>Yeah, why? That's what I don't get. The unvarnished truth is terrible
>enough - why did he have to make shit up? It makes no sense.
Actually, it's so much making more sense. And the funny thing is, it puts in context some of the debates we had early on in the life of the LBO-talk list. :) here's what I've concluded on the specifics, though those with more familiarity with Ward Churchill's work should correct me. This is all speculative:
And I think that, back when Thomas Brown first caused a stir at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk>LBO-talk, people weren't understanding WC's pet thesis and so they couldn't see why someone would lie about seemingly trivial things.
But, see, he's trying to prove a pet thesis: that the genocide of American Indians is just like followed the same patterns as genocide in Nazi Germany.
Which now explains the 9-1-1 piece especially the lengthier piece where he tries to legitimate his claims with reference to the philosopher Karl Jaspers. In the years following WWII, Jaspers theorized the level of moral culpability, moving from outright murder to sitting around doing nothing. (In another post I mentioned that Churchill saw himself, just as everyone else in the US, as both politically guilty and metaphysically guilty -- a view he takes from Jaspers and uses to defend his 9-1-1 claims)
So, Jaspers wasn't just expedient b/c he spoke to an existentialist view of moral culpability, but spoke as a German who was, basically, admitting his and everyone's guilt for what happened. And this is an important piece of rhetoric if he wants to push USers to do ikewise WRT American Indians: admit their moral and metaphysical guilt. He used reference to Jaspers rhetorically to say, "See, this guy did it.Therefore, Americans can do the same." (Which was an added bonus, rhetorically speaking.)
So, Churchill wants everything to turn on this thesis, raising concern for genocide of American Indians to the same level of concern for the Holocaust.
It wasn't enough to show that horrible things happened, and of course they did. Instead, _if_ Churchill's following the same literature as my mentors did (they were survivors of Nazi Germany and one's specialty was the historiography of fascist movements), then you had to show several things:
1. the same kind of racialization
2. the same connection economic development (what historians of fascism have called the crisis of finance capital)
3. the same purposeful intent
4. the same (possibly) evolution from thinking of Jews as a slave labor force to seeing them as a drag or impediment to economic development. (I'm not sure about this one, but I recall people here at LBO-talk getting into an uproar over a claim that genocide happens against those who've been defined as economically useless. Someone also injected into the discussion a claim that, therefore, slaves had a bit more power, comparatively, than American Indians and all hell broke loose. This was back in 1998 IIRC.)
Churchill wanted the genocide of the American Indian to have the same moral force that holds sway in the US when we speak of the Holocaust.
To do that, he wanted to prove the thesis and use that politically to bring attention to the plight of the American Indian.
More oppressedor than thou
(His ex-wife mentions in an interview I found through referrers to the blog that some of WC's enemies are Zionists who don't appreciate the tack he's taking. I have no clue if that's true. How can one assess the claims of an ex-wife who believes she was, basically, abused. aiyiyiyi)
Not surprisingly, the things he got caught out on involve a claim that would help his thesis:
1. the the US government purposefully infected Indians with small pox infected blankets. As Louis Proyect mentioned in comments at Inside HigherEd when he conceded Thomas Brown's assessment last year (spring 2005), the small pox infected blankets were the equivalent of Zyklon B in Churchill's mind.
I skimmed through this part, but IIRC, the report said that there is only one disputed case of this. But Churchill wanted there to be more to prove his thesis.
2. He needed to prove an official US policy that depended on a blood quantum to define who an Indian was. This would make the case for a racialization of Indians that was just like that of Nazi Germany.
Like I said, this is all speculative since I don't know WC's work that well. I'm curious what those who do think.
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