Chuckie Watch 85: Ole Chuckie shore is smarter than them professers

Chuckie's been readin' the Drudge Report or rightie blogs, it seems. Because Chuckie's done come across a Statement of Stupidity 01/31/05 that's been making the rounds in Wingnutville.

And Chuckie don't like it.

The Evil Person in question is Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He's a Native American advocate and apparently likes to be provocative.

Chuckie fans know that one of Chuckie's favorite sayings is, "The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist." This is a takeoff on the American frontier saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." So now Chuckie's found hisself an Evil Injun who also says nice things about The Terrorists. Well, sort of.

I'll say more about what supposedly got Chuckie going. But here's what Chuckie has to say about his Evil Injun:

I don’t know whether you’re an acid drop out or just a natural born idiot Mr. Churchill but it makes no difference. In my book you are a ball of pus who doesn’t deserve to enjoy the free speech that Al Qaida so desperately wants to take away from us.

If fact, if I had my way you would be taken to Iraq and dumped into a back alley in Baghdad at midnight. There you would be able to explain your pro terrorist stand to a real live terrorist.

[Various fantasies follow about ways the Evil Injun could be dismembered.]

Do you follow Marx or is it Mao now?

You’re a bottom feeder ward, a scum sucker and an unrealistic fugitive from the Sixties, a pathetic, anti-American pig who lives in La La Land along with others of your ilk who don’t even deserve to breath the same air as the heroes who died on 9-11.

Why don’t you crawl back in your hole with the rest of the vermin and pull the opening in after you.

Can't you just feel the Christian love radiating from ole Chuckie?

So Chuckie's on a roll. In fact, he's on such a roll that he forgot he was supposed to be vague and actually told us who he was talking about! And it at least seems to be a real person.

Before I describe more about the offender, I should note that the article that Chuckie is frothing at the mouth about came out soon after the 9/11 attacks. That would be 3 years ago, give-or-take. Gee, things must be slow in ChuckieLand and adjacent districts if all they can find to get rip-roaring righteous about is some obscure 3-year-old pamphlet.

What did the professor say?

Since even sweet, gentle Christians like Chuckie are fantazing about horrible deaths for the guy, I should say that I don't have a definitive copy of the article. Here are excerpts from a version of the offending article, from a Web site called Green Anarchy. This article from the Rocky Mountain News was one to which Drudge was linking on Tuesday: CU prof's essay provokes dispute by John Ensslin Rocky Mountain News 01/27/05. Snippets of the article are quoted there:

Churchill's essay argues that the Sept. 11 attacks were in retaliation for the Iraqi children killed in a 1991 U.S. bombing raid and by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations following the Persian Gulf War.

The essay contends the hijackers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 were "combat teams," not terrorists.

It states: "The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course."

The essay maintains that the people killed inside the Pentagon were "military targets."

"As for those in the World Trade Center," the essay said, "well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."

The essay goes on to describe the victims as "little Eichmanns," referring to Adolph Eichmann, who executed Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.

Okay, that's pretty nasty, all right. And the rightwingers, always eager to find other Americans to hate, seem to have a special knack of dredging up questionable comments by academics that most people have never heard of and whose influence on the political debate is effectively nonexistent.

If the Green Anarchy text is the genuine article, then I would say the essay reads like stock radical (rightwing or leftwing) anti-imperialist rhetoric. It seems to be pretty much devoid of actual ideas, meant more to provoke than inform. An article with his byline at Z Magazine caught my eye: Holocaust Denial in Context (undated, but apparently from Dec 1996). The first part reads like a standard review of that dubious field, which he describes in the first sentence as "vicious and factually indefensible."

But by the end, he's arguing like a rightwing anti-Semite. For instance, he writes:

Stripped of the veneer of falsehood and invention with which such propagandists [he means critics of the Holocaust deniers here] have larded it, the experience of the Jewish people under nazism is revealed as being unique only in the sense that all such phenomena exhibit [unique] characteristics. Genocide, as the nazis practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by Jews, nor were the nazis singularly guilty of its practice." In attempting to make it appear otherwise--and thus to claim the privileged status attending and "unparalleled" victimization peddled as being transcendently their own ("accumulating moral capital," as exclusivist Edward Alexander has unabashedly put it) proponents of uniqueness have engaged in holocaust denial on the grand scale, not only with respect to the Armenians, Ukrainians and Cambodians, but asregards scores of other instances of genocide, both historical and contemporary.

Now, I'm guessing that for most American readers, this passage may sound contorted, but it doesn't just scream out "rightwing Jew-hater." I won't even try to explain the bizarre twists and turns of how he gets to that point, except to say it's based on a very bad interpretation of a set of polemics over the Holocaust in German in the late 1980s known as the Historikerstreit. One thing that emerged from that exchange was a conventional wisdom in German politics that the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust should be acknowledged.

That was so much so that the first conservative (Christian Democratic) candidate in the 1994 presidential election in Germany had to resign as a candidate after he made a public remark that was very similar to Ward Churchill's comment that the Holocaust was "unique only in the sense that all such phenomena exhibit [unique] characteristics." And since his essay shows that he is very familiar with the Historikerstreit, I have to think he knows that he's using the words of those who tried to minimize the crimes of the Nazis in that exchange.

(Yehuda Bauer, one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust and one of those specifically criticized by Ward Churchill, devotes a chapter of his Rethinking the Holocaust [2001] to the "uniqueness" issue. Robert Wistrich also discusses the relevant issues in the final chapter of Hitler and the Holocaust [2001]).

Of course, Chuckie thinks the guy must be a Marxist or a Maoist and also "an unrealistic fugitive from the Sixties." But, since Chuckie wouldn't know a Marxist if one came up and bit him on the leg, I doubt it would be possible to explain to Chuckie that the guy's probably a raving rightwinger. I mean, you would have to explain the whole business about how ethnic-nationalist intellectuals often wind up with with reactionary ideas and ... No, no, that wouldn't process for Chuckie. Anything more than two-syllable words, e.g., "scumbag", would just be too demanding for Chuckie.

Do you think Chuckie knows that a Maoist is a type of Marxist? Oh, the mysteries of Chuckie Thought!

Tags: charlie daniels, ward churchill