>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Notice, however, that Churchill did not call the "technocrats" of
>>the American empires "Eichmanns." He called them "little
>>Eichmanns," so he recognizes the difference in magnitude between
>>Adolph Eichmann on one hand and M&A lawyers and bond traders on the
>>other hand as well as the difference between Eichmann's conscious
>>actions and American "technocrats'" unconscious actions.
>
>Gee, that's really something. Eichmann was present at the meeting
>where the Nazi leadership planned the destruction of the Jews, then
>worked at senior levels making that happen. What would a "little"
>version of that be? Designing weapons or picking bombing targets,
>yes. Not going to work and devising litigation or trading bonds.
>There's a world of difference there.
In criminal justice, we make distinctions between conscious and unconscious, planned and unplanned, individual and concerted actions. Such distinctions are to a certain extent inescapable in criminal justice, but that's the very logic that consigns the poor (who commit most "street crimes" on which criminal justice tends to focus most prosecutorial zeal) to prison while letting the corporate power elite literally get away with most murders -- of workers, consumers, and residents subject to pollution, for instance -- they commit. Yes, lives and deaths of human beings are cooly weighed on the scales of cost-benefit calculations by managers, accountants, actuaries, and bureaucrats, but where is malice, an aggravating factor? Or so the thinking goes. More people, however, probably die prematurely of indirect consequences of rises in interest rates, sudden outflows of capital, declines in commodity prices, etc. than are killed by guns, bombs, and other weapons worldwide. As a matter of fact, many violent deaths -- e.g., massacres in Rwanda <http://www.udayton.edu/~rwanda/articles/chossudovsky.html> -- are indirect consequences of such economic changes. In contrast, very few people die of terrorism: "Ratio of Americans killed by lightning since January 2002 to those killed by terrorism: 3:2" (Harper's Index, November 2004, <http://www.harpers.org/Nature.html>). Whatever we think about Churchill's labeling, which is certainly politically inexpedient, surely such facts are matters worthy of moral, political, and philosophical consideration. Based on such facts, what morality should we develop?
>It's interesting that Churchill forgot that most of the inhabitants
>of the WTC were members of the working class. They're often
>invisible, even when they're the majority - but especially so if
>you've got a nationalistic view of the world, where American =
>oppressor and Arab = oppressed, with no exception or contradiction
>involved.
Ward Churchill isn't a Marxist -- he is an indigenist (cf. <http://www.cwis.org/fwj/22/falsep.htm>). Remember, he justified the Miskitos and the Hmongs making alliances with the CIA (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1998/1998-October/009552.html>). I naturally disagree with Churchill in this respect, but a case has to be made -- rather than assumed -- that Marxism makes more sense than indigenism for American Indians and that it is worthwhile for American Indians to seek allies among working-class descendants of settler colonialists. -- Yoshie
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