[News] Ward Churchill speaks out

[News at freedomarchives.org]

The Man in the Maelstrom

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill_interview_pw.html


Ward Churchill speaks out on his controversial essay,
the media frenzy and what the U.S. can do if it really wants to halt terrorism

By Pamela White
Boulder Weekly Feb. 10, 2005

It started when a group of conservative students from Hamilton College in 
New York, hoping to block University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill's 
scheduled talk at their school, protested an essay Churchill had written on 
Sept. 11, 2001. In the essay, titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice 
of Roosting Chickens," Churchill, an American Indian activist and scholar, 
framed the terrorists attacks as inevitable, the natural result of years of 
oppressive U.S. policies, which he outlined at length. He also compared the 
stockbrokers, lawyers and government employees who died in the attacks with 
Nazi "technocrat" Adolf Eichmann for their role in supporting U.S. actions 
abroad.

The students' protest caught the attention of the national corporate media, 
which pounced on Churchill and his controversial essay with rabid ferocity. 
The result was a national furor. For two weeks now, the corporate media has 
controlled the story, fanning the flames of anger and even questioning 
Churchill's ethnicity. Paula Zahn interviewed Churchill - but barely let 
him speak. MSNBC, Fox and MTV carried the story. Denver talk radio couldn't 
get enough of the topic, one radio host declaring Churchill's essay 
treasonous and suggesting that Churchill be executed.

Media attention prompted reactions from members of Congress, who contacted 
Gov. Bill Owens, demanding a response. Owens, in turn, condemned 
Churchill's writings and called for university officials to fire him. The 
Colorado General Assembly then picked up the issue and passed a resolution 
renouncing Churchill's point of view, and the CU Board of Regents held a 
special meeting and apologized to the nation for the essay. The regents are 
now investigating Churchill to determine whether he can be fired.

But, although pundits and politicians have quoted from Churchill's writings 
at length, often taking the words out of context, the man in the middle of 
the maelstrom has been given very little room in the press to respond to 
his detractors. Boulder Weekly sat down with Churchill in his Boulder home 
on Monday, Feb. 7, to talk in depth about his essays, the media frenzy 
surrounding him and what the United States can do if it truly wishes to end 
terrorism.

To read Churchill's essay free of media spin, go to 
<http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html>http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html 
.



Boulder Weekly: What were you doing on Sept. 11 when you first heard about 
the terrorist attacks?

Ward Churchill: I was on the word processor working on an extended essay on 
American Indians in films, which I had been working on for some time... The 
phone rang. It was Kathleen Cleaver. She said, "Is your TV on?" I said, 
"No." She said, "Well, turn it on, because a plane just hit the World Trade 
Center." So probably within five minutes from the time the first plane hit 
I watched it in real time.

I suppose like everybody else, I was stunned... I knew it was real, but 
still there was this disbelief thing. And to be fair about it, that was 
probably affecting everyone, including the people who had set up the 
cameras and were filming the thing as it occurred - probably more so for 
them because they were watching it for real.

But it struck me even before the first building came down that this was 
already being framed. It was proclaimed to be "senseless" before the first 
building came down, and senseless means "without purpose," and that seemed 
absolutely absurd to me on its face. How could they possibly know? There 
are planes being hijacked all over the country. Two of them have hit the 
World Trade Center. One of them has hit the Pentagon. There's another one 
loose. But whoever's doing this has no purpose.

And then there's the outrage: How can this happen? Well, there's various 
ways you could take it, like, "How did they penetrate the air defense?" But 
I don't think that's the nature of the question. That was not my sense. It 
was more like, "What could possibly provoke somebody to do this?" OK, that 
question and, "Why do they hate us?"

All of that [struck me] - both the framing of it as being senseless and the 
amazingly stupid questions as to what would provoke somebody to do this.

BW: My first thought when I saw what had happened was, "Somebody is going 
to get their ass kicked."

WC: Well, it occurred to me at the time that somebody was finally kicking 
U.S. ass for the way the U.S. had been comporting itself. Rather than, "Why 
do they hate us?" my initial response was, "How could they not?" And as to 
who was doing it, the problem is how many contenders there are out there.

Well, it was about that time - it was the early afternoon - I got a call 
from the woman who was the editor of Dark Night Field Notes... She said, 
"We need a from-the-gut response on this, and we need it in time to post it 
tomorrow."

BW: So the essay started as a "from-the-gut" response. What were your 
thoughts going into it?

WC: This was absurd what was being said. No one's calling [the reporters] 
on it for describing it as senseless. You've got a little contradiction in 
packaging here going on between the official news sources who are 
proclaiming it senseless and then the more official officials - the 
official officials - who are proclaiming it things like, "They did it 
because they hate our freedom," and other really profound and insightful 
things of that sort. It can't both be senseless and for a reason at the 
same time.

I don't think I was the only one with a different response from the 
mainstream. It just happens to be the way I framed it. Where that begins is 
borrowing from Malcolm X's thing about the chickens coming home to roost.

The essay "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" was 
written on Sept. 11 and then posted to the Internet that night. Churchill 
started with Malcolm X's famous quote, likened the roosting chickens to 
returning ghosts and asked who those ghosts might be.

Well, I see a half-million dead Iraqi children for starters, children that 
Madeline Albright confirmed she was aware of. This was UN data [on the 
impact of U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq] in 1996 when she went on 60 
Minutes and said, "Yeah, we're aware of it, and we've determined that it's 
worth the price."

It's worth the price of somebody else's children to compel their government 
to do what George Bush had issued as the marching orders to the planet in 
1991, which is: "The world has to understand that what we say goes."

What we say goes - that's freedom. Do what you're told. And if you don't, 
basically the way this works out is we'll starve your children to death.

A communiqué from al-Qaeda, in which the relatively unknown group claimed 
responsibility for the attacks, would later confirm that the plight of 
Iraqi children was primary on the terrorists' list of grievances against 
the United States.

[In the essay,] I went from mentioning Iraqi children to Iraqis over all - 
the children being a half million, there being another half-million dead 
adults in a population of about 20 million in a short period of time and 
not during the war... I mentioned the Palestinians, particularly the 
children in the Intifada, as a direct consequence of U.S. priorities and 
U.S. support to those who are doing it to them. I think I made a little 
mention of a bunch of Panamanians who ended up in a trench who were 
reported as not having died until the trench was opened up and there they 
were lying under the quick lime. I think I talked about something on the 
order of 200,000 uplands Mayan Indians in Guatemala. I think I talked about 
a whole bunch of dead people in El Salvador and Nicaragua, killed under 
false premises... I think I talked about people who had been burned alive 
at Dresden. The nuclear bombings [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], since we're 
on the subject of weapons of mass destruction... Back to the Filipinos, 
back to the turn of the century. I think we're talking about at a minimum 
500,000 to 600,000 people and maybe well over a million in the name of 
liberating them from their colonial masters and turning them into a U.S. 
colony... Which takes us into the Indian wars and Wounded Knee and that 
whole series, all the way back to the Wappingers, the guys who supposedly 
sold the Dutch the island [of Manhattan] for beads and trinkets, which they 
didn't. They gave them permission to use the tip of the island as a port 
facility for trade, which was to the advantage of both. The Dutch falsely 
proclaimed it to be a sale, and when the Indians objected, they sent out a 
military expedition and resolved the problem by basically butchering all of 
them...

All of those chickens came home to roost [on 9/11], because there had never 
really been a response in-kind in all that entire grisly history. It was 
sort of manifested in the symbol of those twin towers at the foot of 
something called Wall Street. And Wall Street takes its name from the 
enclosure of the slave compound for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So now 
there's a bunch of those ghosts, too. All the symbolism is confluent [at 
Ground Zero]...

Churchill then discussed the concept of collective responsibility and the 
notion that some of those who worked in the World Trade Center were not 
only aware of, but participants in actions that caused harm and suffering 
abroad. Such events could not occur without broad support from the American 
public, he said.

Since Madeline Albright said that on 60 Minutes, [the suffering in Iraq] 
could hardly be mysterious to the people in the buildings that would be 
hit. They just flat considered it irrelevant. Or they embraced it. These 
aren't exactly centers of organizing opposition to U.S. policy.

I don't say they had detailed information. They were not concerned enough 
to gather it. They simply embraced it. They applauded it. They voted for 
it. But they're not innocent of it at the same time.

How do you end up participating in this process and being proud and 
triumphalist about this process and making your vocation the participation 
in and proper functioning of that system and be innocent at the same time? 
And that takes me to the Eichmann comment.

BW: Your Eichmann comparison seems to be the thing that has upset people 
the most.

WC: Oh, yes... I said specifically the comparison to Eichmann devolved upon 
the technicians of empire. Is there some definition you can give me where a 
food-service worker or a child or a janitor pushing a broom is a technician 
of empire? I wasn't talking about that, clearly. That's the only point 
that's been raised. "How can you say that an 18-month-old baby girl on a 
plane was comparable to Eichmann?"

Well, the fact of the matter is, I never said that. To use Pentagon-speak, 
that would be the collateral damage... I don't know that they had any 
specific intent to kill everyone that was there. In order to get at the 
target, the dead bystanders were "worth the price," to quote directly from 
Madeline Albright. [The terrorists] used the exact same logic used by 
Pentagon planners and U.S. diplomats - "This is an unavoidable consequence 
of getting at the target."

If there's somebody to blame, following the logic that's used now, it would 
be the people who put a CIA office in the World Trade Center or put command 
and control infrastructure of other sorts in there. It's always "their" 
fault. It's always Saddam's fault. He situated an intelligence office in a 
hospital... That was the justification for bombing the hospital. Well, if 
you're going to apply that rule, it's going to come back to you. By 
enunciated Pentagon rules, [the World Trade Center] was a legitimate target.

I don't accept the legitimacy. I'm feeding it back to [the American public, 
and saying], "How does this feel?" I contest the legitimacy straight down 
the line. But if you're going to do it to other people on these pretexts 
and pretend it's OK, then you can't complain when it comes back to you in 
the same form. That's the point.

BW: So you're not saying the people who died on 9/11 deserved to die?

WC: I'm not a judge. I want the whole goddamned process to stop, you know? 
That extends to these collateral damages... I certainly don't embrace that. 
I didn't judge Eichmann. I didn't impose the death penalty. You can adduce 
that if Eichmann is worthy of death, because of what he had done in 
arranging train schedules and such, then these other Eichmanns are worthy 
of death.

But I didn't pronounce the sentence. I merely made the comparison. I've 
pointed this out when I've actually gone on with these attack dogs: You 
show me where I said it was justified. You're drawing conclusions about 
what I said. I wanted you to think about it. I wanted you to critically 
engage. I wanted you to draw conclusions, but I didn't say that. I made the 
comparison based on an analysis that I believe to be true. You draw your 
own conclusions from it.

Churchill then lamented that one central point of this issue continues to 
be overlooked by the U.S. media and the public.

We have yet to have anybody address the issue of the Iraqi children. It 
always comes back to the same, "But what about these families?"

I want to say this: I have an abiding sorrow for the collateral damage on 
9/11, and I never compared them to Eichmann. They were collateral damage - 
based on a set of rules imposed by the United States, to which I object 
with every fiber of my being. And I am mightily sorry about the janitors 
and the food-service workers and the kids. I mourn the kids in particular. 
They never had a chance to do anything. But I don't mourn them 
proportionately more than I do the half-million Iraqi children. And the 
idea of diverting all of this back to those 3,000 Americans, as if the rest 
were of no more consequence or value than toilet paper, is exactly the 
problem I was trying to define. They're illustrating it perfectly.

I even mourn the Eichmanns in a certain sense. I mourn the fact that they 
were dehumanized without even knowing it, active participants in their own 
dehumanization to the point where they lost their souls and their humanity 
altogether; that the calculus of profit outweighed the value of the lives 
of children who lived in misery and died young as a result, and they 
considered it the way it ought to be. That is a sorrowful situation. And 
I'm trying to penetrate that veil and rearrange the consciousness so that 
there can be a different outcome.

BW: A lot of people have opinions about your essays without reading them, 
so I thought we could go over the main points. One point that struck me was 
your thought that the attacks of Sept. 11 were inevitable, given U.S. 
foreign policy.

WC: That's basically how I framed it - as natural and inevitable. And I'm 
validated in that thesis at this point by the nature of the reaction to my 
essay. What I said, essentially, was if you treat anyone this way, this is 
going to be the response. It's natural, and it's inevitable as long as 
they're human beings. If you don't think they're going to respond that way, 
you're declaring them not human. Arabs will respond that way. Americans 
will respond that way no less.

And you might note that all of these death threats [I've received], and the 
forced cancellations of gigs and stuff, has been under threat of violence. 
And that's terrorism. That's precisely the framing of it. Now it's at a 
lower level than 9/11, obviously, and I'm not complaining about it. I 
anticipated it, because I believe that anybody - anybody - who feels that 
their loved ones have been slaughtered in something approximating a 
military fashion, and that this is considered absolutely inconsequential, 
that they are demeaned and degraded and devalued to the point of being 
called something like "collateral damage" on top of the death, are going to 
have a compulsion to respond in this fashion.

Now Americans, or some of them, perceive that those loved ones and what 
they symbolize, have been devalued and degraded and demeaned by me, and the 
response is identical, with its level adjusted for scale and a few things 
like that. Sept. 11 was a solitary event, a singular event. In the context 
of the people who apparently did 9/11, it's a continuous [series of 
events]. There were 3,000-odd people whose lives were taken on 9/11, as 
compared to a half a million Iraqi children, another half a million Iraqi 
adults, how many hundred thousands of Palestinians living in refugee camps 
for generations and being consumed by U.S. arms, 3.2 million Indo-Chinese 
and so on and so on and so on. OK, we adjust a little for scale and 
duration here, and, actually, this is an overreaction on the part of the 
public here. They're not entitled to this terrorist response. But of course 
the reality of how human functioning occurs, this would be the natural, 
inevitable and entirely predictable response. They just validated my thesis.

If you want to come to grips with terrorism you have first to understand 
it... Try feeling. See what it feels like. Maybe then you can understand it.

I've done nothing. I've killed no one. All I've done is make a 
pronouncement comparable to what is done every day at the Pentagon with 
regard to massive civilian fatalities here, there and everywhere... I did a 
framing that was comparable in its purported insensitivity to what the 
Pentagon does as business as usual with no complaint at all from the 
American public, and the response is a terrorist response. Now that we 
understand it, maybe we can fix it. But first you have really to understand 
it and not pretend it's something "other," alien, psychotic. Well, maybe 
it's psychotic, but the psychosis is generated by tangible causes.
[The terrorists] were sending a message. That's my view. And it's, "You're 
not going to do this stuff with impunity any more. If you continue to do 
it, there are going to be costs and consequences to you. It's not going to 
be one-directional.

And the American public has long since convinced itself that it can act 
however it wants in the world for personal benefit, for profit, for 
whatever, or have it done in their name, and claim innocence and impunity 
from any consequences at the same time.

Excuse me. I challenge that. You're not innocent if you're a participant, 
if you support it, if you embrace it, if you vote for it, if you revel in 
it, if you celebrate it. You're complicit, just like the Germans.

Which raises an issue that is thrown at me: [People say to me,] "Well, you 
pay taxes, and you do this, and you do that."

Yo, I've spent the entirety of my adult life in full-fledged opposition to 
this, and I've never deviated for a moment, and that said, no, I am not 
innocent, because I have not been successful in reaching your brain-dead 
self and making you act in a different way... This applies to me just as 
much as to anybody else. It applies to my family.

BW: How many death threats have you received?

WC: That's hard to say. There are 3,200 unopened e-mails in my queue right 
now. I opened some 900, but became overburdened... As for the effectiveness 
of the tactic, if you're going to swamp me with "fuck you" e-mails, they're 
not going to get read because I simply can't read them, so you would have 
done better with 300 of them than 3,000 of them. But interspersed in there 
there's about 130 that I'm aware of [that are death threats]. Most of them 
aren't credible death threats. They're people blowing their intellect out 
their ass, as usual.

BW: What are you trying to accomplish with these writings?

WC: I'm trying to engender a consciousness that leads people to take 
responsibility for affecting change. You get this rabid denial going on, 
but the whole context of interpretation in this is a rabid denial of reality.

BW: Not only are some people attacking your words. They're attacking your 
position at the university, your pedigree, your person?

WC: - the tenure system, the rules of academic freedom, the ability to make 
a dissident statement - all of that in the name of freedom. A student is 
arrested for trying to speak at a regents meeting, revolving upon a 
question of free speech. I guess that telegraphs [the regents'] position on 
it, doesn't it?

BW: Why do people focus on the issue of your Indian heritage?

WC: Everybody knows that this was all Indian land. Everybody knows in some 
general sense what happened to Indians... The very existence of Indians is 
a reminder of the theft of a continent and genocide... The problem is that 
anyone who is identified as or identifies as Indian stands in a position to 
put that back in people's faces. They've got to destroy it. There's a 
certain resonance to it by an Indian saying it, as opposed to someone else 
saying it... They have to invalidate you and make it go away.

BW: This essay was written three-and-a-half years ago, and yet we have the 
Board of Regents calling a special meeting last week. If you really did do 
something atrocious, aren't they a bit behind the times?

WC: It's three-and-a-half years old. It's been recycled. It's been refined 
and annotated and published as the lead essay in a book that is the 2004 
runner-up for the Gustavus Myer award for writing on human rights. And for 
that they would apologize.

BW: How did that feel when they apologized to the entire nation for 
something you wrote?

WC: You can always smile. The whole nation was waiting with baited breath 
for an apology from the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado. 
Yeah, I'm sure. The University of Colorado did not write this piece. I 
don't think anyone was accusing them of endorsing it. The regents are 
responsible not for taking positions like this, but for guaranteeing my 
right to take it. That's their job. They might not understand their job, 
but that in fact is their job. And it is legally the terms of their job. 
There are a stated set of rules, the rules of the regents of the University 
of Colorado, which are the binding ingredients of my contract, and it says 
unequivocally I have not only the right, but in certain respects it could 
be interpreted to say that I have the obligation to do exactly what it was 
that I did. And so I did my job, and for that they're apologizing and 
threatening to fire me. That's exactly the situation. Why? Because they 
disagree with it. They have a different political point of view. And this 
comes down explicitly as political repression.

BW: Does this raise concerns that we might be looking at open season on 
dissident academics?

WC: That's exactly what it is. It's been as much as stated by Newt Gingrich 
and David Horowitz and others, that this is the "kick-off." I'm the 
kick-off. I didn't select this position. I got selected for whatever set of 
reasons they had. If you want to know why they selected me as opposed to 30 
other targets they might have selected, you'd have to ask them. I think 
they thought I'd be a vulnerable target. Sorry, guys. Miscalculation there. 
It's the opening round of a general purge of the academy of people who say 
things they find to be politically unacceptable.

Consequently this furor in the media over what is basically, even in their 
own framing, a backwater issue in a third-tier university - that's their 
description - in an area that nobody pays any attention to. It's been so 
concerted and relentless. I mean I was the story last week.

BW: You were on MTV news.

WC: I was on MTV news? I can't keep track of it. All I know is that I was 
on MSNBC with Scarborough and with O'Reilly. Paula Zahn did me a wonderful 
service. She pissed off people who flatly disagreed with me with her 
attack-dog routine. She'd ask a question. She'd refuse to allow me to 
answer it. She wasn't doing an interview; she was doing theater. It was 
apparent to everyone. It was so transparent that 80-year-old middle 
Americans were saying, "She's a bitch. Let him talk, man."

BW: What about the Denver talk-radio host who accused you of committing 
treason and suggested you be executed?

WC: Do you suppose I'm going to end up in one of those third-world 
concentration camps down there in Guantanamo Bay?

BW: Do you think the controversy will blow over?

WC: I don't think it's going to blow over, but it does have the capacity to 
reframe my agenda. I wanted to talk about what it was I said, not my right 
to say it. But I've suddenly become the poster boy for academic freedom. 
This is something I can't back up an inch on. I simply cannot.

BW: Did you resign your position as chairman of the ethnic studies 
department or were you forced to resign? I've heard you say before that it 
was a job you never wanted.

WC: I didn't want the administrative responsibility in the first place. No 
one asked me for my resignation. I resigned. I availed myself of the 
opportunity, actually. That's pretty well known. I had someone come down 
from sociology immediately after that, saying, "Man, that was pretty slick. 
If they wanted to punish you, they would have assigned you five more years 
of this." I got out early.

BW: You've gotten a fair amount of support from CU students and faculty.

WC: I've gotten support from the AAUP, which has entered an unequivocal and 
elegant statement of support. That does not mean they agree with my 
position. That's not the issue here. Not everyone who supports me agrees 
with me... The society of American law teachers, all 900 law professors 
have signed on to it. The ACLU here [supports me], the ACLU in the New York 
Times today and so on. So, no, I'm not without support on that issue. And 
I'm actually not without support in terms of the analysis [in the essays].

BW: Isn't the real story in all of this the response to your essays?

WC: The larger framing was articulated by one of the regents, Tom Lucero, 
at the regents meeting the other night: I want a justification for the 
existence of whole departments. I want to review the tenure system 
altogether. I want every course justified to my satisfaction.

BW: That's not academic freedom. That's a dictatorial response?

WC: - from someone who could not possibly have the competence to assess the 
validity of these things. How could Tom Lucero possibly have assimilated 
the knowledge to pass scholarly judgment on the individual courses and 
their content and the scholarship that attends them in all these different 
areas?

This is transparently clear: Anything that he doesn't like, whether he 
knows anything about it or not, is to be gone. He has announced - 
telegraphed - the fact that he doesn't like anything having to do with 
cultural studies, ethnic studies, dissident political studies, gay rights. 
None of that has anything to do with proper scholarship in his mind, not 
that he knows a goddamned thing about any of it. And it's not that he's a 
particularly malevolent individual. He's representative of the whole. 
That's the mentality that goes into this. This is a book-burning exercise. 
It's a stifling of political discourse.

BW: You've written extensively about what you consider the problem to be in 
this country. So what's the solution from your point of view?

WC: The most obvious thing that I adduce is that you're going to have 
change the way you value [other people]. You're gong to have to stop 
denigrating, demeaning and devaluing them to the point of toilet paper. 
That would go further toward alleviating the potential for terrorist acts 
in the United States than any - any - number of tiger cages, torture 
techniques, investments in the security apparatus, training Delta Force 
clones and all the rest of that.

But the question then is, how do you communicate that you actually are 
valuing them? Try obeying the law. The solution is adherence to the law to 
allow other people first to survive and then to survive with some degree of 
human dignity. If you're actually in conformity with the requirements of 
the laws of war and international law, you will not be piling up little 
brown carcasses like this and the whole reason for the [terrorist] response 
abates. It's a call for law enforcement, and that's what's really 
infuriating them - the idea that the United States is not legally entitled 
to unilateral discourse at its own discretion, cannot exempt itself from 
compliance, the idea that it might have to buckle up, it's the law - just 
like everybody else. That's what really set them off.

The self-exemption from the requirements of the fundamental laws of human 
rights and the laws of war is the Nazi signature. That is Nazi diplomacy in 
essence.

BW: Other people have made many of the same arguments you have made. What's 
more controversial about your words?

WC: I go for the gut. That's my speaking strategy. I go for the gut to 
provoke a response. And interestingly, if it hadn't been for the 
right-wingers making this a big issue, I would have failed spectacularly. 
But I can't deal with miserable, starving children in some nice detached, 
objective way. To me that's the essence of the Nazi zeitgeist - being able 
to do that to other people. I cannot do it. I will not do it, and fuck them 
if they think they're going to force me to do it.




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