Ward Churchill

[gordonzola]

Ok, Ok. I don't really want to get into the Ward Churchill debate. But it's all over my friendslist and I don't want to comment in 10 different journals just to say the same thing.

I don't support firing him or censoring him. Blah, blah, blah and duh. I do appreciate that he was trying to focus discussion on US foreign policy and answer the question of the times, "Why Do They Hate Us?" The idea that they hate our "freedom" still doesn't quite satisfy.

But writing in his press release:

* It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack.


Seems disingenuous considering the tone and message in his original essay:

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.

while the "power lunchers" obviously wouldn't have included janitors, food workers, etc., being so cavalier with his words in the aftermath of 9/11 was pretty stupid for an "intellectual" and professor. I mean, I guess it would be more forgiveable if he wrote it in his LiveJournal. I'm surprised it took him this long to lose his administrative position. When I read, actually reviewed, a zine with this article in it a couple of months after the fact, I figured his days were numbered then.

In that essay he actually seems to be completely unaware of the existence on non-"little Eichmans" in the WTC at all. Their deaths didn't exist at all to Churchill. This reads like ass-covering to me. And, ya know, he copped the whole "chickens" line from Malcolm X anyway. and we know what happened to him.

I do wonder about the timing of all of this. I guess it's because it's turning into a book now. Any other theories as to why this essay wasn't popularized/attacked before this? Because it certainly was available.

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Is free speech important to you or not?

Important to ME? What sort of ludicrous liberal prattle is that? The question doesn't even make any sense.

Also I think Ward was targeting the offices of Empire when he wrote about "little Eichmans", not the working class commuters.

I don't. I think, because he has no interest in class politics and believes in an agentless form of political change, that he didn't even conceive of the US as a class society or the WTC as anything but a place where richies swim around in lakes of gold coins, a la Scrooge McDuck, all day.

But even if he was suggesting that working class people were little Eichman's I'd put the principle of free speech over working class solidarity.


And that's why you'll end up with neither in the end.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The full expression of the former is only available by making the latter central.

Someone with your position, on the other hand, would gladly hop into a scab truck and burst through a picket line against striking newspaper workers, to make sure your masters got their profits and the advertisers retained access to the public's eyeballs. Sure, you can say that you wouldn't do that, but that just means that you're inconsistent in your claims about free speech being more important than class solidarity.

So where does that put the free speech rights of your striking workers? Under the wheels of your scab truck.

And it's the same here. Your huffing demands for loyalty oaths and complaints that it is "counterproductive" to critique Churchill's comments are ways for you to shut up workers so that a middle class professor can continue calling people like me Nazis for not having a job quite so nice as his.

On the other hand, my superior position allows me to point out that the attack on Churchill is part of a coordinated conservative attack on free speech, and at the same time point out that Churchill is himself a privileged speaker who foolishly blasts away at workers because, not to put too fine a point on it, you don't run into a lot of data entry clerks in the Ivory Tower.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

What I'd be protecting by crossing a picket line in order to make sure a newspaper was delivered on time would be the newspaper owner's property rights.


You can't divorce free speech from a speech-item like a newspaper. That's utterly ridiculous. But here's another example that doesn't involve speech-items. The Klan has come to town, because drunken Indian Ward Churchill has said bad things about white people. They have a permit to march and speak; of course, they end up surrounded by hundreds of working class people who plan to shout and chant and drown out the Klan's speech, then will fill the streets to prevent the Klan from marching over to the curb in front of Churchill's house.

Doug Lain, Free Speech Activist, will clearly side with the police as they sweep away the counter-protestors, and will happily club a few heads too, to ensure that Klan speech is not disrupted. After all, Ward Churchill might now know that the only good Indian is a dead Indian!

would you be willing to concede that there are times when protecting free speech is more important than working class solidarity?

Nope.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

This is because you are an authoritarian marxist.

Ooh, well that's telling me. Are you sure I'm not a "little Eichmann" too?

I'll start off explaining the difference between the right to speak and the right to be heard

Then you have no problem with Churchill being fired after all. He can speak all he likes, he just isn't owed a platform in a CU lecture hall.

and I'll write up something explaining how property rights obstruct positive free speech writes for the majority.

This of course, contradicts your previous thesis. If you want to claim that people can speak all they like, but that they can be shouted down and have their speech disrupted to the point of intelligibility by others, then you are automatically making a claim in favor of property rights.

But of course, liberals love property so this is no surprise.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I realize that, in the milieu you travel in, most people are so asinine and close-minded that terms like "authoritarian Marxist" are used so casually that they sound like descriptors rather than slurs, but since you're a writer I had thought you's know a little better.

I have to keep reminding myself that when it comes to you -- someone who consistently poses left immediately before lurching to the right -- that you CAN'T be underestimated.