Marc Cooper Attacks Ward Churchill
 
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:19:59 -0600 (CST)

 
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb05/Frank0207.htm

The Distortions of Acumen: Liberals Trash Ward Churchill by Joshua
Frank www.dissidentvoice.org    February 7, 2005

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*Joshua Frank is author of the forthcoming book, Left Out!: How
Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, to be released in March by
Common Courage Press. He can be reached at: frank_joshua@hotmail.com.
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I am sure you've heard of Ward Churchill's latest tribulations -- so
I'll save you the repetition. However, I bet what you didn't know was
that liberals were running hand in hand with conservatives in hopes of
clothes-lining the radical professor.

In a recent CommonDreams.org column titled "Ward Churchill's Banality
of Evil," Anthony Lappe argues that Churchill's critique of 9/11, along
with his calling the workers in the World Trade Center "little
Eichmanns," was utterly reprehensible:

Consider the professor's twisted logic: People who work in the
financial industry are legitimate military targets. Where do you draw
the line? What about the secretaries who serve coffee to the little
Eichmanns? They keep the evil system caffeinated, should they die? What
if you own stock? Does earning dividends on GE mean your apartment
building should be leveled with you in it? What if you keep your money
at Chase or Citibank? Buy stuff at Wal-Mart? Pay federal taxes? Or
better yet, what if you work for the government? Churchill himself
works for a state university. He takes a paycheck from an institution
that in all likelihood does military research and is probably ten times
more complicit in the actual machinery of war than any junior currency
trader.

To start, Churchill never actually said that WTC workers should be
legitimate targets. What he did say was that using the US governments'
own rationale, the WTC would most likely be a target for a military
attack -- for if no other reason than it housed a large CIA office and
was an economic bastion of the military industrial complex.

Arguing that the WTC would be a justifiable military target using the
US government's bloody rationale, Churchill writes in his now infamous
essay

"Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens":

"They [the WTC] 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. Recourse to "ignorance"
-- a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" -- counts as less than
an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that
any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of
what they were involved in -- and in many cases excelling at -- it was
because of their absolute refusal to see."

Now where Lappe really gets off track is when he implies that Churchill
somehow condones the WTC attack, let alone the attack on the Pentagon.
In Churchill's own words I think he spells it out quite clearly in
response to misinterpretations such as Lappe's:

"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, they were simply part of the 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 fuzzy nature of "collateral damage" is what I think Churchill is
really getting at. And Churchill's rejoinder to his critics was only
clarifying his early position, not backpedaling as Lappe contests.
Indeed, Churchill sees the WTC attack as "ugly" and "hurtful". It was.
He also thinks such militaristic conceptions, when applied to other US
ventures such as Iraq and Palestine, for example, are also "ugly" and
"hurtful".

This isn't "twisted logic" as Lappe puts it. Or rather, it isn't
Churchill's "twisted logic": but the "twisted logic" of the US
government.

Churchill simply took the WTC massacre and looked at it through the
lens of the US military establishment, and pointed out why the attack
on the WTC could be justified militarily. Nowhere in Churchill's
original essay did he state such a terrorist act was morally
justified.

And there's the key point. It wasn't right, but evil and iniquitous.
Churchill's larger parallel is what liberals like Lappe cannot seem to
stomach: that the US "military" interventions can also be classified as
"terror".

Lastly, if you are a taxpaying American (yes, I am a taxpayer) you
certainly are a "little Eichmann" in a very real sense. Especially if
you do not speak out against the actions of our government and the
corporations that run the damn show.

Nevertheless, this complicity by no means implies we should be all
bombed in our apartments and homes, or forced to jump from a flaming
skyscraper. And I certainly have never gotten the impression in any of
Churchill's writings that would indicate he would condone such horrific
acts.

In fact I think Ward Churchill would say that such an act of terror is
just as evil as bombing "selective targets" in Iraq.

Part 2 follows:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb05/Frank0207-2.htm

The Distortions of Acumen Continued: More Liberal Trashing of Ward
Churchill by Joshua Frank www.dissidentvoice.org February 7, 2005

The continued trashing of radical professor Ward Churchill from the
left end of the political spectrum is ever-increasing.

Take Marc Cooper, contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and
columnist for the LA Weekly, who on his personal blog responded to
Churchill's essay "Some Push Back":

Move over, Mumia. The Left has a new cause celebre that's a guaranteed
loser: Ward Churchill  I saw the essay at the time and was nauseated by
it. I have been tempted over the years to write something about it, but
have always decided not to. Only because I consider Churchill to be an
irrelevant and clearly deranged loner on the edge of the looniest
left.

Now I regret not having denounced him. Too bad others on the left also
didn't quickly hurry to divorce themselves from this guy.

Churchill, as you know, surfaced in the news last month when he was
invited to speak at an upstate New York university and some
conservatives raised a ruckus  as they damn well should. If this guy
can hang on to his tenure at CU fine. But damned if student funds from
somewhere else should be used to host him as some sort of guest
speaker.

Cooper claims to have reread the essay only to have found "it more
offensive than when I originally saw it right after 9/11." If one only
reads Cooper's grotesque distortions of Churchill's fiery analysis they
would most likely believe Churchill deserves the filthy muck that is
being shoveled his way.

What does Cooper find so offensive anyway? Most likely it is the
following, as Churchill writes about the "technocrats" in the World
Trade Center:

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.

Churchill's Eichmann reference is what got him in deep do-do with the
likes of Governor Pataki of New York and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News.
Certainly it is difficult to defend Churchill's remarks when his
comment is taken out of context.

Leaving the above statement on its own clearly seems to illustrate that
Churchill is praising the attacks of 9/11. But is he really championing
the horrific atrocity?

Not exactly.

Prior to his Eichmann comment, Churchill used the following precursor
to set up his case: "They [the 9/11 terrorists] did not license
themselves to target innocent civilians.'"

There you have it. Churchill was trying to make the argument that the
9/11 terrorists did not target the WTC simply to kill innocent
Americans. According to him, the 9/11 attackers went after the WTC
because it was a legitimate military target in an act of war.  Plain
and simple.

I don't necessarily agree with his assessment, although I think this
was the crux of his argument.

Of course, Churchill should have clarified his position better in his
original essay, which could be categorized as sloppy given the weight
of his argument and tone of his language (he defends and explains
himself later, which we'll get to in a moment). But unfortunately his
vagueness has aroused a plethora of reactionary attacks, both from the
right and left.

Churchill should have emboldened this "little Eichmann" argument by
pointing out that CIA offices were housed in the WTC along with a large
office of the cruise missile manufacturer Raytheon.

Churchill could have also stressed that the terrorists likely attacked
the WTC in hopes of inflicting a massive fracture on the US economy,
which is the driving force behind the violent US war machine. But
instead he left his readers to sit quietly with his "little Eichmanns"
reference.

Even so, Marc Cooper and many others who criticize Churchill's
statement fail to point out that nowhere in Churchill's original essay
does he argue that the WTC attacks were morally justified. In fact he
says it was an act of war, of which he detests.

Churchill writes that "if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the
Pentagon can be understood as acts of war -- and they can -- then the
same is true" for the US conduct in the Middle East.

He goes on to compare the terrorists to Madeline Albright, who oversaw
the US-imposed UN sanctions of Iraq, which killed tens of thousands of
people, mostly elderly and small children. "Evil -- for those inclined
to embrace the banality of such a concept -- was perfectly incarnated
in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her
studio chair like Jabba the Hut, blandly spewing the news that she'd
imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of
Iraq."

Does such a harsh critique of the US military actions, and Churchill's
comparison of these ventures to the WTC attacks imply that he is
delighted people were killed on 9/11?

Not in the least.

In fact, as noted, Churchill argues that these were not individual acts
of terror (unless you can also categorize US military activity as
terror): "This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and
Pentagon were an act of war -- not terrorist incidents' -- they must be
understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve
specific results."

Of course those results can be debated. Perhaps they knew the US
government would react violently, attacking countries in the Middle
East -- which would only inflame more rage against the US and
consequently aid in the recruitment of more fighters to sign up for Bin
Laden's jihad.

Nevertheless Churchill's argument is relatively sound. Does the fact
that his interest "in hearing about" other ways/places the terrorists
could have struck that would have inflicted some "penalty  upon the
little Eichmanns" still bother you?

His question, to me, seems to express that if the assault on the WTC
was only about killing innocents: then how can one ignore the fact that
the WTC housed a CIA office and a weapons producer like Raytheon? Was
this irrelevant or coincidental? Like it or not, Churchill is forcing
us to address his claim that the WTC was a military target.

Churchill, due to the misinterpretations of his Eichmann statement,
later clarifies his original essay in a piece titled "Lessons Not
Learned and the War on Free Speech," where he writes:

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 Robert 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

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.

Now back to Marc Cooper who hisses that he would "be terrified if this
guy was teaching [his] kid." First Cooper makes no mention of
Churchill's counter essay in his online screed, even though he has
"kept half-an-eye on Churchill since" his original essay first
appeared. We can certainly call Cooper's blindness selective
perception, for he wants to see what he wants to see.

This leads us to the much larger issue: What the implications are for
tenured professors and academics that publicly voice their
objectionable political and cultural opinions. What is now happening to
Ward Churchill is all just pure intimidation, which was spearheaded by
Republican Gov. Pataki, exacerbated by Fox News, and condoned by
liberals such as Marc Cooper.

The upcoming battle over whether or not Ward Churchill keeps his
position at Colorado University will set the bar for a whole assembly
of radical intellectuals who could one-day become the focus of
McCarthy-like censorship. It's time to move past Churchill's fearless
thesis about the US empire and fight for his right to voice his
opinions. No matter how unsavory they may be.