The modern left begins with the fight among the Russsian social democrats as to whether they should support the terrorist tactics of the Narodniks, who were fighting in the latter 19th century to overthrow the czar.

Although few know it, the faction that would later call themselves the Communists opposed terrorism as a tactic, as it tended to bring strong oppressive reaction while at the same time sending a message to the people at large that they did not have to engage in political struggle, leaving such struggle to a heroic elite. Hence, at a time of greater oppression, the masses of people were disarmed by non-involvement in political struggle.

However, the early left made a distinction between the terror tactics of left -- the actions ostensibly to support an oppressed people, or to oppose imperial power - and the terror tactics of the government or the right, which were meant to silence the left, or to further seal state or right-wing power against the workers, farmers/peasants, and lower middle-classes.

The Weather Underground members had lost faith in a working class, classic-style revolution. They also believed that the bulk of the middle class was bought off by the excess wealth generated by the exploitation of the "third world". Hence, despairing of any other way, they sought terror as a method of "sparking" resistance, which they hoped would begin among the most impoverished sections of U.S. society, e.g., poor black Americans, native Americans, etc. In this, they were supported by agents provocateurs working for the government, as an perusal of the subject of "Cointelpro" or the Church Committee hearings in Congress will demonstrate to anyone so interested.

The attacks against Obama on the Ayers issue represent, in part, a continuing struggle over the meaning of the Southeast Asian colonial wars, in which the United States butchered over a million people, and tortured tens of thousands. As Meteor Blades makes so very clear, the really hardcore terrorists were Kissinger, MacNamara, Johnson, Nixon, and so many more (including Alexander Haig, a McCain supporter).

On one hand, the purported Ayers-Obama link is just plain silly, as there's really nothing to it. But the politics behind it is very real. Ayers and other radical supporters of the antiwar movement were no criminals: they were trying to stop a massive crime being committed. That they sometimes chose self-defeating methods is very regrettable, but the damage they caused was nothing compared to the damage caused by the great evil they opposed.

Cho [Myung-hwa, a film director planning a film on Lee's life,] pointed out a little-known fact: In 1946, a year after the U.S. Army occupied southern Korea at World War II's end, a U.S. Embassy poll found that 77 percent of southerners wanted a socialist or communist future.

Instead, the U.S. military government kept many of Japan's right-wing Korean collaborators in power, and the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, vowed to "stamp out" the communists.

"It was witch-hunting," said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied the case. "The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could touch her. They waited for their chance."

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, had testified that her confession was probably forced through "out and out torture," probably near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it's now known.

"The water cure is a very common method," Wright said. "Electric shock and the use of pliers is frequent." [emphasis added]

A Korean source backs this up. In a 2005 Seoul TV report on Kim Soo-im, longtime government propagandist Oh Jae-ho, a staunch anticommunist, said he learned from a police official that the defendant had to be carried into the courtroom to confess on the final day.