[A-List] What Did Ward Churchill Actually Say?

["The Buffalo In Da' Midst" <the.buffalo.in.the.midst@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's quite good, and he is interactive with the commenters as well.

Ward Churchill's paper trod on sacrosanct ground. We have been told by
politicians, media pundits, and clerygmen that the terrorists who
attacked the United States on September 11 "hate us because we're
free." That is baloney. Al Qaeda is certainly a terrorist
organization, but it is not a nihilist group. In fact, there is no
point in committing acts of terror if you do not hope to gain from
them. Like the Irish Republican Army, Hamas, and the political
anarchists of fin-de-siÃcle Europe, al Qaeda is an organization of
political terrorists with political goals.


What Did Ward Churchill Actually Say?	
	
by Michael S. Leonard

Ward Churchill, the Colorado professor who sparked national
controversy with a 2001 essay characterizing the victims of the
September 11 terrorist attacks as "Little Eichmanns," was fired by the
University of Colorado on Tuesday.

I will not discuss at any length the merits of his argument, which
pertains to the most loaded, sacred, and taboo topic of the 21st
century United States, and I will not tell anyone what to think.
However, without either defending or ostracizing Professor Churchill,
I do feel compelled to dispell the blatant mischaracterizations of the
essay in question that have become prevalent in the days since his
firing.

Mr. Churchill did not "call the victims of September 11 Nazis," as one
recent article on ToTheCenter asserted. That is not only a
misinterpretation; it is an allegation that does not stand up to the
most elementary fact-check. He made an analogy, and the fact that his
remarks have been taken so literally is proof enough that the SAT's
recent removal of the "Analogies" section was misguided. Furthermore,
characterizing Adolf Eichmann merely as someone "who helped carry out
the Holocaust," while technically accurate, misses the point entirely.

This cursory treatment of the topic ill serves the discourse. It is
impossible to know whether you agree with Professor Churchill or, in
fact, whether he is "an anti-American socialist lunatic," as one
commenter recently described him, if you don't know what he actually
said or what he meant by it.

Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat eventually assigned to manage the
logistics of mass deportation and execution that lay at the heart of
the Nazi "Final Solution," as the extermination of Europe's Jews was
officially termed. He escaped to Argentina after the war and was
eventually arrested (in 1961) by Israeli intelligence agents, who
transported him to Jerusalem for trial on charges of war crimes. In
Jerusalem, Eichmann adopted the "only following orders" defense that
had failed so many of his superiors at the Nuremberg trials 15 years
earlier. After colleagues sent highly incriminating depositions from
Germany and Austria, many of which portrayed Eichmann as an
overzealous careerist who frequently went above and beyond his
"orders" in the hopes of impressing Nazi superiors, Eichmann was
convicted and hanged.

Hannah Arendt, a reporter whose coverage of the trial formed the basis
for her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, turned the case study into a
landmark thesis of political philosophy and mass psychology.
Throughout the book, she treated Eichmann as the embodiment of
individual culpability for the atrocities of a totalitarian regime.
She pointed out that Eichmann was not an ideological anti-Semite; he
was simply trying to out-perform rivals and advance his career. Arendt
noted that he was not psychopathic, psychologically damaged, or
distorted by hatred. She coined the term "the banality of evil" to
describe the way in which people who abdicate their own moral
responsibility can become desensitized to the immoral duties they
perform as a matter of daily life. Eichmann had surrendered his moral
autonomy by refusing to judge the laws or actions of the state he
served, and so had the millions of other Germans who abetted the Nazi
regime in general and the Holocaust in particular...

http://www.tothecenter.com/news.php?readmore=2697