Some years ago I found myself in scout uniform “self pumping” gas at the local short stop. Another fellow pulled into the stall next over and started filling his tank.
“Where yah headed?” he asked.
“I’m on my way to speak at an Eagle Scout Court of Honor.”
“Oh yah, me too." He beamed. “Our dance team is putting on the open flag ceremony. We’re Native Americans.”
“Oh yah, me too.” I replied with equal enthusiasm.
“Really?” he queried.
“Yah, I was born in Ogden, Utah.”
That’s not the end of the story. During the lead up to the Winter Olympics of 2002; (Note – it delights me that every two years all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of the world come together to “worship Zeus”!) I was in the “main” office. Mr. L__, a handsome young teacher newly acquired by the school, was making small talk with one of the secretaries. They were discussing Mr. L__’s participation in the up coming Indian Dance Ceremonies at the Olympic opening show. My Boy Scouts “Indian Dance” all summer long; in fact I consider myself quite an aficionado on Indian Dancing. I have had in my employ; at different times of course; the “World’s Only Living Fire Hoop Dancer” (David Maughan) and the first Indian hoop dancer ever to produce a hoop sphere while hoop dancing (Paul Harris). Any why, I asked Mr. L__ how he had learned to “Indian Dance”.
“I am a Native American!” he proudly intoned.
I chimed in, [you guessed it] “Oh yah, me too, - a pause for effect – I was borne in Ogden, Utah!”
I believe the Olympic ceremony was called the First Utahans or First Americans – something like that. There were representatives of the five Indian Nations found in Utah when the Mormon Pioneers and the Mountain Men first put in their appearance; Utes, Piutes, Shoshones, Hopis, and Navajos. [Please correct me if I got the tribes wrong.] What interested me was the “first peoples” that were missing. There were no Anasazi dancers and no one represented the Fremont people. Why weren’t these “native” people represented? Because they were all “rubbed out” by the Ute. Piute, Shoshone, Hopi, and Navajo invaders who over ran Utah millenniums ago. Yes, these five great Indian Nations perpetrated Genocide!!!! They completely annihilated the “First Utahans”.
This brings me to the rantings of Ward Churchill, the non-Indian, non-professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado.
Last Sunday, I spent over an hour watching CSPAN’s broadcast of Churchill’s speech, pep-rally, and “question” period. Churchill has grabbed fame by writing that the 9/11 attack on America was just punishment for evils “America” has perpetrated in the past. He sighted the steeling of the “land” from its rightful owners. His implication was that “We the People” of the United States are living on stolen land; Indian land from which we should be justly swept into the sea, or to use Churchill’s words the “dust bin of history.” His shouted, angry gibberish was regularly punctuated by half hearted applause and a few boisterous cheers from a crowd of upwards of a hundred people. In front of his podium stood a line of angry looking, dark haired, young men dressed in black and looking ever so much like a line of fascist bully boys. Behind Churchill stood two other impressive motorcycle gang types; no doubt standing by to defend the “professor” should anyone fling the truth in his direction.
His speech was one of the most offensive misrepresentation of history I have ever witnessed. A lie that was applauded by the trained monkeys assembled to “show support” for their master.
I wonder if the “professor” has studied enough history to know that from time immemorial invading waves of people have pulsed over the globe. Does he know about the land bridge that brought the ancestor of the Aztecs flooding down North America on their way to subjugate the peoples who conquered Mexico the time before? The Aztecs harvested the young men of their subject peoples for bloody sacrifice to their Eurasian goddesses? One begins to wonder if Churchill’s image of pre-Columbian America was generated by a Hams Beer Commercial; sweet and loving communal peoples living in harmony with each other and nature. The reality of America before the arrival of Europeans is much like the reality of the rest of the world in any time. Peoples dividing themselves into arbitrary groups – if not by color, then by language, or ancestry, or favorite pottery design; and systematically murdering each other over religion, fear, prejudice and greed. That the Dakota eventually found themselves fighting Irishmen or Africans rather than Shoshones or Crows made little difference to those who killed or died. Cortez, now so vilified in the revisionist history of American development, was once seen as a liberator to the peoples of Mexico who had suffered for centuries under the murderous over lordship of Montezuma and his predecessors.
In Europe, migrating Celts consumed the land and lives of people so forgotten that they are simply called Pre-Celtic. The Celts in turn were over run by Achaeans, Ionians, Dorinas, Latins and Romans, before being driven into the sea by Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. I wonder if Churchill has ever heard or the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns or the Franks? In Japan, the invading Mongolian people pushed the indigenous Ainu population onto reservations were they still live. The Arians swept across India and the Zulu across South Africa. No one living today is any more responsible for their conquest or migrations than the nearest pile of rocks. Churchill’s whole point is moot; we inherit nothing from our ancestors but our humanity.
It is obvious that Churchill has not concept of these ideas. Having cheated his way into a job at the university by claiming to be an Indian he probably finds it quite simple to continue to cheat his students out of the truth. It is ironic that Ward Churchill’s lies have probably cost “genuine American Indians” the chance to teach Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. I wonder how the three Indian scholars who had their chance at a job stolen by this fake Indian feel about the justice of Ward Churchill’s sending them “back to the reservation”?
The fact is that Churchill’s phony claims only serve to emphasize the truth; that no one is any more closely related to any of the long dead legions of the past than any one else. Many of my friends and family cherish the notion that they are some how mystically descended from Hebrews. It is a good thing that Jesus has explained that God is capable of turning stones into sons of Abraham.
But Churchill takes his lie past the foolish to the dangerous. Claiming some mystical right of decent, “Chief” Ward calls down the avenging might of Islamic terrorists on the heads of Americans. Innocents who had no more choice in their linage than he did. Who have killed no more Indians than they have Pre-Celts. How odd for someone purporting to be a liberal to visit the sins of the fathers on the heads of the children way past the third and forth generation.
Churchill went on to further fabricate a position by claiming that the murder of Americans, and now Iraqis as they must fight for freedom against terrorists, is just retribution for the 500,000 Iraqi children starved to death by the US sanctions imposed on Saddam’s regime. The fact is that there is not evidence that any Iraqi children starved to death during the long years of sanctions. More importantly it has become obvious the money for the food and medicine intended for the people of Iraq provided by the Oil for Food program was stolen by Saddam, his buddies in the UN, and some very connected people in France, Germany, and Russia. [Interesting that these are the same nations who’s miss-leadership called for continuing the “diplomatic” solutions to Saddam’s mass murders, support of terrorism, and development of terror weapons.]
My students and I study the Orestes cycle. The story of the vengeance of the Furies on the house of Atreus. The senate of Argos chants “Now the blood that Atreus shed falls on Agamemnon’s head”. It is Athena the Goddess of Wisdom, Justice, and Righteous War, who imposed the shield of the Law between the Furies and the people. As long as the people act in accordance with truth, the Furies will be contained. Now Ward Churchill wants to dredge up clan hatred, blood grudge, and the furies to reek vengeance on the children of people long dead. Terrorist are the prefect tools for this diabolic scheme. They drip the blood of the "eye for and eye, life for life" vengeance of the uncivilized past. Seeking to stir up hate against innocent people by conjuring injustices done to long dead ancestors or their comrades in murder, Churchill and his disciples perpetuate the blood feud. What a convenient weapon terror is once reason goes away.
At the end of his rant Churchill took questions. Most were testimonials to the master’s greatness, but one young man challenged Ward. He said that although he disagreed with Churchill, he felt that Churchill had a right to say what he ever he wanted. He challenged, "why do you protest the celebration by “my people”, the celebration of Columbus Day." "Why," the young Italian American asked, "don’t my 4th amendment rights mean anything to you?" Churchill then launched on a convoluted ramble explaining that the 9th amendment, which reserves all rights not enumerated in the constitution to the people, protected his human rights. To Churchill, showing honor to “the beginner of the Genocide of his people” violated his human rights. This is utterly ludicrous, first, there is no implied right in the Constitution to defend anyone from being insulted, and secondly, Churchill’s rantings about the “little Ikemans” of the Twin Towers might well offend the human feelings of their children, parents, friends, and lovers. The young man tried a follow up question; no doubt wishing to point out Churchill’s miss interpolation of the 9th amendment, but was shouted down by the mob and the “professor”. Obviously in Churchill’s world of fantasy scholarship, and fantasy Indians, one only gets one question at the foot of the fantasy god Churchill!
Churchill would do well to study a little Cicero along with the history his missed. He might come to understand that “Men and Gods are all one commonwealth” and stop trying to claw his way to position and power by inciting hate and division among Americans and other peoples of the world. Maybe he ought to listen to Socrates and Gandhi – who claimed citizenship in no city or county but proudly claimed to be native sons of the world!.
I actually haven't had the lack of sense to finish his "essay", but I do have a copy of it that I found if anyone is interested...
ReplyDeleteBut he just uses the standard ignorance that he can use things to his benefit while ignoring any possible detriment. Ignoring points that would hurt his cause while using the same points to try and further it...
Yeah, he claims that Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children after the first gulf war by starvation. I wonder if he blames us for the starving children in North Korea, too? How many tons of food do we supply the world with annually...?
Anyways...
This type of person infuriates me for two reasons.
ReplyDeleteFirst, their liberal rantings are full of half-truths (at best), and they have been somehow given access to the educational system.
Second, because they are so loud in their denunciations, that are based on hate and bigotry, some become reactionary and it becomes harder to point to the actual history of violence and wrong done by the government of the United States to the native people.
I have a question for Apollo. Where do you get your info? I am not claiming that the civilizations of Meso America were peaceful, but I am an in depth scholar of the culture and would question some of your points. Particularly where do you get your points about the Inca. And just to clarify, were you talking about the Mayan people, and if so, where did you get your info about them?
DannyBoy
ReplyDeleteFor a long time the positions on the Mayas was that they were a “peaceful” even benign people, but relatively recent archeological and historical material has shown they were both warlike and practiced human sacrifice to an extreme approaching that of the Aztecs. This is a subject worthy of greater documentation on our part. I did not reference either Mayan or Incan acts in my original post. However, here are a couple of points to support Apollo’s claims:
On the Maya: From an October 2003 National Geographic article titled “Watery Graves of the Maya –“A source of life for the ancient Maya of the Yucatan lay in an underworld of cenotes – pools and cave rivers – many created after the impact of a meteorite 65 million years ago. Now, newly discovered skeletons yield evidence of sacred funerary rites and human sacrifice.” (pg 82) “To ensure rain and sunlight, and to keep the subtle balance of nature, Maya priests appealed to Chacm, the sustainer of life and the god of rain, who lived deep in the cenotes. When drought, war, or other dangers threatened the Maya performed elaborate rituals and pierced their tongues and earlobes with stingray spines, collecting their blood on parchment for burned offerings. On occasion, a high priest would open a victim’s chest with a stone knife and tear out the beating heart.” (pg 91)
As for the Inca. I have read, but cannot reference here, an account of Pizarro’s visit to the great Inca at Cuzco. The Emperor showed Pizarro the sacred sanctuary of the Inca god. In the temple there stood a large stone basin filled with human hearts. As I recall the account; admittedly written by the Spanish conquerors; Pizzaro showed disgust at the gruesome sight – at which the Inca was offended, pointing out that he had just shared with the Spaniard the sacred core of his beliefs. Be that as it may, here is a quote from the November 1999 National Geographic. The article is titled, “Frozen in Time” “Among the Inca, human sacrifices were rare and were intended as special offerings to the gods. Children were considered purer than adults; indeed a sacrificed child was believed to have been so honored as to in effect become deified – a direct representative of the people, living with the gods forever after. Such children would themselves be worshiped from afar.” (pg 47)
I’m sure the children appreciated the adoration of their murderers. I would also add – in reverence to Ward Churchill’s rant – that the Inca ruled with blood had horror over those who cowered below their mountain fortresses.
It might interest you to know that the Indians of Catalina were also practicing human sacrifice when the Spanish arrived.
Lysis, you miss my point.
ReplyDeleteI am well aware of the violence inherent in Aztec, Mayan, and Incan religious culture. I am aware of the tongue peircing, in fact the king would pierce his genitals to get blood. This isn't what I was questioning. I was questioning the Specific examples that were given by Apollo. I have doubts about the Incan shaman story.
First, the Incas were not a tribal culture, they were far more advanced than that. Second, I have never, in any of my study, read anything that even suggests that shamans were mutilated and eaten. This is what I was asking to be backed up.
My doubts with the Mayan ritual are similar. It sounds similar to rituals that are documented, like the one you reference Lysis. But the blood in those sacrifices was burned not drunk. Also, the Mayan civilization was not a chiefdom, so I am not sure who Apollo means by chief.
Bloody sacrifice, and other bloody rites, were very common in the Mesoamerican civilizations in Pre-History, my doubt was specifically directed at Apollo's examples of such bloody rites.
Ares, under the moniker of Apollo. You could not be more wrong about the early history of this country if you actually tried.
ReplyDeleteIndians had fought for and against colonists/the British ever since colonization.
War is not used to punish crime. And if that was a reason, then you cannot claim that the perpetrators were justified. To justify punishment of crime, the punishment has to be directed at the guilty. No Indians were prosecuted or singled out for fighting in any war against colonists.
If you really want to know about the interaction between the Indians and the settlers read Robert Remini's biographies of Andrew Jackson.
Just to give you a snippet, those who were forced onto the "Trail of Tears" were not (for the most part) aggressive indians. They did try to defend themselves from the encroachment of settlers who felt they had a god given right to all the land they wanted. This was despite the fact that the U.S. Congress had ratified treaties promising these Indians that those lands would be theirs forever. As soon as they saw the benefit of the land, they fought a war with the Indians and made another "treaty" forcing them to move to Oklahoma.
That there were never major attacks without provocation is a completely uninformed and ridiculous statement. How about the massacre by the U.S. Cavalry at the Ghost Dance.
That we have been justified in every step is one of the most incorrect statements I have ever read in my life. I will give a few circumstances that I would like you to justify.
1. Giving a wagon load of blankets that are infected with smallpox to a group of Indians to kill them off.
2. Outlawing religious rites of the Indians.
3. Refusing to recognize Indians as citizens.
4. Rescinding, altering, and flat out refusing to live by the treaties that were made with Indians.
5. The Supreme Court ruling that Indians could never own land, they could only occupy it until the U.S. government wanted it.
I could go on, but I don't feel it necessary unless you can actually justify the first five.
I've remained silent because, sadly, I don't have a large number of specific events that I could point to, but my memory seems to want to try to thrust one forward... Wasn't there some kind of raid against the Native Americans as early as Jamestown? Like right after the "thanksgiving" thing? Like I said, I don't really know, but I think that I heard or saw something of that, if you could afirm or deny that, I would appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteAeneas – I don’t see where I singled out the Shoshone as a particularly war like people. They did “do in” the Fremont Indians of Northern Utah, so the Fremont people might have thought the Shoshone were very warlike.
ReplyDeleteThis leads me to comment on both Aeneas and Ares references to war. I don’t know it is necessarily a bad thing to be a war like people. I am reminded of George Patton’s (George Scott’s) speech about American’s love of battle. Western Culture has dominated the world because of its marshal nature. Our hero’s have always been warriors – as were those of the Shoshone. Ours have just been better at it.
To address Ares and Dannyboy, I would say that war is good when it is just, and war is evil when it is not. That is why there are two gods of war, Athena and Ares. We had three earlier posts on this here in the Agora. Back in November 04, we discussed this idea in postings called Athena and Ares #1, #2, #3. What is more important to this post (Native Son) is whether the wars of the past were just or not – they do not justify violence, murder, or unjust wars today. Ward Churchill is all the things Aeneas claims he is because Mr. Churchill tries to justify his hate for America by the bringing up the sins, imagined or historic, of people long dead.
The sins of the father, anyone?
ReplyDeleteI don't think we'll ever be able to fully escape the long dead past. I know that when speaking of countries you usually have two things to consider, the memory of the people and the memory of the country (of history). Basically people would more often forget about long gone wrongs if they didn't have history books, not to place blame, it's just a fact. It's sad to see things taken into account on a people that is entirely different from its past. I don't have any actual examples because I haven't looked into it, but bringing up the "sins of the father" doesn't get us anywhere, and that's just one of the many reasons that Mr. Churchill is so off center.
I would like to agree with all of the things said about Churchill. ( on a side note, my wife just glanced over my shoulder and saw derogatory things about "Churchill" and was like, "WHat!" I had to tell her it wasn't Winston.)
ReplyDeleteAnyways, my only other point was going to be in response to Aeneas. Though I am not as versed in Shoshone history as others, I would dare say that such an overwhelmingly blanket statement is in all likelihood not completely true. Though in general, and especially around the time of interaction with Settlers, this may be a completely correct statement, it is very hard to believe that throughout the entire history of the Shoshone there was never one leader, never one segment of the society, never one period in time when they were not noble, brave, or peaceful.
I think the point that is missed by Aeneas here is that this is not to cast aspersions on any Indian group, but to try to dispel the flat out myth that Indians were all peaceful and happy until the white man came.
I hope you're not too terribly upset, DannyBoy, but I took this one upon myself...
ReplyDelete"I think the point that is missed by Aeneas here is that this is not to cast aspersions on any Indian group, but to try to dispel the flat out myth that Indians were all peaceful and happy until the white man came."
Apollo, did you even read the comments? I know that comes off as overly harsh, but it was his parting comment afterall...
Sorry, sometimes I wish these could be held in forums where we could see each other and hear each other. That way there wouldn't be so much misunderstanding...
ReplyDeleteBut at least you can laugh at it, keep that virtue, it helps maintain a sanity that some people lack.
Lysis,
ReplyDeleteYou haven't posted for a while. I can't wait for new material. You may want to comment on the success of the Bush doctrine in Lebanon.
Keep up the good work.
Eye thought you should all at least read the damn thing
ReplyDelete[Globalization] "Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
written by Ward Churchill // 9-11-2001
This article appeared in Pockets of Resistance #11 September 2001
When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.
The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.
If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.
How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.
In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.
It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.
There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.
If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.
Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo – continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American military/economic domination – it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them.
Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..
There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.
Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" – or perhaps more outraged – than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."
Property before people, it seems – or at least the equation of property to people – is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world – the Mideast, for instance – began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption.
So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America's free-fire zones.
Tellingly, it was at precisely this point – with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it – that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.
Meet the "Terrorists"
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate "news" media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.
They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less commit "the first acts of war of the new millennium."
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" – now proudly emblematized by the United States – against the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course. That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.
They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not "cowards."
That distinction properly belongs to the "firm-jawed lads" who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below – including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians – while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those "fighting men and women" who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.
Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."
One might rightly describe their actions as "desperate." Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable – one is tempted to say "normal" – emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy). That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI's investigative reports on the combat teams' activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it's pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists – soldiers, really – who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.
And still less were they/their acts "insane."
Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one – or one's country – holds what amounts to a "divine right" to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US "strategic bombing campaign" against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)
Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of "evil."
Evil – for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept – was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she'd imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopf's utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere "collateral damage." Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.
Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless "the world is rid of such evil," to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark. There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of "Arabic-looking individuals" – America's indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world's peoples ample cause to be at war with it – or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.
To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war – not "terrorist incidents" – they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as "escalation").
Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.
About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau
There's another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI's "counterterrorism task forces" can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America's delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed "image-building" exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.
Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau's SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its "crime-fighting' statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual "heavy-duty bad guys" of the sort at issue now?
This isn't a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn't get to approve either the script or the casting.
The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one's fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.
To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its "domestic security responsibilities" are concerned, this is because – regardless of official hype – it has none. It is now, as it's always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are "free" to do exactly as they're told.
The FBI and "cooperating agencies" can be thus relied upon to set about "protecting freedom" by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they've already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they're doing will pertain only to others.
Oh Yeah, and "The Company," Too
A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint "terrorist threats," "rooting out their infrastructure" where it exists and/or "terminating" it before it can materialize, if only it's allowed to beef up its "human intelligence gathering capacity" in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).
Yeah. Right.
Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: "The Company" had something like a quarter-million people serving as "intelligence assets" by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn't even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan's version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As to destroying "terrorist infrastructures," one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries – the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS – to run around "neutralizing" folks targeted by The Company's legion of snitches as "guerrillas" (as those now known as "terrorists" were then called).
Sound familiar?
Upwards of 40,000 people – mostly bystanders, as it turns out – were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether.
And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?
The net impact of all this "counterterrorism" activity upon the combat teams' ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil. Instead, it's likely to make it easier for them to operate (it's worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.
On Matters of Proportion and Intent
As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, "Arab terrorists" have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That's about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you'll get something nearer an actual 1%). They've managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they'd surrendered and/or after the "war-ending" ceasefire had been announced).
In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they've knocked down a half-dozen buildings – albeit some very well-chosen ones – as opposed to the "strategic devastation" visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq's entire economy.
With that, they've given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine..
This might be seen as merely a matter of "vengeance" or "retribution," and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.
The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of "getting even," a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the "terrorists" to "break even" for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that's to achieve "real number" parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.
Were this the intent of those who've entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they'd already done.
Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans).
There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.
Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the "news" media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast "aren't like" Americans, not least because they don't "value life' in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.
The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy
In sum one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be call humanitarianism – imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.
Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Now they do.
That was the "medicinal" aspect of the attacks.
To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they're now experiencing first-hand is no different from – or the least bit more excruciating than – that which they've been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.
More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as "stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe."
Either way, it's a kind of "reality therapy" approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally "do the right thing" on their own, without further coaxing.
Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America's abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.
Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.
Since they've shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.
In the Alternative
Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case.
Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US.
Then, again, it's entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.
What the hell? It was worth a try.
But it's becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.
Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don't get it.
Already, they've desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of "counterterrorism experts" drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.
Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer "in charge," they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will "naturally" occur elsewhere and to someone else.
"Patriotism," a wise man once observed, "is the last refuge of scoundrels."
And the braided, he might of added.
Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a "New Crusade" called "Infinite Justice" aimed at "ridding the world of evil."
One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion – or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet – but the matter is deadly serious.
They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.
To where? Afghanistan?
The Sudan?
Iraq, again (or still)?
How about Grenada (that was fun)?
Any of them or all. It doesn't matter.
The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.
Only, this time it's different.
The time the helpless aren't, or at least are not so helpless as they were.
This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there's a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.
"Go ahead, punks," s/he's saying, "Make my day."
And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the "terrorists"' own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here "at home."
Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?
That, too, is their choice to make.
Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.
"You've got to learn, " the line went, "that when you push people around, some people push back."
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such symmetry.
ADDENDUM
The preceding was a "first take" reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I'll readily admit that I've been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.
For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.
Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America's sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who've died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.
Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).
And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America's "Indian War" in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America's own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Washita, Bear River, and the Marias.
Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?
Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?
Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?
Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?
One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name.
And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted "a Chinaman's chance" of surviving.
The list is too long, too awful to go on.
No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.
The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.
Ward Churchill is professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic studies, University of Colorado at Boulder.
To who ever sent “the article” – thank you very much!!! It is most gratifying to be completely vindicated in one’s position. I feel that our discussion above has already answered or pointed out the absurdity of Churchill’s ratings. The more one reads – and I have read every word – the more ridiculous he becomes. By now one wonders if he is even worthy of ridicule. Although too much time has been spent on Ward Churchill’s pack of lies; I would love to ask Ward some questions;
ReplyDelete1. Who is killing Iraqis now?
2. Where are the 500,000 dead children you purport to count? With so many demanding to see the weapons of mass destruction, why does no one ask this question of the anti-Bush, now obviously anti-freedom crowd?
3. Why were the only mass graves found filled by Saddam?
4. Instead of concocting false numbers to bolster his bogus theories of human behavior why doesn’t Churchill count those murdered by the Taliban and by the Mullahs of Iran?
5. Dose Churchill know enough history to understand how truly silly his attacks of America’s efforts in Vietnam really are?
Arguing with a liar is like running in a nightmare. The only solution is to wake up!
The Lynching of Ward Churchill
ReplyDeleteOn February 1st, 2005 Hamilton College cancelled a planned panel discussion including Ward Churchill, a left-wing professor at University of Colorado in Boulder (CU-Boulder), due to a wave of right-wing death threats. That cancellation is one result of the attempt by conservatives to start a witch-hunt against Churchill with the aim of firing (or, for some, executing) him for his criticisms of US foreign policy, especially his 2001 essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” CU-Boulder should not fire Churchill because he’s right. There are some minor problems in elements of his writings (especially in “Some People Push Back,” which is poorly written), such as his overly broad conception of complicity and ignoring evidence that 9-11 may have been an inside job, but his main critique of US foreign policy is correct. The uproar over Churchill is premised on the racist assumption that American lives are more valuable than non-American lives because there is no equivalent uproar over professors and others who support the Iraq war and other US atrocities that killed far more than 9-11. The racism and violent threats towards Churchill actually prove him right, since this is exactly how he claims the US really works.
On February 1st, 2005 Hamilton College cancelled a planned panel discussion including Ward Churchill, a left-wing professor at University of Colorado in Boulder (CU-Boulder), due to a wave of right-wing death threats. That cancellation is one result of the attempt by conservatives to start a witch-hunt against Churchill with the aim of firing (or, for some, executing) him for his criticisms of US foreign policy, especially his 2001 essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” CU-Boulder should not fire Churchill because he’s right. There are some minor problems in elements of his writings (especially in “Some People Push Back,” which is poorly written), such as his overly broad conception of complicity and ignoring evidence that 9-11 may have been an inside job, but his main critique of US foreign policy is correct. The uproar over Churchill is premised on the racist assumption that American lives are more valuable than non-American lives because there is no equivalent uproar over professors and others who support the Iraq war and other US atrocities that killed far more than 9-11. The racism and violent threats towards Churchill actually prove him right, since this is exactly how he claims the US really works.
Few of Churchill’s critics even attempt to refute the general thrust of his claims, in most cases because they didn’t bother to read his writings. Instead they distort his views, call him names and recycle the same out-of-context quotes over and over. His central claim, that US imperialism against other countries causes foreign resistance and terrorism against the United States, is basically correct. You cannot go around propping up right-wing dictatorships, invading other countries & bombing them to rubble and not expect retaliation.
Many Churchill-haters distort his position by claiming that Churchill supports 9-11 and/or called for more 9-11s. Several editorials have appeared in mainstream media, including Fox News and the Daily Camera (Boulder’s local corporate newspaper) attacking him as if he held one or both of these positions. That discredits those sources since they were either lying about Churchill or blindly repeating right-wing myths without bothering to check their sources. Churchill never said 9-11 was justified or advocated more 9-11s. He did say if American citizens do not want to be subjected to further terrorist attacks then we must force our government to stop engaging in aggression against other countries but that, unfortunately, it looks like we will not do this until we have suffered many more attacks. In terms of fighting the American empire, 9-11 was counter-productive.
Most who actually attempt to refute some of Churchill’s claims focus on secondary aspects of his essay, such as his “Little Eichmanns” reference, instead of his main thesis. Despite the misrepresentations common in the media, Churchill’s reference applied only to the “technicians” who help run the empire; he excludes janitors, innocent bystanders and the like. He defended his reference to them as “Little Eichmanns” in a recent interview:
“It goes to Hannah Arendt's notion of Eichmann, the thesis that he embodied the banality of evil. That she had gone to the Eichmann trial to confront the epitome of evil in her mind and expected to encounter something monstrous, and what she encountered instead was this nondescript little man, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a guy who arranged train schedules, who, as it turned out, ultimately didn't even agree with the policy that he was implementing, but performed the technical functions that made the holocaust possible, at least in the efficient manner that it occurred, in a totally amoral and soulless way, purely on the basis of excelling at the function and getting ahead within the system that he found himself. He was a good family man, in his way. He was loved by his children, participated in civic activities, was in essence the good German. And she [Arendt] said, therein lies the evil. It wasn't that Eichmann was a Nazi or a high official within Nazidom, although he was in fact a Nazi and a relatively highly placed official, but it was exactly the reverse: that given his actual nomenclature, the actuality of Eichmann was that anyone in this sort of mindless, faceless, bureaucratic capacity could be the Nazi. That he was every man, and that was what was truly horrifying to her in the end. That was a controversial thesis because there's always this effort to distinguish anyone and everyone irrespective of what they're doing from this polarity of evil that is signified in Nazidom, and she had breached the wall and brought the lessons of how Nazism actually functioned, the modernity of it, home and visited it upon everyone, calling for, then, personal accountability, responsibility, to the taking of responsibility for the outcome of the performance of one's functions. That's exactly what it is that is shirked here, and makes it possible for people to, from a safe remove, perform technical functions that result in (and at some level, they know this, they understand it) in carnage, emiseration, the death of millions ultimately. That's the Eichmann aspect. But notice I said little Eichmanns, not the big Eichmann. Not the real Eichmann. The real Eichmann ultimately is symbolic, even in his own context. He symbolized the people that worked under him. He symbolized the people who actually were on the trains. They were hauling the Jews. He symbolized the technicians who were making the gas for I.G. Farben. He symbolized all of these people who didn't directly kill anybody, but performed functions and performed those functions with a certain degree of enthusiasm and certainly with a great degree of efficiency, that had the outcome of the mass murder of the people targeted for elimination or accepted as collateral damage. That's the term of the art put forth by the Pentagon.”
Churchill’s claim that some of those killed by 9-11 were not innocent is at least partially correct. The Pentagon is an obvious military target and the CIA admits it had a station in the WTC. Both organizations are guilty of numerous atrocities. The CIA hired many Nazi war criminals after the Second World War, including five of Eichmann’s aids. If CIA personnel aren’t “little Eichmanns” then no one is. The invasion of Iraq killed at least 100,000 people. The American government as committed countless atrocities, from the Trail of Tears to East Timor and beyond (for a more in-depth account of US atrocities see Killing Hope by William Blum or Churchill’s own writings).
In his essay Churchill emphasizes one example of US imperialism, the devastation wrought by the sanctions on Iraq. At the time, the day after 9-11, Iraq was incorrectly near the top of the suspects list for 9-11 but this theory was proven false. Declassified documents prove the US intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water system. Iraq’s water requires materials for purification; drinking unpurified water can lead to diseases and other health problems. Sanctions prevented Iraq from importing these materials, thereby leading to epidemics and mass death. US military intelligence estimated the sanctions would kill hundreds of thousands, or more, and UN figures confirm that the sanctions did in fact kill huge numbers of Iraqis. In 1996 Madeline Albright, who later became Clinton’s Secretary of State, was asked, “we have heard that half a million children have died [from sanctions on Iraq]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Her response was, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
The United States has frequently attacked civilian targets when they allegedly contained installations equivalent to the CIA office in the WTC. During the Gulf War the US repeatedly destroyed civilian bomb shelters, alleging the Iraqi government had military or intelligence facilities in or next to them and were using the bomb shelters as “human shields.” During the run up to the second battle of Fallujah last year the US repeatedly bombed Fallujah, claiming it was targeting “terrorist safe houses” but slaughtering many innocent civilians in the process. US officials dismissed innocents killed in the strikes as “collateral damage.” One difference between these two incidents and 9-11 is that no one disputes the CIA had a station in the WTC but the US’s claims of military/intelligence facilities or “terrorist safe houses” at these targets have never been proved.
By the flawed standards the US uses when attacking other countries, the WTC was a legitimate military target because it housed a CIA station. Hitting it was no different than the US hitting bomb shelters and Fallujah in order to strike at command centers or “terrorist safe houses” (assuming they actually existed and the US wasn’t lying). Any innocents killed by 9-11 were “collateral damage” just as the innocents killed by US air strikes in Iraq are “collateral damage.”
The different reactions to atrocities committed by the US and atrocities committed against the US reveal the underlying racist assumption that American lives are more valuable than non-American lives. When we’re “collateral damage” Americans (especially conservative Americans) find it unthinkable that the act could be justified, but when non-Americans are “collateral damage” it’s either justified or at least debatable whether it was justified. It’s just assumed that American lives are more valuable than non-American lives.
The same underlying racism is evident in the furor surrounding Ward Churchill’s comments. There are many professors who support the invasion of Iraq and/or the previous sanctions on it, as well as numerous other atrocities. Yet there is no furor over their positions, even though the invasion of Iraq and other atrocities killed far more than were killed on 9-11. There is no investigation into the works of pro-war professors. The board of regents hasn’t apologized for pro-war professors’ “disgraceful comments.” The state legislature hasn’t condemned pro-war professor’s positions as “evil.” The Governor hasn’t called for pro-war professors to be fired. There isn’t media uproar over anyone’s pro-war comments. Nor was there any uproar over Albright’s “the price is worth it” comment. The murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is something reasonable people can debate yet the idea that some of those killed on 9-11 were not innocent is unthinkable. These different reactions reflect the assumption that (mostly White) American lives are more valuable than (mostly brown) non-American lives because the reaction against the killing of Americans is much more negative than the killings of non-Americans even when in similar situations and when Americans are killed in smaller quantities.
That racist assumption is visible in many related attacks on Churchill. For example, the Daily Camera claims Churchill’s arguements are “much more hateful than some speech (namely, Columbus Day parades) that Churchill would happily suppress.” Christopher Columbus himself had well over 3,000 Arawaks (the first native people encountered by Columbus) murdered. He wiped them out and began a hemisphere wide genocide that would kill millions. Celebrating Columbus is celebrating genocide; Columbus Day parades are like having Hitler day parades. Churchill only claimed that a portion of those killed by 9-11 were not innocent, he’s not calling for Bin Laden parades or anything even close to that. Yet the Camera values the lives of the (mostly White) Americans killed on 9-11 so much more than the native inhabitants of this hemisphere that merely claiming some 9-11 dead weren’t innocent is viewed as worse than openly celebrating Columbus, a genocidal monster.
Another racist attack is the complaint that Churchill doesn’t criticize atrocities committed by non-whites enough. One letter to the editor in the Daily Camera complains of Churchill’s alleged “failure to condemn the atrocities of Imperial Japan” and that he doesn’t condemn Saddam Hussein enough. This reaction is a reflection of knee jerk racism. You can only criticize atrocities committed by white people if you also criticize non-white atrocities. If you don’t then someone will complain that you’re “ignoring” or “not condemning” non-white atrocities. In this way the emphasis remains on the atrocities committed by non-whites or non-Americans and away from US or white atrocities. You can talk solely about their atrocities, or both our and their atrocities, all you want but if you talk solely about our atrocities (which are the atrocities we can most easily stop) then you’ll get shit for “not condemning” non-White/non-American atrocities.
Governor Owens’s call for Churchill to be fired and his complaint that Churchill helps spawn a “culture of violence” are rife with hypocrisy and racism. If Churchill’s comments spawn a “culture of violence” then what are we to say of those who support the invasion of Iraq, which killed 100,000 Iraqis? The United States spends hundreds of billions a year on the military and frequently uses violence against other countries. Apparently, Owens only has a problem with a “culture of violence” when that violence is directed against (mostly white) Americans, violence against (mostly brown) non-Americans is okay with him. Churchill-haters made countless death threats against him and are using violent threats to force the cancellation of several of his speaking engagements. If conservatives want to see a culture of violence they should look in the mirror.
The Churchill-haters’ complaints that they don’t want to subsidize his views and don’t want their tax dollars going to him are unfounded. Lots of people don’t want our tax dollars being spent on an immoral and illegal war in Iraq, but conservatives don’t consider that a valid objection to the war. If the government only funded things that didn’t offend anyone then it would end up funding nothing, which contradicts conservatives’ support for a strong state.
Churchill-haters’ have no problem with the same university subsidizing conservative views. In November 2003 CU-Boulder paid right-wing pundit Ann Coulter twenty thousand dollars to speak at the university. According to local media reports, during her talk Coulter claimed the war in Iraq would be justified even if it were about oil and the extermination of the Native Americans was justified in order to build the United States. She previously wrote, “We should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” She also said, “my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” If the university can pay this racist advocate of genocide to speak then certainly it can pay Churchill’s salary, no matter what he says. The much greater reaction against Churchill than against Coulter and her support for genocide is further proof of the racist nature of the anti-Churchill hysteria.
No one’s tax dollars are actually going to subsidize Churchill’s views. The university pays Churchill to teach; private publishers, not the state, print his “anti-American” writings. Furthermore, less than ten percent of CU Boulder’s funding comes from the state government so taxpayers don’t even pay him to teach, except for a very small portion of his salary. It’s ironic that the same conservatives who denounce “class warfare” attack Churchill over his $90,000 salary while ignoring the far greater amount made by Coulter, O’Reilly, Limbaugh and other right-wing pundits. Apparently, class warfare rhetoric is acceptable only if you’re attacking leftists.
Since tenure and the first amendment mean Churchill’s political views cannot be used to fire him, Churchill-haters are attempting to use various smears as an excuse to dismiss him. Some have accused him of not being a “real” Native American and launched detailed investigations into his ancestry to prove this. These allegations are groundless because race does not exist in any biological sense. Race is a social construct, a modern version of caste, as proven by the fact that race changes considerably between societies and over time. Latin America has several races (Mulattos and Mestizos) that don’t exist in the United States. The Irish in the US used to be considered a separate race but today are considered White. Modern biologists have come to the same conclusions as historians and sociologists: there is no biological basis for race.
To determine whether Churchill is “really” part of any particular race is impossible because races don’t really exist. If Churchill believes he is a member of a particular race and, more importantly, is treated as if he were a member of that race then is part of that race, because that’s all race is. The belief that biologically distinct races exist is a standard assumption of most white supremacist philosophies, including Social Darwinism and Nazism, so it’s not surprising that Churchill-haters make the same assumption. All this nonsense about Churchill’s “real” race smacks of the “racial science” used to justify old-fashioned racism. Ultimately his race doesn’t matter because a person’s race doesn’t determine whether their claims are true or false. This isn’t about native self-determination; it’s about right-wingers trying to suppress a critic of US foreign policy.
Conservatives also accuse Churchill of “academic fraud.” Anyone who’s written as many works as Churchill is going to have some mistakes in their writing, that doesn’t make it “academic fraud.” Even if all the allegations against him were true (which they aren’t) it wouldn’t refute his critique of US foreign policy and it’s therefore irrelevant. All this talk about “academic fraud” and Churchill’s ethnicity is a red herring. They can’t fire him for his political beliefs but, theoretically, they could fire him for academic fraud or for lying about his ethnicity. However, the real reason for the drive to fire Churchill is his political beliefs; these are just excuses conjured up to justify firing him and are therefore illegitimate.
Churchill’s 9-11 article was written three and a half years ago; complaining about it now is like complaining that the movie “Three Kings” criticized the Gulf War. The article is yesterday’s news. The only reason it is being bought up now, and not when it was originally written, is because right-wingers are making a big deal about it – illustrating the power they have over the media and university. When the right ignored Churchill’s essay the media ignored it but when the right started making a big deal out of it the media started paying attention to it (and repeating right-wing distortions about it).
There are three main reasons causing right-wingers to bring it up. One was their recent defeat in the conflict of Columbus Day in Denver, which Churchill played a role in. Many Colorado conservatives had already developed a dislike of Churchill, serving as a motive to target him.
The second factor comes from Hamilton College in New York, where Churchill was scheduled to speak. Conservatives there were already campaigning against the local left and scored a previous victory by preventing leftist Susan Rosenburg from becoming an artist-in-residence. That victory encouraged them to attack more leftists, including Ward Churchill who was originally scheduled to speak at the college.
A third factor is weaknesses in Churchill’s own writings, especially “Some People Push Back.” Compared to many other writers making similar points (such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn) Churchill is less persuasive and phrases his argument in such a way that it is easier to portray him negatively. This makes it more likely for conservatives to target him since they are more likely to get upset about him and because he’s an easier target. These three factors converged in late January to cause conservatives to launch a campaign against Churchill, which quickly spilled over into the mainstream due to their influence over society and the media.
Unfortunately, rather than circle the wagons and battle against this conservative attack most liberal commentators have taken it as an opportunity to bash Ward Churchill. This plays into the hands of conservatives as it helps their anti-Churchill propaganda and deprives him of potential allies. This is not to say that Churchill’s works are completely free of error or that he should never be criticized, but taking a right-wing witch-hunt as a cue to attack him helps that witch hunt. His writings have been around for years, if liberals have a problem with it then they should have critiqued them before the current furor. If you treat right wing attacks on a radical leftist as a signal to begin attacking that radical leftist then you are dancing to the right’s tune and will play into their hands. If the university fires Churchill it will embolden the right and encourage them to do the same to other leftists, perhaps resulting in a new McCarthyism. Should that happen the witch-hunt will eventually broaden to include some liberals, and they will have helped bring about their own persecution.
The anti-Churchill hysteria illustrates how thought in American society, especially within the media, is restricted to a narrow spectrum, roughly corresponding to liberalism on one end and conservatism on the other. The media (and other institutions) marginalize views outside that spectrum and generally regard them as unthinkable. The media either ignores those views or, if noticed, demonizes them.
Churchill’s views happen to be outside that spectrum and so are unthinkable to the media and most members of society. His claims were first ignored and now are relentlessly attacked & dogmatically rejected because they go outside the acceptable spectrum of opinion. You can count on one hand the number of editorials or other opinion pieces appearing within mainstream media that argue Churchill is right.
The anti-Churchill witch-hunt refutes the nonsense that the United States is a free society where you can say what you want without fear of persecution. In reality, thought is limited with a certain spectrum of “acceptable” views. Views outside the liberal-conservative spectrum are rarely allowed within mainstream media and if you say things outside that spectrum you take the chance that the same thing will happen to you that is happening to Churchill, especially if you publish those views and become somewhat well known within dissident circles. Jailing dissidents usually isn’t necessary because this system is sufficient to maintain control.
The uproar over Churchill’s writings is based on the racist assumption that American lives are more valuable than non-American lives because there is no similar uproar against people who support US atrocities such as aggression against Iraq. Conservative rants about “academic fraud” and Churchill’s “real” race are illegitimate because they are just a front to fire him for his political writings. Churchill’s real crime is daring to question the myth of American innocence & benevolence. The witch-hunt must be stopped
Loe Licentia I am glad you posted here in the Agora. I enjoyed reading your material and developing my response to it. I hope you realize that here in the Agora we like to yell, but we also like each other.
ReplyDeleteJoe, I thought you title “The Lynching of Ward Churchill” rather inflammatory, so in the same tone I would like to respond with:
The Lynching of America
Dealing with the arguments Joe presents is very much like playing a game of Whack-a-mo. You whack one lie down and another pops up. There is some fun in it; but after a while it does get tiring. But start the music and let’s give it a bash!!!
Once again, as is so often the case in the Agora – the game board is divided by a grid of relativist vs. absolutist positions. Joe and Ward have taken up the relativist holes I must go after them with the club of truth.
Joe’s first argument is that Americans value American lives more than any other – and therefore Americans are raciests. This is an enoumouse jump of logic. First I believe that Americans do values America lives more than the lives of other people, and especially more than the lives of America’s enemies. Does this make Americans racists? It makes them nationalists; which is not necessarily a good thing. However I would point out that Americans are made up of many races and that Americans were just as eager to kill Brits during the Revolution or Germans during the world wars as they seem now to be willing to fight Terrorists. I would also point out that Terrorists seem to come from all racial groups, and I am confident that American will fight with just as much determination against the Tim McVeighs as the Bin Ladens. Joe’s argument fails here because of the champion he chooses to attack American with. Ward Churchill! Ward Churchill is a racist, a non-Indian, still Churchill surely places a higher value on non-American lives than on American ones. Whack!
Joe’s next argument is that the enemies of America are justified in attacking America because American is engaging in aggression against other nations. Aggression implies conquest. That is NOT what American forces are fighting and dieing for. Churchill and his defenders confuse the criminal with the “peace officer” because both policemen and murders carry weapons. In the relativist mind set, carrying a gun makes you bad because the relativists say so. The truth in this one is that, it is why one carries the gun that counts. Hitler was an aggressor, so was Stalin. [Ask the people of Poland and other Eastern European countries that lived under the thumb of “the Evil Empire” until America set them free] Ho Chi Min and Saddam were also aggressors. Defense against aggression is no more aggression than fighting crime is criminal. We could discuss the “justice” of this or that cause – here is a fact to consider. When the U.S. had the chance to rule the world after WWII it chose to rebuild it instead. As the people of the U.S.S.R. realized after the First Gulf War, if the U.S. wanted to conquer the world it would have done so. Once the lie their communist masters had been telling them about American aggression was reviled by facts, they dumped the communists! As Ward and company were shown to be liars by the January elections those in America and out will choose to dump them. Whack!
Joe’s next argument is that whole Eichmann killing jumble. This boils down to chop logic which only relativists can stomach – That since Nazis could be good family people it is OK to kill good family people! That because Eichmann was “every man” it is OK to kill ever man! That because those murdered on 9/11 were symbols of American power it was OK to murder them. This stupid argument could be easily applied to American Indians, or Jews, or any other group the relativist choose to target. The truth is that the people in the Twin Towers had done nothing to deserve death and Osama chose to destroy their lives as a terror weapon to gain the world wide power he longed for. His was the act of aggression and justifying it by saying there were CIA agents in the building is ridiculous. Joe tries to bolster this argument, which must have seemed silly even to him, by claiming that America has killed 100,000 Iraqis in the invasion. This number is completely made up and Ward’s Joe’s or anyone else saying it over and over again will not make it any truer. There may have been 100,000 Iraqis killed in this war, there my have been 500,000 their may have been 250. We don’t know. Only to a relativist does saying it make it so. As for the Trial of Tears and East Timor, this is smoke and mirrors. No one justifies the Trail of Tears; be as angry as you want at Andrew Jackson! But don’t use his misbehavior to justify an attack on Americans who had nothing to do with it. Whack! Whack! Whack!
Joe’s next argument – American Imperialism – He claims to prove this by pulling, out of contest, a 1996 quote from, of all people, Madeline Albright. With it he advances the specious argument that 50,000 Iraqi children had died – by 1996 we are force to suppose - because of the sanctions imposed by the U.N on Iraqi after the gulf war. First of all Madeline Albright, not the Secretary of State at the time, had no way of knowing how to answer this. There is no proof that any children died due to the sanctions, secondly we now know that the suffering of the Iraqi people was caused because the money provided for their food and medicine was stolen by Saddam and the U.N. Therefore reasonably and factually Joe’s relativist attempt to justify murdering Americans on the grounds of American imperialism falls. Whack!
Joe’s next twisted attempt to justify Churchill’s position and the attack on the WTC is to claim that the civilians in the WTC were collateral damage to the CIA agents that Bin Laden was really after. Churchill claims the murders at WTC was as justified as American troops killing civilians in Fallujah who were being used as human shields by terrorists. First of all, by using this argument are Joe and Ward admitting that it was OK to kill civilians in Fallujah? I would like to point out that; while terrorists are criminals who must justifiably be captured or destroyed; (see my police vs. murderer discussion above) CIA agents are not! No one has the “right” to kill CIA agents in the first place! Let’s review the facts about Fallujah. The city was a terrorist base from which criminals were murdering not only American and Allied forces but Iraqis. The people of Fallujah were given time to leave and told to do so. Those who did not were being held hostage by murderers who planed to murder them and others. On top of this, American Marines were very careful and judicious in their use of force. They risked their lives again and again rather than kill innocents. Compare this to the WTC attack. There was no warning given, no chance for non CIA agents to flee, the CIA agents did not hold their fellow citizens hostage at gun point to keep the terror bombers from attacking the WTC. The fact that Churchill does not see theses distinctions but rather uses such silly arguments to support his justification of the 9/11 attack is proof of his bias. Whack!
I want to make a claim - that the liberation of Fallujah and the liberation of Iraq are completely different from the attack on the Twin Towers. [First let me note that it seems odd that Joe and Churchill are using the Iraq war as their justification for the Twin Towers. First because the Iraq war happened after the 9/11 attack and secondly because most anti-war types maintain there is “no connection between Saddam and 9/11.] This just goes to point out again that relativists can use any arguments they want to support their manufactured positions. Whether Saddam was supporting world wide terror or not – the war in Iraq is a war of defense fought for the freedom of the people oppressed by Saddam. To try and equate 9/11 to the liberation of Iraq and thereby justify terrorism by the comparison is like comparing the Pearl Harbor Attack to Macarthur’s liberation of the Philippines. It is like saying that the Japanese had the right to launch a sneak attack on America in time of peace because years later American bombs killed some Pilipino citizens during the liberation of Manila.
Joe’s next argument is that it is alright to kill Americans because Americans are guilty of an underlying racism. His argument comes down to this – none American, in which group I guess Churchill and Joe include American Indians, are worth more than Americans – at least white Americans – because white Americans think they are worth more that non white non- Americans. The truth is that all collateral damage is tragic, killing people is wrong. There are times when people must be killed, the one that comes to my mind is in self-defense, but categorizing and justifying killing on mostly brown or mostly white is wrong. Churchill advocates killing white Americans who are not harming either long dead Indians or distant Iraqi’s because those Americans are white. This is wrong! Whack!
Joe’s next rant is his anti Columbus anti Hitler dodge. It is OK to be angry at Columbus, or George Armstrong Custer, or Andrew Jackson, for murdering Indians, it is OK to despise Hitler for murdering Jews and Gypsies and Homosexuals …. But it is the worst sort of Chop Logic to use the miss deeds of these past monsters as justification for the murders done by Osama Bin Laden. Churchill is the raciest here. He claims it OK to kill white innocents because nonwhites people were killed somewhere in the past. This is racisms at its worst. Joe, let’s you and I both condemn it. Whack!
Having dumped the incredible load of trash above on the argument, Joe next goes into a rambling defense of Ward Churchill. Joe begins by stating the specious 1000,000 dead Iraqis number, and by calling the Liberation of Iraq immoral and illegal. Saying these things doesn’t make them so! With these lies as his foundation he tries to defend Churchill by finding fault with some vacuous foil he dubs as “Churchill-haters”. The problem with almost all the arguments Joe puts forward for the remainder of his statement is that they all apply equally well to the “Churchill Lovers”.
1. Joe implies that Churchill haters are bad – I say the same for Bush haters. Whack!
2. Joe says Ann Coulter is an over paid right-wing pundit – I say Ward Churchill is an over paid left-wing pundit. Whack!
3. Joe defends the money paid Churchill by pointing out that Coulter, O’Reilly, Limbaugh are also paid – I say so what? Whack!
Joe then goes on to try and defend Churchill’s professional misconduct and the misrepresentation of his own race with parody like relativist arguments that I wish I would have concocted as a mock.
1. I quote from Joe, “Some have accused him of not being a “real” Native American . . . These allegations are groundless because race does not exist . . .” If race does not exist why does Churchill pretend to be of “The Indian Race” and call for the murder of those who are of the white race. Whack!
2. I Quote form Joe, “To determine whether Churchill is “really” part of any particular race is impossible because races don’t really exist.” I am inclined to agree with this statement. But is seems odd to be used in defense of a man who is paid $80,000 year to teach racism, and racial victimization, who has made his name and fame by claiming that one race destroyed another, and that now the white race can be justifiably killed in revenge for the sins of their fathers. Whack!
4. Joe defends the non-Indian Churchill in holding an affirmative action provided teaching position he was appointed to solely because of his race, by saying there is no such thing as race? Whack!
5. Joe then says that Churchill does not need to have academic integrity because Churchill haters are only using his plagiarism as an excuse to fire him because of his political position. Let’s remind Joe that Churchill is only protected in his position, from which he makes his political statements, because he claims tenure based on the professorship he fraudulently seized. Whack!
6. Joe says there are three reasons to question, Churchill’s right to be a tenured professor. I agree and they are all good reasons.
a. The role Churchill played in making Columbus Day a focus of racial hatred. [I say that this is a good reason] Whack!
b. The previous success of preventing leftist Susan Rosenburg from becoming an artist-in-residence. [I say good reason] Whack!
c. The weaknesses in Churchill’s own writings [I say good reason] Whack!
The UC should not be required to support Churchill in spite of his false positions. The U of U was allowed to dump the false professors who cooked up “cold fusion.” False scholarship is a reason to dump a professor, not a twisted reason for keeping them. Whack!
The defense of Churchill’s writings is based on the racist assumptions that American lives are less valuable the non-American lives. Fair minded people protest Churchill’s academic fraud and his lies about his race because Churchill claims both legitimacy and power based on this fraud. By lying Churchill has legitimized his mythical attack on America’s innocent and benevolent attempt to bring an end to world wide terrorism.
Well Joe, wasn’t that fun? But I am a little worn by the effort.
support_trondheim_bomb
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting. Thank you for giving my post the benefit of the doubt. If you “noticed” any racism in my pride in being a Native American, the racism was in your mind. My citizenship is not a matter of race. I wonder if you friend would be, or is, as upset by Ward Churchill’s claim to being a Native American as you feel she would be mine?
I don’t know your friend; therefore I cannot speak to her motivations in her “extreme” views concerning food, drugs, and race. If she has been taught to be ashamed of her ancestry – this is very sad. Most of the Indians I know are as proud of their Indian ancestors as most Americans of Irish ancestry I know are proud of the Celtic heritage. My pride in being born a Native American is based on the belief that all of us in this great nation, no matter our color or gene pool, are the same race – the human race. As citizens of the world we should seek for those human traits that make us all the same.
Eye am so tired of everyone "WACK!" ing off on churchill just let the poor bastard alone. Though Eye am quite shure that every one of you arssholes would just love the blogsphere and corperate media rumaging through your past academic garbage.
ReplyDeletestrange isn't it the most basic rule is never followed...
Do to others what you would have done to you
Eye am so tired of everyone "WACK!" ing off on churchill just let the poor bastard alone. Though Eye am quite shure that every one of you arssholes would just love the blogsphere and corperate media rumaging through your past academic garbage.
ReplyDeletestrange isn't it the most basic rule is never followed...
Do to others what you would have done to you
Not even Jesus held back from condeming evil when he say it. Churchill is a lying cheet and should not be in a position to corupt the minds of the young or shout encouragement to people how kill the people who are fighing for what is right.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons we had the revolution.
ReplyDelete