Ward Churchill Twisting in the Wind

Thank you for telling us this history of Ward Churchill. It confirms my belief that Churchill is not just a a babbling idiot, he is a CIA agent.

Not only was his "little Eichmanns" attack on the workingclass outrageous and inexcusable since he must have realized that if there was no air defense, the 9/11/01 Reichstag Fire was an inside job as only the president, vice-president or secretary of war can tell the air force to stand down, he now tries to claim Adolf Eichmann was just a technocrat who coordinated train schedules when it is well-documented that Eichmann was a chief planner of the Holocaust, and promoted the use of gas filled vans to kill Jews and promoted the use of Zyklon B to kill Jews at Auschwitz.

You can read all about Eichmann at:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/
and
tp://http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/eichmann.htm:

Most importantly, Churchill offers no solutions to our problems. The only viable solution of course is a labor movement.

Thank you once again for proving my theory that Churchill is most likely a CIA agent.

He questined the Sandanistas? I think the Sandanistas were something on the whole positive but they werent perfect and I wouldnt doubt that the idegenous population did suffer under them (although I doubt it ws more than before them). Does this mean Churchill should be fired from his job as a professor of ethnic studies and we shouldnt defend him because of this disgareement?

Churchill also doesnt believe that 9/11 was an inside job. I'm sure that makes conspiracy minded people suspicious of him but it really just means hes not as crazy as people claim he is.

He does at times appear to be a straw man that the right can use to demonize the left, but once you actually listen to Churchill his Eichman comment wasnt what is seemed and he doesnt make a useful characture of a leftists since he is opposed to many view of other radicals.

The left just can't seem to handle any discussion/ we are supposed to all support Churchill or get deleted. It's happening.

The writer of this screed, Sid Jones, misdeploys the moniker 'ultra-leftist' to desribe Ward Churchill. Ultra-leftists are marxists of the Bordigist stripe. Churchill isn't a marxist.

I do agree, however, that radicals should give some thought before jumping to defend Churchill's statements.

Why are presumptive "leftists" ripping into Churchill? I understand his polemics are inflammatory in the extreme, but this is justified to some extent by the monumental boneheaded complacence he's trying to blow apart. Along the way, he raises points I would expect leftists (REAL ONES... ) to appreciate.

1) Americans are the 'Good Germans' of the twentieth century
Parallels between America now and Germany in the 1930s are legion. It's really fuckin scary. Why are Americans letting this happen? Don't they know better? They're letting it happen because they're severely brainwashed, but even more so because they're class accomplices. To a great extent, they've succumbed to the psychology of privilege. That is, they've become infantile degenerates inhabiting narcissistic wombs of privilege and crass materialism, and 9-11 whacked their cribs across the room. So they're hanging on wide-eyed now, terrified they might get tossed out into reality, and willing to sacrifice any amount of dignity instead. RATHER LIKE THE MUCH-REVILED GERMAN MIDDLE CLASS OF THE 1930s!!!! To which I say "go get 'em, Ward! Give 'em both barrels right in the brain."

2) Setting this 'working class victims' soapbox aside, the WTC WAS a pre-eminent symbol of U.S. global empire, and a great many people working in it DID deserve the "Little Eichmans" label. If you really think identifying with the <3,000 dead in that building is more important than examining the global-scale genocidal crimes orchestrated by the Little Eichmans (200 times as many deaths in Iraq ALONE over the past 15 years), then I'd have to say you clearly don't give a shit about the latter. The moral universalist position (versus the American exceptionalist bigot position) is to be way more pissed off about the larger death toll, and that's exactly where Ward is coming from.

This sappy thoughtlessness is somewhat forgiveable, I suppose, in people who've never seen the NYC elite first-hand and so don't understand the insane proportions of their greed, corruption, and classist arrogance. Does the term "investment banker" set off any alarms? It should. Where do you think they all live? There's a reason for that. The NYC elite are THE people chomping this planet down their infinitely greedy gullets, and have been for 100+ years. People elsewhere are figuring this out even if you can't.

3) I don't see anyone here addressing the key question WHY? why is Ward being dangled before you like a piece of flayed meat? He wrote 'roosting chickens,' what, 3-1/2 years ago? Were you bitching about it then? Are you bitching about it now just because it's being shoved in your face by Limbaugh and O'Reilly and all the other shill whores who just need a good fucking with bazookas? Why is that? Don't you have a brain? Are you incapable of analyzing the purpose these assholes serve, and that you're just playing into their hands? Maybe you're not really a "leftist" at all. Maybe you're just an egotist who thinks "leftist" equals "cool." Fine. Go hang out at the junior high and leave politics to serious people with strong clear free-thinking minds. Don't even vote. Everyone on earth will be far better off.

If your "leftist" status is something other than that of a posturing fraud, you need to quit licking your little baby wounds over 9-11 and get back to the infinitely more important business of global awareness, class critique, and addressing REAL root causes instead of these red herrings the Bullshit Box keeps puking at you. Why haven't you unloaded a .44 mag into that thing yet?

Another thing: Ward is, above all, an advocate for natives of the Western Hemisphere. This is why he condemned the Sandinistas for their treatment of the Miskito Indians. On balance, I don't agree with him on this point either, but that's why, and it's a consistent position for him. I do believe he is a man of principle.

Another important thing to understand is he's just boiling mad and venting. Yeah, yeah, it's counterproductive, yeah, mhm, uh-huh. Try to understand WHY. If you had a comprehensive grasp of Native American history (you don't; you only THINK you do) I solemnly promise you, you would understand why he's so angry and bitter. You'd be willing to overlook it and get to the valid points he makes, which is what you should do anyway. As someone who also writes about the REALITY of U.S. history, and who shares his frustration with this profoundly ignorant and self-centered culture, I sympathize with his hostility. He's not the only one with this viewpoint, he just brings to it his deservedly famous gift as a polemicist, and this makes him a prominent target.

It just saddens me to see "leftists" attacking Ward when they should recognize he's essentially on the same page, and when he's not maybe it's YOU that's not figuring something out. Perhaps you could focus all this combative energy on the REAL enemy. Doesn't it seem likely that Limbaugh and O'Reilly are just distracting you? Divide and conquer...

RE: "Another thing: Ward is, above all, an advocate for natives of the Western Hemisphere. This is why he condemned the Sandinistas for their treatment of the Miskito Indians. On balance, I don't agree with him on this point either, but that's why, and it's a consistent position for him. I do believe he is a man of principle."

Reality Check:

According to Vernon Bellecourt, a long time leader of the American Indian Movement, Churchill did a lot more than condemn or disagree with the Sandinistas.

Churchill was part of a counter-revolutionary effort led by Russell Means to undermine the work the Sandinistas were engaged in in the early 1980s to deal in a positive way with the indigenous peoples of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Bellecourt is justifiably pissed as AIM and their International Indian Treaty Council were working with the Sandinistas on the autonomy issue.

Means testified before Congress, asking for money for weapons, and made an ass of himself by allying with the CIA-funded contras against the Sandinista government. As a rabid anti-marxist anti-revolutionary Means played the familiar role of a scout for the cavalry (according to Dennis Banks, who also is critical of Churchill). Rather than work with the Sandinistas to work out a process of autonomy or sovereignty for the Miskitos and other indigenous groups, Means and Churchill chose to work with the CIA and the genocidal U.S. government. No wonder so many are suspicious of Churchill.

It is tragic that he is one of the most famous speakers and writers on Native issues as he discredits our cause in some ways with his past actions and suspect background.

Nonetheless, his right to speak out on the justice of roosting chickens, his academic freedom, his years of work exposing the government's attacks on Native Peoples, his dedication to the cause of freedom for Leonard Peltier - all need to be defended. He may have been a soldier of fortune at one time but his writing on COINTELPRO should dispel the notion that he's a CIA agent (unless you believe that he's trying to discredit the FBI in his writings in order to boost the CIA).

Defend Churchill's free speech rights but speak the truth.

I heard about Churchill and his support for the contras several weeks ago from UC Davis professor emeritus

The bottom line?

[Defend Churchill's free speech rights but speak the truth.]

While I agree with the broad contours of Churchill's evaluation of American foreign policy and its treatment of Native Americans, I disagree with his broad brush characterization of the people who worked in the WTC on 9/11 as "little Eichmans".

Some may have been, and, even today, one can encounter a Wall Streeter like Lawrence Kudlow on television and radio, performing like a little Goebbels in promoting Bush's wars in the Middle East.

Or, Jim Cramer, who, a year after 9/11, wrote a vitriolic column for theStreet.com, a column taken down within a day, about how we should indiscriminately revenge ourselves against Arabs, anticipating the Iraq war.

But, I have no doubt that the vast majority weren't, as John Ross noted when he tried to persuade his Mexican neighbors that a lot of service workers and immigrants of color were killed in the attack.

Just as with US air raids, cluster bombs, detentions and torture in Iraq, all kinds of people get indiscriminately subjected to the violence.

--Richard

I disgagree with the view that those in the WTC were "little Eichman" but when you really think about it that view does peferctly capture the reason the WTC was targetted (if the hatred was over US foreign policy it explains the reason that the WTC was ttacked twice when its not directly associated with US foreign policy). Ward was partly talking about the motivation for the attacks so you should take that into account when criticizing him for using those words.

I guess the main question I have of those attacking Ward is exactly what you are attacking. Are you attacking the way he says what he says or what he meant by what he says? I can see a real valid criticism of the way he says what he says but dont see much in his statements that really suggest a disagreement between you and him regarding the just of what he says. He is pretty good at using provocative language to say very little when you get into the actual substance. From what I can read into his words, the essay and book that have created so much controversy really are just arguing that the US has pissed people off for a variety of reasons and many blame all US citizens and expecially those who run US corporations. I dont see him directly saying that the WTC attacks were justified but instead see him trying explain the motivations of those behind the attacks.

In a comment above Socialist attacks Ward for blaming the workingclass in the WTC for US foreign policy. I dont think Ward does that ,but looking at public opinion surveys I would be curious to know how one can completely let the working-class off the hook when it is one of the most jingoistic segments of the US population. The reasons why the working-class tend to be more prone to supporting wars and fascism than other segements of the population is pretty well explained in Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" and isnt really in that much opposition to a Marxist analysis (Even though it is a view that certain segments of the population will act against their own economic interests).

[ . . . . . . From what I can read into his words, the essay and book that have created so much controversy really are just arguing that the US has pissed people off for a variety of reasons and many blame all US citizens and expecially those who run US corporations. I dont see him directly saying that the WTC attacks were justified but instead see him trying explain the motivations of those behind the attacks.

In a comment above Socialist attacks Ward for blaming the workingclass in the WTC for US foreign policy. I dont think Ward does that ,but looking at public opinion surveys I would be curious to know how one can completely let the working-class off the hook when it is one of the most jingoistic segments of the US population. The reasons why the working-class tend to be more prone to supporting wars and fascism than other segements of the population is pretty well explained in Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" and isnt really in that much opposition to a Marxist analysis (Even though it is a view that certain segments of the population will act against their own economic interests).]

I think Churchill goes beyond trying to explain the motivation for the attacks, and crosses the line into saying that the people killed in the WTC attacks were legitimate targets.

To the extent that, if you dropped a bomb in any major financial center in the US, you would probably randomly kill or wound some people directly responsible for US global military and economic policy, I would begrudgingly agree, but you would also kill many more people that are completely disengaged from these activities, which is no different than when a suicide bomber kills people in a market or the US bombs a neighborhood in Falluja

I also believe that Churchill ascribes another specific motivation for the attacks, beyond the history of American violence upon other cultures, that is not very plausible, and constitutes a projection of his view of the world upon the perpetrators. I'm engaging in a crude simplification here, but he writes at length about the attacks as an attempt to draw attention to past US atrocities as a precondition for insight and spiritual healing. A nice idea, certainly, but it has very little to do with al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism generally.

Your last point at the American "working class", whatever it is these days, is well taken, and I made a similar argument in response to an article posted about the Left and the alleged deficiencies of its identity politics, an article originally published in Maximum RockNRoll.

The European working class avidly supported imperialism during the last 19th Century, raising the question as to whether there is really a unity of purpose between the working classes of the mature industrial countries of "the West" (the US, Europe and Japan) and the working classes of the rest of world, as the working class of "the West" benefit in many indirect ways from the exploitation of the working class elsewhere, so support for the war, or at least, the imperialist aspect of it, isn't necessarily against their economic interests.

Or, if it is, it isn't readily apparent.

--Richard

.

<<I would be curious to know how one can completely let the working-class off the hook when it is one of the most jingoistic segments of the US population.>>

The working class comprises approximately 70% of the American population--in other words, it's not simply a "segment of the population."

I would like to see some evidence--empirical, not simply anecdotal--to support the assertion that workers are the most jingoistic members of our society.

I don't argue that there are no relative benefits to "having an American passport" which accrue to American workers as well, BUT i don't accept this facile argument that waged-slaves in the US gain in net terms from America's imperial policies. How have workers--waged and non-waged--benefited from the war in the middle east? How did American workers gain from the Vietnam War? In Central America?

Despite its "more radical than thou" air, the Churchill *pose* is at it's heart anti-radical because it implicitly posits that the only force that can do anything to overturn the present order is comprised of self-abnegating classless angels--in other words, we're shit out of luck is the message.

"I think Churchill goes beyond trying to explain the motivation for the attacks, and crosses the line into saying that the people killed in the WTC attacks were legitimate targets."
You may be right but can you find the quotes where he says that? Even a statement that if the US engages in the type foreign policy it does there are bound to be consequences and those pissed off by the US are not always going to distinguish the guilty from the innocent (just as the US does in its wars) isnt sating that the peopel deserved it but that by living in the US we should expect to be targets.

"but it has very little to do with al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism generally. "
What was the motivation for the attacks on the WTC. While the atack on the Pentagon fits into a simplistic view of Islamic fundamentalism the WTC was a symbol of US MNCs and as such there was something almost antiCapitalist in the fact that it was targetted twice. I tend to see Islamic fundamentalist as being similar to Christian fundamentalism in that it is a response to the alienation of modern Capitalism that appeals to poeple wore than socialism partly because of the lack of community based focus on Socialist groups that still put forth a view of the workingclass that resembels the early 1900s more than today. That doesnt mean I remotely like these groups but the explanation for them as comming in response to globalization and lack of community seems to be lacking from the normal "Marxist" analysis of why different fundamentalist movements have been growing lately.

"the WTC was attacked twice when its not directly associated with US foreign policy"

For at least 100 years now, "US foreign policy" and the global-conquest aspirations of US corporations (a.k.a. "globalization") have been essentially tied at the hip and can productively be thought of as one thing. The investment firms in the WTC, for one, were unquestionably participants in the latter. This is an organic vs linear argument. The linkage may not fall into the common conception of such things, but common conceptions are often highly manipulated -- or just plain dumb.

I highly recommend John Perkins' book 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman,' which exposes this organic connectivity in new ways, at least new to me. Perkins says the private sector has taken over a great deal of the dirty work since the '60s, when he first hired on with an international engineering firm (hooked up by the NSA, no less). Since they're basically exempt from public oversight, corporations have offered the CIA etc. an ideal way to place layers of deniability between itself and the unchanged mobster game of covert imperialism. Also, these agencies were trailblazers and mentors; their ideologies and methods were held up as models to US corporate culture, which has absorbed those lessons and then some. Nowadays, the US foreign policy machine just signs multi-million-dollar deals with private contractors, who go out rig elections and whack heads of state for them (e.g. Jaime Roldos of Ecuador). Reagan's gruesome spree in Central America was the last tango for the "glory days" veterans of the '50s and '60s. Of course, all that will probably change now that these goombahs don't have "their hands tied" anymore.

Aaron asked: "i don't accept this facile argument that waged-slaves in the US gain in net terms from America's imperial policies. How have workers--waged and non-waged--benefited from the war in the middle east? How did American workers gain from the Vietnam War? In Central America?"

The general populations of colonial powers are class beneficiaries of the colonial system. W.E.B. Dubois first articulated this about 90 years ago, though I don't remember the title of his analysis. This is actually one of the key reasons for colonialisms' attractiveness to elites. Without colonialism, they're trapped into the pattern of forcing the local peasants into the roll of rock-bottom drudges. The locals are then disabused of any silly ideas about class relationships, i.e. want to shoot the bums through the windows of their palaces. Keeping the public happy and stupid is mostly a matter of keeping their bellies full, and with colonialism, the elites can toss out a few crumbs of colonial booty in exchange for much less anxiety about rebellion. It creates a class buffer zone. With colonialism, the true bottom of the class pyramid is off in some hellhole overseas, where it's not a threat except to the overseer class THERE, while the local "bottom" (the "bottom" in the US, Europe, and Japan) is actually well up the food chain.

You do understand that the abundance around you is totally surreal, right? It's a product of colonialism. Our cost of energy is a product of colonialism! We think it's expensive, but it's not. As a percentage of median income, the cost of BTUs is tiny, far more favorable than in the 'Third World' (the TRUE bottom), and this ramifies across all consumer goods. This alone validates my argument. If you make smart decisions, and can shake off programmed insecurities, you'll find it's easy to have enough here while enjoying a great deal of leisure, regardless of connections, credentials, etc. That's totally alien to most of post-neolithic humanity. Go find a lucid 80-year-old to hang out with and ask them what their grandparents, the last of the agrarian poverty culture, were like. It's SO different now.

Back before the U.S. had its own colonial economy, there was far more class consciousness and revolutionary anger among U.S. industrial workers. Read Zinn. The robber barons were anxious about class insurrection all the time, and for good reason. Our vaunted "hard-won workers rights" are actually more a product of mature neocolonial economics. It's the deal they made so we'd stop taking communism seriously.

Of course the U.S. ruling class is now forgetting the lessons of its own history in its lust for more $billions$. Hey, their greed is of psychotic proportions, what can I say? It happens. That's okay, let 'em keep jabbing King Kong with a stick...

Ward C. claims in his book and speeches what is almost a tautology i.e. there are people who worked in the World Trade Center who were technicians of the functioning of the system which includes the functioning of the war machine, killing milllions and millions of people thruout the world and are analogous to what the technical functioning that Eichmann did to allow the Holocaust machinery to function. Read investment bankers, Read the CIA station that was in the building. Read others who help the war machine function. Just because you're part of the working class doesn't mean that you are innocent. The builders of the ovens in the concentration camps were working class as are the builders of military weapons in the U.S. They still deserve to be called Little Eichmanns.

Most of the secretaries, janitors, food service workers, firefighters, children, passers-by, etc had minimal or nothing to do with the functions of the system and the war machine and therefore are by definition and in Churchill's statements not "Little Eichmanns".

There are in between cases of course and they're not that relavent, because beyond this, Churchill stated that he was not trying to say anyone deserved to die. He was just trying to explain why others who he does not support ( "i have no love of any kind of fundamentalism"-from WC at the Anarchist Bookfair), would bomb the WTC, and the Pentagon and to make sense out of what the meida called "senseless". This theory (that the bombings were in response for what the U.S. did in the Middle East) is called "blowback" and many others including CIA analysts have stated this. They just didn't use as colorful or explosive language (or as good research) as Professor Churchill.

Professor Churchill must be supported against THESE attacks no matter what other criticisms we might have of him. Whether he is an Indian/Native American or not, i'll leave that to the Native Americans to hash out. They have been under attack by whites and others here for so long, that the least they should have the right to do themselves is decide who is and not part of their people. The only thing i will say about this is h that some of WC's detractors have as little "Indian blood" as WC.

On the Sandinista/Soldier of Fortune thing, could someone refer to a good source on this. What does Professor Churchill say when asked about this? He generally doesn't mince his words, Until i know about this i have no comment; so should everyone else.

Now as for "Socialist" calling him a CIA agent. You should know better. If you have evidence state it, if you don't, shut up. People who have differences of opinion should not stoop to name calling. It doesn't help the movement.

[I don't argue that there are no relative benefits to "having an American passport" which accrue to American workers as well, BUT i don't accept this facile argument that waged-slaves in the US gain in net terms from America's imperial policies. How have workers--waged and non-waged--benefited from the war in the middle east? How did American workers gain from the Vietnam War? In Central America?]

During Vietnam, the AFL CIO strongly supported the war because a lot of its members were working in the armaments and other related industries.

Currently, many of these people work for corporations in which they invest through their pension plans and other retirement alternatives.

If they are employed, they benefit from the purchases of goods manufactured and sold in the US at deflationary prices.

Of course, a lot have been pushed out of their jobs, but a lot haven't, and the emerging US service economy is effectively subsidized by low cost goods produced abroad by people working under horrible conditions.

Now, they might well experience an improvement if this system were replaced with a fairer alternative, but, then, again, maybe not, and I see no sign that workers themselves are willing to abandon the present system of exploitation of workers abroad.

[Despite its "more radical than thou" air, the Churchill *pose* is at it's heart anti-radical because it implicitly posits that the only force that can do anything to overturn the present order is comprised of self-abnegating classless angels--in other words, we're shit out of luck is the message.]

I think a more accurate description is that Churchill comes from an indigenous perspective (regardless of the credibility of his own background) that pronounces a plague on both capitalism and Marxism as alternative forms of Eurocentric domination.

I don't really agree, as suggested by my earlier comments about Churchill forcing a square peg into a round hole in regard to the victims of 9/11, and failing to recognize the cross-cultural relationship between the workers and financial services industry.

--Richard


add your comments

The "emerging service economy" you refer is one where approximately two out of three jobs created pay poverty wages (or close to) and few if any benefits. Whereas forty years ago GM was America's biggest employer, today Wal-Mart is--that says a lot.

It is true that the globalization of production has had something akin to a deflationary effect on the prices of consumer goods. But this "side" of American-led globalization doesn't only find its beneficiaries in America. Those goods are sold globally, after all.

But if we look at America over the course of the last thirty-plus years (1973 being the end of the post-WW2 boom), we see that real wages have fallen for workers here, despite the general decline in the price of consumer goods (and food, it should be said). Housing, health care, education, energy costs, and child care eat up far more of workers' pay-checks than they did thirty years ago, while the social wage has been hacked almost to death and the employment picture has become far more iniquitious.

The argument that the ruling class has "bought-off" the American working class with "imperial loot" may have contained some truth to it in the 50s and 60s, but I truly believe it is mis-leading and inaccurate today. Pointing to *relatively cheap* gadgets, furnished in the context of dramatically deteriorating conditions, hardly seems the stuff of a great buy-off.

I have to sign off here, but quickly: Just because most American workers aren't revolutionary doesn't prove that the system works *objectively* to their benefit. It's important not to mix apples and oranges...

I'm interested in continuing to pursue this discussion.

The slave-owner class is out to screw everyone as much as they possibly can, and they're screwing Americans more and more, no doubt. As in 'third-worldization.' They're clearly out to make a class colony of the whole planet, including here. Still, if you compare standard of living etc. here to most of the Third World, which is most of the world, there's just no comparison. We've slipped, yes, but it's still a hell of a long way to the bottom. Why do you think immigrants keep flooding into this country to take those Wal-Mart jobs, or worse? Cuz as much as it sucks shit it's still way better than anything back home. If not for the dynamic I mentioned in the last post, they wouldn't even bother, cuz the master class would be screwing everybody here just as deep as back there. They would absolutely be doing that to us if they thought they could. What I think they're really doing now is ratcheting the screwing up little by little to find the threshold of what we'll tolerate. They let us settle in and get real dumb for a good 25 years, then in the 70s they started this skulking program of finding our new limit. It's like the Keynesian economics of class rape.

Also, compare industrial conditions here in the 1880s (gruesome) to that of this heyday you're talking about, and it's more clear that they really did throw us a bone. One thing that's really slipped since then is motivation and organization in the working class. I'm not blaming the victim here, I'm just pointing out where the class pigs have created an opportunity and exploited it. 60+ years ago, the working class was totally into class analysis and workers' rights. Since then they've had their brains sucked out by television sets and are really fragmented, disorganized, apathetic, and many just have no idea how much they've already lost. I wouldn't describe the Middle Class this way, but then they're the ones who've REALLY been bought by the colonial enterprise. The middle class is the key political powerhouse. Let them get crazy about things, and they pull their power together and start busting heads. That's what happened in the '60s, which is the last time a big bone got tossed out (the 'Great Society'). The time before that was the 1930s -- another big bone (the New Deal). If the Middle Class doesn't get royally pissed though, if enough of them have been bought, this spells dark days for social change. The trick is buying enough of them. Privilege is intensely corrupting, 'conservative' being just a euphemism for corrupt, usually. So I think a decisive share of the middle class has been bought. Look at friggin NPR! This crowd is who their content's aimed at, and therefore it's exactly the corrupt classist wannabe fare they like to hear.

This explains a lot, I think. Our masters have figured out who they can fuck and who they need to buy, and they're doing both very surgically now

The Soldier of FOrtune thing

someone is demanding evidence, but that fact is not disputed. CHurchill admits openly that he worked for Robert K Brown but just lamely claims that he was "only [following orders]...in the graphics department.." y'know, helping the Mercenaries get that slick commericial look in their publication. That is little Eichmanism if there ever was such a thing...a simple google search will produce the evidence there is no dispute on the facts

(my 5 minute rebuttal to a weak argument on 'pacifism)
Your arguments are so full of holes I don't know where to begin. Have you read 'pacifism as pathology'? He never, in that book, or any subsequent essays or speeches says that non-violence is not viable or should not be practiced. What he does is deconstruct (with mixed
results) the liberal ideologies of politics from those in privilege in this country, those that can choose non-violence. Especially white, hetero, middle-class, male americans who when faced with difficult or dangerous struggles can fall back to the state or withdraw support from those affected and marginalized communities.

There are people and communities that are NOT able to choose non-violence or pacifism as a lifestyle, strategies or tactics. (A peace vigil with candles didn’t stop families from being brutally murdered in El Salvador at the hand of U.S. funded forces.)

If you can't draw the connections in those two towers that fell and some of the technocrats who benefited from the work inside then I would say come out from your cave. This doesn't imply that ALL the people in there were terrible people or even deserved to die. But he was making the point that in some ways we in the u.s. are all complicit to a degree in the oppression and suffering of
those outside the u.s. The argument doesn't say we should all be killed, but that we need to do two things. One is recognize that we all in the u.s. are complicit to the destruction of people and the planet to varying degrees , and two that some (in this case 'freedom fighters'/'terrorist'/'army')
from another country deemed the WTC a legitimate military target, much as your president Bill Clinton did when he bomb the aspirin factory in the 90's or your president Bush is doing when
he orders death in Iraq and Afghanistan now.

Churchill didn't say that his arguments or ideas were the only way. He simply and many times has illustrated that people, like you, with liberal politics should think about how you can and do sell out marginalized communities by not wanting to give up ANY of the privilege that you have been granted in this country of ours.

Your essays weak argument are ‘proof in the pudding’ of what you don't see, because it would require closer examination and a real challenge to your privilege and politics in this country.
When you pull that lever in the voting booth it helps no one but yourself (whether left or right).

All that said it doesn't mean, and I will stress this part, that it is not violence vs. non-violence.
That is a 'red herring' liberal/conservative argument. As Churchill has said over and over and I will reiterate. It takes ALL kinds of tactics and strategies to make changes in this world we live in. your lack of support for actions outside of your ‘comfortable zone’ are a disservice and dangerous to those who have no choices and for those of us who choose to use our privilege in many different ways of struggle.

The fact that you copyrighted your lame essay on an open publishing forum says something about your commitment to change. Continue on your path to be lulled in the democratic party and let those of us who want real change challenge those ideas and do our work without your hinderance.

scott

"One is recognize that we all in the u.s. are complicit to the destruction of people and the planet to varying degrees"

While its not exactly what Ward was arguing there is an element of the outrage that is confusing. People have misinterepreted what Ward said as blaming all those in the WTC towers and fidn such a view incomprehendable. Yet one hears people blame whole countries and peoples all the time when it comes to countries besides the US. When a suicide bombing happens one hears "those people do things like this" as if it were the whole people not individuals carrying out such actions. When Chirac disagreed with Bush's timing of the Iraq war the US right blamed the French people in general etc... If you look at any war between countries the desire to attack is almost always aimed equally at the governmemnt and people with the whole peopel being demonized not just the government. If one stated that those who carried out the WTC attack found those inside the tower guilty because of the actions of the US government, I dont think you woulld find anyone who would disgree. Yet somehow Ward has been put in a spotlight since people jump from something he said that almost amounts to just saying this (with a little bit of hypebolic talk of our own complicity in our governments actions) to seeing Ward as supportive of the attacks.