Looks like the University of Colorado will fire Ward Churchill for his comment made several years back about some people in the World Trade Center being "little Eichmann's." As pointed out, "the whole point of churchill calling them little eichmans or technocrats of the empire is comparing them to the pencil pushers of the nazi death camps, as the wtc folks were the pencil pushers for the american empire."
So much for freedom of speech and academic freedom. The UC will dismiss him on some other trumped-up charges, but this is what it's all about; this and Ward bringing people's attention to the negative side of the American Empire.
Infoshop News - Chancellor says he'll fire Churchill over 9/11 comment
"As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? 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, 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."
— Ward Churchill , Some People Push Back
"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. If you don't get the message out of 9/11, you're going to have to change, first of all, your perception of the value of those others who are consigned to domains, semantic domains like collateral damage, then you've really got no complaint when the rules you've imposed come back on you."
— Ward Churchill , Statement to Democracy Now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_9/11_essay_controversy
Yeah, guys saying stuff like this is the kind we don't want teaching in our institutions of higher learning...
Professor Churchill blew it, but in a different way than causing controversy and potentially losing his job. ver a factually true statement originally attributable to the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt upon seeing Eichmann on trial at Nuremburg where she noted that she expected to see some hideous monster, but instead saw a "...withered little man in spectacles", a part of a larger monsterously hideous "machine".
ReplyDeleteDue to the controversy caused by his "little Eichmann" comment, one of the Prof. Churchill's main talking points was obscured...
That the U.S. government is doing almost exactly the same thing, using exactly the same techniques on Iraq, Lebanon etc, that were used to overwhelm the First Americans, their culture & traditions.
The "playbook of domination" hasn't changed.
On a more amusing note, the "Rainbow Family", who have been harrassed, stalked by specially assigned "Rainbow Units" of the USFS, and arrested for attempting earth oriented spiritual ceremonies in various national forests around the US on the 4th of July every year, are utilizing the same Colorado lawyer as Ward Churchill after this year's "gathering" outside of Steamboat Springs Co where the USFS and other authorities went so far as to specifically target folks who appeared to be "rainbows", threatening travellers on the way to the event and forcing them to turn back under threat of arrest if they continued on.