Why care about Ayers?

[CG6468]

Why care about Ayers?

Posted: Saturday, October 1, 2011 10:17 pm

FRANK MIELE/Daily Inter Lake | 58 comments

Some people say that writing a series of columns about 1960s revolutionaries is a waste of time. They say that radicals like Bill Ayers weren’t that popular to begin with and are completely irrelevant by now.

On the first point, I certainly agree. There’s no reason to think that Ayers had popular support for his revolution back in 1969 when he was preaching the triumph of “world communism” from his SDS pulpit. He was and is out of the mainstream, with little likelihood to convince people to support him and his desire to overthrow the U.S. government.

But when you say he is irrelevant, that’s where I draw the line. How can he be irrelevant when the revolution he sought so earnestly has come about?

If Ayers is irrelevant, then so is Barack Obama. If Ayers is irrelevant, then so is Hillary Clinton. If Ayers is irrelevant, then so are dozens of top-level players and consultants in and out of the Obama administration such as Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Valerie Jarrett, Carol Browner and Ron Bloom. All of those people — Obama, Clinton and the rest — have ties to radical organizations either dating to the 1960s such as SDS or Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation or to later socialist organizations that shared the goal of dismantling American society and rebuilding it as a socialist state. You merely need to read their own words to see that none of this is secret. The evidence is all over the Internet. Their hatred for “bourgeois” America is transparent, visceral and unmistakable.

Indeed, the whole point of quoting extensively from Ayers’ own writings for the past several weeks has been to establish the remarkable parallels between the revolution he and his contemporaries envisioned and what has actually taken place. Their stated goal as members of Students for a Democratic Society, and later the Weather Underground, was “the destruction of U.S. imperialism” and ultimately the imposition of a new socialist state that would dictate the “control and ... use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world.”

You would have to be severely lacking a sense of irony not to appreciate the fact that while America has not yet fully committed to its newfound role as leader of the socialist world, we have nonetheless embraced liberating Libya and other Third World countries from their imperialist oppressors, using our “ill-gotten” wealth to bail out Europe not to mention Africa and Asia — and of course creating a welfare state that provides housing and health care for all, and even tuition breaks for illegal aliens!

Why Care About the Commies?

[vesta111]

Why Care About the Commies?

Guilt by association, got to watch those birds of a feather.   [11]