On September 11, an article with the title »No Regrets for a Love of Explosives« appeared in the New York Times¹. Bill Ayers, once wanted by the FBI and now working as a university professor, had just published his memoirs, »Fugitive Days,«² something that caused a furor all over the USA. As a key member of the activist movement »Weather Underground,« which started up in 1969, Ayers took part in many symbolic acts of violence in the early seventies directed against military and government institutions. As a result, he ended up on the FBI\'s wanted list, along with many other members of the organization. Among the prominent targets of actions carried out by »Weather« were the Capitol, the headquarters of the National Guard, and, in 1972, the Pentagon.³ Nobody was ever hurt except in one explosion in New York that claimed the lives of three »Weather« members, including Ayers\' then girlfriend, Diana Oughton. Since then, the »Weather« mythos has provided material for a large number of artistic reappraisals, the most prominent of these probably being Emile de Antonio\'s film »Underground« (1974) and Raymond Pettibon\'s video »Weathermen \'69: The Whole World Is Watching« (1989). From about 1980 on, the former members finally began to emerge from the underground. Some of them were arrested or gave themselves up to the authorities which often had no consequences for them, as many of the legal proceedings had to be called off on account of the illegal methods used in FBI investigations.

When the feature article appeared in the New York Times on September 11, no one could know what significance the episode on »bombing the Pentagon« recounted by Bill Ayers would suddenly acquire on this very day; indeed, what sort of re-encoding the concept of terror would altogether undergo in the USA. All at once, the question arose of how opposition to the worldwide imperialism of the USA - which has perhaps only taken on other forms since the time of the Vietnam War - and to a US-dominated process of globalization was able to keep going. What changes do critics of official US politics find in the scenario since then, and what criteria will have to guide this criticism in future? Bill Ayers runs through historic phases of symbolic politics of resistance, and explains the facets of a new, old conclusion: »New Morning - Changing Weather.«

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] The current »War against Terror« brings to mind a historical period in the U.S. - the late sixties and early seventies - in which there still seemed to be a political option that was conceived the other way round: precisely targeted acts of violence (in which you yourself participated), termed »terror« by the State, in order to end a war that was getting totally out of control and could not be justified by any means. What are your feelings vis-a-vis this historical »reversal«, these suddenly changed roles?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I\'m not sure »historical reversal« is the term - deception, imprecision, and perversion come to mind, but this is all purely rhetorical. From 1965-75 the US government waged an illegal and immoral war - a war of terror - against the country and the people of Viet Nam. Whole regions of Viet Nam were designated »free-fire zones« by the US, cities were bombed indiscriminately, civilians were murdered by the tens of thousands, and this was not mere »collateral damage,« the perverse Pentagon term of art for mayhem and murder, but deliberate, cold-eyed policy. In 1965 I was arrested in a nonviolent protest inside a draft board - a relatively small outcry practically drowned out at the time by a considerably larger pro-war counter-demonstration. For the next years, I organized, I spoke up, I wrote, and I demonstrated against murderous US policy, and I was arrested in escalating acts of militant opposition to terror. By 1968 the overwhelming majority of Americans had been won to oppose the war, but the war continued and escalated - we didn\'t know it then, of course, but after President Johnson was driven from office, the war would unwind for another seven years and over a million-and-a-half more human beings would be sacrificed in the American-built death chamber in Southeast Asia.

Those of us who opposed the war searched desperately for what more we could do to end it - some joined the Democratic Party and attempted to build a Left within it, others went to work in factories and tried to organize the industrial working class, others moved on in their professional lives, and a small group of us - young, determined, somewhat despairing in that time - decided to build a clandestine capacity to survive what we thought was an escalating oppression at home, and simultaneously a capacity for illegal and armed resistance to the war and racism. In my book I describe a moment when a few of us flirted with the idea of matching official terror with a terror of our own, but we never did. We pulled back, and in fact, never killed or even injured anyone. We defended our actions as extreme measures employed in the face of an international emergency. In that sense - and in light of the fact that every day the war dragged on a couple of thousand more human beings were murdered - we were entirely restrained.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] One of the guiding slogans of the movement you participated in was »Bring the War Home!«, let the war-makers of the military-industrial complex get a feel of what they are inflicting on innocent civilians thousands of miles away. Would you ever have imagined in your wildest dreams that this slogan could foreshadow something like the September 11 events?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] The events of September 11 - a massive crime against humanity carried out, apparently, in the service of a monstrous reactionary ideology - was way beyond my imagination, far beyond anything anyone I\'ve spoken to could have dreamed in their most heated nightmares. Turning commercial airliners into giant guided missiles controlled by highly skilled suicide bombers - the planning, the patience, the practice - it\'s all finally too much.

For decades I\'ve challenged my students and other audiences to wonder with me how long the US-something like 5% of the world\'s population ... could go merrily along in its determined innocence, its self-induced blindness, controlling and consuming the vast majority of the planet\'s wealth. Two billion of the world\'s 6 billion people lack the basics to survive; this winter millions of Afghans may well perish from starvation; and some of us routinely practice a habitual and extravagantly wasteful consumption while a growing number of people can\'t consume enough to live another day. How high will we have to build the walls around ourselves to maintain that injustice? How deep the moats? How many of the barbarians at the gates will we be willing to slaughter to defend that imbalance? The arrogant self-designation, »the world\'s only superpower,« sounds hollow and false following September 11.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] In your recent memoir, »Fugitive Days,« you write: »Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.« How do you feel about this passage after the recent events? On the last pages of your book, you seem to be somewhat ambivalent about the use of bombings as a means to increase global justice.

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I re-read Fugitive Days after September 11, and on occasion had to stop in order to catch my breath or wipe my eyes. The opening of the chapter on bombing the Pentagon was one such occasion. As a writer I decided to enter that difficult, complex territory with a chirpy, light-hearted tone, to work the style, that is, against the content. After September 11 nothing much felt light-hearted, certainly not the phrase »bomb the Pentagon« with the image of a commercial airliner transformed into a bomb which would randomly incinerate hundreds of innocent people. But that chapter does something else - it narrates the stories of two groups of young Americans. One group, determined, somewhat despairing, a bit off the tracks, steels itself in order to put a small bomb in a pipe in the Pentagon in order to sound a searing alarm against the war. The act was designed as a symbol, and as intended, no one was hurt or injured. Another group of young Americans, frightened, despairing, and also off the tracks, enters a Vietnamese village and kills 347 people outright, and then rapes, loots, maims, tortures, burns homes, and slaughters animals. The intention was partly symbolic, a symbol of random death and ongoing danger, and it was harrowingly real as well. The question that I raise in the chapter is this: What is terrorism?

I wrote a memoir, not a manifesto nor a polemic nor a diatribe nor a defense. I try to capture something of the resonant feeling of those times, the color and the texture and the tone, and to tell the story of how one boy lived his life, negotiated the tricky terrain of chance and choice, woke up to a world in flames, and came of age inside a whirlwind of violence.

Of course, one of the terrible facts of our world is the existence of violence - not as the tactical choice of a few, but as the core characteristic of a wide range of social relations. In our own history the existence of slavery is the clearest example - whole generations could grow up and die and never lift a hand against one another and yet the relationship, if adequately examined and understood, was violent at its very core. Colonialism is another such relationship. During the war against Viet Nam every American was implicated in acts of violence - we knew what was being done in our names, we saw and read about instances of the terror in gory detail, and we were called upon to watch and to accede. Many of us resisted, some of us took extreme measures.

I don\'t believe, however, that tactics should ever elevate above strategy or principle. Global justice doesn\'t grow out of the barrel of a gun nor is it at the end of a lighted fuse. Justice will come from the hearts and minds of millions of people hoping for a fairer and more peaceful world, and stirred to act together against the obstacles to their liberation. The measure, then, of the value of any tactic is how it serves the goal of educating or organizing many, many other people. This doesn\'t rule out militant, or extreme, or creative, or even armed action - it simply offers a standard from which to judge.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] In retrospect, do you think the campaign you started under the name Weather Underground did contribute to the end of the Vietnam war? If yes, in what respects?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I do. We were a small part of the largest international antiwar movement in history. The anti-war movement limited the options of the war-makers, allowing a range of progressive options and movements to emerge and flourish. The Vietnamese people themselves, of course, mobilized and united, were the decisive element and force in their own national liberation.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] The Weather campaign was strictly targeted at military institutions, and institutions alone, not the people representing them, or people working there in possibly low-paid jobs. The president back then, Richard Nixon, called the actions »the work of cowardly terrorists«. What is your reaction when you hear exactly the same words under today\'s circumstances?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] While Richard Nixon had it wrong on both counts - we were neither cowardly nor terrorists - George Bush has it half wrong. Others have noted that you can call the September 11 bombers many things, but cowardly isn\'t one of them - they guided those planes right where they wanted them and went to their deaths in the process. They killed thousands of innocent people and they committed a massive crime against humanity, and, yes, they were terrorists. But the language - the catch-all labels and the easy, oft-repeated phrases - is imprecise and unhelpful as well. After all, a couple of decades ago, the US had the bright idea of arming these thugs (a gesture roundly condemned by the Left) calling them »freedom fighters« and aiming them at the Soviet Union. We called them right-wing fundamentalist zealots then, and that is a more accurate identifier today.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] Shortly before September 11, a young demonstrator was shot in Genoa by the Italian Police at an anti-globalization rally. Again, this resonates with scenes from American history: after the incidents at Kent State and Jackson State University in 1970, when authorities fired into the crowds of demonstrators, killing and wounding lots of people, the president blamed it all on the victims (»when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy«, he said). After Genoa, we heard exactly the same phrases. How far, do you think, have we actually progressed or moved from that scenario of 1970?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I don\'t think we can quantify progress or motion so easily. The rulers will always blame the victims, of course, and they will forever turn a blind eye to even the most reasonable aspirations if they feel their power or their wealth threatened in the least. The issues that we faced thirty years ago - imperialism, racism, the growing disparity between rich and poor - challenge us today in new forms. Imperialism never means its withdrawals, and power concedes nothing without a demand. Every generation and every individual must find ways to name the obstacles to democracy and freedom concretely, and to move against them.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] What is your feel vis-a-vis the so called »anti-globalization movement«? Was it, in your opinion, on the right track to effectively challenge the new Empire before September 11? Have their goals been discredited after the attacks?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I take great heart and hope from the recent actions in Seattle, Washington, and Genoa. Young people woke up millions and began to forge an exciting new movement for social justice on a global scale. Recent events affirm the need to strengthen and extend the international movements for economic justice, environmental sanity, human rights and women\'s rights, and criminal justice.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] One of the first actions Weather undertook in 1969 was the blowing-up of a police statue at Haymarket Square in Chicago (opening the historic »Days of Rage«⁴). After the statue was re-erected again a year later, you blew it up a second time. The actions appear to have been motivated by a significant sense of humor?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] True - a kind of bratty, outrageous, juvenile delinquent sense of humor always rode along in the sidecar of our earnest self-righteousness.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] A lot of references of your movement came, of course, from pop culture. For instance, a lot of Bob Dylan was used: the line »You don\'t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows« gave the movement its initial name, his album title »New Morning« headed a communiqué in 1970, »Maggie\'s Farm« signified the Pentagon in your coded language. How important was that symbolic dimension of the »popular«?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] The youth culture was a culture of opposition - long hair, drugs, rock\'n roll signified a resistant stance in the world. Of course, it was seized, sanitized, and commodified. Even in the 60\'s, »THE SIXTIES« was being sold back to us as a product, bell-bottom pants, say, or revolutionary deodorant. Now, in the fog of nostalgia, it\'s worse - »The 60\'s, Inc.« with an established group of scholars and commentators who attack all renegade accounts of the significance of that time and who defend their authorized views, their patents, through pieces in the New York Times. Janis Joplin\'s image is employed as a pitch-man for Mercedes Benz, John Lennon\'s for Apple, and Martin Luther King\'s, for chrissake, for everything. But culture was and is - as always - deeply contested territory.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] Your acts were primarily conceived as acts of »agitation« and »education« (as you write), mostly with respect to the racist circumstances in large parts of the U.S. back then, and of course the attempted destruction of a people that a famous politician (or general?) wanted to see »bombed back to the Stone Age«. In the light of the developments over the past two decades - how do you assess the success of these education endeavors, especially as towards the goal of making Americans face global political realities?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] On page 285 of Fugitive Days I write:
I think back to my childhood, to the houses in trim rows and the identical lawns and the neat fences; I remember everyone sleeping the deep American sleep, the sleep that still engulfs us and from which I worry we might not awake in time. We are living our isolated lives in our shattered communities, and in our names the U.S. project shatters community everywhere - in the Middle East, in Colombia, in the Philippines. The world roils in agony and despair, the catastrophe deepens, and our ears are covered, our eyes are closed. Perhaps only the bark of bombs at our doors will shake us up after all.

That paragraph startled and saddened me when I re-read it. It didn\'t have to happen. It shouldn\'t have happened. The people of America must wake up and insist that our country become a nation among nations, not a superpower or a superior state, but one among many.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] In your Memoir you also state - referring to the very problem of memory itself - that »America\'s foundational myths - are authorized amnesia«. In a very illuminating passage you describe how the U.S. is driven by a pragmatic sense of »Forget about it. Let\'s move on.« Do you see this deeply-entrenched ideology somehow change under present circumstances?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I hope this period, so full of anguish, fear, and uncertainty, can become the occasion for fundamental change, for a new enlightenment, a reaching out. But, of course, the dogs of war are unleashed, the single-minded slogans are being chanted, and a suffocating unanimity is heard throughout America. I believe that while that unanimity is five miles wide, it is only a millimeter deep, and it must be resisted. Of course, all identity is forged through experience and built on memory, and that\'s as true for a national or social identity as for an individual one. This means that half-remembered events and false memories create a deformed identity capable of ever-repeating disasters. It\'s in the interest of the rich and the powerful to quash memory, and of the rest of us to fight for it, to invite debate, conflict, resolution, forgiveness, imagination, and truth.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] Currently, it appears that the traumas of September 11 have been totally handed over to two major disciplinary machines: to psychological counseling on the individual level, and to a patriotic war machine on the international, global level. There seems to be no intermediary ground in between these two apparatuses to deal with the crisis, to deal with it maybe on a reflective, socio-political level. Maybe you can comment on this?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] True, but this too is part of the territory we must engage and contest. When President Bush says, »Everything changed on September 11,« we must respond that some things changed, but much remains the same, and that our dreams of justice and simple fairness are more intense than ever. We must resist this becoming the occasion for a massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands, for example, or the scuttling of civil liberties, actions already underway. When President Bush says, »Watch what you say,« we should speak up with force and confidence, seek the truth, search our souls, and act on our contingent understandings as best we can. When President Bush repeats »You\'re either with us or you\'re with the terrorists,« we should respond, none of the above.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] »Fugitive Days« gives a vivid account of life in the underground, presenting it in fine-grained everyday detail, without ever glorifying it. Would you say that individual memory usually tends more towards a glorification, or rather to a »neutralization« of traumatic pasts?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] It does both - but politically what\'s important is to tell the truth to power and to challenge »official memory,« which is always anesthetizing and glorifying.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] The Memoir ends when you and Bernardine Dohrn turned yourself over to the FBI in 1980. One wonders - and would have loved to read - what happened then, especially until you became Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Chicago.

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] See the sequel - perhaps I\'ll call it Fugitive Nights.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] Having been on the FBI\'s most-wanted poster (your wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was even designated »the most dangerous woman in America« by J. Edgar Hoover once), your life circumstances seem significantly changed since the Fugitive Days of the seventies. Have you come to peace with America over those 20 years?

[b]Bill Ayers:[/b] I learned long ago, in fact it was a lesson taught to me by the Vietnamese, to make a distinction between the American people, indeed the American landscape and the American ideal, and the US government. I\'ve tried for decades - even in the darkest, most despairing days - to find some balance between loving my life, participating whole-heartedly in the daily joys and challenges it brings - raising our children, teaching my students, taking long eclectic walks through the city at night - and at the same time being wide-awake, engaged in the society and the world, and willing to participate fully in what the known demands of me, to throw my fate on history\'s great wheel. So, no, I\'m not at peace with the United States government and I probably never will be, but I am at peace with myself, with my family, and I experience the day-to-day life of an ordinary person living in happy opposition in extraordinary times.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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