An Interview with Ward Churchill: Accusations and Smears

[durutti]

Joshua Frank: Prof. Churchill, I'm sure that the majority of CounterPunch readers are familiar with your now infamous essay "Some Push Back," so I won't ask you to explain yourself, but I recently read in an Associated Press article that you wished you had phrased your Adolf Eichmann comment a bit differently. It seemed obvious to me after reading your essay that you were referring to Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann in her classic book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Is that true? Could you expand on your comment to the AP?

Ward Churchill: What I meant was that I wished I'd explained the Eichmann analogy a bit, right off the bat. Silly me. I thought it was rather self-explanatory, like maybe a lot of the people professing such strong negative opinions on the matter might have some clue as to who Eichmann actually was and how Hannah Arendt had rather famously analyzed the implications of his career. This is especially true with regard to my self-styled "liberal" critics. I mean, really, Dave Dellinger advanced exactly the same analogy clear back in 1975 without generating anything resembling the same kind of sanctimonious response from the "left." But, then, he was an unabashed white guy, and a pacifist to boot, so...

JF: Your "liberal" critics have also gone after your scholarship. I remember reading something that Marc Cooper, the circular pundit for The Nation, wrote about it on his blog, hoping that it would get you canned. He, like a lot of liberals, doesn't like your politics and demeanor. But it's not just the liberal establishment that's jumped on the "get-Churchill-fired" bandwagon. The right-wingers seem to think that going after your scholarship could actually do the trick and get you fired - which they've clearly wanted since your 9/11 essay blew up. The most severe of these charges is an alleged plagiarism case, where you've been accused of stealing someone else's work. What's been the fallout of all of this, and are the charges legit? Or has the media simply taken the whole episode out of context?

WC: Let me reframe that one a little bit. The commonalities linking "liberals" like Marc Cooper to reactionary jackanapes like Bill O'Reilly couldn't be clearer. At a certain level, and it's not a terribly obscure one, Cooper and O'Reilly share an identical agenda. That's a point I've been trying to hammer home for years, with only limited success, and now Cooper has come right out in full public view and proven me correct. That's been one of the most gratifying aspects of this whole charade, as far as I'm concerned. I'm absolutely delighted that he and liberals more generally have elected to attack me the way they have.

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank07182005.html">More.

[geek tragedy]

1. Ward Churchill isn't a progressive, and sure as hell isn't representative

of the progressive movement. Go stand somewhere else, Ward. You're not one of us.

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/011273.html

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

12. Gee, one can't even agree with you without being flamed on?

Don't hold back, tell us all how you REALLY feel.

[geek tragedy]

14. Please, don't start a flame war and then play innocent. I'd have more

respect for you if you'd not try to have it both ways.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

20. *SNAP*

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

22. Hehehe

It seems truth DOES hurt sometimes. :evilgrin:

[Swamp Rat]

26. É aí rapaz!

:hi: Ele é o cara de pau aqui agora, mas tem medo de mim. Porque? :D

[bpilgrim]

11. says who?

he's gotta LOT of supporters here on DU and we are a progressive liberal lot :hi:

peace

[geek tragedy]

13. I doubt he has many supporters here--just a few loud ones. Given that

his comments would get him banned here (gloating over the deaths of 911 victims and advocating that US soldiers kill their commanding officers).

Wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire.

[bpilgrim]

15. take another poll, then

fyi: the Eichmann Analogy is NOT banned, here and is, in FACT, often used here - at least since i've been reading DU ;->

"Wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire."

how revealing, thank you :toast:

peace

[geek tragedy]

16. How often are murder victims referred to as 'Little Eichmanns' here?

Doesn't sound like progressive language to me.

[bpilgrim]

17. current neoCON practices and policies are often compared to fascism here

and us little people contributing to them in small ways have been noted by such american luminaries as Thoreau and his work on civil disobedience so i doubt such analogies will ever be effectively censored since many will come to that conclusion all on their own let alone reading about it in intellectual circles.

and many here on DU have respect for the man and his right to express himself unlike the brown-shirts on the far right.

peace

[geek tragedy]

18. I still haven't seen anyone here so morally idiotic that they'd compare

bond traders to convicted genocidalists.

[bpilgrim]

19. are you the final aribiter?

i hope not since you don't see the point, that is you can take the RW WHACKO's spin and run-wit-it -or- you can take the learned & full historical context of the fascist analogies that today occurs, fyi, in our halls of congress.

peace

[geek tragedy]

28. He defamed murder victims, called for US troops to frag their commanding

officers, is a personal fraud, and is a pitiful 'scholar.'

The wingnuts try to pretend he is representative of the progressive movement as an attempt to smear us all.

That's a lie on their part--Ward Churchill is a bizarre, morally twisted crank who lives on the fringes.

[ole_evil_eye]

27. i ain't one of em

this guy doesn't speak for me and I wish he'd take his aging hippie schtick elsewhere


bastard

[delhurgo]

2. I don't like him either, but I made this and never posted it, so I might

as well post it here.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Your link doesn't work. It's to microsoft.

[durutti]

4. Strange.

It's on CounterPunch.

[Monkie]

5. working link

www.counterpunch.org/frank07182005.html

your link has http in it twice

[1932]

6. From the article, interesting insight into rightwing strategy:

JF: Can you explain a bit about "how the liberal 'left' has actively collaborated in the right's use of 'scholarly standards' as a ploy to accomplish its objectives"?


WC: It's been going on for quite a while now. In my view, you can probably date the origin of the technique from the David Abraham case of the mid-80s, when a newly-minted assistant professor at Princeton came out with a really excellent book titled The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, in which he not only laid out the role played by German big business in bringing the Nazis to power, but the whole complex range of liberal democratic sociopolitical dynamics that contributed to the same result. The study, which was unabashedly neomarxian in approach, was really well received, heralded in some quarters as a major methodological breakthrough.


The problem was that Henry A. Turner, a senior historian at Yale, and an archconservative to boot, was just then finishing what he viewed as his summative work, a weighty tome called German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, in which he sought to completely exonerate German industrialists from complicity with Nazism. On it's face, the situation would seem to form an ideal basis for colloquy, that is, subjecting the two competing interpretations to the process of discussion and debate that supposedly constitutes the backbone of scholarly life. But Turner elected not to play it that way. Instead, he set out to cast the impression that his opponent was guilty of "research fraud," thereby not only eliminating Collapse of Weimar as a competitor to his own book, but destroying the reputation of a junior scholar he considered ideologically objectionable in the bargain.


Turner's approach is instructive in that it established the template for what the right has been doing ever since. Joined by Berkeley's Gerald Feldman, another senior and very conservative historian specializing in the German interwar period, he drafted graduate students to go through Abraham's annotation, line-by-line, citation-by-citation. And, of course, they found plenty of trivia: quotation marks missing in various places, inserted where they shouldn't have been in others, wrong dates here and there, and so on. These are the sorts of "endless, minor errors" you'll find in any book, including those of such "greats" as Sir Lewis Namier. But Turner and Feldman kept generating "reports" in which they cast Abraham's missing quote marks as examples of "plagiarism," his inserted quote marks, wrong dates and the like as "fabrications," and his resulting conclusions as "fraudulent."

[1932]

7. And the key paragraph:

In the end, Turner and Feldman's allegations against Abraham were shown to be sheer nonsense. All of the documents Abraham cited actually existed, although he'd misdated several. His inserted quotes attended accurate paraphrases. Attribution was given to sources quoted where missing quote marks were concerned, etc. Most of all, it was determined that none of his technical errors had any appreciable effect on either the quality of his argument or the validity of the conclusions he'd reached. But all that took years. Meanwhile, he was denied tenure and Collapse of Weimar was withdrawn by Princeton University Press. Feldman actively intervened in several search processes to prevent his being hired by other universities, and even attempted to have his Ph.D. revoked by the University of Chicago. The bottom line is that David Abraham was destroyed as an historian.

[1932]

8. And if you want to buy Abraham's book (as a fuck you to the right)

here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0841910847/qid=1121725222/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7409792-4883063?v=glance&s=books

[Disturbed]

21. I agreed with Churchill's piece.

I wonder if anyone would've paid any attention to it if he hadn't included the "little Eichmans" remark? Others have essentialy written real similar essays regarding why Amerika was attacked in such a way on 911 and not gotten the vile reaction that his piece did. I also feel that the attack upon him was about trying to muzzle any others in Academia from voicing dissent of the Bush Regime.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

23. He lowered his guard

And included a phrase which, if taken out of context (a certainty, when dealing with deliberate spreaders of RW propaganda) would make him look like a kook. Bad move, but completely innocent.

[eridani]

29. So, the right uses exactly the same methods against--

--first-rate scholars that it does against not particularly good ones like Churchill. If we are going to throw them a marginal scholar's firing as appeasement, does anyone think that will sate their appetite? That's why it's a good thing for lefties to defend Churchill.

[1932]

30. Marginal scholar or exceptional scholar, the concern is the same:

people who are trying to be thoughtful about what's going on in the world shoudn't be criticized merely for trying to be thoughtful.

As Churchill points out, bad conservative scholarship gets a lot of leeway because liberals are happy to have a crowded marketplace of ideas.

Conservatives don't want a lot of choice and a lot of different views.

It's important to keep the marketplace crowded.

[Doc Bottom]

24. I agreed with "Some People Push Back"

And I think Churchill has been rather sadly abused and harrassed.

But I've got to say that his scholarship is shite. I looked at some of his books and just wanted to slap the guy silly

[H2O Man]

25. About two weeks ago

there was a thread on DU:GD in which Octafish and I discussed a fellow from the Nixon administration named Tom Charles Huston. This young man advocated setting up an intelligence group within the White House, which would have been more powerful than the CIA, FBI, or NSA. His proposal included many of the same types of domestic spying which we now fondly refer to as the Patriot Act.

Since that discussion, Bob Woodward's book, "The Secret Man" has come out. In it, he discusses Mark Felt. Let me quote one short paragraph from page 34:

"Felt later wrote that he considered Huston himself 'a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community.' The four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary defines a gauleiter as 'the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control.'"

I can understand there being a wide range of views of Ward. However, it seems strange that people focus on his Nazi comment, which I think was incorrect, but not particularly significant. I've wondered if the right-wing upset was because he did not take a LIHOP/MIHOP stance on 9-11. Instead, his views were closer to those expressed by Michael Scheuer in "Imperial Hubris."