The Anti-American Academy: Robert Jensen
LGF
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He says the United States is a depraved criminal nation bent on dominating the world, and Ward Churchill is right.
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Ward Churchill is right about 9/11.
I state that bluntly, even though I disagree with some aspects of the University of Colorado professor’s now-infamous essay, because so many (including some on the left) have defended his First Amendment rights while either remaining silent about, or condemning, the article’s analysis.
So, for the record: The main thesis Churchill put forward in “’Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” is an accurate account of the depravity of U.S. foreign policy and its relationship to terrorism. Later I’ll return to my disagreements, but at a moment when right-wing forces have targeted not only Churchill but academic freedom and the left in general, it is more important than ever to stand firm on that point.
Malcolm X was correct, and it was appropriate for Churchill to quote him: Chickens do, indeed, come home to roost. And whether U.S. citizens want to acknowledge it or not, there likely will be chickens heading our way for years to come.
I take Churchill’s central thesis to be that (1) U.S. crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes around the world — from the genocidal campaigns against indigenous people on which this country was founded, through the post-World War II assaults (both by the U.S. military and through proxy forces) on the people of the Third World — are crimes, in legal and moral terms; (2) while contemporary non-state terrorism is a complex phenomenon, U.S. policies aimed at domination and control around the world are one of several key factors in spawning such terrorism; and (3) we must study that history and those connections if we want to prevent further crimes, whether committed by the United States or against U.S. citizens.
I also take a core assertion of Churchill’s essay to be that we citizens of the U.S. empire bear some collective responsibility for those crimes, depending on our level of power and privilege, and our capacity for resistance. As Churchill explained recently, he includes himself in that category, not as a perpetrator but as a member of movements that have failed to stop the crimes (just as I would include myself). Further, those people at the top of the power pyramid must accept their responsibility for those crimes, even if they are not directly involved in the planning and execution of specific criminal acts. The technocrats “at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” which U.S. policy serves, he wrote, are not innocent. (More later on how to understand the boundaries of that category.)
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In case you missed it, he is a journalism professor. This is how he feels about the country that has provided him with a privileged, comfortable lifestyle, and this is what he’s teaching college-level journalism students.
He says Ward Churchill was showing his love when he called the murdered victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns.”
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For me, left politics — resistance to unjust impositions of authority and the struggle for a sustainable world that balances a deep yearning for individual freedom and a deep sense of responsibility for each other — is fueled by anger at the world as it exists, along with a love for people and an appreciation for the beauty of the non-human world. That righteous anger is powerful, as long as it does not slip into self-righteousness and stays in balance with that love. We can be glib about that struggle, but in reality the tension — inside of each of us and inside our movements — is not always easy to cope with. I wrestle with it every day.
Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement was fond of quoting a line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” In the essay he wrote on 9/11, I believe Churchill was facing those harsh and dreadful realities, and I believe that essay was his attempt on that day to take love out of the realm of dreams and make it real in the world, in action.
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