[Mb-civic] Raise Your Voice but Keep Your Head Down

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

IO have passed on forwarding any comments about the Ward Churchill 
contoversy but this one by Michael Albert is very worthwhile...

---

Raise Your Voice but Keep Your Head Down

By Michael Albert


I first met Ward Churchill when I was working at South End Press twenty
five years ago and Ward submitted his first book which was about 
Marxism
and Native Americans. It was a collection of essays which revealed why
indigenous people distrust Marxists' cultural politics and community
norms. I found Churchill's insights very compelling and became friends
with him. I haven't seen Ward for years, but every so often we publish a
piece by him on ZNet, where I now work. I offer all this in case anyone
might feel our ties bias my viewpoint. 

I think the current controversy about Ward Churchill is a manipulative
attack on free speech aimed at the whole left. I remember when Ward's 
post
9/11 essay came out. My reaction was to wish he hadn't written it. Ward
took clear and cogent insights about the causes of international hostility
to U.S. policies and weighed them down with not so clear and not so 
cogent
non insights about the general population of the U.S. This kind of mix is
always a problem, not least because astute but reactionary readers will
try to dismiss the good by pointing to the bad. It doesn't matter that
that is like trying to dismiss Newton's positive contributions about
gravity on grounds that he believed in alchemy. When attacked with
manipulative skill, tangential flaws can be used to undercut important
truths.

On a larger scale, that's what people are now trying to do to Ward
himself, as well: dismiss him in toto, as a person and as an employee of a
university, over a single essay some key parts of which were, I would
agree, worthy of criticism. 

There are two problems that should not be confused with one another. One
problem is that no person should be seen as only the tangential worst that
he or she does, even if there is a complete consensus about the failings,
unlike in this case. 

Ward Churchill, for example, over the years, has contributed a great deal
to the comprehension of cultural concerns and possibilities as well as to
revealing the dynamics of repression and international relations. Ward is
a prodigious writer and an effective speaker and organizer who has fought
for just causes over and over. 

I don't agree with Ward's views on some health issues, on population
issues, and on certain particular cultural matters, much less on the
efficacy of what we might call political trash talk about strategies of
struggle. But none of that has interfered with my liking Ward the person
and feeling positive about his many contributions. Ward Churchill should
not be judged solely on a single essay written the day after a gargantuan
calamity, whatever anyone may think of that piece. Parts ought to be
criticized, yes, but not the person who wrote it. It is the difference
between ad hominem and substantive argument.

But second, and in this case more important, there is the little matter of
free speech. Criticizing what someone says is not the same as writing them
death threats and trying to terminate their career. The right-wing thugs
who are after Ward Churchill are stalking horses for more astute and sober
folks in the rear. The troops in the field are Ward's proximate problem,
but the powers that be--at the University of Colorado, in the Colorado
state government, in major media from Fox to The Wall Street Journal and
from ABC and the New York Times, through to the halls of Washington
DC--are ultimately far more important. 

Are reactionary elites going to coercively remove Ward Churchill from 
U.S.
academia? That needs to be prevented by all of us, including people
annoyed at having to wage the free speech fight over words they do not
like. Raise your voice.

Why is it so hard for people, often on both sides of the left/right
divide, to understand that what free speech means, if it means anything at
all, is freedom to speak what others do not like or even cannot stand to
hear? 

Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement. Hitler tolerated
what he liked. So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too. So did Genghis Khan, the
Shah, and Henry Kissinger. Free speech only becomes an issue when 
someone
says what others don't want to hear. Ward Churchill did that and so free
speech is now an issue. If the wrong side wins, the precedent will be
dangerous.

This dynamic is not new but it is growing bolder. A recent report in the
New York Times relayed how teachers in many states and counties in the
U.S. are avoiding evolution by natural selection as a topic in their
public school classes. The teachers fear fallout from fundamentalist
parents, scared school board members, and even politically cowed
principals. Ward's fight and the fight of these teachers are logically of
one cloth. The difference is that so far Ward has more guts. 

Ward used to tell me, after a visit, "Keep your head down." He had seen
war at home and abroad and he knew what he was talking about. Now 
Ward is
in another kind of war. I doubt any of these right-wing thugs will come
after him bodily. But the harm they can do institutionally is bad enough.
Keep your head down.

Why Ward Churchill? I think Ward would probably say it is because what 
he
is doing is very effective. Ward may even see the attacks on his essay as
evidence that the essay had great dissident merit. I think Ward would be
wrong in that. Ward is being attacked not because he is the strongest
possible target, but because he is one of the weakest possible targets.
His essay is featured not because it was seriously threatening, but
because it is easily ridiculed. Ward provided right wingers fodder they
could manipulatively use. The right wingers are hoping that Ward has
sufficiently irritated those who would otherwise defend him so that he is
left without defenders. We can't allow that. The right is a long way from
going after stronger targets. Everyone on the left has to be sure no
targets they do go after are vulnerable.

Since 9/11 at public talks I often compare George Bush and Osama bin
Laden. I note that if you could have been a fly on the wall of the inner
circle meeting rooms of the U.S. government leading up to the bombing of
Afghanistan, I believe you would have heard no discussion, not even a
minutes worth, taking into account the well being of the Afghan people in
the face of possible massive starvation induced by our assault. Mass media
at the time reported (on back pages only) that bombing Afghanistan could
lead to five million deaths. No mainstream paper had a headline "U.S.
contemplates killing millions to prove we are tough," though all knew it
was true.

I also indicate in the public talks that if I were to now have the
opportunity to ask bin Laden how he could possibly have chosen to
undertake the assault on the Twin Towers, despicable as this act was, I
think he would probably understand the question and would reply, roughly,
that he thought the gains (in trying to propel the U.S. into reactions
that would provoke fundamentalism throughout the Mideast) were worth 
the
price in human loss. Bin Laden, as evil as his designs surely were and
are, would understand, that is, that there was something untoward that
occurred on 9/11, piles of corpses, and that the negative deaths had to be
weighed against what he saw as positive political gains. Sane people will
reject his moral calculus, of course, but I am guessing that at least he
had one.

On the other hand, I say in these talks that if I were to now have the
opportunity to ask Bush and Cheney how they could possibly have chosen 
to
undertake the bombing of Afghanistan, I think they would not even
understand the question. They would not see any need to weigh off benefits
against costs because they saw no costs. For them the general estimates
made by all responsible parties that literally millions of Afghans might
suffer starvation if bombing were to commence counted for naught. For
them, Afghans are like bugs outside our front door are for the rest of us.
To Bush and Cheney Afghans are expendable. Bush and Cheney have no 
moral
calculus. They reduce humans to the status of fleas.

And then I say in these talks, if there is a deep hell for sinners surely
Osama bin Laden is headed for at least its seventh floor down, but George
Bush and Dick Cheney are going to ride an elevator even further down to a
deeper basement. Everyone at talks like this given in the U.S. understands
these images and few have any problem with the harsh tone. When I have
given talks like this in Europe, however, I have been asked why I am
alive. I was confused the first time I heard this question in France, and
then in Belgium and Italy, and then I realized what they meant. "If the
U.S. is as bad as it seems, why don't Bush and Co. eradicate people as
radical and militant as you? That's what our really bad guys did here in
Europe, after all." 

Well, the answer is that things in the U.S. are not that bad. Our
fundamentalists can only pick on targets that are relatively weak and
effectively repress them in states that are relatively congenial to right
wing thuggery, and even then they can do so only in relatively limited
ways, at least so far. But if we let our fundamentalists get away with
that much, which is already more than bad enough, then it will be just an
opening act. If they succeed at first, their efforts will expand. 

So why do O'Reilly and the Wall Street Journal pick on Ward? I think it's
because his words can be made to seem indiscriminate, and indeed 
arguably
were indiscriminate, and because as a result they felt he would have a
hard time fighting back. Pick Ward off, then work on all those teachers
still having the gall to tell students that Darwin knew what he was
talking about, and then move on from there.

I don't want to rally around Ward Churchill's specific words. They aren't
my cup of freedom. I want to rally around Ward Churchill's right to write
whatever words he chooses. More, I want to fight for our need to have
institutions and social conventions that respect and support dissidence
rather than institutions and social conventions that try to extinguish
dissidence at every opportunity. Indeed, when we attain that level of free
and supported speech, we might have reason to claim a degree of
civilization.

P.S. There are plenty of historical instances of individuals being judged
for more than one dimension of their lives and writing, even when one
dimension had no redeeming logic at all. Here is another comment from 
W.
Churchill (compliments of Mickey Z): "I do not agree that the dog in a
manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain
there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for
instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America
or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been
done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade
race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken
their place."

Whoops, that wasn't Ward Churchill, it was Sir Winston Churchill, the man
U.S. News and World Report called "The Last Hero." Sir Winston also 
said:
"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,"
and asked British scientists to cook up "a new kind of weather" for the
citizens of Dresden.

I wouldn't recommend taking Winston Churchill out of the library, but I
would recommend strongly criticizing his vile words that had far fewer
redeeming features than the worst things Ward Churchill has ever even
fantasized saying.


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   ---   George Orwell


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