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

[thearagorn.livejournal.com]

on the Justice of Roosting Chickens is already a book (on AK Press as a matter of fact).

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

At least Ward Churchill comes out and says what everyone has fucking thought at least once. Were there little Eichmans in the Trade Center? OF COURSE THERE WERE. Big ones too, maybe, although maybe the bigger ones - the Himmlers etc - got warned and stayed away. I deserve big flamey death for my role in the destruction of the world. So did they. So do you.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Of course he doesn't acknowledge the existence of non-"little Eichmanns" in the Towers. He's essentially a moralist -- thus his silly appeals to the "rule of law" and some vague idea of "us" trying to do what's right. Us who? Us the warmongers in the rulings class? Are these leopards going to change their spots? Of course not. Is "us" the working class? Of course not, he has no interest in class politics -- that's why it's so easy to see the 3000 dead as "little Eichmanns", whether they were temp workers, SEIU members, folks trapped in the PATH or 1 and 9 trains on their way to somewhere else, etc. The only agent for change is apparently those who are impressed with his caterwauling and ready to simply adopt Churchillism.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

No, and since Gordon's post wasn't about that, and my post wasn't about that, what's this question about -- I mean, other than the sort of whimpering liberal rhetorical strategy which makes disclaimers and nice-nice petting mandatory before anyone's comments receive a critique?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

So you're sitting on this thread, administering loyalty oaths not-so-cleverly disguised as questions?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

That's all the more reason to believe that those who disagree with Gordon would actually state so explicitly, as people who do want Churchill to be removed have done in their responses.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

A couple of terms could use definition. Here are my proposals:

"Freedom of speech" refers to a right protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting laws that govern what may or may not be said (or written, or published.) That's all it says, and even that isn't absolute--see, e.g., the business about falsely shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater. Firing Churchill from a publicly funded institution might come under the heading of what the First Amendment prohibits. (My hunch is that if there's a justiciable First Amendment claim here, it's one based on the concept of "chilling effect." commandercranky, what do you say?) Cancelling Churchill's invitation to deliver a lecture, in my opinion, probably doesn't. (Calling him a jerk definitely doesn't.)

"Loyalty oaths" were imposed by public and private employers as a condition of employment; if you refused to sign, swearing that you were loyal to the US, or that you had never belonged to a "subversive" organization, you didn't get the job. As far as I know, no one on LiveJournal is in a position to deny anyone else on LiveJournal employment on the basis of how they answer, or don't answer, a question posed by someone's Comment.

The question "why the fuss now?" is interesting. But I have a suspicion the answer is uninteresting--that it's an accident of timing. COINCIDENCE? Well, yeah, quite likely.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Loyalty oaths to what, exactly? To the principle of free speech? Maybe.

That's a yes, then. In proper liberal fashion, nobody gets critiqued before ritual hooting in front of abstract principles.

And I still think it's counterproductive to spend a lot of time attacking this paragraph.

It is, if you consider the fortunes of a middle-class academic more important than so-called radicals painting thousands of working-class people as middle-class Nazis. As someone who thinks the working class is key to solving political problems and creating the transformations radicals are supposed to be interested in and fighting for, I consider the latter fairly important, and the mere fact that someone is sitting atop a six-figure salary and denouncing data entry clerks and subway commuters as "little Eichmanns" far more counterproductive.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't understand idiomatic expressions and metaphorical language either!

As far as your explicit tying of "freedom of speech" to American legal and political traditions instead of tying it to a normative view of human rights, well, perhaps this visual aid may be of some assistance:




Yep, oddly enough, the world doesn't begin and end on US borders.

[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.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

well, I posted this, then lost my internet connection for a few hours. Ordinarily, I would have been in the thick of discussion on my own journal but now I think I'll just go to bed. Play nice kids.

[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.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

I think Churchill was used to swimming in a world where Arendt's characterization of the "banality of evil" underlies a lot of the discourse as a given. If he'd referenced Arendt without specifically calling the people in those buildings "little Eichmanns", he'd have made the exact same point without giving the right wing pundits such an easy target. I do believe that's exactly the point he was making, that the stockbrokers and power lunchers were participating in evil in a very banal way.

That said, I think one could make the case that it's somewhat disingenuous to characterize the power lunchers that way and not characterize the janitors and such in a similar manner. I guess that depends on where you draw the line (if you do) between being complicit in U.S. corporate capitalism and being a victim of it if you're employed by it.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

well, that's true. But it doesn't obligate me not to point out Churchill's non-lovey doveyness. Much of my Flist debate has lots of "he never said..." and "obviously he didn't mean..." which leads me to believe people read Churchill's press release and not his original article. Which is fine too until they start arguing about the content. There were seriously at least five different people I would have commented the above quotes to so I decided to just do it here.

And honestly for most people this whole thing is more along the lines of "we must protect our lefty friend" rather than "we must protect free speech" even if it's framed that way. I don't know if it was passion or desire for fame that lead Churchill to rush this essay into publication but as soon as I saw it I remember thinking, "well, the Left is going to waste a bunch of time and resources on this debate"

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I had an elaborate theory about "why now?" I was thinking that during the aftermath of 9/11 some people really were more receptive to figuring out "why they hate us?" and perhaps the rest of the essay would plant too many seeds of thought that the right-wing pundits didn't want to sow. Now, a few years and a re-election later, they feel safe going back to get the people on their list.

but that seems too involved so yeah, it's probably more coincidence.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

that seems too involved

To me, too. The right wing went after Susan Sontag and Bill Maher (among others) right after 9/11. Did Churchill escape notice then, and only come to their attention when Hamilton College invited him to speak? Hard to say. Absent evidence for some deeper explanation, I'm going with Shit Happens.

A pimple on the ass of the Left

[walktheplank.livejournal.com]

Ward Churchill: wingnut, or government agent? It's hard to say. The Right Wing media couldn't have created a better "Left Wing" bogeyman if they paid for it.

As for "why now?" instead of four years ago (when the essay was originally published), two words: Bill O'Reilly. The O'Reilly Factor exists for the sole purpose of whipping conservatives into a frenzy in order to generate higher ratings. Usually O'Reilly takes things out-of-context. Or he makes shit up. But Ward Churchill went and handed him a ready-made issue on a silver platter. "The stupidity and moral degeneracy of the left -AND YOUR TAX DOLLARS ARE PAYING FOR IT!!!" This is the stuff that conservative talk shows are made of.

As for the free speech question. Sure, let the guy speak. Why not? Let him try and do a Q. and A. I've always thought that the best thing to do with morons like the KKK is to let them talk all they want: then people can see what a bunch of jackasses they really are. But part of freedom of speech is that you have to be willing to live with the consequences. Ward Churchill can publish whatever the hell he wants, but he doesn't have a "right" to be paid for it. And he doesn't have "right" to go out on the paid lecture circuit. Ward Churchill is also perfectly free to walk down the street wearing an S.S. uniform, but if someone smashes his face in, well, don't go crying to momma.
_____

I do think that it is interesting that many of the founding members of the American Indian Movement have accused Ward Churchill of being an FBI informant and "a white man, a wannabe." (You'll notice he's always wearing sunglasses.) I have no opinion on the matter, but it's worth checking out.

Just a sample:
AIM Council on Security and Intelligence - Press Release


For his part, Ward Churchill seems to think that the original A.I.M. group is morally bankrupt because they have accepted government grants and acted as a "social service agency." (Heaven forbid!) It's worth asking which has had more of a lasting impact on the lives of native peoples -"social services"? or the half-baked screeds of a professor who gets paid lots of money to compare office workers to Adolph Eichmann from the safety of the Ivory Tower?

Has anything tangible ever come about as a result of Ward Churchill's militant posturing?

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this, 'cuz it's more or less how I feel, too.

[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.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

He was a department chair. $100,000 is low-end for that.

[mark27.livejournal.com]

anyone who uses language so sloppily and expects people not to be pissed of and offended is obviously a horse's ass who doesn't deserve the time and attention of much of anyone

so you're saying that it doesn't matter if you have a point or if your arguments are valid if you happen to use language sloppily? that's pretty weak.

The right wing punditocracy feeds off of this shit.

that's true. one has to be more careful of one's language if you're intending to use it in those battles. was he? I don't know. anyone who has ever seen ward churchill talk knows that he is certainly no politician. he doesn't try to excise his emotional investments from his academic research, but that doesn't change the fact that his research and subsequent arguments are valid.

if it were up to me, Ward Churchill would have to spend the next six months touring the Nazi death camps in Europe, visiting the Holocaust museums in Washington, DC, Berlin, Los Angeles and Israel

conversely, if you spent the next six months touring native american reservations and visiting the sites of the old US concentration camps (on which the nazi camps were modeled), you might have enough insight to realize that comparisons between the Nazi regime and the european occupation of the americas is more accurate than not. Anything the Nazi's did, the United States visited more severely and with more efficacy upon the Native Americans.

[spoonfeeding.livejournal.com]

thanks for making the first point- to consider Eichmann without Arendt's analysis is to miss the point of him mentioning Eichmann at all.

I disagree with your second point. I remember having this huge debate with a friend of mine who wanted to blow up the WTC years ago. She was going to do it at night "so no one would be hurt." I pointed out that there would undoubtedly be janitorial and security staff, and she said that by working there in any capcity, they were complicit and culpable. I didn't believe that the single mother of 3 with a 10th grade education and the desperate need for any job she can get has as much culpability as the stockbroker with the access and leisure time to make a considered choice.

Not to sound patronizing- and I don't believe blue collar workers are necessarily desperate and uneducated- but, dude, I've been the kid of that blue collar worker, and if someone had told my mom she shouldn't work for the only place she could get a job because they had bad international trade policies, she'd have looked at them like they were insane.