>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>>And one of the reasons I think his screed was unfortunate is that
>>>it's made it more difficult to condemn the horrid treatment of
>>>American Indians.
>>
>>Why is that?
>
>Because people - whether nonideological or not - will throw
>Churchill's quote in your face whenever you bring up U.S. brutality,
>whether in Indochina or Kansas. He's made it a lot easier to dismiss
>critiques of imperialism and genocide.
Where's evidence for that? Find me one person who used to accept -- or would have been open to accepting -- critiques of US imperialism and genocide of Indians but now dismisses them on account of one essay by Ward Churchill.
The only "people" who would cite the Churchill essay as a reason to dismiss critiques of US imperialism and genocide of Indians are usual suspects: David Horowitz, Christopher Hitchens, and the like, i.e., people who have already dismissed such critiques before reading the Churchill essay anyhow. Let them be Holocaust deniers whose words indict themselves.
The majority of Americans have never heard of Ward Churchill and, even after this sudden though temporary increase in media coverage of him, never will. They will not read his best works, nor will they come across his worst ones. If you think otherwise, you clearly overestimate American reading and viewing habits.
>I have mixed feelings about the Timothy Burke analysis I just
>forwarded, but I think he's onto something when he says that
>Churchill's worldview is fundamentally nationalist and
>monochromatic. We're either innocent victims or guilty perpetrators;
>there's no room for contradictions there at all.
I agree with you on that, and my criticism of Churchill is that he has given up on American workers, and that shows in his 9/11 essay, full of anger and despair. For all we know, though, Churchill may turn out to be correct in the end, and we are the ones who are clinging to our _faith_ in American workers' capacity to put class-based international solidarity before nationalism and transform America from a capitalist empire to a democracy, a socialist republic. If we are not to be arrogant or complacent, we have to entertain that terrible possibility, i.e. the possibility that the majority of American workers will continue to passively consent to letting US imperialists exploit them and allowing them to rule foreign nations directly or indirectly. That would be tragic, but who knows if it isn't the only world we will ever live in before climate change or something like that will do us in forever. Evidence from history so far is in Churchill's favor, rather than confirming our faith. That's really bad news, and it's no wonder no one wants to hear it, but it may be true, for all that. It's possible that, unbeknownst to us, time -- I mean time to repair the world -- is running out. -- 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/>