Free Speech on (One) Campus

[struggle4progress]

02/14/2005 @ 4:22pm

As a joke some years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Ward Churchill's 1998 book "Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America." In it, the University of Colorado professor .. argued that nonviolent political activism .. should not be seen as a force for positive social change. Rather, Churchill suggested, pacifism is a counterrevolutionary movement that unintentionally reinforces the very status quo its proponents claim to be dismantling.

As a Quaker, I was not about to buy into Churchill's worldview, which the friend who presented the book with a wink and a nod well understood. And as a journalist who has covered social justice struggles in the United States and abroad for the better part of a quarter century, I knew enough about how political change occurs to find Churchill's thesis wanting.

But I read the book with interest, and found it to be an engaging enough statement of a controversial point of view. It made me think. It forced me to reconsider some of my own presumptions -- although, instead of changing my thinking, Churchill's critique ultimately reinforced my faith that Thoreau, Gandhi, King and their followers are the real change agents. And .. Churchill's book remains on the shelf of serious books to which I return for information and insight.

In other words, while I probably disagree with Ward Churchill more than most of his right-wing critics, I recognize him as a challenging public intellectual who has prodded and provoked my thinking in ways that I have to respect. <snip>

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2193