I’ve done exactly one post on Ward Churchill since the fake indian, fake combat vet, fake scholar, and fake American burst on the scene early this year. The reason I’ve pretty much ignored the guy isn’t that he hasn’t supplied us with a wealth of material. Let’s face it; he’s as daffy as a dik-dik. The reason I haven’t written anything is the same reason I don’t blog NASCAR. Watching slow motion replays of traffic accidents just doesn’t do it for me. Trying to absorb the rapid fire incantations of lies, distortions, false analogies, and jaw dropping misstatements of fact is like seeing a stock car hit the wall at Daytona and roll over and over and over until, after coming to rest on the infield, you wonder how anyone can walk away from such a horrible scene.
I’ve seen the Nutty Professor on C-Span twice since his January coming out party. Both times, my head was killing me about halfway through his presentation due to my brain being overburdened by trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. Churchill appears to be a man in love not only with himself and his own voice, but also in love with a technique commonly used by people who really don’t have anything to say but just can’t keep their mouths shut.
It’s called “bullshitting.”
All of this being said, this article by Matt Labash, senior writer for The Weekly Standard is a real eye opener. Labash has a profile of the Rocky Mountain Moonbat that’s reveals Churchill is much more than your average America hating lefty. The profile of the Mad Professor that emerges is one of an image conscious charlatan.; a money grubbing mountebank who accepts $5000 per speaking engagement while apparently trying to milk his 15 minutes of fame for everything its worth.
I pity Mr. Labash his assignment. According to Churchill’s ex wives, he can be a difficult man indeed to get along with. But Labash doesn’t shy away from the tough questions. It’s just a pity Churchill didn’t see fit to answer them:
Seeing he’s a wee bit sensitive about his Indian identity, I go right for it, asking just how Indian he is. “I am not going to get into pet poodle pedigree,” he says. “I’ve done this twice and I’m not doing it again. It is absolutely racially affrontive.” But everybody wants to know, including his university, I respond. “And everybody can go f–themselves,” he snaps.
What this type of rationale reminds me of is the musings of Hitler’s favorite philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, after penning the overly verbose and stunningly ignorant treatise on racial purity entitled Foundations of the 19th Century, Mr. H. realized that by writing that “teutons” were superior to other “races,” he had neglected to include himself in that illustrious company of supreme beings. Accordingly, he simply altered the definition to fit; he said that “anyone who believes or acts like a Teuton, is a Teuton.”
Similarly, according to Churchill “Anyone who believes or acts like an indian is an indian.” This is true even if native Americans themselves deny your heritage.
This is a good indication of how Churchill uses words to trivialize the important and complicate the obvious. It’s not the work of a scholar. It’s what bunko artists do.
Then there’s the little matter of Churchill’s combat experience in which Mr. Labash, who is asking these questions as he and the good professor are getting progressively more inebriated, tries to get a straight answer from the increasingly tipsy professor:
MOVING ON TO LESS CONTROVERSIAL FARE, I ask him about the discrepancies in his Vietnam record, in which he’s made himself sound like a ground-pounding trigger-puller, while records suggest he drove a truck, and a résumé claims he worked as a public information specialist. “I performed infantry functions, I ended up in a transportation battalion,” he rolls, before abruptly stopping. “Actually, I said I wasn’t going to do this with anybody, and I’m not.”
Why–it’s under question? I ask.
“I don’t care. Show me some possible relevance to it. . . . I’m not running for f–ing office. I don’t have to vet my life back to potty training stage in order to be entitled.”
I suggest that since people are alleging deception in several areas of his life, doesn’t that go to his credibility as a scholar? “My academic work is subject to being assessed like any other academic work, and it doesn’t matter if I think I’m goddamned Napoleon Bonaparte,” he says. “This is not the National F–ing Enquirer, though it’s been turned into that.” He says no one contests that he’s been in Vietnam, and no one contests that he’s decorated (with a Cross of Gallantry and “this and that,” he adds).
Actually, the good professor has a point of sorts. His Viet Nam experience, or lack thereof, shouldn’t be counted when trying to judge his academic record. What should be counted and indeed, looked into, are the charges of plagerism, shoddy research, and barefaced falsehoods that other scholars have leveled against him and for which he has failed to address in any other manner except by accusing his accusers of being jealous academics with various axes to grind.
All of these questions about Churchill’s past are relevant only in that they reveal him to be the grifter that he is, a lefty fakir of such eminence that even his scholarly tomfoolery is excused by his supporters as just a misunderstanding. The real problem with Churchill is his core philosophy. It springs from the eternal well of victimhood’s identity politics:
Churchill, to his credit, doesn’t subscribe to any meaningless “praxis of personal purity,” so he takes his coffee (black) with a shrug and lights a Pall Mall. I ask if he’s an anarchist, and though they have an affinity, he says no. He’s an Indigenist. Not quite sure what that entails, I ask him to explain. He’s a wordy bugger, and goes on for a good while about a “consciously synchronous level of population” and a “latitude of action that is governed in a self-regulating manner” and a “unity in the differentiation that’s consonant with natural order.” I figure this would all go down a lot easier if I’d first eaten peyote.
Later, on my own, I explore his philosophy in a manifesto conveniently titled “I am an Indigenist.” While Churchill generally shies from being prescriptive–much more fun to talk about what others have done wrong–this essay is the exception. The “highest priority of my political life,” he writes, is “the rights of indigenous peoples,” for whom he foresees the restoration of land. He envisions a “North American Union of Indigenous Nations” that would comprise “roughly one third of the continental U.S.” Ever the pragmatist, Churchill says the region would enjoy as much autonomy as it wanted, and that with Indians controlling all those natural resources, much-needed conservation will prevail in a land now completely overpopulated. (He cites an ecological demographer’s estimate that North America was “thoroughly saturated with humans by 1840,” and figures we’re due for a good dose of population control, possibly through “voluntary sterilization” and “voluntary abortion.”)
Before you burst out laughing at this kind of mountebankery, one should pause and consider that this voice from the “old left” is being married with the ideals of the anarchists, the anti-globalization loons, the “sustainable development” nazis, and others in the new coalition of luddites who seek to destroy western civilization. The fact that Churchill is getting this kind of noteriety gives these other wackos a huge boost in exposure. And the indications are that they intend to ride the Mad Prof’s coattails to semi-respectability and perhaps even an entry into the more “mainstream” leftist elements like Moveon.org.
It’s not enough to say that Ward Churchill is a fast-talking confidence man who continues to make outrageous statements about the country of his birth to simply get rich and get attention. One must recognize that it’s not what he says as much as what he’s coming to represent; the pinnacle of leftist thought synthesized for two generations and nurtured in the propoganda factories that pass for college campuses in America.
Churchill has become a hero to a ready made audience who’ve been conditioned to believe the worst about their own country without discovering where the truth lies themselves. The danger is that his influence will spawn another generation of like-minded nitwits whose worldview has been shaped by the cartoonish intellect of this faux indian, scholar, and activist.
It would be fascinating to revisit Churchill in 10 years to see what his inspiration has wrought. If it’s any more profound than a small cadre of ill clothed, ill fed, foul smelling galoots who rant on about “little Eichmann’s” I’ll be very surprised.
UPDATE
Giacomo at Joust the Facts links to another article on Churchill, this time one that dissects the Nutty Professor’s “scholarship” and shows how he uses deconstructionist techniques to tell tall tales of American History:
The fault, in what can charitably be called his analysis, is that he disassociates cause and effect, picks out bits of history, simply ignoring that which preceded or caused it. History, a la Churchill picks up at a starting point — any starting point — that supports his beliefs. For instance — Churchill whines about the Allies’ “strategic bombing campaign’ (the foregoing words, we suppose, put in quotes to emphasize that it was a cover-up phrase for wanton destruction) against Germany during World War II.” Of course there was indeed a bombing campaign against Germany and its cities from 1940 to 1945. But what was its cause? Who first began the bombings of populations?
His technique could have been lifted from the Jacques Derrida playbook. And Giacomo points out in his own post on the subject that taking things out of context - in this case as it relates to a quote by George Bush - is Churchill’s weapon of choice:
Churchill is upset that his comment about the “little Eichmanns” gets taken out of context, and seeks to defuse that bombshell (though he still calls the people in the towers by that epithet). Here he commits the same effrontery, taking the President’s words out of context to support his own thesis.
I guess in the Mad Prof’s world, what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander.
