Protected Speech

Price Charles is getting married to his long-time paramour, Patricia Parker-Bowles. The BBC told me it was going to happen as soon as April. They interviewed a man named Winston Churchill about the situation, saying he was a long-term friend of the Prince and a former Member of Parliament. He said exactly what he thought, even if it was a little ahead of public sentiment.

He thinks the wedding is a good idea. They didn’t say it on the radio, but I think he is the Grandson of the real Winston Churchill. I listened carefully for an echo of the gravelly voice that galvanized the West against the scourge of the Nazis. I think it might have heard it, faintly.

The Churchill’s have roots in North America. Great Winston’s mother was a beauty from New York. From this distance, we see Jenny Jerome only through the lens of her famous son. He still has the power to evoke visceral rage in his opponents, though he has been in his grave a half-century. You can see it by the way people talk about his mother.

Some accounts paint her marriage to Winston’s father, the dashing youngest son of the Duke of Marlborough, as a fairy tale. Just as magical as the marriage between the young Diana and Prince Charles in 1981. No one is around to remember the objective truth about Churchill’s mother. Other accounts claim that she was a fortune-hunting adulteress, and worse.

Words are funny things. No substance at all to them, yet they can cut like knives. Remember the firestorm that started with a student at NYU who accused former pro-football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman of being a capitalist tool who deserved to die?

I don’t know if the kid has returned to a normal life, or if the mob is still following him around. Sometimes words cause us to react with Pavlovian response.

That happened to another Churchill who made news with words yesterday. This particular Churchill is an American from Colorado. He is an educator by trade, a tenured professor. He makes his living through words.

Ward Churchill is a professor of ethnic studies, a curious discipline which appears to have been created as a set-aside for those who could not compete in the more structured disciplines of Sociology, Anthropology and History.

But it seemed a correct thing to do, at the time, on campuses across the country. The first time I heard Ward speak on the radio I was puzzled. He appeared to have no obvious ethnic background, and I thought it odd that a white guy should be Chairman of an ethnic studies department. When I saw his picture, his pale eyes blazed and his long dark hair was gathered back in a pony-tail.

”Oh,” I thought, realizing the nature of the game. Ward has some Native American blood in his veins, and has taken The Cause. He is a long time member of the American Indian Movement, and that is a cause which I recognize as legitimate, whether you have grown up on the Reservation or not.

If you are looking for me to trivialize the sundry crimes against the indigenous people of this continent you will have to look elsewhere.

I support the rights of the Sovereign Tribes, because that is what they are.

But by Ward’s logic, I could wrap myself in my Grandfather’s Irish ethnicity and take up arms with the IRA in Ulster. But I do not know the man personally, and will leave the source of his simmering anger up to him.

Ward is a committed foe of the American Empire. He writes about it all the time, the injustice of it. He has published many books on the subject. Like most polemics, including mine, they thankfully have a limited shelf-life. But the odd thing about the written word is that it has a way of living forever.

What came to pass was an invitation for Ward to speak at a symposium at Hunter College. That caused one of his older polemics to be dredged up. Three years ago, shortly after the terror attacks, Ward got a little carried away in praising the courage of the hijackers, and the noble nature of their cause. He specifically spoke of the ”gallant sacrifices” of the jihadi ”combat teams.”

It was all perfectly justified, the murder of the civilians in the Trade Towers. His words were that the dead were ”little Eichmanns” in their cubicles, instruments of global imperialism who got exactly what they deserved.

I can follow the logic, as contemptuous as I find it. Of course he has a right to an opinion, and a right to express it. Academic freedom is an essential value of this democracy, and the First Amendment, while not absolute, must be fiercely protected. I gave up many of my liberties to defend the constitutional right of our citizens to be idiots, if that is what they chose.

Ward has a blind spot about this. In his way, he was giving a version of The Buffalo Speech, the one that harks back to a pristine land before the White Man came and destroyed Paradise. I’ve had to listen to the Speech before, and it is better to just let it run its course.

But Ward went on to re-write a little more history. I heard him say that Adolph Eichmann ‘only scheduled trains’ as a bureaucratic tool of the Nazi machine, and that is why the murders of the financiers was justified.

Maybe it is a technical point, I thought, but Eichmann was much more than a scheduler of trains.

Ward should have stuck to the Buffalo Speech where he is on relatively solid ground.

His facts are wrong. Adolf Eichman ran an execution program quite unlike anything that had gone before.

By trivializing the actions of a dedicated Nazi, and applying a moral equivalency to civilians in peacetime, I think Ward takes leave of the protection of his ivory Tower, and his bastion of tenure. While some are still alive who suffered from Adolf Eichmann’s organizational skills, perhaps I can impose on you the facts as I know them.

Eichmann was a Lieutenant-Colonel and Chief of the Jewish Office of the Geheime Staatspolizie, the Gestapo. He was not a cubical dweller. He was engaged in the process, all the way. He helped craft the policy.

Ward has a shocking lack of appreciation for history- something one would expect to be a central value for a tenured professor. I think Ward should have checked his facts before he launched his unfortunate metaphor. But people seem to throw the Nazi label around quite lightly these days. Maybe it is because they are lazy, or have forgotten, or never knew.

Eichmann joined the Nazi party on April Fool’s Day of 1932, giving him a longer association with evil than any of the junior financiers who died in the Towers.

His good pal was an odious thug named Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who would go on to become a world-class monster. He was a useful connection in the dark empire, and Eichmann found an opening in Reinhardt Tristan Heydrich’s State Special Security Service (Riechsicherheindientz/SD) in 1934. His skills were recognized quickly, and by the beginning of 1935 he was the official responsible for ‘Jewish questions’ at the Berlin head office of the SD, specializing in Zionism.

Eichmann’s first big opportunity came after he was sent to Vienna by the Gestapo to prepare the ground for the unification of the Reich and Austria.

From August 1938 he was in charge of the “Office for Jewish Emigration,” the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue exit permits for Jews from Austria.

Eichmann’s acquired expertise in “forced emigration.” He supervised the expulsion of 150,000 Jews from Austria in only a year and a half. By March 1939, he was already handling forced deportations from the ”Government General” in Poland, and in October of the same year he was appointed special adviser on the “evacuation” of Jews and Poles.

In December, 1939, he was transferred to Amt IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) where he took over Referat IV B4, dealing with Jewish affairs and evacuation. For the next six years Eichmann’s office was the headquarters for the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’

In the summer of 1941 his ‘resettlement’ department began to create the death camps and developed gassing techniques. In so doing, he organized a system of convoys to move his captive population to their deaths.

Ward Churchill’s essay says he only ”scheduled the trains,” and to stress the metaphor with the financiers, he said- I heard him say it- that ”Eichmann never pulled the trigger.”

I beg to differ. In Budapest in 1944, he played a public and personal role in the massacre of Hungarian Jews. Late in that year he could report to Himmler that approximately four million Jews had died in the death camps, and that another two million had been killed by his efficient mobile extermination units.

There are those that remember what happened.

Ward’s blind spot to history speaks volumes of his integrity as a scholar, if he had any to start with. The Boulder Faculty Assembly, of which Churchill is a member, has said his comments were ”controversial, offensive and odious,” but he has a right to say them based on the principle of academic freedom.

I thought Academic speech is protected only if it is scholarly.

But you have to love the First Amendment. Students at the University of Colorado at Boulder gave him a standing ovation yesterday he told a campus audience ”I’m not backing up an inch.”

The ACLU issued a statement defending Churchill’s right to speak out and called on regents, legislators and the governor ”to stop threatening Mr. Churchill’s job because of the content of his opinions.”

Press accounts say Ward was interrupted several times by thunderous applause, which I can understand. I was in Boulder last Fall, and saw a rag-tag little parade led by a scraggly student who wore a shirt that advocated shooting the President.

It is a form of protected speech, I understand.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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