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Amherst, MA--There is no statue to Lord Jeffrey Amherst at Amherst College or the town it resides in in Massachusetts. According to the Town Manager-- there being no mayor yet--there is also no exhibit. Yet, this small town in Western Massachusetts and Lord Jeffrey Amherst are in the news, because of a concerted reactionary effort to remove Ward Churchill from a tenured professorship at the University of Colorado.
There aren't any mementoes to Lord Jeffrey Amherst
at Amherst town hall.
Typical of the slander and libel campaign against Ward Churchill is a statement by "Chad Fairbanks" at the website "Free Republic," which is a website of military veterans often in the top five for all political websites in terms of website popularity in the united $tates--thanks to a band of hard- core but aging crackpots who wanted a nuclear exchange over the Vietnam War. Writing to "fuquadukie," "Fairbanks" said, "The man is a chronic liar, a poseur, and intellectually dishonest (see his claims of government smallpox epidemics against indians done deliberately, for instance) and has done more to harm American Indians than any other white man in recent decades." (1) As of almost a month later on March 8, there is still not a statement anywhere in the Free Republic thread acknowleding the documented cases of whites' giving indigenous people smallpox infected blankets. It is Lord Jeffrey Amherst who left behind documents describing this effort and providing the world the first glimpse into biological warfare. Another thread on the "Free Republic" said much the same irresponsible thing without rebuttal or mention of the real history of the united $tates again referring to Churchill for: "making up the story about smallpox blankets."(2)
The Free Republic is also an excellent example of the kind of social forces involved in attacking Ward Churchill. There are 26.4 million veterans in the united $tates, more than one in seven voting age people.(3) Although not all veterans are pathetic reactionaries like the Free Republic, it is true that as the founding fathers predicted, having a large standing army builds a professional self-interest in society--a special interest. When a professor attacks the u.$. military for using biological weapons on indigenous people, there is a risk that more than one in seven voting age people will take it persynally and then lobby for his removal. In a society with one in seven hundred as veterans, the risk would be virtually non-existent.
The Ward Churchill case is an excellent example of why democracy for the white trash in not a good thing. The white trash does not favor civil liberties or it would be for prosecuting those responsible for conspiring against Ward Churchill --so that misuse of the word "democracy" to mean liberty is out of place. For the white trash, democracy means political equality and that everyone's "opinion" is as good as everyone else's, and this in a wide range of things that the white trash deems somehow fuzzy. This same white trash would not be caught dead saying that their opinion of how to check for colon cancer is as good as anyone else's. Nor would they claim to know how to put together a NASCAR vehicle in a competitive event, but let politics come up and any ignorant slobbery will do: "My daughter is a tenured professor and I would fire her in a heartbeat just for some of the nutty ideas she has. But that's just me. I should have taken her to the woodshed more often when she was little. Back then she seemed like a pretty reasonable sort. The university education twisted her mind and it got worse when she married a flaming liberal who is worse than she is. There's no hope of ever convincing either of them that they are brainwashed. They truly believe that they are more intelligent than the great 'unwashed'. Their elitism and arrogance makes me ill." (1)
Amherst College has some silly bourgeois
statues, but none for its namesake.
We should be clear that this is not some kind of radical proletarian attack on the class structure. Quite the contrary, it is a religious defense of the class structure, an attack on the Enlightenment itself. These reactionaries want more church and advertising brainwashing and less brainwashing by professors. Then they wonder why Amerikan educational standards do not compare internationally while u.$. colleges are one of the few export industries.
In these rabid threads opposing Ward Churchill there are no attempts at factual argument. That is not the point. The real point of Free Republic chauvinists like chauvinists across the united $tates is that only U.$. civilians are innocent and things like the documented use of biological warfare against indigenous people are matters of opinion, not fact.
To be sure, there are those who dispute Ward Churchill's particular accounting of one small pox outbreak in 1837. The ultra-right loonies are using that academic dispute the same way they are using the bloodline "fraud" idea. They assert something, only to take it back, while knowing full well that most of the infotainment press will report the simple version. So, a Honolulu newspaper publishes that Ward Churchill is not an indigenous persyn. A thousand white trash outlets follow suit, and only a few retract when the original does. Even readers of those outlets that do retract may not notice the retraction. The cumulative effect is the Big Lie. Likewise, in the smallpox outbreak of 1837 controversy, some scholars say some things and a thousand media outlets repeat it as if all the incidents of smallpox infection given by whites to natives were handled in just the one Ward Churchill controversy.
The David Horowitz types of the world stir up first year students quoted as follows in a major Colorado newspaper: "'Ward Churchill made up stuff that never happened,' said Michael Drost, a freshman in international affairs. 'Students would be expelled for academic dishonesty; why not a tenured professor?'"(4)
So it goes with the small pox blanket story. In reality, the best one could say for the critics of Ward Churchill, if one reads the fine print, is that they are saying one story of whites' giving natives smallpox infected blankets is not true, while two are already definitively documented. Yet, the political purpose in the press is evident white genocide denial. The story goes that Churchill "made up" the small pox story--without mentioning historical incidents before the one Churchill was talking about, ones already proved. Now there are over 100 Internet links with Ward Churchill's name, the phrase "made up" along with smallpox infected blankets but excluding Amherst's name. That's the Big Lie technique in action. It eliminates not just the 1837 small pox infection, but the definitively deliberate infections before it. The Big Lie technique obliterates that Ward Churchill was merely extending on what was already known, not "making up" something heard about for the first time.
When we dig down deep into the weenies' lunacy, we find that they are referring not to an academic paper, but a legal briefing Churchill wrote and later expanded upon and included as documentary evidence in a book. We note that none of the idiot scribblers actually said anything successfully contesting the point of the brief: "Churchill made the argument that protesting the parade was tantamount to combating genocide, and was thus his legal duty under international law"(5)-- and that's in the words of the Brown paper against Churchill being cited occasionally and remotely by the McCarthyists as their touchstone.
Interestingly, while these same whitey genocide-deniers are saying that oral evidence should not be accepted, it is quite obvious that it IS accepted even in the white man's court. So, the point remains that oral history would count as part of Churchill's duty in court--a point left out by the inconsistent.
Even the quote of Churchill from the McCarthyists' beloved paper(5) shows that Churchill himself did not say the documentary evidence for the 1837 small pox infection was as good as for earlier biological warfare by white settlers. In fact, as Brown himself has admitted, his paper has not yet faced peer review, as of now in 2005.(6) In other words, the reactionaries are whipping up first year students in Colorado to call for firing Ward Churchill on the basis of a paper that has not faced peer review yet. That's clearly sidestepping normal procedures, a part of discrimination.
It's all obviously discriminatory extra academic review of Ward Churchill's work; even though he received tenure in 1991. It's clearly motivated by a speech he made. The genocide-deniers did not win their struggle on academic grounds so now they stir up a political witch hunt against one man and seek to scapegoat him for all their anti-intellectual, anti-tenure and anti-education frustration.
Most of these lynch mob activists oppose Mao, but he politicized education while these same lynch mob activists would claim education is not political. When Mao had the Cultural Revolution, education across-the-board had discussion and struggle involving the public. Here in the united $tates, the new McCarthyist counterrevolution targets one man in a conspiracy against civil rights and in alliance with genocide-deniers. That's the difference. We Maoists apply principle across-the- board. McCarthyists apply it only to suit their militarist and genocidal agendas.
The other difference is that in any Maoist government, the state will pay for education. The cheap bastards degrading education in Colorado and the rest of North America by extension are up in arms at the University of Colorado's paying Ward Churchill's salary, when the state only pays 7% of the school's annual income!(7) The rest comes from students paying to attend. So much for the loony reactionaries' respect for free enterprise! There's no consistency needed when the first priority is denial of white genocide.
Notes:
1. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/1341755/posts
2.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/1339464/posts
3. http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws- kerry05.html
4.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~61~271
8487,00.html
5. http://hal.lamar.edu/~BROWNTF/Churchill1.htm
6. http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/a_new_ward_churchill_controversy
7. http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/cda/article_print/0,1983,BDC_2448_3536907_ARTICLE-DETAIL-PRINT,00.html
Amherst, MA--Over 50 people of Amherst have signed the petition for Ward Churchill and launching a criminal investigation into the conspiracy against his civil rights. Everywhere people expressed amazement at how the discussion of smallpox warfare against natives had been so grossly simplified and obliterated. In Amherst, MA, "the story of the smallpox blankets" is not associated with Ward Churchill.
Some town residents simply said, "why don't they check with a historian?" Town officials advised the same thing.
Long time resident of Amherst (1.6 megabytes, .wav)
Amherst musician supports Ward Churchill (3 megabytes, .wav)
South Asian physicist from Amherst comments on the biological warfare (2.2 megabytes, .wav)