[Vision2020] Bernadine Dohrn (Mrs. Bill Ayers)

[Tom Hansen]

Greetings Visionaires -

Remember the reference I made to Bernadine Dohrn back at:

http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2008-September/056348.html

" . . . a statement presented by Bernadine Dohrn (who later married Bill 
Ayers) declaring war against the US government back in 1969 as a member of 
the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)."

http://www.tomandrodna.com/speeches/Bernadine_Dohrn_1969.mp3

In case you are wondering what Bernadine is doing nowadays.  Wee . . . she 
is writing columns, such as . . .

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"Homeland Imperialism: Fear and Resistance"
By Bernadine Dohrn 

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703dohrn.htm

The creation and cultivation of fear is one of the pillars of empire both 
abroad and within the imperial “homeland.” And that fear is always 
accompanied by the threat of discipline, punishment, and violence. Every 
state uses violence to enforce its power against its enemies, but we must 
recognize that a major change has occurred. September 11, 2001 gave a 
green light for a full blown, and bipartisan, agenda of repression at 
home, as well as for the expanded imperial project abroad.

Yet it’s important when we talk of repression always to pair it with 
resistance. As we pile up the evidence of consolidated state power we must 
remember that a part of what has happened since 9/11 includes 2/15—that is 
February 15 of this year, when as many as ten million people around the 
world simultaneously joined to cry out against U.S. imperialism.

This robust and unified resistance to imperialism is indeed new, but in 
the United States and elsewhere, it did not come from thin air. On the 
local level, on the person-to-person level, incredible organizing work has 
been underway focused on prisons, women’s health and safety, labor, the 
environment, reparations, antiglobalization, solidarity with Latin 
American and African countries, and human rights movements. Anti-death-
penalty struggles have, notably in my home state of Illinois, begun to 
achieve great things. 

These social movements and organizing from below are invisible to the U.S. 
newspapers and CNN, but they are the cauldron in which people understand 
the connections between issues and come to understand reality. And so as 
we talk about the cultivation of fear and repression, we should note that 
what looks strong is also weak. The message sent by the U.S. mass media is 
not necessarily the message received. 

Miles Horton founded the Highlander Center in 1938, in its time a center 
for adult organizing and education throughout the South, and indeed 
throughout the country. He often told a simple little story. In the mid-
sixties, the Klan put up a series of billboards across the South with a 
famous picture of Martin Luther King at Highlander. It showed several 
people from the Communist Party, as well as Martin Luther King and Rosa 
Parks, sitting in the front row of a lecture. It had a circle around Dr. 
King’s head and the caption “Martin Luther King at communist training 
school.”

Miles described going with a carload of young teenagers to a civil rights 
demonstration in the South, and as they passed one billboard nobody in the 
car said anything. As they passed a second one somebody in the back 
said, “Hmmm.” And when they passed a third one, a kid in the back seat 
said, “You know, that’s the dumbest poster I’ve ever seen, because they 
don’t tell you who to call.” The powers that be think they’re giving one 
message, but it’s actually being received in other ways.

The scope of the current repression is vast, and as separate resistances 
are created it is our task to unite them. There’s no detail too small for 
repression at this moment. Under attack are state medical marijuana 
statutes (an attack initiated by the Clinton administration), end of life 
statutes in Oregon, abortion, the judiciary, environmental protections, 
social security, public education, women’s rights, and a range of 
progressive measures from birth control to OSHA regulations. Far-right and 
neoconservative cultural activists are assigned to each of these domains 
to implement a reactionary plan that has been articulated since 1964. A 
part of their strategy includes the culture wars and the criminalizing of 
the sixties. 

The heart of today’s repression is the American addiction to caging 
African-American people, especially young men. This is the model for the 
cage in which they now seek to place the entire world. The mass 
incarceration of people of color took place through a very deliberate 
cultivation of fear, the legend of a crime wave, and the invention of the 
super-predator myth during a decade when crime rates plummeted. Key facts 
about the United States are that prison construction and staffing has 
become the largest sector of state budgets, the fastest growing major on 
college campuses is criminal justice, and the fastest growing union has 
been the union of prison guards. When Angela Davis speaks of the “prison 
industrial complex,” she’s not kidding. It has become a major set piece of 
economic, social, and cultural life and what is at its core is the caging 
of young African-American men, overwhelmingly for nonviolent offenses.

How has this happened? The field was well prepared in U.S. history, but it 
was sown with the development of fear promoted on the nightly news, the 
anxiety that strangers were coming through your window, the imagery of 
young kids shooting each other and shooting up high schools, and the 
conviction that this was likely to happen in your neighborhood, although 
all the facts were to the contrary. 

And so the legacy of slavery, the modern day version of slavery, is 
reflected one way in prisons but it is also visible in the transformation 
of schools. Schools in America have become barricaded places of fear. 
People who don’t have their own youngsters in school today may not realize 
what’s happened to the environment where our young people spend seven 
hours of their day. You can’t get into a school and you can’t get out. 
Surveillance is pervasive. There are lock downs, body searches, and dogs. 
There are armed guards. And all of this is in schools that have never seen 
a violent incident. The fear of violence and the notion that it is likely 
to come from anywhere, including from our young people, has been the 
precursor and the trial run for what’s now happened in all of our public 
spaces and airports.

Now we have war abroad and war at home. The second stage of the process is 
the silencing. Ari Fleischer, the day after 9/11, proclaimed “beware of 
what you say” and announced that you’re for us or you’re against us. The 
Jihad is here, at home, and it’s going to be enforced by the 
neoconservatives; consider the full-page ads that the New York Times seems 
to run once a month from people like William Bennett. Such an ad 
(“Americans for Victory over Terrorism”) states as its purpose: “we will 
take to task those who ‘blame America first.’ ” The target of this 
Jihad “against terrorism” is the population here at home; and so this 
notion of “taking to task” means menacing and disciplining, threatening, 
and silencing people like Susan Sontag, Bill Maher, Danny Glover, and 
university faculty in places all over the country. The result is a 
chilling effect. That is to say, people around the targets back away, get 
silent, don’t stand up when they see the cost of simply expressing your 
opinion or even making a joke, let alone publicly objecting to what’s 
going on.

The actual tools of repression, the USA Patriot Act and now the bill 
creating a Department of Homeland Security, were passed in a way that took 
even the lawyers and legislators who passed them weeks to figure out what 
they had done. The Patriot Act is 348 pages long; it passed two weeks 
after 9/11. No one even knew what made it in or out of the homeland 
security act until the final moment, and still the INS is trying to figure 
out which of its functions are assigned to which agency.

The Patriot Act created a new federal crime of domestic terrorism. It is 
important to recognize the broad brush of what now counts as “terrorism.” 
I am part of a children’s law center in Chicago. We represent children in 
court. We have seen this tremendous mushrooming of young students, of 
course primarily African-American and Latino youth, getting expelled from 
school for “terroristic” threats. The word alone creates fear, and by now 
almost anything manages to scare a lot of Americans. 

Here’s the language from the Homeland Security Act: “Acts dangerous to 
human life that are a violation of the criminal laws if they appear to be 
intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or 
coercion.” Malevolent prosecutors and judges (and we do not lack for them) 
could sweep anything under such language. “Acts dangerous to human life” 
might be read to include attempting to block any street on which there is 
vehicular traffic. And think for a moment of the phrase “appear to be 
intended to influence.” The tools are in place to criminalize, as domestic 
terrorism, basic protests, and civil disobedience. Can you doubt that they 
had Seattle in 1999 in mind? 

Prosecutions are underway that are reminiscent of the indictments of the 
early-fifties McCarthy period and the conspiracy indictments of the early 
seventies pre-Watergate Mitchell Department of Justice, the two most 
recent periods of overtly political repression. For example, John Ashcroft 
has orchestrated a series of high profile indictments against Islamic 
charities, including the Holy Land Foundation in Texas and the Benevolent 
Association in Chicago. In the Chicago case Ashcroft flew in to announce 
the indictments. A year later all the terrorist charges were dropped and 
the head of the organization pled to one corruption charge, involving 
improper reporting of received funds. It will not surprise you that the TV 
coverage of the indictment was hysterical, but of the plea quite 
restrained. The aim was to accustom the U.S. public to, and intimidate the 
judiciary from interfering with, the repression of freedom of association, 
and they are no doubt pleased with the results. 

Now one must look abroad, or at least as far as Guantanamo, to see the 
full extent of what is in the works. What were accepted restraints on U.S. 
power for decades have been shattered. We are talking of torture and 
extrajudicial executions or assassinations. We have now had the example of 
the United States executing people on the soil of a state at peace with 
the United States with no evidence, no charges, and no legal process 
whatsoever. Torture, like slavery, is practically the only thing in 
international law and human rights that’s an absolute. There are no 
exceptions to it. Torture is banned; every country in the world has signed 
on. But we have Guantanamo. We have U.S. troops and CIA forces 
implementing “stress and duress tactics” as they call them, and we have 
the U.S. admittedly handing prisoners over to torture by other cooperating 
states. This too has not happened out of thin air; the techniques 
developed in the last twenty years in “control units” in maxi-maxi prisons 
in the United States are barely a step short of Guantanamo. 

So the long and short is that our task is to keep on organizing 
politically. The structures of opposition are there. We need to make the 
connections between these issues so that people better understand state 
power, and don’t see imperialism as only an optional foreign policy. On 
the human scale, it’s essential to stand up in solidarity. I don’t think 
you can overestimate how important it is, when someone is under attack, to 
write them a note, to call them up, to object, to stand up and say that 
you disagree and you think they’re acting courageously. That stuff 
matters. The failure to do it gets noted, and where support is expressed 
it is powerful.

A friend and colleague at the university has been passing around a poster 
that he made on a Xerox machine. It’s a faded picture of four aging Native 
Americans at the turn of the century in their indigenous dress. They’re 
all holding rifles and they’re not posing. They are standing with their 
rifles looking directly into the camera. And the banner across it 
says “homeland security, fighting terrorism since 1492.” That’s our 
tradition. 

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She also wrote an article titled "She Challenged the Rules" at:

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0104dohrn.htm

footnote to Jeff Harkins:  Bernadine Dohrn (University of Chicago, Class 
of '66) - Just another bright star that lights up the University of 
Chicago campus.

Now, if you will excuse me, I really must get to Farmers' market.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho


"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college 
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)


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