What Did Ward Churchill Actually Say?
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p>ToTheCenter.com, NY
by Michael S. Leonard
Ward Churchill, the Colorado professor who sparked national controversy with a 2001 essay characterizing the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks as “Little Eichmanns,” was fired by the University of Colorado on Tuesday. I will not discuss at any length the merits of his argument, which pertains to the most loaded, sacred, and taboo topic of the 21st century United States, and I will not tell anyone what to think. However, without either defending or ostracizing Professor Churchill, I do feel compelled to dispell the blatant mischaracterizations of the essay in question that have become prevalent in the days since his firing.
Mr. Churchill did not “call the victims of September 11 Nazis,” as one recent article on ToTheCenter asserted. That is not only a misinterpretation; it is an allegation that does not stand up to the most elementary fact-check. He made an analogy, and the fact that his remarks have been taken so literally is proof enough that the SAT’s recent removal of the “Analogies” section was misguided. Furthermore, characterizing Adolf Eichmann merely as someone “who helped carry out the Holocaust,” while technically accurate, misses the point entirely. This cursory treatment of the topic ill serves the discourse. It is impossible to know whether you agree with Professor Churchill or, in fact, whether he is “an anti-American socialist lunatic,” as one commenter recently described him, if you don’t know what he actually said or what he meant by it.
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat eventually assigned to manage the logistics of mass deportation and execution that lay at the heart of the Nazi “Final Solution,” as the extermination of Europe’s Jews was officially termed. He escaped to Argentina after the war and was eventually arrested (in 1961) by Israeli intelligence agents, who transported him to Jerusalem for trial on charges of war crimes. In Jerusalem, Eichmann adopted the “only following orders” defense that had failed so many of his superiors at the Nuremberg trials 15 years earlier. After colleagues sent highly incriminating depositions from Germany and Austria, many of which portrayed Eichmann as an overzealous careerist who frequently went above and beyond his “orders” in the hopes of impressing Nazi superiors, Eichmann was convicted and hanged.
Hannah Arendt, a reporter whose coverage of the trial formed the basis for her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, turned the case study into a landmark thesis of political philosophy and mass psychology. Throughout the book, she treated Eichmann as the embodiment of individual culpability for the atrocities of a totalitarian regime. She pointed out that Eichmann was not an ideological anti-Semite; he was simply trying to out-perform rivals and advance his career. Arendt noted that he was not psychopathic, psychologically damaged, or distorted by hatred. She coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the way in which people who abdicate their own moral responsibility can become desensitized to the immoral duties they perform as a matter of daily life. Eichmann had surrendered his moral autonomy by refusing to judge the laws or actions of the state he served, and so had the millions of other Germans who abetted the Nazi regime in general and the Holocaust in particular. [more]