Our romance with power
This is what is wrong with romanticizing power. No matter how much damage and destruction people do to the lives of others in its name, noone ever wants to take responsibility.
The Real Bill Ayers by Bill Ayers
Here's hilzoy's spot-on response to Bill Ayers stank solipsism:
"Starting his narrative in 1970 allows Ayers to omit the time when Weatherman was not trying not to harm people: for instance, the Days of Rage:
'The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at.'
Nor should we forget Bernardine Dohrn's comment on the Manson murders at the Flint War Council in 1969: 'Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!' At the same meeting, Weathermen 'debated the ethics of killing white babies, so as not to bring more 'oppressors' into the world, and denounced American women bearing white babies as 'pig mothers.' (p. 159) And they sang songs about a lawyer, Richard Elrod, who had broken his neck during the Days of Rage: 'Stay Elrod stay/ Stay in your iron lung/ Play Elrod play/ Play with your toes a while.' (p. 159)
The 'accidental explosion' Ayers refers to occurred when three Weathermen blew themselves up while making nail bombs to detonate at a dance at Fort Dix. One was Ayers' girlfriend, 'who was later identified from a fragment of finger.'
After three of their own were blown up, Weatherman tried not to hurt people, though they did blow up property, and seem to have placed a lot of trust in their ability to tell, for instance, whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed. And after that explosion, according to Ayers, the Weather Underground got a new name. But when his co-Weathermen blew themselves up, they were planning to kill a whole lot of people. Weatherman was never nonviolent.
Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground did more than 'cross lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense.' They were, by any syandard I can think of, terrorists. As one historian says, 'The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence (...) I don't know what sort of defense that is.'
They say they did it to end the war in Vietnam. But how, exactly, that was supposed to happen is a total mystery. It's the Underpants Gnome theory of political activism:
Phase 1: Set a bunch of bombs.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The war ends!
That level of tactical idiocy is one thing when you're collecting underpants. It's quite another when you're setting bombs.
Ayers may think that there's still a debate about the Weather Underground's effectiveness. And he might also think that he 'acted appropriately in the context of those times.' To me, though, he's just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole.
He has done enough harm already. Now he should do the decent thing and leave us in peace.'
Actually, there is one more important twist to Bill Ayer's retardation.
It was consistent with the same theory dominant in most mainstream political circles now and then: that with enough pressure, they could get their way.
Everyone who is everyone believes this line of nihilism. As long as they can justify it in the name of their cause. Bill Ayers and his pals just took it to all extremes they could conjure. Which makes them bigger shitheads than everyone else, that's for sure.
But it doesn't exactly get everyone else off the hook.
Lord Acton was not joking. Power tends to corrupt. Absolutely power corrupts absolutely. It doesn't matter who has it or who wants it.
That is why we value liberty. Because those who seek to exercise power never know a limit to its use. Unless we take liberty seriously.
Strangely, no matter how much power those who romanticize it gather and no matter how long our regressive obsession with it, we always come back to that principle.
When we say we live in a liberal democracy, today, or that we get a liberal education, or that we love liberal values, this is what we mean.
It has nothing to do with ideology. Left-wing, right-wing or otherwise. It has to do with freedom. And affirming a democratic government that respects it and takes it seriously.
And that is our challenge this generation and will be as long as those who are hostile to liberty kill, imprison, and repress those who love it.
Most people may not know Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wolstonecraft. They might recognize James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin and any and all of the early liberals that made our liberty central to our governance and our lives.
They did not fight and sacrafice for our liberty so we could pretend that it was all an elaborate hoax by naive idealists who did not understand the nasty and brutish world as it is. They made those sacrafices so we could cherish it.
We can romanticize power out of our free will. But we ought not do all of the things that we can.
It will up to us to decide if their sacrafices were made in vain.
