Ward Churchill

[w0aew]

You may have heard all the furor over Ward Churchill and an essay he wrote some time ago. For the curious, here is a link (http://tinyurl.com/5zyys) to said essay.

[KC2KFC]

Quote[/b] ]A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" – now proudly emblematized by the United States – against the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course. That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint. I guess a case could be made tying Al-Quaeda with Saddam if the reason Al-Quaeda attacked the WTC was because of the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq.

Quote[/b] ]The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..

There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus. I think it was Al Franken who said, "How does it affect me?" How did this affect Americans on a personal level?

Quote[/b] ]If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.So what happened to the UN oil for food program? Oh that's right it was corrupt.

Interesting reading, but the guy seems to be quite a kook.

[w0aew]

Quote[/b] (KC2KFC @ Feb. 03 2005,13:01)]Quote[/b] ]The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..

There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus. I think it was Al Franken who said, "How does it affect me?" How did this affect Americans on a personal level?
Well, how did 9/11 affect Americans on a personal level? I think that might be his point...that as long as the U.S. harms others, Americans are less concerned than when the harmed others retaliate.

[KC2KFC]

Quote[/b] ]A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" – now proudly emblematized by the United Statesagainst the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course. That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint. According to Ward, this has been an on going problem for the past 1,000 years from the start of the first crusade. Then the heat was turned up when the Johnson administration decided to provide additional support to Israel. Actually I think our support of Israel began back in the Truman administration when Truman recognized Israel as a country. So the question is how do you end the this? I mean just look at the Palestinian/Israeli issure that has been festering for years with no end in site. Think of all the peace accords, the talks, the almost solutions. Does one side have to truly defeat the other as the allies did in WW2? Can a peaceful solution really be achieved through diplomacy? Going back to the first Gulf War our aim was to go in and liberate Kuwait which had been attacked by Saddam. So because we along with the rest of the world helped liberate a country, we should be attacked by a terrorist group which supposedly did not have any ties to Iraq? Would diplomacy have worked back then? Would diplomacy work with terrorists? Would we want to even recognize a terrorist organization so we could negotiate with them? What does Ward want us to do?

[w0aew]

Quote[/b] (KC2KFC @ Feb. 03 2005,14:16)]What does Ward want us to do?
Good question. Maybe he wants westerners to try to understand the viewpoints of others on these various tragedies. That is, is it possible for westerners to even consider the concept that their various interventions have produced more harm than good? If westerners can at least consider this viewpoint (not necessarily agree with it but to at least entertain the idea), then more effective strategies for resolving these issues could be possible.

One extreme measure is simply isolationism: forget who is fighting whom in the middle East and simply purchase oil from the current victor. If we don't pick sides, then we're less likely to be attacked. However, such an approach could also lead to more suffering by the innocents that Ward is concerned about. It's a selfish approach--even Machiavellian--but it would provide some measure of buffering from these ancient conflicts.

The other extreme is to deeply emesh our interests with those of various forces in the middle East to promote a high standard of living, secularism rather than theocracy, and more direct involvement of the governed with the governors. However, that approach can threaten long-standing cultural values, religious viewpoints, and other traditions which, in turn, can lead to violent retribution.

I think that America has vacillated back and forth between these extremes. It may be that we will have to forego our do-gooder impulses and move closer to aloofness from middle Eastern concerns to promote our own interests in the short term at the expense of more violence on middle Eastern turf.

You might say that Bush has become an extreme liberal do-gooder wishing to spread sweetness and light around the world at tremendous national sacrifice.

Ward thinks along different lines with different conclusions, but those are the thoughts that come to my mind on reading his essay.

[N7AAO]

Quote[/b] ]AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT GRAND GOVERNING COUNCIL

MINISTRY FOR INFORMATION
P.O. Box 13521
Minneapolis MN 55414
612/ 721-3914 . fax 612/ 721-7826
Email: aimggc@worldnet.att.net
Web Address: www.aimovement.org

Ward Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York on February 3, 2005. His appearance was canceled by the college after he caused a public furor over his loathsome remarks about the 9-11 tragedy in New York. AIM's Grand Governing Council has been dealing with Churchill's hateful attitude and rip-off of Indian people for years.
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The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.

Churchill’s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naïve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement.

New York’s Hamilton College Kirklands Project should be aware that in their search for truth and justice, the idea that they have hired a fraud to speak on Indian activism is in itself a betrayal of their goals.

Dennis J. Banks, Ojibwa Nation
Chairman of the Board
American Indian Movement
Phone: 218-654-5885

Nee Gon Nway Wee Dung, aka, Clyde H. Bellecourt, Ojibwa Nation
National Executive Director
American Indian Movement
Cell: 612-251-5836
Office: 612-724-3129
(Straight from the AIM website (http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html))

[KC2KFC]

Quote[/b] ]One extreme measure is simply isolationism: forget who is fighting whom in the middle East and simply purchase oil from the current victor. If we don't pick sides, then we're less likely to be attacked. However, such an approach could also lead to more suffering by the innocents that Ward is concerned about. It's a selfish approach--even Machiavellian--but it would provide some measure of buffering from these ancient conflicts. I'm not sure if isolationism is truly the answer. Oil drives the world economy and without it, let's face it our standard of living falls dramatically. Also innocent people have suffered throughout history and will continue to suffer. There will always be the have's and the have not's. Innocent people suffer everyday weather it being during time of war or some poor clerk who is murdered in a convenience store robbery. Of course warfare brings it to a large scale, but if you start adding up the murders committed by criminals on a daily basis throughout the world and the pain and grief of those families you would see that it is just part of human nature.

Quote[/b] ]The other extreme is to deeply emesh our interests with those of various forces in the middle East to promote a high standard of living, secularism rather than theocracy, and more direct involvement of the governed with the governors. However, that approach can threaten long-standing cultural values, religious viewpoints, and other traditions which, in turn, can lead to violent retribution.I agree with you one this. I don't think it is our place to change the world, but some feel the United States has a manifest destiny to promote liberty and democracy throughout the world. Obviously maintaining diplomatic ties with countries is important, but I also believe there will be countries and peoples who just will not like us and will always want to bring harm to our nation, our culture and our way of life whether it be from envy or just plain old hatred. I don't think we can ever stop that no matter how nice we are to them.

Quote[/b] ]I think that America has vacillated back and forth between these extremes. It may be that we will have to forego our do-gooder impulses and move closer to aloofness from middle Eastern concerns to promote our own interests in the short term at the expense of more violence on middle Eastern turf. I belive that vacillation is a result of our own democracy. As administrations come and go so do the policies. That is probably what makes us unique in a sense, but also confuses the rest of the world. It was Winston Churchill who said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Our form of democracy forces us to change course every so often, probably more than other nations would like to see.

Quote[/b] ]ADDENDUM

The preceding was a "first take" reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I'll readily admit that I've been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.

For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.

Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America's sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who've died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).

And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America's "Indian War" in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America's own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Wa####a, Bear River, and the Marias.

Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?

Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?

Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?

Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?

One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name.

And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted "a Chinaman's chance" of surviving.

The list is too long, too awful to go on.

No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.

The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.
Ward fails to mention things like the extermination of 6 million jews in Europe by the Germans in the 30's and 40's. He fails to mention the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march by the Japanese. He fails to mention how many in Southeast Asia died at the hands of the French prior to our entry into Vietnam. In other words, Ward can blast the U.S. with his anti-american rhetoric, but I think he fails to include many of the European nations that have contributed to the problem.

Is Ward saying we should just stand aside and let the others commit these atrocites without any response?

[w0aew]

Quote[/b] (KC2KFC @ Feb. 04 2005,07:17)]Is Ward saying we should just stand aside and let the others commit these atrocites without any response?
If so, there certainly are (and were) lots of places to intervene (N. Korea, Serbian/Albanian conflict, the Tutsi/Hutu massacres, Cambodian killing fields, mass killings in the Dafur region of the Sudan, etc., etc.).

I suppose that the U.S. most aggressively intervenes whereever a sufficient number of American interests overlap (e.g., economic, moral/ethical, militarily strategic) and where the most can be accomplished with the least sacrifice (more bang for the buck). That is, intervening again in Korea would provide less economic and militarily strategic benefits than in Iraq and would cost more in soldiers' lives and logistical support (I assume...dunno).

Disagreements occur in defining these parameters. For example, Trent Lott and other Republican leaders opposed Clinton's intervention in the Serbian/Alabanian conflict on some of these grounds (and for politically self-serving reasons). The same can probably hold true for Kennedy and other Democratic leaders opposing some of Bush's policies in the middle East (although so many of them voted to give Bush free rein in the matter of Iraq).

What would be helpful is if our national leaders saw fit to explain some of these reasons for their policies and not assume the public is incapable of understanding them and must be supplied with simplistic rationales that can't pass the least critical examinations (e.g., Powell's evidence for Iraq's threat would not have withstood scrutiny as a freshman essay).

War should always be the last resort. Even though the victor is the one who eventually controls the destiny of the vanquished, both sides can suffer enormously and the unintended consequences can haunt subsequent generations (e.g., the seeds of WW2 sewn in the aftermath of WW1).

I think Ward's essay is infantile, overly dramatic, bombastic, and poorly written for a tenured professor. Stylistically it is a 19th century screed. But the points raised are valid (to me, anyhow) and perhaps his overly dramatic style warranted by his perception of the urgency of the dilemmas posed by American middle Eastern policies. The essay certainly woke me up to a few ideas I hadn't considered, although these ideas are not in line with Ward's. To that end, I think he has provided a service (provoking thought and reconsideration) which is a professor's job and for which he should not be punished.

[KC2KFC]

Quote[/b] (WA5OES @ Feb. 04 2005,09:48)]I think Ward's essay is infantile, overly dramatic, bombastic, and poorly written for a tenured professor. Stylistically it is a 19th century screed. But the points raised are valid (to me, anyhow) and perhaps his overly dramatic style warranted by his perception of the urgency of the dilemmas posed by American middle Eastern policies. The essay certainly woke me up to a few ideas I hadn't considered, although these ideas are not in line with Ward's. To that end, I think he has provided a service (provoking thought and reconsideration) which is a professor's job and for which he should not be punished.
I would have to agree with you on this. He comes off as a kook, but does make you pause and think about it. I see things quite a bit differently than he does, but he does have a right to speak his mind in this country.

[N7AAO]

Quote[/b] (KC2KFC @ Feb. 04 2005,12:03)]Quote[/b] (WA5OES @ Feb. 04 2005,09:48)]I think Ward's essay is infantile, overly dramatic, bombastic, and poorly written for a tenured professor. Stylistically it is a 19th century screed. But the points raised are valid (to me, anyhow) and perhaps his overly dramatic style warranted by his perception of the urgency of the dilemmas posed by American middle Eastern policies. The essay certainly woke me up to a few ideas I hadn't considered, although these ideas are not in line with Ward's. To that end, I think he has provided a service (provoking thought and reconsideration) which is a professor's job and for which he should not be punished.
I would have to agree with you on this. He comes off as a kook, but does make you pause and think about it. I see things quite a bit differently than he does, but he does have a right to speak his mind in this country.
Which also means he has the right to make a total fool of himself... which is about all I, personally, think he's accomplished. http://www.qrz.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif