ON THE JUSTICE OF WARD CHURCHILL VIA POP

ON THE JUSTICE OF WARD CHURCHILL VIA POP

ON THE JUSTICE OF WARD CHURCHILL VIA POP [2008]

Some Questions We Should Be Asking About the Attacks on
WARD CHURCHILL

For the past two months University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill’s scholarship and personal life have been put under a microscope. The University is under intense pressure to fire him. Nearly every day the Denver-area media has featured negative allegations as if they were fact. Responses from Professor Churchill and those who support him are rarely printed. What’s really going on here?

WHO IS WARD CHURCHILL?
Ward Churchill has written more than twenty books, dozens of book chapters and over one hundred journal articles. As of 2001 he was the most cited scholar in his field. He was hired with tenure in 1991 because he had already published six books, more than most academics ever publish. Prof. Churchill has received numerous teaching awards, four prestigious awards for writing, and was inducted into the Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars in 2004. Students flock to his classes – which are always oversubscribed – and his public lectures are uniformly well received. His department unanimously voted him chair in 2002. More than 1000 academics and over 5000 others have weighed in to protest CU’s current “investigation.” Such accomplishments don’t happen by accident, or because of a “false claim” of American Indian identity. Why are they being ignored?

WHY IS HE CONTROVERSIAL?
What Prof. Churchill says – and how he says it – often forces people to confront issues they would rather avoid. His research focuses on the government’s failure to comply with the Constitution and with international law, raising troubling questions about the treatment of American Indians and the consequences of U.S. foreign policy. The current controversy was triggered by his suggestion that the best way to ensure American security is to prevent our government from engaging in illegal military interventions which destroy other people’s families and communities. Why has public discussion moved from these substantive issues of U.S. policy to a microscopic examination of Prof. Churchill’s life and work?

WHAT ABOUT ALL THESE ALLEGATIONS?
The media has repeated, ad nauseum, allegations of “academic fraud” from a handful of relatively unknown academics, without investigating the underlying facts, while the praise of Prof. Churchill’s work by dozens of eminent scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Stannard, Haunani-Kay Trask, Richard Falk and Robert A. Williams, Jr., has been ignored. Why are the accusers’ credentials and motivations not scrutinized? Why hasn’t the support of the experts in these fields received at least as much exposure? Prof. Churchill has provided evidence of his associate (not honorary) membership in the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee, his long-term participation in the local American Indian community, and his support from American Indian organizations nationally. The denials of his identity all stem from a small, self-appointed group calling itself “National AIM” that has spent many years engaging in politically motivated attacks on Prof. Churchill and the Colorado AIM chapter. What makes these individuals the authority on Prof. Churchill’s identity? Why hasn’t the local media bothered to investigate them? Or talked to American Indians who have worked with Prof. Churchill for decades? Initially Ward Churchill was accused of “advocating” the 9/11 attacks rather than trying to explain their causes; then of criminally “inciting” others to violence. As it became clear that these charges were false, these morphed into claims of personal threats of violence – all years (or decades) old, none ever reported to the police, all denied by Prof. Churchill. Why is the media so determined to paint Prof. Churchill as an advocate of violence? Could it be because he has been such a consistent critic of violence perpetrated by the U.S. government? what’s behind this relentless campaign to discredit ward churchill? This is not just about Ward Churchill. The CU Board of Regents is now refusing to stand by its own rules on academic freedom; established tenure and review processes have been discarded; race and gender studies programs, a wide range of professors and the institution of tenure are under attack both here and around the country. Freedom of speech is meaningless if those who express “unpopular” positions are subjected to onslaughts of unsubstantiated personal and professional attacks. Ward Churchill will not be silenced, but who knows how many others will be? Are we simply going to sit back and watch?

Press Release – Ward Churchill
January 31, 2005

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

• The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

• I am not a “defender”of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting John F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”

• This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King’s April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

• In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that “we” had decided it was “worth the cost.” I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

• Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as “Nazis.” What I said was that the “technocrats of empire” working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

• It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American “command and control infrastructure” in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a “legitimate” target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than “collateral damage.” If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these “standards” when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

• It should be emphasized that I applied the “little Eichmanns” characterization only to those described as “technicians.” Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that’s my point. It’s no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

• The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the “Good Germans” of the 1930s and ’40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

• These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today’s world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

[This statement represents the views of Ward Churchill, not the University of Colorado at Boulder.]

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