'Praire Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism', the political statement of the Weather Underground co-authored by William Ayers, is now available for review online. Fewer radical documents have ever been published in America.
From
Zombie, via
LGF:
After a long search, I was lucky enough to finally get my hands on a copy of the original edition of Prairie Fire, which is now extremely rare and hard to find. It was written in secret while Ayers and his fellow Weather Underground members were still in hiding and on the run, and still actively engaging in bombings and other violent acts.
This essay features many high-resolution scans of quotes and entire pages taken directly from Prairie Fire, which journalists, bloggers and other media members are free to copy and re-post.
So far in 2008, there has been almost no mention of this manifesto and its insurrectionary goals. It seems as if the media, William Ayers, Barack Obama and his supporters don't want you to know about Prairie Fire. Which is exactly why you need to see it.
You can read the
entire text at Zombie.
Here are some key excerpts:
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.
Ayers is often referred to as an 'anti-war activist' of the '60s. Yet he himself was waging war against the US, advocated that position, and was even supporting the defeat of American soldiers in Vietnam in support of Ho Chi Minh's Communist paradise-to-be.
Ayers did get his way on that one. But we all know how that
turned out.
Zombie also has some interesting commentary on the subject:
Ayers was not simply protesting “against” the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn’t against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn’t against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire.
Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Underground as the justifications for their violent acts.
As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings — their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.
The next one might be familiar to those of you who saw the inside of Obama's Houston
campaign office.
THE BANNER OF CHE
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
If you read
this DJ OpEd I wrote recently, you'll find that philosophy hasn't changed with time. At all. He in fact sees even the educational system as a tool of revolution from the inside. He said that himself at an 'education conference' in Venezuela in 2006.
There is more at Zombie and LGF. Much more.
However, as relates to Obama and the election, you have to ask yourself if any of this is relevant on the following grounds:
1. Obama had a very close political relationship with Ayers and Dohrn for over a decade. He even launched his political career at Ayers' house in 1995. Does that association matter?
2. Though Obama has frequently used the 'set off bombs forty years ago' argument, Ayers is in fact still a revolutionary radical. The only thing that's changed is he now uses the classroom instead of explosives to force his ideology on others.
3. If the association of Obama/Ayers is a valid one, does not the similarity in theme of Ayers' past radical words with his
present ones become a relevant political issue vis-a-vis Obama? And if not, why not?
This has been a heated subject on both sides of the political aisle: by those Obama supporters who believe the Ayers relationship is a chimera, and those Obama detractors who believe Ayers is not only a close political associate of Obama's, but that their 10-plus year relationship in a variety of roles in Chicago is totally relevant to Obama's campaign, and that the American people need to know just whom Obama's been associating with throughout his political career and what influence they might have with him now.
In closing, it might also be noteworthy to include that a book review Obama wrote on Ayers' 'A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court' is now being
denied as ever being written by the Obama campaign, which seems eager now to distance themselves from Ayers and all the resultant negative fallout.
If that is what the campaign is saying about Obama's review of Ayers' book,
they are a liar.
Why would the Obama campaign say such a thing, if not to distance themselves from Ayers even further?
They seem to care about all this.
The real question is, should we?
