Authors: Bill Ayers
Seated in the back row, Maria handed over an envelope swollen with a weathered wad of low-denomination euros, “for the plane ticket,” she said. It was uncountable on our bouncing bus, but everything was feeling right. “Cool,” I said, and stuffed it into my vest pocket. She broke out her military-style pack and pulled up a thermos of thick black Greek coffee and a bag of Arab food, grease darkening the paper sack in a delicate Rorschach, and we dived eagerly into flatbread and falafel, hummus and baba ghanoush. Georges offered portions to our dubious fellow travelers—“We’re anarchists!” he proclaimed—and we chattered happily about plans for the week as they pointed out the ancient sights along the way.
“An anarchist convention,” I said as we rolled through the city streets. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms—like a fat anarchist?” It sounded like an oxymoron to me, something akin to jumbo shrimp or Justice Scalia. And a keynote speech seemed so unnecessarily hierarchical. “Are you sure you’re anarchists?” I teased.
“Don’t be fooled,” Maria kidded back. “This is all a front for chaos and confusion. You’re one of our many props!”
The squat was beautiful: anarcho-graffiti in the entryway and up the narrow stairs, open windows and unlocked doors, assorted chairs in all manner of disrepair in the large commons area, pirated electricity and Internet, big pots of red beans and lentils bubbling away on a small black stove, and a huge, salvaged wooden table overflowing with black bread, apples and cheese, olives, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs. I was given a mat and assigned a small back bedroom, which I shared with three other comrades, and situated right next to the toilet (thank you, young anarchists!). I had to give my talk—“Society-in-Motion: Democracy Makes a Tentative Appearance in the Streets of Amerika”—late that night, so I headed off for a nap to shake off the remaining jet lag.
It was already dark when I peeped my eyes open and stumbled out to the common room. “At last!” Maria laughed as she passed me a Greek coffee and a handful of pistachios. “We’re late!”
A dozen of us stampeded down the stairs and piled into several cars bound for the Arts College, anarchist headquarters for the week (Do anarchists even have a headquarters? I asked). I was scrunched in the back seat of a rusted-out Soviet-era Zap without springs or shock absorbers. It was a bumpy ride.
My talk, scheduled for 8:00 p.m., didn’t get started till 10:00, which seemed fine with everyone else. I was just going with the flow, so it was cool with me too—“Please pass another cup of black coffee,” I said. When my time came, I asked for a moment of silent remembrance for fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, murdered by the police not long before at a spot near where we now assembled. I then channeled the great anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin: Freedom without socialism is a license for privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality. I spoke of our shared values of peace and participatory democracy, agency and power from below with neither gods nor masters. I offered a modest proposal that Bernardine and I had first suggested at a gathering in Berlin a year before to try to illuminate the fault lines of power and violence: every citizen or resident of a country that has
any
US military presence on its territory must be allowed to vote in US elections. The applause was thunderous and sustained. I ended by saluting the great anarchist tradition in Greece stretching back centuries and sustained by subsequent generations of Greek youth, and reminded them that it was now their moment and their honor to carry it on.
A large group of us left the auditorium after midnight and retreated to a café to keep the conversation going, accompanied by bottles of cheap red wine, an assortment of briny olives, old cheeses, and freshly baked bread. I got back to the squat around 2:00 am and was awake a few hours later to meet Petros, a doctor who had trained in the United States, and catch the fast boat from Piraeus to the faraway island of Paros, where we would spend the day with Manolis Glezos, returning to the anarchist convention late, late that night. Petros was excited to make the introduction: “You and Manolis will love each other,” he insisted. “You share some politics.” I couldn’t wait.
Manolis Glezos was the most respected (or reviled) man in all of Greece and well known throughout Europe for a dazzling act of courage when he was just nineteen: in late May 1941, he and a friend climbed the Acropolis and tore down the Swastika that had flown over Athens since German occupation forces marched into the city a month earlier. Their symbolic action was magnified many times when the Nazis, determined to nip all opposition in the bud lest the virus of resistance spread, offered a reward of Manolis’s weight in gold for his capture and sentenced Manolis and his pal to death in absentia. By the time we met, Manolis was ninety years old and a veteran of seventy years of struggle for peace and justice. He’d been imprisoned by the German occupiers, the Italians, the Greek collaborators, and the Regime of the Colonels, adding up to over a decade behind bars; he had been sentenced to death multiple times, charged with espionage, treason, and sabotage, and escaped prison more than once; his fifteen-year-old brother had been executed by the Nazis. He’d been the focus of widespread international protests and “Free Glezos!” campaigns on several occasions over the years, which surely explained why Manolis was still alive and standing at the dock waving happily when we arrived.
His broad smile emerged from his bushy white mustache and drove a deeper crease across his already wrinkled countenance, and his beaming shock of windswept hair stood out against his brown face. He was wearing a loosely fitted, coarse cotton shirt with pants to match, a beige scarf, and a light sports coat buttoned to the top, collar up. We embraced for a long moment, then turned and walked arm in arm—Petros on one side, me on the other, Manolis stepping spryly along in the middle—to a café in the plaza as the two of them caught up on the gossip and the news of the day.
Our walk was slow, for every person we passed—every one, no exception—greeted Manolis and presented a kiss or a handshake or a hug, and he offered an embrace or a word to each in return. It became the customary practice of our day together, and I assumed of his life all the time: he was a flesh-and-blood man, to be sure, but he was simultaneously larger than life, a symbol and an icon. He bore the responsibility gracefully without being in its thrall, responding warmly to everyone he met but remaining as ordinary and earth-bound and humble as anyone I’ve known.
I asked him about his time in the Greek Parliament. He said that each time he ran, and particularly when he was elected, it was always as part of a larger strategy, a useful tactic for him and his comrades at specific times, but never an end in itself. “I’m interested in people collectively discovering their own power,” he said. “That’s an entirely different thing from an individual or a party in power.”
When we finished our second coffee Manolis led us on a walking tour of the town: up and down the narrow streets, through the white marble gates, in and out of shops and cafes, greeting everyone as we went. The sparkling heavens, bright and blue and clean, matched the luminous Aegean below, and the wind seemed to dance between sky and sea before sweeping over our little patch of rock and trees.
In an Eastern Orthodox Church near the town center, we admired ancient statues and a jumble of holy relics collected in glass-covered boxes while a small tour group assembled on the steps. One tourist glanced in our direction and poked another, who looked over and nudged two more; soon everyone was smiling and waving and craning for a look. The tour guide turned and said, “Oh, hello. There you are.” Turning back to her charges, she said, “I see you all recognize our Manolis Glezos.” Spontaneous applause erupted and cameras flashed as Manolis cheerfully went to shake more hands. He welcomed them, and, discovering they were from Spain, told of a time he had visited their homeland—fresh out of prison—at the invitation of Picasso, and said the great artist had done a portrait of him that still hung in Manolis’s home. The tourists applauded once more, and we moved on.
Manolis told us about the years when he was the elected president of the Community Council in Aperathou, an experiment in far-reaching participatory democracy. “We governed by consensus,” he said, “in a local assembly with forums reminiscent of the period of radical democracy in ancient Greece.” They abolished all privileges for elected officials, developed a written constitution, and challenged the idea that “experts” or professional politicians and self-proclaimed leaders were better at running the town’s affairs than ordinary people. “Every cook can govern!” was a kind of theme and watchword.
Manolis put his face close to mine and said with conspiratorial conviction, “The biggest obstacle to revolution here—and I’ll bet it’s true in your country as well—is a serious and often unrecognized lack of confidence.” I agreed. Petros was right: we had some politics in common—definitely. “We spend our lives in the presence of mayors and governors and presidents and chiefs of police,” Manolis continued, “and then we lose our power of self-reliance, and we doubt that we could live without those authorities. We worship them in spite of ourselves. We may not mean to but we do, and soon enough we embrace our own passivity and become enslaved to a culture of obedience. That’s a core of our weakness. That’s something you and I must challenge and change.”
Before we caught the last boat to Piraeus, Manolis gave me an autographed copy of one of his books,
National Resistance 1940–1945
. I gave him
Fugitive Days
. “I’ve already read it,” he said, “but now I have your autograph!”
Manolis has been arrested by riot police in front of the Parliament building each year since our meeting, still living the activist life, still battling the murderous system of oppression and exploitation, still opening spaces for more participatory democracy, more peace, and more justice. And I still see him in my mind’s eye waving cheerfully from the dock—filled with energy and hope.
When I retired from the University of Illinois, the board of trustees voted to deny me emeritus status—an honor initiated by the faculty and advanced on approval from the provost to the chancellor and then to the president and finally to the board. This was a first in the history of the university, and ignited another round of weirdness. Strange times.
I didn’t like the sound of it,
emeritus
, except when applied to noxious politicians—George Bush,
emeritus
. Yes! He was gone. And I didn’t like
retired
much either, because the cultural construction and the social assumptions all pointed toward the grave.
Christopher Kennedy, head of the board and billionaire chair of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, made an impassioned plea at the end of a public meeting that was quoted in the papers:
I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our University to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy. . . . There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so.
He noted that I had long been a popular teacher at UIC, that I had earned considerable respect among education scholars, but added that since emeritus status is a tribute, “our discussion of this topic does not represent an intervention into the scholarship of the University, nor is it a threat to academic freedom.” This last bit struck me as overly defensive and wholly inaccurate.
Kennedy was referring to
Prairie Fire
, the manifesto of the Weather Underground, written decades earlier, and I might have been impressed that Kennedy even knew the book existed except that it, too, had been resurrected in the run-up to the national elections. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly read from it regularly—good stuff mostly—always pointing out that it was “dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy.” That wasn’t true. The dedication page reads, “to harriet tubman and john brown/to all who continue to fight/and to all political prisoners in the us.” This boxed dedication is superimposed over an artist’s rendering of wall-to-wall names of people in prison—hundreds and hundreds of them. The force of the piece is that it points to the fact that the United States was already well into creating a massive gulag—and this was way before mass incarceration gripped the country—and it’s true that Sirhan Sirhan’s name is there, but so are Willy Johnson’s and Michael McGann’s. Exactly: who the hell are they? And was the artist in any way endorsing Johnson’s and McGann’s actions, whatever they were? Not likely.
I immediately wrote a letter to Christopher Kennedy expressing surprise that I’d become an issue and noting that I was truly sorry he had found himself in that impossibly difficult situation. I went on,
I’m also saddened that your loss was once again made present and painful to you and your family. I can only imagine the awfulness of those memories, and as I try to put myself in your place, the sense of anguish and anger seems utterly overwhelming.
I asked to meet with him away from the weight of stereotypes and media creations “to see if we might find some common ground in our shared commitment to the University, to basic democratic principles, and to a belief in the power of redemption and reconciliation.”
I told him that I had never praised the man who murdered his father, nor had I ever condoned assassination—“That narrative is categorically false.” But I went on to ask him to consider the implications of his action. What are my thousands of students to make of it? And beyond that, what was anyone to make of the board intervening in the academic affairs of the university, making decisions about things they cannot adequately or fully evaluate or judge, and are therefore appropriately the province of the faculty and the officers hired by the board? “But whatever the outcome of this,” I said, “I want you to know that I regret the pain that this has rekindled for you. I would welcome an opportunity to talk with you if and when you think that might be worthwhile.”