CENSOR THIS COLUMN
Tue Feb 15, 2005
By Ted Rall
Ward Churchill and the Redefinition of Censorship
NEW YORK--Nothing should appear in a newspaper unless it has first been approved by a government censor, say half the high school students in a recent poll. So free-speechers are losing the never-ending war over freedom of expression. This is because censorship is being redefined.
The latest skirmish over the First Amendment concerns Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is a liberal enclave in a conservative state. Hamilton College in upstate New York, which had invited Professor Churchill to speak about American Indian activism, cancelled his appearance after someone Googled his name and found an essay he had written three years earlier--which appeared without a smidgen of attention at the time, much less controversy.
"Some People Push Back" is a furious rant written mere hours after the September 11th attacks, and one suspects the tone of the piece owes much to the revulsion that thoughtful Americans felt for the mindless "United We Stand" jingoism that stifled attempts at serious analysis of the terrorists' motivations in the immediate aftermath. "The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not 'cowards,'" Churchill wrote, presaging remarks that got Bill Maher fired by ABC a few months later. "The word describes all those 'fighting men and women' who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf [during the 1991 Gulf War], enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings."
But these are not the comments which caused Hamilton College officials to disinvite Professor Churchill after more than 100 death threats led them to conclude they couldn't guarantee his safety. By this point most people accept that it takes some stones to fly a plane into a building. Mohammad Atta was a mass murderer, but not a wimp.
After World War II, Churchill reminds us, "Pious Americans...led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed--nay, empowered--their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name. If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans."
After calling those killed in the Pentagon legitimate military targets, he challenged the presumed innocence of the World Trade Center victims, calling them "little Eichmanns": "They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire--the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved--and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to 'ignorance'--a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore'--counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in... it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants [dying in Iraq due to trade sanctions]."
My two cents: Actually, the World Trade Center was no nerve center of American capitalism. Second-tier real estate in an inconvenient corner of Manhattan's financial district, the towers were home to hundreds of two-man representative offices for obscure foreign import-export outfits. That's why so many foreigners died that day. The biggest Wall Street brokerages and investment banks keep their offices further downtown, closer to the action. Only one notable personality, conservative commentator Barbara Olsen, died on 9/11, and she was on one of the planes. No boldface names from the business world died. The 2,800-plus New Yorkers who perished in the towers were mostly clerks. Even if you buy the notion of "collective guilt," the WTC victims, some of whom were illegal immigrants, waiters and maintenance staff, were as innocent as could be. On the other hand, the citizens of a democracy surely bear some responsibility for the actions of their government.
So did Hamilton College censor Ward Churchill?
Not according to the letters of the editor section of the "liberal" New York Times. "Those who present forums to college students," wrote one Dean Brown, "should investigate those who are offered the privilege of speaking...those opinions...do not need to be given a soapbox."
Attorney Thomas Boyden wrote in 1999, "There is no such thing as 'private censorship.' It is only when government uses its coercive powers to inhibit speech that censorship occurs." This is a boilerplate conservative trope. Jay Ambrose, writing in the right-wing Washington Times, used it to justify Disney's 2004 cancellation of a distribution agreement for the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11": "Don't call it censorship, which is what the government does when it tells private parties they cannot say something publicly."
Like Winston Smith in "1984" I'd heard this repeated so often that I began to believe it was true. But the dictionary doesn't relate censorship to government action. The verb to censor is simply "to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable." As a noun, a censor is "a person who is authorized to read publications or correspondence or to watch theatrical performances and suppress in whole or in part anything considered obscene or politically unacceptable." A censor can be an editor, producer or high school principal.
Censorship is grounded in motivation. An editor who, faced with space limitations, decides not to run an article because it's less interesting or important than another isn't a censor. He becomes a censor, however, if he cans a piece because of taste or political concerns.
As Ambrose points out, "No company--whether a film studio, newspaper corporation or whatever--can or should publish or distribute everything that comes its way." He's got a point. Who wants to read a paper containing 290 million letters to the editor? Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves three simple questions to determine whether a voice is being censored or edited:
1. What are the reasons for the suppression?
Were Professor Churchill an inept lecturer or ignorant about American Indian activism, the subject he was originally invited to discuss, Hamilton might have a legitimate reason to disinvite him. But his critics don't say that. He is being savaged for sins of tastelessness (insulting the dead) and political incorrectness (arguing that ordinary Americans, tacitly complicit in their government's genocidal foreign policies, had it coming on 9/11). These are dictionary definitions of censorship.
2. What is being suppressed?
Popular opinions don't require protection. The First Amendment was written to protect free expression that causes discomfort, even rage, by the majority. Both the censor and the civil libertarian will probably disagree with Churchill's assessment of American collective guilt, but the true defender of free speech recognizes his own revulsion as further reason to err on the side of open discussion over silence.
3. Who is being suppressed?
Perhaps the most reliable barometer of censorship is the relative sociopolitical status of people and institutions urging the suppression versus the voice being suppressed. In one corner of the Churchill controversy, we have a 57-year-old ethnic studies instructor with unusually strident political views. In the other there's Colorado's governor and state legislature, hundreds of right-wing talk radio hosts around the country, and Bill O'Reilly, the hugely popular Fox News talking head--all of which have demanded that the University of Colorado fire him. These calls have prompted vandals to trash his car and threaten his life. Only the powerful may censor; only the weak can be censored.
The most ironic aspect of censorship is that it attracts wider attention to comments that were previously ignored. After the speech police went after Ward Churchill, the readership of his 9/11 essay shot up by millions. He became nationally known. Had the right-wingers managed to censor themselves, only a few hundred souls would ever have seen it in an obscure journal called "Pockets of Resistance."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...nsorthiscolumn
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ward Churchill
... each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants [dying in Iraq due to trade sanctions]."
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If Sadamn had allowed the UN inspectors to do their jobs, the sactions could have been addressed.
Further if Sadamn had used the money from the Oil for Food progamn as it was intended instead of stealing 23 Billion and using it for palaces and treasures for his family and cronies, the people of Iraq would have had food & medicine.