From Salon:
Last week, a Denver jury found that Ward Churchill, the former head of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado, had been improperly fired and awarded him $1 in damages. A judge must now decide whether Churchill should be reinstated in his job or receive back wages. The verdict was justified, but Churchill’s victory offers scant cause for celebration. To put it mildly, Churchill was not an ideal poster child for the cause of academic freedom. If right-wing critics of the university had set out to create a perfect caricature of a tenured radical who sacrifices scholarship for advocacy, they couldn’t have come up with a better one than Churchill. The Churchill case was a train wreck pitting the First Amendment against academic standards in a zero-sum game.
The debacle began the day after the 9/11 attacks, when Churchill, a widely read and influential activist scholar who specializes in American Indian issues, published an essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Churchill argued that the 9/11 attacks were payback for America’s ongoing “crusade” against the Arab-Muslim world, an onslaught manifested in such actions as the decade-long sanctions against Iraq that are estimated to have cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children.
Churchill was sticking his neck out to go that far. Now that 9/11 hysteria and its attendant myth of American innocence has faded, many commentators have belatedly acknowledged that the terrorist attacks did not emerge out of thin air, that America’s Mideast policies were in part responsible for them. (Even PBS travel guide Rick Steves has made this point.) But in the days after the attacks, anyone who dared to suggest U.S. actions might have fomented Arab/Muslim rage against America was virtually excommunicated. Susan Sontag was called a traitor for saying the same thing in the New Yorker. Bill Maher’s ABC show “Politically Incorrect” was canceled after he mockingly compared the bravery of Americans firing missiles from a distance to that of people flying planes into buildings. As someone who also publicly criticized U.S. Mideast policy in the days after the attacks, I can attest from personal experience to the reaction.
But Churchill went further than Sontag, Maher or just about any other public intellectual. Churchill not only blamed American policies, he essentially said that the people who were killed in the World Trade Center deserved their deaths. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil,” he compared the people who worked in banking and finance to Nazi-like functionaries, whose work supported the American killing machine. They didn’t see the consequences of their evil actions, Churchill wrote, because they were “too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”***By Gary Kamiya
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