>The essay was written a year or two ago as a first draft addressed
>to myself, to eventually be revised into a piece of a long-term project
>on ethnic nationalist movements in the US. I thought it might be a
>piece to effectively demonstrate how such movements rewrite history
>to fit their contemporary political aims. To give you an idea of the
>context: Another piece of that chapter analyzes the recent use of
>Lost Cause revisionism by neo-Confederate southern nationalists.
I'm hoping you see some political differences between American Indians and neo-Confederates. The first have received centuries of brutal treatment that continues today, and the second are mourning a cause that deserved to be crushed. I'm no friend of any kind of nationalism, but those are still horses of two very different colors.
>I made the essay public now as a gift to the left, so that it would
>not be necessary to line up behind Churchill on the free speech
>issue.
A gift to the left? Unless you're punning on the German meaning of the word (poison), it's a gift to the right, and they're making good use of it. Your work could well play a crucial role in his firing. If you think that Churchill's dispensable just because he said some reprehensible stuff, think again. Sacrificing him won't placate the right - it'll encourage them. They want to purge the left from the academy - surely you must be familiar with The David Project and the repulsive David Horowitz.
>I don't understand why anyone would object to outing a bogus
>claim of genocide.
And I don't understand why someone would set out to discredit a claim of genocide. Here's the official definition of genocide:
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
>committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
>ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>
> (a) Killing members of the group;
>
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
>calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
>part;
>
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I think it's safe to say that American Indians have suffered all five of these insults. So what if a particular instance of reported genocide may not have happened? That's something for a book review, maybe, not for an essay circulated in a time of witch-hunting.
Your earlier statement that you posted the piece because it would get more attention now is shameful - it's almost a definition of opportunism.
>It seems to me that an intelligent left would learn to support Palestinian
>rights without coddling goons like Arafat, to support Irish Catholic
>rights without enabling IRA bombers, and to support Indian treaty rights
>without lining up behind the aging gangsters and posers that run AIM.
You realize that AIM hates Churchill - they've denounced him as a fraud and impostor. Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn't it?
>Thanks everybody for your thoughts. Not the ad hominem bozos, but the
>legitimate critiques. I appreciate them more than you might imagine, even
>when I disagree. Some of the implications about my timing verge on conspiracy
>theory, and I am disappointed to see so much support for a charlatan that is
>based on superficial impressions and shared enemies rather than informed
>affinity. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by that, but you hope for more.
I don't support Churchill's politics or style, or his taste for AK-47s either. But I support his right not to get fired for his opinions, and anyone who takes critical thinking seriously should too.
Doug