"I am NOT patronizing!"
Posted on 02/06/2005 1:51:09 PM PST by wagglebee
LONGMONT — University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill’s comparison of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to a Nazi villain has grown into a nationwide controversy, but in December he also used the infamous name of Adolf Eichmann to illustrate his opposition to the name of Chivington Drive here in town.
The Longmont City Council voted Dec. 28 to change the name of the street, named for Col. John Chivington, a Civil War officer who led the Sand Creek Massacre.
Two weeks before the vote, Churchill spoke to the council about Chivington and drew an analogy to Eichmann, the Nazi credited as a chief architect of the Holocaust.
“With all due respect to all concerned, the name should be off the street,” Churchill said. “We do not name streets for Adolf Eichmann and would not expect the affected community to sit still for a moment if it was done.”
Over the past week, Churchill has drawn increasing criticism for an essay he penned in 2001 after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In it, he suggests that the victims of the attack in the twin towers were “little Eichmanns” and were culpable for serving as “technocrats” in the U.S. government’s oppressive foreign policies.
The Eichmann reference and others in the essay “Some People Push Back,” which he turned into a book titled “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” has triggered a push for his removal as a professor at CU.
Although the essay is more than three years old, it received little attention until students at New York’s Hamilton College came across the essay on the Internet while researching Churchill before his planned appearance there.
The controversy started brewing when students at Hamilton started protesting Churchill’s appearance and has not let up. Protesters, lawmakers and Gov. Bill Owens have called for Churchill’s removal. Churchill resigned as chairman of CU’s Ethic Studies Department, but he did not quit his professorship.
At the Longmont City Council meeting in December, Churchill complained about accurately portraying Chivington through vile language he said the colonel used against the American Indians he and his troops slaughtered.
Before the council ultimately decided to change the name of Chivington Drive, the city had proposed a plaque depicting the massacre at Sand Creek with commentary that described both Chivington’s role in the Civil War and in the massacre. Churchill said he found it disturbing that the proposed wording failed to mention Chivington “comparing my children to lice and instructing the troops directly to slaughter them.”
CU Chancellor Phil DiStefano on Thursday evening announced a plan to investigate Churchill’s body of work to determine if there is cause for his removal. The CU Board of Regents endorsed the plan in a meeting that ended when police and a protester ended up in a physical altercation.
During the meeting, Regent Tom Lucero characterized Churchill’s essay as “abhorrent,” “patronizing,” “vulgar” and “disturbing.”
If DiStefano and his team find cause, Churchill will be issued a notice of intent to dismiss him. He can appeal such a notice to a faculty board, which can launch its own investigation and make a recommendation.
DiStefano also noted that he has an option to take no action against Churchill.
Leftists are nothing if not robotic sloganeers.
He tried to backpedal with Paula Zahn, saying what he wrote years ago wasn't very well thought out. But as of last December he was thoughtlessly sloganeering about a street name?
Maybe Eichmann is the only name the learned man knows?
Kinda wish he'd meet his own Eichmann.
Two weeks before the vote, Churchill spoke to the council about Chivington and drew an analogy to Eichmann, the Nazi credited as a chief architect of the Holocaust.
Horsefeathers maintains that contemporary liberalism has devolved into little more than a pose. It has become a stance, an attitude- self flattering and insistent on its intellectual and moral superiority. Its childish utopianism,and its adolescent craving for excitement require scapegoats to explain the failure of the real world to match its longings. The Jews are the always available, anti-utopians. George Bush is the functional equivalent, for today's liberals of the universal scheming and nefarious, Jew--the dreaded Neo-Con. It should come as no surprise that leftist Amerika hater, Ward Churchill, is a Jew hater as well. Prof. Edward Alexander exposes the nature of what passes for thought in the precincts of Churchill's academic left.
"Some ideas," wrote George Orwell over half a century ago, "are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them." The truth of this observation is daily reenforced at countless universities.
Amidst a glare of nationwide publicity, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has been asked to resign as chairman of that school's Ethnic Studies Department because he published an essay in which he likened the 3000 people massacred at the World Trade Center on 9/11 to "little Eichmanns." For good measure, he added that their killers had made "gallant sacrifices" to achieve noble ends. Prior to this incident, Churchill's scholarly reputation was based mainly on a squalid tract called A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE (1997), in which he argued that the murder of European Jews was not at all a "fixed policy objective of the Nazis," and accused Jews of seeking to monopolize for themselves all that beautiful Holocaust suffering that other groups would very much like, ex-post facto, to share.
He argued that Jewish "exclusivism" had nearly erased from history the victims of other genocidal campaigns, and that Jewish scholars stressed the Holocaust in order to "construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population." He not only likened Jewish scholars who have argued for the unique character of the Holocaust to neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers; he said that the Jews are worse than the latter-day Nazis because "those who deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortion upon one target. Those [Jewish scholars] who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many." Given the current academic atmosphere, it is a safe bet that what might delicately be called Churchill's shortage of sympathy in the Jewish direction made him a strong candidate to head Colorado's Ethnic Studies program.
Extremism is the order of the day on campus.In the aftermath of 9/11 a professor at University of New Mexico effervescently declaimed: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." An academician at University of Massachusetts told his students that "The American flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression."
At Columbia University, Professor Nicholas DeGenova vaulted to national renown when he declared, at an anti-war rally in March 2003, that "U.S. patriotism is inseparable from...white supremacy" and then expressed the "wish for a million Mogadishus in Iraq." (This was a reference to the 1993 incident in Somalia when eighteen U. S. troops were killed.) In June 2002 Trent University philosophy professor Michael Neumann bravely declared (in Alexander Cockburn's online publication Counterpunch) that "if an effective strategy [for promoting the Palestinian cause] means encouraging vicious, racist antisemitism or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care." And Noam Chomsky, the ne plus ultra of anti-Americanism (and the person historian Arthur Schlesinger long ago, in 1969, called the consummate "intellectual crook")pontificated: "Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people..." And so on ad nauseam.
What the poverty of the English language compels me to call the 'ideas' in these professorial fulminations are pretty uniform: anti-Americanism, antisemitism, tenacious attachment to the motto: "the other country, right or wrong." The uniformity of opinion has a comic element to it: the extremist professors nearly always present themselves as brave dissenters confronted by a mob of thick-skinned louts; in fact they belong, perhaps more than any other segment of American society, to a community of CONSENT, in which "diversity" means that people look different but think exactly alike.
But what is more disturbing than the opinions uniformly expressed is the hysteria, bordering on mental imbalance, that characterizes them. People we used to think of as harmless drudges pursuing mouldy futilites are now revealing to us the explosive power of boredom, a power that may well frighten us.
--Edward Alexander
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Washington
I bet when his pen skips he compares it to one Eichmann used ...
Does sound like a 13 year old old that just read there first Poe.
Ok guys...listen up...this Ward Churhill character is probably the most over-rated guy in the US. His views are totally based on the fact that he has radical views on america based in part by his Native american heritage. He is a nobody. The only problem i have is that people like him influence young, naive, students in to an anti-establishment ideology that is more dangerous than al qaeda-like groups of islam. Domestic terrorism terrifies me, not islamic extremists. Ward Churchill is the US's national security No. 1 problem.
wardh churchill's ideology* not him personally.
I agree with what you say, except that Churchill's views are not based on Native American heritage. He is not actually Native American. Just a radical who faked Indian ancestry so that he could critisize US as a member of "oppressed group".
"Not patronizing?
H377; you're not even PAT!
I'm surprised it took them this long to realize that Chivington is not a suitable person to have a street named in his honor (we don't have any streets named for Lt. Calley), but Churchill's comparison of him to Eichmann is still grossly overdone. Churchill's rhetorical ploy making Indian children his children is part of his ongoing fraud of pretending to be an Indian.
Colorado is a beautiful state, but I think the lack of oxygen from the altitude takes its toll on the thinking of some of the people there.
And that was just the positive parts of his essay.....
i'm starting to think that the holocaust is for churchill a lightning rod--on or off depending on his emotions.
Excellent article.
However, people like Churchill might be easily dismissed as PC buffoons if they weren't so damn scary.
A former roommate of mine, a recent college graduate, commented about all the "awful things" we Americans did to the Japanese during World War II. To which I answered that the Japanese had committed many atrocities. Although she was pretty mixed up in other areas, and maybe not representative of all college kids, it did leave me wondering what is going on. It seems to have gotten worse since I left.
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