The news item below might be interpreted in various ways - certainly, the Corporate and State media give it their own spin, manipulating facts for their own purposes. But what about us, what about people who are active in the global liberation movement? Can we derive knowledge, useful material from it? Can we use it to assess where the Movement is going, how successful it is?

The subject is so VERY highly charged that the article can not be read without one's prejudices and preconceptions leaping up immediately into the mental fray where concepts, ideas and emotions battle each other within us; therefore it's an excellent personal and collective test, a barometer of sorts - "where do MY prejudices, preconceptions and possible ideological rigidities lie in all this?"

I'd like to state mine.

I still believe that Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and the other comrades of the Weather Underground represent some of the most honest, dignified, loving, warm and genuine branches of the american revolutionary socialist movement in recent history. What they embodied and called "small 'c' communism", to differentiate it from the authoritarian doctrinaire communism of the day, was a loving, psychedelic, dedicated, anti-imperialist grassroots section of the movement that included both urban guerillas and aboveground networks of collectives peopled by lovers, friends, comrades who helped transform the open mass struggle of the people so that it could fulfill the highest of its potential at the time - to this day, their work has not been understood or appreciated correctly by other revolutionary minded activists either within the US or outside it.

The Weather Underground might be correctly criticized for some of the emotional rigidity of some of its members, and also for what might be an overzealous, almost dogmatic guilt-tripping element that was embedded in some of the organizing they did; but these were elements of the psychological character of the entire US population at the time, part of a character armour shared by an entire population whose main culture was - and still is - the epitomy of Imperialism. What the Weather Underground was able to accomplish within that setting is a phenomenal achievement.

Professor Ward Churchill was illegally removed from the University for his views on September 11. The US population is still numb and keeps lending a neutral acceptance of the excesses by illegitimate authority about this, in the same way that torture, illegal surveillance and illegal genocidal war have been accepted just as numbly by the people in the US since September 11; these facts provide a sample of the *failure* of radicals and liberals to help people reclaim a sense of what democracy is all about. Also, these facts are testimonies to the *failure* of the 9/11 Truth movement to render the Truth into a functional tool with which people can liberate themselves, change and realign US foreign and domestic realities toward serving the people: the immediate aims of restoring Peace abroad with Justice and Democracy at home are still *very* fuzzy for the 9/11 Truth movement. It's been an almost total failure on that front.

The very definitions of Liberation, Peace and Justice have suffered in this project: the Truth movement is still under the domination of right wing authoritarian politics with racism, sexism and homophobia highly integrated within all of its levels.

Professor Ward Churchill's views on the events of September 11 might be wrong, might be partial truths, or might become essential reading some day in Universities of the future. He has a way with statements that is easy to distort, to misrepresent - also perhaps his choice of examples or phrases may lend those distortions. Additionally his personal style might be more confrontational and sprinkled with "unfortunate" remarks than what the liberation movement needs in this time. It's not a new thing; he has been in the center of various divisive controversies in the past - long before September 11 - where many radicals and liberals felt that his behaviour and his politics were questionable. And they are questionable - *everything* uttered by University professors should be questionable, and *everything* claimed by people who are active in the movement should be questionable. We need to cultivate our communities' abilities for critical thinking and self-directed evaluations of the Truth.

But in the meantime, if americans can tolerate so easily the illegal ousting of a University Professor for making "uncomfortable" statements, along with war, torture and a total destruction of civil liberties and the Constitution, we need to examine the role of modern authoritarianism more closely. Does it exist? In what forms? How does it operate? How do we subvert it?

*Everything* we do or abstain from doing within the Movement depends on how we evaluate and analyze the role of authoritarianism; if it's true that the vast majority of americans have been reduced to a numb paralysis where "freedom" equals "desire to shop", or "desire for more Spectacle", what kind of activities and attitudes does the Movement need to cultivate so as to help people become restored to healthily reclaiming liberation through collective self-organized mobilizations?

Petros Evdokas, petros (at) cyprus-org.net
from the Belly of the Beast
petros-evdokas.cyprus-org.net/Another-sort-of-Introduction.html
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