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- - - THE seemingly inevitable ascent of Barack Obama to become US president has hit a hurdle, as he is forced to confront accusations, supported by a hard-hitting television ad campaign, that he had a long-time association with two of America's leading terrorists from the 1960s, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, one-time leaders of the Weathermen (also known as the Weather Underground). It is not in dispute that Obama began his political career in 1995 at the home of Ayers and Dohrn, when his sponsor (herself on the far left of the Democratic Party and a champion of the Soviet Union as late as 1986) arranged for him to meet some influential leftists and potential campaign supporters and contributors who could launch his career. In the best-selling expose The Obama Nation (2008), Jerome Corsi reports that one of the attendees at this launch recalls how Ayers and Dohrn introduced Obama as "the best thing since sliced bread". Subsequently, "the record shows that connections between Obama and Dohrn have actively continued since Obama launched his political career in their living room in 1995". For example, Michelle Obama and possibly also Barack Obama worked at the same law firm at the same time as Dohrn in 1984-88, while in 1995 Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge using a $US50 million grant and selected Barack Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the project, a position that Obama held for eight years. Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund for three years after Obama joined the board in 1999. Obama also served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund with Ayers's father and brother. These facts cast doubt on the recent claims by Obama's campaign manager that Obama knew Ayers only slightly and only because they lived in the same neighbourhood and their children went to the same school. Apart from the above connections, Ayers's children are much older than Obama's. Equally unlikely is the claim that Obama knew nothing of Ayers and Dohrn's terrorist past. As Corsi remarks, people familiar with Chicago politics "wonder how Obama can think we are so gullible as to believe Obama was the only person in Chicago who did not know Ayers's bomb-throwing terrorist fame". But even if there was a long-term association between Obama and Ayers and Dohrn, is that necessarily a bad thing? The answer requires a brief review of the turbulent time of the 1960s when Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen and signatories of the ultra-radical manifesto You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, released at the national convention of the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society in June 1969. This 20,000-word manifesto called for a communist revolution in the US; the victory of communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War; and the creation of "two, three, many Vietnams" designed to consume all of America's military resources. It denounced all police as "pigs" and detailed strategies to defeat them; and advocated a vanguard role for black people, supported by university students and young people, in the revolutionary overthrow of American society. The Weathermen advocated urban guerilla warfare and terrorism and undertook an intense campaign of bombings, violent demonstrations, riots and jail breaks from 1969 into the early '70s, beginning with the Days of Rage, held in October 1969, to correspond to the trial of the Chicago Eight. In 1970, the group issued their Declaration of a State of War against the government of what they dismissed as AmeriKKKa. Ayers participated in 30 bombings in this period, including attacks on the New York Police Department headquarters in 1970, the US Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers had gone underground as a terrorist following a lethal mistake in a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which three members of the Weathermen were killed (including Ayers's then girlfriend) when a nail bomb being constructed as an anti-personnel device exploded. In 1970, Ayers (whose father was a wealthy chief executive of a large telecommunications company and later obtained his son's freedom from prison) described the Weathermen's message: "Kill all rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." Similarly with Dohrn. After the Charles Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, Dohrn enthused: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Bizarrely, in September 1970 the Weathermen were paid $20,000 by a psychedelics distribution organisation called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break out of prison the leading advocate of LSD, Timothy Leary. Leary escaped to Algeria, where he joined the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in exile. Ayers published his autobiography Fugitive Days: A Memoir on September 10, 2001, and was quoted in The New York Times on 9/11 as saying: "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough". When asked if he would "do it all again", he responded: "I don't want to discount the possibility." A month earlier he was photographed for a magazine interview standing on the American flag. In November 2007, during a speech given by Ayers at a reunion of SDS members, Ayers was recorded as praising the group's spirit of rebellion and quoted communist revolutionary heroes in support of his views, while Dohrn referred to the US government as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and complained that life in America involves living in "the belly of the beast" and at "the heart of the monster". Obama was, of course, only about nine when all this started, and wasn't directly involved in the Weather Underground. However, in his autobiography Dreams From My Father (2004), he makes it clear that he was seeking in his youth to construct an identity as an African-American activist, drawing inspiration from Malcolm X, the radical face of the Nation of Islam, and other radicals from the '60s. Indeed, in his second book, The Audacity of Hope (2006), he declares himself to be a pure product of the '60s and specifically distinguishes the "pre-1967 liberalism" of his mother with "its sweet-natured romanticism", from his own radical political outlook based in the hard-core revolutionary currents of 1968 and the other violent years that followed. He described how his vision of the '60s was shaped by images of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the fierce battle between police and demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic national convention, the ignominious last-second escape of defeated US personnel from Saigon, and the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont where Hells Angels bashed a young man to death. Starting college in 1979, Obama describes how he chose his friends carefully: "The more politically active black students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performers." He describes how they discussed "neo-colonialism, Frantz Fanon (the Black Power hero and apostle of cleansing violence), Eurocentrism, and patriarchy"; and how he read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness "to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid ... Their demons." Obama concludes: "Despite a 40-year remove, the tumult of the '60s continues to drive our political discourse." The question that the American people may have to ask themselves is how much this extremist milieu still drives Obama's political outlook and how much it will guide his decisions, policies and appointments throughout the federal government system as the next president of the US. Mervyn F.Bendle is a senior lecturer in history and communications at James Cook University. - - - Interestingly my favorite novel(la) is Heart of Darkness, which I read as a meditation of how men make themselves gods once they have become unmoored from their cultural roots, and forget who they are. The racism angle of interpretation, which was faux for awhile in academia, based on a criticism of how Conrad portrays Africans, doesn't begin to penetrate what Conrad was really getting at in that story IMHO. I view Obama as potentially a kind of Kurtz, if you take him at his word in his memoirs when he talks about his inner conflict and struggle for identity. - Bob _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
