Dismantling the Politics of Comfort

[Freedom_from_Chains]

Ward Churchill is perhaps one of the most provocative thinkers around. A Creek and enrolled Keetoowah Band Cherokee, Churchill is a longtime Native rights activist. He has been heavily involved in the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. He is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado and has served as a delegate to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

One of Churchill’s areas of expertise is the history of the U.S. government’s genocide of Native Americans—the chronic violation of treaties and systematic extermination of North American indigenous populations. His many books include A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to Present (1998) and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the U.S. (2nd edition, 2002). His new book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, was just published by AK Press (www.akpress.org).

(cont) http://www.satyamag.com/apr04/churchill.html

[indigobusiness]

1. Gets right to the heart of our darkness...

"Politics of Comfort" says it all...

snip

Your recent works detail the documentable history of the consequences of U.S. imperialism. After reading On the Justice of Roosting Chickens and listening to your two CDs, what do you want your audience to walk away with?

A fundamental understanding of the nature of their obligation to intervene to bring the kind of atrocities that I’ve described to a halt by whatever means are necessary.

The predominating absurdity in American oppositional circles for the past 30 years is the notion that if one intervenes to halt a rape or a murder in progress, if you actually use physical force as necessary to prevent that act, somehow or other you’ve become morally the same as the perpetrator.

What do you think those oppositional circles need to do to really effect change?

Stop being preoccupied with the sanctity of their own personal security, on the one hand, and start figuring out what would be necessary. That might require experimentation with tactics and techniques. Not how, like an alchemist, you repeat the performance often enough to make yourself feel good in the face of an undisturbed continuation of the horror you’re opposing. If your candlelit vigil doesn’t bring the process you’re opposing to a halt, what do you do next, presuming you actually desired to have an effect.

snip

[Freedom_from_Chains]

2. Gets right to the heart of our darkness

Yes it does and unfortunately that seems to be the part that most people are having difficulty with. However, until we are able to grasp such truth I am certain the future does not look real promising.

[indigobusiness]

3. It's hard to look in the mirror

at one's own warts.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

4. It's hard to look in the mirror

That is true, it is hard. However it is necessary if one ever hopes to get beyound them. Like the saying goes, "You keep doing what your doing, and you keep getting what your getting."

[indigobusiness]

5. Yeah. How can you remedy problems

until you are willing to face them?

[Freedom_from_Chains]

6. Answer: You can't

That has always been the first step. ;)

[Karenina]

7. This whole brouhaha

is another sad example of Americans' lack of comprehension.

[housewolf]

8. Character flaw

It always seems to me that one of Americans' biggest character flaws is a refusal to look at their character flaws.

Something that the AA program got - the need to take a fierce moral inventory of yourself and your character flaws.

Americans just pretend that we don't have any.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

11. Your assessment is dead on.

Could it be the whole country just needs a meeting? :)

[Karenina]

12. or SUMTHIN!

:shrug:

[housewolf]

9. Anybody see him on C-Span Wed nigiht/Thurs am?

It was a presentation he did along with Russell Means at CU Boulder with some other Native Americans. Powerful presentation, he was quite firm in exercising his first ammendment rights. He's a strong guy. The audience was mostlly supportive but there were a few who challanged his positions.

[applegrove]

10. Nothing wrong with an intellectual looking at things with 'fresh eyes'

Nothing wrong with an intellectual looking at things with 'fresh eyes' - just wish he hadn't dropped the 'bait the victim' bomb.

[Karenina]

13. The "victim" needs to get a clue

as to who the real perpetrator is.

[applegrove]

14. I think the initial responce to 9/11 - the adult one, was to remove

I think in the initial response to 9/11 - the adult one, was to remove the American base from Saudi Arabia and put it in Qatar. The reason why: because no infidel was supposed to be in Saudi Arabia (according to the Koran). So that was the intellectual response when Bush & co. were behaving as adults and not as adolescents (who could rule the world by attacking any nation much weaker than the USA like Iraq - while ignoring anything with "meat" like Korea or China and their massive human rights abuses). They listened to the best advisors and intellects after 9/11.

So you did not see it in the ridiculous Bush propaganda machine - but experts up and down inside the US government obviously had some say in what needed to be done 'on America's side' vis a vis the War on Terror.

Personally I think an apology for what the US has done (in Iran by putting the Shaw there and replacing a democracy with him to make oil dollars) would go much further to ensuring regime change at this point.

Where are the adults!! But Ward Churchill was not the only one to talk about American responsibility for 9/11. Americans on the street and in airports did that in that first week. He is just the only one this week willing to blast through the noise machine. And unfortunately he did it by 'baiting the victims'. It may have been a strategy on his part to get attention, to get the bile of the right and centrists up so that he could garner followers on the far left. I do not know. But many say the same things he says. Many, many, many. Perhaps it is new for you to hear about it within the USA. But we in Canada (and the rest of the world) have been watching right wing American secret opps for generations and have been yelling and screaming about it. As have many, many Americans.

It is still unfortunate that Mr. Churchill chose to 'reframe' is own timely ideas by specifically 'baiting victims'. Nothing wrong with looking at the whole terrorist thing with 'new eyes'. I just wish he was not acting like a propaganda machine himself and stayed the course of the intellectual.

[dbeach]

15. AIM [American Indian Movement } calls him a fake...

"A statement from the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council Email this page Print this page
Posted: February 04, 2005
by: Dennis Banks / Dennis J. Banks, Ojibwa, is chairman of the Board of the American Indian Movement. For more informat


Dennis J. Banks, Ojibwa, and Clyde H. Bellecourt, Ojibwa -- Guest columnists

Ward Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.on Feb. 3. His appearance was canceled by the college after he caused a public furor over his loathsome remarks about the 9/11 tragedy in New York. AIM's Grand Governing Council has been dealing with Churchill's hateful attitude and rip-off of Indian people for years.

The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9/11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people's lives.

Churchill's statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them ''little Eichmanns,'' comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann who implemented Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all. "

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410305