On the Justice of Roosting Chickens:
Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperialist Arrogance and Criminality (Abbreviated as "JR" in review below)
Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004, 309pp. pb
Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader (abbrev. "AR")
New York: Routledge, 2003, 483pp. pb
Reviewed by mim3@mim.org August 11 2005
The white supremacist movement trying to deny Amerikans' own collective responsibility for September 11, 2001 is trying to fire Ward Churchill from the University of Colorado. The natural effect of this yahoo movement will be to increase readership of Ward Churchill's books. In this review, we explain why we not only defend Ward Churchill's "free speech," but also agree with him on the substance of some basic political problems ethically speaking. After we beat back the attack on Ward Churchill, we will also publish a review on our disagreements with his essays on Marxism, dialectics, post-modernism and indigenism.
"The justice of roosting chickens" refers to a phrase that Malcolm X used in the 1960s. Today the popular phrase for the same idea is "what goes around comes around."
Much like earlier Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill pushes his audience with an ethics of internationalism: "There is the matter of political guilt.It is the collective responsibility of citizens in a modern state to ensure by all means necessary that its government adheres to the rule of law, not just domestically but internationally. There are no bystanders. No one is entitled to an 'apolitical' exemption from such obligation. Where default occurs, either by citizen endorsement of official criminality or by the failure of citizens to effectively oppose it, liability is incurred by all." (JR, p. 21)
Ward Churchill goes on to explain that whatever happened to Germans in 1945 can apply to Amerikans as well, because the responsibility is analogous. (JR, p. 24) At the time, Amerikans convinced Germans that they had "collective responsibility" for the devastation of their own country. In truth, the Allies were right about that. There is no way for nations to co-exist in peace and therefore have a basis for positive mutual economic relations without that basic ethical understanding.
The basic idea of ethical internationalism and collective responsibility is the reason that Ward Churchill faces firing as a tenured professor at the University of Colorado. His comment on the World Trade Center that the victims were not simply innocent victims galvanized his Amerikan nationalist opponents. Most of On the Justice of Roosting Chickens is a day by day and year by year timeline of u.$. history that explains what was really behind many conflicts in u.$. history. Instead of a series of unprovoked attacks in history, we Amerikans see in Ward Churchill's book the historical reasons "they hate us."
Acts of Rebellion is a book of essays on various topics. These chapters are often concentrations of his previous work on indigenous subjects.
MIM found the maps of indigenous territory especially useful. According to Ward Churchill, the land owned by the government and corporations of the Western region of the united $tates would be fair compensation for the unceded land claims of the First Nations. He shows the reader that most of New York state and Florida have no proper title conveyed from the original inhabitants. The same is true of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota.(AR, p. 69) Churchill proposes consolidating the First Nation land claims into one Western region land claim where population is still sparse.(AR, p. 291)
The land owned by individual settlers in the Western region of the united $tates is still so small that Ward Churchill says the First Nations could allow whites and other nationalities to keep their houses and backyards while still obtaining a third of the land mass of the continental united $tates. What he proposes leaves out California, Florida and New York and instead concentrates the new indigenous republic in the Rocky Mountain region. Few people may realize how extensive land designated as "public" by Uncle $am is. It would thus seem that Churchill's land plan is more feasible because of its unwillingness to take on the settlers directly. If settlers want to keep their land they need only submit to the new republic.
As we wrote this review, Census estimates of population data from 2004 came out in the press. USA Today reporters Paul Overberg and Haya El Nasser said on August 11 that there is a trend of Black professionals to move to the suburbs of the South from the North. It was Stalin and the Comintern that said in the 1920s and 1930s that there is a Black-belt nation in the South. The trend of population after World War II has generally opposed the Black-belt nation until now. This is relevant as we picture the revolution of the oppressed nations.
Churchill left open California and part of Texas; although he also said that the territory claimed could be adjusted in other ways. Aztlan may want to claim these territories, so there is something to work out among the indigenous peoples and the Mexican nation in particular. Once we take out the Black belt nation as well, we may see a rump united $tates in the northeastern quadrant of what we now call the united $tates. Churchill only raised the idea of an indigenous owned Rocky Mountain region. He also believes there are Asian-descended nations that need a relationship to land.
Churchill covers the corruption of the law to steal land for settlers, nuclear waste abuses of indigenous peoples, sports teams and rituals named after offensive views of the First Nations and the American Indian Movement (AIM). By itself, the "Fantasies of a Master Race: the Cinematic Colonization of American Indians" is sufficient to condemn the entirety of Hollywood and justify the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the opppressed nations over u.$. imperialism for years to come. Churchill shows readers just how many poisonous movies and TV shows there are when it comes to just the so-called Indians alone. Just reading this chapter, we see how it is impossible to grow up untwisted.