Bill Ayers

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-problem-with-poetry-students-and-other-lessons-from-derek-walcott

A letter in response to Nicholas Lemann’s article (April 26, 2010), “Terrorism Studies.”

May 17, 2010

New Yorker

Nicholas Lemann’s otherwise excellent review of the current scholarship on terrorism becomes muddled when he attempts to answer the most basic and straightforward question: What is terrorism, anyway (Books, April 26th)? The expert consensus, according to Lemann, includes a few common traits: terrorists have political or ideological objectives, and they intend to spread fear and panic as they intimidate an audience larger than their immediate victims. Good enough, but he then veers off track: terrorists are non-state actors, he claims, which exempts Russia’s brutality in Chechnya, Iraq’s crushing of the Kurds, Sherman’s march to the sea, and countless other horrors and atrocities throughout history designed to cause terror for a political goal. Terrorists, he continues, target ordinary citizens, or, when they kill soldiers, their attacks don’t take place on the field of battle. That’s a convenient tautology: if any conventional government decides to pound a village to dust, it’s a field of battle; if a villager kills a soldier in the exact same spot before the invasion commences, that’s terrorism. Terrorism, according to Webster’s, is “a mode of governing, or of opposing a government, by intimidation.” This definition has the virtue of consistency and fairness; it focuses on the use of coercive violence, whether committed by a religious cult, a political sect, a group of zealots, or the state itself.

William Ayers, Chicago, Ill.

I know that health care legislation is massively complicated, difficult for ordinary citizens to understand, and nightmarish for leaders like you to grapple with as you work to move things forward for the good of all. I’ve followed the debates, and I think you can easily cut through the fog by applying one of the following simple fixes: everyone should receive the exact health care plan members of Congress vote for themselves; or, massively cut costs by instituting a single-payer program (government paid health care, similar but better than Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, or the National Health Service) which would quickly put the predatory health insurance industry out of business and simultaneously weaken the power of Big Pharma.

Whatcha think?

Bill

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chicagoinc/ct-bernadine-dohrn-close-cook-jounty-jail-0314-chicago-inc-20170313-story.html

It is one thing to curl one’s lip in disgust at ISIS and to sneer at the Eastern maladies of dictatorship and religion that seem to curdle the social worlds of West Asia. It is another to acknowledge the authorship of the United States in the destruction of nations in the region, and its role in the incubation of groups like ISIS. How does one even begin to consider that Bush—the instigator of the destruction of Iraq—is now considered to be an avuncular figure among liberals? It is a sign of his own anxiety that Bush decided to paint veterans. Perched in his study, he must ponder the cost of the war on those who wear the uniform of the United States. But there are no paintings of Iraqis, civilians, or soldiers. There is no mention of the million Iraqis who died as a consequence of Bush’s decision to conduct what the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called an “illegal war.” Not one of the profiles in courage includes the Iraqis who collaborated with the U.S. occupation and now find themselves unable to enter the United States as a consequence of Trump’s Muslim ban.

http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/features/a25279/bernardine-dohrn-trump-protest/