by Jerome du Bois
Like many, I was struck by the alacrity with which Ward Churchill whipped up his infamous 9/11 essay --one day. He seemed to have it readymade, right there in his head.
Today, I came across two articles from the Rocky Mountain News which throw even more light on how this man's mind works. The first is by Paul Campos, a UC law professor; I excerpt his description of parallels between Churchill's profile and fascism. The second is a vivid description by a former student of a certain day in the classroom: April 19, 1995.
Here is Paul Campos in yesterday's Rocky Mountain News:
As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:
• The worship of violence as a purifying social force. This often manifests itself as an aggressive and romanticized militarism, that produces a kind of cult of the warrior, and that advocates violent action as a mechanism for social change, and an appropriate way of crushing dissent.
• A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.
• The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents, who are characterized by turns as demonically clever conspirators plotting to undermine the possibility of a virtuous society, and soulless automatons mindlessly carrying out the orders of a vast and evil bureaucracy. This dehumanization often leads to demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.
• The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter. The supposed virtues and sins of a nation or people are ascribed to all of its individual members, so that, for example, one speaks of "the Jew" (meaning all Jews collectively and each Jewish person individually) being responsible for the decadence of modern culture.
Anyone who reads widely in the collected works of professor Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone.
Now read Kimberly Hickel's account, from an article by Katie Kerwin McCrimmon, also from yesterday's Rocky Mountain News (hat tip: The American Thinker):
Kimberly Hickel is a former student of Churchill's who says she was in his class on April 19, 1995, when the Oklahoma City bombing took place.
"He actually stood in front of our class and said how the FBI got what they deserved. It was awful," said Hickel, who graduated from CU in 1997.
Some of the students tried to argue with Churchill, saying the innocent children killed in the day-care center didn't deserve to die. But he refused to allow them to speak their minds.
After that, Hickel boycotted his class and wrote a letter to Churchill, attacking his point of view. He, in turn, gave her a D- for the class. She complained to his superiors, but said they did nothing.
"The whole school is afraid of him," she said. "He is hiding behind free speech. But he doesn't allow students to stand up for free speech," Hickel said.
Now an interior architect and designer in Edwards, Hickel said she was especially offended by Churchill's latest writings because she lived in New York at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and witnessed the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center.
She saw people jumping to their deaths to try to escape the towers.
"I hope he gets fired," Hickel said. "He's an evil, evil person. Do you think an evil person should be a professor at CU?"
Before the sun went down on that very day the heart was blown out of Oklahoma City, with everything still smoking and people screaming and weeping, this strutting vulture, this leering hyena, tears at the torn flesh with glee.
(Readers may also be interested in my earlier piece, "The Indian Giver.")
Technorati tag: Ward Churchill
Update: More from Joe Gandelman at Dean's World.
Posted by Jerome at February 6, 2005 11:33 AM | TrackBack