The Re-education of Bill Ayers

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

In a recent column appearing in the mouthpiece for American nihilism, the New York Times, Bill Ayers, co-founder of the domestic terror organization The Weather Underground, bemoaned the recent election controversy surrounding his personal and political association with President-Elect Obama:

I was cast in the ‘unrepentant terrorist’ role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ scene from George Orwell’s 1984, when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam War.

Contrary to what Ayers and his media rehabilitators would have us believe, few of the bombings, which included the nation’s Capitol Building and the Pentagon, had much to do with the war in Vietnam.  “These bombings,” Ayers and his fellow “revolutionaries” declared in a statement released in 1970, “were carried out by the Weather Underground to retaliate for the savage criminal attacks against Black and Third World peoples, especially by the police apparatus.”

These bombings, in fact, proved clumsy and ineffective. In reality, the Weather Underground was never more than a collection of guilt-ridden, upper-middle-class white college kids playing “urban gorilla.” Their clumsiness, however, eventually came back to bite them.

Shortly before noon on May 6, 1970, a series of explosions reduced a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse to rubble. In the building’s basement, a Weather Underground bomb maker accidentally detonated an explosive device comprised of dynamite and roofing nails by inadvertently connecting one of its electrical circuits. One of the three bomb-makers —identified by a single print lifted from a severed finger – was Diana Oughton, great-granddaughter of Boy Scouts of America founder William Boyce, and Bill Ayers’ girlfriend. Two others, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, also perished in the blast.

The nail-laden explosives, it was later discovered, were intended for a non-commissioned officer’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. As Diana Oughton and her atomized companions discovered, Bill Ayres’ brand of “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism” proved far more deadly than your average college fraternity prank.

In his New York Time’s piece, Ayers said, “Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.”

Contrary to the claims made by the media and Ayers, Weather Underground members were far more than “extreme” vandals. In a pamphlet entitled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, co-written by Ayers while hiding from justice:

We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years…We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society.

Larry Grathwol, an FBI informant who infiltrated the Weather Underground, recalled during a televised interview what Ayers and his college revolutionaries had planned for us once they toppled the American imperialist state:

I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. When, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250-million people.

And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.

The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

“They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.

I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25-million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25-million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25-million people. And they were dead serious.

After re-surfacing, Ayers received a Masters in Education degree in Early Childhood Education in 1984. He is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Education. According to Ayers, his driving passions are teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research and helping children in trouble with the law.

On his education website, Professor Ayers tells fellow educators:

We perhaps need practice in seeing the world and asking our questions as a child sees and as a child asks:

• Why is that person sleeping in the street?” 
• Why are they hurting that man?”
• Why is she crying?”
• Is it fair that they don’t have anything to eat?”
• What ought to be done?”
• We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally.
• We cannot be child advocates, for example, in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.

The horrors of communist “re-education” camps are too well known to ever happen here, no matter how badly Obama’s number-one fan may have once desired. Re-educating millions of people proved problematic for Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, resulting in an estimated 1.5 million dead – or 1/5 of that nation’s population.

Instead, the older and much wiser 60’s radicals retooled their ideas on re-education, leaving behind the “killing fields” for the greener pastures of the academy. Instead, they use our nation’s educational system to herd new generations into a bold vanguard that, they hope, will someday “build the new society.” Thanks to 54-billion dollars earmarked for education under legislation co-sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2001  – and signed into law by President George W. Bush – education’s re-educators will insure that this new vanguard sees “no child left behind.”

--Mr. Curmudgeon