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."