As far as I am concerned, Ward Churchill ceased to be a serious leftist (in the sense of being grounded in a clear class analysis), when he decided that the Sandinistas and CISPES were a bigger problem than Washington for the indigenous people: cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1998/1998-October/009552.html>.
Short of setting up your own police state, though, you can never stop non-leftists, even leftists, from saying a lot of things that are morally unjustified or politically counter-productive or both -- about imperialism or anything else.
E.g., Susan Sontag said, among other things, that "[t]he white race _is_ the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations whenever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself" ("What's Happening in America," p. 203).
The Right have never forgotten that one, and that's the only thing that they wanted to talk about when Sontag died. That's their choice.
Our approach, in contrast, should be to criticize what needs to be criticized while learning what can be learned from others' views.
Also, we should try to take our opponents' arguments at their best, not at their worst, if we are to get involved into serious debates and criticisms.
In any case, the Right can never succeed in discrediting critiques of imperialism just because of what Sontag said or Churchill said here and there. The majority of Americans don't even know who Sontag was and who Churchill is. They have never heard of them.
A bigger problem than the Right's perpetual Culture War is that representations of whites, American workers, etc. implicit or explicit in opinions like Churchill's and Sontag's are quite widespread. Essentially, such views are based on rejection of the classical Marxist concept of the working class as (by definition) being exploited by capital, however well paid they may be, and espousal of the idea that most Americans, including most American workers, are the "middle class" who benefit from the miserable poverty of the less fortunate, especially in developing nations. Those are the foundations of Churchill's and Sontag's errors. Many of those who would never say what Churchill and Sontag said -- including those who condemn what they said -- actually share the same foundations (or rather moral and political quicksands) with them in the way they view classes in America. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>