[lit-ideas] Re: Stanley Fish, Ayers & the Manson Family

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 23:49:47 -0700

Mike,

Now, now.  You have everything wrong as usual.  I’ve listened to the parole
hearings and these former Manson terrorists and reputable testimony provides
evidence that many have turned their lives around.  Don’t you believe in
repentance?  Heck, some of the Manson girls are more repentant than Ayers
and Dohrn – which wouldn’t be hard since they aren’t repentant at all.  As
to associated them with Ayres and Dohrn, Bernardine did that herself.
Listen to Bernardine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn):

“Dohrn has been criticized for a comment she made about the recent Charles
Manson <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson>  led Tate-LaBianca
murders in a speech during the December 1969 "War Council" meeting organized
by the Weathermen and attended by about 400 people in Flint, Michigan
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan> : "Dig it! First they killed
those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!" Dohrn also
charged that her fellow left-wingers showed themselves to be scared
"honkies" for not burning down Chicago when Black Panther
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panthers>  leader Fred Hampton
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton>  was killed, and urged her
audience to arm themselves and be "a fighting force alongside the
blacks."[9] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn>  Dohrn's
husband, Bill Ayers <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers>  has written
that Dohrn was being ironic when she made the statement:[10]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn> ”  

Well, yeah, Ironic.  Aren’t we all?

As to the Vietnam war you say I still haven’t a clue about.  It was part of
our “containment policy,” the policy originated by Kennan and Acheson during
the Truman administration.  The policy credited with winning the Cold War
for us.  The Vietnam war was part of that ongoing policy of resisting
Communist aggression wherever we could.  Of course we made no secret about
this policy.  The Soviets knew as much about it as we did, maybe more,
because they launched a very effective campaign against our containment
policy.  They were at their best during the Vietnam war convincing countless
brainless Americans that they should oppose America and support the Soviet
cause.  They did a really good job of it, those Soviet propagandists,
because the Americans who were caught up by that propaganda still believe it
40 years later.  Listen Dohrn hoping for a new and better communist future
for America.  She’s still opposed to the American Liberal Democracy.  So is
Ayers.   And I am suspicious of anyone who calls these two respectable.  

Lawrence Helm





From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Geary
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 10:57 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Stanley Fish, Ayers & the Manson Family

LH:
>>what you write brings up a recollection of another 60s set of activists,
the Manson family<<
 
 
Nice, Lawrence, equating Ayers and Dohrn with the Manson family.  You're a
treasure.  That would make them psychopaths and Obama and University of
Illinois and all who support Obama psychopathic as well, no?  
 
 
>>If there is a principle, why haven’t any of the Manson family been given a
clean slate?<<
 
My guess is that after all these years you still haven't a clue how
destructive the war in Vietnam was to the fabric of American society, that
war and the Civil Rights movement combined to change everything for some
many people.  
 
As Naomi Jaffe wrote: "We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive
violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think
is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your
white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in
to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do
anything about it, that's violence." 
 
At what point does one become a willing executioner?  Do you have to
physically pull the trigger or are you just as guilty by turning your head
away and quietly paying your taxes?  I don't know.  At what point does it
become morally imperative to actively oppose one's government?  These are
hard questions and I've no doubt they will always be answered individually,
not in accord with some reasoned limit. 
 
To equate ritual murder by a group of psychopaths with the violence of
political dissidents seems hideously obscene to me.   I have and always will
condemn a turn to violence except as a very last essential resort to save
life.  I understand the rage that drove the radicals of the 60's but
violence only breeds violence and condemnation.  They might as well have
shot themselves.  In fact, that may have been more effective, but I'm glad
they didn't.  
 
 
Mike Geary
Memphis

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