Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention”–as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name–have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission . . . . keep reading.

For more on the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” bill which passed the House and is now in a Senate committee, see Ward Churchill on Democracy Now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_snF1EDQlg

I like Ward Churchill.

When he walked into my journalism class on Wednesday I could smell fire from a mile away.

Churchill’s crisp white shirt matched the white stripes in his hair, just as everything I knew about him up until meeting him was perfectly matched by his swagger.

Ward came to talk about his rather abusive relationship with the media throughout the past three years. Needless to say, he had a lot to articulate.

Enhanced by his mischievous smile and the witty banter to back it up, listening to Churchill talk was like taking part in a duel, except you forgot your arsenal. Every word from his clearly well equipped artillery is sharpened like a knife.

My mother would call him a smartass–a tall, highly publicized and irrefutable smartass. But isn’t that why we love him? That’s certainly part of it.

Ward Churchill is a man who, if nothing else, has seized our attention and caused us to think . . . the rest.

(Photo from the Try-Works.)

Protests again halted Denver’s annual celebration of the genocidal legacy of Christopher Columbus, resulting in the arrests of 88 demonstrators. Despite the fact that the protestors only engaged in passive resistance, the Denver police used excessive force on many. For news, see here and check for updates at www.transformcolumbusday.org and www.coloradoaim.org.

In 2004, Denver police arrested 244 Columbus Day protesters, including children and elders. In late January 2005, a jury acquitted the initial group of defendants (including Ward Churchill) and the City was forced to drop the remaining charges. Immediately thereafter, the local media began attacking and attempting to discredit Ward Churchill.

The Columbus Day holiday originated in Colorado 100 years ago. At that time Columbus’ legacy of murder and slave trading was being rewritten to glorify the conquest of the Americas in conjunction with the United States’ expansion and “acquisition” of colonies such as Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. For excellent background on Columbus and his legacy, see the award-winning documentary, “The Canary Effect”; see also a short video here.

This October, Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen were featured in a series of events in Charlottesville, Virginia, highlighting the devastating legacy of both Columbus and the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. For details, see here and here.

Genocide Denial and North American Academia

An interview with Ward Churchill
by Sara Falconer
October 12, 2007

It might be said that the measure of any decent smear campaign is the level to which the subject’s own peers turn against them. If that’s the case, Ward Churchill’s defamers must be pretty pleased with themselves these days, as people of all political stripes line up to heap scorn on him.

Talking to him, you know this man is anything but defeated. Following his recent dismissal from the University of Colorado, he’s taking his polemic show on the road, with stops next week in Ottawa, Toronto and Guelph.

Churchill became a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in 1990. His name was already well-known in activist circles, following a long stint as a leader of the American Indian Movement, and later as a national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. His books, from Agents of Repression to Pacifism as Pathology to A Little Matter of Genocide, are eye-opening, rending accounts of history, and staples on the shelves of thousands of people who are committed to social justice.

He gained widespread notoriety in 2005, when the media seized on an essay he had written on September 11, 2001 entitled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” In it, he suggested that American foreign policy was to blame for the attacks. He went on to say that some of those killed in the attacks were not “innocent” victims, but in fact the very people orchestrating and profiting from the imperialist system. He called them “little Eichmanns,” a reference to the infamous Nazi bureaucrat.

The essay had appeared on a fairly obscure website, and didn’t attract much public attention until 2005, when Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York State. Former Stalinist and current right wing writer David Horowitz, among others, led a campaign against Churchill which quickly picked up steam. Right wing radio host Bob Newman went so far as to argue that he should be executed for treason.

Under considerable pressure, the University of Colorado began investigating claims that Churchill had falsified and plagiarized some of his research. In 2006, a five-person investigative panel announced that it had found evidence of misconduct, but was split as to whether he should be fired, especially given the questionable timing of the allegations.

Eleven professors at the university signed a complaint against the investigation, saying that the committee violated standard scholarly practices and was biased against Churchill. He has continued to deny any misconduct, but was fired in July. He filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming that his dismissal was retaliatory, and contravened his right to freedom of expression. Free speech is constitutionally protected regardless of the popularity of the perspective, he argues.

You’d like to think that academia, if nothing else, is a bastion for bold ideas, a last refuge for unpopular speech.

Significantly, the “roosting chickens” title is a nod to a Malcolm X quote on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who called it a simple case of “chickens coming home to roost.” The comment was undoubtedly received with as much enthusiasm in Malcolm X’s time as Churchill’s essay has in the years following its publication.

In a lively interview with Newsweek shortly after his dismissal, he refused to apologize for the “little Eichmanns” statement, in characteristically ardent terms:

“I never have any particular regrets about calling things by their right name. And it’s about time we stop pretending that Americans are in a completely different analytical category from everyone else in the world, and are somehow exempt from the consequences of their actions.”

Churchill is no stranger to unpopular ideas. Many of his writings have focused on the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US. Inspired in part by resistance to his own work, Churchill’s current speaking tour focuses on what he calls “the denial of genocide in American academia.”

“If you were making the exact same arguments and using same techniques to deny the holocaust in Germany, you would be guilty of a crime in Canada,” he says.

Most deniers of the German holocaust are nuts, fringe types, he explains. “When you’re talking about native people exactly the same thing is done, only it’s the mainstream of academic discourse.”

Churchill makes a convincing argument that the historic and systemic oppression of this continent’s Indigenous populations does indeed fit within the official definition of genocide as found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which specifies “…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:”

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

“It’s no more acceptable when something is done to victims of one genocide than when it’s done to another set of victims,” he says. “If the… Zundel types are repugnant–and they are–then the people who would deny the native genocide are just as repugnant.”

One of the main differences in this context, he points out, is that European whites were largely successful in their conquest. And the victors, of course, write history.

“If you’d had a Nazi victory in Eastern Europe, the situation of any Jews who survived… would have been quite discernibly different.”

At its best, academia can be a space for people of colour and Indigenous peoples to develop their own histories. Churchill presents a different analysis of history, and he doesn’t much care if the mass media or his political opponents like it.

Overall, he says, Canadians have been more receptive than Americans to his message. He does as many talks in Canada as he does in the US, despite the much smaller population.

“One suspects it is in part because Canadians - and even progressive Canadians - tend to view their history as rather less genocidal than that of the United States,” he muses.

“Canada didn’t resort to the same direct killing techniques… but that’s hardly an indication that the genocidal policy wasn’t effective, just that the techniques employed were different.”

He cites articles A and B of the genocide convention–imposing serious physical or mental harm, and inflicting destructive conditions of life.

“Surely in Canada it’s clear that native peoples are subjected to various forms of psychological battering, and physical battering in the sense of endemic poverty,” he says.

Falling back on the argument that Canada’s treatment of the Indigenous population hasn’t been as brutal as that of the US doesn’t cut it either. “If you’re talking about a worse genocide than another genocide, then you’re arguing for a ‘good’ genocide.

“That’s part of what I’m about, is calling people on their self-absolutionist stances. Canadians like to pretend that they’re qualitatively different than Americans, and they’re not.”

Likewise, the Canadian myth of a “mosaic” society is deliberately oblivious to systemic racism. “You have to be in a state of extreme denial to be blind to the profundity of racism in society,” he adds. “You really have to be a Nazi or a Klansman to come out and celebrate being a racist… At least they’re honest. They’re relatively easy to deal with. It’s the mass of deniers who continue to profit from a racist society which is far more insidious.”

“Give me a Klansman any day; at least I know exactly who I’m dealing with.”

Churchill’s sense of humour comes through again as he turns to the controversy surrounding his 9/11 essay. His favorite moment, he recalls, was reading a headline in a Maoist publication: “Ward Churchill fired for calling little Eichmanns little Eichmanns.”

“The only people upset are in fact those who would be encompassed within my meaning of the term little Eichmanns,” he says. “I’m not getting it from communities of colour. I’m not getting it from poor people.”

With all of the focus on his dismissal from university, there is a risk that people aren’t listening to what he has to say about racism and imperialism, and clearly that’s what frustrates him most.

“If they can discredit my scholarship they can discredit my analysis, and if they can discredit my analysis they can reinforce the status quo,” he fumes.

Some detractors went as far as questioning his Native American heritage. And although there were rumblings that Karl Rove had a direct hand in his targeting, Churchill, who has written extensively about the government’s illegal and corrupt Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) against civil rights era activists, shrugs them off.

“Cointelpro has been assimilated into the media to the point that you don’t actually need intelligence agencies’ involvement most of the time,” he says.

Still, there’s more than a hint of those bad old days in the air, with leftist writers and academics eagerly siding with those who want to dismiss Churchill as a kooky extremist. People like Todd Gitlin–who are considered left, but not too left, get a big share of the media attention surrounding this case.

“Most of my generation has sold out so long ago for so fucking cheap that it gives me generational embarrassment,” Churchill says.

He believes that there is still hope for a broad social justice movement, outside of the currently established left. “It’s not going to be people who work for the Nation, or the Progressive. It’s certainly not going to be any part of the ‘responsible left.’”

“We need to constitute an actual left. And that’s going to come by and large from the new generation.”

As a professor, Churchill was extremely popular with University of Colorado students, who have invited him to teach a “voluntary” class. The course is entitled “ReVisioning American History: Colonization, Genocide, and Formation of the US Settler State.”

After years of weathering attacks, Churchill offers advice to budding activists. “Take clear positions and remain consistent and people will come to you. Don’t worry about alienating people who are fundamentally sold out… Strip them of their privilege, they’re gonna be alienated. I thought that was the goal.”

Now, student organizations have responded by inviting Ward Churchill back to teach on a voluntary basis, starting Tuesday Oct. 2, 2007.  The course is entitled “ReVisioning American History:  Colonization, Genocide, and Formation of the U.S. Settler State.”

According to Professor Churchill,

This course is an entirely voluntary exercise for all parties involved.  It carries no credit, fulfills no institutional requirements, involves payment of no tuition, entails no paycheck to its instructor . . .  The sole purpose of the course is to provide those desiring it a critical and comprehensive alternative to the triumphal narrative upon which the eurosupremacist orthodoxy of scholarship has been constructed, refined, and is currently being (re)imposed with increasing rigidity on campuses across the United States. . . .

This week, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to oust controversial academic Ward Churchill, who famously called 9/11 victims ‘little Eichmanns.’ His reaction—and his defense of those remarks.

He will go down in history as the guy who called the victims of September 11 “little Eichmanns”—a reference to the notorious Nazi bureaucrat who helped ship hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Ward Churchill’s comment, included in a long-forgotten essay dug up by an enterprising journalism student, stirred a national debate about the power of unpopular words—and the proper consequences for those who use them.

But the saga of the tenured University of Colorado ethnic studies professor grew more complicated in 2006, after allegations surfaced that Churchill had plagiarized, falsified or misrepresented some of his other scholarly work (Churchill denies any wrongdoing). An investigation was launched, and a panel of peers pored over his work. By May 2006, the panel had reached some damning conclusions, saying some of Churchill’s questionable writings fell into the category of academic misconduct. But the five-person panel was split on whether Churchill should be fired. That didn’t stop University of Colorado President Hank Brown from recommending to the school’s elected Board of Regents that Churchill, an extremely popular teacher on campus, be terminated. On Tuesday, the Board voted 8 to 1 to do just that.

Churchill calls his dismissal nothing short of a free-speech witch hunt. Brown calls Churchill’s criticism “a smoke screen.” The battle isn’t over. The morning after his firing, the professor filed a lawsuit in Denver district court, saying his dismissal was retaliatory—and a violation of his free speech. He spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Jim Moscou about what he calls the “conspiracy” against him—and explains why he still stands by the phrase that struck hard at the country’s soul.

NEWSWEEK: Any regrets over calling 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns”?
Ward Churchill: No. I never have any particular regrets about calling things by their right name. And it’s about time we stop pretending that Americans are in a completely different analytical category from everyone else in the world, and are somehow exempt from the consequences of their actions.

Let’s be clear for a moment: how do you define a “little Eichmann”?
Exactly as Hannah Arendt did. [Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist whose work included coverage of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel. She coined the phrase “banality of evil,” suggesting great evil emerges from ordinary people accepting and participating in misguided premises of the state, rather than driven by sociopaths and fanatics.]

And how do you think she defined it?
Well, that’s a scholar, a Jewish scholar … who very self-consciously (considered) the aftermath of what happened to the Jewish people in the hands of the Nazis. She attended the Eichmann trial. And she probably intimated as much that she intended in confronting a monster. And what she confronted was a little, nondescript mouse of man, a consummate bureaucrat, petty individual, who didn’t even necessarily agree with some of the policies he had been in a position to implement, but who took his identity, who took his sense of self-esteem, prestige, possibility of advancement—all which is fairly important to people—from discharging his organizational responsibilities in a superior manner.

(The public backlash) was just a visceral reaction. .…What Eichmann did was arrange train schedules, the logistic structure for the delivery of Jews and materials to the camps, and the transport from the camps, things like the gold fillings from teeth. We’re talking ugly business here. But he wasn’t handling the gold. He wasn’t killing the Jews. Not even the Israelis accused him of that. He was absolutely instrumental in a technocratic, bureaucratic, very sterile-organization sense for rendering the process efficient.

But how can you possibly compare the victims of 9/11 to that of a man shipping the gold fillings from murdered Jews?
Those (9/11 victims) who were engaged in the international-financial operations, which were the motive cause for U.S. policy … in full knowledge of what effects were on juvenile populations, sweatshops, and so forth—that’s the anchor there. Implement policy for profit, to maximize profit, to increase dividends, blah, blah, blah. Which also, by the way, increases their commission, establishes their stature, leads to their promotion trajectory, leads to their quality of life, and in full knowledge—they may suppress it—of the carnage that is induced in this profit-maximization profile. …Basically, I said you are accountable for what you do in the world. And … if you are profiting from carnage … you are the moral and philosophical equivalent of Adolf Eichmann. You don’t like that, change the behavior. That’s not who you want to be, stop acting like that.

So the behavior of every 9/11 victim is a moral equivalency to Eichmann’s support of the Holocaust?
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask what the moral equivalency would be of the half-million Iraqi children that died in Iraq from U.S. sanctions? Those children were reduced to less than no value. Now if you were the parent of one of those children … how are you going to ultimately respond? You want security from that kind of retaliation, stop killing their kids. Stop acting like your kids are important and theirs are utterly irrelevant.  Stop acting, as [former secretary of State Madeleine] Albright put it, that we have decided that it’s worth the cost of their pre-12-year-old children to convey what George Bush the first said, “What we say, goes.”

The University of Colorado Regents voted 8 to 1 to fire you. Your reaction?
Perfectly predictable.

You saw it coming?
Oh, since about February 2005. I was teaching when [the little Eichmann essay revelation] occurred, in the spring of 2005—the spring I was voted the best undergraduate teacher on campus by all the students. …(By spring 2006), I was placed on administrative leave.

What have you been doing since then?
I’ve been doing research and work. That’s my life, man.

Were you surprised to see a lone vote against your dismal?
Somewhat. I actually figured there may be as many as two votes of purported liberals who, in full knowledge of how it was going to turn out, could then posture. … I’m not saying that’s totally cynical on Cindy Carlisle’s part [the C.U. regent who cast the sole vote not to dismiss Churchill]. I think she actually believed what it was she believed; that the penalty was too severe. … Being a regent doesn’t qualify you for any scholarly authority and frankly being a former Republican senator and professional administrator—just like [being C.U. president and former Colorado senator] Hank Brown doesn’t qualify you for having a particular competency either.

But it was essentially a 2006 review of your work by faculty—a committee of your peers—that the regents based their decision on.
Let’s cut to the heart of this. They spent over two years building up this illusion that there is a competent, scholarly authority, which was the basis of this set of investigative findings; that I engaged in falsifying, misrepresentation, blah blah blah. … Well, it seems that there is a whole litany of research-misconduct complaints that have begun to emerge about the nature of the report itself, which begins with the fact they have not made any of the primary evidence available so it can be compared to their interpretation of it.

The committee’s review of your work was unflinching. They said they found deliberate examples of plagiarism and fabrications that were “not a matter of occasional careless error.”
They can say whatever they want. …They will not let it be subjected to scholarly scrutiny, which means it’s vacuous assertions.

Setting aside your issue with the committee, as an academic, don’t you believe the committee’s conclusions amount to a dismissible offense?
No, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to play that game. These are not my issues. … (What) they are saying … will be held to the same scholarly standard and scholarly integrity that they say they are enforcing, or it is an absolute sham. That’s not “my issue.”

So you question the scholarly integrity of the committee review?
What I’m saying is you can say whatever you want. Anybody can. Including people with PhDs. It either passes scholarly muster or not. It’s either true or its not. … If that’s true, it should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other scholarship. If not, then it’s not scholarly and it’s a sham, because they have presented it as scholarship.

Are you saying there is fraud?
I’m saying it’s fraudulent. I’ve been saying it since day one. … It’s about time someone mentions the fact they will not allow scholarly scrutiny of the supposedly ironclad positions that they have advanced as facts to the public.

Do you believe was there a conspiracy to fire you?
I believe there was literally a conspiracy within the administration, a strategy that was hatched by virtue of devising a plan to create certain appearances. … I’m not simply tossing out rhetoric when I say “sham” and “fraud.”

How could the administration control the findings of your peers?
This was as much of a jury of my peers as the (1950s) all-white juries in the southeastern states in regard to black defendants. …These were not my peers and they were handpicked. You’ve got the chair of the committee who was writing to people—and I’ve got the e-mails—referring to me as a most unpleasant individual, although we have never met; comparing me, and this is a quote, to celebrity-male wrong doers, are your ready for this, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and horror-of-horrors, Bill Clinton. …These were not peers. I’m saying the committee was handpicked.

On Tuesday’s high-profile hearing you wore an American Indian Movement T shirt. Why are you connecting your firing on misconduct charges with the Native American struggle?
Do you know anything about my work?

I do.
I don’t understand your question then. Virtually everything I write about, the whole focus of the scholarship, has to do with American Indians. I’m an American Indians professor.

Are you saying that they fired you because of your Native American work and positions?
Because I reflect a native understanding of the nature of the interactions that have occurred since a lost Italian seamen washed up on a beach in the Caribbean half a world away from where he thought he was, and was called a great navigator. We don’t say that was necessarily a great navigational accomplishment. We’ve got a different understanding in our histories, in our societies, in our communities. Those are reflected in my writings. That’s my job.

Does that also reflect in what happened to you?
Sure.

How?
They are looking to repeal the whole interpretive line that I’ve advanced! … I’m considered—rightly, wrongly or indifferent—at the forefront of this particular line of historical interpretations of indigenous understanding. That is to be completely discredited.

Will you stay in teaching?
I’ve been teaching all my life. And I guess you can say in a way that I’m engaged in teaching right now.

Do you think you did anything wrong at all, or are you just a victim?
I’m not a victim. Never, ever call me a victim. OK? Don’t call me embattled either. I’m beginning to think that’s my first name (from its use in press reports). It’s ridiculous. I’m a target, not a victim. And you may notice, I don’t tend to roll over and get stepped on.

Fundraiser for WBAI in NYC

Presented by WBAI 99.5fm and The New York Society for Ethical Culture

Featuring WARD CHURCHILL
Plus, Lynne Stewart, Bernard White, Amy Goodman (Invited)

Performance By M ATOU = Soni Moreno (Ulali)
Attahua Papa, Tiokasin Ghosthorse

Saturday March 31,2007
New York Society for Ethical Culture
West 64th Street at Central Park West
7 to 9 PM

Ward Churchill, author of a mountain of books on the FBI and Cointelpro, is standing at Ground Zero in a raging firestorm over academic freedom.

For more information: www.wbai.org