R.I.P Ward Churchill

Two things today. First, rest in peace, Ward Churchill, who did more than any other academic back in the day to open my eyes to the horror of the racist genocide and political repression that lay at the heart of United States history

This 1997 book was very important to me as I was extracting myself from the poisonous culture of bourgeois academia: https://citylights.com/city-lights-published/little-matter-of-genocide/

Ward Churchill was the victim of an egregious right-wing attack on intellectual and pedagogical freedom, an assault that cost him his tenured position in the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Ethnic Studies Department between March of 2005 and July of 2007. Sparked by FOX News and Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens, this neo-McCarthyite hit job was shamefully carried out by the University of Colorado and backed by reactionary judges who cancelled a Colorado jury’s ruling in favor of his reinstatement. The jury upheld Churchill’s lawsuit claiming that he had had been wrongly fired as retribution for his expression of politically unpopular views. The US Supreme Court refused to hear Churchill’s appeal in 2013.

For more details, see this excellent reflection by Eric Cheyfitz in CounterPunch: In Memoriam: Ward Churchill, 1947-2026

I commented as follows beneath liberal professor Stephen Zunes’ Meta post ripping Churchill for supposed academic misconduct and for defending the use of violence in response to genocide and imperialist criminality:

“No defender of academic freedom should be anything short of horrified and enraged by what the University of Colorado and its academic accomplices did to Churchill at the behest of Fatherland News thug Bill O'Reilly. His political writings and comments after 9/11 were not academic submissions or publications and the plagiarism charge against Churchill was not substantiated. Hate on the guy for his politics if you want (I don’t), but please acknowledge the chilling neo-McCarthyite repression he faced and the message it sent across academia.”

Hello?

Second, get a load of this published New York Times discussion between the establishment political commentators Robert Siegel (a retired radio personality), E.J. Dionne Jr. (a liberal Democratic author and Times opinion writer) and Kristen Soltis Anderson (a Republican pollster). Despite being titled “How are the Democrats’ Midterm Dreams Shaping Up?,” this published transcript manages to go more than 7,300 words without any of the participants being recorded as uttering a single solitary word about the many-sided, ongoing, and multi-jurisdictional Republi-fascist assault on what’s left of free and fair elections in the US or about the remarkable and persistent unpopularity of the Democratic Party. I’m not sure what world these big thinkers are living in but in the reality-based planet and country I try to inhabit, the Reich-most US major party is moving to steal the midterms and lock in fascist rule and the Dems are unwilling to mount anything close to the sort of struggle required to defeat fascism.

At some point in the discussion, Soltis-Anderson actually said this: “I don’t actually think Republicans have become more ideologically extreme in the Trump era…the ideological assertion that Republicans have moved to the right, I think, falls apart upon contact with what the actual Trump agenda has looked like.”

Yikes!

And Dionne actually said this: “The problem with the Republicans is — with some exceptions — they haven’t spoken up against what are true outrages: murders, literally murders, in the enforcement of immigration.”

Oh my: the problem with virulent, genocidally racist and xenophobically nationalist Amerikaner fascists is that they haven’t spoken up against virulent, genocidally racist, and xenophobically nationalist Amerikaner fascism.

You can’t make up shit like this.