Ward Churchill attacked by Fox News
There was an interview with Prof Churchill on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/
It suggests that what he said has been distorted. For example.
"AMY GOODMAN: What are you saying was in the World Trade Center?
WARD CHURCHILL: There was a Central Intelligence Agency office. There were Defense Department offices. There was, I believe, an F.B.I. facility. All of which fit the criteria of the bombing target selection utilized by the Pentagon. If it was fair to bomb such targets in Baghdad, it would be fair for others to bomb such targets in New York. That's what I'm saying. I don't think it's fair to bomb such targets in Baghdad, therefore I reject New York, but so long as United States is applying those rules out in the world, it really has no complaint when those rules are applied to it. "
Ward Churchill's statements seem to be a legitimate part of the debate. Night after night after night, Fox news has distorted this into a call for further terrorism. Clearly it is no such thing.
American military targets have included:
Baby food factories
Roads
Bridges
Railway stations
hospitals (Fallujah!)
Civilian homes
Unarmed prisoners
It is not "calling for the killing of American citizens" to point this out.
He also referred to some of the victims as "Little Eichmanns". (How often have you referred to a traffic warden or a bossy receptionist as a little Hitler? Has anybody suggested you should be sacked for it?)
"Well it goes to Hannah Arendt's notion of Eichmann, the thesis that he embodied the banality of evil. That she had gone to the Eichmann trial to confront the epitome of evil in her mind and expected to encounter something monstrous, and what she encountered instead was this nondescript little man, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a guy who arranged train schedules, who, as it turned out, ultimately didn't even agree with the policy that he was implementing, but performed the technical functions that made the holocaust possible, at least in the efficient manner that it occurred, in a totally amoral and soulless way, purely on the basis of excelling at the function and getting ahead within the system that he found himself. He was a good family man, in his way. He was loved by his children, participated in civic activities, was in essence the good German. And she [Arendt] said, therein lies the evil. It wasn't that Eichmann was a Nazi or a high official within Nazidom, although he was in fact a Nazi and a relatively highly placed official, but it was exactly the reverse: that given his actual nomenclature, the actuality of Eichmann was that anyone in this sort of mindless, faceless, bureaucratic capacity could be the Nazi. That he was every man, and that was what was truly horrifying to her in the end. That was a controversial thesis because there's always this effort to distinguish anyone and everyone irrespective of what they're doing from this polarity of evil that is signified in Nazidom, and she had breached the wall and brought the lessons of how Nazism actually functioned, the modernity of it, home and visited it upon everyone, calling for, then, personal accountability, responsibility, to the taking of responsibility for the outcome of the performance of one's functions. That's exactly what it is that is shirked here, and makes it possible for people to, from a safe remove, perform technical functions that result in (and at some level, they know this, they understand it) in carnage, emiseration, the death of millions ultimately. That's the Eichmann aspect. But notice I said little Eichmanns, not the big Eichmann. Not the real Eichmann. The real Eichmann ultimately is symbolic, even in his own context. He symbolized the people that worked under him. He symbolized the people who actually were on the trains. They were hauling the Jews. He symbolized the technicians who were making the gas for I.G. Farben. He symbolized all of these people who didn't directly kill anybody, but performed functions and performed those functions with a certain degree of enthusiasm and certainly with a great degree of efficiency, that had the outcome of the mass murder of the people targeted for elimination or accepted as collateral damage. That's the term of the art put forth by the Pentagon.
AMY GOODMAN: How many people have interpreted this, "if as you said, true enough, they were civilians of a sort, but innocent, give me a break. They formed a technocratic core at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the mighty engine of profit, to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly." How many people have interpreted this as that they deserve what they got?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, I'm not a judge. I don't make the assessment as to what it is they deserve. I'm simply pointing to the reality of it. I don't know that I even agreed with the execution of Eichmann, per se. I'm not repudiating it. I'm not taking exception to it and defending the man, but I don't make that decision. What I did was posit the reality with the intent of allowing the reader or compelling the reader even to draw their own conclusion. If their conclusion is that if you do these things, you deserve death, then that's the conclusion they've drawn.
AMY GOODMAN: What conclusion...
WARD CHURCHILL: Apparently...
AMY GOODMAN: What conclusion have you drawn about September 11th and the...
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, I posit my conclusions that if you want to avoid September 11s, if you want security in some actual form, then it's almost a biblical framing, you have to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As long as you're doing what the U.S. is doing in the world, you can anticipate a natural and inevitable response of the sort that occurred on 9/11.
(and I suggest you read the whole transcript. Democracy Now! publishes transcripts of all its major interviews)
Posted by derekmcmillan
at 7:54 AM GMT
