From an campus newspaper account of a recent Ward Churchill speech:
Markevich responded by asking Churchill to clarify his Sept. 11 remarks.
“Three young high school students were traveling on a plane to an award ceremony. Of course, they never made it,” Markevich said. “They were murdered.”
“By Bush and Cheney,” someone shouted, to wild applause by some of the audience. Churchill smiled and shrugged, but did not comment.
“My question is, were those three students part of a cog in a capitalist machine and were they also ‘little Eichmanns’ who deserved to die as you claimed?” Markevich said.
“That was an amazingly stupid question,” Churchill said. “If you have a reading comprehension above the eighth grade, which you should have, since you appear to be impersonating a student up there, then you’d understand that those three … could not be construed as the technocratic core of the empire, and that’s who I described as little Eichmanns. That’s disingenuous bullshit you just spit out.”
1) What sort of idiot audience applauds “by Bush and Cheney” in this context? This sort of knee-jerk Bush-hating is just stupid. Let’s hate them for real things.
2) Churchill, whose firing I supported, is right to call this specific question misaimed; in his infamous essay, Churchill called the folks killed while working in the WTC “little Eichmanns,” not the people on the planes. That doesn’t mean Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” statement was less than repulsive.
3) In his speech, Churchill recycles for the billionth time the “Israel/Nazi” comparison, which I think is brainless, useless, antisemitic (what makes the “Israel is the new Nazis!” rhetoric attractive to folks like Churchill, I suspect, is not that the Nazi comparison adds any analytic power to our understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but that the comparison is an especially hurtful thing to say to Jews). But the comparison of Israel and American “manifest destiny,” also made by Churchill, is more interesting to me, and I’d be interested in seeing the comparison developed by someone who — unlike Churchill — isn’t completely without class and credibility.
1) What sort of idiot audience applauds “by Bush and Cheney” in this context? Bush and Cheney weren’t even in the White House during 9/11! This sort of knee-jerk Bush-hating is just stupid. Let’s hate them for real things.
by which you mean “were not bodily in the building” right?
because it’s a brainlapse of elephantine proportions to claim the duet was not in power. Bush was very much “In the White House” in terms of already holding office. hence why My Pet Goat for that huge ass time was such a big deal.
Huh?
I have no idea what the heck I meant by that; I don’t even remember writing it. (Although, admittedly, I was very sleepy when I wrote this post.) I’ve deleted that sentence and feel rather bewildered.
a brave admission, amp. i too am frequently bewildered by things i’ve apparently said or written. i think that’s one of the things that’s so unsettling about people like churchill having jobs in academia – he has a rhetorical style that resembles that of a person suffering some sort of low impulse control. for that reason i tend to file him under the same rubric as pat buchanan or ted nugent.
i have zero respect or any putative “educator” who responds to the question of a student by describing it as “stupid bullshit” – even if it is. when you are an educator your responsibility is to guide the minds of the young and uninformed, not to berate and belittle them. it’s a sign of someone themselves having a small mind.
What the hell happened to Churchill? Has he always been a self-serving mendacious crank? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
I read his “Fantasies of the Master Race” about ten years ago and was very impressed by it. He has also done some interesting work with other Native American activists in building a case for reparations for Native Americans. Yet even then he had pissed off a lot of people in the American Indian Movement; several contributors to listservs I subscribed to at the time accused him of being a poser and a fake Indian – accusations he was fond of throwing around himself. These he seems more interested in being the Michael Savage of the Left – angry, irrational, insulting, racist and insanely sloppy in his thinking.
Hi,
Something here about a First Amendment and free speech and even Rush and Coulter getting a say. Churchill’ s analysis may not be what we wish to hear but it is a lot more sane than the fantasy that all Muslims hate the US.
The end of Churchill’s career at the school seemed more of McCarthy and less about scholarship. Is there now a litmus test for scholars? Pleasant, non-confrontational, and bland?
Being rather old and having served , I remember when almost every instructor was less than pleasant and marveled at your youthly ignorance. Granted, it was a pose or role that the person dropped after one had proved their worth.
Economic warfare is a reality to many outside the US. They love the citizens but detest the government. Why? The US conducts economic havoc. Those in the WTC that assisted in this endeavour were enabling the further aims of the US Empire. They actually were cogs in the mighty multinationals that leftie blogs often mention. And collateral damage? Just look at the foreign press data on our oopsies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I don’t condone murder but it seems to be the only message that our aristocracy understands. Something about the French Revolution and how to avoid it .
Well, that was quick.
It is the precisely the fact that Churchill is trying to shoehorn a North American analysis into a Middle Eastern mold that deprives him of any credibility, even historians who do comparative colonialism don’t look immediately at European settler-colonial societies (USA, Canada, Australia, ZA) for comparison to Israel, unless they are explicitly anti-Israel and want to make ahistorical comparisons (in terms of scale of the activities, language, culture, religion, and motivation of the participants) for propaganda purposes.
What is Israel’s “Mother Country”? Europe, the Charnel House of the Jewish people?
Daß ich nicht lache. Israel was MADE in Casablanca, in Rabat, in Tunis, in every place that sent forth 900,000 Jews to her between 1948-56. One by one by one.
Mold
So how many degrees of separation does it take to not be a cog? The executive’s receptionist? Janitorial and security staff that allow them to operate? The grocer that feeds them? The civil servants that protect them? The IT dept. without which they couldn’t do business? What about the power company employees are they fair game also?
I don’t condone murder but it seems to be the only message that our aristocracy understands.
Um…Ever heard of the civil rights movement? It was pretty non-violent (on the part of the pro-equality people anyway) and got the attention of the aristocracy nonetheless.
I’d like to add, that Churchill is a loon and an idiot, but if he hadn’t been held up by right-wingers as the poster boy for “The Left” nobody would know who the hell he is and he could be a loon and an idiot in the obscurity he deserves.
A perfect example of what my wise friend Barbara likes to call “Stop being on our side; you make us look stupid.”
Hi,
Think of the WTC dead as collateral damage in the way of the Glorious Righteous Slayers. Kinda like the villagers next to the Iraqians/Taliban/Viet Cong/Redskins/etc.
Churchill should have the ability to speak his mind. He was also tenured, I believe. Not the kind of precedent I want. Who is next? Lesbian, Trans, Bi, Long-Haired (male). This is why the teachers’ unions decline to allow firings for other than cause. The only ones left would be the single, desparate skoolmarms who took the crappy pay and…wait a minute….that is why Churchill must go.
Churchill should have the ability to speak his mind. He was also tenured, I believe. Not the kind of precedent I want. Who is next?
He *has* the ‘ability to speak his mind’. (And isn’t it sad when we’ve come to a time when “he’ll say whatever the fuck crosses his mind!” is considered a refreshing sign of intellect and moral worth?)
Churchill wasn’t fired for being an asshole, or for responding to student questions by saying “you’re a fool if you dare question me,” or for being anti-Bush. (If that was all it took to lose tenure, the nation’s universities would be empty.) He was, actually, fired for academic misconduct.
What sort of idiot audience applauds “by Bush and Cheney” in this context?
The kind of audience whose actions support the belief on the right that a great many opponents of the current Administration’s policies oppose them not because they are wrong but because they are the policies of the current Administration, and that they’d like to see the current Adminstration fail regardless of the effect of such failure on anyone else.
Churchill should have the ability to speak his mind.
And thank God for that. If he hadn’t, and had kept quiet, he might still be influencing young minds as a faculty member. That’s why I oppose hate-speech laws. They make it harder to spot the fools.
Hi,
Sorry to tell you this but many of our youth have somehow gotten the idea, despite the best efforts of the MSM, that Bush/Cheney is one of the worst admins ever. Even here in Republican territory (I stole that money and its mine and stuff yer taxes) the kids are less than charitable to the fratocracy.
They might even view our adventure into empire at Iraq as equivalent to murder.
“But the comparison of Israel and American “manifest destiny,” also made by Churchill, is more interesting to me, and I’d be interested in seeing the comparison developed by someone who — unlike Churchill — isn’t completely without class and credibility.”
Any comparison between modern Israel and Maerican “Manifest Destiny” is pretty weak, pretty strained. Where there is a link is between Manifest Destiny and the way American Protestants understood ancient Israel in the Old Testament. (I say Old Testmanet and not Tanakh because the Jews have almost nothing to do with this.)
This is the mechanism – one of the core impulses of the Reformation was the desire to have a source of authority independnet of the church hierarchy. That was Scripture. Well, for an audience looking for drama, the Old Testament is a lot more entertaining than the New, except for Revelations, and that explains its out-sized popularity among some Christians. Anyway, American Protestants saw and were motivated to see any parallel they could find between the righteous actiuons of ancient Israel in possessing the Promised Land and their own spread in North America.
There are all kinds of signs of identification with ancient Israel in American popular culture – use of OT names vice names of saints as personal names, OT toponyms across the country, maybe even the popularity of infant circumcision at one point. Some have taken it to the point of actual identification – the creepily mis-named Christian Identity Movement, bluntly and blatantly anti-Semitic, was based on the contention that Anglo-Saxons were the true children of Abraham and Jews were impostors. I don’t know of anything like that in European anti-Semitism.
Anyway I can’t see from this any valid link between modern Israel and Manifest Destiny.
despite the best efforts of the MSM, that Bush/Cheney is one of the worst admins ever
Despite their best efforts? Because of their best efforts, from what I can see. And I’m no Bushbot; there’s been lots of mistakes, misdirection and downright incompetencies on the part of this administration. When Bush was elected (and I voted for him, because Kerry was even worse), I told my wife “We’re going to regret electing a Texas oilman as President.”
Hi,
RonF made the point of MSM agenda leading the masses to a conclusion. I would have to say that most ‘Merricans would string up the merry frat boys if the media actually told the truth more often. In politics one makes sausage and no one goes away truly happy. But, when the sausage has sawdust, rodents, and parts of migrants (Sinclair’s The Jungle) then it’s time to enforce.
I was in government and attended public meetings. No one was screened and every question was addressed. The press relayed the meetings to the wider public. Why then, must the MBA president have Gannons planted?
I used to say “We are in government, we don’t have to lie”.