Ward Churchill, a powerful speaker and professor at the University of Colorado, has come under attack by the McCarthyites running the University. There is an orchestrated campaign to have him fired for his WRITINGS.
It is incumbent on all of us -- particularly the state Green Parties across the country and the nationwide organizations -- to defend Churill's right to freedom of speech, whether we agree with what he said or not. (I pretty much agree with his statements, across the board).
Below, please read Ward Churchill's defense of his statement, which is exactly on target. And below that, please read Alexander Cockburn's piece which suggests that the vitriole heaped against Churchill is part of a stepping up of attacks on OTHER professors as well, such as Shahid Alam, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
Please read ....
And to all Greens, let's make our voices in support of Churchill and Alam public, beyond these lists. Defend academic freedom. Defend the Bill of Rights and freedom of speech. Stop the McCarthyite repression NOW, before it takes off.
Mitchel Cohen Brooklyn Greens/Green Party of NY
Ward Churchill -- Press Release
Monday, January 31, 2005 -- In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.
The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.
I am not a "defender" of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable".
This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed ... without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government".
In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.
Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing, but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.
It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when they are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
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. According to Pentagon logic, they were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.
The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.
These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, 'On the Justice of Roosting Chickens', which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.
[End Statement by Ward Churchill] _ _ _
Beat The Devil -- Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right by Alexander Cockburn
When it comes to left and right, meaning the contrapuntal voices of sanity and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and writer, often on Indian topics. Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point, in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned."
That piece was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. About those killed in the 9/11 attacks, Churchill wrote recently, "It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American 'command and control infrastructure' in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a 'legitimate' target."
At this point, Churchill could have specifically mentioned the infamous bombing of the Amariya civilian shelter in Baghdad in January 1991, with 400 deaths, almost all women and children, all subsequently identified and named by the Iraqis. To this day, the US government says it was an OK target.
Churchill concludes, "If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these 'standards' when they are routinely applied to other people, they should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them. It should be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns' characterization only to those [World Trade Center workers] 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. According to Pentagon logic, [they] were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else." I'm glad he puts that gloss in about the targets, thus clarifying what did read to some like a blanket stigmatization of the WTC inhabitants in his original paper.
A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests by Governor Pataki and others at his scheduled participation in a panel at Hamilton College called "Limits of Dissent?" In Colorado, he's resigned his chairmanship of the department of ethnic studies, and politicians, fired up by the mad dogs on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by Lord O'Reilly of the Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction from his job (Loofah? See O'Reilly's lewd fantasies: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11272004.html).
Why should Churchill apologize for anything? Is it a crime to say that chickens can come home to roost and that the way to protect American lives from terrorism is to respect international law? I don't think he should have resigned as department chair. Let them drag him out by main force.
So much for the voice of sanity. Now for the dementia of the right. The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just wrote a book about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on an antiwar panel in Washington.
Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and current organizer for Military Families Speak Out, who duly moved Frank to write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] who would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face." Then upon Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International Socialist Review editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a "right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to confide to his readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for interrogation." After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank mused, "Maybe sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor in California and called on someone to punch the governor in the face, or have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remain of Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub her knickers in his face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his job in a minute.
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and get invited on Fox or CNN talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley call on the Washington Times editorial page for Seymour Hersh to be imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers are allowed to play.
After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right turned their sights on Shahid Alam, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston. Alam, author of the excellent Poverty From the Wealth of Nations, wrote a column for the CounterPunch web site in December in which he argued that the 9/11 attacks were an Islamist insurgency, the attackers believing that they were fighting -- as the American revolutionaries did, in the 1770s -- for their freedom and dignity against foreign occupation/control of their lands. Second, he argued that these attacks were the result of the political failure of Muslims to resist their tyrannies locally. It was a mistake, Alam said, to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Now he has been labeled "an un-American" professor by Fox News, and there's an Internet campaign to have him stripped of his faculty position.
So write to all the appropriate names, defending Churchill and Alam; and if you feel like an outing to execrate Frank and The New Republic, there'll be a demonstration sponsored by the DC Anti-War Network, the DC chapter of the ISO and others at 5 pm on Friday, February 11, outside TNR's DC editorial offices at 1331 H Street NW.