Re: [Marxism] Ward Churchill Redux

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 06 May 2009 16:26:25 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

>
> 
> My interest in this is not as somebody trying to defend the 
> integrity of 
> the Ivory Tower, since Churchill's sins pale in comparison to what I 
> 
> have seen around me since my undergraduate days. I am far more 
> concerned 
> about the impact this has on American Indian activism, because it is 
> 
> essential that movements for social change be beyond reproach when 
> it 
> comes to such matters. Our exemplar should be somebody like Howard 
> Zinn, 
> who despite being criticized often for matters of interpretation 
> (see 
> Michael Kazin's assault in the Spring 2004 Dissent), has never been 
> 
> challenged when it comes to matters of fact.

No doubt.  On the other hand, nobody as far as I
know has been able to challenge Norman Finkelstein
on matters of fact, but that did not prevent him from
being run out of the academy.  And I remember the
case of the historian David Abraham whose writings
were concerned with providing a Marxist analysis of
the rise of the Third Reich.  He was run out of the
historical profession for minor league sloppiness
in his scholarship.  Meanwhile other scholars
who have engaged in wholesale falsifications of
facts and who have even committed outright
plagiarism continue in their posts unmolested
since their views are aggreeable to the powers
that be.

> 
> It would appear to me that Churchill was driven to invent a 
> conspiracy 
> where none existed because it served his overall interpretation of 
> the 
> American Holocaust, to use David Stannard's term. Since he has so 
> much 
> invested in a comparison between Nazi Germany and the USA, he was 
> tempted to posit the sort of conscious and deliberate extermination 
> that 
> took place at Auschwitz on American soil. In this scenario, smallpox 
> 
> blankets occupy the same place as Zyklon B. A genocide did take 
> place, 
> but it did not follow the same pattern as in Nazi Germany.

As I understand him, Churchill is very much taken with the
analysis of Nazism that political philosopher Hannah Arendt
presented in her writings including her *The Origins of
Totalitarianism* and her *Eichmann in Jerusalem*.
He seems especially interested in her "banality of
evil" thesis, which features in both his work on
the extermination of the American Indians as
well as in his popular writings like his essay
on 9-11.

Jim F.
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