Posted on 03/14/2005 8:52:38 PM PST by quidnunc
I’m beginning to see Ward Churchill as the carny in the dunking booth, who hurls insults at the crowd, and then howls with outrage when he gets soaked. Yes, the unenlightened were out to get you. Yes, the system was rigged against you by the power structure. No argument there. But should anyone care?
For the second time in the new millennium, a university professor has come under heavy fire from the political right, and is in danger of losing his job as a consequence. The most prominent dispute in recent years concerned the scholarship of Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University, who argued that a small minority of Americans owned guns during the early national period. Bellesiles’s thesis was a direct assault on the National Rifle Association’s claim of widespread gun ownership in American history. Thus the Bellesiles controversy opened with the two sides clearly distinguished by their policy leanings.
The gun lobby opened the fray by accusing Bellesiles of fabricating evidence. At first, Bellesiles responded with a defense of his scholarship, founded on evidentiary claims. As it became more and more apparent that Bellesiles’s evidence was questionable at best, Bellesiles turned to political stereotypes to defend himself. Now, Bellesiles would position himself as a professional scholar being assailed by right-wing gun nuts engaged in amateur history. This tactic bought Bellesiles some additional support from the academy, for a time, until it became obvious to nearly everyone that his scholarship actually was of dubious reliability. As this uncomfortable fact dawned, scholars began withdrawing their support, in a state of embarrassment and betrayal. Bellesiles’s initial interlocutors may have been amateurs driven by their political opposition to his thesis, but their criticism turned out to be more believable than Bellesiles’s defense.
The instigating issue today is a three-year-old essay written by Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado ethnic studies professor. Churchill is under attack from the right for likening victims of the World Trade Center attack to Adolph Eichmann, the notorious Nazi implicated in genocide. Churchill’s opponents object to his insults to the dead, and to his implicit support for the terrorists who perpetrated the attack. Churchill’s defenders on the left have preferred to downplay or ignore his characterization of the 9/11 victims, and to instead defend justify his essay’s central thesis — that US foreign policy was a predictable motivating factor behind the attacks. Churchill’s defenders argue that he is being attacked for expressing political dissent. In other words, rather than debating, the two sides are talking past each other, each addressing different aspects of Churchill’s essay in order to score political points.
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Even DU is backtracking on Churchill today with the new charges of plagiarism coming from the woman in Nova Scotia who she said threatened him with a midnight call or whatever. I'm sure that those lefties who stood so firmly for him even last week are regretting it today.
he threatened her, I mean.
>>>In an article Brown published on his faculty website, he presented evidence that Churchill falsely claimed that the US Army distributed infected blankets to spread a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan people in 1837.
Funny, this is when Farr was just beginning to study what smallpox was.
Actually, the brunt of the criticism of Bellesile's work came from a fellow historian that studied Bellesiles's book and found fatal errors. It was his work and persistence in the face of a ferocious backlash from his left-wing peers that eventually brought Bellesiles down.
Yup, the Germ Theory of Desease was not really established until the late 1800's. For the US Army to have done this one purpose that early, they would have to have been psychic as well as evil.
Yup, the Germ Theory of Desease was not really established until the late 1800's. For the US Army to have done this one purpose that early, they would have to have been psychic as well as evil.
The adjective 'notorious' seems to pale in describing a man who implemented the 'Final Solution' to exterminate millions of Jews. . .but perhaps I am being too picky re this singular word; which could as easily apply to say; those who lead the FBI's 'most wanted list'. . .
. . or .perhaps it is the use of just 'implicated in genocide'that is more the problem here. . .
Actually, there was an earlier documented case of smallpox diseased blankets being given to Indians in 1763 in Pittsburg.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
What the Lefties want you to believe is that the evil White people did it on purpose to kill off the Indians.
Saying Eichman was "implicated in genocide" is a lot like calling Napoleon "a significant French general of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
churchill's jealous of the holocaust because he could not adapt the like to american indians.
Yes they did. People even in the dark ages understood at least some of the ways sickness was spread although they didn't know exactly why it was spread. The British did this to the Indians but to my knowledge there is not one documented case of Americans doing it.
A 'words mean things'. . .bump!
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