Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in 2008 | 60s radicalism | Obama | terrorism | Weatherman — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows — Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the wind blew rumors of sedition, revolution and terrorism from the Left. It disclosed the falsity of the association of the anti-war movement with noble pacifism. In truth this falsity should have been evident to anyone still possessed of his critical intellect. The Jacobins were very far from being pacifists; and virtually every subsequent revolutionary movement, from anarchism to syndicalism, from Fascism to Communism, included some notion of sacred violence or justified terrorism. The quasi-revolution of the Sixties never accomplished much in the way of violence, at least in the sense of violence sufficient to threaten the regime; but it was not for lack of intent.

With that context, consider this article from the Politico:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

[. . .]

Unlike some other fringe figures of the era, [Ayers and Dohrn are] flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

“I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.

The Politico reporter comments that, “Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.”

Leftist terrorists, you see, are marked by “ambiguity.” Attempted murder, insurrection, failed bombings of American soldiers, “we didn’t do enough” — an ambiguous record indeed. By way of analogy, we might reflect briefly on the chances of an abortion clinic bomber, supposing merely that his intrigues by and large failed, earning the quintessential postmodern appellation ambiguous. We might reflect, again analogically, on the reaction to the discovery that a GOP frontrunner was associated with a clinic bomber.

Sen. Obama’s choice here is pretty clear: he can repudiate domestic terrorists, or he can temporize. He can stand for a simple standard of morality, which declares that the deliberate murder of innocents is wrong, always and everywhere; or he can favor “ambiguity.”

As for William Ayer and Bernardine Dohrn, well, with apologies to Bob Dylan, we’ll leave them to their own special Desolation Row, where, as part of a Peace Movement protesting a war, one builds bombs designed to dismember young soldiers at a social event.

To them, death is quite romantic
They wear an iron vest
Their profession’s their religion
Their sin is their lifelessness
And though their eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
They spends their time peeking
Into Desolation Row

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UPDATE: It appears that some whitewashing is going on over at Wikipedia.