I haven’t read Ward Churchill’s essay yet, but I will. Thank you, Bill O’Reilly.
In O’Reilly’s recently published column in The Herald (“Fanatical faculty floods our colleges, assailing America”), he chides Churchill’s characterization of bureaucratic complicity (“little Eichmanns”) and then counters by characterizing Churchill’s tenured teaching position as creating fanatics (“little Ayatollahs”).
In both cases these characterizations have distorted and over-simplified reality, but they have also illuminated by presenting real complexities and paradoxes.
It is easy to examine others. For example, how and why did the Holocaust occur in Germany and Europe seems an important and yet safe topic. A side discovery might be the uncomfortable similarities between (Godly) American Manifest Destiny and (evil Nazi) German quest for Lebensraum (living space). Both boil down to land grabbing by so-called Christians engaging in varying degrees of genocide. Ethnic cleansing is by no means exclusive to a particular place, people, religion or time. In America it took a few centuries, much of it under a Constitution, president, Congress and consenting citizenry.
Of the few articles I have read by Churchill, I think he provides a biased, yet invaluable, point of view. He pulls scabs off of the American collective memory and it makes the ruling status quo howl. The louder the holler the more we pay attention. All bureaucrats are not necessarily equivalent to death camp administrators, but we can ask nonetheless: how complicit are they? How complicit are we all?
Since Churchill’s statement our government has needlessly invaded Iraq, killed thousands and sanctioned torture. But we say, “Hey, it’s not my fault, God said to.”
O’Reilly’s loud howls against inflammatory language are delivered with patriotic heel clicks. The intent is to censor and intimidate, to select and determine who can express outrage at hypocrisy. You should think and feel “Heil,” but don’t dare say “Heil.”
Wayne Evans
Bothell
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