Ward Churchill’s Banality of Evil
The right to free speech doesn’t mean you’re right
by Anthony Lappé
“The storm around Churchill’s statements has many on the far left coming to his defense. As a Native American activist, he has a long record of fighting injustice (see my interview with his frequent co-author Jim Vander Wall here), and I too support his right to free speech. Ruffling feathers is what good professors do. It’s a shame that the controversy has cost him his chairmanship of the Ethnic Studies Department at Colorado (he resigned this week). Now his troubles have reached all the way to New York, where an appearance at Hamilton College was cancelled due to what administrators said were security concerns over a flood of death threats.
But there’s a big difference between the right to speak your mind, and being right. And I think he’s dead wrong.
Maybe it’s because I was blocks away when the towers fell. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a wussy pacifist than my more radical brothers. But I cannot find it in me to find what he wrote anything other than completely reprehensible.
Consider the professor’s twisted logic. First one has to ignore the fact that the main crime he accuses the U.S. of – the embargo of Iraq under Saddam which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths – was an act of the U.S. government and was likely unpopular, as most limits on commerce are, with the financial community. Let’s grant him that the bankers are complicit in America’s global corporate domination. We can all agree on that. But where do you draw the line when it comes to doling out the professor’s brand of tough justice? What about the secretaries who serve coffee to the little Eichmanns? They keep the evil system caffeinated, should they die? What if you own stock? Does earning dividends on GE mean your apartment building should be leveled with you in it? What if you keep your money at Chase or Citibank? Buy stuff at Wal-Mart? Pay federal taxes? Or better yet, what if you work for the government? Churchill himself works for a state university. He takes a paycheck from an institution that in all likelihood does military research and is probably ten times more complicit in the actual machinery of war than any junior currency trader.”
You can find the essay in this article, Ward Churchill’s Essay and Statement: Updated…Feb 9 on Bob Hoffman’s “Political Gateway” site.