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April 25, 2005 -- Ward Churchill spoke to a mostly-local student crowd at the Claremont Colleges tonight, after running a gauntlet of the tamest counter-demonstrators MIM has ever seen. Four or five protesters carried signs saying things like "If you don't love America: Why are you still here?" Which caused several people to wonder: does the "love it or leave it" crowd even understand what it means to be an indigenous persyn? A couple of Churchill supporters stopped to tell the Amerika Firsters: "Ward Churchill was here before you were." And MIM pointed out that part of the reality Churchill exposed is that anyone who doesn't think Amerikan-style democracy is great can just wait till Amerika invades their country to prove how wonderful our "free society" is.
Churchill addressed the issue of First Nations sovereignty in his talk, saying that what the reactionaries don't realize is that he is a true "conservative" -- an advocate for the rule of law. In this he includes the 430-some treaties the u.$. has signed with various First Nations since the first white settlers landed, which add up to jurisdiction covering well over 30 percent of the u.$.-occupied land on this continent. This doesn't mean indigenous people are going to "start building water-wing factories" so the u.$. people can swim back to wherever they came from: It just means the Amerikans are going to have to learn how to live under native jurisdiction if they want to stay on here legally.
This issue of jurisdiction on "U.S. soil" is part of Churchill's larger point -- the one that has all the "good Germans" in this country so pissed off -- that the only way to provide security for the Amerikan people is to assure the world's people that they have nothing to fear from the united $tates. In other words: when Amerikans can comport themselves like citizens of the world, maybe the rest of the world's citizens will treat them as such. MIM agrees heartily with Churchill on this, and we argue that the only law that will matter in the quest for international peace is that imposed by the international proletariat on its current oppressors -- the imperialists.
This is an important point for people here to reckon with. For example, one student told MIM that while Ward Churchill should be allowed to say what he wants as a private citizen, he "should not be trusted to teach." When questioned about what makes this a matter of "trust" when Ward Churchill has jumped through all the hoops necessary to become a tenured professor at a large university, s/he said that he is not "objective" enough. When people say this, they mean that college students need to be protected from radically progressive ideas. We have two answers for this complaint:
First, an objective presentation of the facts does not stem from taking all alleged authorities and "splitting the difference." Reality is more one-sided than that. We live in a class society, and there is no humyn interaction unfettered by the oppression of some groups of people by others. The David Horowitzes of the world would have us describe this situation in polite, neutral terms. But find me a polite way of saying that Madeline Albright thought 500,000 Iraqi children's lives were an okay "price" to pay for enforcing an Amerikan agenda in the Persian Gulf. Tell me how to say, with complete neutrality, that generations of Palestinian children have grown up knowing no national territory other than a refugee camp. "Objectivity" in this case just means pretending that these relations are somehow consensual. We can talk about how there were sanctions, and how children died, but connecting these two things as cause and effect is not okay with these bigots because tracing that straight line relationship would be making a "judgment" that might be offensive. (Yes, that's right: to the people who want to shut Ward Churchill up, saying something mean is a worse crime than genocide.)
Second, there is a whole wide world outside of academia, and it does not stop while students study, even though in this country students have the exorbitant privilege of being able to believe that it does. Most of the world is subject daily to the effects of u.$. militarism, and the people in this country are responsible for that. As Ward Churchill said at Pomona: "you are not exempt from the consequences of what you allow to be done in your name." There is no exempting yourself from hearing the truth about war-crimes perpetrated in your name. If you choose not to hear the shrieks of the dying, well that's your prerogative, until the next WTC attacks. But to try and shut up a persyn who is trying to stop that violence is downright criminal.
MIM and an ally collected 117 signatures, and very few refusals, on the petition to Defend Ward Churchill. We noticed that publicity for the event was sparse (one email message, forwarded widely, as far as we could tell), that a lot of people knew about Churchill's case but had no idea the event was taking place, and that the event was not even announced on the college's own website (where all other events happening in the same auditorium were posted). The college seemed to be trying to walk the line between opening a forum for those who wanted to hear Ward Churchill out, and keeping the event very quiet so as not to attract too much controversy or violence.
Any negative political effects of this action can be laid at the feet of Colorado's Governor Owens, Chancellor DiStefano and hysterical propagandists like David Horowitz -- all of whom have orchestrated this witch-hunt that has resulted in over 100 death threats to Ward Churchill. We have to give the Pomona College administration and security credit for not interfering with MIM's petitioning or with other peaceful demonstrators, but it is not a good sign that the state of Colorado has succeeded in shutting down Ward Churchill's message to this extent.