News William Ayers: What's the Real Story?

  • Thread starter Thread starter LowlyPion
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Interview
Click For Summary
William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, is a controversial figure due to his past involvement in bombings aimed at protesting U.S. policies during the Vietnam War. Critics argue that his unrepentant stance on these actions raises serious ethical concerns, equating his tactics with terrorism. The discussion highlights the parallels drawn between Ayers and political figures like Barack Obama, suggesting that attempts to link them are politically motivated and reminiscent of McCarthyism. Supporters of Ayers contend that his actions were symbolic rather than intended to cause harm, framing them as expressions of dissent against a repressive government. Ultimately, the debate centers on the definitions of terrorism and dissent, and how they apply to historical and contemporary political contexts.
  • #31
CaptainQuasar said:
? Don't you get it, Obama won the election. It doesn't work to claim that criticizing the Iraq war is terrorism.
⚛​
That quote of yours appeared to advocate violence in opposition of the Iraq war. did I misunderstand you intent?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #32
russ_watters said:
Huh? You really need to grab a dictionary, because you clearly have no clue what those words mean. You are making a fool of yourself by saying such things.

i've actually read quite a bit about Raphael Lemkin. as for terrorism, it's pretty much lost it's meaning since the "War on Terror" began. a kid spitting in his teacher's coffee is a terrorist, now.

as for the whole McCain/Ayers thing, i know you think I'm siding with Ayers, but I'm not. i just think McCain is a hypocrite. and i don't think he showed much of the honor or courage he was campaigning on except during the times he was backpeddling. the rest of the time he was happy to let people go around thinking his opponent was an islamic terrorist. i think his actions were despicable, and if something like http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/wantedfortreason.htm" happens again, he's going to have to shoulder a huge chunk of the guilt of it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #33
russ_watters said:
That quote of yours appeared to advocate violence in opposition of the Iraq war. did I misunderstand you intent?

I think so. You said that two wrongs do not make a right and I was pointing out that falsifying intelligence and invading Iraq constitute two wrongs.

So, I have to agree with Russ that the Weathermen were out to hurt people. Multiple sources agree that at the townhouse in Greenwich Village multiple bombs packed with nails were found and the bodies of Ted Gold and Diana Oughton were riddled with nails. And of course a nail bomb is an anti-personnel weapon, it's not just designed for property damage.
Three Weathermen were killed, including Ted Gold; his body was ripped to shreds when the bomb he was working on, filled with one-and-a-half-inch roofing nails, exploded.

Also mentioned in http://books.google.com/books?id=6KC36MHH3j8C&pg=PA143&dq="Diana+Oughton"+roofing+nails" in the local paper The Villager.
⚛​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #34
CaptainQuasar said:
You know what genocide is, don't you? Twenty to thirty million Soviet citizens were killed during the Nazi invasion of Russia. Six million Ashkenazi Jews were killed in the Holocaust. One of them is a genocide and the other is not. Bloody slaughter of people is terrible and wrong but it does not make a genocide by itself.
⚛​


"You dishonor the victims of real genocides" is what I was referring to. Yeah, I'm sure being told that you don't have the honor in death that someone else does because not everybody of your race died is no big deal.
 
  • #35
...Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since 2000 stems from an interview he gave to The New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication.[25] The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again," as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."[20] Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer's characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion."[26] In a November 2008 interview with The New Yorker, Ayers said that he had not meant to imply that he wished he and the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence. Instead, he said, “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more ****.” Ayers said that he had never been responsible for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in Vietnam in which “thousands of people were being killed every week.” He also stated, "While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme radicalism against property,” and “We killed no one and hurt no one. Three of our people killed themselves.”[27]

In the ensuing years, Ayers has repeatedly avowed that when he said he had "no regrets" and that "we didn't do enough" he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as ". . . inadequate [as] the war dragged on for a decade."[28] Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs.[28][29]...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers#cite_note-25

Here is the radical organization that claims both Ayers and Obama as former members.
http://www.woodsfund.org/site/epage/61430_735.htm
 
  • #36
CaptainQuasar said:
I wouldn't say it was immature; carrying out bombing campaigns like that can certainly achieve political goals.

Of course it was immature. It wasn't well thought out. It was as much as anything an expression of frustration that grew from the widely held belief among younger people at the time that the Government was the enemy.

The Government was drafting and sending thousands to their deaths in the meat-grinder of Viet Nam. It was shooting at dissenters with live rounds. It was actively investigating and harassing all dissent.

It was radical action to be sure, and as I have said not something that I agree with, but I think calling it terrorism of any particular flavor, most especially, in the more modern sense of the World Trade Center (the epitome of symbolic terrorism) or Oklahoma City is wholly counter productive to any discussion to attempt to so over-exaggerate and emotionally charge what Ayers was doing in order to somehow besmirch Obama for knowing him or working with him on goals (inner city development and education) that none of these nutballs slinging the mud even disagree with in the first place.
 
  • #37
russ_watters said:
Irrelevant,...

It's not at all irrelevant. The Government was committing crimes against its own people as well. It was pursuing a course of aggression in Southeast Asia, for tenuous and unsupportable motives of foreign policy.

It was that old Domino Theory of the Cold War. That nations would fall like dominoes. It was as though somewhere in our State Department was a game of Risk laid out on a table and the dice was being rolled while thousands perished.

You can't effectively assess Ayers' acts out of the context of the times, as those acts were in response to what was happening at the time.
 
  • #38
russ_watters said:
This is what annoys me most about this forum - people throw around words without any regard at all to their actual meaning.

... Ayers was a member of an organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the US government and committed acts of physical violence not just against property but against people.

And since you are so against throwing around in this forum unsupported characterizations, what violence did Ayers actually commit against other people? Are you relying on the deaths of the three people that killed themselves making a bomb?
 
  • #39
russ_watters said:
The WU did hurt people and they did it on purpose. In addition, the accident that killed 3 members and effectively ended the overt actions of the group was preparation for a planned act of mass murder. So they were a relatively incompetent terrorist group, but a terrorist group nonetheless.

There is no actual evidence of that I have ever seen.

That is the propaganda of your Federal Government, the same Federal Government that lied about issues like body counts in Viet Nam and acts of domestic espionage and illegal acts to influence elections in order to remain in power.
 
  • #40
russ_watters said:
That wasn't their only act. They also firebombed the house of a NY State Supreme Court justice.

There is no evidence of that having had anything at all to do with the Weather Underground.

You act like there weren't other groups that hadn't been motivated to resist Government activities. (Never mind that there was a disproportionate number of blacks that were getting drafted and killed in Viet Nam?)

In the case of the NY Supreme Court Justice's house never mind that it occurred at the time of Black Panther Party trials in NY. Being so eager to paint Obama with a guilt of acquaintance with William Ayers, I suppose you are as eager to paint the Weather Underground with the same brush used to paint the Black Panther Party?

You can read about the incident here:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html
 
  • #41
russ_watters said:
Irrelevant, because: Exactly. Two wrongs don't make a right.
No, they don't, but if everyone else was wronging more than you, that makes you...less evil?

He is a citizen who supported and probably got away with crimes and wishes he had had the stones to do more. That makes him a bad person.
The first sentence above would just as well describe Tubman, King, Parks, Mandela and a whole host of other revolutionaries that broke the law and didn't repent it - all bad people.
 
  • #42
Gokul43201 said:
The first sentence above would just as well describe Tubman, King, Parks, Mandela and a whole host of other revolutionaries that broke the law and didn't repent it - all bad people.

I don't know to what degree Ayers himself was a bad person, that's a qualitative judgement and I'd have to know much more about him than I do. But you have specifically chosen people reknowned for their non-violent protest there to compare him to. None of those people said things like http://books.google.com/books?id=eEXERPD02UYC&pg=PA188&dq="kill+all+rich+people"+ayers" or served as the spokesman for an organization that at one point was constructing nail bombs with the obvious intent to kill many people. Diana Oughton, his own girlfriend, was participating in the manufacture of the nail bombs, so I would have difficulty believing that he could plausibly deny knowledge of those plans. Though perhaps her death and the death of his other friends changed his perspective on violence as a means to achieve his goals.

(If any of those nonviolent protesters did that stuff in some case I don't know about, I think that would be good support for an argument that said individual is a bad person.)
⚛​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #43
LowlyPion said:
That is the propaganda of your Federal Government, the same Federal Government that lied about issues like body counts in Viet Nam...

In Vietnam the suspicion is that the U.S. military inflated estimates of North Vietnamese killed to make it seem more damaging, since we lost the war.
⚛​
 
  • #44
I have to say that I condemn random acts of violence against innocent people as a form of protest. It's the height of idiocy. No excuse for it. None.
 
  • #45
hadn't Ayers left the organization when those people got killed making the nail bomb?
 
  • #46
WarPhalange said:
"You dishonor the victims of real genocides" is what I was referring to. Yeah, I'm sure being told that you don't have the honor in death that someone else does because not everybody of your race died is no big deal.

Oh, I get it. You're pretending that I said that the North Vietnamese who died defending their country from a U.S. invasion don't have any honor in death. Because I said their deaths weren't part of a genocide, I guess? I don't think anyone will believe that. Particularly anyone who knows what genocide is.
⚛​
 
  • #47
Proton Soup said:
hadn't Ayers left the organization when those people got killed making the nail bomb?

You really ought to at least make a check of somewhere like Wikipedia before you make claims like this; it's how rumors start. The Pentagon bombing happened two years after the explosion in Greenwich Village. According to a cited quotation on Wikipedia from one of Ayer's own books he knew how much it cost to manufacture the Pentagon bomb, so it seems pretty likely that he was involved in that. (Which his article on Wikipedia does assert.)
⚛​
 
  • #48
CaptainQuasar said:
You really ought to at least make a check of somewhere like Wikipedia before you make claims like this; it's how rumors start. The Pentagon bombing happened two years after the explosion in Greenwich Village. According to a cited quotation on Wikipedia from one of Ayer's own books he knew how much it cost to manufacture the Pentagon bomb, so it seems pretty likely that he was involved in that. (Which his article on Wikipedia does assert.)
⚛​


that's a pretty tenuous link, knowing something.

edit: actually, i could care less. what's any of this got to do with Obama? i mean other than trying to smear Obama and perhaps incite some idiots to try and assassinate him like they did with Kennedy? is that what you want? i think it is.
 
Last edited:
  • #49
Proton Soup said:
that's a pretty tenuous link, knowing something.

Okay, this is just getting silly. First you say that he wasn't part of the Weathermen any more, now you say that he was part of the Weathermen and knew about plans for mass murder and just didn't stop them? You're simply demonstrating that you don't know anything salient about him and are defending him blindly.

Look, if you want to forgive him for it, go ahead and forgive him. Heck, Ronald Reagan went and laid a wreath on the graves of a bunch of Nazi S.S. soldiers in the eighties, forgiving them for way worse things. And they weren't even Americans! But there's no point in pretending Ayers didn't participate in that stuff knowingly and willingly.

Proton Soup said:
edit: actually, i could care less. what's any of this got to do with Obama? i mean other than trying to smear Obama and perhaps incite some idiots to try and assassinate him like they did with Kennedy? is that what you want? i think it is.

Go back and read what I've written in this thread.
⚛​
 
Last edited:
  • #50
Proton Soup said:
as for the whole McCain/Ayers thing, i know you think I'm siding with Ayers, but I'm not.
Allright, I'm out of the McCain thing. This isn't a McCain/Ayers thread. It's an Ayers thread. What you think of McCain isn't relevant to a discussion about Ayers - it's an intentional distraction.
 
  • #51
CaptainQuasar said:
I think so. You said that two wrongs do not make a right and I was pointing out that falsifying intelligence and invading Iraq constitute two wrongs.
Ok, well that's a pretty bizarre non sequitur. I have no comment to make on it.
 
  • #52
CaptainQuasar said:
Okay, this is just getting silly. First you say that he wasn't part of the Weathermen any more, now you say that he was part of the Weathermen and knew about plans for mass murder and just didn't stop them? You're simply demonstrating that you don't know anything salient about him and are defending him blindly.

Look, if you want to forgive him for it, go ahead and forgive him. Heck, Ronald Reagan went and laid a wreath on the graves of a bunch of Nazi S.S. soldiers in the eighties, forgiving them for way worse things. But there's no point in pretending he didn't participate in that stuff knowingly and willingly.



Go back and read what I've written in this thread.
⚛​


i do forgive him, just as i forgive McCain. that is kind of the point of a lot that i wrote here. i don't see a big difference between the two, other than McCain actually killed a lot of innocent people and when confronted by his conscience didn't do anything about it because he was afraid of the consequences. Ayers actually had the courage of his convictions.
 
  • #53
LowlyPion said:
It's not at all irrelevant...

You can't effectively assess Ayers' acts out of the context of the times, as those acts were in response to what was happening at the time.
The law does not say that treason and murder are ok if you really believe in your cause. It is irrelevant.
And since you are so against throwing around in this forum unsupported characterizations, what violence did Ayers actually commit against other people? Are you relying on the deaths of the three people that killed themselves making a bomb?
Please read carefully what I say. I do not throw around unsupported characterizations. I was specific and I meant nothing more and nothing less than what I said: Ayers was a member of a terrorist organization who'se stated goal was to wage war against the US. Whether he actually planted any of the bombs himself affects only the particular type of crime. And again, if he had been more successful - as he wishes he would have been - he'd probably still be in jail today, if not executed for murder or treason.
 
Last edited:
  • #54
russ_watters said:
Allright, I'm out of the McCain thing. This isn't a McCain/Ayers thread. It's an Ayers thread. What you think of McCain isn't relevant to a discussion about Ayers - it's an intentional distraction.

Ayers was protesting the very thing McCain was doing. McCain is the one that brought the whole subject up. but if you'd rather, we can discuss what this Ayers thread is really about.

http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/wantedfortreason.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #55
russ_watters said:
Ok, well that's a pretty bizarre non sequitur. I have no comment to make on it.

Oh, okay. Well, in some other thread when you entertain two wrongs making a right, I'll be sure to refer you back to what you said here. :biggrin: (It definitely was a non-sequitur, I just thought it was a humorous observation.)
⚛​
 
  • #56
Proton Soup, you shouldn't try to prove that black is white because of where your sympathies lie. No one is going to believe or respect anything you say about McCain now because you have demonstrated yourself so ready to move forward on incorrect or misleading facts related to Ayers.
⚛​
 
  • #57
Proton Soup said:
Ayers was protesting the very thing McCain was doing. McCain is the one that brought the whole subject up. but if you'd rather, we can discuss what this Ayers thread is really about.
Actually, it was Hillary Clinton who first brought it to light - why aren't we talking about her? Oh, tha'ts right: It isn't relevant!
 
  • #58
LowlyPion said:
Being so eager to paint Obama with a guilt of acquaintance with William Ayers...
I shouldn't have to clarify again, but: I have never mentioned Obama in this thread! This isn't about Obama, it isn't about Clinton, and it isn't about McCain. It is about Ayers.
 
  • #59
Funny thing, Russ, you seemed to completely ignore Ayers comments that he didn't support hurting more innocent people. I thought that was the basis of your argument - that he would do it again.
 
  • #60
Proton Soup said:
edit: actually, i could care less. what's any of this got to do with Obama?
Nothing. But you are the one who brought up Obama. That right there was the first I used his name in this thread! You are the one bringing up all these irrelevancies to try to derail the thread.