Letter from Deric Pamp
Free Speech – August 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
I have been struggling with my harsh opinion of Ward Churchill [who spoke in Salida on June 5]. My reaction is not just to his “little Eichmanns” comment about the 9/11 victims, but to his whole, posturing schtik: the cowboy boots and all-black outfit that makes him look like an entertainer like Johnny Cash, the raised fist in victory like Huey Newton despite his upper middle class life, his advocacy that is so thinly disguised as scholarship, and since his visit to Salida, his intellectually dishonest defense of his record. He’s a Vietnam vet, and therefore he’s my brother. He is speaking out against the ruling oligarchy, and I am a First Amendment zealot. I should like him but in fact, from top to bottom, front to back, Churchill sets my teeth on edge.
One difficulty is that I regard most highly those who recognize that even when they disagree fundamentally, the people on the other side of an issue often have a reasonable basis for at least some of their ideas. Churchill, however, consistently fails to recognize that there are two sides to the issues in which he is interested. This failing is especially distressing in a professor – a person who, in theory, works in the wonderful Marketplace of Ideas that a great university should be. Serious people see shades of gray in many issues, but Churchill thinks in black and white.
At the same time, he seems always to demonize his opponents, even to dehumanize them. He thinks the capitalist system oppresses people in the Third World (a conclusion that could be discussed) so people working in the system, like stock brokers in the World Trade Center, are “little Eichmanns” who deserve, or at least should not be surprised to receive, a fiery death. That is intellectual laziness, since many of those who died were several steps removed from the international system he hates (cops, firefighters, building maintenance workers). Worse, it shows that Churchill does not understand, or perhaps does not care, that his opponents are people, too. They have dreams and fears, spouses and parents and children. When he likens them to an emotionless war criminal who purposely enabled the (real) Nazi attempt to destroy a race – I’d use the word “genocide” but the sloppy rhetoric of people like Churchill has debased the value of that terrible word – he denies them all respect. The wors
Perhaps the primary reason I think so little of Churchill is that he is a flat-out hypocrite. A week prior to the explosion of controversy after his “little Eichmanns” comment was unearthed, he and several American Indian Movement members were found not guilty by a court in Denver. They had been on trial for disrupting the Columbus Day parade the year before. Native Americans have a legitimate beef with America for how they have been treated, but Italian Americans have a right to march in a parade to honor a native son who did a brave and unusual thing, way back at the end of the Middle Ages. Churchill’s disrupting the parade was an attempt to deny free speech to those who wanted to march. After his acquittal (in a legal system he denigrates), he went on record as saying that the Columbus Day parade was “hate speech” and that the government has — wait for it — an affirmative duty to “suppress” that kind of speech.
Whoof. That’s quite a statement. It made me remember his name. I thought at the time that Churchill was just another academic fool who did not understand the real world or the First Amendment. If you haven’t been on campus for a while, “hate speech” is a term now found in some college codes of conduct, which outlaw the use by members of the academic community of racial slurs and similar unkind statements.
The problem, of course, is that the First Amendment does not make an exception for statements which make other people unhappy. The First Amendment requires instead that people be free to say even those things that upset other folks, such as using the “n” word for an African American, or marching to honor Columbus — or calling victims of terror bombings “little Eichmanns.”
But now Churchill sees himself as the poster boy for First Amendment freedoms and wraps himself in the Constitution. The rights and protection which he would deny to those who want to march in Denver on Columbus Day, he is pleased to apply to himself, to ensure that he can say whatever he wants, no matter how hateful. Hypocrisy of that unalloyed purity is rare.
As much as I dislike and distrust the man, I will defend Churchill’s right to say whatever he wants, and not to lose his job for saying it. But I put Ward Churchill in the same league as Larry Flint, the publisher of pornographic Hustler magazine: odious they may be, but as Americans they have a right to say what they want. Just don’t ask me to think of them as heroes in the ongoing effort to defend the First Amendment.
Deric Pamp
Salida
