Outlaw History #37

I agree with Ward Churchill when he observes that “we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.”

I agree with this statement, and with almost everything else Churchill says about 9/11. He is right about 9/11. When you push people, and push them and push them, as the Americans and Europeans have done with the Arabs in the Middle East, the day will come when “they will push back.” Hello 9/11?

So why did he make such an egregious blunder as writing that the folk at the World Trade Towers, intentionally slaughtered by Arab fanatics, somehow deserved it because they were “little Eichmanns,” passing their time “arranging power lunches and stock transactions” when they should have been paying attention to the US sanctions against Iraq which were causing half a million children to die?

I believe he made this “error” because Ward Churchill is an old fashioned, left-wing, anti-Fascist. He believes in the “unique monstrosity” of the Germans (read: “Nazis”). In American culture, outside the fringe left, the word “fascist” doesn't carry much weight. “Fascist” is not media-effective. “Nazi” is.

We've all seen the movies. We have all followed the career of Stephen (“Schindler's List”) Spielberg, so we have the real skinny on World War II. During WWII it was not the fascists who were the problem, but the Nazis. Those devil-Nazis were everywhere, up to everything, and it took the whole world to bring them down.

“Little Eichmanns” then is a coded reference to “Nazis.” Churchill compared the folk working at the Trade Towers, “arranging power lunches” in order to make a buck, as Nazis. Compared them with those who allegedly had a program to “exterminate” all the Jews of Europe, and then all the Jews in the world. After which they would exterminate all the Slavs in the world. After which they would actually get down to business.

Churchill is a mixed bag, like so many of us. He exposes American imperialism with a forthrightness that makes Republicans and Democrats edgy and angry. He is a True Believer in the Jewish Holocaust story, which is the conventional academic pose, but at the same time argues that the “Jewish” holocaust was one of many and was not “unique.” Those who argue that no other “genocide” was in the same league with the Jewish one do so for their own profit.

Churchill discusses these two matters – the Jewish Holocaust story, and the exploitation of the Jewish Holocaust story for profit – in an 11,000-word essay titled “Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context.” He is refreshingly forthright in his conventional perspective on the matter.

“Of all the intellectual monstrosities arising during the course of the late 20th century, one of the most vicious and factually indefensible has been the 'school of historical revisionism' known as 'Holocaust denial.'”

In the interest of revealing what is most vicious and indefensible about my person, I will confess here that I am one of those who believes that the German “gas chamber” story was an invention, that it was the first great “weapons of mass destruction” fraud, and that it was institutionalized by the same folk who invented the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction fraud – the US Government, with the excited encouragement of those who can now be identified as “Israeli-Firsters.”

While this is not a subject that can be discussed in polite society in America or Europe, or Israel, Holocaust revisionism is widely discussed throughout the Arab world. Arabs appear to be of the view that the Jewish Holocaust question should be examined in the routine manner that every other historical question is examined. The new Palestinian leader, Abu Abbas, is a Holocaust revisionist.

Ward Churchill mentions my name in his 11,000-word “Assaults on Truth and Memory.” The first section of the essay is a fawning discourse on Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust. By coincidence, Lipstadt devotes a full chapter in her book to my struggle to encourage an open debate, on campus, about the Holocaust question. The professors think that is carrying intellectual freedom much too far. Where are the Arabs in America when you really need them?

Churchill has already lost his chairmanship of the CU Ethnic Studies Department, and taken a pay cut of about $18,000, because he voiced a controversial idea. Now Governor Bill Owens and his gang want to see him fired from his teaching job at CU. Churchill is not cowed. He told The Denver Post his job is protected by the university's guarantee of academic freedom.

“This is exactly what I'm protected from – an attempt to take my job on the basis of a difference of opinion on a burning issue.”

While Churchill is a True Believer in the Jewish Holocaust story, he knows nothing whatever about the gas chamber fraud. He just goes along with his “teacher,” Deborah Lipstadt.” Ten years ago Lipstadt was already ten years behind the curve. But she has a very interesting point of view with regard to Ward Churchill's right to express controversial views on “burning issues.”

Here is how Lipstadt thinks about “light of day,” that is, the academic ideal of intellectual freedom, open debate, and a free press:

“It is naïve to believe that 'light of day' can dispel lies, especially when they play on familiar stereotypes. Victims of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and a host of other prejudices know of light's limited ability to discredit falsehood.”

I ask very simply, what does Lipstadt believe will dispel lies and discredit falsehood? Night? How many victims of racism, sexism, and antisemitism speak against light and in favor of suppression, censorship, and the threat of prison?

Does Ward Churchill believe that intellectual freedom is there for all of us, or for some of us? For those who believe that it is inevitable that Arabs are going to continue “pushing back,” and for those of us who believe that the gas chamber fraud is at the heart of what “morally justifies” Israeli and US policies in the Arab world?