part of the “spark” for a just world. His book is a partial story of continuing to keep that “spark” alive today.

This article was first published at Dissident Voice and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was published in the United States by Monthly Review Press and in South Africa by Jacana Media. Read more articles by Alan Wieder on The Rag Blog.]

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Rick Ayers and Bill Ayers : Really Show Teachers the Love

Reframe the education debate:
How we can show teachers the love

Don’t allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition.

By Rick Ayers and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2012

Last week (May 7-11, 2012) was Teacher Appreciation Week. Which got Rag Blog contributors -- and education reform activists -- Rick and Bill Ayers to thinking.

Let’s stop the hype and the hypocrisy: a nice note, a flower, a Starbucks card, and a week when we all go smooshy over Miss Brody or Mr. Escalante can’t possibly counter 51 weeks of official disdain and a continuing frontal assault from the powerful. Lots of cynical similes filled teachers’ in-boxes last week: Teacher Appreciation Week feels a lot like Turkey Appreciation Week at Thanksgiving, or Deer Appreciation Week during hunting season -- and we’re the turkeys!

Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving problems, making connections, putting in 70-hour weeks and spending our own money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do, and attack us shamelessly every day.

Want to appreciate teachers?

Don’t allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition: nation against nation, state against state, school against school, classroom against classroom, and child against child.

Education, like love, is one of the fundamentals of life -- give it away generously and lose nothing -- and school is where we can work out the meaning and the texture of democracy -- coming together to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in harmony with each other.

Good teaching deals with the real -- honor teachers for that.


Reframe the debate

We are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver -- something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity.

The controlling metaphor for the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little upturned heads.

It’s rather easy to think within this model that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and privatizing a space that was once public, is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes,” is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled “standards” for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that “accountability,” that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials -- is logical and level-headed.

This is in fact what a range of wealthy “reformers,” noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call “school reform.”

Oppose the “reform” policies that will add up to the end of education in and for democracy: replacing the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from the losers -- test, test, TEST! (and then punish), and destroying teachers’ ability to speak with any sustained and unified voice.

The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss -- the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn’t leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

Note that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and that teachers' independent and collective voice is essential in determining these conditions.

Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable financing, and a strong teachers contract that protects intellectual freedom, due process of law, benefits (from pensions to health care) negotiated in good faith, and encourages collegiality and collaboration.

Throw in a note or a flower if you like.


Missing the mark

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s open letter to teachers, his idea of a public appreciation, missed the mark badly even as it regurgitated every silly cliché rehearsed by opportunist politicians everywhere: my mom wuzza teacher, my sister wuzza teacher, my wife wuzza teacher -- all the wuzzas feel our pain. He went on:

“I have worked in education for much of my life.” [And some of his best friends are... you know.]

“I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” [Thanks, boss.]

“Many of the teachers I have met object to the imposition of curriculum that reduces teaching to little more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. I agree.” [And your “Race to the Top” program is paint-by-the-numbers on steroids.]

“You have told me you believe that ‘No Child Left Behind’ has prompted some schools -- especially low-performing ones -- to teach to the test, rather than focus on the educational needs of students... [It] has narrowed the curriculum.” [So now you’re telling us what we’ve been telling you?]

“You deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.” [Just do it!]

Arne Duncan acts like a junior foundation officer dispensing grants, rather than someone whose responsibility is the education of every child in a democracy.

On the bright side, Duncan recently announced that he supports same-sex marriage -- perhaps we should all gay-marry immediately, and hope that at last he’ll show us some love.

[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rick and Bill Ayers co-authored Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. Read more articles by Rick Ayers and Bill Ayers on The Rag Blog.]

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Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Looking Back at Kent State and Jackson State

President Richard Nixon, pointing to a Cambodian map, announces the entry of American soldiers into Cambodia, on April 30, 1970.
Kent State and Jackson State:
Looking back / leaning forward

Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation the U.S. had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving 120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each.

But in the common doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the U.S. opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned.

The next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue... you name it, get rid of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black student unions, even at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the warmongers, and themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 National Guardsmen amassed on the Kent State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed students -- four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned. Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa.

Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty and callousness at home, the shredding of constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing of armed violence on its own citizens. The 10-year war against Viet Nam and the murderous (secret) assault on the Black freedom movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the U.S. military and its NATO spawn bring home their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed weapons to work and play.

Add to that the quiet violence of a 20% child poverty rate in the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2½ million people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education, health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home -- all of it hitting people of color disproportionally.

Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively at the Black and Latino freedom movements. In response, 80% of U.S. colleges and universities called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and universities, 500 campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not reopen until the fall. In Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon, and inevitable resistance will surely follow.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Why We Oppose NATO

Graphic from Left Turn :: Virage a Gauche.
Why we oppose NATO!

The new NATO is a secretive and costly instrument of war and aggression. It makes its own rules and confirms its own authority.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2012

The day after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration took dozens of extreme, transformative actions, including invoking Article 5, the right to collective self defense, of NATO’s founding charter -- a first in NATO’s 50-year history.

This marked the fateful expansion of NATO’s mission into new geographical regions (such as Afghanistan) and novel functions, such as the initiation and rationalization of the use of preemptive attacks on sovereign states.

All of this was codified and consolidated over the next months in support of the U.S. “war on terror," crimes committed by non-nation state actors were reframed as “acts of war,” and NATO nations were now expected to join together and respond in kind, opening a door onto war without end, worldwide conflict, and the “long war.”

This is why groups of citizens in virtually every NATO nation have come together to press their governments to leave this deadly enterprise.

NATO has become part of the background noise that over time and with repetition we simply take for granted, an unexamined but passively accepted part of the given world: “NATO forces...” “NATO bombings...” “NATO casualties...” NATO becomes a familiar and entirely opaque presence in our lives. In reality NATO is anything but benign, and exposing the reality behind the mask is an urgent responsibility.

NATO is not a mutual self-defense organization; it is now plainly a global military alliance designed to engage in aggressive invasions and preemptive wars. A 2004 communiqué declared that “Defense against terrorism may include activities by NATO’s military forces, based on decisions by the North Atlantic Council [not the UN Security Council] to deter, disrupt, defend and protect against terrorist attacks, or threat of attacks, directed from abroad, against populations, territory, infrastructure and forces of any member state, including by acting against these terrorists and those who harbour them.”

NATO has collaborated with the U.S. CIA in a wide range of illegal activities, including detainee transfer operations called “renditions,” blanket over-flight clearances, and access to airfields for CIA operations -- in effect acting as partners in torture, abduction, and indefinite detention. Under cover of NATO, the U.S. has created an entirely unaccountable framework that enables it to evade both national and international law.

NATO has refused to address civilian casualties resulting from NATO bombings and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. The U.S. continues to dominate NATO military strategy and weaponry, accounting for virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles dropped or fired on Libya.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 prohibits nuclear weapon states from transferring nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, and conversely prohibits non-nuclear states from receiving nuclear weapons from nuclear states. All NATO members are parties to the NPT. The five non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey) that maintain U.S. nuclear weapons on their territory, and the U.S. itself, are all in violation of the NPT.

The new NATO is a secretive and costly instrument of war and aggression. It makes its own rules and confirms its own authority. As a tool of global intervention NATO undermines democracy and constricts citizen participation on issues of war and peace. It has no place in a democracy, and an authentic democracy should have no business with NATO.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Chicago's Growing Resistance to NATO Summit

Protest against NATO in Strasbourg on April 4, 2009. Photo by Jos van Zetten / Flickr / Wikimedia Commons.
Resistance builds:
NATO coming to Chicago

Organizers and supporters will use humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination to voice their rejection of permanent imperial wars and the many forms of violence that arise from the same paradigm.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / Truthout | March 20, 2012

The leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the gently named but dangerous behemoth dominated by the United States -- and history’s largest global military cohort -- plan to meet in Chicago on May 20 and 21.

The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) was to have met in Chicago in mid-May as well, overlapping with NATO. Fearing massive protests, the G8 cancelled, retreating to Camp David, Maryland, chased out of town by a coalition of dissidents, activists and agitators.

Isolated and inaccessible, Camp David is where the “leaders” of the planet’s eight wealthiest countries belong -- sequestered and remote, barricaded and cut off in every imaginable way. The Camp David move illuminates the elite’s isolation from the people they pretend to represent.

By the same token, NATO -- a military alliance of 28 countries -- is the only major intergovernmental body without a basic information disclosure policy. It's a closed cabal with an active PR front and zero engagement with the public it claims to protect.

From their separate berths, NATO and the G-8's heads of state, intelligence personnel, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats -- the 1 percent of the 1 percent -- will conspire to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor, and the living planet to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.


A People's Primer on NATO

On NATO’s official web site, a white dove flutters across an elegant page, but soon enough, it moves to images of helicopters and fighter planes menacing the world under the facade of peace.

“NATO forces” are referenced constantly, and yet the reality of NATO is obscure and enigmatic.

U.S. military spending alone accounts for nearly half of the world’s military spending; add NATO countries, and the figure jumps to three quarters.Under cover of NATO, 9,000 British troops were deployed to fight a U.S. war in Afghanistan, offering a fig leaf presented as “coalition forces” to U.S. military aggression.

Purportedly set up as a defensive organization, in 1999 NATO’s mission statement was rewritten to allow for offensive action across the Eurasian landmass. Since 1999, NATO has waged war in four countries on three continents, none of which are near the North Atlantic region: in Southeast Europe's Yugoslavia, North Africa's Libya, and Central and South Asia's Afghanistan and Iraq.

NATO retains hundreds of nuclear weapons in military facilities across Europe, an end-run around the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which forbids the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear countries. England is required by the NPT to work toward nuclear disarmament; instead, its nuclear weapons system has been hidden under NATO since the 1960s, a set-up that means its nuclear weapons could be used against any country attacking, or threatening to attack, any of NATO's member states.

Between 150 and 240 U.S. nuclear weapons are sited in five European countries. These are B61 gravity bombs -- tactical nuclear weapons -- which are more flexible and easier to use in a battlefield and have a variable explosive power exceeding, at their upper limits, the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb by more than a factor of 10.

NATO’s preemptive “first strike” doctrine is a menacing presence across the planet; its Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defense (ALTBMD) is the latest successor to Reagan’s Star Wars plan. Russia recently signed on and will be on the U.S. side of the space shield, erected against some other states -- perhaps Iran, perhaps China -- promoted to the status of “enemy."

Anti-war rally in Chicago, Oct. 8, 2011. Photo by misterbuckwheattree / Chicagoist.

Municipal militarism protects global militarism

A 1984-style national security dragnet is set to descend on Chicago in an attempt to lock the city down during the NATO summit. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it clear that he will happily act as the host of NATO -- and that the 99 percent are not welcome. Emanuel is concocting a culture of fear, suggesting that it is the growing human resistance to NATO that represents danger, outside agitators, violence, and invasion.

Universities and schools are being urged to close early in May; communities of color are told that NATO's work is not their concern; merchants are preparing for assault from the dissenting masses. But NATO, and their G8 friends in hiding, are the real masters of war; it is they who are the greatest purveyors of violence on this earth.

It is unsurprising, then, that Emanuel has funding to further arm and mobilize the police and militarize the city. The Mayor has announced plans to contain and suppress demonstrators. He has pushed through legislation that restricts and criminalizes free speech and assembly and requires costly insurance for public demonstrations. He is issuing a steady stream of pronouncements about a fabricated Chicago, which he says is under siege from ominous and dangerous outside forces.

The mayor, not the popular resistance, is creating conditions -- once again -- for a police riot in Chicago against people exercising their right to peaceful dissent. Emanuel can still change course, and he should; so far, he has chosen to frame the coming convergence of protesters and the powerful solely in military and security terms.


Join the Coalition/Come to Chicago

Chicago is big enough for all -- it is after all a nuclear-free and cease-fire city, cradle of the Haymarket martyrs and the eight-hour day, labor and peace actions, vast civil rights and immigration rights manifestations, home of Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel.

Chicago is a vast public space with historic parks, monuments, neighborhoods and streets for popular mobilzations -- Chicago belongs to all of us. We underline the right -- the moral duty -- to dissent and demonstrate, to resist and to be heard, to participatory (not billionaire paid-for) democracy.

The festival of NATO counter-summits, protests, and family-friendly permitted marches planned for May are the next chapter. Organizers and supporters will use humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination to voice their rejection of permanent imperial wars and the many forms of violence that arise from the same paradigm: discrimination and hate based on race, gender, and ethnicity; epic income disparity; mass incarceration; inadequate resources for education, health care, and opportunities for meaningful work.

Music, dance, teach-ins, and peoples’ tribunals will overflow the parks and theatres. The protests are in the spirit of the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the Madison labor struggle, drawing equal inspiration from the work of many others: the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, teachers and nurses, the undocumented DREAMers, returning veterans against the wars, women insisting on reproductive dignity, people resisting foreclosures/take-back-the-landers,, those working for LGBTQ equality and more.

People from everywhere will bring their spirits and their creativity, pitch their tents and stake their claims. Join us!

Friday, May 18: National Nurses United Rally, Daley Center Plaza.
Sunday, May 20 (morning): Iraq Veterans Against the War Rally and March.
Sunday, May 20 (afternoon): Coalition Against NATO-G8 Poverty Agenda (CANG8) Rally and March, Downtown Chicago.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. This article was published at Truthout and was posted to The Rag Blog by its authors. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Come to Chicago!

Graphic by Dave Wittekind / The Rag Blog.
UPDATE: In a major development, the G8 summit has been moved from Chicago to Camp David by President Obama, who apparently gave Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel only an hour's advance notice of the move. The NATO gathering will still be held in Chicago.

There is speculation about a widening rift between Obama and Emanuel.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel today wouldn't get into the particulars of why Chicago lost the G-8 summit in May, deferring to President Barack Obama.

The mayor was touting the importance of Chicago hosting the back-to-back G-8 and NATO gatherings of world leaders as late as Monday morning. Hours later, the Obama administration announced it was yanking the G-8 summit out of Chicago in favor of Camp David.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

The mayor said he saw no slight or embarrassment for Chicago in President Barack Obama’s move. Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff, said he “takes at face value” Obama’s explanation that Camp David would be a more relaxed setting in which the world’s leaders could connect.

Organizers of Occupy Wall Street said:

The Group of 8 Summit, a meeting of the governments of the world's eight largest economies, was supposed to convene in Chicago this May. For months, Occupy Chicago, international anti-war groups, Anonymous, and hundreds of allies have publicly planned to shut it down.

Now, only two months before the meeting is scheduled to begin, U.S. President Barack Obama is moving the assembly of over 7,000 leaders from the world’s wealthiest governments to the Camp David presidential compound, located in rural Maryland near Washington, DC, one of the most secure facilities in the world. The Chicago Tribune reports that summit organizers are "stunned" by the news.

In an article distributed by Truthout, the Occupied Chicago Tribune said:

The prospect of such a response [from massive demonstrations], and the political context in which it will take place, was enough to force the Obama administration to reconsider bringing the G8 summit to the president’s hometown and the site of his re-election campaign headquarters.

According to the Uprising Radio website, demonstrations will still take place in Chicago:

Chicago activist Andy Thayer, who is working with a coalition of groups in preparation for the May summits told the Associated Press on Tuesday, “Guess what? The protests are going to happen anyway.” There is also a possibility that activists will follow the G8 to Maryland.

An open invitation:
Come to Chicago

Occupy this/Occupy that!
NATO/G8: May 18-21, 2012

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2012

The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) is meeting in Chicago in mid-May, overlapping with representatives of history’s largest global military cohort, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the gently self-named military behemoth dominated by the U.S.

Heads of state, spooks, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats -- the 1% of the 1% -- plan to gather in barricaded opulent surroundings while coordinating and conspiring to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor, and the living planet, to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.

A 1984-style national security dragnet is descending on the city to attempt to lock Chicago down. Chicago’s Mayor is concocting a culture of fear, suggesting that it is the human resistance to NATO/G8 that represents danger, outside agitators, violence and invasion.

Universities and schools are being urged to close early in May; communities of color are told that this is not their concern; merchants are preparing for assault. In reality, NATO/G8 represents the masters of war; it is they who are the greatest purveyors of violence on this earth.

NATO/G8 will not be alone in Chicago: Occupy’s 99% will gather in a festival of life and peace, joy and justice. Two permitted, family-friendly rallies at the Daley Center and marches for justice, jobs, and peace are scheduled on May 18 and 19 (and perhaps another on May 21). Music, dance, teach-ins, and peoples’ tribunals will overflow the parks and theaters.

Image from Occupy All Streets
We will all be there to open Chicago back up. In the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy, the Madison labor struggle, the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, teachers and nurses, the Dream youth, returning veterans against the wars, women insisting on reproductive dignity, foreclosure resistance, LGBTQ equality and, many more, Adbusters, CanG8, CodePink, Portoluz, and others have called for people to come from near and far, armed with their spirit and their creativity, pitching their tents and staking their claims.

We’re excited and you’re invited: Come to Chicago, May 18-May 21. Bring a sleeping bag, and if we have room, you can stay with us on the Southside.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it entirely clear that he alone will happily host NATO/G8, but that the 99% are decidedly not welcome. He has funding to further arm and mobilize the police and militarize the city; he has announced plans to contain and suppress demonstrators; he has pushed through legislation that restricts and criminalizes free speech and assembly, and requires insurance for public demonstrations; he is issuing a steady stream of pronouncements about Chicago-under-siege from ominous and dangerous outside forces.

But Chicago is big enough for all -- it is after all a nuclear-free and cease-fire city, cradle of the Haymarket martyrs and the eight-hour day, labor and peace actions, vast civil rights and immigration rights manifestations, home of Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel.

The rich and the powerful do gather here, but Chicago is a public space with historic parks, monuments, neighborhoods, and streets for popular mobilizations as well -- Chicago belongs to all of us.

We underline the right -- the moral duty -- to dissent and demonstrate, to resist and to be heard, to participatory (not billionaire-paid-for) democracy. Mayor Emanuel can still change course, and he should; so far he has obstinately and foolishly chosen to frame mid-May solely in military and security terms.

The mayor, not the popular resistance, is creating conditions -- once again -- for a police riot in Chicago against people who have every intention and every right to assemble peacefully deploying humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination, to forcefully express rejection of imperial and permanent wars, to challenge racial/ethnic/gender discrimination and hate, to demand justice, education, health care, and peace, women- and gender-dignity, the opportunity for meaningful work and reversing epic income disparities, an end to mass incarceration, and the urgent need to shift course and live differently for the sake of the planet and future generations.

Join us in Chicago in May (or, if you can’t come, act in solidarity -- Occupy the suburbs, cities, and communities across the land): stand up for civil and human rights, exercise your voice and be a witness, act up and speak out. Be part of a wave of people power, creative direct non-violent action, and the most vast, determined resistance in memory.

History calls!

Occupy the future!

Another world is possible!

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. This article was also posted at Bill Ayers. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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THEATER / Jonah Raskin : The 'Reborning' of Zayd Dohrn

Scene from Zayd Dohrn's Reborning at the San Francisco Playhouse.
The Reborning of Zayd Dohrn:

A fascinating piece of theater from the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers that speaks to our time now and where we've come from as a society...

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- What do you do if you’re a young, rising playwright and you’re the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? You write plays about parents and children and about parenting.

That’s what Zayd Dohrn, the oldest of three sons raised by Dohrn and Ayers, has done in his one-act play Reborning, which is on stage off, off, off Broadway at the San Francisco Playhouse.

If you don’t live in the city or nearby it might be long way to go to see a 75-minute play that races along, but if you can go in the next month or so it’s a fascinating piece of theater that speaks to our time now, and that also shows where we’ve come from as a society.

Part comedy, part tragedy, Reborning mixes satire with real pathos, and makes for laughter and for tears. The play features only three characters: a young woman who has been abandoned by her mother; an older woman who has lost a baby and wants a replacement; and a young man who brings them together tenderly in a kind of family.

The older woman might in fact be the biological mother of the younger woman, but the play leaves the relationships ambiguous, as though to say that we can choose or not choose our parents and our children, and make the families we want to make.

The narratives we tell ourselves and one another are all-important. Nothing is fixed or unalterable in Zayd Dorhn’s world and everything is possible. Secrets come to light, the past is peeled away, and scars are healed almost overnight.

It’s tempting to read Reborning as an autobiographical work, and there’s no doubt that Zayd Dorhn drew upon his own emotional crosscurrents to write his play. Growing up an underground kid with fugitive parents wanted by the FBI gave him plenty of sensational material and dramatic, real life characters to mirror.

Still, his characters aren’t copies of his parents or their contemporaries. Unlike them, his fictional people are pulled to art rather than to ideology, and express themselves in creative work rather than in political struggle.

Reborning takes theatergoers through a kind of emotional hell that includes dumpsters, death, and denial, but it’s a therapeutic work that ends on a note of reconciliation. The characters clash with one another; they shout and they argue, but they don’t hit, shoot, and bomb, and the play offers no big blow-up.

The final scene is an unclimactic kind of climax, but nonetheless genuinely heartfelt. It reflects a world in which mistakes are unmade, and seemingly irreconcilable differences are resolved peacefully.

The tensions between the two women -- the mother/daughter figures -- drive the play, but it’s the male character who brings them together. He’s also the comedian of the piece and he supplies the sexual energy that can be as funny as it is steamy.

In the first scene of the play, he walks around on stage holding a huge phallus in his hand and that irreverent image sets the tone for much of the play. Could the male character be inspired by his father and could the women be inspired by his mother? Maybe so.

Zayd Dohrn was in the audience the evening Reborning had its premier in San Francisco -- the celebrity in the crowd. His parents were in the audience, too, though no one seemed to recognize them. They might still have been anonymous underground fugitives out on the town for the evening, not the infamous Dohrn-Ayers duo in the media at the time of Obama's election.

Like many of the sons and daughters of former Weather Underground fugitives, Zayd Dohrn has come of age, and put the underground behind him. “Reborning” seems an apt metaphor for his own evolution as a playwright who dramatizes the theater of the human heart.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Bill Ayers : I'M SORRY!!! (I Think...)

Bill Ayers' Sixties history -- and his alleged relationship with Barack Obama -- hit the top of the news during the 2008 presidential campaign. Image from webcastr.
On notoriety, complexity, and contrition:
I’M SORRY!!!! (I think...)

By Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog

Bill Ayers is Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, June 8, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. They will discuss social change and the Sixties, the Weather Underground, and educational theory and reform in the U.S. today. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

[Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Senior University Scholar. He is an internationally respected education reform theorist and social justice advocate. Ayers was also active in the Sixties New Left and was a founder of the Weather Underground. Ayers was allegedly involved in the bombings of several buildings and was a federal fugitive starting in 1970, but charges against him were dropped in 1973. There has been pressure on Ayers to disavow his Sixties activities, especially his involvement with the Weather Underground. This is a response he wrote in 2008.]

The episodic notoriety is upon us again. And always the same demand: Say you’re sorry! Of course there is much to regret in any lived life, much to rethink and redo. But opposing the War in Viet Nam with every fiber is not one of them.

Here was the situation: thousands of people a week were being slaughtered by the U.S. military in a sickening and catastrophic imperial adventure. Those of us who opposed the war had worked to convince people of the wrongness of the war, and soon most agreed. But we could not stop the war. It dragged on for a decade and the human and material costs were incalculable. What to do? Whatever one did in opposition, it wasn’t enough, because we did not stop the war. We didn’t do enough, we weren’t smart enough, brave enough, focused enough, or just enough.

“We did the right thing” was taken again and again to be evidence of an obtuse refusal to apologize, proof that my various wrong-doings had not been adequately recognized. I’ve failed to fess up, I’m told, and my transgressions, then, are enduring, on-going. Without a full-throated confession, wholehearted and complete, uncomplicated by fact or detail or even by my own interpretations, and then, without the crucial detail, saying the words, “I’m sorry,” something vital is missing.

I feel like I’m in a bit of a trough here, because I hear the demand for a general apology in the context of the media chorus as a howling mob with an impossibly broad demand, and on top of that I’m not sure what exactly I’m expected to apologize for. The ’68 Convention? The Days of Rage? The Pentagon? Every one of these can be unpacked and found to be a complicated mix of good and bad choices, noble and low motives.

My attitude? Being born in the suburbs? I feel regret for much -- I resonate with Bob Dylan singing of “so many things we never will undo; I know you’re sorry, well I’m sorry too.” But, he goes on, “stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow, things are going to get interesting right about now.” Some read my failure to apologize as arrogance, stupidity, and recalcitrance, or worse, but I think, or I hope, that I’m holding on to a more complex, a truer read and memory of that history.

In some part, apologizing is rejecting, letting to or giving up -- conversion. There’s something deeply human at stake, something in both the heart and the head, and intellectual severance, an emotional break. And a broad, general apology may be just too much -- I am not now nor have I ever been... Even when true, the words are mortifying. They are the end not only of a dream, but of a life. The apology in general is uttered, and suddenly you die.

On top of that the apology is never enough -- to be effective it must be enacted every day, its sincerity proved by ongoing symbolic purges, no one of which is ever adequate. David Horowitz, the poster-boy of 60’s apostasy, said that if Bernardine [Dohrn -- Bill's wife, also a founder of the Weather Undergound] and I were to say we’re sorry for everything and then don sackcloth and ashes it would be inadequate. There’s always more to do.

Naming names during the McCarthy years was the prescribed form of apology for a radical youth. People were coerced into providing information when no information was needed -- the rift was long past, the names already known -- and to disassociate with a ghost already gone. The ritual was one of expiation, isolation, and realignment. Loyalty and subservience was the rite of passage, the price of growing up.

In my case, my actions were all well-known, I’ve resolved the legal charges, and I’ve faced the consequences. The legal system must of necessity hew to a narrow line -- the law’s business is to weigh charges, render judgments, and level punishments, nothing more, nothing less. A central moral question remains -- the question of individual responsibility and of the nature of moral judgment.

But I still refuse to grow up if the price is to falsely confess a sin I don’t take to be a sin. What is left to do? Those who refused and suffered the lash of McCarthyism, those who “stood on principle," had a terrible time trying to say what the principle was: Support for the U.S. Communist party? Not exactly. For Stalinism? No, definitely not. Opposition to anything the U.S. government does? The importance of never telling on friends? Free speech? I feel the same bind. What am I defending?

Perhaps it’s simply the importance of defying the ritual abasement and the rewriting of history. I embrace that defiance. Where in all the noise is there any authentic call for a process of truth-telling, a means to reconciliation? Where might we construct an honest chain of culpability?

America is in desperate need of some kind of truth and reconciliation process -- not because I want to see Henry Kissinger, for example, wheeled in front of a magistrate and forced to confront his victims. Well... it’s tempting, but not the heart of the matter. We need a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more just future. We need a history of lesson as a guide to teaching. Its really that simple.

I write about memory, about its tricks and deceptions, about its power to create a powerful or a deformed identity. Individual identity, collective identity, generational and national identity are all built on the memories of shared experiences. Our national identity is a catastrophic, festering sore.

The victims of violations must have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering; the victimizers must be asked why and how they created that suffering; society must have the opportunity of witnessing all of this in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us. So we need the stories that constitute the truth-telling, and we need the possibility of amnesty in order to move on.

In this truth-telling you can make no convincing moral distinction among victims -- suffering is suffering after all. But distinctions are possible, even necessary, among perpetrators: anti-colonial fighters, for example, are struggling for justice against forces of oppression.

Similarly collective guilt and collective punishment are terrible, reactionary ideas whether in the hands of Nazis or French colonialists or Israeli settlers. On the other hand, collective responsibility is an essential and powerful and useful concept. Americans are as a group responsible for war. We must, as a group, do something about it.

So I want to keep it complicated, to defend complexity against the distorting labels that come to us in neat packages and summary forms -- apologizing in general is asking too much. As one McCarthy-era resister said: I’d rather be a red to the rats, than a rat to the reds.

Todd Gitlin -- he’s everywhere -- is quoted, incredibly, as saying, “It’s not that the country is more reactionary.” He goes on, “I think the prevalent feeling is impatience with the claims made back then that violence can contribute to the political good... It’s just a very hard sell today. Acts that seemed to make sense back then seems senseless to us now.” He seems to say that these acts might have been sensible then, or at least seemed so. That’s new. Gitlin warns against “people who have harbored this grudge against the 60’s… Nobody needs to rescue those days, but nobody needs to savage them either.” Still, he seems in a rescuing mode.

Bill Clinton pauses while giving a speech on January 7, 1999, the day his impeachment trial began. Photo from CORBIS.

Confession and apology is a primary pedagogy, a ritual that runs deep within our culture. We are raised on the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, and so we learn at a tender age both that confession is ennobling in itself, and also that it has the power to diminish punishment. On the other side, failure to confess or refusal to do so is proof of arrogance, self-righteousness, and hard-heartedness. In a recent capital case in Illinois the jury said the defendant “cooked himself” by refusing to take responsibility, to show remorse, and to say he was sorry. Refusal invites greater punishment, even, if you’re the president, impeachment. Better to confess, take your raps, and move on. Erase the blackboard -- we’re all such easy believers in moving on.

Our earliest instruction includes injunctions to confess and to apologize, to say “I’m sorry” for transgressions large and small. If I ever said something unkind or did something wrong or hurt someone’s feelings, making amends was never enough, never adequate to moving forward. The words themselves, my mom taught me, were essential -- I’m sorry.

The ritual extends throughout life -- public and private -- and apologizing can be an essential part of intimate friendships. When one partner hurts another’s feelings, or a misunderstanding leads to sadness and tension, some semi-formal statement of regret seems necessary. Like saying “I love you,” both an expression and an act of love, or “I hate you,” a hateful gesture in itself, “I’m sorry” carries more weight than two simple words. It’s a form of atonement, it’s the act itself.

We were recently treated to the protracted struggle between a sitting president and his tormentors in the media, the Congress, and the special prosecutor’s office, and it all came down, finally, to whether Bill Clinton would confess. The scope and scale of his misdeeds was never in doubt -- his bad behavior was known far and wide, down to the tiniest detail. More than we wanted to know.

While most citizens felt that enough was enough, powerful forces insisted that without an admission to lying under oath, without a specific confession, there could be no honest resolution. In late 1998 the New York Times urged Clinton to just “say the words,” confess as an indication that he recognized his wrongdoing, to say I did it and I’m sorry, and thereby create the basis for rehabilitation and reconciliation.

President Clinton in other cases was the absolute master of the public apology -- soaring diplomacy and low-slung politics -- the component parts of which an aide called the “four C’s”: confession (admitting fault), contrition (I’m sorry), conversion (seeing the light), and consequences (taking some limited responsibility and moving on). Politicians, of course, opportunistic and adversarial by nature, are practically programmed to never apologize, to never explain. Apologies can then be built on the slick constructions that allow a plea of innocence and guilt at once: If I offended anyone, then I apologize. The offended shake their heads in cold comfort, and try to figure out what they were just given.

The ritual of the Catholic confessional is comforting and reassuring, releasing guilt, cleansing, but at the same time disciplining and policing. The little booth with the flimsy curtain does both kinds of work, and both kinds of work are recreated in the police dramas with their persistent scenes of interrogation and on shock TV, with the noisy beating of breasts and the loud sobs of lament, abject and disingenuous. Today psychotherapy earnestly recapitulates the confessional act for non-believers and the banal theme-song of the self-help gurus urges: “Get it off your chest.”

Apologizing is only a part of the equation, receiving or accepting the apology completes the transaction. For the receiving party the confession and apology allows a sense of justice in meting out punishment, but it can easily become the occasion for building up a full head of indignation: I was wronged, and I want to defend that high ground of self-righteousness as long as possible. This is tricky -- to refuse an apology authentically offered, to say or do things that are mean-spirited or overly zealous, can bring their own fresh offense, and then another round of apology is in order -- now reversed.

There’s still a deep ambivalence in our society about confessions -- we protect people from being made witnesses against themselves, and yet we demand a kind of general openness; we oppose the forced confession, and yet we applaud the detectives of NYPD Blue as they bully or trick some recalcitrant sleaze-ball into signing the statement; we want our courts to be paragons of integrity, and we daily tolerate the most transparent horse-trading -- plead to this lesser crime (just say the words, Schmuck) and I’ll give you a better deal. We remember Salem where young girls were threatened into hysterical confessions of festivals of witch-craft, and we know too well the absurdity of young men found innocent after confessing to crimes they could not have committed.

What do we want these confessions to be? What do we want them to do? What purpose is served? What is at stake? What are the persons who receive the confessions or apologies supposed to do with them? I was impressed with Jonathon Franzen’s confession and apology for dissing Oprah and acting like an elitist jerk: “Mistake! Mistake! Mistake!” he said. “I was an idiot and I’ll never do it again.” That didn’t slow down the criticism a single beat.

Fugitive Days [Ayers' memoir] is I suppose the ultimate non-apology, no matter what’s in it, because, whatever else, it’s the snapshot of that excruciating decade by someone who lived on an extreme edge of it, and survived somehow intact.

Michelle Goodman wrote again to say that I “seemed to want it both ways," and I guess it’s true, I do want it both ways. Doesn’t everyone? I want to do the heroic thing and I want to survive. I want the romantic fun of the outlaw and still the moral high ground of protesting war and injustice. I want to be right but complicated, opinionated but generous, public and private. Every American seems to want both the good life and a good conscience at the same time. Everyone wants to be a peaceful person and close their eyes tight to the violence erupting all around and in their names. Yes, I definitely want it both ways, and perhaps that’s not possible -- shouldn’t be possible.

It’s hard to know what else is at work for me personally, or for Bernardine. One odd response I got again and again as I talked to folks in the media in July and August was this: reporters said to me with a straight face and a slightly surprised tone, “You don’t look anything like a Weatherman.” I’d always ask -- What does a Weatherman look like? -- and we’d all laugh.

Chicago Magazine reported that for Weathermen, Bernardine and I had raised three remarkable young men, which struck me as a bizarre non sequitur, and the Times reporter kept asking how many square feet our home in Chicago had -- I pointed out that she was conditioned to Manhattan, and we laughed -- and referred to my mother-in-law’s care-giver consistently as our “house-keeper.” “You certainly don’t live like Weathermen,” she said.

Perhaps for some our successes in our professional lives and our “normal-looking family” constitute a kind of implied apology, and then the book by contrast is so, well, unapologetic. There’s nothing in Fugitive Days that I haven’t said out loud for 30 years -- but, of course, who paid attention then? It surprised me that the book sounded like a departure to some, but it did. Perhaps, as a young friend observed, we’re like the punk band that got a record contract -- some unstated but assumed agreement is breached; success was never supposed to be part of the deal. Be a punk. Stay a Weatherman.

Another possibility is that people who lived through that decade are still trying to measure their own contributions -- Michelle Goodman referred insistently to the marches and the teach-ins and the letters to Congress she’d sent -- against the horror of what we had witnessed. We, all of us, including me, recognize how small our contribution to peace really was.

Or perhaps some people have made a kind of unspoken or unacknowledged reconciliation with the world as it is. Slipping to the Right is normal after all -- one of my dad’s favorite bon mots has to do with any thoughtful person being a socialist in college and a Republican by middle age -- and so Fugitive Days may be a bitter reminder. Yes, and then a challenge.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn with son outside federal courthouse in New York, 1982. Photo by David Handschuh / AP.

It’s a strange sensation to be assigned a role — in my case “unrepentant terrorist” (wrong on both counts) — to be handed a script, and then to discover that no editing or improvisation is permitted. I read time and again that I’m wandering around saying “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” -- unrepentant, triumphant, arrogant -- when what I actually wrote was, “among my sins -- pride and loftiness -- a favorite twinkling line... guilty as hell, free as a bird…” Sins? Oh my, is that repentant enough? Apparently not. This feels more totalizing than a conspiracy. It feels like the suffocating straightjacket of common sense.

What complicates matters, too, is the wide range of vaguely constructed offenses -- some internally contradictory, others pitting complaining commentators directly against one another -- for which I’m putatively guilty and urged to confess. Inclined to apologize, I’d be hard put to know where to begin; I feel, then, like the man asked by the police inspector if he’s now sorry for beating his wife over all these many years who says, “But I didn’t beat my wife,” to which his interrogator replies, “So you’re still not sorry?”

Any normal person is expected to already know and accept that being a Weatherman is synonymous with fanaticism, violence, and murder. There’s no need for a normal person to read the book -- others will read it for them, tell them what it says, and save them the trouble. The campaign around the book pushes forward, and the book itself is but a footnote. Any normal person skips over the footnotes.

Another Big Lie is the famous Charles Manson story. Bernardine was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!”

I didn’t hear that exactly, but words that were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, a murder we were certain -- although we didn’t know it yet -- was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of an emerging police state. She linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing terror in Viet Nam.

“This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and our response. And what do we find in our newspapers? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it!...” So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke, stupid perhaps, tasteless, but a joke nonetheless -- and Hunter Thompson for one was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor.

Not only is it apocryphal and demonizing, it’s irrefutable -- every attempt to explain, including possibly what I just wrote above, is held up to further ridicule, as deeper dimensions and meanings are slipped into place and attached to the story. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, for example after a three hour conversation, reached over and touched Bernardine’s arm and said, “I just have to ask you about the Manson quote. It’s my duty as a journalist.”

I heard Bernardine respond in full, explaining the context, the perverse humor of it, Fred’s murder and all the rest, her own meaning-making and her sense of its meaning to insiders and outsiders alike. It made no difference: Kolbert reported the received story intact without any mention of any part of their exchange, and with this added fiction: “The Manson murders were treated as an inspired political act.” Not true, not even close, a lie on every level.

And two months later Steve Neal of the Chicago Sun-Times, playing off Kolbert, wrote: “...the Weathermen idolized killer Charles Manson and adopted a fork as their symbol...” Not true, not true. But what’s the use? By the end of the year a Time magazine essayist called me an “American terrorist,” and echoing the New York Times, said that “even today he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs.’” It’s all part of the endlessly-repeating official account, the echo that grows and grows as it bounces off the walls. How can it ever be effectively denied?

Also see:

• Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn: Bringing the War Home, 1970 / The Rag Blog / March 22, 2010

The Rag Blog

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