On Saturday, noted “small c” communist, and close family friend of the president, Bill Ayers was the keynote speaker at the annual commemoration of the National Guard shootings at Kent State in 1970 that left four students dead. In response to a reporters’ question, he told the audience of about 350, that there was “no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts. No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.”
“How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.”
Huhhhh? Did he just compare the bombings of the Weather Underground to target practice?
Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, co-founded the anti-Vietnam War Weather Underground group that bombed the U. S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other buildings in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. The radical Weather Underground took its name from lyrics in a Bob Dylan song.
The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.
He took a swipe at U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saying, he committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed. Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence.”
“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.”
Here’s where the Akron Beacon Journal Online story really shocked me…….
The reporter actually reported on some inconvenient questions that were asked of Bill Ayers afterward about the Weatherman bombings…causing our “small c communist” to feel a little discomfort, I’m afraid.
In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.
Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.
Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.
“No one knows for sure but I think they were. (He knew. He was the leader !)
And had they carried it out it would have been a catastrophe,” Ayers said. “But they didn’t and it didn’t happen. But what did happen is, on that same day John McCain murdered civilians. Do we have any responsibility for that? Should there be any reconciliation for that? Should he tell the truth about it?”
Why does he keep bringing up John McCain? John McCain didn’t target fellow Americans with nail bombs.
Shortly before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, people in the townhouse were assembling nail bombs packed with dynamite and roofing nails. Former members of Weatherman later advanced differing claims as to the planned uses of the bombs. According to Mark Rudd, the plan was to set them off that evening at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates at the Fort Dix, New Jersey Army base, to “bring the [Vietnam] war home”.[2] Other reports say that some were destined for the Fort Dix dance and some were to destroy the main library at Columbia University.[3][4]
According to Cathy Wilkerson, who was a leader of the New York collective of the Weatherman, they were disappointed with the minimal effects of their earlier use of Molotov cocktails at the home of Judge Murtagh and other locations. At the suggestion of Terry Robbins, another of the leaders, they decided to use dynamite for newly planned actions.
They purchased a considerable quantity of dynamite and a number of electric fuses. The group investigated and designated three targets, including a dance at Fort Dix, an army base in nearby New Jersey.
But, but, but, Bill wasn’t there….
Ayers himself attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.” Notably, Ayers’ fingerprints were found at the bomb-making site, along with an assortment of anti-personnel weapons, stabbing implements, C-4 plastic explosive, and dozens of Marxist-Leninist publications.
After the death of his girlfriend, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn spent the rest of the decade as fugitives running from the FBI.
And there is good reason to believe that the Weather Underground’s terrorist spree did more than property damage (and self-inflicted carnage):
The San Francisco police officer’s union has accused the Weather Underground as the bombers that killed a San Francisco police sergeant in an attack a month prior to accidental Greenwich Village explosion.Eleven years later two cops were killed–by gunshot wounds, not bombs–in a Brink’s truck robbery north of New York City. That crime was carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground.
The retired domestic terrorist was circumspect at the Kent State commemoration, on Saturday, though.
The Weather Underground never accomplished what it set out to do: to end the Vietnam War, to end the system that created war and to create a more-just society, he said.
Um….Thank God? Bill Ayers’ idea of a “more just society” isn’t what most people would think of as a “more just society”…
Zombie’s excellent 2008 expose on Bill Ayers’ book, Prairie Fire is a must-read for anyone who might be fooled by Ayers’ self-flattering history revisionism.
William Ayers is a communist. But don’t take my word for it. He said so himself:
And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to “seize power” in a violent communist takeover of the United States:
The text that William Ayers authored in Prairie Fire, and the additional documentary links provided below, prove that:
• Ayers was not simply protesting “against” the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn’t against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn’t against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links),Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings — their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.
• Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers’ list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”
• Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers’ contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.
Bill Ayers’ vision of violent Communist revolution is one that was once shared by our president, coincidentally!
The Obama I knew was nothing like the lifelong pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign. When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. — completely divorced from the profit motive — which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.
The title Prairie Fire was an allusion to Mao Zedong‘s 1930 observation that “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” Ayers and his co-authors dedicated the book to a bevy of violent, America-hating revolutionaries — including Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin who had killed Robert F. Kennedy.
Ayers told the Kent State drones he still holds out hope for the creation of a peace culture and a peace movement in the nation.
Just remember that the “peace” communists like Bill Ayers yearn for comes at a huge cost to those who don’t share his communist totalitarian ideology.
Nice Deb 