Shut Up, Bill Ayers
“I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village.
[…]
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.”
Way to whitewash the irrevocable harm done by the Weather faction to Students for a Democratic Society, and the derailing of an organized antiwar student movement, as a result of a ridiculous, narcissistic split engineered by the Weather people—RYM, as they called themselves— in 1969. Ayers’ revisionism would be laughable if he weren’t such a preening jackass.
Jesse Lemisch’s illuminating piece on miserable post-modernism’s enabling of Weather Underground nostalgia quotes alumnus Mark Rudd’s withering take on the demented adventure:
“[T]he Weather Underground was a huge fuck-up! We did the work of the FBI by destroying SDS. We accidentally killed three of our own people. We split and undermined the larger anti-war movement.. the importance of the Weather Underground was that it was a total disaster. “Don’t try this at home.”
But whatever, Bill Ayers. “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are.”
