Are There Any More Ward Churchills Out There?

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by Anwaar Hussain
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Has it occurred to Americans that the inmates have taken over the asylum? Do they ever ponder that they are not the only real people on earth, that they do not have a birth right to feed their security on the insecurity of others?

The embattled University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill continues to be harried. His plight has been turned overnight into a vicious media spectacle. His crime…. writing an essay called “Some People Push Back”, in which he made a simple point that “if U.S. foreign policy results in widespread death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.”

To fire an academic, the University of Colorado must prove his ineptitude, neglect of duty, disobedience, conviction of a crime, moral turpitude, sexual harassment or “other conduct which falls below minimum standards of professional integrity.” Concerning the point made in his essay, one fails to see how the good Professor can be accused of any of these charges.

It was much like this when the Nazis purged the universities in Germany. One cannot resist the comparison. The rise of the Nazis to political power in 1933 severely damaged the entire country’s academic environment. A large number of “political radicals” were immediately purged from university positions throughout the country. A massive brain drain followed soon after these purges. It has been estimated that a whopping thirty percent of the country’s scientists fled the country during the 1930s. Within the space of just seven years, Germany was transformed from being the virtual center of the scientific world to an isolated island.

Most oppressive regimes have a significant nationalistic streak running through them. Totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany under Hitler, Soviet Russia under Stalin and China under Mao shared two major characteristics: their state-supported nationalism, and their restrictions on academic liberty. Such regimes tend to promote a standardized, nationalistic, and apolitical academic culture which would best suit the unique needs of the fascist governments. Such regimes treat a questioning mind or a sense of inquiry with disdain and/or various forms of persecution: harassment, dismissal, incarceration, or, at the extreme, torture and/or death.

In a civilized society, a university stands out as a place where competing ideas may stand side by side, where reason, persuasive argument and further discovery test their validity. Critical thought is a university’s lifeblood, easily putrefied by an inhospitable climate. A university is its true self only when it refuses to become an instrument of the State or any vested interest. At the heart of a university lies the spirit of free inquiry which, as Socrates put it, is to follow the argument where it leads.

College and university academics are citizens too. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional harassment. The ideal of freedom of expression must particularly be clung to when we are deciding upon a response to expression that affronts us. By no means is it here suggested that one must submit to unpalatable or possibly erroneous ideas. The productive counter is further debate and further inquiry, not state controlled media trials or threat and intimidation.

Reading history, the mind fairly boggles at how a modern civilized country like Germany could sink to the evil depths that produced the horrors of the Nazi era. What could explain the approval or submission of German citizens to such malevolent rulers? It was indeed difficult to understand how such a phenomenon could occur. But it did.

Is America, too, going that way? Blind loyalty, nationalistic jingoism, unquestioning obedience, twists and cover-ups, fear, ad nauseam repetition of outright lies, self-righteous grievance, messianic rhetoric, the finality of authority, traditionalism, and dehumanizing the purported enemies usually comprise the arsenal of weapons in such states. The state media is often the medium of choice for launching these weapons. Would Americans please look around and check their premises?

What is the remedy?

Good Americans need to come out of their hiding and speak up. They are good only if they make their presence felt now. Later, they will find themselves more in the position of ‘Good Germans’ who, despite the horrendous atrocities going on right under their noses, feigned total ignorance.

To change, the public’s strong support or acquiescence to the earlier mentioned factors must be broken down by getting the truth out and demonstrating that rational forces do exist in sufficient numbers for one to join without the fear of being alone. Strong dedicated groups must take up the fight and continue until the tide has turned.

In spite of harsh actions that the state and its supporters will, in all likelihood, take to smother even healthy dissent, the resistors’ numbers and power should continually grow till the time comes that the state clearly no longer represents the majority or is forced eventually to accept the message.

One must admit, though, that even now such voices are sprinkled throughout the USA. They do perceive and decry their country’s corporate militaristic imperialism and the use of state media for the spread of propaganda towards that end. But these voices, seemingly few and far between, lack the deafening resonance of a single, unified, coherent demand that those in power return to legitimate governance, serving the interests of the general population, and not simply the vested (read invested) interests of minority elites.

Question time…America.

Has the witch hunt of academia, a la the Nazi era university purges, only now begun in earnest, or perhaps did it in fact begin in January 2005 with the hounding of Professor of Economics at North Eastern University Shahid Alam when he wrote “America and Islam : Seeking Parallels”? Or was it earlier still, in February 2003, when Sami al-Arian, the computer sciences professor of University of South Florida, was arrested and now sits in a jail cell in isolation awaiting trial on trumped up terrorism charges.

Harrying Ward Churchill encroaches further on academic freedom and seriously undermines already rapidly vanishing First Amendment rights, that most hallowed of the US Constitution’s Canons. Do Americans appreciate that democracy and liberty and freedom are not just words to be uttered by the President at his Inaugural?

And why this pretence of hurt, why this self righteous anger over perfectly reasonable comments? What is the crime of Ward Churchill any way? Is it an offense for an American to say that chickens can come home to roost and to suggest that the only way to protect American lives from international terrorism is to respect international law?

Can the Americans understand that when they deprive one or two or several individuals of their freedom, everything that the country traditionally has stood for is mocked? Is there anyone in the great United States of America willing to stick up for Ward Churchill, his academic prerogative and his writings, or at least to put them in perspective? Or, have they, finally, ascribed to a notion that good citizens are banned from original thought by Presidential decree?

And where is the collective voice of the Good Americans hiding? Why are they wallowing in their deafening individual silences? Do they know that this demon has to be eradicated from within? Or are they waiting for outsiders to come rescue them from an inbred beast?

Has it occurred to Americans that the inmates have taken over the asylum? Do they ever ponder that they are not the only real people on earth, that they do not have a birth right to feed their security on the insecurity of others?

When Dr. Gerhard Herzberg, a renowned name in the field of atomic and molecular spectroscopy, came to Saskatoon in 1935 as a refugee from Nazi university purges in Germany, he said to the university president, “I hope I’ll be of some use to you.” He went on to win for Canada the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Should Professor Ward Churchill, perhaps, now proceed to China to present his insightful thoughts there and hope to get the Chinese yet another Nobel?

In the meanwhile… are there any more Ward Churchills out there? God knows, the world needs them now as much as the Americans themselves do.



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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