Ward of the State

Why the state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill

Michael C. Moynihan | August 1, 2007

"I mean, c'mon man. Do you know who Adolf Eichmann was?" Of course, I said. He plowed ahead anyway, offering a canned history of the Holocaust interspersed with a CliffsNotes recapitulation of Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Interrupting, I offered that I, too, had read Arendt's book. "Look, one guy [at a debate] insisted that he was the commandant of Auschwitz! I mean, most of these people, like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, haven't a clue who Eichmann was."

I was loath to agree with Ward Churchill, the now-infamous professor of ethnic studies who compared the victims of 9/11 to the Nazi "desk killer" Adolf Eichmann. He was probably right, though the point was irrelevant. Regardless of what Fox News anchors know of Holocaust historiography, his comparison remained grotesque. And while Hannity might not understand the supposed depth of Churchill's reference, the blow-dried cable host can, after a protracted phony war, finally claim victory.

Last week, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted 8-1 to dismiss Churchill for trading in "falsified... and fabricated history." And while the university had previously adjudicated in his favor, correctly ruling that his rambling Eichmann essay was protected speech, the more serious charges of academic misconduct stuck. It was, he explained, the attack dog "corporate media," led by people like O'Reilly, that forced his ouster.

The waves of protest that followed the media onslaught were understandable enough; a visceral reaction to an academic who cared more for ideological bomb-throwing than dispassionate scholarship. To Churchill, his professorship clearly functioned as a state-funded pulpit from which he could loudly denounce the evils of capitalism and expose the tawdry history of empire. To those unfamiliar with campus politics, his very employment was shocking. And one needn't be David Horowitz to take exception to his views.

But to the defenders of academic liberty, there was an issue of greater importance than an incoherent Nazi analogy. Following Churchill's termination, Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) co-founder Harvey Silvergate wrote dismissively of his academic work, but defended his right to engage in crassness and intellectual frivolity. The "little Eichmanns" essay, Silvergate said, was "the sort of nonsense for which post-modern leftist academics have become famous and (in some quarters) popular, and which makes a mockery of serious liberal criticism." But as FIRE pointed out, "From a legal standpoint, there can be little doubt that even Churchill's most controversial political statements are protected by the First Amendment."

(Churchill himself has decidedly mixed feelings on free speech. When attempting to get a Columbus Day celebration banned from the streets of Denver, he implausibly argued that the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution superseded the First Amendment, thus protecting Native Americans from "incitement to genocide" by those celebrating the holiday. "To argue you have a First Amendment right to engage in genocidal advocacy on Columbus Day," Churchill told the Boulder Campus Press, "is a violation of my Ninth Amendment right.")

According to Churchill, his dismissal had nothing to do with academic standards and everything to do with abridging his right to free speech. Because of the media attention, the 9/11 essay had become a public relations nightmare for the university, forcing them to sacrifice the loony professor: "The pope died—remember him?—and the paper had me on the front page. There were 400-odd significant news stories in the [Denver] metro area press—Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Boulder Camera—in barely 60 days. These reporters haven't a clue. This one journalist asked me how to spell Noam Chomsky's name. I mean, the guy had never even heard of him." To Churchill, the press was both clueless and malevolent—and, to paraphrase Chomsky, they were manufacturing public discontent. "[The Eichmann piece] was never meant for that audience," he told me.

To be sure, Churchill's strained moral equivalence between the stock broker's laptop—people, he told me, who were ultimately responsible for the deaths of Iraqi children—and the exterminationist's rubber-stamp precipitated the investigation of both his academic work and his claim to Native American ancestry. But regardless of what prompted the blogger and media investigations—and it was clearly ideological opposition—it forced a long overdue academic review of both his published work and his claims of American Indian ancestry, which helped him secure his position at the university. (Churchill told me that his supposed Native American heritage was a hindrance in the hiring process; a claim belied not only by his very hiring, but his appointment as department chair). Indeed, Churchill encouraged his opponents not only to read his books and articles, but to scrutinize them. As one academic told the Rocky Mountain News, he "put the noose around his own neck and urged somebody to kick the chair out from underneath him, so [the firing] was inevitable."

But Churchill is disingenuous (or naïve) when expressing surprise that politically-motivated hatchet men would scrutinize his academic record. He is, after all, a political activist both in his private time and in his classroom. Fair or not, insert yourself into a contentious political debate, and expect to be treated like a politician.

Just ask Michael Bellesiles, author of the discredited book Arming America. Those who criticized the integrity of Bellesiles's book—which argued that the conventional wisdom regarding America's colonial gun culture was a mere "folk tale"—did so, the author harrumphed, for ideological reasons. His critics were engaging in rank "McCarthyism" and, as Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm wrote in reason, Bellesiles complained that the book had been "subjected to unfair, unprecedented scrutiny." But an Emory University commission disagreed, ruling that the book was marred not only by errors and distortions, but also phantom (i.e. invented) evidence. After the report was made public, he was fired and previous sponsors, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, pulled support. Bellesiles denounced it as a "political decision that should send chills through academics everywhere and is clearly intended as a warning to any scholar who dares to work on a controversial topic."

Churchill and his legions of online supporters grumble that the investigations of his work began only after the Eichmann kerfuffle. This is true, but so what? If you think cubicle jockeys are fascists, or if your scientific research is underwritten by Phillip Morris, you should be ready to justify your work. And for those in the unenviable position of casting judgment on Churchill, this was the nut of the issue. Committee chairwoman Marianne Wesson, professor of law at CU, told me that "If colleges and universities are to maintain a community of scholars that polices itself and justifies public confidence in our system of higher education, there must be faculty-led processes for the investigation and adjudication of claims of misconduct."

And this was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face," calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up." R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost entirely from scratch."

Even after losing his job, and with an academic reputation in tatters, Churchill is unrepentant about the article that started it all. When I ask him if he has any regrets about the "little Eichmanns" piece, he doesn't pause: "The only thing I regret is that I didn't take a harder line."

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Comments

|8.1.07 @ 12:11PM|#

All I can say is good freakin riddance. The alum there at CU has to be glad this albatross has finally been taken from around their necks. This time I can say, "Good job Brownie" (Hank Brown). You, and the regents, came through for the good of academics.

|8.1.07 @ 12:14PM|#

Why are we still talking about this douche? No, seriously, why?

|8.1.07 @ 12:16PM|#

I applaud Mr. Moynihan on his restraint, as I would have been hard-pressed to refrain from punching Mr. Churchill in the cock.

|8.1.07 @ 12:26PM|#

Churchill is still wrong about Eichmann. He wasn't some guy who shuffled papers - he was a policy-maker and manager of the machinery of death.

Even if one posits that America's policy towards Iraq is the equivalent of the death camps, Eichmann isn't the equivalent of people working for financial firms in New York. He'd be the equivalent of the Chief of Staff for CentCom.

fyodor|8.1.07 @ 12:35PM|#

Moynihan visited Colorado and didn't drop in??

This article is all fine and good but I think we could stand a more in-depth parsing of what does or doesn't constitute a with-hunt in reaction to the expression controversial views (regardless of who does or doesn't find them valuable). One factor may be whether the university itself instigated the "investigation" into Churchill's (or whatever perpertrator of unpopular views) versus simply reacting to information brought by others. As long as what happened was the latter, and as long as the university is willing to look at any potentially damaging information about any professor brought to it by outsiders, Churchill doesn't have a leg to stand on. It's a little ridiculous to expect no one to try to "get you" when you say things that piss them off.

seer|8.1.07 @ 1:08PM|#

I stopped reading when he claimed that the 9th amendment somehow supersedes the first amendment right to celebrate Columbus Day.

|8.1.07 @ 1:11PM|#

Churchill is still wrong about Eichmann. He wasn't some guy who shuffled papers - he was a policy-maker and manager of the machinery of death.

Isn't that why they're "little Eichmanns" rather than "Eichmanns"? Not quite at the commandante's level, but still--alledgedly--banal, evil bureaucrats.

Primitivist author John Zerzan used the word first to refer to the Unabomber's victims.

|8.1.07 @ 1:25PM|#

"I was loath to agree with Ward Churchill, the now-infamous professor of ethnic studies who compared the victims of 9/11 to the Nazi "desk killer" Adolf Eichmann. He was probably right, though the point was irrelevant."

I had to read like like 5 times before the grammar clicked and I realized he was actually referencing something in the previous paragraph, not agreeing with the comparison.

|8.1.07 @ 1:28PM|#

I would have called them "tiny Elvises."

[Tiny Elvis]: How we doin' on that that PBJ, Sonny Red? Oh, an' have you killed all the Jews yet?
[Sonny Red]: TCB, Tiny E!

|8.1.07 @ 1:32PM|#

RC,

A lower-level bureaucrat doesn't just differ quantitatively from a policy-maker, but qualitatively.

The people in the WTC didn't play a smaller role in setting policy than Eichmann - they played no role at all.

Calling them "Eichmanns," and not just comparing them to camp guards or something, carries with it an element of power over the policy being criticized.

|8.1.07 @ 1:34PM|#

So if Moynihan really did chat with Churchill, why not post it in the form of an interview instead of a rehash of his various beefs and rationalizations for Churchill's obviously political firing? It would have been interesting to read Churchill state his case in his own words, but instead Moynihan gives us "I talked with Churchill; I won't tell you what he said, but boy was he full of crap."

But anyway, enough about Churchill's highly outrageous Eichmann comment. Let's get back to discussing health nazis and anti-smoking facists!

VM|8.1.07 @ 1:43PM|#

tsk tsk. Simply not in touch with REAL AMURIKANS.

*gets back to affixing Garfield suction cups to rear window of Crysler HUMUNGO SUV.

Very similar to Arkemphadius's Conundrum...

|8.1.07 @ 1:45PM|#

joe,

"[Hannah] Arendt concluded that, aside from a desire for improving his career, Eichmann showed no trace of antisemitism or psychological damage. She called him the embodiment of the "Banality of Evil," as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred." --Wikipedia

I think this quote gets to the essence of the analogy Churchill was going for. He wasn't talking about their power per se, but about their being ordinary, self-interested individuals willingly helping to cause genocide. The individual power they had doesn't seem relevant.

The obvious retort is that Churchill is a sick fuck. By comparing US foreign policy to Nazi genocide, he shows himself to be a dumb, mouth-breathing, quasi-fascist propagandist himself. Besides, Nazi analogies are so passe.

But, if he were right about US policy, I think the analogy would make sense.

|8.1.07 @ 1:52PM|#

Oh, and sorry to quote from Wikipedia. I'm pretty tired.

|8.1.07 @ 1:55PM|#

RC,

I still don't see how WTC office workers can be said to have any responsibility for the government's Iraq policy. Maybe if he'd limited his statement to the people in the Pentagon, I'd see the logic.

Royce|8.1.07 @ 2:00PM|#

The one guys says this should send chills through the acedemic community, it should. It should send chills down the spine of anyone plagiarizing, misrepresenting, and fabricating information in order to make a point they have preconceived. Everything he says would be fine (in the free speech sense) as long he had looked carefully at facts and research and presented it, and then came up with loony explanations for what the facts mean. If you make claims based upon a bunch of crap there are going to be other people in your field that are going to sniff it out. Everything in you research paper should be properly source for this reason, so that any qualified scholar can review it. This guy tried to pass off a lot of crap as true, and then get angry about WHY he was investigated. What kind of unbelievable egomaniac would feel that he is entitled to tell lies in scholarly papers, not be fact checked, and be able to keep his job? ESPECIALLY because he was saying things that pissed people off.

|8.1.07 @ 2:02PM|#

But, like, man, capitalism IS responsible for the government's Iraq policy. It, like, doesn't matter who's in the White House, man. The real decisions are still made on Wall Street, you know? Or in the WTC.

|8.1.07 @ 2:11PM|#

joe,

Yeah, I was actually thinking that through a little more. Even though, in a war, a country might target another's civilian infrastructrure, they don't (I think) target the civilians per se, even if a bunch of them die.

To argue that they're "little Eichmanns" who deserve it is just vindictive and grotesque. Eichmann himself would have been an appropriate target in war; the petty office workers under him would not have been.

Kinda funny. Churchill's analogy makes him sound curiously like Ayn Rand: "If we go to war with Russia, I hope the 'innocent' are destroyed along with the guilty. There aren't many innocent people there...."

Now that's a connection I didn't see coming.

lunchstealer|8.1.07 @ 3:07PM|#

joe, one assumes that he means that Wall Street was generically responsible for creating the ravenous consumer market that set the need for oil, and the pressure on Washington to stabilize the world's oil supply at any humanitarian cost, and that they bear more responsibility than [e-mail]

|8.1.07 @ 3:18PM|#

I think Ward Churchill sees "genocide" in everything.

lunchstealer|8.1.07 @ 3:39PM|#

Whatever it is I think I see becomes a genocide to me!

|8.1.07 @ 4:29PM|#

"or if your scientific research is underwritten by Phillip Morris, you should be ready to justify your work" - WTF
I guess it's OK that the Anti-Tobacco Industry's "research" is funded by the Big Pharma, marketers of over priced, ineffective Nicotine products?

|8.1.07 @ 4:48PM|#

Yeah, lunchstealer, probabably something like that.

lunchstealer|8.1.07 @ 5:36PM|#

You know, what makes the Chomsky/Churchill is that in an interconnected world, they are good at illustrating the connections from horrific events back down the chain. And in an interconnected world, that chain will always lead to some element of American government or American corporations. What happens then is they say "Aha, I've found the culprit!" And logically, you can't fault any single one of their steps (well, not Chomsky's anyway - Churchill seems to be way sloppier) so someone who's looking to have their eyes opened to some wider truth will latch on to this fairly uncritically.

The problem is that you could just as easily find links back to global communism, or to tribalism, or to Catholicism in most countries. Or anything else you wanted. The key to vilifying whatever you want to vilify, is to create a chain of causality that leads to your target, and stop there. You usually don't even have to claim that if you took that link out that the world would be better (a typically unfounded claim) becuase your audience will make that assumption, and not require any burdensome proof.

It's also true that anticapitalism will get you crazy laid.

|8.1.07 @ 10:38PM|#

What gets lost in all of this nonsense is the continuous and uncritical acceptance of American foreign policy over the past 75years. The overthrow of democratically elected governments is not something that Chomsky made up, its the truth and it strongly affects the way others in the world see us.

SxCx|8.2.07 @ 1:19AM|#

So is Ward Churchill a tax resister or a murderer? Does he eat Cheerios? Isn't General Mills a subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin?

|8.2.07 @ 4:17AM|#

"Even if one posits that America's policy towards Iraq is the equivalent of the death camps, Eichmann isn't the equivalent of people working for financial firms in New York. He'd be the equivalent of the Chief of Staff for CentCom."

Joe, I am puzzled as to what you are talking about. Who, but you, posited that "America's policy toward Iraq is the equivalent of the death camps..."? Are you getting that from the "laptops..." comment toward the end of the article?

|8.2.07 @ 4:27AM|#

"The overthrow of democratically elected governments is not something that Chomsky made up, its the truth and it strongly affects the way others in the world see us."

I presume that one of the overthrown governments you refer to is Iraq?

|8.2.07 @ 4:30AM|#

Joe,

Actually, I did not read Churchill's "Little Eichmann" babble. Is the "America's policy toward Iraq is the equivalent of the death camps..." comment taken from Churchill's article?

|8.2.07 @ 8:25AM|#

Honestly if you do not know the history of the United States intervention in Central and South America it is an amazingly shameful sequence of anti-democratic interventions, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Haiti, Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras etc. This is not even the tip of the iceberg however, Iran in 1953 with the overthrow of the elected leader has a lot to do with today and the monniker "the great white satan", turns out other people don't like having their elected leaders toppled by the CIA. Hmm..Go figure.

|8.2.07 @ 10:34AM|#

I like the comment about anti-capitalism relating to being "crazy laid". Humor is so tied to truth. Oh, I forgot, there is no truth.

What would have happened if Carter had supported the Shah and the Mullahs had been beaten back? Would we have a modern capitalistic/democratic aircraft carrier of a state in Iran today? Maybe!

Will Churchill win in court? All he has to do is argue that he was just fulfilling the mission statement of the Ethnic Studies Department - forgetting about the slight errors in scholarship. And since ES has nothing to do with scholarship anyway why should he be held to any standard other than the spout-off standard which he is obviously very good at. Also, the other profs in ES are still in place and they are doing basically what Churchill did though maybe not attracting the same attention. Finally, all his lawyer has to do is assemble a jury of crazies from Boulder and Churchill is home free.

So what if Churchill wins and continues to "teach" and thumb his nose at the academy? Does this force CU to take a look at what they have wrought in ES and all those other whacko "Studies" departments created for the sole purpose of political "activism"? I doubt it. CU has neither the inclination or the will to wipe this fraudulent cancer from the campus.

Snapple|8.2.07 @ 1:56PM|#

I have a comment about Mr. Moynihan's article and supporting documentation here.

http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2007/08/desk-killers.html

Mr. Moynihan's article makes some fine points, but I feel that Mr. Moynihan should have said more about Nazi Adolf Eichmann's roll in the Holocaust, since he admits that he shares Ward Churchill's undocumented opinion that Americans and FOX NEWS personalities are so ignorant about Eichmann's role in the Holocaust.

Mr. Moynihan might have made more of the fact that Churchill is the one who is ignorant about Eichmann's role in the Holocaust and once opined that "Eichmann primarily arranged train schedules." [video--see my link]

I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid! So Mr. Moynihan might have documented how the "scholar" Churchill actually minimizes the responsibility of Eichmann for the murder of Europe's Jews.

Churchill loves to blame the victims, if they are Americans. He also wrote that two FBI agents who were ambushed and murdered on the anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn died "Custer-like--in their self-made trap." Churchill disparaged these victims of terrorism in exactly the same way that he disparaged the 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns." I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid!

Mr. Moynihan wrote that Ward Churchill told him:

"Look, one guy...insisted that [Eichmann] was the commandant of Auschwitz! I mean, most of these people, like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, haven't a clue who Eichmann was."

Moynihan briefly dismissed Churchill's comparison of the 9-11 victims to Eichmann as "grotesque," but he didn't explain why this was a grotesque comparison; and he agreed with Churchill's undocumented claim that "most of these people like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, haven't a clue who Eichmann was."

Mr. Moynihan also doesn't seem to realize that Ward Churchill is the ignorant one who has minimized Eichmann's central role in the Holocaust. Ward Churchill actually told a female college student [video] that Eichmann "primarily arranged train schedules."

Mr. Moynihan wrote:

"I was loath to agree with Ward Churchill, the now-infamous professor of ethnic studies who compared the victims of 9/11 to the Nazi "desk killer" Adolf Eichmann. He was probably right, though the point was irrelevant. Regardless of what Fox News anchors know of Holocaust historiography, his comparison remained grotesque. And while Hannity might not understand the supposed depth of Churchill's reference, the blow-dried cable host can, after a protracted phony war, finally claim victory."

If Mr. Moynihan agrees with Churchill's undocumented claim that the public and FOX cable hosts don't know who Eichman was, why not educate FOX and the public instead of ambushing FOX NEWS and the public with the likes of Ward Churchill?

It was a cheap shot you shared with Wardo, Mr. Moynihan!

Criticize FOX NEWS for what they actually say that is ignorant, not for what Ward Churchill claims they are ignorant about!

Churchill did not document what Hannity or O'Reilly know about Eichmann, and Churchill showed his ignorance when he ridiculed the alleged remarks of an an unnamed member of the public who was not far wrong: True, Eichmann may not have been "the commandant of Auschwitz," but he was an administrator of Dachau.

I find the point about Eichmann being a "desk killer" very relevant to Churchill's case because Churchill has used his government teaching position to preach that Americans, their leaders, and their law enforcement officers deserve to be murdered.

To call Eichmann a "desk killer" is to trivialize his crimes. Eichmann was one of the man architects of the Holocaust. Does anyone call Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices mere "desk killers"? I don't think FOX NEWS ever said anything that stupid!

Churchill has even claimed that Eichmann wasn't accused of massacring Jews. Churchill said there was one charge that he killed someone but that the person who made the accusation wasn't credible. In fact, Eichmann was convicted on all counts for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Even Eichmann seems more honest than Ward Churchill and admitted at his own trial:

"Why me," [Eichmann] asked. "Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews."

Eichmann was executed because he was a high Nazi SS officer who organized the genocide of Europe's Jews. Nobody forced Eichmann to join the Nazi Party or to become the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel in the SS. Eichmann was an opportunist, not some reluctant policeman who found himself dragooned into arresting Jews. Churchill is repeating Eichmann's pathetic rationalization as historical truth. Eichmann was not some ordinary policeman who followed orders because he was afraid of being shot.

Churchill mocks a man who supposedly attended one of Churchill's talks and who incorrectly claimed that Eichmann was "the commandant at Auschwitz." This is actually not a very big mistake, because Eichmann was an administrator at Dachau; and he visited Auschwitz and involved himself in the decisions about the gas chambers at that huge death camp. He approved the use of Zyclon-B and witnessed Jews being murdered.

"Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Heydrich and Eichmann along with 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union...Eichmann took a keen interest in Auschwitz from its founding and visited there on numerous occasions. He helped Höss select the site for the gas chambers, approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process. [full text]

According to Wikipedia, Eichmann "was a high-ranking Nazi and SS Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Due to his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was tasked by Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to facilitate and manage the logistics of mass deportation to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe....In 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Eichmann returned to that country and submitted an application to join the active duty SS regiments. This was accepted, and in November of 1933, Eichmann was promoted to Scharführer and assigned to the administrative staff of the Dachau concentration camp....

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Jewish measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. To this Final Solution of the Jewish Question Eichmann was tasked as Transportation Administrator, which put him in charge of all the trains which would carry Jews to the Death Camps in the territory of occupied Poland...[I]n 1944, he was sent to Hungary [and] at once went to work deporting Jews and was able to send four hundred thousand Hungarians to their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers." [Full text]

I have posted an article about Churchill's previous minimization of Eichmann's crimes here [see link above for documentation]. Churchill is a moron to compare any of the people murdered by Al Qaeda to Eichmann.

In fact, the evil Churchill's September 2001 article "Some People Push Back," where he compares people murdered on 9-11 to Eichmann, has an apocryphal uncited quotation supposedly from the New York Times as well as really stupid errors of fact and chronology.

These errors were corrected when they were "quoted" by the Maoist MIM, although sometimes the MIM includes both the error and the correct information in the same article.[See link above]

If people wouldn't be so gullible and would just look up Ward Churchill's "facts," they would see that he is no scholar. It would be screamingly obvious that Wardo is a stupid, evil liar. I was surprised at first that anyone who has earned a Ph.D. could defend Wardo's writings which are really slander cloaked as "scholarship."

But then, even though I am sometimes described as a lunatic, I managed to remember that many of the people who attended the Wannsee Conference, where the "final solution" was plotted, had their doctorate degrees. I read that "The drafted document [of the Wannsee Conference] contained sixteen signatures from all the upper ministries of the German establishment. Of these sixteen signators, eight had PhD's."

Snapple|8.2.07 @ 2:11PM|#

Documentation for this post is here:

http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2006/09/doh-ward-churchill-tenured-plagiarist.html

There were a lot of really stupid errors of fact in Ward Churchill's 9-11 essay besides his Eichmann comment, but nobody noticed them except for the Maoist MIM which does nothing bu write about Ward Churchill.

The day after 9-11, Ward Churchill wrote:

"[F]ormer U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday... repeatedly denounced what was happening [UN sanctions against Iraq] as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halliday's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved."(1) [Ward Churchill "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens."]

In fact, that idiot Churchill is both fact and chronology-challenged.

Firstly, Madeline Albright made her remarks on Sixty Minutes, not Meet the Press. Secondly, she made her remarks in 1996, so she could not possibly have been responding to the remarks that Churchill attributes to Denis Halliday in 1998.

|8.2.07 @ 11:42PM|#

Let us remain vigilant. Let us not feel too relieved at Churchill's departure. We all know there are thousands of other academics within our institutions of "higher learning" who think just like him. He just happened to make the mistake of saying what they are thinking. And of course, since things got just a little too hot, he had to go, lest the light of truth exposing Churchill reflect upon them, exposing their own leftist (dare I say, to be more accurate, communist) sympathies.

Remain vigilant I say.