Genociding Ward Churchill for over a 20th of a century

CNews 31December07

Just in time to miss the holiday season, fans can now pre-order Speaking Truth In The Teeth of Power, Professor Ward Churchill's latest froth on his travails ever since somebody noticed he wasn't much of anything he claimed to be. The paperback lists for $21.95, but in a remarkably prescient move, Amazon.com appears to be pre-remaindering it for $14.93—a 32% discount! According to the single blurb on Amazon, "[t]he book opens with a lengthy interview conducted by journalist Joshua Frank concerning Churchill's remarks and the back story to the hoopla[....]" Ah, so that's where the missing parts of that interview got off to....

Of course, the blurb also contains a couple of glaring factual errors (bf added):

Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) is professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado/Boulder. A member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM (American Indian Movement), he is a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. A prolific writer and lecturer, he has authored, co-authored or edited more than twenty books.

CNews 30December07

Inside Higher Education has an excellent report of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, er, the deliberations of Modern Language Association (MLA) to adopt a couple of resolutions concerning the Middle East, Academic Freedom, and Professor Ward Churchill (ht Terry Hastings). To excerpt any one paragraph would be to deny other equally jaw-dropping observations their day in the sun, so read the whole thing.

Okay, we can't resist one teaser: "Defenders of the original version [of an anti-Zionist/anti-Israel resolution] faulted [AAUP president Cary] Nelson’s version [which chose no sides in the Middle East] for being even-handed."

CNews 24December07

Apparently, Russell Means ("Esq.") doesn't speak for all Indians (who knew?!): "An Open Letter To Russell Means..." (ht Heidi)

Update: Newsbusters covers the Great Means Secession of 2007

CNews 20December07

AFP: Lakota form new country

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

Rodney Bordeaux, chairman of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said his community has no desire to join the breakaway nation. Means and his group, which call themselves the Lakota Freedom Delegation, have never officially pitched their views to the Rosebud community, Bordeaux said.

"Our position on that is we need to uphold the treaties, and we're constantly reminding Congress of that message," Bordeaux said. "We're pushing to maintain and to keep the treaties there because they're the basis of our relationship with the federal government."

Members of the new nation would not pay any taxes, and leaders would be informally chosen by community elders, Means said. Non-Indians could continue to live in the new nation's territory, which would consist of the western parts of North and South Dakota and Nebraska and eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana. The new government would issue its own passports and drivers licenses, Means said.

"Our withdrawal (from the treaties) is fully thought out," Means said, referring to peace treaties the Lakota people signed with the government in 1851 and 1868. "We were mandated by our elders in 1974 to do two things. First, to establish relationships with the international community... and the second mandate, of course, was to reestablish our independence."

CNews 19December07

Peer Reviewed*

Speaking of peer-reviewed publications (and who isn't), here's a handy alphabetized list of all the publications Professor Ward Churchill lists on his latest available c.v. under the heading "Scholarly Essays (Peer Reviewed)".

"Original" is the number of original articles The Perfesser's published in that particular publication; "reprints/translations" seems pretty self-explanatory, as does "refereed" (btw: we'll update all those "unknowns" as well as provide links where available to all those publications as time permits):

CNews 17December07

There’s nothing new here, except to note that Churchill’s massive ego has grown even more. For narratives from people who had survived the boarding schools, he relies heavily on Brenda Child’s Boarding School Seasons [...] and David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction [...], at the same time excoriating Adams for not using the term “genocide.”

Kill the Indian, Save the Man [...] is part of Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide [...] expanded, reargued, and made even more unreadable.

From the introduction:

I have by design engaged in no new research while assembling my essay. Instead, to underscore the obviousness of what is being obfuscated and “denied” by “responsible” scholars, I’ve chosen to rely exclusively on previously published data, most of it long and readily accessible to anyone willing to consider its implications. My main contribution to the literature, I think—aside from offering the first comparative assessment of residential school operations and impacts covering both the U.S. and Canada—is thus to have effected a synthesis of the relevant information, configuring it in a manner facilitating its being scrutinized through the lens of legality.

The problem with political loons like the professor from Boulder is that they never seem to get around to actually addressing the problems of their claimed constituents—in this case, Native Americans. If this Indian wannabe was genuinely interested in the plight of Pine Ridge residents, one would think he would be out in front on the issues of the day, putting his taxpayer-subsidized wampum [you'll be called a racist for that one, Joe] where his mouth is. Instead we get substandard academics laced with self-indulgent fantasy under the guise of constitutionally protected speech and "academic freedom."

I mentioned to Glenn recently that one of the things I appreciate about non-violent action--and particularly an action like this--is how democratic it is. You don't have to be strong, or big, or tall, or male, or "able-bodied," or know how to use high-tech gadgetry or weapons. You just have to be true to yourself, your community, and your values. You have to have a little bit of courage, and a little bit of clarity.

I think of Rachel Corrie, a thin, 23 year old woman, lying under that Israeli bulldozer, saying "my back is broken"--the last words she ever said. She did what she was able to do. She gave her all, she gave her best, and I hope she left this world with no regrets. She wasn't defeated, because her courage and her clarity and spirit outlive her. She is one of our ancestors now, and I really believe she was with us that October day in the street.

CNews 16December07

CNews 14December07

Everybody's (okay, just a couple of people) wondering whatever happened to the court-type goings-on that were supposed to happen this month concerning Professor Ward Churchill's suit against CU, as noted by Fox News last month:

The university filed motions in September to dismiss the complaint and Lane, Churchill's attorney, filed a response last week. The university will file reply briefs to his response soon, said Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the CU System. There won't be a ruling for about a month, he added.

Hegel set out the conditions required for an ethical modern, mass state. He was not a utopian. He saw rather clearly that the liberal state, notably in the United States, presented only civil society and not the ethical state. Hegel’s ethical state would not only recognize each person as an individual, but would also make available the material conditions necessary for each person to thrive. Hegel argued that providing rights while ignoring familial and communal bonds fails to provide the conditions necessary for individual fulfillment. Therefore, for Hegel, the principle of one person, one vote is not enough. If people lack community, the abstract right to vote and any other abstract right is ineffective. In Hegel’s view, a liberal state must foster community — through labor organizations, political organizations, fraternal organizations, and the like. It must ensure that individuals can express themselves and know that their views are taken into account in the community.

"The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a ''vanguard'' party, or a State bureaucracy."
— Noam Chomsky

CNews 12December07

CNews 10December07

CNews 7December07

CNews 5December07

Well, It's An Honor Just To Be Nominated

by Jim Paine

When last we saw Our Hero, Professor Bruce E. Johansen, he was living down the unbearable shame of having resigned from the Investigating Subcommittee of CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct—the subcommittee charged with taking a look at various fabrication and plagiarism charges leveled against then-Professor Ward Churchill. Johansen resigned his post on the five-member subcommittee after it came to light (here on PirateBallerina, and unbeknownst to me, the same day in the Boulder Daily Camera) that he'd already voiced his high opinion of Churchill several months previous. After he resigned from the subcommittee (along with fellow pro-Churchillite Robert A. Williams), Johansen grumbled a bit, and then fell off our radar.

Apparently, however, PB did not fall off Johansen's radar. Thanks to a PB reader, Waldo Pepper, I've become aware that Johansen recently published a book entitled Silenced! Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Praeger Publishers, 2007), wherein Johansen demonstrates how loathing turns to obsession, and obsession turns to fabulism. From the very first page of the book's Preface, Johansen wallows in an ecstasy of imagined martyrdom while twisting the facts to substantiate his later characterization of me and PB:

Very quickly, some Denver print and broadcast media, fed by an anti-Churchill Web site, Jim Paine's pirateballerina.com, busied themselves questioning Williams's and my impartiality because we had defended Churchill's free-speech rights in public, a matter that was not under investigation.

I can't speak for the "Denver print and broadcast media" but I can say that what PB highlighted was public praise for Churchill's scholarship from both men. From Johansen: "The present controversy has focused on only a tiny fraction of Prof. Churchill's work. I have read some of his books, and find them to be well-argued and intensively documented in a scholarly manner. He occasionally has referenced my work, and he has done so properly." From Williams: "...[A]nyone who's followed the field of American Indian Studies for the past three decades would immediately recognize Ward Churchill as an important scholar, writer and advocate, whose published works are widely cited and relied upon." Churchill's scholarship, and his writing, and his documentation—I believe—was under investigation.

Still on the first page of the Preface, Johansen rails on:

I lasted exactly two weeks in a rancid atmosphere during which some in the media surrendered their critical facilities to Paine and his blog, a raging partisan who was telling me I could not be fair. In Denver, a gaggle of Internet gossips, radio talk-show hosts, and editorial writers seemed to think they owned the university, despite the fact that it receives only 8 percent of its funding from state taxes. Churchill was wonderful cannon fodder in the audience-rating wars, and they knew it.

Incidentally, PB reader Rex refuted the single-digit state-tax support myth over a year ago (second item). Moving on, by the second page of Johansen's Preface, PB and I have surpassed bête noire status and moved into Doctor Doom territory:

By early November, I was spending large parts of my work days, evenings, and weekends defending my own research integrity, after pirateballerina (with no evidence) accused me of being a "stooge" of Churchill, as well as a "fabulist" and a "fabricator of research" who had a "quid pro quo" with Churchill. Paine's Web site had become the tail that wagged the media dog in Denver on the Churchill issue. Paine rang his Internet bell, sang "Ward Churchill, come and get it!" and the press came abounding [sic] like a pack of half-starved, naive puppies. Surveying the situation, my wife, Pat Keiffer, summed up the situation in one word: "Cesspool."

Wow. Johansen's version of me even scares me. I have crushed my enemy; I have driven him before me; I have heard the lamentations of his woman. I am Conan the blogarian. Fear my cascading style sheet.

In any case, Johansen spends the next couple of paragraphs covering his "quid pro quo" legal saber-rattling (during which he says my claim that a quid pro quo existed between Churchill and Johansen "vanished" from PB, even though the obvious truth is that I simply replaced quid pro quo with a different phrase (and with acknowledgment of Johansen's weak but effective attempt at lawyering). I never imagined that Johansen and Churchill had an actual agreement to boost each other; the phrase with which I replaced quid pro quo more clearly represented my opinion.

Johansen eventually gets back to his resignation:

I resigned, as did Williams. I requested and was provided op-ed reply space in the Rocky Mountain News[...]. I said, in part, that I was leaving the committee because the level of discourse on this issue in the Denver area had become nearly neurotic, and because my continued membership on the committee in such a toxic atmosphere was going to inhibit its ability to conduct a proper investigation. I also resigned because the rules of the committee prohibit apparent or perceived conflict of interest, as well as the real thing. Thus, by this test, imagination trumps reality. These rules beg one very important question in an incendiary conflict: whose perceptions govern? Paine certainly believed his did.

On pirateballerina.com, Paine said I had displayed remarkably good judgment by resigning—a supposed stooge fabulist, faker of research, and mutually back-scratching member of the Ward Churchill Fan Club with remarkably good sense—a very rare bird, indeed. The night the news broke that Williams also had resigned, my wife Pat and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary with a movie: Good Night and Good Luck, the story of Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy, a fitting conclusion. Was I now, or had I ever been, a stooge of Ward Churchill?

Johansen's high dudgeon goes on for several more paragraphs (and overflows into other chapters), but you get the idea. Besides, I'm tired of transcribing, so I'll leave Our Hero there, center stage, shaking his fist and manifesting his stigmata. I'll post more when I stop laughing.


[Huge thanks (and, of course, @sspats) to PB reader Waldo Pepper, who forwarded to PB large portions of Johansen's comedy extravaganza.]

Addendum: At amazon.com, the reviews of Silenced!:

"Bruce Johansen's book comes to us at exactly the right time, when a war atmosphere has led to attacks on independence of thought and rational scientific inquiry in the academy, exactly the place where those qualities should be cherished. His book should rouse us from complacency and provoke us to join the struggle for the defense of our constitutional rights." - Howard Zinn

"The Right Wing is willing to destroy lives and sacrifice the First Amendment in their desperate effort to acquire and hold onto power. But thanks to the hardwork, courage and clarity of Dr. Johansen, and millions more of us, they will not succeed. Long live the First Amendment and all of our constitutional rights!" - Roberto Maestas, Founder and Executive Director, El Centro de la Raza, Seattle, WA

"Bruce Johansen is the kind of free-thinking writer who inspires us all. In Silenced! he reminds us that informed views are often uncomfortable and that there are things of vital importance only academic voices are equipped to say. Uniquely in print, he peers under rocks and examines the wider context to what we get to hear and what we're encouraged to dismiss. This is a book of our time by a fascinating author - don't miss it." - Joy Porter, author of Place & Native American History & Culture (Peter Lang, 2007).

CNews 4December07

Blast From the Past: Matt Labash wrote "The Ward Churchill Notoriety Tour" back in early '05, and it's still the most insightful character sketch of The Perfesser and his acolytes.
Excerpt:

The crowd might've yelled "Off with his head!" but it was hard to tell since they were speaking in tongues. And this was all before Churchill got to the Eichmann charge, which had been grossly misinterpreted the first time around. Of the World Trade Center victims, Churchill needs to make one thing clear. "I didn't actually say they were Eichmann, I said they were little Eichmanns." By that, he means that like Eichmann, who didn't directly kill anyone, and who was merely following orders by overseeing Jewish transport operations and other logistical concerns, they were good Germans, "the technocrats of empire," who participated, perhaps even unwittingly, in the immiseration of countless cultures.

Forget the sloppy historical analogy, since even if you favor a heads-up comparison between modern-day America and Nazi Germany, Eichmann was a bit more proactive than Churchill allows, recounting in his own words how he witnessed a mother shot with a baby in her arms, "his brains splattered all around, also over my leather overcoat. My driver helped me remove them."

Forget, also, that if you page through the obituaries of Cantor Fitzgerald financiers--that company being Churchill's oft-cited embodiment of American complicity and callousness--you discover all sorts of examples that complicate Churchill's line: There were people like Juan Cisneros, who volunteered as a Big Brother, and who only wanted to be a bond trader until he could sock away enough money for his parents, who'd immigrated from Guatemala. Or like Matthew Leonard, Cantor's director of litigation, who helped the homeless and did extensive pro bono work for poor people in Chinatown. Such lives couldn't possibly be as noble as getting paid out of the same compulsory-taxes kitty that finances our unjust wars, or cataloguing the stereotypes in Dances with Wolves, or collecting five grand a throw to feed discontent to roomfuls of emaciated anarchists, when what they most need is a hot shower and a cheeseburger.

CNews 3December07