Clay Burell's Bookmarks tagged orwell →  View Popular

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.

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?

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?

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?

I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

At any rate, come and get me, copper.