Soccer Moms, Women in Black, and the Blanquist Demonology of Roosting Chix

Pacific Coast
North America

The die is cast. Indy media sites have rejected monolithic censorship. Criticism of Ward Churchill is accepted within left circles. That in itself is a momentous victory of the radical freedom embodied in the (((i))) concept. Nevertheless, the debate is highly contentious. On one side, WC has drawn sharp criticism from mature activists who were supporters of the Sandinistas. On the other side are activists who prefer to focus on his support of Miskito, who took up arms against the socialist government in Managua. Both sides agree, however, that Churchill has written a great number of articles and books, and it is criticism of those writings rather than a personal attack on the man which has gained currency at indymedia. The very existence of the debate is an escape from the insidious totalitarian temptation of the software: quick, easy deletion which becomes increasingly unaccountable and unpredictable. Hooray for Indymedia!

The purpose of this particular essay is to begin to deconstruct pitfalls of the so-called "9-11" essay “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” from an unapologetically critical position. Nothing herein should be construed to suggest that Churchill does not have a right to free speech or that he should be dismissed from his position in the university hiearchy. The sole purpose is to raise a red flag of warning against certain peculiarities of Churchill's writings which pose dangerous pitfalls to progressive praxis.


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Pitfall #1 : Allowing anger at U.S. foreign policy to eclipse perception of alliances and warp praxis into a form of vitriol directed to white middle class Americans, including pacifists and peace-keepers who disagree with black bloc tactics, and even may borders on a precursor to a form of “reverse” racism .If this occurs, it will not only deform praxis of its’ true believers, it will isolate them from non-violence activists and the vast majority of working people, who find 911 utterly abhorrent.

The writer's guidelines for the legendary Seattle publication "Eat the State" brooks no quarter with hackeneyed rhetoric or political jargon.
http://eatthestate.org/stock/guidelines.htm They note the fine line between being angry and being sarcastic and being abusive and counsel to avoid invective aimed at individuals. "Focus on their bad choices", they counsel, "not them as a person."

This critique does not cast Ward Churchill as a bad person, a good person, a demagogue, a martyr, a "poseur", or a hero. Labels, ad hominens and reification destroy the dialect. But we can, to use a despised “yuppie” bumper sticker slogan, Question Authority and look at the tendency of Churchill to argue in exactly those terms: labeling Americans as "Good Germans" may seem a harmless and appropriate metaphor. But once the dogs of ideological war are unleashed, he soon moves to characterizing even progressive activists as "putrid" and "nauseating". And from there, into a contrasting soft-pedaling of Mohammed Atta which the electoral left has no choice but to distance itself from.

Many readers are electoral absentionists, who believe that voting is a waste of time and could care less what the majority of the electorate thinks. But (((i))) does not require that anyone reject electoral politics. Jim McDermott is better than his opponents, yet he cannot be expected to endorse Roosting Chickens. But these considerations aside, the issue is not the implied scorn of electoral activism which is clearly between the lines of Churchill's essay. It is the implications his writing has for the goals, strategy and tactics of direct action - what are appropriate limits and what should be the relationship between affinity groups electing civil disobedience and organizers who turn out large numbers - often families - of protesters who wish to placard and petition and vigil.

Churchill argues clearly and convincingly that his view of the latter, those in the comfort zone who also prefer to spare the city thousands of dollars in property damage, is nothing short of a fundamental, visceral disdain that seethes and smokes with an animosity that is downright frightening to many people.

Sadly, in the same essay, the 911 hit squad is essentially praised for their "patience" and described as a "combat team" performing not terror but rather an "act of war". Anyone who believes that attacking unarmed civilians with boxcutters is some kind of warrior's deed rather than a grisly cowardly crime against humanity should not be surprised to be condemned in the terms which Churchill now finds Gov. Owen and the talk show slime balls.

Churchill and his supporters seem to be entrenching themselves into the position that his statements require no apology. That is their perogative, but they cannot by edict enforce that viewpoint on the rest of the left, and no amount of deletions or petty vilification will change the fact that there are huge numbers on the Left who find Churchill's statements to be an utter and complete embarassment which we may not recover from well beyond the 2006 elections. Indeed, Colorado Republicans appear poised to a dramatic victory in that election, structured around the ultra-left tunnel vision which appeals to no one but a small coterie of individuals who seem to have no perspective on what ordinary working people think about all this.


Pitfall #2 Allowing visceral anger ala Roosting Chickens to eclipse perception of the overall situation in the time one is situated, in favor of an ahistorical permanent Blanquist insurrectionism which is oblivious to the objective alignment of social forces.

Churchill writes from his gut, which would not be a bad thing, but he has such a lopsided analysis and so much animosity that the essay churns with facile generalizations about topics far too grave for that kind of flip essay. For instance, he makes no mention whatsoever of the role of the sanctions in suppressing Saddam Hussein’s known and documented pattern of producing – and using – chemical and biological weapons. The stated purpose of the sanctions was to prevent another Halabj, and not, as per Churchill’s smug formulation, to commit genocide.

If one follows Churchill in his style of analysis, one rapidly loses intelligibility to anyone who does not want immediate all out war in the streets. Agreed: insurrection is not a bad word. It is not only appropriate, it is a patriotic duty in many situations.

But following the categories of Churchill’s thought as set out in the Roosting Chickens essay – an irationalist emotionalism - one becomes so clouded with animosity loses the ability to think and determine whether or not one is in a concrete reality which warrants use of force, such as violent insurrection. The urge to refuse and resist is salutary, but it needs to be tempered with realism and a perception of the specific context. As Rosa Luxembourg counseled, when:

“…phenomena, which arose upon a concrete historical soil, are released from this connection, and converted into abstract patterns with general and absolute validity such a procedure is the greatest sin…”
ORGANISATIONAL QUESTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
http://flag.blackened.net/infohub/organise/content.php?article.238

To his readers, particularly when they refuse to distance themselves from and repudiate the Roosting Chickens mind set, the Time now is the Time to Seize the Time and – here’s the catch - that will be true of any time and all time forever without end.

In the old days, it was called Blanquism, after Louis-Auguste Blanqui http://www.politicsprofessor.com/politicaltheorists/louis-auguste-blanqui.php

Pitfall #3 Giving Peace a Chance is ruled out by the tone of the article, to the root of one’s being

To reverse Churchill’s own formulation, when and where, exactly, are we ever to arrive at peace?

The Churchill of Roosting Chickens seems to be a man who is first and foremost not at peace with himself and his own inner demons. Anger and perhaps even animosity are understandable and human, but only he and his gods can know whether they have consumed his soul.

His state of mind when writing that essay can be understood, but, mercifully, one would hope, not mirrored. We can only hope that he and his followers will take their exculpatory fig leaf – that it was written in the “confusion” of post 911 – and repudiate the essay once and for all so that future generations will never take his writing for a justification of terrorist violence.

Pitfall #4 – Placing relentless pressure on leftists who are uncomfortable with Ward’s attack on them to step back and let the State do what it will, or even be forced to centrist or right-of-center organizations, by default.


Comrades can at this timevigorously disagree with the pro-Churchill crowd and still be leftists in good standing: they can brick the local Starbucks if they dare; they can spray paint graffiti; they can try to get Jeff Leurs out; they can tree sit. Ward Churchill notwithstanding, I venture to say they can still “sign-wave”, petition and vigil. Although Ward seems to think that makes them useless vanilla shirkers, anyone who demonstrated in the smaller weekly actions knows that facing down a crowd of jeering counter-demonstrators is not the bowl of cherries he seems to think it is. Indeed, a member of Portland Peaceful Response was stabbed at one of the Friday vigils.

All I ask is that far, far to the left of the spectrum, there be a clear statement to the world that the left does not believe in hurting humans or animals or any sentient being except in unavoidable self-defense from immediate imminent threat – the same thing I ask of Tony Blair and George Bush.

Pitfall #4- Forcing (((i))) participants and others to either support Churchill or get lost is tantamount to abandoning the field of American public opinion to the LGFers and the Freepers and followers of Bill O’Reilley, because most working people in the English speaking world find Churchill’s views anathema.

I also hope that the Democratic Party is not stigmatized, through this matter, as the party of apologia for Mohammed Atta. If that occurs, we can look forward to the abomination of a President Dick Cheney 2008-2016, or worse. Can we please have a little common sense? And all I ask of Ward and his followers is to say, yeah, that article was a real goof. Let’s not repeat the Ralph Nader spoiler effect, this time three years ahead of time, and split the left right in two before we even have a chance to fight back in 2006!

Conclusion

Unfortunately, those who see supporting Churchill as some kind of Holy See won’t repudiate the essay because they cling to the notion that it is in all important respects true and correct. Intellectually they cling to the fiction that the level of collateral damage at the WTC is “the same” as the levels tolerated by, say, General Meyers and Donald Rumsfeld. But neither Churchill nor his followers back that with facts, and even if they could demonstrate similar ratios of civilian to military casualties, two wrongs don’t make a right. Sadly, fumbling attempts to do just that – justify WTC as “acceptable collateral damage” fail, pathetically, by equating Cantor-Fitzgerald employees to, well, Eichmann. To equate bond traders to Einsatzgruppen Schutstaffel betrays ignorance of both history and the nature of what it is that bond traders actually do.

Bond traders can make a great deal of money but their jobs are stifling, high pressure lives talking about numbers. Are they privileged? Yes. Do they make more than I make? Yes. But so do tenured university professors. I envy neither. They remind me of Richard Corey, the song immortalized by Simon & Garfunkel:

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace;
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.


The pain of the family of those Cantor Fitzgerald workers – and those who reluctantly allowed their children to fight and die in Blair’s war – is no more and no less than the pain of those Iraqi and Afghani’s who lost beloved family members.
I call upon the followers of Ward Churchill and his followers to acknowledge that the pain of war knows no race, no ethnicity, and no nation. We all cry tears of water and salt, we all bleed red blood, we all pray to a blue sky.

I call upon Churchill and his admirers to choose their words carefully so as not to become an albatross around the neck of the left, progressives and yes, the pacifists who are now acting in his defense . I doubt that Ward will heed this call and backtrack anytime soon, but I look forward to an older, mellower Ward Churchill looking back, after a long and productive career, and perhaps stating frankly that Roosting Chickens is not characteristic of his matured viewpoint and not anything he would support going forward.

At this time, no one profits more from Ward’s obstinate self-righteousness than the war mongers of the paranoid and crazed right wing. It is his right to stick to his guns, and I respect that according to his tactical analysis it is the thing to do. Perhaps that is so, but that does not mean that we have to enforce passive acceptance of every aspect of the doctrine, the tone, and the dark affect of Justice of Roosting Chickens.

Neverthess, if Ward were to recant, those who oppose the new wave of McCarthyism will be able to carry our message into the community and actually win support.It is only when it is not only possible, but typical, to defend Ward Churchill in the barber shops, the pool halls, the taverns, the biker hangouts, PTA meetings and at the corner stores that he will be redeemed, and in this matter he is the one who ultimately controls his Fate.

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Posted by: Info at Apr 14, 2005 17:27

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