[Marxism] Ward Churchill liberal lynch mob

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

While most people are aware that Fox-TV and other rightwing outlets are on 
a campaign footing to get Ward Churchill fired, there is a parallel 
campaign by liberal academics and journalists to accomplish the same thing. 
Although some of the liberals claim that Ward has the right to teach (as 
does Bill O'Reilly for that matter), their steady drumbeat of denunciation 
serves the interests of the Colorado Board of Regents. Before turning to 
the latest charges in the liberal campaign against Churchill, it is worth 
noting that blogs have been critical to lining up public 
opinion--especially in the academy--against him. One of the prime movers is 
crookedtimber.org, a group blog that includes Chris Bertram, a former NLR 
editor and other self-described leftists. Another is marccooper.com. Cooper 
is a Nation Magazine reporter who worked for Allende in the 1970s. 
Nowadays, he is on the verge of going through the sort of conversion that 
Christopher Hitchens went through. Nearly half of his blog entries consist 
of jeremiads against the left.

The blog has emerged as an important Internet medium. Unlike the more 
horizontally oriented mailing list (let alone the anarchistically 
free-for-all usenet), the blog is essentially a vertical medium. Some 
personality with a bit of name recognition will set up a blog and hold 
forth on various topics. In many cases, there is not even a comments option 
or if they exist, they tend to be awkward to use in comparison to email. In 
the case of crookedtimber.org, the software used for comments is so poorly 
constructed and is so subject to intermittent failure that it would not 
pass muster on my Intranet project at Columbia University.

But the biggest problem is that the blog is analogous to a lecture where 
the audience is allowed to ask questions or make brief comments after the 
lecture is finished. In other words, the blogger sets the agenda. It is 
easy to understand why an academic or a journalist would want to exercise 
this type of control. After spending years building up a career and 
reputation, why would you want to operate on the same level as the plebe? 
Perhaps the most open recognition of this goal is the aptly named "Max 
Speak, You Listen", the blog of Max Sawicky, an economist at EPI.

Yesterday, a link to an article by Thomas Brown, a professor at Lamar 
University, appeared on cliopatria, a group blog at the History News 
Network (<http://hnn.us/>http://hnn.us/). The link then appeared on 
crookedtimber.org as part of a continuing attack on Ward Churchill by Henry 
Farrell, a professor at George Washington University. Brown's article 
charges Churchill with falsifying the history of a genocidal incident 
against the Mandan Indians in the 1830s. Since this bit of history was used 
in Churchill's legal defense in a Colorado trial arising out of Columbus 
Day protests a few years ago, Brown calls for his jailing on the charge of 
perjury. He also repeats the charge made by the Bellecourt brothers that 
Ward Churchill is not really an Indian. I am surprised frankly that Brown 
did not also repeat the Bellecourt charge that Ward Churchill is an FBI 
agent, although somebody has repeated this on the comments section under 
Farrell's latest entry. Except for a couple of voices there, the comments 
section on crookedtimber.org has been demanding Ward Churchill's scalp.

Despite supporting calls for Ward Churchill being jailed and accusing him 
of being a liar and a hack, Henry Farrell warned me about being uncivil to 
him yesterday. Apparently he took umbrage at my noting that it was unseemly 
for him to question Ward Churchill's scholarly credentials when he himself 
had never written a book in his life. Well, that is his prerogative. Of 
course, I am free to say things to my heart's content on Marxmail and pen-l 
(despite risking another rebuke from my dear old pal Daniel Davies, a 
member of the crookedtimber.org collective--or whatever it is) like this.

Turning to Brown's article, we learn that there is nothing in the author 
Russell Thornton cited by Ward Churchill to support the claim that soldiers 
gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Mandan Indians, a group that 
was part of the Lakota nation. Brown writes:

>>Note the discrepancies between Churchill and Thornton. Thornton locates 
the site of infection at the Mandan village, not at Fort Clark. Nowhere 
does Thornton mention the U.S. Army. Nowhere does Thornton mention ?a 
military infirmary in St. Louis where troops infected with the disease were 
quarantined.? Nowhere does Thornton mention the distribution of 
?smallpox-laden blankets as gifts.? On the contrary­Thornton clearly 
hypothesizes the origins of the epidemic as being entirely accidental.<<

While coming to work this morning, I discovered that Thornton is *not* the 
exclusive source for his recounting of the Fort Clark incident. Thanks to 
history student Noah Schabacker, who posted the following rebuttal to Brown 
on crookedtimber.org, I was spared the trouble of answering Brown and 
Farrell myself:

>>This ?essay? by Prof. Brown is flat out false. Which is to say, Mr. 
Brown falsifies or deliberately misreads at least two notes in Ward 
Churchill?s work in order to accuse Churchill of academic dishonesty. 
Specifically, Brown accuses Churchill of misrepresenting sources in A 
Little Matter of Genocide (among other places). However, by simply looking 
at Churchill?s footnotes, one finds that the sources Brown attributes to 
Churchill and the sources Churchill actually cites are not the same at all. 
Churchill describes the incident on page 155 of A Little Matter?; Brown 
asserts that Churchill?s source is Russell Thornton?s American Indian 
Holocaust and Survival. Churchill?s description is tied to endnote #136; 
note #136, on page 261, reads thusly: ?Stearn and Stearn, The Effects of 
Smallpox, op cit., pp. 89-94; Francis A. Chardon, Journal at Fort Clark, 
1834-39 (Pierre: State Historical Society of South Dakota, 1932).? Nowhere 
is Thornton cited as the authority for the Mandans and the smallpox 
blankets. As a nod to ?peer review? (if such a thing exists on the 
internet), I invite (indeed, request) other readers to look at the sources 
I?ve referenced here.

It is 11:30 PM. I have a BA in History, a copy of A Little Matter of 
Genocide, and an internet connection. If I can find the relevant 
information in the relevant book in less than ten minutes and write a 
detailed post on it, it would seem that Dr. Brown, with the resources of 
Lamar University behind him and his years of training in reading academic 
sources, should be able to do the same thing. I haven?t seen the trial 
brief, but the preceding information would seem to discredit the entire 
sorry exercise.

As an aside to Henry Farrell, who originally linked to this hit job, I must 
say that it seems the height of irresponsibility to link to work accusing 
an academic of falsifying his sources and committing perjury without 
actually evaluating the accusing work first. This is not hard to do, 
requiring only a copy of A Little Matter of Genocide, available at fine 
bookstores everywhere. As a professor, you of all people should know the 
harm that can result from even mendacious claims of academic dishonesty.<<

Ultimately, the assault on Ward Churchill's veracity (leaving aside its 
dubious merit) has a class basis. Liberal professors are simply 
uncomfortable with the charge that the USA is guilty of genocide. Arguments 
by Thomas Brown against the USA's most visible proponent of this view would 
have a tendency to relieve any possible feelings of guilt. Who would want 
to appear as a "good German" in the academy of a state created on the bones 
of millions of indigenous peoples?

Something similar happened to Mike Davis a few years back when he had the 
audacity to represent Los Angeles as a looming disaster. Real estate 
interests decided that they would undercut his credibility by pointing out 
flaws in his research. Jon Wiener described the fallout from this campaign:

?Mike Davis provides a second example of a media spectacle around a 
historian targeted by the right for his politics. Davis, a leading Marxist 
historian, won a MacArthur ?genius? grant and an appointment as a Getty 
Institute scholar for his book on Los Angeles, City of Quartz, after which 
a Malibu realtor launched a campaign in 1999 charging that his footnotes in 
a new book, Ecology of Fear, were fraudulent. The charges mushroomed and 
were featured in the New York Times, the Economist, and on page one of the 
Los Angeles Times; neither UCLA nor USC would hire him; he ended up leaving 
Los Angeles, for a job at SUNY-Stony Brook. Evidently, the search committee 
and administration at Stony Brook concluded that the errors in his 
footnotes were minor and that he met the requirements for appointment to a 
tenured position.?

Unfortunately, it would seem that people like Henry Farrell would not be 
satisfied with Ward Churchill undergoing such a fate. By posting the truly 
loathsome article by Thomas Brown, he lends his imprimatur and that of 
crookedtimber.org to the call for Ward Churchill's jailing on account of 
perjury. This has the rancid odor of McCarthyism, if not worse.

--

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