"Little Eichmanns"


What can you say about a college professor who calls the victims of 9/11- the victims, mind you, not Mohammed Atta and company- "little Eichmanns?"

I am not qualified to analyze Ward Churchill's psychological condition. Nor do I necessarily think that absurd and even bizarre political opinions need necessarily be symptoms of mental illness. But this sort of comment- made while knowing full well that the people who lost utterly innocent family members at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or in that Pennsylvania field would read it- goes beyond the realm of the merely eccentric or even asinine. There has to be something wrong with someone twisted enough to make such a statement. Maybe his disorder isn't mental, but it is surely moral insanity of the first order.

"Hate speech" is a much-abused concept, and one that generally causes my eyebrow to rise. I do not necessarily advocate the silencing even of people whose opinions I find crude or ignorant or bigoted or revolting in some other way. They are their own refutation, by and large; only people with problems of their own are apt to react to your average racist or anti-Semite or mere insensitive jerk with anything other than disgust.

But this guy is a college professor at a state school. He's being paid to form minds- and given the power of the grade with which to enforce at least outward conformity with his twisted thought patterns. Free speech is not the issue here; let Churchill get himself a blog!

But he doesn't belong in the classroom, and this is one case in which, in my opinion, a university's investigation of "hate speech" is well warranted.

HT: Deans World
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Anonymous said…
Ward Churchill really is a crazy idiot. I knew alot of strange people like him growing up in Oregon, as well as the crack-pots that taught me in the history and religion department at Luther College. Terry Sparks taught me that the disciples made up the resurrection to keep the real meaning of Christianity going, namely, that God wanted us to be socialists. Jodi Grewahl claimed to be a Communist, but not a bad Communist, but rather a Trokskite. Even with my bad experiences in higher education, I can't help the question of how one determines that a person is a "tenured radical" as O'Reilly was so fond of calling him. At Luther, if the moronic hierarchy of the ELCA would do their job, we'd only get people who teach in accordance with the Lutheran Confessions. There would be no denials of the resurrection or encouragment of free love (another thing that the Indian Communist was fond of discussing). The point is, Lutherans have an idea of "The Good" by which we are able to judge people's teachings by. The American system is built on a suppossedly "neutral" concept of "The Good." The founding fathers remembered that we tried to kill each other off in the west in about a hundred years worth of religious wars, so they thought that they could set up a neutral system, based on tolerance and all our problems would be solved. Of course, that's not really true. There is a definite metaphysic and ethic to the Constitution, which really only tolerants so much. Nevertheless their goal does remain tolerance, which was alot easier when everyone basically believed in Protestnatism and, well, America! Now though, we have the Ward Churchills who hate our system and want to destroy it. The problem is, how, without prescribing a universal notion of "The Good"(which has the pontential for becoming oppressive) can we get ride of a moron, lier, fool like Churchill. From a neutral academic standpoint, he's good to go! He's published alot of crap (like 20,000 pages of leftest garbage), he's done all the professor stuff (though he has no doctorate, something that, as a doctoral student makes me dislike him all the more!). So, I guess what I'm asking is, Bob, how much of a idea of the common good do we have to prescribe before we get ride of him? And how do we keep this concept from being oppressive or stiffling public debate, that is, contradict the whole reason we set up the American ideal of tolerance and governmental neutrality in the first place.
3/31/2006 07:26:00 PM
Robert Elart Waters said…
Do they still have the co-ed naked soccer game at Luther College, church school that it is?

Very little in the way of left-wing lunacy taking place at an institution sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, alas, would startle me.

Whether the ELCA qualifies in any meaningful sense as "Lutheran," of course, is another matter. Certainly the post-modernist rot in that benighted church body has long since eroded any moral or intellectual compass its institutions might have once possessed. Not sure that's entirely true in the LCMS.
4/03/2006 10:56:00 PM
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