The following articles taken together are a sad commentary on the extent to which authoritarianism continues to extend its hold over Republican Party thinking these days. Josh Marshall reports (02/07/05) on how the party is taking "working the ref" to a new level. They have their lawyers ("trial lawyers"?) threatening legal action to stop MoveOn.org from criticizing Dear Leader's Social Security phase-out proposal.
For decades now, the Republicans have railed about the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! The result has been that reporters now bend over backward to avoid accusations of "liberal bias." All the while, we have more and more cable and radio outlets with conservatives screaming, "Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!"
Marshall points us to a story on how the Reps have their lawyers ("trial lawyers"?) threatening legal action to stop MoveOn.org from criticizing Dear Leader's Social Security phase-out proposal.
Combine that with Joe Conason's look at Totalitarian Scribblers Salon 01/27/05, which analyzes the payola-to-pundits scandal, and with this reminder of past misdeeds from Eric Alterman in his 02/07/05 blog post (scroll down to "Here is another figment").
Together, they give a pretty good sense that the Republican hardliners won't be satisfied until every news outlet is a clone of party-line Fox News, all of them blaring, "Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!"
To quote Conason:
It is remarkable that Williams and Gallagher, who claim to understand why democracy and freedom are superior to tyranny, don't fully understand why pundit payola is so repugnant. American journalists don't take money from the politicians they cover because we don't live in a totalitarian regime where state-subsidized scribblers are expected to glorify the Beloved Leader.
Yet that's essentially what Williams and Gallagher did. While quietly taking money from the Bush administration, they promoted the president and his party, as well as his policies, while denigrating the opposition. Their misconduct gives off a nauseating whiff of totalitarianism that should outrage any honest conservative.
The Ward Churchill flap
For some reason, conservatives for decades have nursed the notion that American colleges and universities are crawling with Marxist professors. Anyone half-familiar with US universities and not totally spaced out on Oxycontin knows what a joke that is!
But Ward Churchill, the guy ole Chuckie was grumping about the other day, has become a poster boy for the rightwingers of what they would like to think liberals and "the Left" are about. This is related to the press issues I just mentioned, and I'll get to that.
James Wolcott, in the process of sending up Signal Flares 02/07/05, points us to this long and thoughtful post by Digby on W Churchill: Witnessing History 02/06/05. Digby writes with weary irony:
I realize that we soulless, decaying leftists are supposed to step up and repudiate him (or maybe tie him up and throw him in water to see if he floats) but I'm just too tired. Since I'd never heard of the guy before the right raised him to the status of leftwing icon I don't really feel like I have much of a stake in his allegedly treasonous three year old book. Anyway, I'm still busy disavowing Jane Fonda and and Joseph Stalin, my personal role models.
This makes me think that it would probably be a pretty painful thing to hear today's Republican zealots try to describe just what was wrong with Stalin. Most of them would probably make him sound like Bill Clinton with a moustache. But I digress.
Wolcott has a few thoughts himself. In the following quote, I should explain that some rightwingers have decided that the film by director Clint Eastwood, former Republican elected official, Million Dollar Baby, is somehow Patriotically Incorrect or otherwise sinful, I forget just how. Maybe there was a picture of Spongebob Squarepants in there somewhere that I just didn't catch. Also the Michael Medved he mentions is a former liberal who know goes around endlessly repenting for his blindness and general mistakenness during his much-regretted liberal years.
If there's anything positive to be gleaned from the Ward Churchill hooga-booga, it's that the Right seems to be wandering farther afield to pounce upon ever flimsier and more obscure "outrages." Ward Churchill is a pale spectre compared to the juicy target of Michael Moore, and the phony uproar over Million Dollar Baby is a desperate attempt to plug the Oscar Hollywood Liberal Controversy Gap now that Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Mel Gibson's The Passion of Michael Medved have been eliminated from the best-picture steel-cage deathmatch category. And, of course, the Super Bowl was so carefully sterilized that it gave the praying mantises nothing to waggle their antenna about this morning. If the cultural-values conservatives ever succeed in cleaning up culture, they won't know what to do with themselves since it was never culture they were interested in anyway. The cultural conservatives of decades past actually read T. S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, F. R. Leavis, and other custodians of tradition. Today's cult-cons scrutinize cartoons for butt-cracks and tabulate penis references in sitcoms, and then wonder why no one wants to sit next to them in the sauna.
Since the guardians of Patriotic Correctness have made him a nationally-known figure for a few days, I heard Churchill on C-Span Wednesday night. I don't usually vege out in front of C-Span, but I did for a while then and listened to the guy speak, from the Univerisity of Colorado earlier this week.
I'm not impressed with his analysis of the world. I can see how people might mistake him for a leftwinger, because he talks about sympathizing with the Third World and talks about various nasty things Americans have done since the day they started being Americans, if not before.
But if you ever have one of those geeked-out moments where you find yourself wandering around the public library - yes, I confess, it does happen to me sometimes - see if you can find a copy of one of the book The Dynamics of War and Revolution by Lawrence Dennis, who in the 1930s was the leading American theorist of fascism. He also seems to be railing against the aggressive and warlike tendencies of the American past.
The American admirers of Hitler, Dennis one of the more prominentm among them, were eager to complain about the "warmongering" tendencies of Franklin Roosevelt, because they had an immediate interest in having the US not stand in the way of the march of Nazi progress in Europe. But besides that particular perspective, just listing a string of atrocities and injustices in the past is not the same thing as opposing them. Dennis and his type were glad to have people think that war and aggression and genocidal killing were as all-American as apple pie.
And hearing Churchill's speech reinforced by early suspicion that I discussed in an earlier post, that his brand of Third-World-romanticist ethnic-nationalism is closer to a rightwing viewpoint than to anything "left", much less "liberal." (Someday I'll do a post about the difference in the European and American meanings of "liberal," which will be sure to give a headache to any of Dear Leader Bush's admirers who wade through it.)
I don't want to pigeonhole him too much. Maybe he is "left" in some reasonable definition of the word. But his description of the Palestinian situation just reinforced my earlier suspicion that he's encouraging something that sounds a lot like a Jewish-conspiracy view of the world. And the thing I mentioned in the post I just linked, his take on the German Historikerstreit controversy and the weird but intense scorn he directed at several well-known critics of the Holocaust denial pseudohistory make me think he basically has a rightwing ethnic-nationalist viewpoint.
Having said all that, though, in his speech that C-Span carried, he certainly seemed to be intelligent and articulate. And he did describe his view of American collective guilt for various problems in the world that was at least coherent enough for me to be able to articulate why I reject it. And the basic reason is that collective guilt is essentially a meaningless concept. While it's absolutely true, for instance, that the blowhard fools who dismiss the torture scandal as just frat-boy entertainment are contributing to the political climate that makes such a thing possible.
But while regular citizens people who defend torture in the gulag are jerks for doing so, there's a huge difference in saying that that Joe and Jane Voter have a responsibility to think about such things seriously and saying they are guilty of the acts in the way that Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and others in the line of command down to the torturers themselves are guilty. It's a very short step from "everyone is guilty" to "no one is guilty."
I'm not sure how we could define even collective responsibilty, much less guilt, for the way the Dutch took Manhatten Island from the Indians there, a topic which Churchill touched on in his talk. But real crimes are being committed today in the torture scandal and a number of other areas, and the individuals actually involved in those crimes need to be brought to justice for their actual deeds. Blurring that responsibility into some vague notion of collective guilt just helps criminals get away with things no one should get away with.
But what ties this to the press issues I started off with is that academic freedom, and freedom of speech generally, mean that it's okay for people to say even damn fool things, as long as everyone else if free to say what a damn fool thing it is. And trying to get him fired for expressing what is a controversial opinion would be a bad precedent. A lot of the talk from politicians about how he should be fired reminds me an awful lot of the McCarthy era. And an awful lot of the segregation era in the South.
And though they've seized on some of Ward Churchill's bad taste in phrasing, especially the "little Eichmanns" notion, the real target of the criticism seems to be an attempt to demonize the idea that American policy has anything to do with the terrorist threat. The Bush hardliners prefer to have people think that "they hate us for our freedom" or something similar, that The Terrorists are motivated by irrational and unquenchable opposition to the United States that amounts to mental illness or Evil against Good. Good against Evil is a prescription for endless conflict, endless arms races, endless military interventions. But if American policy can be changed in ways that affect the support for jihadist groups, a world of less conflict and less fear would be possible.
However faulty his formulation of his message and however off-putting his rhetoric is, Ward Churchill is asking people to look at the ways that American policy generates violent hostility to the US. It's a discussion that should be encouraged, not suppressed.
Tags: ward churchill
2 comments:
I agree that academic freedom needs to be protected. Since 9/11 it has become increasingly difficult to speak in opposition to the views and policies of the administration. Professors should be able to express controversial views without fear of reprisals.
Recently I read that Science teachers in the public schools have been intimidated and discouraged from teaching evolution in many communities in America.
It is pretty clear that America suffers when teachers and professors have to kowtow to the political majority.
Neil
I concur fully. The right to a free press is one of the most fundamental rights we have that keeps our freedoms intact. Repubos are extinguishing the very pillar of democracy that keeps us free.
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