http://www.countercurrents.org/voniati020709.htm
By Christiana Voniati
02 July, 2009
On my way to the "Kala Kathoumena" coffee shop, in the old city of
Nicosia , I was wondering how a terrorist looks like. I had an
appointment with Bill Ayers, whose radical organisation, in the 60's,
had accomplished what the terrorist mullahs failed to accomplish on
9/11: to bomb the US Capitol. During the presidential race that
preceded Obama's election, the 64 year old education theorist and
Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois of Chicago had
come under fierce attack from the American Right. They called him a
"state enemy", an "unrepentant terrorist" and "Obama's political mentor".
During the Vietnam war, when Ayers was 25, he co-founded a legendary
revolutionary organisation, the "Weather Underground", which acted in
the broader context of the anti-war movement, and Ayers was on the
FBI's Most Wanted list. The militant action of the radical
organisation, which included the bombing of empty government
buildings as well as several banks, was characterised by the US
government as "domestic terrorism". As soon as I met Ayers, from the
very moment I shook hands with him, it was apparent to me that this
was a case of a charismatic and multi-dimensional man, with
inexhaustible faith in, and profound love for, the humankind, and
whose fiery yet eloquent spirit can enrapture, inspire and win over a
disbelieving intellectual, as much as an illiterate worker. The
questionnaire I had meticulously prepared for the purposes of the
interview seemed oddly unnecessary. I set it aside and let the
conversation take its course…
You say, a teacher's message is this: "You can change your life
-whoever you are, wherever you've been, whatever you've done, another
world is possible."
For all of my life as a teacher that is, since 1965 - I've been
saying that the reason why teaching is so powerful and dynamic, so
intellectually challenging and so ethically interesting, is precisely
because the message of teaching is that you can change! You can
change in an individual way, but if you take that message one step
further, you can say that you can also change the world. I 've taught
everywhere; I 've taught in juvenile detention systems, I 've taught
in prisons. When you're a teacher in prison, you are up against the
harsh reality, but you're still saying to these guys that no matter
what you've done, you can change. You can create another world. And
if we unite together, we can change not only our own lives but we can
change the world. This is the message of teaching, this is the
message of community organising: a profoundly democratic message. And
that's what draws me back to teaching again and again.
But how can one determine democracy? You can have a participatory
democracy, or an abstract notion of democracy, wherein citizens are
kept at distance and distracted from the decision-making processes
and the public sphere. Or there's the "democratisation" that the West
is trying to transfer to other countries, such as Iraq , for example.
The "democratisation" of Iraq was a lie on which the US have been
permitted to wage a war. There was never any intention to bring
democracy to Iraq . In fact my joke always was… I don't know if you
know what an Electoral College is… In the US, we don't have a popular
vote, we have what is called an Electoral College and it's
retrograde, it goes back to the Civil War, it goes back to protecting
White Power… In the year 2000, George Bush lost the popular election
but he won the electoral college. The vacuum of democracy is evident
here. So, what my joke always was: I hope when they export democracy
to Iraq , they take the Electoral College with them and get it out of
the US . But, what you are referring to is hugely important. I grew
up in the student movement, the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) and the core of our values was participatory democracy, direct,
local democracy and our ideal was, the people with the problems are
also the people with the solutions and our basic slogan was "Let the
people decide!". We were very big in creating what is called a
democratic culture. What we meant by that was that formal democracy
can and is undermined everyday by, for example, militarism, by
corporatism, by consumerism, by racism. These things undermine the
culture of democracy. So we were arguing and are still advocating, is
that a culture of democracy is much more than the forms. So you can
click an election ballot and call yourself a democracy, or you can
see the requirements of being a citizen is full participation every
day: that you wake up in the morning asking yourself "how can I
participate in the civic life today", not how do I every four years
push a button. That's not democracy except in form. So yes, I make a
strong distinction between formal democracy and engaged citizenship.
Formal democracy is often a sham used to undermine participatory democracy.
You also advocate that education can never be neutral, that it always
has a politics, an ethics, a value. Some people may object this
stance. For example, here in Cyprus , we have a private,
English-speaking school that has recently decided upon dealing with
the challenges for an intercultural and integrated education. The
English School 's board has been since under attack by various groups
and individuals, for having a politics and not being neutral.
Education can never be neutral. Education always either serves the
status quo or change. It always serves either the way things are, or
the way things could be. So, even though you can't always see what
the politics of a particular system or school or classroom are, they
are always there. It's a myth that you can be neutral, and most of
the people who cry for neutrality are actually crying to keep the
status quo intact, as it is. So in the US , when I was young, the
great upheaval was: Don't teach politics. And what they meant by that
was don't teach about racial equality. Just leave politics out of it.
Racial inequality was the standard, it was the given. So if you were
to bring in something as unsavory as politics , you were bringing in
the idea of multiculturalism. But we brought it in and we won. It's
the same with the question of women. Should women be equal? If you
brought that in, you were bringing in politics, because the things
are is just neutral don't raise that question, that's for the
church or for the family to figure out. The current situation is
about gay people; if you are willing as a teacher to say gay people
have full rights like everyone else, you are accused of being
political. But to assume that we don't talk about that, well, that 's
a politics too, if you know what I mean. You can't get out of being
political by saying I am not raising that controversial question,
because the controversial question is already posed everyday by the
social realities themselves.
So, you are suggesting that formal education and schools may well
function as an ideological state apparatus. In which case does
education reinforce the existing power structures or the status quo
and in which case does it challenge them?
Well, most governments and most educational systems -and this is a
contradiction right at the heart of education- want people to be
obedient and conforming. And that is true across the borders: true of
the Soviet Union , true in communist China , it's true of the US ,
it's true of apartheid Africa . What they want is citizens who go
along. But education is never that project. Education is always about
asking queer questions, it's always about searching through evidence
and arguments, in order to have a mind of your own, which should be
dynamic and in motion itself. That's why education "feels
uncomfortable" in schools. Schools are one thing, education is quite
another thing; they coexist but they are not the same. I argue again
and again back in the US for education to find its way outside and
beyond schools. Schools are institutions that want you to go along
and be quiet, to stand in line. Education is never like that,
education is disobedient, education is unruly…
"Education is unruly". Unruly is also the activist… Can the street educate us?
Oh yes, absolutely! The workplace and the street are important forms
of education. In fact, one of my reference points again and again for
my own life, is the Freedom Schools in the 1960's in the south of the
United States . The Civil Rights Movement was going through a down
period, a low, and a young volunteer from the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), named Charles Cobb, brought a proposal
in which he said, the black people of Mississippi have been denied
many things: decent facilities, full trained teachers,
forward-looking curriculum. But the fundamental injury is that they
have been denied the right to think for themselves, about the
circumstances of their lives, how they got here and how can they be
different. This led to the creation of a Freedom School curriculum,
which I was very fortunate to be part of in the 1960's. it was a
curriculum of questions, it wasn't a curriculum of answers. And the
questions were things like, "why are you and I in the Freedom
Movement", "what do we hope to accomplish", "what do we want, that we
don't have", "what does the majority culture have, that we don't",
"what do we want to keep"… and it went on like that for 26 pages,
just question after question. That's curriculum of questioning,
that's a curriculum for citizenship, that's a curriculum for
democracy. And the Freedom Schools did not exist in classrooms, they
existed in community centers, back yards, plantations… And to show
how revolutionary that was -and it was very revolutionary- three
teachers of the Freedom Schools, the martyrs of Mississippi Chaney,
Schwerner and Goodman, were kidnapped and by Ku Klux Klan fanatics.
So Freedom Schools were revolutionary then and Freedom Schools are
still revolutionary. To ask the question "how did I get here", "how
could it be different", those are revolutionary questions.
Education is revolution then…
Absolutely! At its best, education is revolutionary. It can be
revolutionary in that it can take any individual from the kind of
sleepiness or the anesthetized condition of not knowing where you
are. It can wake you up and that's why most of us can look back in
our lives and say, "oh, there's a moment when somebody woke me up, a
book, a teacher". That's why we fall in love with our teachers,
because they remind us that another world is possible. And it's
exciting, it's thrilling. It's not the person itself that draws you,
it's what that person is doing to you, what they are making you
think. So I think that, yes, education can be revolutionary in that
sense and then, collectively, when all of us feel for example that,
we can't go forward unless we change the circumstances of our lives,
then education is revolutionary in a social sense.
And how does social justice fit in all this?
Well again, that's a struggle, it's a point of conflict. In a
democracy, education is always about - at least theoretically-
adhering to a principle, a recognition: that every human being is of
incalculable and immeasurable value. And that together as a
community, we have to strive for fairness, for equity, for freedom
for all. That means that education and democracy is always tilting
towards social justice. In other words, the full development of each
single one of us is only possible with the collective development of
all of us. So the full development of all is the condition for the
full development of each. And that's a profoundly social justice statement.
Speaking about human development and social justice, let us move to
Latin America and specifically to Hugo Chavez. Do you think the
paradigm of the Bolivarian Revolution challenges or falsifies the
whole "End of History" narrative?
Oh, absolutely. I think Fukuyama 's "End of History" thesis is
demonstratively false, even as it was written it was demonstratively
false. Every generation believes that it's reached the end of
History. If you live long enough you realize it. One of the messages
of every power, of every elite is to say, "this is it, doesn't get
any better than this, there is no other possibility". And then, what
revolutionaries always do, is say "no, another world is possible" and
they always bring that into the public square. So the idea that
History has ended, meaning the defeat of class conflict, is so
provably, demonstrably false in the world that we live in. We live in
a world of profound inequities and disparities, and those inequities
and disparities lead the social conflict again and again. So it is
true that, for example in the US or in Great Britain , the export of
class conflict and of the working class has been underway for a long
time. But we have a gigantic proletariat that is in any minute going
to organize itself and rise up and demand equity and fairness and a
piece of the world, and that will going to change everything. So I
think, Chavez is one example. And the other thing to say about Chavez
that is interesting to me, is that, Venezuela is not a country with
either a proletariat, nor a peasantry. So you have neither of the 20
th century models of what would be the engine…
You do have the oligarchies and the poor though. And intense internal
imperialism.
You do have the poor - Absolutely, you do have these kinds of
contradictions -no doubt about it, but you don't have either of the
engines of social change that were demonstrated in the 20 th century.
And yet -speaking of something that neither you or I could predict-
here comes a charismatic military leader (and I have inherent
distrust in military leaders, I don't trust them and I don't trust
strong men, my politics make me skeptical right away). You have the
poor, you have many many factions of political parties and
organizations, none of which can get along, none of which know how to
talk to one another. And along comes a charismatic intellectual
military man. And by the way [laughs] he's fuelled with espresso, I
've seen him up close and the guy drinks about 24 espressos a day, he
never sleeps.. But he was influenced by books, by ideas. All of us
danced to somebody's ideas. And Chavez was influenced by books by
ideas and by his background as an indigenous person, as a person from
a poor family… And suddenly he was in a position to make a change.
And suddenly all these factions, all these left-wing parties, all
these trade-unionists, found it in their interest to begin to talk to
one another. And out of chaos came this unity that said "with Chavez,
we can move the society forward". The exciting thing about the
Bolivarian Revolution is reading the Constitution. I don't know if
you read it, but to me, this is a brilliant example of a 21 st
century articulation of what's possible for humanity. And the parts
about education are brilliant, because they basically say something
that is far beyond from what we say in the United States . That
education should be something not that we do early in life in order
to finish and get a job. In the US , why is education a K-12 or a
K-16 affair, where you get finished and then go work for the rest of
your life? Why isn't education for life? The idea that education is
for the young is so false and yet that's what we do in the United
States . But in Venezuela , education is for everyone. And my own
experience there -I 've been to Venezuela several times- of looking
at the Education Circles in the factories or the towns or the
villages, to see all people who are illiterate to come together and
re-name the world, it's so exciting. It's a model to me -coming out
of the 3 rd world, of what we can aspire to in a place like the US .
Real education, popular education, participatory education.
Why then is Venezuela widely represented like such an immense threat
to the world social order, or to the Washington Consensus?
Absolute power finds anything threatening. When you are aspiring to
absolute power, any questioning, any challenge has to be put down. I
was in Venezuela several times reading the New York Times, accounts
of what was going on. It was like an Alice in Wonderland world,
through a looking glass because the NYT had Chavez painted as this
monster, suppressing the media. I was staying in a hotel where the
right-wing newspapers would be delivered to my door. So the idea that
somehow freedom of the press didn't exist is ridiculous. So that's
one answer. Another answer, a more telling answer, is that, there
were those of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era, who would
say "why is Vietnam a threat to the US ?". In Vietnam we don't have
any military interest, we don't have any economic interest, so why?
Are we going to spent 10 years, three million deaths, billions of
dollars suppressing this revolution? And Chomsky's answer was
"Because the idea will spread". The idea will spread and ideas are
power. What we have to understand instinctively, is that we oppose
the power of force with the power of ideas, and the power of people
thinking differently. That is the threat Chavez represents. What if
you thought differently about economics, about the role of education
and about questions of social equity. What if you thought
differently? Then the project of the US would be imperiled...
You said something that Obama keeps repeating, that the might of our
nation lies not in the force of our guns, but in the force of our ideas…
I believe ideas are a good counterforce to guns, but I worry that the
US ' sense of itself and its ideas is arrogant and misguided. As you
yourself said earlier, what kind of democracy do we want to export?
It's an abstract statement and Obama could mean many things by it,
but it is true that ideas have power. It's why for example, in the US
the Conservatives have spent an enormous amount of time in the last
20 years attacking kindergarten to 12 th grade education and are now
attacking the universities. They are saying that the universities are
hotbeds of left-wing thinking. It's not true, from my perspective.
But anything that offers an alternative perspective is threatening to
them. So, that is what Chavez represents: a different way of
considering lots and lots of questions, and certainly the role of the
US in the South is one of those things. I think he has provided an
interesting counterweight around development in the surrounding
countries and so on. A good example is health care. I mean, the idea
that the US has a good health-care and that we should be proud of it
is so crazy, and yet if you are in America- 70% of us don't have
passports, we don't know any better- we guess that, wow, we must have
a very good health care system, even though if you're sick you don't
get care and so on.
Let us go back to Obama: he said that the might of our nation lies
not in the force of our guns, but in the force of our ideas…
Nonetheless, in Afghanistan he keeps sending more troops, even though
extreme poverty, hunger and complete lack of social policies are far
more serious threats to the country's population than the Taliban…
A couple of things you made me think of by putting it this way: one
is that, Obama's statement is a hopeful one. But it has to be matched
by action. The fact that the US spends a trillion dollars a years on
military and is happy to use violence to solve its international
problems, is happy to invade and occupy countries, this is what has
to end, it's not rhetoric about ideas over guns. It's actual action
to stop the use of weapons and violence to resolve political
conflicts. Take the question of Taliban and Afghanistan . After 9/11,
it's true that the US has suffered a terrorist action within its own
territory. 3.000 people were killed, it was a terrible crime against
humanity, a pure act of terrorism carried out by a retrograde,
crypto-fascist group of religious fanatics- that is all true. But
after 9/11, there was a great debate in the US about what had
happened and that debate was repressed by the powerful voices. One
side of the debate as it went forward, which I agreed with, was that
even though we had suffered a crime against humanity, as a nation,
the response to a crime is a criminal justice response. It's a police
response. If someone gets killed in Chicago , the police gather
evidence, look for the perpetrator and put that person on trial.
There's no war involved, it's a criminal justice matter. Because the
war metaphor won the debate inside the US , we went on a WoT. But
there's no monolith called terror. Terror is a tactic. So a war
against terror is like a war against nervousness. How do you defeat
it, how do you know where it is? A tactic can't be defeated by a war…
There's also the problem of defining terrorism. Like Noam Chomsky and
Gilbert Achcar argue in "Perilous Power", even the US government has
trouble defining terrorism, because the term may refer to them in some cases.
That's exactly my point. If you think of a stable definition of
terrorism, which I think is important, and you recognize terrorism as
a tactic that is used by religious fanatics, political factions,
crazy people, governments, states, then you can see in the history of
the 20 th century, that the most violence that's been done by
terrorism has been done by states. State terrorism is the most
prevalent of all. The most spectacular, is things like the World
Trade Center , where 3000 people were murdered and that's
unforgivable. But, the number was 3000 lives - meanwhile, the US has
killed over 3million in a terrorist war against Vietnam . So how do
you measure these things? WoT is the wrong metaphor. After the crime
against humanity of 9/11, there should have been a criminal justice
response which might have meant calling up military force. But it
would have been to seek the perpetrator, it wouldn't have been to
invade countries and overthrow governments. So overthrowing the
Taliban even was in itself an aggressive act, it had no meaning
vis-à-vis 9/11. They never pursued Bin Laden's group, they didn't
pursue it aggressively or eagerly. Instead, they've opened up a war.
How many countries will be invaded when Bush announces a WoT? Nobody
knew. How long it will go on? Nobody knows. Will terrorism ever be
eliminated? No. That means it's a war forever. It's a clash of
fundamentalisms, so in that regard, we have to say "no, we do not
want a WoT, a war on tactic. What we want is to lower the levels of
violence. And that means the US who has in many ways a world monopoly
on violence -we spent a trillion dollars a year on violence and the
rest of the world spends a trillion. So a country with 4.6% of the
world's population spends half of the military budget of the world.
We have a responsibility, if Obama's words are to be taken seriously,
to lessen our nuclear arsenal, to eliminate ultimately our nuclear
arsenal, to lessen our weapon systems, to stop exporting hand guns to
every country in the world, to stop exporting smart arms to every
conflict in the world. We have to take seriously that it's our
responsibility to move in that direction. And yes, it seems to me
that if we want it to really be a nation among nations, we would not
only resolve questions like healthcare in our own country, but we
would export healthcare to other countries instead of violence. We 'd
be exporting books, not weapons. But that's not what we do, and it's
not in our genetic make-up. So we have to change our history, because
our history in these matters is very bad.
Let us discuss Obama's historic speech in Cairo . To an impressive
degree, Obama's rhetoric has managed to challenge Bush's
manicheanism, along with the absurd representation of the world's
Muslims as a monolithical, one-dimentional community. Do you think
Obama's speech grants the Arab world the "permission to narrate"?
I like the reference to "Permission to Narrate", I assume you are
talking about the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said. Yes, I think
that's exactly what the speech does. You have to remember the bar is
so low because we had George Bush for 8 years. So we are used to an
absolute idiot, a person who had never left the US before he was
president. He didn't even have a passport; it's astonishing if you
think about it. But that is so typical of the people of the US .
National Geographic did a survey of 18-25 year old American kids.
They gave them a blank world map: 80% could find Iraq , 80% couldn't
find Israel or Palestine , 40% couldn't find Great Britain and 10%
couldn't find the US . It's astonishing but yet typical that
Americans don't know geography, don't know history, don't know
language, because we are the center of the universe, even though
we're only 4.6% of the world's people. My joke always was, you
shouldn't be allowed to bomb a country you can't find on a map!
Having said all that, it seems to me that the speech was hugely
significant, because Obama indicated through that speech a
willingness to change the narrative. Changing the narrative is a lot
of what politics is about. I know for a fact that Obama understands
the Palestinian situation. And for him to say in that speech that the
Palestinians have suffered for 60 years, that dates their suffering
at 1948. No American president has ever said that. For him to say you
need to stop the settlements was huge, even though it's a small step.
There is so much more to do, but it was still a step, in the last two
decades no US president would say that. Now, what's more important,
is what we do as an international citizenry, as progressive forces,
as a movement within the US . What do we do to change that narrative
so that more is possible, so that the permission to narrate spreads
and deepens. Another thing through which Obama showed his political
skill, once again, is, he goes to Cairo, he speaks to the Arab world,
and then he puts a tiny little finger in the eye of Israel and given
that that's very difficult to do inside the US, he rushes to
Buchenwald (Holocaust Memorial) 24 hours later. By doing that and by
going there with Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, Obama
inoculated himself against the inevitable firestorm of criticism that
the Israeli lobby would bring forward, as the frontpages were
dominated by Obama and Wiesel at Buchenwald . It was a politically
savvy message.
Let us go back in time, to the "Weather Underground". It's been
described as a domestic terrorist organisation. Yet you argue that
the Weathermen had a moral stance. How's that?
I don't think we were terrorists, I think we debated terrorism. When
the war went on and we were determined to stop the war, we did in
fact debate what direction to go and terrorism was one direction we
debated. We did discuss it and we rejected it. In fact the bomb that
killed my girlfriend and my two comrades, in March 6, 1970 , was to
be put in a dance at a military base. That would have been a
terrorist act but it never went off. That was hotly debated and after
our friends had been killed, the organisation was not resolved in
what direction we were taking - we weren't even underground at the
time. That act forced a huge revaluation and conversation amongst us,
and we argued that terrorism was never defensible and that
politically it is almost always counter-productive. And you could see
the counter-productiveness of it in places like Vietnam . The
Vietnamese were never convinced that the Americans were right or good
because they were killing them. Likewise, the Palestinians, as much
as the Israelis, keep saying we're going to pound them into the
ground until they see the way we see - it's never going to work. It's
politically backwards and morally indefensible. So we chose a
different path and we were not terrorists but saboteurs with a
political mission and an ethical mission, in that we wanted to end
the war as well as the system that created these wars.
But do you claim to have had the authorship of this moral mission?
How could you claim that what you did was ethical and not arbitrary?
How could this "moral mission" be checked?
Checking such things is very difficult and that is true not only of
illegal work, it's also true of legal work. But I have had this
standard for several years and it's extremely valuable: that you can
to be constantly in touch with large masses of people, that you have
to have a dialogue. You can't just go out on your own and do what you
want, you must be in dialogue. The responsibility of an activist or a
citizen is to open one's eyes. To see more of the world than you can
see when you are half asleep, and then to act. You make your best
judgement, you act as well as you can. And then, you must rethink.
You can't just act and act. You must act and rethink and then act and
rethink. And in rethinking you must have a pedagogical standard: did
I teach people and did I learn? That is the pedagogical gesture.
Ordinary people saw what we were doing and understood it. Yes, the
Head of the Senate condemned us, calling us communist and all kinds
of names. And many newspapers were writing against us. But ordinary
people saw what we were doing and they understood it. If you get
paralysed because everything is so ambiguous, then you can't act and
you're paralysed. So you need to act with imperfect knowledge but
then you have a responsibility to rethink. And that rethinking
involves exactly what you are talking about, trying to be connected
with a base of people, so that you are not acting completely on your
own. And the Weather Underground was the same. The Republican
portrayal of us during the presidential race was that we were somehow
a wild group of nutcases. But the fact is that we were underground
for 11 years and never arrested. How did that happen? We were
recognised in the street every week, people saw me, I mean I lived
mostly in the open. Nobody wanted us arrested. We were leaving in a
sea of like minded people. We weren't as crazy as it now may seem. If
we were that crazy, why weren't we turned in, there were hundreds of
us. We were living relatively openly, going to cafes and movies and
living in apartments and people recognised us and didn't turn us is.
Why? Because people were opposed to the war and didn't think we were
so outside the pale as to be their enemy. We were not their enemy.
Looking back, are you proud of the action of, and the "critique"
posed by, the "Weather Underground"?
When we were underground, a movie was made about us by a famous
film-maker named Emile de Antonio. We had negotiated with him and he
came to our hideout and interviewed us and made a movie called
"Underground". Several years later, I was with some young activists
who were looking at the film and wanted to talk about it. So I
watched the film with them I hadn't seen it for 20 years. I found
it interesting that, on the one hand, I found the rhetoric and the
posturing kind of macho, embarrassing. On the other hand, the
politics, I agreed with completely. So, I wouldn't stand up now in
the way I stood up then and I wouldn't act the way I acted and throw
my head around in the way I did in the film. But, I didn't disagree
with the politics. I found the politics to be accurate. Now, four
decades later, our world has changed and our politics need to change
too, obviously. But our critique was based on two fundamental truths:
The first is that the US is a country that was founded on, and
fuelled by, White Supremacy, and that we threw ourselves into the
fight against White Supremacy. The second truth is that, the US '
position in the world has been not to be a nation among nations but
rather to be an imperial power, and as such, the US ' imperial
project is indefensible and the primary responsibility of opposing it
belongs to the American people. As citizens of this imperial power,
we felt a very personal responsibility to oppose the massacres going
on in Vietnam , in Laos and in other places.
Christiana Voniati
Head of International News Department
POLITIS Newspaper,
Nicosia, Cyprus.
E-mail: christiana.voniati@politis-news.com
Blogspot: http://christiana-voniati.blogspot.com
.
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