Democracy Now!Exclusive: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on the Weather Underground ..(11-2008)

Bill Ayers is now a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Bernardine Dohrn is an associate professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.

and I spoke with both of them from a studio in their hometown of Chicago. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed the McCain campaign attacks, President-elect Obama, the Weather Underground, their plans for the future and much more.

I began by asking Bill Ayers to respond to the controversy surrounding him in the presidential race.

First of all, the idea that Bill O’Reilly says, you know, that I was in hiding. I wasn’t in hiding. I was teaching and speaking and writing and doing all the things I do. What I wasn’t doing was commenting on the presidential campaign to the media. And I decided not to do that.

We decided not to do that when this all began, because we couldn’t figure out a way to interrupt what we took to be a profoundly dishonest narrative that, you know, had no—we had no purchase. We had no way into it.

I never was a terrorist. And the idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense.

We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam.

JUAN GONZALEZ:

Now, obviously, when you say that the Weathermen was not a terrorist organization, many Americans, who would see that the organization set bombs in government buildings and in other places, would dispute that. Why would you say that it was not a terrorist organization?

BILL AYERS: Because—

BERNARDINE DOHRN: No-–

BILL AYERS: Go ahead.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: Can I jump in, Juan?

BILL AYERS: Sure.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Sure, Bernardine.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: Nothing the Weather Underground did was terrorist.

And, you know, we could make lots of choices if we were reliving it. Nothing we did was perfect. But decision was made, after the death of our three comrades in a townhouse, not to hurt people, to engage in direct actions that were symbolic, that were recognizable and understandable to the American people and that protected people.

And that kind of restraint was widespread. There were tens of thousands of political bombings over that first three—1970, ’71, ’72, ’73, all across the country, not under anybody’s leadership, but they were overwhelmingly restrained, symbolic.

Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings. How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context.

So you have to go back to the savage and unrestrained terror that the United States was unleashing in the world, in Vietnam, as Bill said, and at home.

You remember that the assassinations of black political leaders in the United States was a regular feature of life. And, you know, it seemed—the context of the time has to be understood.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill O’Reilly, Bill Ayers, in the ad said that you admitted to bombing a police station and weren’t sorry about it.

BILL AYERS: What I wrote in my book, Fugitive Days, I wrote about the extraordinary decade in which many of us came of age and committed ourselves to fighting against war and against injustice and for peace.

And mostly what we did was nonviolent direct action through that whole latter part of the ’60s. And then we reached a kind of crisis, which is, we had convinced the American people—we and forces—you know, it’s an interesting thing to think about the years ’65, ’68.

In three years, the American people swung all the way over to oppose the war. Kind of reminds you of the recent events, where in three years a popular war became massively unpopular.

But in any case, the question was, what do you do? And in no way do I think, or in my book do I rationalize or argue, that what we did was the best thing or the only thing.

But what I do say is it was understandable in its own terms.

“Is it terrorism?” Juan asked. No, it’s not, because terrorism targets people and intends to intimidate and murder people in order to get a political—its political way. We never did that. We never intended to do it. And no one was hurt or killed. So that’s an important distinction.

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UNREPENTANT TERRORISTS, LIARS AND THE LIES THEY TELL. These beasts are teaching the next generation of radicals.

Mothers and Fathers: guard, guide and teach your children well.

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Ayers on Book TV - In Depth - last aired on 6-13-08 (3 hours)

http://booktv.org/Watch/10555/In+Depth+Bill+Ayers.aspx

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