IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 147Is this Ayers’ dark prophecy of a future America ruled by his protégé Obama? The New York
Times review moves towards its conclusion. Reflecting on his varied life in a mellow epiphany of
self-indulgence, Ayers added: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope
and history rhymed.” (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a
War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen,” New York Times, September 11, 2001) Too bad
for the dead and maimed cops and innocent bystanders whose blood purchased these epiphanies for
the privileged elitist Ayers, a gravedigger of protest politics in the US all his life.
The question of the continuing close friendship among Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama began to
emerge in February, thanks to the efforts of certain blogs such as noquarterusa.net, and to a
campaign on this issue conducted by the right-wing radio talk show host and television personality,
Sean Hannity.^45 Gradually, the Ayers question began to seep into the controlled corporate media:
Joe Klein wrote ‘There are other guilt-by-association problems floating out there: the occasional
over-the-top racial statements by Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright; the fact that Obama has been
described as “friendly” with 1960s dilettante-terrorist William Ayers.”’ (Joe Klein, Time, March 6,
2008) The “friendly” was from arch-mindbender David Axelrod. But Bill Burton, Obama’s
spokesman, said Ayers “does not have a role on the campaign.” Ayers said he had no comment on
his relationship with Obama.
A brief look at the final phase of the Weatherman faction before it disappeared into clandestine
safe houses for a decade or more will permit us to understand the ideology of Ayers and Dohrn,
which is important because these ideas live on today most emphatically in the Obama campaign,
and are in danger of being accomplished under a future Obama regime. The atmosphere that
prevailed in the last days of the legal, aboveground existence of the Weatherman faction is
conveyed in an extraordinary article from Liberation News Service written in the final days of 1969.
WEATHERMAN: AN AGENCY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD
WILL RULE THE USA
We can start with an old article from Liberation News Service about one of the last legal public
events the Weathermen ever held, a kind of Christmas and New Years’ party for agents
provocateurs as the student movement entered its death agony: ‘The Weatherman controlling
faction of SDS held a national “war council” here Dec. 27-30. [1969] About 400 young people
showed up at the gathering—nominally SDS’s quarterly national council meeting—to practice
karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the “Weather Bureau” lay
down its political line for revolution in America. The meeting hall was decked with large banners of
revolutionary leaders—Che, Ho, Fidel, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver—hanging from the ceiling.
One entire wall of the ballroom was covered with alternating black and red posters of murdered
Illinois Panther leader Fred Hampton. An enormous cardboard machine gun hung from the ceiling.
Violence was the keynote of the long hours of talk that began Dec. 27. The distinction between
revolutionary armed struggle and violence for its own sake is a major point of contention between
Weatherman and its numerous critics. The strongest debate centered on the question of who is going
to make the American revolution. Weatherman, along with many others in the movement,
recognizes that the American revolution is part of the world struggle against U.S. imperialism, a
struggle for liberation from both colonial and capitalist oppression. Weatherman’s critics maintain,
however, that Weatherman’s internationalism is based on an analysis that ignores capitalist
oppression in America. Weatherman sees revolutionary change in America as happening almost
solely, if at all, as a belated reaction to a successful world revolution including a successful revolt