More on Churchill and academic freedom

Below I mention Bill O'Reilly's hard-on for Ward Churchill. Today someone sent me an LA Times story with a note saying "nothing is ever as simple as it may appear." The story begins:

AURORA, Colo. — A student protest turned into a brawl here Thursday, shutting down a meeting of the University of Colorado board of regents after it agreed to investigate a professor who compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis.

The article takes up three main topics: the protest, the content of Churchill's article, and the question of Churchill's ethnicity (is he an American Indian or one step up from a cigar store replica?). Leaving aside the latter (in part because I am uneducated on the question and in part because I really tire over arguments about who is "authentic" and who is authorized to speak about what), here are some excerpts about the first two:

School officials struggled to be heard as students in the room screamed "Fascist regents!" and "Let the public speak!" One protester got into a shoving match, then a full-blown fight with police. Chaos erupted as students dove over chairs to taunt officers while regents were shuffled out a side door for their own safety.

"What country am I living in?" shrieked one demonstrator.

Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, later decried the scene as "mob rule" and repeated his calls for Churchill's dismissal. Meanwhile, the state Senate passed a resolution Thursday denouncing the professor's remarks as "evil and inflammatory."

The furor over remarks by Churchill, 57, began last week. He was asked to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., about Native American prison issues. But professors there discovered a paper he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."

Churchill called those working in the World Trade Center "technocrats of empire" and "little Eichmanns," comparing them to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi mastermind of the Holocaust. He said the workers were "civilians of a sort."

"But innocent? Gimme a break," he wrote.

Churchill said the "combat teams" that killed nearly 3,000 people "manifested the courage of their convictions." In a taped speech, he said that if the Pentagon wasn't a legitimate target, "I don't know what is."

Outrage ensued, and Monday Churchill stepped down as chairman of the department of ethnic studies, though he retains his $94,200-a-year teaching job. Hamilton College canceled his speech, saying it had received so many threats that it couldn't ensure his or the students' safety.

Churchill, who specializes in Native American issues, has said his writings were taken out of context, and that he meant that if America behaved unjustly it could not expect to be spared from attack.

Sadly, I am so tired I won't give this subject the justice it deserves, but I want to say a couple of things, if only in brief. First, I have read a slew of articles recently about bloggers, articles that praise weblogs for their attention to stories that might not otherwise come to the attention of the general public. But almost all of the articles have some sort of "but they're not real journalists" provisos. Why? Because of tone and a lack of objectivity. Many of my companions online have already pointed out the obvious--we're not pretending to be objective. But the LA Times is, and let's look again at the above article. There's a word choice issue ("shriek," "dove," "taunt," "chaos"...). There's a sentence structure issue ("though he retains his $94,200-a-year teaching job"). There's a framing issue ("after it agreed to investigate a professor who compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis" not "after it bowed to pressure from conservative pundits such as Bill O'Reilly and agreed to investigate a professor who argued that all Americans are culpable for policies that result in starvation and death").

And there's a plain old sloppy thinking, bad reporting issue. I have read Churchill's paper. It's damn easy to find. Type the title into a search engine, and there it is. I would be willing to bet hard cash that the journalist who wrote this article did not. I'm not going to try to defend the essay as a brilliant piece. I think it's pretty problematic in some ways. It's a polemic, written immediately following September 11 (like on the 12th), it is a passionate and angry piece. But it doesn't focus on condemning World Trade Center workers and praising the pilots of the planes. It focuses on sanctions and war, the resulting dead, and our mutual responsibility for supporting a regime that systematically kills middle easterners. Here is a piece:

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.

It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

Thus the "roosting chickens" in the title: "Globalization: 'Some People Push Back' On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."

Anyway, I am tired, thus the too-long-ness of this post. But despite my less than sharp rambling here, I think you probably understand what I'm getting at: to simply say "compared the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis" is really a gross misrepresentation of Churchill's argument. Don't get me wrong, he is beyond uncharitable to the dead and wounded of September 11, but his is an argument about individual responsibility for a systemic problem.

All of which adds up to a couple of "no duh...time to go to bed Einstein" points: first, media coverage of the Churchill controversy doesn't even seem to be making the effort to disguise itself as anything other than shrill, biased propaganda. And second, we are in a McCarthy era. Mark my words, Churchill is the canary in this coal mine.