not that jared israel is my hero or anything, but i recently learned that not only ayers & dohrn were involved in the gates-funded, mainly chicago-led "small schools movement" that morphed into the bush-obama school "reforms" & gates-funded charter school push -- but another high-level weatherman as well, mike klonsky, also at U of Il -- now head of the "small schools workshop," also gates-funded.

and ayers' brother john is vp of the carnegie foundation for teaching and a bigshot in the charter school movement. not to mention dad being commonwealth ed ceo + on the board of about every major corporation in his day.

so israel's take on ayers and dohrn as provocateurs mirrors my own...

i know some of the folks who check in here were more involved in student politics back in the day than i, so just wondered what your reactions to this article were (i didn't know israel was in sds, either...)




The Emperor’s New Clothes (TENC) * www.tenc.net


The Weathermen Redeemed, Part 1:

The Provocateur Exhumed

by Jared Israel

[Nov. 2, 2008]

Part 2: Obama's "I-was-only-8" Lie
http://emperors-clothes.com/8yearslie.htm

Part 3: Obama Forgets the Early '80s
http://emperors-clothes.com/forget.htm

Part 4: A Weatherman Dream in New York
http://emperors-clothes.com/dream.htm

==========================================

Two leaders of the Weatherman faction that sabotaged Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, who lived for a decade supposedly hiding from the Feds while claiming credit for the occasional bombing and/or armed robbery, and who are now exhumed in our post-modern world as socially prominent professors, have become an issue in the U.S. election. This due to the accusation that Ayers and Dohrn are linked to Barack Obama.
The Republicans’ accusation has been made from the far Right perspective that Obama’s alleged links to Weathermen, whom the Republicans say are representative of the radical student movement of the ’60s, show he is a hidden socialist. This is all quite misleading. To see why, we need to answer the question: who were the Weathermen?

That done, we can examine what Obama and McCain are saying – and not saying. Starting with Obama’s defense, we will see that it incriminates him in ways not raised by McCain. And then turning to McCain, we will see that the Republican attacks on Obama’s connections with the Weatherman are not only completely misleading, but hypocritical.

==========================================

Snobs with a License

==========================================

I have an unusual perspective on Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. You see, I know them. Not as friends. Quite the contrary. In the late 1960s, I was co-leader of the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, the force within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that opposed the Dohrn/Ayers/Mike Klonsky alliance of Weathermen and the like-minded.

The struggle within SDS was complex. Put briefly, the bone of contention was how SDS, which had become a mass-based student organization first because of the civil rights movement and then especially by organizing student opposition to the Vietnam war, should view the American people – working people. Worker Student Alliance (WSA) caucus members argued that working people – white and non-white – were the key force for social change, that students should be won to a pro-working class attitude, and that in our campus struggles, for example as related to the Vietnam war, we should fight for that attitude. (E.g., many people argued that the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) should not be allowed to recruit and meet on campus because ROTC polluted the University as a Temple of Knowledge, and so on. We argued that this argument reflected a contemptuous elitism, implied a (non-existent) superiority towards the students who joined ROTC, and moreover misdescribed the university, which was an institution reflecting the nature of society, not some superior, ivory tower. We said ROTC should be banned from campus because it lured students, especially poorer students, into becoming officers in an unjust war. We said that, instead, these students should be given scholarships and decent jobs. While we believed white people could overcome racism in common struggle with non-white people, over shared problems, the Weathermen viewed white American working people as being the problem. The Weathermen hid their ideology of contempt behind rhetoric about what they, oblivious to the irony, called “white skin privilege.” I say “oblivious to the irony” because the Weathermen and their allies disproportionately came from upper class backgrounds. In any case, whatever their backgrounds, their ideology was a trendy adaptation of the contempt for supposedly ‘crude’ working people they had absorbed during their upbringings. They were snobs with a license. Self-scrutiny? Please. Self-indulgence and self-glorification were their watchwords, as they demonstrated.

Today, it is distressing to see on the internet young people looking up to Ayers and Dohrn as heroes of the student movement of the ’60s. It means that the Weathermen’s terribly harmful effects are being recycled.

In fact, the Weathermen were heroes only in their own minds. By the time the Weatherman faction crystallized as such in 1969, its members had precious little connection to campus campaigns against the war and racism. (Some, like Bernardine Dohrn never had.)

The Republican Right calls the Weathermen Marxists and says everyone in SDS was a Marxist. This is wrong on both counts:

1) Many and possibly most of the rank and file people in SDS were liberals and even conservatives, angry about the war and racism.

2) And while it is true that virtually all leaders of the factions contending on a national level – leaders of the Weathermen and their allies, on one side, and leaders of the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) caucus on the other – did call themselves Marxists, to assert that the Weathermen were in fact Marxists is nonsense, not to mention unfair to Marx.

The Weatherman ideology was a mush of de Sade, Marcuse, Timothy Leary, Frantz Fanon (from whom they got deification of third world leaders and a tragically wrong-minded notion of the cleansing virtue of violence) and the PLO. (This at a time when the American Left, broadly defined, was not enamored of the PLO.) The Weathermen were into self-righteous, false-revolutionary posturing, extreme anti-Americanism, glorification of any demagogue who happened to be non-white, and grotesque self-indulgence. (They boasted that they all slept with each other all the time, but how they had enough brain cells left to remember doing so is a mystery since they routinely smoked anything that would burn and couldn’t escape.) To see how little Weatherman ‘thinking’ had (and has) in common with Karl Marx, check out the articles Marx wrote during the U.S. Civil War. [1]

The internal struggle in SDS came to a head at the June 1969 convention in Chicago. That convention opened with a debate between me, as a leader of WSA, and Mike Klonsky, an ally of the Weathermen and one of three elected SDS national officers. (The others were Bernardine Dohrn, the Weatherman chief who is now Bill Ayers’ wife, and Fred Gordon, from WSA.) Klonsky attempted a sucker punch from the Super-Duper Left (that was Klonsky’s pose - he should have had a cape), reading a purported letter from Anna Louise Strong, an American living in China, purportedly conveying a message from no less than Mao Tse Tung, stating that those opposing the Weathermen et al. were counter-revoluti

onary, or words to that effect.

In brief, I replied that I didn’t know whether or not the letter was authentic, and if it wasn’t, then shame on Mike Klonsky. However, I said, the letter might be authentic. If so, Mao was trying to dictate policy to the American student movement, which was struggling to work through very complicated problems about which he knew not a thing, and in which arguments he had no business interfering anyway, and if this was the case, then shame on Mao Tse Tung. This was received with tumultuous applause from the majority of delegates, including many who did not belong to any faction. They were much relieved to hear somebody challenge Klonsky’s demagogic appeal to a new conformity.

That opening debate was a disturbing omen for Dohrn and Ayers and Klonsky et al. As the convention progressed, the WSA delegates – serious-minded people, who had joined SDS based on participation in various campaigns on campus and the appeal of good thinking – these WSA delegates, who were experienced and thoughtful, were having productive discussions with other delegates who weren’t in any faction about the politics and tactics of campus struggles, which the WSA people, unlike the Weathermen and the Klonsky-bots, actually knew something about. Seeing they could not defeat WSA politically, the Weathermen and friends tried various disruptive tactics, and finally instituted a plan to destroy SDS, with Bernadine Dohrn taking the floor and announcing to a stunned majority that those who opposed the Weathermen were henceforth and forever expelled – poof! – and then, in mercifully oblivious self-contradiction, leading a walkout of some hundreds of delegates – i.e., a minority – while the majority chanted “Shame!”

I initiated that chant. In retrospect, I was mistaken. The Weathermen had no shame.

==========================================

Dohrn of the Living Dead

==========================================

Following their walkout, the Weathermen formed their own SDS, competing with the legitimately constituted organization – “legitimately” because, after all, it was the Weathermen who had walked out. Now there were two national SDSs, each with its own version of the SDS newsletter, New Left Notes. With no WSAers present to scold them with talk about elitist attitudes and winning students to pro-working class ideas in the context of on-campus struggle against war and racism and in support of working people, Weatherman was free to express its essence. Which it did.

For example, the Weathermen adopted as their hero one Marion Delgado, who they claimed was a Mexican-American child that put a slab of concrete on some railroad tracks, derailing a train and killing many people. I don’t know if this tragedy in fact occurred, but that’s what the Weathermen wrote in their version of New Left Notes. And they adopted as their slogan “Marion Delgado - Live Like Him!” So, a) Weatherman advocated emulating a murderously disturbed child. And b) in specifically choosing a murderously disturbed Chicano child, and presenting him as the poster-child of their “revolutionary struggle,” in what they called “the belly of the beast,” they revealed the profound depth of racism that underlay their phony fight against “white skin privilege.” Yeah, they wanted to serve third world people. On a plate. In the same way, their pose of adulation for manifestly corrupt and/or demagogic and/or undignified non-white leaders – exactly the kind of leaders nobody would wish on anybody they respected – was and is the flip side of the standard racist attitude, that it is natural for non-white people to have such leaders.

The media ate it up and spewed it out. Weatherman, made large by media coverage, larger than death, had two terrible effects:

1) For many people, the widespread publicity about the Weathermen’s ideas and actions discredited the very possibility of decent-minded social change, pushing people to the hard Right and greatly reinforcing racist attitudes. Big surprise there.

2) At the same time the massive media coverage falsely romanticized the Weathermen into bizarre celebrities – Zorro, stoned – encouraging young people who were upset about war and injustice to emulate these media provocateurs, who cloaked the worst ideas in left-wing rhetoric.

The Weathermen are once again in the spotlight, and they are once again having a terrible effect. I will try to counter this effect in the context of refuting what Obama is saying about the Weathermen, and what the Republicans are saying as well.

First I will deal with the web page where Democratic candidate Barack Obama answers the charge that he is close to Weatherman leader Bill Ayers. I will show that, in answering this charge, Obama spends most of the page falsifying the record in order to prettify Bill Ayers and his Weathermen, thus indicting himself far more harshly than his opponent John McCain does. And he lies a tricky lie, which makes one wonder about his past.

After that, I will take on the Republican side, raising the question: if Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are, as Republican nominee McCain says, monsters, then why are they unpunished monsters? Ayers and Dohrn came out in the open on December 3, 1980, a month after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election. Why didn’t the Reagan Justice Department prosecute them on numerous possible (and extreme) felony charges, such as second degree murder? Why didn’t Bush Sr. or Bush Jr.? I will show that the explanations (plural, and contradictory!) that the media has put forward for why the government failed to prosecute Ayers and Dohrn are not credible. The failure to prosecute Ayers and Dohrn, who have publicly confessed to committing murder, at least in the second degree, and other Federal and State crimes that have no statutes of limitations, and who have not confessed to, but are convincingly linked to, at least four murders in the first degree – this failure supports the charge many people made in 1969: that key Weatherman leaders were (and still are) agents provocateurs with the assignment of destroying the very possibility of a decent Left in this country, associating the notion of social change with gangsterism and corruption.

I will start my analysis with Mr. Barack Obama’s defense of Mr. William Ayers.

==========================================

A Defense that Backfires

==========================================

During the Obama-Clinton Democratic primary contest, a debate moderator raised the issue of Obama’s relationship with Ayers. In response, Obama’s campaign website put up a special page, 40% of which is devoted to quoting various sources rejecting the notion that Obama’s ties to Ayers are of any importance, and 60% of which is devoted to defending Weatherman Ayers. At the outset one might ask: why would Obama, who is known for brutally divesting himself of liabilities (e.g., when mentor Rev. Wright became a liability, Obama devoted one full hour to attacking him on TV), and for whom Ayers was and is certainly a liability, create a web page devoted to defending the reputation of Bill Ayers?

Relying on misleading documentation, deception and outright lies, the Obama page depicts Ayers, and through him the Weathermen, as honest idealists, who in the very distant past engaged in “violent actions,” but who have now turned into model social reformers. In this way, Obama, who is generally expected to become the next U.S. president, rehabilitates the Weathermen, thus giving a poison gift to the people of the world and attacking himself more harshly than McCain does.

Obama’s web page on Bill Ayers is 1200 words long. As noted above, less than 40% is devoted to downplaying the significance of Obama’s relationship to Ayers. I will ignore almost all of this self-defense, since I am not in a position to judge the significance of Ayers sitting on the same boards as Obama, and the like. I will discuss only what I am in a position t

o evaluate: Obama’s much-repeated argument that he was 8-years old when the Weathermen were active, and his arguments, taking up just over 60% of the page, defending Ayers, which I will refute point by point.

It is stunning that the McCain campaign has not produced a detailed refutation of this web page. This failure, and the message delivered by Gen. Colin Powell, essentially ordering McCain to lay off Ayers, [2] suggest two things: 1) Obama is the candidate of the U.S. Establishment and 2) the rehabilitated Weathermen are slated to be used as role models for the Left, such as it is, worldwide.

We are in a mess, my friends. And Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers helped get us there.

Continued in Part 2: Obama’s “I-was-only-8” Lie

===========================================

Footnotes and Further Reading

===========================================

[1] See the articles published in 1861-1862 in the New York Daily Tribune and Die Presse (Vienna), as collected in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States, Richard Enmale ed., New York, International Publishers, 1937.

For example, see Karl Marx, “The North American Civil War,” Die Presse (Vienna), October 25, 1861, English translation in op. cit., pp. 57-71, posted at
http://www.tenc.net/a/18611025.htm

[2] On October 19, 2008 Gen. Powell endorsed Obama, pointedly telling McCain to stop talking about Bill Ayers:
“And I’ve also been disappointed, frankly, by some of the approaches that Senator McCain has taken recently, or his campaign ads, on issues that are not really central to the problems that the American people are worried about. This Bill Ayers situation that’s been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign. But Mr. McCain says that he’s a washed-out terrorist. Well, then, why do we keep talking about him?”

The transcript of Powell’s endorsement of Obama is posted at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27266223/

The transcript is backed up at http://www.tenc.net/a/arch/powell-msnbc.htm

===========================================

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The Worker-Student Alliance was PLP's attempt to take over SDS. While there's no arguing about the ultra-leftism of Weatherman, PLP (in and out of SDS) instituted an absurd level of democratic centralism, and became laughably doctrinaire. I was hanging around in a hot bed of SDS activity, and knew many people who were dedicated, talented and studying Marx.

The Weather celebrities I met (before the split) appeared to be authentic, and in no way agent provocateers. What happened later, I have no idea. The WSA people appeared to be the worst caricature of communist front organizers. Shortly after the split, many PLP members became so disgusted with the organization's action in the student movement that they either left or were expelled. Some became very active in VVAW, and there was for a few years a quite large national network of ex-PLP and SDS members that tried to move the analysis of the student/civil rights movements into a working class (Marxist) context. It's amazing how many people I've met in the last 20 years that participated in that process.

Since then, seemingly dedicated former members of SDS have fallen into all types of liberal/conservative political activities. That doesn't mean they were provocateers in the past. Overall, I can't offer an answer, but the WSA people were as bad, in their own way, as Weather in dividing the movement. It was bound to happen, as it is with any non-proletarian movement, but they sure sped things up.

thanks for your answer, appreciate it.

plp = wsa?

yep

I generally agree with Curt's summary but should add a few things. Israel was no hero in any of this and there was not as much to choose between RYM and PL as you might guess. SDS was under tremendous pressure to "do something" or "get serious" and the tide was already passing. The organization was isolated by definition. If Ayers was a "provocateur", he was one of many. Personally, I think there were none because none were needed.

The RYM types are familiar by today's standards: ever escalating very hot rhetoric with little substance, mixed with little "theory" and a practical method based on opportunism - "radicals". Daniel Cohn-Bendit comes to mind.


PL was as funky. They blew out of the Sino-Soviet split, originally out of the CPUSA (1962?) but I actually think the split brewed up out of the hardships of McCarthyism. By the time they hit SDS, it was the 30 day home course on Marxism. I heard that afterwards, they became "quasi-Marxist", "rejecting" socialism in favor of an "immediate" elimination of commodity production or some such. They felt "snobby" enough to "criticize" everyone, "Comrade Mao" and "Comrade Lenin" not excepted.

Israel is wrong about many things. Just for one, "white-skin privilege" was intended as a Marxist formulation, pioneered by people like Ted Allen in NYC. It had nothing to do with RYM and was just one of many attempts to try to understand how an international formulation mapped to the U.S... i.e. it was radicalism by translation. Few in SDS understood the real divisions in the Labor Movement or were able to explain ideas such as the "aristocracy of labor" in any meaningful way.

I knew a few of these people and liked most of who I met but I never saw any of them again after these events (the opposite of Curt's experience). In the Labor movement, you would sometimes run across a Trot or an RCP type but I never saw anyone from PL... I mention this because there was a minor movement into the factories in the early 1970s (some of us didn't have to "move"). It wasn't exactly on the scale of the narodniks but it was significant. I think most of the people above ended up in "community organizations" or small time politics or whatever. Shame... Some were talented (Dohrn comes to mind).

The idea of Ayers as a "professional", moving on from SDS to destroying public education in league with Gates - 30 years later - is beyond silly. Sorry, but it is. More likely is that he has screwy ideas on MANY subjects.

******

On another subject, I saw you piece on the "economic boom" in Angola. This is something I once knew a lot about. The irony hangs so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Thanks for the piece.

who exactly was pressuring sds to get serious & what tide was passing?

my impression was that sds was a growing concern on college campuses until weatherman came on the scene?

& somewhat off-topic, what position was carl oglesby in all this?

i can't get over the fact that the son of commonwealth edison, supposedly the leader of weatherman, got off scot-free while others went to jail & some are still there. and moves right into a good, connected job in academia, he & his wife both. the small schools research started shortly after; chicago was the center of all that, & not thirty years later. started in the 80s. i wasn't there, but just so pat.

Relying on misleading documentation, deception and outright lies, the Obama page depicts Ayers, and through him the Weathermen, as honest idealists, who in the very distant past engaged in “violent actions,” but who have now turned into model social reformers. In this way, Obama, who is generally expected to become the next U.S. president, rehabilitates the Weathermen, thus giving a poison gift to the people of the world and attacking himself more harshly than McCain does.

This paragraph doesn't really compute. Isn't half of the argument being made that they ARE "model social reformers" now? As for the "honest idealists" claim thats kind of stupid even on the face of it, even if we discounting the idea that they were all plants or whatever because no one's motivations are THAT puristic or singular and it would be impossible for some of it to not be opportunistic.

Which is not the same thing as "a plot"

who exactly was pressuring sds to get serious & what tide was passing?

my impression was that sds was a growing concern on college campuses until weatherman came on the scene?

& somewhat off-topic, what position was carl oglesby in all this?

i can't get over the fact that the son of commonwealth edison, supposedly the leader of weatherman, got off scot-free while others went to jail & some are still there. and moves right into a good, connected job in academia, he & his wife both. the small schools research started shortly after; chicago was the center of all that, & not thirty years later. started in the 80s. i wasn't there, but just so pat.




You are really stretching me here. I was very young and have pushed a lot of this out of my mind. But, I did know some of the participants, particularly afterwards, and I was in the middle of the "debrief" which went on for several years after the fact. I was also very close to one of the chroniclers of these events (no, not Sale...).

First, look real close at the timing. Yes, SDS was still growing but not "from the center". It was the chapters that were active and completely decentralized. Nixon was President. The war wasn't ending. And SDS, as a national organization, had already been superceded. The competition for "revolutionary" talk was intense. National events had already become the responsibility of "committees".

Now, enter PL. I could write the story in exact reverse - that PL destroyed SDS and that the only reason that the Weather-flakes got any support at all was because everyone else fought the PL takeover.

Curt called them "doctrinaire". That is way charitable. It would be hard to imagine any crew more out of tune with the times. SDS was mainly organizing against the war. PL was non-stop critical of the Vietnamese... and were about to declare the convocation of the Paris peace talks as "surrender" and "a sellout" (they probably own the copyright on irony). PL was also on a kick against "nationalism" and were attacking people like the Panthers non-stop. Finally, PL questioned the validity of any "student organization" (when SDS was nothing but students) and decided to fight the culture wars "against hippies" precisely at the moment when SDS consisted of nothing other than 99% hippies and wise-ass students.

At the same time, PL had no monopoly on "Marxism". Everybody claimed Marxism (and all of it was VERY bad Marxism). PL didn't even have a claim on "Maoism". The RCP was a later split-off from RYM. It would be easier to argue that Israel was the spy.

In fact, none of it was like that. Informers and cops of every description? They were everywhere. But... the idea of a vibrant important organization blown up by "agents"? That is pure bullshit.

How did Ayers not get arrested? Who knows? His family bought him out, maybe... (they were big time and this is Chicago we are talking about). Or maybe he had been a confidential informer for some agency or another... Or maybe, the Carter/Reagan Justice departments made a deal. It doesn't matter. There is a Grand Canyon between SDS in 1969 and Gates Foundation charter school schemes in the 1990s in Chicago.

BTW, Dohrn was more important than him, IMHO (and possibly even crazier).

Carl Oglesby? Never met him. He was president for one year in the mid 60s when SDS still had a "President". He was an older guy (in his 30s), a recently reformed Republican right-winger, and a cultural guy (artist?). He spoke well and said nothing.

Jared Israel may or may not be a spy but is this as dumbass as I think it is?


Why don’t Obama and his spokesmen ever get specific about Weatherman violence after 1969?

Why don’t they mention that in March 1970, stolen dynamite exploded and destroyed a townhouse where the Weathermen were hiding in New York, killing three people?

So the "I was 8 lie" is a lie because he was actually 8 1/2?

Sorry hb, I'm not reading this shit

thanks, anax.

kid: my posting the entire article doesn't imply an endorsement of its content.

i was interested in only the stuff on ayres; unfortunately, the bug or whatever it is on this forum wouldn't let me select & delete the irrelevant text.

i agree -- the stuff about obama is off the wall. he seems to be implying that obama knew these folks when he was at columbia in his twenties because he lived in the same general neighborhood....and since they were in hiding, he must have shared in their diabolical secrets or something...it's of a piece with the tea party "extreme lefty obama + ayres" stuff...

as previously mentioned, israel isn't my hero. but i've always wondered how ayres & dohrn got off with no consequences...

Hey hb, you should have no problem editting your stuff, I tried to give you more permissions, but I'm a sorry admin (Mike, help?).

Could someone in this thread please define all the acronyms? I know SDS, but some of the others...I was only 12 at the time (at least in 68, 13 in March 1970)...call me an extremely late bloomer...

i don't know what the problem is, i don't think it's anything to do with permissions. i never used to have trouble, but the bug popped up after some ms update (if i remember right) & when i try to select & copy the box jumps. i talked to mike about it once but he wasn't sure what the deal was.

i don't know what the problem is, i don't think it's anything to do with permissions. i never used to have trouble, but the bug popped up after some ms update (if i remember right) & when i try to select & copy the box jumps. i talked to mike about it once but he wasn't sure what the deal was.


Weird shit? I can edit any of your stuff anytime if you want, pm me, but I'm still going to try to figure out something so that you don't have to...

that would be nice, but i don't know why it's happening. and there have been a couple of times that it didn't.

also, the cursor is really slow -- my typing is always ahead of the printing and maybe it's my imagination, but it seems to be in synch with those bbc tags (whatever they are) -- specifically -- the one with the m arrow that scrolls by.

i wish i could turn those off, maybe it would help -- or maybe it's just my imagination.

now i type this paragraph and try to select & delete:

& i don't have trouble. but the box jumps (the scroll bar on the side moves). it jumps worse the more text there is.

i didn't use to have problems posting here -- now i do.

i have no clue.

really strange, I myself would clear all cookies from this site and restart my computer, but that's about my limit of tech savviness...

hb, might it be a browser problem? I remember having weird stuff happen with Opera sometimes like that. Restarting the browser would fix it (but sometimes it would come back) but also, I've never had the same problems when I use IE or Firefox.

EDIT: way off this topic, but you have to explain Paul Cezanne to me sometime, CL.

hb, might it be a browser problem? I remember having weird stuff happen with Opera sometimes like that. Restarting the browser would fix it (but sometimes it would come back) but also, I've never had the same problems when I use IE or Firefox.

EDIT: way off this topic, but you have to explain Paul Cezanne to me sometime, CL.


What about Cezanne? The Father of Modern Art...