Ward Churchill on CSPAN

I wandered in from a late-night round of drinking and talking with a neighbor to find controversial professor and activist Ward Churchill on CSPAN defending his contention that the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center were like "little Eichmanns", that the people who died in those building were directly or indirectly responsible for our foreign policy and the trade pressure that adversley affects entire continents. Churchill holds that the 9/11 attacks were the direct result of ten years of sanctions on Iraq and the millions of deaths, 500,000 of them children, that resulted from it - "chickens coming home to roost" as he puts it in a new book. This argument, I believe, further confuses the relationship between Iraq and 9/11 - but it's close enough to the truth to stir things up a bit and prompt a little introspection - which is precisely what a good academic does.

Personally, I've never heard Al Quaida's particular motives for the attacks on 9/11 other than America's offending presence in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi sanctions, which in retrospect seemed to have worked as advertised in reducing Saddam Hussein's ability to produce more WMD, to my knowledge, were never attributed as a motive for Al Quaida's attack. But I'm just an average American news consumer and I certainly could have missed that important detail in all the self-righteous nationalism that followed. The national ego will protect itself, no matter its culpability.

What's more important than Churchill's grandstanding on CSPAN, I think, is that Americans begin to have a dialbogue about our accountability as a nation. Like Churchill said last night, the attacks on 9/11 were not a "senseless act" of violence on innocent Americans" as it was so often reported, but a highly coordinated attack on our country by a group of Islamists who share a belief about The United States and our foreign policy. There was motive, intent, and a reason they did what they did and who and what they targeted - regardless of whether we get to hear about it or not. The Pentagon is not a symbol, and neither is The World Trade Center.

And there's more, not less reason today for the same group(s) to commit viloence against the United States. Our leaders have proven over the interim period between 9/11 and today that they're willing to risk our security to pursue their domination of the world energy market and to "stablizing" the middle east by whatever means necessary - particularly if those means are exorbitant military contracts with little or no congressional oversight. The proof is always in the profits. Follow the money. There were clues in the secret meetings between energy executives and our "vice" president before the missiles sailed. Since he claims executive privelege and refuses to reveal what happened in those pre-war meetings, I feel free to guess: the administration wanted to make sure that the energy companies were on board, willing to commit billions of dollars in future infrastructure once the dust settled. I know this is a very cynical view - but these are very cynical times where cynical people are willing to risk public safety for personal profit.

Anyway, I think that Ward Churchill is just the first prominent figure in the beginning of a new anti-war movement. Already, establishment press like The Rocky Mountain News have begun the character assasination of a once-respected, albeit already controversial, professor. In the article, "Ward Churchill: A Contentious Life", the paper felt compelled to report how many times he's been married (4), how much money he makes ($92,000), how swank his digs are (a million-dollar view of the snow- draped Indian Peaks) and how many Pall Malls he smokes (2-4 packs a day). Granted, it's a profile piece, but what sticks out are diapproving quotes phrases like "he's just a bully", "His message stirs echoes of a fading counterculture", "prone to "apoplectic fits if he's defied"' and other detractors who imply that he's an egomaniacal wife-beating "pretend Indian" with a questionable service record in Viet Nam. As we now know post-election, if your political leanings are left, your military service isn't honorable, but questionable.

Regardless of how Ward Churchill fares under hyper-media scrutiny, his presence and his mouth have opened the debate about Americna hegemony - and that's just as it should be.