By Marinka Peschmann

Less than a week before American’s go to the polls to elect the 44th President, excerpts from declassified FBI files documenting unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and his Weather Underground Organization’s mission to end the Vietnam war, and bring about a Marxist-Leninist revolution inside America, may offer comparables into Senator Barack Obama’s remarkable youth movement and grass roots organization that outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton and is propelling him into the White House. Obama’s political career was launched in Ayer’s home.

According to the 1976 FBI reports, Ayers, and his future wife Bernadine Dohrn traveled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba before the October 1969 Days of Rage riots as part of the Venceremos Brigades.

The Venceremo Brigades was a Cuban spy operation tasked to recruit “individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.” (Story here)

“The ideological mating between the American radical left and the Vietnamese Communist, with Fidel Castro playing matchmaker, exploded in…the streets of Chicago,” the FBI report discloses. “It is love that feeds the inextinguishable hate against the United States.”

While brave warriors fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against radical jihadists bent on the destruction of Western Civilization, and because Obama has been elusively sketchy about his relationship with Ayers, his education co-chair on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that radicalized students and showed no academic achievement; it seemed fitting to see how Obama’s Marxist co-chair built up his movement.

Tapping into the frustrations and discontent over the Vietnam war, according to the FBI report, in a speech entitled “A Strategy to Win” Ayers said, “We’re not just saying… bring the U.S. troops home and deploy them some place some other time, we’re saying bring the war home…”

How did Ayers propose to achieve his objectives? By quickly setting up a “National Action Staff,” because “people have to get confident about this– that we can build a revolutionary youth movement…”

Next the FBI report refers to passages from the New Left Notes, the Students for Democratic Society newspaper, dated August 23, 1969.

“The National Action is building fast. All over the country, from Detroit to Houston, from Miami through cities in Ohio and out to Denver, Colorado, people are digging on the action… for the past two months, the National Officers, the National Action staff, and the National Office staff have been busting to get out propaganda, develop a scenario with other organizations for the action itself, build contacts throughout the country, get people in motion, and develop an overall strategy for building the action… we want to fill people in on what’s been going on—and talk about what should be going on—in cities, chapter and regions…

One of the most important reasons for calling the National Action lies with the decision that it was possible and necessary to build an anti-imperialist, working class youth movement in the mother country…

And what became clear to people—through the struggles at Columbia and Chicago, at San Francisco State and at Kent State—was that putting forward our politics in an aggressive way was the ONLY way to organize the masses of people in this country. That only by dealing with the issues of white supremacy, the black liberation struggle, Third World struggles, and the fight against imperialism, only by challenging the consciousness of the people could we ever develop a movement capable of helping topple the imperialist state…

We say clearly that this is an action not to register a complaint or up the percentage points in public opinion polls, but to make a difference, to create the solution.

The National Action is one of the key ways of talking to young people in this country about a building a class conscious revolutionary youth movement…

Chicago is the site…We are coming back to turn pig city into the people’s city.”

After Ayers’ Days of Rage, a four-day declaration of “war on the Chicago police” where 287 people were arrested and 59 police officers “sustained personal injury,” on October 21, 1969, the New Left Notes reported a WUO update: “We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. From here on it’s one battle after another with White Youth joining in the fight and taking the necessary risks. Pig Amerika–Beware: There’s an army growing right in your guts, and it’s going to help bring you down.”

Ayer’s, who dodged prison because of a prosecutorial misconduct, has reinvented himself as a “distinguished scholar” who holds court in the antechambers of Chicago’s radicals. Why he chose to associate and work with the then unknown Barack Obama remains a mystery. 

Perhaps, the FBI report offers an answer, “Good revolutionaries are never deterred by odds.” If so, maybe Ayers’ gamble and investment in Obama’s political career might pay off.