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February 11, 2005
Churchill and the "Little Eichmanns"
Ambimb posted a bunch of links to items about CU professor Ward Churchill's suddenly newsworthy essay (don't forget to read the feedback) about the origins of 9/11. If you ignore the soundbites from Fox News and the like, his essay, save for some poor uses of Nazi metaphor, is pretty dead-on.
Basically, he says that U.S. imperialism over the last 20 years, and really Western Christian Crusaderism over the last millenium, including the Clinton administration's continuation of Bush I's policy towards Iraq, resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children and increased suffering for the survivors. I don't think that can be disputed.
The blowback against Professor Churchill was to be expected but that it happened over three years after the fact is interesting, especially that erupted at Hamilton College in New York. In his essay he takes to task the American ingnorance of anything foreign that would distract them from their lives.
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" and "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
It's not so apparent how everyday Americans, if they care, can help to prevent a repeat of 9/11. If the voting booth doesn't work, then what?
Just to be straight. The Muslims don't "hate freedom." It could be argued that the people carrying out daily attacks in Iraq quite enjoy the freedom they didn't have under Saddam.
The opposition to the West by Muslims, while going back 1000 years, has some fairly contemporary roots. Winston Churchill, after the success of Mustard gas on the Western Front in World War I advocated gassing the Kurds and any other Iraqi rebels in the 1920's as a way of quelling the unrest in the former Ottoman Empire, and Saddam, then our ally, with our blessing, gassed the Kurds, and Iranians, again in the 1980's. And of course, there's the fact that the CIA put the Ba'ath party in power in Iraq in the first place.
That's a lot of meaty background to get to the point of this post. Churchill is a somewhat familiar figure around these parts. My Mass Communications professor knows him fairly well as an advocate for Indian affairs. A columnist for the local paper has an axe to grind with Churchill about his Indian bona fides and just put forth another column suggesting that his questionable Indian ancestry might draw his credibility into question.
My professor knows the columnist, too, and he said he just stood back and let them go at it when Professor Churchill was in Lincoln because he liked both of them.
I just listened to Churchill on the Mike Malloy show tonight. If you'd like to hear the interview, it's available for download at Whiterosesociety.org" (scroll all the way down to the Friday, 2/11 show).
Posted by Half-Cocked at February 11, 2005 10:29 PM