Ward Churchill and the MIM Joke about Genocide

Ex-professor and Indian-impersonator Ward Churchill. [Video of Churchill attacking a reporter.]

"I broke and slammed [my Indian wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital." ---Ward Churchill

Jewish child being rounded up in the film Schindler's List.

Ward Churchill often accuses Americans of being genocidal "Little Eichmanns," but this is what Ward Churchill, a wealthy man, wrote in his essay "I Am Indigenist":

"Every yuppie born counts as much as another seventy Chinese...Lay that one on the next soccer mom who approaches you with a baby stroller and an outraged look, demanding that you to put your cigarette out, eh? It is plainly absurd for any American to complain about smoking when you consider the context of the damage done by overall U.S. consumption patterns. Tell ’em you’ll put the butt out when they snuff the kid and not a moment before. Better yet, tell ’em they should snuff themselves, as well as the kid, and do the planet a real favor. Just “kidding” (heh-heh)."

A joke? Wardo is an admirer of the Weathermen, a terrorist organization whose members once had a discussion about whether killing white babies was correct.

Wardo's sick joke also reminds me of the genocidal joke that Churchill's supporter the Maoist MIM made when he reviewed the James Bond film Moonrakers:

"An evil eugenicist takes over the space program to create a new species in space and kill the inhabitants of earth. We cannot much object to the plot then."

It is Wardo who seems like some evil eugenicist to me. All these professors who love Wardo so much should read what he says about who should be executed and think if that is what they want for their families.

Here is what the Indian-imposter Wardo admits he did to his own Indian wife:

"I broke and slammed [my wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital."

Oops! Ward Churchill Commits Self-Censorship

"We won't need this anymore."---the Maoist MIM

CORRECTION: My article incorrectly states that Ward Churchill's CV omits to list his ridiculous article ["The Covert War Against American Indians"] that claims that FBI-backed death-squads murdered 342 Indians. The article is listed. I was incorrect to say the article was not listed. I have a problem with one eye that is acting up, but I should have been more careful.

Still, I think everyone should read Churchill's 1985 C.A.I.B. article and consider the fact that the British scholar Christopher Andrew and the Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin claim that the Soviet KGB supplied the C.A.I.B. with propaganda designed to compromise the American government. [The Sword and Shield pages 232-234].

Also, consider if you think that the FBI would back death-squads in order to kill hundreds of Indians.

Here is the citation from Churchill's CV:

"Special focus section on repression of the American Indian Movement, including two feature pieces ("The Covert War Against American Indians"[pp. 16-21] and "The Strange Case of ’Wild Bill’ Jank-low" [pp. 22-4]) and three sidebars ("Profile of an Informer" [pp. 18-21], "Dennis Banks" [p. 24] and "The FBI at Pine Ridge: 1973-1976" [pp. 26-7, 29]), CovertAction Information Bulletin, No. 24 (July 1985) pp. 16-29. (The late William Kunstler also contributed an article titled "The Ordeal of Leonard Peltier" to the section [pp. 25-9])"

Original article--note correction above:

The totally discredited Plagiarist of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill and his defenders often claim that poor, picked-on Wardo is being censored, but I notice that Ward Churchill has omitted from his updated CV a 1985 article he wrote for the Covert Action Information Bulletin that claimed that FBI-backed death-squads murdered 342 Indians.

I have written about Churchill's 1985 article and about the the reported Soviet/Cuban sponsorship of the C.A.I.B. in my very first post here.

Some bloggers make fun of Wardo's sock puppets, but they have not yet noted that Wardo, a man of many disguises, may be a sock puppet, too.

According to his CV, Ward Churchill has written a number of articles for the Covert Action Information Bulletin. This publication was reportedly edited by Philip Agee, who was fired from the CIA and ended up living in Cuba and creating anti-American propaganda with the assistance of the Soviet and Cuban intelligence services.

A book by a British scholar, Christopher Andrew, and a Soviet defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, claims that the Soviet KGB supplied the C.A.I.B. with propaganda designed to compromise the American government. [The Sword and Shield pages 232-234].

Agee, who has also evidently advised on films in which Ward Churchill appears, claims he became disillusioned with the CIA because they didn't support democracy in Central and South America, but I never noticed that Castro was a democrat.

I wonder why all these professors who are so informed about Ward Churchill's scholarship have never read the book by Andrew and Mitrokhin or noticed that Churchill wrote for the C.A.I.B., which has been described as a mouthpiece for the Soviet/Cuban security services.

Harjo: Ward Churchill, the White Man's Burden

"Like it or not, Churchill is like gum on the bottom of your shoe and we're stuck with him for a bit."---Susan Shown Harjo

Susan Shown Harjo has an article about Ward Churchill in Indian Country Today (8-3-07) describing all the problems that Ward Churchill has caused Indians.

Ms. Harjo believes that Ward Churchill is the white man's problem. I understand what she means, but I think an evil, dangerous, mendacious provocateur like Ward Churchill ends up being a problem for the whole human race because he is the kind of person who tries to make us fight with each other instead of love, care for, protect, and understand each other.

Harjo writes:

Ward Churchill wants you to believe the University of Colorado fired him from a tenured professorship because he wrote an inflammatory essay calling people who were killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, ''little Eichmanns'' who were a ''technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire.''

CU would have you think that its July 24 firing had nothing to do with what Churchill wrote in that essay and everything to do with what he didn't write in his books, but claimed he did.

The CU Board of Regents fired Churchill by an unambiguous 8 - 1 vote for academic misconduct, including alleged plagiarism and lies about historical facts.

Churchill and CU will finish the fight in court and the focal point will be, as it has always been, about money.

Churchill first distorted historical facts to CU in his resume, when he claimed to be Cherokee and Creek. CU accepted those claims as gospel and gave him a communications professorship and an ethnic studies chairmanship, with promotions adding up to a $96,000 annual salary.

This gave Churchill the time and means to write books and sell them on the lecture circuit. Former students maintain that he required them to buy and read his books, and to validate his perspectives.

For a while, he also sold paintings whose subject matter and styles were lifted from works by other artists. When the Indian Arts and Crafts Act was amended with increased penalties for promoting products as made by Indians when they were not, he not only stopped marketing his artwork, but he started attacking the Native artists and leaders who were responsible for the amended law.

Churchill falsely claimed that the Indian Arts and Crafts Act imposed a federal standard of Indian identity. In fact, the federal law bows to and depends totally on tribal law about who is and who is not a tribal citizen or member.

While Churchill wrongly says that the arts law is rigid and unforgiving, it actually has a compassionate standard for unfair or unfortunate exclusions. It provides for inclusion under the law for anyone a Native nation certifies as an Indian artisan, even if that person cannot meet tribal citizenship or membership standards.

When Churchill started attacking real Native people behind that law, he opened his own life and identity to scrutiny and criticism.

Native peoples found that Churchill's claims to be a tribal person were baseless and informed CU that he was not a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation or Cherokee Nation.

At the same time that Churchill was dissing ''card-carrying Indians,'' he started waving around something that purported to be an ''associate membership'' in the Keetoowah Band of Cherokees, which translated into English as ''not even close to being Native.'' The Keetoowah Band does not claim Churchill as one of its own.

Churchill struck out at anyone and everyone who would not validate him as a Native person, exhibiting a virulent attitude against Native people of a kind rarely seen beyond the rings of anti-Indian hate groups.

...While Churchill is primarily marketing himself as a free-speech martyr, he's also creating a subsidiary brand: ''Indian-rights martyr.'' He's selling the idea that he was such an Indian advocate that CU and American society generally wanted him canned.

But that doesn't square with the facts of his employment at CU. CU hired him because he was ''Indian'' and because it believed his ''Indian-ness'' enhanced its faculty's cultural and ethnic diversity profile.

CU hired him and gave him promotions and tenure without the academic credentials it usually required of its faculty members. CU has consistently maintained its defense of Churchill as an Indian against actual Native peoples.

Not only did Churchill use ''Indian-ness'' to land a job that he would not have gotten as a white man, he has publicly blamed lapses in research judgment on a lack of Indian studies standards.

Why is it important for Native peoples to continue to tell the world that Churchill is not a Native person? Churchill is now a cause celebre and there are a lot of people who are angry with Native people because of him.

Some Churchill supporters are mad at Native peoples for being mean to a ''fellow Indian.'' Some Churchill opponents are mad at Indians because Churchill claimed to be one.

Some folks are against Indian studies because Churchill says there aren't any Indian studies standards. Some folks are opposed to Indian studies because Churchill has been part of Indian studies.

There are even a number of well-meaning people who think that, by supporting Churchill, they are supporting Native peoples and Native rights.

Like it or not, Churchill is like gum on the bottom of your shoe and we're stuck with him for a bit. [Full text]

Bird Friday

“I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it's both.”--Forrest Gump

For Bird Friday, I am presenting "The Feather Theme" from the film Forrest Gump.

Wikipedia explains:

"The film tells the story of a simple man and his epic journey through life, meeting historical figures, influencing popular culture and experiencing first-hand historic events while largely unaware of their significance, due to his lower than average intelligence."

The Desk Killers

"The drafted document [of the Wannsee Conference] contained sixteen signatures from all the upper ministries of the German establishment. Of these sixteen signators, eight had PhD’s."

On his PirateBallerina site, Mr. Paine quotes approvingly from Michael C. Moynihan's critique of Ward Churchill in Reason Magazine.

Mr. Moynihan's article makes some fine points, but I feel that Mr. Moynihan should have said more about Nazi Adolf Eichmann's roll in the Holocaust, since he admits that he shares Ward Churchill's undocumented opinion that Americans and FOX NEWS personalities don't know who Adolf Eichmann was.

Mr. Moynihan might have made more of the fact that Churchill is the one who is ignorant about Eichmann's role in the Holocaust and once opined that "Eichmann primarily arranged train schedules." [video]

I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid! So Mr. Moynihan might have documented how the "scholar" Churchill actually minimizes the responsibility of Eichmann for the murder of Europe's Jews.

Churchill loves to blame the victims, if they are Americans. He also wrote that two FBI agents who were ambushed and murdered on June 26, 1975 (the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn) died "Custer-like--in their self-made trap." Churchill disparaged these victims of terrorism in exactly the same way that he disparaged the 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns." I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid!

Mr. Moynihan wrote that Ward Churchill told him:

"Look, one guy...insisted that [Eichmann] was the commandant of Auschwitz! I mean, most of these people, like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, haven't a clue who Eichmann was."

Moynihan briefly dismissed Churchill's comparison of the 9-11 victims to Eichmann as "grotesque," but he didn't explain why this was a grotesque comparison; and he agreed with Churchill's undocumented claim that "most of these people like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, haven't a clue who Eichmann was."

Mr. Moynihan also doesn't seem to realize that Ward Churchill is the ignorant one who has minimized Eichmann's central role in the Holocaust. Ward Churchill actually told a female college student [video] that Eichmann "primarily arranged train schedules."

Mr. Moynihan wrote:

"I was loath to agree with Ward Churchill, the now-infamous professor of ethnic studies who compared the victims of 9/11 to the Nazi "desk killer" Adolf Eichmann. He was probably right, though the point was irrelevant. Regardless of what Fox News anchors know of Holocaust historiography, his comparison remained grotesque. And while Hannity might not understand the supposed depth of Churchill's reference, the blow-dried cable host can, after a protracted phony war, finally claim victory."

If Mr. Moynihan agrees with Churchill's undocumented claim that the public and FOX cable hosts don't know who Eichman was, why not educate FOX and the public instead of ambushing FOX NEWS and the public in cahoots with the likes of Ward Churchill?

It was a cheap shot you shared with Wardo, Mr. Moynihan!

Criticize FOX NEWS for what they actually say that is ignorant, not for what Ward Churchill claims they are ignorant about!

Churchill did not document what Hannity or O'Reilly know about Eichmann, and Churchill showed his ignorance when he ridiculed the alleged remarks of an an unnamed member of the public who was not far wrong: True, Eichmann may not have been "the commandant of Auschwitz," but he was an administrator of Dachau.

I find the point about Eichmann being a "desk killer" very relevant to Churchill's case because Churchill has used the bully pulpit of his government teaching position to preach that Americans, their leaders, and their law enforcement officers deserve to be murdered.

To call Eichmann a "desk killer" without explaining his central role in organizing the deliberate murder of Europe's Jews is to trivialize his crimes. Eichmann was one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

Does anyone call Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices who plotted the 9-11 attack mere "desk killers" because they didn't fily the planes? I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid!

Churchill has even claimed that Eichmann wasn't accused of massacring Jews. Churchill said there was one charge that he killed someone but that the person who made the accusation wasn't credible. In fact, Eichmann was convicted on all counts for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

According to a BBC article by Professor David Cesarani:*

"In March 1944, after German forces invaded Hungary, [Eichmann] travelled to Budapest with a special task force and personally directed the plunder, ghettoisation, and deportation of over 437,000 Jews in the space of eight weeks, most of whom were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau."

Even Eichmann seems more honest than Ward Churchill and admitted at his own trial:

"Why me," [Eichmann] asked. "Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews."

Eichmann was executed because he was a high Nazi SS officer who organized the genocide of Europe's Jews. Nobody forced Eichmann to join the Nazi Party or to become the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel in the SS. Eichmann was an opportunist, not some reluctant policeman who found himself dragooned into arresting Jews. Churchill is repeating Eichmann's pathetic rationalization as historical truth. Eichmann was not some ordinary policeman who followed orders because he was afraid of being shot.

Churchill mocks a man who supposedly attended one of Churchill's talks and who incorrectly claimed that Eichmann was "the commandant at Auschwitz." This is actually not a very big mistake, because Eichmann was an administrator at Dachau; and he visited Auschwitz and involved himself in the decisions about the gas chambers at that huge death camp. He approved the use of Zyclon-B and witnessed Jews being murdered.

"Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Heydrich and Eichmann along with 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union...Eichmann took a keen interest in Auschwitz from its founding and visited there on numerous occasions. He helped Höss select the site for the gas chambers, approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process. [full text]

According to Wikipedia, Eichmann "was a high-ranking Nazi and SS Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Due to his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was tasked by Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to facilitate and manage the logistics of mass deportation to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe....In 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Eichmann returned to that country and submitted an application to join the active duty SS regiments. This was accepted, and in November of 1933, Eichmann was promoted to Scharführer and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp....

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Jewish measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. To this Final Solution of the Jewish Question* Eichmann was tasked as Transportation Administrator, which put him in charge of all the trains which would carry Jews to the Death Camps in the territory of occupied Poland...[I]n 1944, he was sent to Hungary [and] at once went to work deporting Jews and was able to send four hundred thousand Hungarians to their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers." [Full text]

I have posted an article about Churchill's previous minimization of Eichmann's crimes here. Churchill is a moron to compare any of the people murdered by Al Qaeda to Eichmann.

In fact, the evil Churchill's September 2001 article "Some People Push Back," where he compares people murdered on 9-11 to Eichmann, has an apocryphal uncited quotation supposedly from the New York Times as well as really stupid errors of fact and chronology.

These errors were corrected when they were "quoted" by the Maoist MIM, although sometimes the MIM includes both the error and the correct information in the same article.

See here and here.

If people wouldn't be so gullible and would just look up Ward Churchill's "facts," they would see that he is no scholar. It would be screamingly obvious that Wardo is a stupid, evil liar. I was surprised at first that anyone who has earned a Ph.D. could defend Wardo's writings which are really slander cloaked as "scholarship."

But then, even though I am sometimes described as a lunatic, I managed to remember that many of the people who attended the Wannsee Conference, where the "final solution" was plotted, had their doctorate degrees. I read that "The drafted document [of the Wannsee Conference] contained sixteen signatures from all the upper ministries of the German establishment. Of these sixteen signators, eight had PhD’s."

*Cesarani, David. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer". Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

NOTE: Cesarani has a different view of Adolf Eichmann than does Hannah Arendt, whom Ward Churchill cites as his authority. This Wikipedia article about Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem explains some of the differences. At the bottom there is a link to the term "Little Eichmanns." It turns out that this term was not original to Ward Churchill. It was first coined by the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan to describe people who were murdered by the Unabomber.

*According to the Wikipedia entry for the Final Solution:

"The term was coined by Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official who supervised the genocidal campaign and was captured, tried and executed by Israeli authorities in 1961–1962."

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell on "Overhauling Intelligence"

Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, has published an article in Foreign Affairs called "Overhauling Intelligence." The article can also be read on-line in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Mr. McConnell published an earlier article on a related theme in the Washington Post (5-21-07). This article was called "A Law Terrorism Outran: We Need a FISA for the 21 st Century."

Other ODNI press releases for 2007 can be found here.

The key points of "Overhauling Intelligence" are summarized here:

Summary: Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.