Fugitive Days - Bill Ayers

FUGITIVE DAYS

MEMOIRS OF AN ANTIWAR ACTIVIST

BILL AYERS

'How can we make the decision makers hear us, insulated as they are, if they cannot hear the screams of a little girl burned by napalm?' This for Bill Ayers is the question that leads to the formation of America's most well-known urban guerilla group, the Weather Underground, of which he was once a prominent member.

As cited in his memoir, Fugitive Days – Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist, there are other moments as well that point and nudge him inexorably towards the conclusion that the formation of a radical political organisation willing to take up arms was the answer to the problems of America, and in particular to the war in Vietnam. Tiny, fleeting moments of illumination that at the time of occurring were never really dwelt upon or considered further but were seeds being sown that would eventually blossom into a genuine fighting force in the streets of America.

'Did you know,' says Ayers' partner one night 'that Simone Weil proposed to parachute behind enemy lines in World War II in order to carry out sabotage? And here I am already behind enemy lines'. It's said as a throwaway remark, a comment seemingly of no consequence but important enough to be remembered years later.

From the calling out of a simple slogan – End the War! - to the calling out of another slogan – Bring the War Home! - was but a very small step, as it was to another – Create Chaos in the Mother Country! If the world was in flames, as indeed it appeared to be during the Vietnam war years, it was almost logical that in order to join the struggle on the side of the Vietnamese, the Black Panthers and oppressed people everywhere that a second front be opened right inside the belly of the beast so as to drive a stake through its heart. That second front was the Weather Underground.

As every good revolutionary knows (or will come to know) there comes a time where you will ask 'What now? Where now?'. Once all avenues of prescribed protest have been exhausted and you hit an impasse where what is being protested will not budge or buckle, you will come to ask what else can be done to further your cause?

Do you continue to try and reach out to more people to get them on your side? To try and hit some kind of tipping point? It makes sense to do so but as every good revolutionary will also come to learn - there is no tipping point. It's a myth. They've got the guns but we've got the numbers, as the saying goes but again this is another myth. A million men may march for their rights or to end the war or to ban the Bomb or whatever, but to hope that this will make a difference is to hope against hope.

So if a demonstration will never force the hand of a government then what is the point of it, you might ask? Why march through the streets and to a seat of power if when you get there no-one's home and you're left shouting at an empty building? Why march to the White House, or to 10 Downing Street or wherever if when you get there those inside slam shut the door in your face then for good measure unleash the hounds upon you?

As history tells us, the point of a demonstration is not to send to those in the seat of power a message but to send a message to those alongside you. The point is not to shout to the top but to whisper to the side. To let others know that they are not alone and that there are other people who think and feel the same as them. The point of a demonstration is to create and present a physical manifestation of unity and commonality over any given issue.

Having marched a thousand times already, the Weather Underground instead blew up one day a statue of the police officer who gave the order to shoot protesters in the Haymarket Massacre of 1886. They were under no illusions, however. They knew that it was a symbolic act that wasn't going to bring a halt to the war in Vietnam but at the time it just seemed the right thing to do – and they were right. The action caused outrage but at the same time met with a lot of approval from the more enlightened spectrum of society.

In retaliation and to show he would not be intimidated by such an act of vandalism, the Mayor of Chicago where the statue was based ordered that it be repaired and re-erected, only for it to be blown up by the Weather Underground again a few months later. To this day, the statue is standing again but is now inside the Chicago Police Academy where it has a full-time guard and is entirely inaccessible to the public.

In hindsight, this was probably one of the Weather Underground's most successful actions, certainly being far more successful than their Days of Rage riot where they had called upon everyone to descend upon Chicago so as to really bring the war home to the streets of America.

Expecting up to 25,000 people to join them, it ended up instead with about 250 – the hardest of the hardcore – decked out in motorcycle helmets and padding, armed with slingshots, bricks and billy clubs. Unswayed, undiminished and unbowed by their lack of numbers, to chants of 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' they swarmed upon the city destroying bank windows and luxury cars, pre-empting Stop The City and Black Bloc tactics by years.

Up against the lines of better-trained and better-armed police they paid the price, of course, and had their arses thoroughly kicked. History, however, was in the making and though the action was a failure, in tactical terms and lessons learned it was a defining moment, though not quite as defining as the other great Weather Underground disaster known as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, where members of the group blew themselves up whilst manufacturing bombs.

The premise of and the aims of the Weather Underground were noble and totally, absolutely, irrefutably correct. Millions of people were being killed in Indochina as millions of tons of explosives were being rained down upon the land. Every day that went by the figure grew higher as the atrocities got worse. In My Lai the entire village was slaughtered without mercy by American troops, and in Kent State unarmed students were shot dead. In the face of this, attending another peace march was a luxury and a decadent one at that – in the eyes of some, at least. Under such circumstances, planting a bomb in the Pentagon seemed to be an answer though in actual fact it was the complete opposite: Letting a bomb off in the Pentagon wasn't an answer but a question.

As Bill Ayers writes: 'What does the dream of social justice ask of us? What are the obstacles to our humanity? How shall we live? To say 'We want justice' makes utter sense but to add 'But of course not by any means' is to put your neck on the chopping block. Say the unjust are particularly powerful, as they so often are in our world, and enforcing a wide range of painful social relations, and say they make it clear that any serious opponent will be jailed or shot. They insist on only “peaceful” protest, prescribed and entirely in-bounds and they enforce that dictate with clubs and guns and rockets. They grant themselves a monopoly on power, an exclusive franchise on violence, and they use it. What then?'

That is the question – to which there is no one single answer. And that - right there - is also the difference between those who would wage a war without end seeing millions dead – and the likes of Bill Ayers and those who would do more than just raise an eyebrow.

Fugitive Days is an interesting read and unlike a lot of memoirs serves a purpose other than stroking the author's ego, though weirdly there is an element of that here too. I don't suppose Ayers wrote it as a money making exercise as I can't imagine there's much money to be made from the subject. No, I think it's more to do with his personal legacy and how the Weather Underground might be remembered in the future. Thankfully and somewhat satisfyingly, Ayers regrets nothing and apologises for even less. There is no rebuke of the principles that drove him to bomb the Pentagon which in light of the age the world found itself in post-9/11 is actually a very brave thing to do.

Throughout the book there is a constant theme of memory and of remembering that reaches its zenith when Ayers writes about 'the commodification of memory', inspired by of all things a Starbucks napkin celebrating the company's silver anniversary.

'25 years ago', it says on the napkin 'The astronauts of Apollo 14 went for a drive over the moon's surface... Radicals from the Weather Underground exploded a bomb in the US Capitol... And the Baltimore Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys in the final five seconds of Super Bowl V'.

The moon, the bombs, and the Super Bowl. All placed with equal standing on a napkin celebrating 25 years of a multi-national company. Each event as important (or unimportant?) as the next. Moments in history captured and rendered upon a napkin to be thrown away after use. An ephemeral product. An ephemeral culture. An ephemeral history.

The world turns. Empires rise and empires fall. Wars are won and wars are lost. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Extinction looms. And here we all are once again - as we have always been and probably ever shall be – asking: What now? Where now?

The silence in return is deafening.

John Serpico