Criticized professor speaks at Reed

[struggle4progress]

Organizers invited Ward Churchill, whose essay on the 9/11 attacks enraged many, as a stand against "blacklisting"

Sunday, April 17, 2005

SHELBY OPPEL WOOD

<snip> Justin Wilson, a Reed student who introduced Churchill, said organizers wanted his visit to represent a defense of academic freedom and a stand against "blacklisting." <snip>

For the United States to be secure, Churchill said, its leaders must "change the equation in terms of valuing life." He said Americans must place equal value on the lives of people of other countries. <snip>

"Is there really no place for the U.S. to intervene in the world?" one student asked.

"Yeah, good question," Churchill replied. "The answer is real simple, no. If you want to export democracy, you might first want to learn something about it." <snip>

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1113731877276570.xml

[SheilaT]

1. Reed College, that wonderful bastion

of true academic freedom!

I wish I could have gone there myself.

[LdyGuique]

2. I caught Ward on C-Span about a week ago --

and really found him quite compelling in his arguments. I'd read his original article when the flaming started and frankly didn't see the reason for such a hate-filled reaction. Now, after he's further clarified what he meant and why he uses the term, it makes perfect sense.

As he said repeatedly, Eichmann never murdered anyone. He was a logistics planner, a facilitator, an enabler. One who worked to supply the necessary elements to get the job done, from scheduling trains to shipping supplies east. While I feel his assessment was too harsh with regards to various WTC workers being "little Eichmanns," I can see his point of view. The world's banking organizations has much to answer for.

In the same vein, Switzerland and its banking policies has enabled many a dictaor to skim off millions of dollars and to perpetuate crimes within their own countries until they made a dash to the border. They, too, are little eichmanns.

[ClayZ]

4. I saw that too! He made perfect sense to me, too!

I agree with everything he said on C-Span!

http://www.satyamag.com/apr04/churchill.html
Interview with Ward Churchill in Satya

.....That brings me to one question, which is, in general, people like to think they’re pretty decent. They don’t like to think of themselves as violent or complying with a system that is oppressive...

"Heinrich Himmler viewed himself in exactly that way. He was a family man, he had high moral values, he’d met his responsibilities, blah, blah, blah—a good and decent man in his own mind."

<snip>

What gives you hope?
"What gives me hope is that people are imbued innately with consciousness and you can potentially reorder that to arrive at an understanding of what needs to be done. Once the understanding is there, the capacity to do what necessary is obviously present. So despite the fact that my experience tells me that it is unlikely (because of the vast preference of the bulk of the people to indulge themselves personally, rather than engage in something that might be effective but personally uncomfortable), the possibility of an alteration in that consciousness, remains always present. There’s where I find hope. That was a somewhat muddled response.

What would I do in the alternative if I were completely divested of hope? Collect stamps. The reason to go on with the struggle is why it’s work. It’s not an event; it’s a process. And if one understands one’s place in the world properly one is obligated to struggle. Struggling, you’ve got to have hope that you can succeed. If not in the immediacy of my lifetime, then to plant the seeds that can reach maturation at some point. Now I have an obligation to my children and my children’s children and generations out into the future, as do we all, whether we understand it or not."




:kick:

[Voltaire99]

5. Yes, Ward Churchill makes a lot of sense.

Churchill has been pilloried by those, both right and center, keen on preserving what Lewis Lapham calls the national myth of perpetual innocence.

It may be useful for Clintonian centrists who get themselves in a tizzy over the professor's incendiary analogy to look beyond Churchill's rhetoric.

Consider the great midcentury social psychologist Erich Fromm's verdict on the Nazi pencil pusher. Fromm wrote this in "On Disobedience," a 1963 article that anticipates Churchill's argument by forty years:

The case of Adolf Eichmann is symbolic of our situation and has a significance far beyond the one which his accusers in the courtroom in Jerusalem were concerned with. Eichmann is a symbol of the organization man, of the alienated bureaucrat for whom men, women and children have become numbers. He is a symbol of all of us. We can see ourselves in Eichmann. But the most frightening thing about him is that after the entire story was told in terms of his own admissions, he was able in perfect good faith to plead his innocence. It is clear that if he were once more in the same situation he would do it again. And so would we--and so do we. The organization man has lost the capacity to disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he obeys. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

http://eqi.org/fromm.htm

The above should be of special use in understanding why so many of our brothers and sisters go along with the "war on terorrism" narrative or the occupation of Iraq. It does not take a right winger only to support empire. Empire depends on its Little Eichmanns.

[BeFree]

6. Yeah, perfect sense

Far too many of us just look the other way. Far too busy with the petty little furtherings of our own petty little lives, far too many of us totally ignore the history of how we got where we are.

We are here because of the blood sweat and tears shed by millions upon millions of innocent people who's daily labors contributed to the wealth and furnishings we all partake.

Yet, far too many of us think we are here because of our own doings. The failure to examine how things came to be is the ultimate failure of our society and leads to even more blood sweat and tears shed by even more millions of innocents.

But too examine the history of how things came to be means one must question the established order and in so doing, that one is shunned and castigated by the society which denies and ignores the high prices paid to get to this point.

Churchill is a fine example of the society's shunning.

[stevedeshazer]

3. Damn, missed it

I didn't know he was in town, I'd like to have heard him.

[Heidi]

7. I find his arguments compelling, but . . .

I would like for someone to ask him, point blank, why he misrepresented himself as a Native American, when in fact he was only an honorary member of the Keetowah Band of Cherokee. This is completely apart from the academic freedom issue, where I believe he definitely is in the right.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

8. He's a fool.

He described World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who kept the trains running to deliver Jews to death camps across Europe.

"True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire," he wrote.

Yes. Very compelling. :eyes:

[Doctor_J]

9. I tried to get a job at Reed

and was pissed when they picked someone else. Maybe I should've hinted at my politics?

[megatherium]

10. Old Reed College cheer:

R-E-D, R-E-D, Reed! Reed!

The bookstore there sells tee-shirts that have a mock seal of Reed College bearing the motto Communism, Atheism, Free Love.

[Psephos]

11. Churchill no longer deserves defending, imo

I don't have a problem with his Little Eichmann comments. I completely disagree, but I have no problem at all with him saying them. I also don't think he should suffer any political consequences for voicing an opinion some find repugnant.

What I do have a problem with is his serial plagiarism, his lying about his heritage, and the way he took a tenured professorship from someone else who actually did have the heritage he lied about.

I have a problem with the threatening way he handled the woman in Canada whose writings he purloined.

I have a problem with some of the ugliness I've seen on video taken in unguarded moments. Something not right there.

I also have a problem with him ripping off someone else's art, making a mirror image copy of it, and then signing his own name to it, and selling serigraphs of it at a hundred bucks a pop.

You have to really twist yourself into a pretzel to think this guy is oppressed. The truth is, he himself is an oppressor. His whole life is about looking out for #1. Just because we superficially share politics does not mean we must be bedfellows.

Peace.