Clay Burell on 2008-11-17
I hadn't made the Orwell 1984 connection, but it's totally apt, and again shows Orwell's brilliance.
This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Nov 2008, by Clay Burell.
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17 Nov 08
Clay BurellInteresting, wide-ranging conversation. Palin's "terrorist" is an education professor at UChicago.
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During the campaign, how many clips did you see of people like Sarah Palin denouncing Bill Ayers, "the terrorist pal" of Barack Obama?
I'm not a big consumer of television, so I didn't see a lot. I also felt from the beginning that this is a cartoon character that's been cast up on the screen and I didn't feel personally implicated in that character. One of the delicious ironies of a campaign filled with ironies was that the McCain campaign tried to use me to bring Obama down -- and every time that he mentioned my name his poll numbers dropped. Again, I think that's a big credit to the American people. But I did see a few clips. I saw the clip where she [Palin] first talked about Barack Obama palling around with terrorists and the crowd shouted, "Kill him, kill him." That was sent to me by my kids.
I don't know if you remember the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell's "1984"? In Two Minutes Hate, the party faithful gather in front of a television screen and the image of Emmanuel Goldstein is cast up on the screen and they work themselves into a frenzy of hatred and they begin to chant, "Kill him." That's how I felt. I felt a little bit like I was this character cast on the screen. It bore no relation to me. And yet it had a serious purpose and potentially serious consequences.
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Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?
I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.
Martin Luther King?
No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.
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The New York Times headline on the morning of Sept. 11 was "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen."
That headline "No Regrets" was also the headline of the Chicago magazine article a week earlier and it was the headline of several articles. And remember all these interviews were done before 9/11. What I have said continually, and I still say, that while I regret many things (you can't be 63 years old and not have many, many regrets), what I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam. A murderous, violent, terrorist war against an entire population. I don't regret resisting that war with every ounce of my being.
Now having said that, that's not a tactical statement. That's a sense of both hope and despair and rethinking. In 1965, I was first arrested in Ann Arbor for opposing the war in Vietnam. And at that time, something like 60 to 75 percent of Americans supported the war in Vietnam. Three years later, in 1968, something like 65 percent of Americans opposed the war. A lot of things happened in those three years. But by 1968, when we really had won the argument about Vietnam, we thought that the war would really come to an end. Especially when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would step down.
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I wrote the front-page editorial in the extra edition of the Michigan Daily that came out on April 1, 1968, after the most amazing presidential speech of my lifetime.
It absolutely blew me away. I was watching in my little apartment. We poured out of our house, as did hundreds of other students, we swirled around the campus and landed on Robben Fleming's front yard.
The president of the University of Michigan.
What I remember so clearly from that night was that there were maybe a thousand of us in his front yard. And he came out with a bullhorn. I had a bullhorn and we had a bit of a discussion. I think I was entirely inarticulate and cursing. But what he said that night, "Congratulations. You won a great victory. Now the war will end." And what I remember was this great feeling that we had brought about this phenomenal substantive change. And that peace would come. Four days later, King was dead. Two months later Kennedy was dead. And a few months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged with a secret plan to extend the war. And, at that point, the question that pressed itself on us, was how do you end this war?
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Clay Burell on 2008-11-17
Let that sink in: LBJ announces he won't seek re-election - a concession that he considered the War a mistake. FOUR DAYS LATER, ML King is assassinated. TWO MONTHS LATER, Robert Kennedy is assassinated.
Again, without emotion, history is not understood objectively. To forget the emotion of Ayers' context is to entirely misunderstand perhaps THE most important factor of his actions during that time.
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This is where we probably part company. One of the reasons, in my view, that Nixon got away with pursuing the war was that, in part, the violence of the Weather Underground -- and some of the other extreme parts of the antiwar movement -- discredited the overall antiwar movement. And that led to a further polarization of American life, which led to the first round of demonology involving yourself.
I don't see it that way. You could be partly right. I don't know how to make those cause-and-effect relationships. I would posit a different explanation. I think what happened was cynical and thought through and it was deliberate. And I think what happened was that the Nixon administration determined that they could keep the war going without a domestic upheaval that they couldn't handle. So they stopped bringing dead soldiers home. So they made it an air war and a sea war that was no longer a ground war. So they withdrew troops and they punished Vietnam and pounded it into the ground. When I say it was a war of terror, that is not idle talk. There were entire areas of Vietnam that were designated free fire zones. If you were a pilot and had leftover ordinance, you could just drop it in those villages and they did. So a couple of thousand people every month were dying, innocent people ...
It was a crime against humanity on an enormous scale. We were trying to end it. In the six years that the Weather Underground existed, we did everything we could to end it. We never hurt or killed anyone -- by design. We didn't want to. Was it risky, were we a little nuts, were we a little off the track? Yes. Did we cross lines of legality and propriety and common sense? I think we did. On the other hand, I don't think we were the cause of any kind of reaction. I think we were a small part of an upheaval against war and against killing.
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But there is a larger question about this period, which was when the Weather Underground was making bombs and taking credit for bombings. As you explain in the book, none of you were getting any sleep, you were all living on amphetamines and you were all constantly talking to each other in revolutionary jargon. In hindsight, how crazy were you then?
I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter, I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.
Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.
And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?
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Clay Burell on 2008-11-17
I would love to hear Palin's response to this analogy. She was a first-grader when Ayers was doing this during the Vietnam War, so she has no direct adult memory of the time.
She showed little knowledge about other basic history and geography (and political) facts, so I suspect she would similarly fail a high school test on the Viet Nam War if she were given one today.
And yet she demonizes, very comfortably and confidently, all people who protested that war.
Again: how would she answer this analogy?
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In the book you also state that a phone call was made to the Pentagon a half-hour in advance warning them to evacuate that part of the building. But reading this entire passage -- and remembering the era -- what baffles me is how could you possibly ever believe that doing things like this would be an effective way to getting what you wanted?
What we thought we were doing was to raise a screaming alarm -- to try to wake up anybody who was still sleepwalking to the reality of what was going on in our name. Frankly, I look back at it, and I don't claim or claim in the book, any particular heroism or status as leaders in any sense. What I do try to point out is that 1968 comes and the war is massively unpopular and our democracy can't grapple with that. It can't end the war somehow. And those of us who are committed to ending the war did many, many different things. Some went to Europe and Africa to get away from the madness. Some went to the communes of Vermont and California to start an alternative life. Some went into the factories of the Northeast to organize the workers. My younger brother actually enlisted in the Army and tried to build a serviceman's union. You talk about nuts. Was that nuts? It was admirable and a little unrealistic.
And a small group of us decided that we wanted to survive what we thought was an impending American fascism. We saw this in the murders of black leaders close to us. The murder of Fred Hampton [of the Black Panthers] had a huge impact on us. We wanted to survive that -- and make the making of the war painful for the war makers. So, looking back, it was hard for me to say that anybody had a purchase on the right thing to do ...
History is always lived looking forward not backward. What are we doing now to end two unpopular wars? Two wars without end. What are we doing? And I would argue that we're not doing enough, those of us who see the war as illegal, immoral, unwinnable. What are we doing to stop it?
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Clay Burell on 2008-11-17
Interesting challenge:
Is the Iraq War (with civilian deaths estimated between 500,000 and one million people) a sort of "Obedience to Authority" Milgram experiment, in which a cowed democratic citizenry does nothing while its government continues a war it opposes, BUT - like Palin - can call others in the past, who broke laws to oppose wars the People considered wrong, "evil"?
Are we seeing, in the absence of serious grass-roots pressure to end the war, a version of Hannah Arrendt's "Banality of Evil"?
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What's your biggest hope for an Obama presidency?
Most of all, what I really hope is that we put an end to the era of 9/11, the era of fear and war -- and that's what I think most people hope. That spirit in Grant Park was that spirit of hope and that spirit of "yes, we can." "Yes, we can put an end to this." "Yes, we can reimagine the future." I think it's a time when we could redefine what are we basing our foreign policy on, what are we basing our education policy on. I think this election is automatically a historic moment. It automatically restores a certain amount of goodwill in the world. I hope he uses it. I hope he closes Guantánamo immediately. I hope he withdraws from Iraq immediately. But those hopes aren't idle. They are built on building an irresistible social movement to see that those things happen...
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One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn't help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there's something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening...
We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn't want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn't want to savor that? Who doesn't want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it's their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let's not lose hope in ourselves. But let's wish them all the best.
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Public Stiky Notes
Again, without emotion, history is not understood objectively. To forget the emotion of Ayers' context is to entirely misunderstand perhaps THE most important factor of his actions during that time.
She showed little knowledge about other basic history and geography (and political) facts, so I suspect she would similarly fail a high school test on the Viet Nam War if she were given one today.
And yet she demonizes, very comfortably and confidently, all people who protested that war.
Again: how would she answer this analogy?
Is the Iraq War (with civilian deaths estimated between 500,000 and one million people) a sort of "Obedience to Authority" Milgram experiment, in which a cowed democratic citizenry does nothing while its government continues a war it opposes, BUT - like Palin - can call others in the past, who broke laws to oppose wars the People considered wrong, "evil"?
Are we seeing, in the absence of serious grass-roots pressure to end the war, a version of Hannah Arrendt's "Banality of Evil"?
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