Clearly states he was an "information specialist" and did one tour of duty in Viet Nam. In his "essay," he talks about those who've seen horrific front lines combat like himself...but in his resume, he sounds like a REMF.
Posted on 02/02/2005 5:38:53 PM PST by dennisw
Cool.. I sent it to O'Reilly last night. Hopefully it will get through.
Democrats.?.. (Eddie Murphy laugh)..
Don't forget fighter pilot.
This guy exploits people in order to attack others for alleged exploitation? Shameful!
The folks at AIM deserve our sincere thanks for trying to set the record straight. I hope they're ready for the attack in Academia for this.
Awesome! I look forward to hearing the results.
He claims to have been Army... I don't know how old he is, but I'm sure we can find out.
He claims to have been in VietNam, so use "entered service" dates between, say 1962 and 1972.
I'm checking through the Ranger Training Brigade here at FBGA to see what they've got.
the following is from:
http://www.sdonline.org/33/ward_churchill.htm
Another came with the publication in 1993 of a book by Deborah Lipstadt, a fairly prominent Judaic scholar at Emory University, entitled Denying the Holocaust.3 It deals with Holocaust deniers of the neonazi persuasion. I found two things especially striking about the book. One was the system of classification Lipstadt uses. I found that very useful, and entirely applicable to the context with which I deal. So, if that’s all there were to it, I’d have relied upon her method with thanks and attribution, and that would’ve been the end of it. In the second half of the book, however, she goes into a sort of extended polemic having to do with the inappropriateness of suggesting that there might be other peoples who have suffered experiences in any way comparable to that of her own during the nazi genocide.
Here, she focuses on denouncing Afrocentrism, including, presumably, its characterizations of the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on American blacks as genocidal4—interestingly, she fails to discuss the impact on the societies of subsaharan Africa5—and repudiating the idea that the camps in which the U.S. placed Japanese Americans during World War II might be comparable to some of the nazi concentration camps. A couple of points are worth highlighting here, beginning with the fact that a page after they’re first mentioned the Japanese Americans have somehow been transformed into “Japanese.” From there, they quickly mutate into a sort of “racial fifth column,” real or potential, at least in the quite reasonable perception of U.S. policymakers, and thus their mass internment is presented as an “unfortunate” but entirely justifiable national security measure.6 Unfortunately for Lipstadt, the nazis often used an identical rationalization, picked up by postwar deniers like Harry Elmer Barnes, to explain why it was “necessary” to intern the Jews.7 At another level, she appears to deliberately conflate concentration camps and death camps, thus setting up a straw man to rebut. It’s true, as she implies, that comparing Manzanar to Auschwitz would be absurd. But I’m unaware—and she offers no examples—of anyone who’s actually made such a comparison. To compare Manzanar and Dachau, on the other hand, which several serious scholars have done,8 is another matter entirely.
What to make of this? One is left to conclude either that Lipstadt is abjectly ill-versed in her subject matter—a possibility the quality of her performance in the first half of the book renders utterly implausible—or that she’s quite consciously engaging in exactly the same pattern of obfuscation, distortion and outright deception she so ably exposes, and quite rightly reviles, as the stuff of neonazi pseudoscholarship. In other words, it wasn’t accidental or mere sloppy scholarship. She knew what she was doing. Her goal, of course, is different from that of the neonazis. Where they deny that the Holocaust occurred at all, she wants people to believe that it happened, but that it happened only to Jews, “uniquely” so, and that for any other people to contend that any aspect of their historical experience is in any way genuinely comparable, is to degrade and dishonor the memory of the nazis’ Jewish victims, and thus to be objectively guilty of antisemitism, and thus on the same moral footing as the neonazis. 9 Wow!
What I’ve found is that this is very much a standard theme in “responsible” or “respectable” Holocaust scholarship. Where the neonazis deny a single genocide, those embracing the exclusivist posture of “Jewish uniqueness” deny many. Indeed, they deny everybody’s holocaust but their own. With this in mind, I couldn’t wait to see how Lipstadt dealt with the destruction of indigenous peoples which attended the U.S. exercise in “nation-building.” I mean, she had to deal with it, right? She’s an American scholar purporting to explain why the concept of genocide is inapplicable to the understanding of American history. So, you’ll understand why, when I reached the end of Denying the Holocaust, I thought maybe I’d been too eager, that I’d read too fast and somehow missed the part about the campaigns of “extermination”—that’s an official term, not something I made up for effect—conducted against American Indians. I didn’t want to go back and reread the whole second half of the thing, so I flipped through the index, trying to figure out where I should look. Nothing under “American Indians.” Nothing under “Native Americans.” We’re never dignified with so much as a passing reference anywhere in the book’s 250-odd pages. We’re treated as if we’re either nonexistent or utterly irrelevant. I’m not sure which, and I really don’t care, because I submit to you that, either way, it’s impossible to conceive of being any more denied than that.
Clearly states he was an "information specialist" and did one tour of duty in Viet Nam. In his "essay," he talks about those who've seen horrific front lines combat like himself...but in his resume, he sounds like a REMF.
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."
Interesting to note that Banks always tried to represent himself as Lakota (Sioux) when he was in South Dakota and ran for tribal chairman on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I guess it must be easy to change your tribe.
He lists his duties as publishing the battalion newspaper.... doesn't really sound like a "thick-of-the-fighting" kind of guy.
He worked as a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune for a while. Maybe that qualifies? lol
AI ping...
Yeah, he claims to have "infiltrated" that august journalistic body.
Soldier of Fantasy is hardly credible journalism.
Ha! I knew he was a white guy when I saw him on the news.
What's with your screenname? Are you really an Elvis?
Thank you, thank you very much.
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