Robert Jensen of the Univeristy of Texas at Austin has a piece on CommonDreams [1] entitled "Ward Churchill Has Rights, and He's Right," arguing that "The main thesis Churchill put forward in [his controversial essay] is an accurate account of the depravity of U.S. foreign policy and its relationship to terrorism. "
Sorry Robert, but the central thesis of the essay was that mass murder against US citizens is justified.
Jensen predicts that "right-wing forces" will "take passages from this essay out of context to 'prove' that I am anti-American, support terrorism..."
No, I'll just take a passage from the original Churchill essay [2] to prove that you are deeply in denial. Churchill writes that the WTC victims (making no exception for the apparently irrelevant secretaries, busboys and janitors) "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."
Churchill has apparently since said that he didn't mean the working-class folks killed at the WTC (gee, how generous). Yet he expresses no regret at referring to the "gallant sacrifices of the combat teams [at] the WTC and Pentagon." I'm sure the next of kin of the secretaries killed at the WTC will be very comforted that their loved ones were acceptable collatoral damage in Churchill's universe. (Or is there some "context" I'm missing here?)
Jensen does express some lukewarm criticism of the Eichmann remark, but from a position of "support," as he puts it. I'm glad the idiot left has learned so much since the days when Maoist yahoos "supported" Pol Pot, whose exterminationist zeal Churchill seems to share.
Jensen cites Churchill as a personal influence, especially his book on the decimation of the Native Americans, A Little Matter of Genocide [3]. Jensen seems incable of grasping the hideous irony of an enthusiast for mass murder claiming to have any legitimate voice on this matter.
Finally, lest I be accused of arguing that because Churchill is dead wrong he has no rights, let me clarify that Ward Churchill has the same God-given right we all do to spew vicious malarky without fear of censure. He shouldn't even have his tenure yanked for it, although there may be a case for yanking his tenure on grounds of falsifying his Indian identity [4].
One more thing: such apologias are a little distasteful for a publication with as self-consciously utopian a name as CommonDreams. If they wish to continue in this vein, perhaps they should consider changing it to CommonNightmares.
See our last post on the Churchill affair [5].
