Barack Obama Naked

Playing dress up is fun.

Nothing can provide as much intellectual security as the conviction that one’s position is not only factually warranted but morally imperative. This position is evident in the writings of activist (I hesitate to actually confer on him the honor of being referred to as a “scholar”) Ward Churchill. His “history” is more polemic than anything and frequently cast in extremely Manichean terms. But the most insidious part of Churchill’s work is not the sanctimonious presentism that pervades his scholarship, but the extreme “ends justify the means” mentality that leads him to conclude that innocent people deserve to die – and the cover of legitimacy his reputation as a professor lends to that position.

Churchill gained notoriety outside activist/cultural studies circles in 2001 when he wrote an essay immediately after the terrorist attacks in September called Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In that essay he recites a litany of supposed crimes by the United States, either against Iraq specifically or in defiance of international law more generally, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t. The important thing about the essay, though, is less the facts that he cites in it, but more the conclusion that he draws; namely, that the military/civilian divide should not exist. The people who worked in the World Trade Center, because they ultimately abetted the spread and maintenance of a global capitalist system that Churchill perceives to be oppressive, are thus collaborative and guilty “little Eichmanns” deserving of their fates.

Pure evil, according to Zerzan.

The Eichmann comment and the whole notion that doing anything except totally disengaging from modern society makes you the moral equivalent of a murderer stems from the philosopher John Zerzan and his respective understanding – I’d call it misuse – of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” outlined in the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Zerzan believes that the domestication of animals is wrong. Reading something like that, you might make the mistake of believing that he’s a fervent animal rights supporter. No, he just opposes agriculture. Seriously. Along with basically every other part of civilization. Basically, Zerzan makes the Luddites look like Steve Jobs. Churchill’s politics are not as insane as Zerzan’s (not even close), but their similar understanding of Arendt’s work is extremely distorted.

Arendt’s book revolves around her observations at the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who had coordinated the holocaust. Arendt expected, along with most other observers, to find in Eichmann someone like Julius Streicher: a frothing at the mouth anti-Semite hell-bent on a pure German race. What she found instead was a relatively colorless bureaucrat who had abdicated all sense of moral responsibility and in the process facilitated one of the most horrific crimes in human history. Even in oppressive, totalitarian societies people can still resist policies like the ones that the Nazis sought to implement, but Eichmann, like most Nazis, chose instead to collaborate in their implementation. Arendt’s overall point was that people who are not evil can wind up doing extraordinarily evil things.

But the society Arendt was talking about was not the United States, it was an ideologically motivated totalitarian society with extensive mass mobilization of the citizenry that ultimately sought to completely annihilate entire groups based on their religion, race, sexual orientation, and political affiliation. True, the United States’ sanctions on Iraq killed innocent people. But that is something entirely different from an effort to wipe every Iraqi off the face of the Earth. And Saddam Hussein, after all, could have diverted at least a little bit of money from his crappy army to feed people had he wanted to, but he didn’t. The holocaust and Iraqi sanctions are difficult in degree and type, and the way the guilt is distributed is much more complex. But one need not resort to this kind of morbid calculus to identify the most enormous error in Churchill’s thinking. Eichmann, after all, was in the military, and was actually in charge of coordinating the holocaust. He was not an ill-defined cog in a massive system that does much, much, much more than simply abet killing people. Blogger zombietime, in his coverage of Churchill speaking at an anarchist book fair in the San Francisco area, summed up Churchill’s conclusion fairly well: “People with jobs are not humans.” He continues:

One wonders what Hannah Arendt would have thought if she knew that one day her study of Eichmann would be used to dehumanize an entire nation of people — which is exactly what Churchill did here when he said that “going with the program” (i.e. participating in society by, for example, having a job) “voids your humanity.”

Indeed. Churchill, because of the controversy ignited by his essay, was the subject of what may have been a politically motivated investigation by his employers at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Politically motivated or not, the investigation did find that he had committed what I would characterize as very, very serious instances of academic misconduct and that he had also lied about his own personal history on his job application. So while he may have been victimized for speaking his mind, it probably would have helped his case if he had not been a plagiarizer and a fraud.

I’m reminded in some ways of Bill Moyers’ interview with Judge Richard Goldstone. Goldstone’s view was that even though Israel was the subject of inordinate attention and harassment by the United Nations Human Rights Council, if serious crimes were committed during the course of the Israeli war in Gaza, they should still be investigated regardless. That the investigation itself was the result of an evident and persistent bias in the Council should not mean that Israel gets a free pass when it actually does commit crimes. Such is how I feel about Churchill. If, ultimately, the University of Colorado did single out Churchill for political reasons I’ll be ready to condemn that, but at the moment I’m only ready to condemn them for not holding up Churchill, or indeed all its scholars, to the same level of academic rigor that it did most recently.