The End of an Empire is Messy

How do you start a revolution without shedding blood or overtly overthrowing the government? Is bloodshed necessary? Follow the path of William Ayers and the Weather Underground for answers.

"In 1969, a small group of leftist college student radicals announced their intentions to overthrow the U.S. government in opposition to the Vietnam War", according to Wikipedia."

As a cofounder of the Weather Underground, Ayers sought to start a revolution in the 60's and 70's, deploying bombs against American citizens as the need arose. Although never being convicted of a crime due to a technicality, Ayers proclaimed on September 11, 2001 that "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough"--when asked if he would do it all again, he saidas "I don't want to discount the possibility."

Fast forward to November, 2006, when Ayers spoke in front of a “distinguished” group of guests in Venezuela, including Hugo Chavez, and said "the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis (educator) as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane. Thank you, Luis, for everything you’ve done" (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2099317/posts)

"I also thank my youngest son, Chesa Boudin, who is interpreting my talk this morning and whose book on the Bolivarian revolution has played an important part in countering the barrage of lies spread by the U.S. State Department and the corrupted North American media."

Ayers went on to speak of educators he admires, "They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

Ayers began his career at 20, working at Head Start. (Sound familiar?)

"I taught at first in something like a Simoncito—called Head Start—and eventually taught at every level in barrios and prisons and insurgent projects across the United States. I learned then that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society? Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens."

Ayer's continued, praising Venezuela's educational reform as well as "enlightenment and liberation".

"Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation"

Ayers clearly illustrated that educational reform was a means to change from capitalism, racism and militarism to a more humane and revolutionary model, as enacted by the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chavez. Does Obama share his desire for educational reform? I checked his website which included the following plan to "assist" parents with "zero to five" universal pre-school and quadrupling the budget for "Early Head Start"; Obama's plan also includes a "voluntary" assessment for teachers and churning out 30,000 recruits to high need schools (see below).

Early Childhood Education · Zero to Five Plan:

The Obama-Biden comprehensive "Zero to Five" plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, the Obama-Biden plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama and Biden will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state "zero to five" efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

· Expand Early Head Start and Head Start: Obama and Biden will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both.

· Affordable, High-Quality Child Care: Obama and Biden will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.

Obama even has ideas on the teachers who will educate the children.

· Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.

(Source: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/)

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Barack and Michelle Obama seem to share the same vision for the youth of this country as well as recruiting teachers. She was stumping on October 1, 2008 exhorted:

“....young American's to give back to their communities by "decid[ing] to walk away from big-paying jobs to maybe teach or work in the community." Michelle and her husband did this, but she also recognized an ever growing problem that "when you do [work in the community] and you've gone to great schools, you find your salary isn't enough to cover the cost of your debt... We want a president who knows that the importance of education should not be dependent upon whether you can afford it." (Source: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/01/1476453.aspx)

Though we know very little of Mrs. Obama's social positions, we do know that she said this about redistribution of wealth:

"Most Americans, she said, don't want much."

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."...

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership...for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

Who knows if Barack and Michelle Obama, William Ayers, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Lenin have similar ideas about education? Oh, did I forget to mention Lenin? In a speech given in front of an enthusiastic crowd in 1920 he described the process of changing a capitalist society into a communistic one as follows:

"It is all the more necessary to dwell on this question because in a certain sense it may be said that it is the youth that will be faced with the actual task of creating a communist society. For it is clear that the generation of working people brought up in capitalist society can, at best, accomplish the task of destroying the foundations of the old, the capitalist way of life, which was built on exploitation. At best it will be able to accomplish the tasks of creating a social system that will help the proletariat and the working classes retain power and lay a firm foundation, which can be built on only by a generation that is starting to work under the new conditions, in a situation in which relations based on the exploitation of man by man no longer exist.

How? Lenin explains:

“And so, in dealing from this angle with the tasks confronting the youth, I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organizations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.”

"Of course, this is only a "single word". It does not reply to 20 the principal and most essential questions: what to learn, and how to learn? And the whole point here is that, with the transformation of the old, capitalist society, the upbringing, training and education of the new generations that will create the communist society cannot be conducted on the old lines. The teaching, training and education of the youth must proceed from the material that has been left to us by the old society. We can build communism only on the basis of the totality of knowledge, organizations and institutions, only by using the stock of human forces and means that have been left to us by the old society. "Only by radically remolding the teaching, organization and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society."

YIKES! Why did this come to mind? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM

"That is why we must deal in detail with t he question of what we should teach the youth and how the youth should learn if it really wants to justify the name of communist youth, and how it should be trained so as to be able to complete and consummate what we have started."

"You have to build up a communist society. In many respects half of the work has been done. The old order has been destroyed, just as it deserved, it has been turned into a heap of ruins, just as it deserved".

From William Ayers blog: "The end of an empire is messy at best...and this one is ending like all the rest.” Randy Newman

"The ground has been cleared, and on this ground the younger communist generation must build a communist society."

YIKES again! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mvP0ArKIGY

Unfortunately, in Lenin’s vision, fifty year olds were not expected to see the glory land.

“The generation of people who are now at the age of fifty cannot expect to see a communist society. This generation will be gone before then. But the generation of those who are now fifteen will see a communist society, and will itself build this society. This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a communist society. In the old society, each family worked separately and labor was not organized by anybody except the landowners and capitalists, who oppressed the masses of the people.”

So has Bill Ayers been rehabilitated? Or has Bill Ayers found comrades in a bloodless battle to indoctrinate the youth, overthrow capitalism and start a communist revolution? From his "reunion" speech at Michigan State University in November, 2007:

"I saw a world in flames...
We had a view that we could change things. We believed that we could make a difference. Together we really are going to change things."

"We have to open our eyes and see the world as it is. Get a vision of what else could be what the options are, what the alternatives are.
I love the slogan from the world social forum, another world is possible."

"I think this is a moment of unprecedented opportunity for movement building. By that I mean a movement is quite different than a project or an organization or a campaign although all those things are part of it. A movement is when people can make the connection between, as we used to say in the civil rights system...between a rotting shack and a rotting system."

Somehow when Ayers says “the end of an empire is messy”, it doesn't sound patriotic.