And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to "seize power" in a violent communist takeover of the United States:
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After a long search, I was lucky enough to finally get my hands on a copy of the original edition of Prairie Fire, which is now extremely rare and hard to find. It was written in secret while Ayers and his fellow Weather Underground members were still in hiding and on the run, and still actively engaging in bombings and other violent acts.
This essay features many high-resolution scans of quotes and entire pages taken directly from Prairie Fire, which journalists, bloggers and other media members are free to copy and re-post.
If you're interested only in viewing or downloading the scans taken from Prairie Fire, scroll down this page to see a large selection of shocking quotations which you can use as you see fit. My introductory explanation below simply provides context and elucidates why the text of Prairie Fire is so significant at this very moment in history.
So far in 2008, there has been almost no mention of this manifesto and its insurrectionary goals. It seems as if the media, William Ayers, Barack Obama and his supporters don't want you to know about Prairie Fire. Which is exactly why you need to see it.
How Is This Relevant to the 2008 Presidential Campaign?
There's nothing illegal about being a communist. People in this country are free to hold whatever political beliefs they so choose. I don't know William Ayers, I've never met him (that I'm aware of), and I have nothing against him personally.
This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.
Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama's past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.
Furthermore: Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him. The now-standard talking points are:
• Ayers was never actually convicted of setting any bombs or killing anyone, so there's no real proof that he ever did anything wrong.
• Ayers is now a respected, mainstream, mild-mannered and popular professor, so obviously his political views couldn't have been that extreme.
This essay disproves all of these claims. The text that William Ayers authored in Prairie Fire, and the additional documentary links provided below, prove that:
• Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers' list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as "guilty as hell, free as a bird."
• Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn't mean that he wasn't a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers' contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.
But Where Is the Obama Connection?
This essay is only about William Ayers' past and present political views. It is not about the connection between Barack Obama and William Ayers. That issue has been covered (and continues to be covered) elsewhere in innumerable news reports and blog postings. Yet as evidence mounts of the extensive and long-standing connection between Obama and Ayers, making their association more and more difficult to deny, Obama's campaign and supporters have started shifting their strategy; Sure, they say, Obama may have had a connection with Ayers, but why is that so bad? Look at William Ayers now: He's a completely respectable man. What -- he protested against the Vietnam War? So did everyone. He's no extremist. I see these arguments made in countless blog posts, comment sections, and even news articles. This essay exists to stop that political escape route. There's no getting around it: William Ayers was a violent communist revolutionary bent on overthrowing the government and "seizing power" in the United States. The proof is on this page. And the only difference between the 1970s William Ayers and the William Ayers with whom Barack Obama has associated is that Ayers no longer uses violence to achieve his goals. But Ayers' underlying political world-view (i.e. communism) has remained the same.
For the record, and just to be complete, here are links documenting some of Obama's many connections to William Ayers:
• Ayers and Obama worked together for years on a school reform program called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
• Ayers and Obama also served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a separate charity organization.
• Obama had his political coming-out party in William Ayers' home.
• Ayers mentions Obama by name in a book he wrote in 1997, and mentions that the two are very close neighbors.
• Obama gave a short glowing review of that same Ayers book for the Chicago Tribune.
• Obama and Ayers were both presenters together on a panel about juvenile justice (organized by Michelle Obama).
• Both Obama and Ayers were close friends with the same person, Rashid Kalidi.
• There are also several unverified rumors swirling around that have not been documented: That Ayers may have helped to write part (or all) of Obama's autobiography; that Obama and Ayers shared an office space together for three years, on the same floor of the same building in Chicago; and that Ayers and Obama may have known each other as far back as 1981.
Authorship of Prairie Fire
How do we know that William Ayers himself co-authored Prairie Fire? Doesn't the cover say it's by The Weather Underground as a group, and doesn't mention him specifically?
Well, it's simple enough to prove. Because in the introduction, the four actual authors sign their names -- Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Billy Ayers, and Celia Sojourn:
(A scan showing this section in context on the full page in Prairie Fire can be found below, lower down in this essay.)
Of course, in true communist spirit, earlier in the Introduction they mention that the book grew out of "study groups," "conversations" and "struggles" of the entire Weather Underground, but the four members listed above are the ones who actually sat down and wrote the manuscript. And of those four, "Billy" Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were the most educated and literate, and were the acknowledged leaders of the group, so it's almost certain they did the bulk of the writing. (Especially considering, as I'll show below, the similarities between ideas in Prairie Fire and contemporary writings by William Ayers.)
But that's not all. On his own blog, in his own resumé, Ayers lists himself as the author of Prairie Fire. Which is as conclusive as you can get.
The Evidence
The rest of this essay consists primarily of scanned pages taken directly from an actual physical copy of Prairie Fire printed in 1974. As you will notice, the production quality was fairly crude, with some pages being typewritten (possibly by William Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn themselves) with others typeset in varying fonts, and then printed somewhat inconsistently with different densities in different sections of the book. While this may have lent Prairie Fire an air of outlaw authenticity when it first was distributed, it looks rather odd and irregular in the era of computers and modern typography. I only mention this detail here to explain why the various scanned pages and quotes seen below look different from each other.
PLEASE NOTE: For each of the full-size scanned pages displayed below, if you click on the image, your browser will open a new window showing a high-resolution version of the scan. I provide the hi-res scans as proof that this evidence is real, and in case anyone wants to inspect the text in more detail.
The individual quoted lines scanned below are already high-resolution, so there is no need to click on them. In a few instances, the quoted sentences start or end in the middle of a line; in those cases, I only display the relevant quote in question; I do not include the text on the remaining portions of the lines.
Underneath each scanned image is a transcription of some (or all) of the text shown, to make things easier for bloggers and journalists to copy and paste the sections which interest them.
(The full book is over 150 pages long, so I necessarily can only present a small selection of pages here. But nearly every paragraph on every page throughout the entire manuscript is jam-packed with the exact same kind of communist/socialist/revolutionary verbiage you see here. If you want to see more, or if you simply want to confirm that all of this is true, I encourage you to seek out your own copy of Prairie Fire; a few copies can still be found in major libraries and through rare book dealers.)
Below the scanned images is a final section providing quotes, links, videos and documentation proving that William Ayers maintained his political beliefs essentially unchanged throughout the '80s, '90s and 2000s, during which time he was accepted into the upper echelons of Chicago society, mingling and working with academics, activists and politicians -- including Barack Obama.
Page 16: The Weather Underground's own list of their terrorist bombings and other crimes
On page 16 of Prairie Fire, Ayers and his fellow co-authors brag about their numerous acts of domestic terrorism, and provide a handy list detailing not only each crime but in most cases the justification for each crime as well. Note an important detail: Most of the stated rationales for the Weather Underground's violent acts have nothing whatsoever to do with Vietnam. This disproves the ubiquitous media assertion that Ayers and the Weather Underground were "Vietnam War protesters."
Also note Wikipedia's list of Weather Underground actions that provides additional details regarding their putative justifications, including bombing a bank "in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers" and bombing a federal office building due to "the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other aspects of women's daily lives," among many others which make no mention of Vietnam. Also note that the bombings and other violent acts continued after Prairie Fire was published, and that all the Weather Underground "actions" in 1974 and '75 happened after the United States had already pulled its ground troops out of Vietnam and was no longer an active combatant in the ground war, which would have rendered any Vietnam War protests pretty much meaningless.
Click on the image below to see a hi-res version:
For the record, to prove beyond any doubt that this is real, click on the small image below to see a high-resolution scan of the entirety of page 16 in full context, including the edges of the book cover, the crease in the center of the book, and so on:
Page 10: The Start of the Chapter 1
The main body of Prairie Fire begins on page 10, after various introductory pages. The following four scanned images are all short quotes taken from page 10. Below each quote is a transcription of the text. The final image of this section shows all these quotes in context in the book on page 10 itself.
Here is the same quote repeated again, this time with additional context, in the form of the subsequent two sentences:
Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.
Without armed struggle there can be no victory.
The following scan shows the full two-page spread of pages 10 and 11. Page 11, as you can see, is a picture of Che Guevara. A full transciption of the text is below the image.
The unique and fundamental condition of this time is the decline of U.S. imperialism. Our society is in social and economic crisis and assumptions about the U.S. are turned on their heads. These are hard conditions to live through. But they are favorable for the people and for revolution.
These conditions of constant change demand the weapon of theory. Like people everywhere, we are analyzing how to bring to life the potential forces which can destroy U.S. imperialism.
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.
Our intention is to engage the enemy, to wear away at him, to harass him, to isolate him, to expose every weakness, to pounce, to reveal his vulnerability.
Our intention is to encourage the people, to provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness, to stir the imagination, to popularize power, to agitate, to organize, to join in every way possible the people's day-to-day struggles.
Our intention is to forge an underground, a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack.
THE BANNER OF CHE
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war. Revolution is the most powerful resource of the people. To wait, to not prepare people for the fight, is to seriously mislead about what kind of fierce struggle lies ahead.
Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.
Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.
Without armed struggle there can be no victory.
It will not be immediate, for the enemy is entrenched and intractable. It will require lengthy, deliberate political and armed
The Introduction
The following four scanned images are all short quotes taken from Prairie Fire's typewritten introduction. Below each quote is a transcription of the text. The final image of this section shows all these quotes in context in the full introduction to the book.
Sisters and brothers,
Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology - a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US.
The following scan shows the full two-page spread of the introduction, outlining the Weather Undergound's revolutionary communism, their goal of overthrowing the capitalist system, and ending with the names of the authors -- including "Billy" Ayers. Remember: Click on the image if you want to see a high-resolution version.
Sisters and brothers,
Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology - a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US. It comes out of our own practice of the last five years and reflects a diversity of experiences. This paper is not the product of one or two people, nor even a small handful of us. Rather PRAIRIE FIRE represents the politics and collective efforts of an organization. It has been the focus of our study groups and our political education. It has been chewed on and shaped in countless conversations, struggles and written pages. It has travelled around the country, growing, developing thru the attempt to understand the shape of world forces and the revolutionary possibilities before us. The paper was rewritten four times and collectively adopted as the political statement of the Weather Underground. The twelve-month process of writing PRAIRIE FIRE, squeezed between on-going work and practice and action, has now reached a kind of end-point. A cycle is done.
We undertook this analysis to explain the changes in US and world conditions since the Vietnam ceasefire and to evaluate the consequences of the Vietnamese victory. We have come some distance in evaluating the political situation, the priorities for revolutionary work since we began this writing. Now many more revolutionaries will need to shape and change the paper. The politics cannot be realized unless and until the content of the program is activated in thousands of situations, among thousands of people in the coming period. PRAIRIE FIRE will be a growing thing.
We hope the paper opens a dialectic among those in the mass and clandestine movements; we hope people will take PRAIRIE FIRE as seriously as we do, study the content and write and publish their views of the paper as well as their analysis of their own practice. We will respond as best we can.
Our movement urgently needs a concrete analysis of the particular conditions of our time and place. We need strategy. We need to battle for a correct ideology and win people over. In this way we create the conditions for the development of a successful revolutionary movement and party. We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society. Getting from here to there is a process of coming together in a disciplined way around ideology and strategy, developing an analysis of our real conditions, mobilizing a base among the US people, building principled relationships to Third World struggle, and accumulating practice in struggle against US imperialism.
PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded revolutionaries, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women's groups, collectives, study groups, workers' organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle.
PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become our way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.
We have only begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti-imperialist forces around a revolutionary program is an urgent and pressing strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands.
Bernardine Dohrn
Jeff Jones
Billy Ayers
Celia Sojourn
For the Weather Underground
Dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan (among others)
The following snippet is taken from the book's dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure '60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:
Here's the two-page spread of the dedication page and copyright page in high-resolution, showing the full list of people to whom the book is dedicated:
As an aside: Note how, on the copyright page, the authors state that the public is "free to utilize the material" in the book "for political debate and study." That is exactly how it is being used in this essay, though I think it's not quite the kind of debate that William Ayers originally had in mind! Also note that my reproduction of their material, as per their instructions, is true and accurate, and that I am not "profiteering" from it because this site has no ads and does not generate any income whatsoever.
Page 40: Strategies for Revolution
Page 40 of the manuscript is typical: It outlines the Weather Underground's strategies for overthrowing the United States. Among the many strategies are: eliminating the feeling of patriotism among the general public, destroying the government from within, and starting a mass insurrection among the lower classes. The three scanned quotes are followed by a full page 40 with them in context:
Page 41: The Definition of Socialism
Ever since the word "socialism" was brought up in the campaign by "Joe the Plumber," to whom Obama said he intends to "spread the wealth around," there has been much discussion among pundits about what the word "socialism" really means, and whether or not it's a bad thing.
Well, William Ayers had his own definition of socialism, which he spelled out on page 41 of Prairie Fire. Because it's relevant to current events, let's look at what the word "socialism" meant to left-wingers not too long ago:
(Note: the distortion of the text in the following image was caused by a glitch in the scanner; it was not on the original page.)
Here's page 41 in full:
Page 13: Vietnam Is Only One Aspect of the Global Communist Revolution
Page 13 discusses how the Vietnam War is only one component of the overall drive for worldwide communism. The following quotes speak for themselves:
This defined our international responsibility and our duty as white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation. We are part of a wave of revolution sparked by the Black liberation struggle, by the death of Che in Bolivia in 1967, and by people's war in Vietnam.
Here are pages 12 and 13 in high-resolution, showing the above quotes in context; page 12 depicts a Vietnamese peasant woman:
Page 128: Views on Israel, the Palestinians and Mideast Oil
The following quote is taken from page 128, from the portion of Prairie Fire having to do with the Middle East. I include it here to show the amazing consistency of the radical left-wing view of the area -- the issues and arguments remain almost unchanged from 1974 to today: ending Zionism, no "war for oil," stopping U.S. support for Israel, etc. Aside from a few current events details, this exact same text could have appeared in any contemporary left-wing essay about the Middle East. This shows that what once was a radical communist view has now become mainstream:
(Note: the darkened area and the distortions were caused by a glitch in the scanner, and were not part of the original page.)
Here is the entirety of page 128, to put the quote in context:
Ayers' Current Views
At the beginning of this essay, I wrote that William Ayers is a communist. And while I certainly have shown that he was a communist, has he changed his stripes since 1974? Has he ever renounced the ideologies he embraced in Prairie Fire (and elsewhere)?
In short: No. He still maintains the same belief systems. To this day, he sticks to the exact same phraseologies to describe his unchanged political philosophy.
This section explores William Ayers' current beliefs about communist ideology. And why is this relevant? Because if he believed it in 1974, and still believes it in 2008, then he almost certainly continued to believe it in 1995-2006, the period during which Barack Obama had his associations with Ayers. There is no evidence whatsoever that Ayers went through some "right-wing phase" (which would have been totally out of character) nor had any diminuation of his political fervor. As far as anyone can tell, and according to Ayers himself, he has had a consistent and unchanged philosphy from the 1960s up until the present.
What this means is that William Ayers was a communist when Barack Obama associated with him.
So, let's get to the evidence about whether or not Ayers has changed his views.
On April 12, 2002, Ayers said during an interview with a college radio station:
I considered myself partly an anarchist then and consider myself partly an anarchist now. I mean I'm as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist.... I'm very open about what I think and nobody here is surprised by what I think.As the video notes, Obama was working directly with Ayers within days of this interview being given -- and for years prior and afterward.
...
Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No it is not. I don't regret that. The people of the world are being exploited and oppressed and militarized by the great imperialist powers, led by the United States. That is the situation today in my view.
...
And I'm not sorry about anything that I participated to try to end that war or against that government that was waging that war.
Continuing in the same video, Ayers gave a TV interview in January of 2004 in which he hits on some of the exact same themes and uses some of the same phraseology he used in Prairie Fire:
If we were being fair and open-minded, then if you looked around at the world today, you would say the greatest purveyor of of violence, as King said, is our own government. ...In Prairie Fire, one can find many references to the United States government promoting violence, to white supremacy, and to racism. It's quite obvious nothing has changed in Ayers' philosophy.
...
White supremacy and racism continues to be the dagger point of American democracy. I do believe that. I believed it then, I believe it now.
Next, let's turn to Bill Ayers' own personal blog, where he posts his own writings.
On April 20, 2006, Ayers posted an open letter in which he wrote:
We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.What more need be said?
...
I want to embrace...draft resisters, deserters, tax avoiders...
...
If we know we hope to achieve a democratic and socialist world, a culture of life and love, our strategy and tactics are informed by filling that vision out on the ground...
...
I went to Camp Casey in August precisely because I'm an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out...
...
Opposing aggressive war is always urgent, but for revolutionaries we need to both be fully activated in the opposition...
On November 7, 2006 Ayers posted this essay on his blog describing his visit to a conference in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela -- an essay which sounds like it could be a missing chapter from Prairie Fire, and which Ayers concludes by shouting "Viva Presidente Chavez!"
And just a few months ago on June 28, 2008, Ayers describes himself in this posting on his blog as a "socialist" when it comes to economic policy.
All of this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. To this day, nearly every word that Ayers utters and every sentence that he writes hews to the exact same communist line. You can easily find hundreds more examples yourself just by browsing through his blog or simply by Googling his name and searching for his writings and speeches, almost all of which still revolve around notions promulgated in Prairie Fire.
William Ayers is a communist. By his own description. He was a communist then, he is a communist now, and he was a communist for the entire time that Barack Obama worked with him and was associated with him.
Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese communists, whom William Ayers was glorifying and praising, themselves imprisoned and tortured for over five years a young pilot by the name of John McCain. Here's a newly discovered video of McCain taken in January of 1968 as he lay injured in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war hospital shortly after his capture. What's heart-rending about it is that he does not yet know that he will spend the next five years being tortured by William Ayers' comrades:
Additional Links
New York Times: Obama and '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
In 2001, the New York Times reviewed Ayers' fictionalized "memoir" Fugitive Days and called it "maddeningly evasive... one of those books that tell by not telling."
Excellent article by David Horowitz about Ayers; the source of the quote in which Ayers describes himself as "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."
Undercover agent Larry Grathwohl, who had infiltrated and joined the Weather Underground, described their post-revolution governing plans for the United States in this video taken from the 1982 documentary "No Place to Hide." The Weather Underground openly discussed exterminating 25 million Americans who refused to be "re-educated" into communism.
Here's a transcript of his interview:
And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.
The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.
I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious."
-- Larry Grathwohl, former member of the Weather Underground
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