[Peace-discuss] Forty years ago?

[C. G. Estabrook]

	March 6, 1970/2010 ... A Day to Remember
	by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970 announced: 
"Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man's Body Found."  The story described an 
elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large 
explosions and a raging fire "probably caused by leaking gas" at about noon on 
Friday, March 6.

The body was later identified as belonging to 23-year old Ted Gold, a leader of 
the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of a 
"militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society."  Over the next several 
days two more bodies were discovered -- Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had both 
been student leaders, civil rights and anti-war activists -- and by March 15 the 
Times reported that police had found "57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe 
bombs and about thirty blasting caps in the rubble," and referred to the 
townhouse for the first time as a "bomb factory."  That awful event announced 
widely the existence of the Weather Underground, in some ways the most 
notorious, but far from the only group of Americans to take up armed struggle as 
a protest tool at that moment -- the story took off from there, growing, 
changing, and accelerating every day.

A few days after the Townhouse explosion Ralph Featherstone and William "Che" 
Payne, two "black militants," associated with the Student Nonviolent 
Coordinating Committee, according to Time magazine, "were killed when their car 
was blasted to bits" by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington 
D.C. to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown.  The Black 
Liberation Army leapt onto the national scene, and other organized groups -- 
Puerto Rican independistas, Native American first nation militants, and Chicano 
separatists -- emerged demanding self-determination and justice.

Violent resistance to violence was far from an isolated phenomenon: Time noted 
that in 1969 there had been 61 bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC 
and other war-related targets, and 93 bomb explosions in New York, half of them 
classified as political," a category that was "virtually non-existent ten years 
ago."  According to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there 
were 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats.  Out of this total, 
975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary, attacks, meaning that, on 
average, two bombs planned, constructed, and placed, detonated every day for 
more than a year.  Our national history includes times of anarchist resistance, 
labor militancy, massive unreported (and still largely unacknowledged) slave 
rebellions, and the armed abolitionism of John Brown; the late 1960s and 1970s 
was becoming one of those times.

How had it come to this?

Empire, invasion, and occupation always earn blowback.  In 1965 most Americans 
supported the war, but by 1968 people had turned massively against it -- the 
result of protest and organizing and a burgeoning peace movement, and of civil 
rights leaders like the militants from SNCC, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther 
King, Jr. denouncing the war as illegal and immoral.  Even more important, 
veterans came home and told the truth about the reality of aggression and 
occupation and war crimes.  The US government found itself isolated around the 
world and in profound and growing conflict with its own people inside its own 
borders.  The Vietnamese themselves were decisive: they refused to be defeated. 
  The Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed any fantasy of an American victory, and 
when President Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March 1968 that he would 
not run for re-election, it seemed to us we had won a victory.

But peace proved to be a dream deferred, for the war did not end -- it escalated 
into an air and sea war, expanded into all of Cambodia and Laos, and every week 
the war dragged on anothersix thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. 
Six thousand human beings -- massive, unthinkable numbers -- were thrown into 
the furnaces of war and death that had been constructed by our own government. 
The war was lost, but the terror continued.  All Vietnamese territories outside 
US control were declared "free-fire zones" and airplanes rained bombs and napalm 
on anything that moved, destroying crops and livestock and entire villages. 
John McCain, an unremorseful war criminal, flew some of those missions.  As a 
young lieutenant, John Kerry testified in Senate hearings at the time that US 
troops committed war crimes every day as a matter of policy, not choice.

No one knew precisely how to proceed, for the anti-war movement had done what it 
had set out to do -- we'd persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built 
a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment -- and still we couldn't find 
any surefire way to stop the killing; millions of people mobilized for peace, 
and our project, our task and our obsession, was so simple to state, so 
excruciatingly difficult to achieve: peace now.  The war slogged on into a murky 
and unacceptable future, and the anti-war forces splintered then -- some of us 
tried to organize a peace wing within the Democratic Party, others organized in 
factories and work-places, some fled to Europe or Africa or Canada, others to 
communes, the land, and hopeful but small organizing projects.  Some began to 
build a vehicle to fight the war-makers by other means, a clandestine force that 
would, we hoped, survive what we thought of as an impending American 
totalitarianism.  Every choice was contemplated, each seemed a possibility then 
-- and we had friends and family in every camp -- and no choice seemed utterly 
beyond the pale.

The Weather Underground carried out a series of illegal and symbolic attacks on 
property then, some 20 acts over its entire existence, and no one was killed or 
harmed; the goal was not to terrorize people, but to scream out the message that 
the US government and its military were committing acts of terrorism in our 
name, and that the American people should never tolerate that.  Some felt that 
our actions were misguided at best, off the tracks, indefensible and even 
despicable, and that case is not impossible to make.  But America's longest war 
itself, with all its attendant horrors, was doubly despicable, and while many 
stood up, who in fact did the right thing; who ended the war; who transformed 
the world?

We began to think of ourselves as part of the Third World project: revolutionary 
liberation movements demanding justice and freeing themselves from empire, we 
believed, would also transform the world.  We thought that we who lived in the 
metropolis of empire had a special duty to "oppose our own imperialism" and to 
resist our own government's imperial dreams.  Eventually we came to think that 
we could make a revolution and that in any case it was our responsibility to 
try.  It was a big stretch, but every revolution is impossible until it occurs; 
after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.

All of that was forty years ago -- lots of water under the bridge since then, 
raging rivers and cascading falls, rapids and torrents, chutes and ladders -- a 
long time in the life of a person -- the young become the old, and stories get 
retold.  But it's also a matter of perspective: the meaning of any historical 
event will always be contested, and the more recent the event, the fiercer the 
contestation.  The last word has not been written about the radical movements of 
youth in Europe in 1968, and certainly the meaning of the Black Freedom Movement 
or of the US invasion and occupation of Viet Nam and the various American 
reactions to that catastrophe -- from mindless jingoism to sincere patriotism, 
from reluctant participation to gung-ho brutality, from protest to armed 
resistance -- are far from settled.  We're reminded of the Chinese premier Chou 
En Lai responding to a French journalist's question many years ago about the 
impact of the 18th Century French revolution on the 20th Century Chinese 
revolution.  He thought for quite awhile and finally said, "It's too soon to 
tell."  Forty years is less than the blink of an eye.

The big wheel keeps on turning: events and actions and adventures plunge 
relentlessly forward and nothing withstands the whirlwind of life on the move 
and history in the making.  No single narrative can ever adequately speak to the 
diversity and complexity of human experience, for meaning itself is in the mix, 
always contested and never easily settled.  Because meaning is made and remade 
in the present tense, our backward glances are now necessarily refracted through 
the US defeat in Viet Nam, the steady decline of empire, the hollowing out of 
the economy through militarism, the destruction of our political system, the 
environmental catastrophe that capitalism wrought, the terror attacks of 9/11 
and the subsequent invasions and occupations and wars that continue as defining 
features of our national life.  There is no sturdy accounting of distant times: 
everything must change, no one and nothing remains the same.

Many who knew and loved them 40 years ago, choose to remember Ted Gold, Diana 
Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ralph Featherstone, and Che Payne every day as beautiful 
and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and 
freedom, believed further that all men and women are of incalculable value, and 
thought that they had a personal and urgent responsibility to act on that deep 
belief.  We think of Brecht: a smile is a kind of indifference to injustice. 
And then we turn to Rosa Luxemburg writing to a friend from prison: love your 
own life enough to care for the children and the elderly, to enjoy a good meal 
and a beautiful sunset, to embrace friends and lovers; and love the world enough 
to put your shoulder on history's great wheel when required.

We have not forgotten our fallen friends, not for a moment.  March 6 is for us a 
time of more formal remembrance.  Their deaths and all that followed offered us 
an opportunity to reconsider and recover.  We were able to recommit and to see 
that the first casualty of making oneself into an instrument of war is always 
one's own humanity, that, in the words of the poet Marge Piercy, "conscience is 
the sword we wield.  Conscience is the sword that runs us through."  We remember 
our lost comrades, their many brave as well as their damaging last acts, and we 
continue to vibrate with the hope and despair they embodied then.
Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar 
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and recently author of Fugitive Days 
(Beacon, 2008).  Bernardine Dohrn is director of the Children and Family Justice 
Center and Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University School of 
Law, Bluhm Legal Clinic.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ad050310.html

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