Signs of the Times

In a stunning blow to freedom of speech, Bill O'Reilly, host of FOXNews program "The O'Reilly Factor", seems to think that it is his duty to fire up the American people to get University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill fired.

Why?

Because recently, he and other political conservatives discovered that Churchill wrote an essay about 9/11 that - GASP! - was not very supportive of the subsequent actions of Bush and the USA. The following is part of the rather long essay in question:

"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

by Ward Churchill

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" – or was it "sand niggers" that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.

It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who 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. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.

Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo – continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American military/economic domination – it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..

There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for "our kids," no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" – or perhaps more outraged – than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."

Property before people, it seems – or at least the equation of property to people – is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world – the Mideast, for instance – began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption.

So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America's free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point – with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it – that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States. [...]

Now, what was wrong with that? Keep in mind that in America, we're supposed to have this thing called freedom of speech. That means that everyone is allowed to voice their own opinions on things, and they won't have to worry about being fired, harassed, or threatened with death.

I read the entire essay, and nowhere did I find anything that would be considered racist, sexist, anti-semitic, or anything else that could be considered hate speech. The man was simply presenting his opinions - backed up by a formidable number of facts. Of course, you won't know that they are facts unless you've done your homework.

Apparently, what really angered many people was that Churchill dared to suggest that Americans themselves are the cause of 9/11, because we remain ignorant of what our leaders are really up to as a result of the pleasing distractions of daily life. Subsequently, Churchill received death threats, swastikas were painted on his truck, and he is on the verge of losing his job at the university.

Let's think especially about the death threats and swastikas, because I want to see if I have this all straight. A man exercises his right to free speech and publishes an essay. A bunch of Americans get all riled up by O'Reilly and become so enraged that they threaten to KILL Churchill, and paint Nazi symbols on his truck. In other words, for simply expressing a view that does not line up with their own, many Americans feel it necessary to act in exactly the same way that fascists would have - and they even use the swastika to convey their message of hate! Who are the real "terrorists" here? Who is really promoting hatred and violence? Churchill didn't say that Americans deserve to die; he believes that if we (WE, he includes himself) continue to allow our leaders to act malevolently in our name without really knowing what they are doing, then we deserve what we get.

Karma, right? No big deal.

What scares me the most is that I look around and I see an America that is quickly devolving into something much worse than McCarthyism. Since 9/11, we talk a lot about preserving and promoting freedom, while back home a man can't speak his mind without being fired and threatened with death. And this guy is a university professor! You know, the seat of "liberal" thought? I remember when I was in college. I took a sociology course taught by a short bald guy whose head would literally glow red when he got upset about how little Americans know about what their government has done - and continues to do - in their name.

This is nothing new, folks. It is our reaction to it as a nation that has changed. If we don't make an effort to learn the truth, we are all lost. If we don't stop it now, it will become unstoppable. I'm not sure what to call the phenomenon, other than American fundamentalism, or maybe even budding fascism. We've already got the Patriot Act I and II, torture, political persecution, death threats, and swastikas going on.

The only thing left is to open the detention camps.