Bill Ayers: Mr. Red Star Himself, Part II
Posted by BradHarrington 9 years, 9 months ago to Politics
Part II here, where I really decide to get serious. <big smile>
Brad Harrington
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April 27th, 2010
Ideas DO Matter
By Bradley Harrington
“When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels.” - Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged,” 1957 -
For those who remember the university “Free Speech” riots of the 1960s, the recent University of Wyoming (UW) protest can’t help but introduce a small sense of déjà vu: “Some University of Wyoming students and faculty held a rally Thursday [Apr. 22] denouncing the college’s refusal to allow former 1960s radical William Ayers to speak on campus.” (“Students protest censorship at UW,” Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Apr. 23.)
What has this rally’s attendees so upset about the banning of Ayers? Meg Lanker, UW student and one of the rally organizers, said that students “would have been able to evaluate his ideas, and the university does not give us students the intellectual benefit of the doubt.”
OK, let’s evaluate Mr. Ayers’ ideas; that’s easy enough, as he has aired them for decades.
In 1969, for instance, Mr. Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group, with the goal of overthrowing the “capitalist” U.S. government and establishing a communist society in its place.
Do you understand what communism is, Ms. Lanker? What it preaches and how it is practiced? Communists believe that all individuals should be equal - and, to the extent that they aren’t, will be made equal at the point of a gun. Communists believe that man’s life belongs to society, and that all private property - including yours, including your very life - is to be controlled by the rest of society, i.e., the state.
Wherever communism has been practiced, the results have always been a sea of human blood. In the 20th century, with thanks to communist revolutions in Soviet Russia and Red China alone, it has been documented that more than 60 million human beings were slaughtered in purges, gulags, forced-labor camps, man-made famines and by firing squads - nearly a dozen times the number of Jews executed by Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Nor have Mr. Ayers’ beliefs mellowed over the years: right now, to this very day, Mr. Ayers’ office door at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is decorated with a picture of Che Guevara - Castro's hit man and the person responsible for exterminating thousands of human beings during and after Cuba’s communist revolution.
And that red star you see in the upper left-hand corner of Mr. Ayers’ blog site ( http://www.billayers.org )? That’s the Soviet Red Star - the same star that adorned the tanks that ruthlessly rolled into Eastern Europe during World War II, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tanks which subjected over 300 million human beings to barbarically-enforced subjugation for decades. No, Mr. Ayers means it all right.
Are THESE the ideas you believe would benefit humanity, Ms. Lanker? Are THESE the social practices you think we should be advocating and discussing? Is THIS the kind of “intellectual benefit of the doubt” you profess to grant to murderers, thugs and thieves? And do you seriously presume that it is the role of a university administration to open its campus doors to such types of people? Shucks, why not just invite Castro, Kim Jung-il or Hu Jintao to share their “ideas” for “evaluation” as well? Why screw around with wanna-be punks like William Ayers, when you can have the real thing, blood, guts and all?
While I can understand your poor grasp of the implications of that which Mr. Ayers promotes and advocates - being young and a student, after all, and presumably enrolled in college to gain a comprehension of the wider world around you - that same leeway does not extend itself to the two UW faculty members who also attended your event.
Donal O’Toole, for example, professor of veterinary science, said: “We’re just asking Tom [Buchanan, UW president] to treat this like a real university.” Translation: a “real university” would be one that grants an aura of respectability and credibility to communist gangsters, as if the difference between individual rights and mass annihilation were merely an issue of opinion.
And THIS - for those who seek to understand the manner in which such unspeakable atrocities were ever allowed to occur - explains the fashion in which communist brutes have been able to seize and maintain power in their client states for decades: because the good, which should have known better, chose to whitewash the facts of reality with apologies, claims of “agrarian reform” and characterizations of “youthful idealism” instead of calling institutionalized butchery what it is: butchery. It is an aura of respectability and credibility that the butchers could never have earned on their own merits. And we wonder at the spread of the rule of brute force? You are absolutely correct on one key point, Ms. Lanker: ideas DO matter.
Mr. Ayers, of course, is well aware of the depth of today’s intellectual vacuum, for it takes a special kind of boldness to sue UW in the name of “free speech” - while admiring totalitarian dictatorships where the serfs who dare to exercise it receive imprisonment, beatings and firing squads for their efforts. Now THAT is “government persecution.”
Do you want to make an honest difference in the world, Ms. Lanker? Do you want to fight for ideas? If so, don’t you think the steps of the Chinese embassy would have been a better place to hold your rally?
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Brad Harrington
********************
April 27th, 2010
Ideas DO Matter
By Bradley Harrington
“When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels.” - Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged,” 1957 -
For those who remember the university “Free Speech” riots of the 1960s, the recent University of Wyoming (UW) protest can’t help but introduce a small sense of déjà vu: “Some University of Wyoming students and faculty held a rally Thursday [Apr. 22] denouncing the college’s refusal to allow former 1960s radical William Ayers to speak on campus.” (“Students protest censorship at UW,” Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Apr. 23.)
What has this rally’s attendees so upset about the banning of Ayers? Meg Lanker, UW student and one of the rally organizers, said that students “would have been able to evaluate his ideas, and the university does not give us students the intellectual benefit of the doubt.”
OK, let’s evaluate Mr. Ayers’ ideas; that’s easy enough, as he has aired them for decades.
In 1969, for instance, Mr. Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group, with the goal of overthrowing the “capitalist” U.S. government and establishing a communist society in its place.
Do you understand what communism is, Ms. Lanker? What it preaches and how it is practiced? Communists believe that all individuals should be equal - and, to the extent that they aren’t, will be made equal at the point of a gun. Communists believe that man’s life belongs to society, and that all private property - including yours, including your very life - is to be controlled by the rest of society, i.e., the state.
Wherever communism has been practiced, the results have always been a sea of human blood. In the 20th century, with thanks to communist revolutions in Soviet Russia and Red China alone, it has been documented that more than 60 million human beings were slaughtered in purges, gulags, forced-labor camps, man-made famines and by firing squads - nearly a dozen times the number of Jews executed by Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Nor have Mr. Ayers’ beliefs mellowed over the years: right now, to this very day, Mr. Ayers’ office door at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is decorated with a picture of Che Guevara - Castro's hit man and the person responsible for exterminating thousands of human beings during and after Cuba’s communist revolution.
And that red star you see in the upper left-hand corner of Mr. Ayers’ blog site ( http://www.billayers.org )? That’s the Soviet Red Star - the same star that adorned the tanks that ruthlessly rolled into Eastern Europe during World War II, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tanks which subjected over 300 million human beings to barbarically-enforced subjugation for decades. No, Mr. Ayers means it all right.
Are THESE the ideas you believe would benefit humanity, Ms. Lanker? Are THESE the social practices you think we should be advocating and discussing? Is THIS the kind of “intellectual benefit of the doubt” you profess to grant to murderers, thugs and thieves? And do you seriously presume that it is the role of a university administration to open its campus doors to such types of people? Shucks, why not just invite Castro, Kim Jung-il or Hu Jintao to share their “ideas” for “evaluation” as well? Why screw around with wanna-be punks like William Ayers, when you can have the real thing, blood, guts and all?
While I can understand your poor grasp of the implications of that which Mr. Ayers promotes and advocates - being young and a student, after all, and presumably enrolled in college to gain a comprehension of the wider world around you - that same leeway does not extend itself to the two UW faculty members who also attended your event.
Donal O’Toole, for example, professor of veterinary science, said: “We’re just asking Tom [Buchanan, UW president] to treat this like a real university.” Translation: a “real university” would be one that grants an aura of respectability and credibility to communist gangsters, as if the difference between individual rights and mass annihilation were merely an issue of opinion.
And THIS - for those who seek to understand the manner in which such unspeakable atrocities were ever allowed to occur - explains the fashion in which communist brutes have been able to seize and maintain power in their client states for decades: because the good, which should have known better, chose to whitewash the facts of reality with apologies, claims of “agrarian reform” and characterizations of “youthful idealism” instead of calling institutionalized butchery what it is: butchery. It is an aura of respectability and credibility that the butchers could never have earned on their own merits. And we wonder at the spread of the rule of brute force? You are absolutely correct on one key point, Ms. Lanker: ideas DO matter.
Mr. Ayers, of course, is well aware of the depth of today’s intellectual vacuum, for it takes a special kind of boldness to sue UW in the name of “free speech” - while admiring totalitarian dictatorships where the serfs who dare to exercise it receive imprisonment, beatings and firing squads for their efforts. Now THAT is “government persecution.”
Do you want to make an honest difference in the world, Ms. Lanker? Do you want to fight for ideas? If so, don’t you think the steps of the Chinese embassy would have been a better place to hold your rally?
********************
