Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

 Mark Kleiman, Brad Delong and Dave Noon all gleefully link to Hilzoy’s fierce rebuttal to Bill Ayers’ New York Times Op-Ed where he seeks to explain his past. Most of the points Hilzoy raises are quite fair, especially her last one about the “underpants gnome” theory of political violence. Basically, despite any justification the Weather Underground could cook up for their bombing campaign, it was very obvious at the time how ineffective it would be at actually ending the Vietnam war. This point seems to be the most devastating, and suggests that the biggestflaw in Ayers and Dohrn wasn’t their fondness for violence or their self-righteous, but instead their extreme narcissism. 

But I want to dispute two points that are being made against Ayers. One, I disagree with Hilzoy and Noon’s questioning of why the Times gave Ayers the Op-Ed space at all. Despite the Ayers-mongering proving that “his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was irrelevant to the outcome of the campaign,” it’s still worth noting that this man was turned into a figure of revile and hate by the Vice Presidential nominee and much of the right-wing media, and had his story presented to the public totally stripped of context or explanation. At the very least, he should be able to present his side of what happenned.

The second point is that there is something very odd in our political discourse, where Bill Ayers, who really didn’t kill anyone (the case of Diana Oughton and the two others who died in the Greenwich  can be attributed to negligence on the part of the other people building the bomb, not malice on the part of Ayers) has to justify his being a national forum, while Henry Kissinger, who is partially responsible for the killing of some 200,00 people in Indonesia and the untold sufferings caused by some 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia (the Allies dropped “just” 2 million tons of bombs in World War II) (not to mention recalling the American diplomat who documented Pakistan-committed atrocities in West Pakistan, now Bangladesh), can opine about American foreign policy in the Washington Post without any real questioning of his past activities. It seems like he has much more to answer for than Bill Ayers.