bill ayers in the new york times

Bill Ayers, the latest favorite boogeyman of the right, had an editorial in the New York Times on Friday.

In the 2008 election, the McCain/Palin campaign took guilt-by-association to a level that would make Joseph McCarthy proud, and Ayers was by far their favorite demon to invoke. I followed the Ayers hysteria (Ayersteria?) for as long as I could stomach it, since I've heard Bill Ayers speak at Chicago-area political events, and for many years frequented a certain Upper West Side bar owned by one of his old comrades from the Weather Underground. (In the closing days of the presidential campaign, Rashid Khalidi got dragged into the mix for good measure as a "PLO spokesperson." Khalidi was my teacher at Columbia, and about the most radical thing he did was allow us to not take our final exam "in solidarity" with the grad student strike.)

Amidst all the frothing at the mouth about him being a domestic terrorist, I'm glad Ayers saw fit to make an important point about the Weather Underground: they never killed anyone, except three of their own members who died in an accidental explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Their bombs were always accompanied by warnings giving workers ample time to leave the targeted buildings. And, while I think most people today would say their actions were, at the very least, ill-advised, they weren't quite the American al-Qaeda that Republicans, particularly Palin, painted them to be.

I'm also glad Ayers made at least some attempt to explain the genesis of the Weather Underground: as a very extreme response to a brutal, insane, and seemingly unstoppable war that killed nearly 60,000 Americans and at least three million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. But I have to disagree with him on one point. I think the antiwar movement absolutely did bring an end to the Vietnam War.

It was not the marches on Washington, or even the student strikes, campus occupations and civil disobedience of activists in the US that stopped the war. Ayers is right about that--marches and sit-ins, no matter how massive, are not enough to bring the US war machine to a halt. Nor, I would argue, was the resistance, no matter how heroic and determined, of the Vietnamese people, who spent thirty years fighting for their country's liberation from colonialism and imperialism.

The US government could have ignored or repressed domestic opposition, and probably could have eventually crushed Vietnamese opposition (it was already on its way to doing so after the Tet Offensive) if not for the third factor in play, which was resistance to the war among US soldiers themselves. It was the antiwar movement among soldiers that brought about a collapse of the US armed forces so severe that it led generals to invoke the specter of the Russian Revolution.

The GI revolt is one of the least-known and most important elements of the 1960s. It's been brilliantly documented recently in the film Sir No Sir and the book Soldiers in Revolt. But it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the determination of the Vietnamese that led many US soldiers to question what they were really fighting for. And it was the stateside antiwar movement that gave them the courage to start resisting what they were being asked to do.

For more on this time period, I cannot recommend enough one of the most brilliant and passionate historical books I've ever read, The American War: Vietnam 1960-1975 by Jonathan Neale. I first read this book not long after 9/11, and can say without reservation that it saved me from utter political depression. The documentary The Weather Underground is also an excellent, non-hysterical look at how a small group of activists progressed from marches and leaflets to blowing stuff up.