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Ward Churchill is facing firing at the University of Colorado, originally for his speech about 9/11 called "Some People Push Back." Now there are a series of persynal attacks launched with the design of paralyzing his support, so reactionaries can push through their agenda.
1. He supposedly plagiarized a painting. This is an inherently unprovable charge because the artist is dead, and the law says verbal permission to use an art work suffices. This charge demonstrates the desperate nature of Ward Churchill's critics and their willingness to speculate to achieve their aims.
The charges in Kitty Kelly's book against the Bush family are getting less press, but they have real sources behind them. We can only imagine what articles the press would be full of, if it ordinarily allowed attacks on a Bush or Kerry based on what dead people might have thought but never said. That obviously would open the door to anything.
2. Ward Churchill has had some disgruntled students who say their grades were too low. Show us a professor who does not have some disgruntled students and we'll show you a professor who is not doing his/her job within the existing system as it exists now.
3. A scholar named Thornton says on one website(1) that Ward Churchill screwed up his footnotes on his work in connection to a smallpox epidemic among natives. Yet no one denies there is not now and not prior to now any peer-reviewed published paper on the subject for or against the subject in question. In other words, we have no proof that there is anything abnormal going on. No doubt academia has its humiliating moments. That's normal for academia. It's completely wrong to raise the normal academic processes at this moment as a reason to fire Ward Churchill.
4. The real agenda in the Thornton case is demonstrated by the letter writing campaigns that claim Ward Churchill "made up" "the story" about smallpox infected blankets given to indigenous people by whites. That agenda is holocaust denial, the denial of the holocaust of native peoples in North America. This kooky agenda is in the open at the Denver radio station KHOW featuring reactionary Craig Silverman. The web page there denies there was a genocide against indigenous peoples.(2)
5. They say Ward Churchill is not a "real Indian," but not one of these desperate critics has offered a family tree for Ward Churchill disproving his claims. Again, it's all the realm of speculative slander by people who cannot win an argument. At the same time, bureaucrats in the specific Cherokee band in question and across the country are applying for money in new federal programs. It is their motivations that should be questioned, not Churchill's, especially since the original subject was 9/11.
The real issue above all others is that Ward Churchill told Amerikans they have to take responsibility for their own actions. What he said about World Trade Center victims being little Eichmanns was in fact less extreme than what Amerikans told German civilians after World War II in 1945 and 1946, when there was a collective responsibility movement, the likes of which still present themselves in the commemorations of the Allied bombings of German civilians in Dresden in World War II. We did not see any of these Republican windbags get up and call the mayor of Dresden a "terrorist" or "terrorist-sympathizer," for saying something more extreme about a larger massacre of civilians than what Ward Churchill said. These Republicans are too busy covering their asses for sympathizing with Hitler in the first place and dragging out opposition to u.$. entry into World War II.
It does not surprise us that the hard-core Republicans and unreconstructed McCarthyists oppose Ward Churchill along these lines, because they're still resentful for being exposed that Republicans did not support going into World War II. Not only that, but Ward Churchill hit these same types of reactionaries back with their own Ayn Rand garbage in the major speech in question.
Now had Ward Churchill forgotten World War II and its embarrassments to the Republican Party and had he not used Ayn Rand to apply to Amerikans, we can be sure the furor would be less than half if existing at all. The nerve that Ward Churchill has to take the reactionaries' own words about Germany and throw them back as applying to Amerikans, as if Amerikans were not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The governor of Colorado should have been impeached by now for organizing for Ward Churchill's firing. It's a violation of civil rights and no, the governor of Colorado is not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. He is part of the government and the First Amendment contrasts between the "government" and the "people." That's real issue number one, the governor along with his collaborators on government payroll organizing this civil rights violation. One does not get to use government office to organize action and then claim it was just speech.
Along these unconstitutional lines, of using government office to violate the First Amendment, the legislature attempted to cut the University of Colorado's budget. That is the second real issue--the funding of universities and who is paying for professors. Distorted as it is in the question of a vendetta against one man, even this vendetta turned out to be hot air when the public learned that the legislature only provides 7% of the University of Colorado's money. What a bunch of cheapskate, posing windbags trying to create the impression that they actually do anything for education by lynching Ward Churchill.
The Ward Churchill case is indicative of Amerika as a whole. There is no denying that there is something very much like Amerikan office politics going on here. Attack and fail and then slime. It goes to show that people sitting around in offices across Amerika have nothing better to do but speculate how Churchill might have plagiarized a dead man or that he made up being of indigenous heritage.
Notes:
1. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/02/09/churchill2_9
2. http://www.khow.com/hosts/caplis-silverman.html linking to
http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html