Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kellichou]

So, for those of you who haven't yet heard, CU's board of regents
voted 8 to 1 to fire Ward Churchill--on the basis of "academic
dishonesty."  I wonder if any professor's career could withstand such
intense scrutiny (and possibly trumped-up charges)?

The excerpted comment below is in Churchill's own words, and I REALLY like it.

Excerpt from Democracy Now! interview with Amy Goodman that really,
for me, illuminates the context of Churchill's comment (and also shows
how/why so many right-wingers are SO ANGRY at his comment--I also like
how Churchill's own web site states that his firing is a right-wing
"test case" to see how easy it is to quash free speech and critical
thinking in this nation).

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/18/157211

WARD CHURCHILL: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Well, can you respond to this
firestorm now? But I'd like you to start off by you explaining your
comments that have become well known now around the issue of the
technocrats at the World Trade Center being like little Eichmanns.

WARD CHURCHILL: Well it goes to Hannah Arendt's notion of Eichmann,
the thesis that he embodied the banality of evil. That she had gone to
the Eichmann trial to confront the epitome of evil in her mind and
expected to encounter something monstrous, and what she encountered
instead was this nondescript little man, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a
guy who arranged train schedules, who, as it turned out, ultimately
didn't even agree with the policy that he was implementing, but
performed the technical functions that made the holocaust possible, at
least in the efficient manner that it occurred, in a totally amoral
and soulless way, purely on the basis of excelling at the function and
getting ahead within the system that he found himself. He was a good
family man, in his way. He was loved by his children, participated in
civic activities, was in essence the good German. And she [Arendt]
said, therein lies the evil. It wasn't that Eichmann was a Nazi or a
high official within Nazidom, although he was in fact a Nazi and a
relatively highly placed official, but it was exactly the reverse:
that given his actual nomenclature, the actuality of Eichmann was that
anyone in this sort of mindless, faceless, bureaucratic capacity could
be the Nazi. That he was every man, and that was what was truly
horrifying to her in the end. That was a controversial thesis because
there's always this effort to distinguish anyone and everyone
irrespective of what they're doing from this polarity of evil that is
signified in Nazidom, and she had breached the wall and brought the
lessons of how Nazism actually functioned, the modernity of it, home
and visited it upon everyone, calling for, then, personal
accountability, responsibility, to the taking of responsibility for
the outcome of the performance of one's functions. That's exactly what
it is that is shirked here, and makes it possible for people to, from
a safe remove, perform technical functions that result in (and at some
level, they know this, they understand it) in carnage, emiseration,
the death of millions ultimately. That's the Eichmann aspect. But
notice I said little Eichmanns, not the big Eichmann. Not the real
Eichmann. The real Eichmann ultimately is symbolic, even in his own
context. He symbolized the people that worked under him. He symbolized
the people who actually were on the trains. They were hauling the
Jews. He symbolized the technicians who were making the gas for I.G.
Farben. He symbolized all of these people who didn't directly kill
anybody, but performed functions and performed those functions with a
certain degree of enthusiasm and certainly with a great degree of
efficiency, that had the outcome of the mass murder of the people
targeted for elimination or accepted as collateral damage. That's the
term of the art put forth by the Pentagon.

[jaydub]

I wonder if any professor's career could withstand such
intense scrutiny (and possibly trumped-up charges)?

I'd hope we hold our professors to higher standards than Mr Churchill displayed.

Well it goes to Hannah Arendt's notion of Eichmann, the thesis that he embodied the banality of evil

That's nice.  Its good to know he not only thought the Americans killed in the WTC and Washington were not only evil, but they were banal as well.  And even in that capacity, they rank below Eichmann himself in importance.  That's just dandy.  Why, those Saudi terrorists did us a favor, getting rid of those trivial, dronelike bloodsuckers.  Not to mention the sheep who made them coffee in the cafeteria, ran the security, delivered packages, or came to their aid as first responders.

Churchill is just a misunderstood peach!

[Nabubrush]

Jesus! From this guy's perspective, I ought to be put to the sword!

[Ben-San]

Reading the full interview, the key point is not that he thinks that the WTC was a legitimate target for attack, but rather that it would be classified as such by US military policy if it were in a country the US was at war with, and that this is a problem with US policy.

Definitely not making his point accessible, though.

[Doc]

According to this article the official charges were plagiarism and fraud. I agree that undue focus was put on him because of his statements, but fraud and plagiarism cannot be tolerated in the research community. According to that article I linked the one person who voted for him disagreed only with the penalty not that he didn't do it.

[linnea]

I don't think it was fair for Churchill to compare WTC workers to Eichmann. What a provocative statement: you have all these pissed-off, hurt Americans who witnessed this spectacle. There's the huge psychological warfare aspect going on with an attack on American soil. Then you have someone who stands up and smugly compares the WTC workers to Nazis and claims that he's allowed to say such because he is of the First Nation. I remember that there was some speculation that he wasn't even really Native American, but I don't know if that's true or not.

Does the average American know who the fuck Eichmann was? No. But they know he was a Nazi and they're going to be livid as hell when someone compares suicide bombing victims to Nazis. In this sense it is obvious that Churchill is claiming that his comment was taken out of context because his point was that Eichmann didn't know the full extent of what his bureaucratic actions were having, which is also not true.

I knew that Eichmann engineered the Holocaust, but I have never before heard Churchill's description of Eichmann as a "banal, gentle bureaucrat". It is always weird to me when people try to focus on the "human" aspects of the Nazis, and it's worse when he compares WTC workers to this man. Sure, I bet that even the worst torturer called his dog Liebchen and made it do tricks for little pieces of steak and petted and hugged it before he went to bed at night, but talking about that kind of stupid bullshit unfairly takes the focus off the atrocities that said Nazi committed.

Anyway, the point that Churchill was making is that these banal little worker bees at the WTC had the blood of millions on their hands. That is also not true. Those people were working in a major hub for the United States economy, and I think it's fallacious to equate the WTC (American stock market and banking industry) with the worst evils of American foreign policy. Churchill's statement is fallacious because the bombers didn't pick the WTC to find the largest concentration of evil little Eichmanns, they did it for a multitude of reasons, including to try and disrupt our economy. I think that Churchill is making a cheap shot at American foreign policy by making the most provocative, shit-stirring statement possible (American victims = Nazis), which most Americans are going to be pissed about. Talk about a PR nightmare for CU.

If you're going to make such a public statement that is engineered to emotionally wound many people who are already suffering, your academic career had better be god-damned spotless, because your credentials and everything upon which you stand are going to be subjected to intense scrutiny. Since his track record contained carefully-hidden fraud and plagiarism, he should have kept his mouth shut and maybe he could have bought a few more months or years of riding his career before getting found out for fraud.

[theinevitable]

hm. I almost wanted to agree with him... and then I thought "wait... but the main fact is that Eichmann was a banally evil... Nazi. What did those people do?" It was not really clearly set out.

I kind of like the "banality of evil" concept, though. That makes a lot of sense.

[V-Adore]

O choir, let me preach to you thus:

The concept of the "banality of evil" is a great one, in my opinion, and it goes far to explain how exactly the Third Reich happened: the small complicities of many people who did not consider themselves evil, and may well have been pleasant enough, but still aided and abetted one of the greatest evils the world has ever known. However, this concept makes flagrantly no sense when applied to the WTC, where... no actual evil was being committed, unless you consider capitalism to be evil. Furthermore, the "banality of evil" theory is generally applied (IIRC, anyway) only to Eichmann and other Nazi bureaucrats who were highly-ranked enough to be active party members who were at least somewhat aware of what they were doing; applying the same complicity to the average WWII-era German citizen is more dubious and more controversial. Applying it to average employees of a large corporation during peacetime, and implying that they were complicit simply by being employed, seems entirely baseless.

Furthermore, what's the basis for the plagiarism concerns? Maybe Churchill was put under intense scrutiny, but if he plagiarized fair and square, he should take the consequences.

[linnea]

Thanks for hitting my main point of disagreement with the guys protestations Somebody nice. Saved me some typing there. Dude is leaving out other causal reasons for choice of target that do not buttress his central point.

ALSO: I think it would hae been better if it had been pointed out originally that dude Godwin'd himself in his own argument and just laughed at him.

Heh!! Fuck yes, Ash. Godwin's Law. Tiny can.