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Apparently, in dealing with history for many of Ayers' critics there is only one way: condemnation. It allows them to avoid facing the complexity of truths about this part of U.S. history.
Yes, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were terrorizing those South Vietnamese who were not going along with their politics. I am not willing to accept that valid as the cause of national liberation might have been, terror was justified. Had Ike and the Kennedy boys understood the history of Viet Nam, they would have realized that the idea of the North Vietnamese just being stooges for Beijing (dominoes!) was plainly silly. Chinese and Vietnamese enmity before and after U.S. involvement proves this assumption utterly wrong.
Yet, the fact that the Viet Cong were no better does not justify the bombing war launched against the free fire zones in South Vietnam, North Vietnam and Cambodia. I remember very well the body counts daily published by General Westmoreland, and we suspected then and do now know for sure that amongst these dead "enemies" were counted scores of innocent civilians, from babys to the elderly. Who living through those times does not remember the little naked girl severely burnt by Dow-produced Napalm? Who will forever forget Saigon’s police chief executing, murdering a Viet Cong suspect at the light of the day? I did and do condemn what happened in My Lay but I will refrain from moralizing about, for example, former Senator Bob Kerrey. Monday morning quarterbacking is easy and futile but when you try to understand what happenend you might avoid ever getting your young soldiers into such situations again. The chicken hawks of today clearly did not, and they made Abu Ghraib possible.
If in those days you wanted change to come about the first address to go to was your own government. Change - we thougt - could come by different means of protest, from the Army sergeant with a peace sticker in his car (chapeau!) to demonstrating in the streets, to burning your draft cards, go to Canada etc. If I understand Ayers correctly what he wanted to show in his memoir was how he got into the Weather Underground. I remember well the discussions we used to have – in the U.S. as well as in Europe – about the means to use. And I do remember it the same way as Susan McGee does. Civil disobedience was one way, the more radical people were advocating the use of violence against property, and later on even less people were argueing for violence against the “character masks”, the agents of “the system”. Ayers belonged to the second, the bombing property group.
It is fair to accept the terrorism definition offered by JoleneB. And, yet you cannot deny a moral difference between violence against property and that against people. Here in Germany we had courts declaring that civil disobedience amounted to “violence” thus civil disobedience would be terrorism as well. But in hindsight, we realize how slippery a slope our way of thinking led to.
At the time, I was not sure whether insisting on peaceful means was due only to my very principled stand (what a wonderful person!) on peaceful means or to physical cowardness (what a jerk!), as well. But I can attest to the desperation we all felt that we were not able to stop the evil that Ayers was fighting, too. Yes, we all did not do enough.
My participation in the protest in your country was the tiniest possible but I remember well the “America, love it or leave it” mentality that seems to creep into the discussion here, too. What I do know, people like Ayers loved their country as much as his critics claim to do, but certainly in a desperate, crazy way - desperate and crazy as the times were. If you want to understand shut your urge for judgement off for a moment, and you might learn something for yourself at long last.
