The following is my response to someone on an internet thread who tried to compare Bill Ayers and the militancy of the 60's with what is happening today on the right. As usual, there was an element of derision in the post as often happens when someone of one political philosophy tries to degrade the thoughts of another, even asking me if I even know who Bill Ayers is. He didn't know who he was asking.
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I was an off and on (mostly off) participant in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the late 60's/early 70's. SDS was the most visible non-violent anti-war movement of that time, also involved in civil rights, women's rights, apartheid, et. al. A group of radicals within that organization broke off and formed another group. The new group was not committed to non-violence as SDS was, and 'some' of them participated in crimes of violence. This new group was called the 'Weather Underground', or Weathermen. You ask if I know who Bill Ayers is? What do you think?
It's interesting you should bring it up though. Left wing groups have not participated in violent tactics to any degree at all since that time in our country's history. However, there is a commonality with what is happening today. An argument can be made for the following:
The Tea Party is to the Republican Party what the Weathermen were to SDS. The difference is, the Weathermen NEVER killed anywhere nearly as many people as the fringe right has in the past decade right here on American soil. As a point of fact, it can be argued the Weather Underground was responsible for NO deaths, only damage to various facilities. Other groups took responsibility for the handful of fatalities that occurred. Ayers was mentioned as a 'possible' suspect in a fatal bombing of a police station in S.F., but never charged because authorities didn't believe he had anything to do with it. Meanwhile confederates, both friendly and unfriendly to Ayers in the subsequent years have said Ayers was never involved with that or any other fatality. Meanwhile no member of the 'underground' was ever convicted of killing anyone. In fact, the Weather Underground suffered more fatalities of their own during that time when attacked by police than all the fatalities contributed to the entire left, whether the underground or anyone else.
So the transition from SDS to Weather Underground, to more violent groups in fact occurred. The transition from Republican Party to Tea Party has already happened. One wonders if there will be further iterations that increase the danger of this group. Homegrown right wing militants have already killed more people in our own country since 9/11 than all other terrorist attacks combined. Don't ask me why militants of the right are so much more violent than militants of the left. I don't know unless it's an intrinsic value on human life. Even in the worst cases in the 60's and 70's, the acts were designed to send a message without the intent to actually kill anyone. They took pains to avoid the loss of human life. Their attack on the Pentagon was scheduled and carried out when they knew no one was present and the bomb was only two pounds, designed to cause damage and gain publicity, not to harm anyone. One of Ayers' targets was a statue erected on Chicago's Kennedy Expressway to honor police involved in an attack against a left wing group. Ayer's blew it up twice, but with no fatalities because it wasn't close enough to people (being far from the roadway or housing) to harm anyone. That hasn't been true of today's rightist militants.
This isn't an homage to Ayers or anyone else who chose militancy over non-violence, in fact, exactly the reverse. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. Even Ayers himself has expressed regret to both those who were of the opposite political philosophy and his own confederates for his actions and leadership of his movement. The point however is this. What is happening on the far fringes of the right today, while it mirrors 'some' of what happened in the left in an earlier time, is much more dangerous than any number of Ayers or others from that era.
Those of you on the right who continue to bring up Ayers as your example of the horror of the left as equal or even worse than what the militant right wing has and is doing now, need to get out your weigh scales and do a truly balanced analysis. Your rhetoric only encourages your own fringe groups to do more, to kill more, to destroy more and to further divide the nation. You need to stop the Timothy McVeighs and the Koressh's and doctor killers like Scott Roeder and all the others who use conservative politics as their rationale for a campaign of murder and mayhem. The truth is, many of us in the 60's in fact did that. We made no bones about deploring violence, and said as much often and publicly. Think Dr. King Jr. He abohored the violence of splinter groups like the Black Panther movement and the groups that came from that. I believe that our ethic was in no small part responsible for limiting violence. Meanwhile, we certainly didn't promote violence with our rhetoric, (remember 'make love, not war) which cannot be said of many on the right today who would never commit acts of violence themselves, but seem to have no problem encouraging it. including Republican leadership in congress and the right wing media talking heads.
It's much easier to have a dialog designed to find resolutions to the issues of the day if we aren't aiming guns and bombs at others.
Following is a report compiled and prepared by the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI during the latter part of the Bush administration and released in the first quarter of '09. It outlines the threat of right wing militancy and terror as the Number 1 threat to American security.
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf
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