Many readers are aware that Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was on-hand for the anti-Trump demonstration in Chicago on Friday night. The demonstration, organized by Soros-funded MoveOn.org (see here, here, here), turned violent, and got Trump’s planned campaign rally cancelled.
On Saturday, Ayers tweeted out a picture of what he called “the dining room alter [sic],” which shows images of radical figures grouped over what appears to be a brick fireplace arch.
The dining room alter pic.twitter.com/IXyaHCTp8a
— Bill Ayers (@WilliamAyers) March 12, 2016
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
(Putting Martin Luther King, Jr. with Malcolm X is one thing — disjunctive and brow-raising — as is the rather humorous inclusion of Edward Snowden. Juxtaposing any of them them with mass murderer Che Guevara is grotesque. The dolls are a particularly ghoulish touch. H/t: Tim Brown.)
These are the last few tweets prior to the “dining room alter” tweet.
America is not white, thank goodness, and the future belongs to the rainbow. The times they are a changin'
— Bill Ayers (@WilliamAyers) March 12, 2016
When the Hate Train rolls into your space, OCCUPY!
— Bill Ayers (@WilliamAyers) March 12, 2016
Oh, Mark. I didn't know you cared. Sweet https://t.co/jDOhzhs2MY
— Bill Ayers (@WilliamAyers) March 12, 2016
Nothing says “ash heap of history” like a superannuated fanboy terrorist. Not exactly what Hannah Arendt had in mind with the “banality of evil” – but surely a corollary to the proposition.
In any case, Ayers’ reference to an “altar” – and the implication of worshiping at a shrine to bloodthirsty evil – cued the echo of a memory for me. The memory wasn’t of a previous allusion to an altar by Ayers or one of his associates, but it was an invocation of “altar” imagery by a scholar of their movement’s vileness and perversion: Paul Kengor.
In 2010, Kengor did a series of interviews with Breitbart just after the publication of his book Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. (Which procure forthwith and read, if you haven’t.)
The interview series was posted in segments, and the one that dealt with Bernardine Dohrn and the infamous Weatherman (or Weather Underground) “war council” of December 1969 has the passage in question. Here is an extended excerpt:
Big Peace: [T]he Weathermen…were communists, right?
Kengor: Yes. The shift toward the Weathermen was the culmination of a rift within SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. SDS had soured into a witches’ brew of varying factions, from anti-war liberals to Maoists, followers of Che and Fidel, and even the occasional Stalinist. [Mark] Rudd was disturbed by the unusual “adulation of Joseph Stalin” among some comrades.
Another critical area of separation was the divergent feelings about violence. Advocacy of violence was a central reason why Weathermen went underground. But it wasn’t the only reason. Some were interacting with foreign adversaries. Bill Ayers was inspired by the Cuban revolution–still is. Ayers is currently swept up with Hugo Chavez, as are many “Progressives for Obama.” Not coincidentally, Chavez is a huge fan of Obama, who he calls “hope.”
In Dupes, I look at the connection between the Weathermen and Cuba, the KGB, Soviet Bloc, and Vietcong.
Big Peace: In Chicago from 1968-69, these folks held several major events. You have a couple chapters on this in Dupes.
Kengor: Yes, the slogan was “BRING THE WAR HOME!” …
In October 1969, they uncorked their National Action in Chicago. Rudd affirmed the cornerstone of the plan: “In Chicago the pigs [police] have to be wiped out. We’re going to fight with violence and wipe out Chicago.”
Big Peace: Also there were Ayers, Dohrn, Hayden, the usual suspects. You write that “what ensued was an organized riot.”
Kengor: Yes, commencing on October 5, 1969, when the peace-loving “flower children” dynamited the statue commemorating the Chicago police killed in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. … They clashed with over 1,000 police, many injured, and one city official paralyzed.
Big Peace: Of course, Bernardine Dohrn was there.
Kengor: The day after the initial rampage, the young Reds were licking their wounds, bruised and beaten. There to buck up the boys and girls at a Grant Park rally was Bernardine Dohrn, anointed commissar of the “Women’s Militia.” …
Big Peace: You write that the most infamous moment was the “War Council” held in Flint, Michigan on December 27, 1969, attended by some 400 “student troops.” John Jacobs created another fitting slogan: “We’re against everything that’s good and decent.”
Kengor: Yes, that was quickly made manifest when an indecent Bernardine Dohrn grabbed the microphone and, true to form, went on a scorching rant, shouting: “We’re about being crazy motherf—ers!”
Like a radical revival meeting, Mark Rudd got caught up in the fervor, uttering words he later regretted: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up something.”
Likewise moved by the spirit, Kathy Boudin, a red-diaper baby who later did prison-time for murder, and today is on Columbia’s faculty, declared all mothers of white children to be “pig mothers.” She spoke of “doing some sh-t like political assassinations.”
Big Peace: Worst of all was Dohrn. This is where she did the four-finger salute?
Kengor: Bernardine enriched the brethren with her ruminations on the Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by the satanic Charles Manson “family.” The victims got no sympathy from Dohrn, the future childcare advocate who today is a faculty member at Northwestern University.
The crime done by the Manson clan was horrific. They ripped open Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and shoved a fork in her belly. Bernardine Dohrn, professor of child education, saw a kind of deliciousness in these “revolutionaries,” sharing her feelings with the assembled. Dohrn thrilled: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
Big Peace: Dohrn was serious, right?
Kengor: Dead serious. The faithful in the room, including Bernadine’s sweetheart, Bill Ayers, knew she was serious. In 1980, David Horowitz, an ex-communist who today is fearless in exposing the insane left, interviewed 30 members of the Weather Underground present at the War Council. He said not one of them doubted that Dohrn was anything but serious.
Indeed, they “dug it.” As Mark Rudd reported, the assembled “instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly.”
[…]
In hindsight, this was a turning point. A line had been crossed, like the Jacobins after the first drop of the guillotine. The blood began to flow, rushing from the altar where Bishop Dohrn saluted and exhorted the faithful. Domestic terror cells, bomb-making units, criminal acts, murder, death–all followed. The Weather Underground proudly took credit for upwards of a dozen bombings. I won’t go through those here.
Where the radical left builds altars, blood flows. Note this well: at the left’s altars, there is never any redemption. There is only perpetual sacrifice.
