Ward Churchill: A Craven Puppet with Quisling Impulses

This cartoon depicts the Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling saluting Adolf Hitler. Quisling founded a fascist Norwegian party that got money from Hitler. When the German Army invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, Quisling burst into a radio station, proclaimed himself Prime Minister, and ordered the Norwegian people not to resist; but his plan backfired and instead galvanized Norwegian resistance. Lacking popular support, Quisling was no longer useful to Hitler. The Germans finally installed Quisling as Minister-President on February 1, 1942.

Quisling was executed by the Norwegian government after WWII. Today his mansion is a Holocaust museum. The name "Quisling has become synonymous with the word "traitor" because Quisling was Hitler's stooge. Still, he was a pretty ham-handed stooge.

The discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill has his facts wrong on the history of Vidkun Quisling. In Perversions of Justice, Ward Churchill claims that "Quisling...served as head of the puppet government installed in his country by the Nazis after it was occupied in 1940" (Footnote 8, page xxi).

Actually, Quisling was not appointed until 1942. The Nazi attempt to install him after the invasion only galvanized the resistance of the Norwegian people. Norwegians wouldn't serve in his government. Ward Churchill "cites" Paul M. Hayes, the author of Quisling: The Career and Political Ideas of Vidkun Quisling, 1887-1945.

According to Churchill's footnote, Hayes' book was published by Indiana University Press (1972). According to Amazon and Wikipedia, the book was also published by Newton Abbot, David and Charles (1971) and by Indiana University Press in 1972.

In any case, Paul M. Hayes probably did not say that Quisling was installed by the Nazis in 1940, because Wikipedia cites Hayes as the source for its description of Quisling's abortive 1940 coup. A mocking Time article published on April 29, 1940, notes that the London Times pointedly referred to the traitor as "Major Quisling."

The ex-professor Ward Churchill depicts himself as an advocate for Indians, but actually he has often used his bully pulpit at the University of Colorado to denigrate both his own personal Indian enemies and elected Indian officials as "Quislings."

The University of Colorado should have noticed that Ward Churchill's articles and books often smear some Indian people as Quislings. Scholars should not have given Churchill a platform for his anti-Indian agenda, but perhaps they fell for his hypocritical and cunning pro-Indian masquerade. Churchill even claimed he was an Indian so that people wouldn't listen to real Indians.

Ethnic Studies shouldn't be in the business of denigrating Ward Churchill's own personal enemies and elected Indian officials while making saints of those who support his agenda.

For example, in Struggle for the Land (p. 369) Ward Churchill denigrates Indians he doesn't like as "hang around the fort Indians." On pages 369 and 399 he denigrates some Indians as "Vichy Indians." On page 370 he calls some Indian leaders "craven puppets" with "Quisling impulses."

Churchill is denigrating these Indians as Nazi collaborators just like he denigrates the people murdered on 9-11 as "little Eichmanns."

Search "Ward Churchill" Quisling at Google Books, or "Ward Churchill" "Quisling impulses," at Google Books to read Churchill denigrating elected Indian leaders and his personal enemies as Quislings. Search these terms at Google Web to see how this label appears in Churchill's articles and other people's writings.

In his article "I Am Indigenist," (ZNet, 2-27-09), Ward Churchill lists his enemies who "queued up to roster the régimes installed by the U.S. to administer Indian Country from the 1930s onward, the craven puppets who to this day cling to and promote the "lawful authority" of federal force as a means of protecting their positions of petty privilege, imagined prestige, and often their very identities as native people. No, indigenists and indigenism have nothing to do with...Quisling impulses..." [here Churchill lists his enemies].

These smears don't have a lot of credibility with me because I know that Ward Churchill is a Quisling who cut his teeth writing articles for the KGB-sponsored "Covert Action Information Bulletin." In this KGB mouthpiece the Quisling Ward Churchill claimed that the FBI backed death-squads that murdered 342 Indians.

I think we can all probably guess who peer-reviewed those articles!

Read this KGB-sponsored propaganda [Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 24 (Summer 1985), pp. 16-21] for yourself and decide who is the Quisling, Indians or the white man Ward Churchill.

Read more about the C.A.I.B. in my first post.

Sword and Shield, a book by the British scholar Christopher Andrew and the Soviet defector and KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, quotes Mitrokhin as saying that the Bulletin was founded "on the initiative of the KGB" and that the KGB supplied the C.A.I.B. with propaganda designed to compromise the CIA. Churchill's article is actually is designed to defame the FBI. [The Sword and Shield pages 232-234; See also my post about the Mitrokhin Archive]