Ward Churchill speaks in Saskatchewan

Have you heard of Ward Churchill? Count yourself lucky if you haven’t.

For some reason, he was invited to speak in North Battleford on Saturday. (Yes, yes, I know, second anniversary of the beginning of Iraq War–what I mean is, I don’t understand the reason for inviting someone whose views are the intellectual equivalent of, oh, say, Fred Phelps ravings against homosexuals, and someone who is accused of plagiarism of art, plagiarism of academic work (and threatening the real author of the work), shoddy academic work of his own, advocating terrorism, lying about his ethnicity, etc.) In any event, if you have heard of Ward Churchill, but haven’t actually heard him, you can listen to what was on CBC Saskatchewan’s Morning Edition this morning here (Real Audio file).

I’ve transcripted it below:

TRANSCRIPT OF WARD CHURCHILL REMARKS
BROADCAST ON CBC SASKATCHEWAN MORNING EDITION MARCH 21, 2005
FROM A SPEECH IN NORTH BATTLEFORD, SASK., ON MARCH 19, 2005

Most memorable feedback I’ve gotten from anybody came from the mother of a fireman who was killed trying to get people out of the building on 9-11. Let’s say she’s not a fan, OK? This was wounding, especially with the O’Reilly’s of the word trying to spin it off that so that I was calling her son one of the little Eichmanns, which I wasn’t. And it says right there I’m talking about this technocratic core of Empire, technicians and technocratic elite. I’m not sure how you can make a janitor fit that description, or an 18-month-old baby girl, or a fireman who is trying to do rescue work, they are not in the definition that I applied the analogy to. But, whatever confusion she may have had, or maybe she’d worked her way through it, she got right to it, and of all the people who were critical she’s the only one who has ever done this. And she said, with regard to the loss of her son, and the way she lost him, “There is no pain like it. I feel deeply the Palestinian and Iraqi mothers whose children are killed violently bear the same pain.”

She’s the only one of those who are critics–I’ve still got some unopened e-mails there, so it’s possible I’ll encounter another one, but thus far, after several thousand, she’s the only one who even mentioned anyone other than her and hers. And that is what I define the problem as, absolute self-indulgence, self-absorbent–sorb–preoccupation and presumption of privilege on the part of the general public in the United States is what triggers this kind of response.

OK, I got one the other day that says “I used to be indifferent to Indians but after listening to you I’m glad we exterminated them, my great-great grandfather is to be commended for the scalps.” It’s bringing all that ugly, poisonous pus aggregated in the carbuncle of the American mentality out into the open where you can deal with it rather than running around all the time pretending that the opposite of everything is true. It’s not easy dealing with it, it’s not really easy being a center (?) of that, having that 6,000 e-mails deep of invective thrown at you, but I think it actually serves a purpose in lowering the mask, the pretense that things are other than they are. What they’re doing in Iraq is of a piece to how they consider native people here. And you need to call it out by its right name, OK? Because now racism is reimposing itself. It’s much more effective than it used to be.

And I think I was way too polite, OK? If I could have had the 6,000 e-mails I was talking about to punctuate the point, to support the point, I would have framed it more accurately, which would have been far more harshly, it wouldn’t have been “little Eichmanns” just “Eichmanns.” But people who knowingly, no matter what the rationalization they make or how they try to justify it, knowingly trade in the miserable deaths and rotting flesh of children in order to have a better cappuccino are indistinguishable, in terms of their outlook on the world, from Eichmann to me. (Applause.)

So I don’t back off that, and I don’t apologize for it. I would probably have said it better, which would have been at somewhat more length, but I wrote that on the day of the event. It was done in time to be posted on Dark Knight Web site on 9/12. And I type with one finger, believe it or not, so I’m kind of constrained in how many words I can get out in a 12-hour period of time. That’s pretty much it.