The First Amendment was written for Ward Churchill

Ward Churchill is an American Indian activist and scholar who framed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 as inevitable, the natural result of years of oppressive U.S. policies, which he has outlined at length over the years. He was at his most offensive when he compared the stockbrokers, lawyers and government employees who died in the attacks with Nazi "technocrat" Adolf Eichmann for their role in supporting U.S. actions abroad.

But, the First Amendment allows for freedom of speech. Lest we forget, this is a good thing, generally speaking anyway, since it enables a dynamic environment in which new and perhaps superior voices are allowed to be heard and to evolve. Does America need new voices? In the intellectual arena probably not. It is bizarrely and broadly radical there with representation from a wide assortment of mostly leftist freaks, not the least of whom is Ward Churchill.

But among politicians and the electorate there is an incredible homogenization to the point where only one voice is often perceived. Arianna Huffington calls our one major Party, the Republicrats, George Wallace said a long time ago that "there's not a dimes worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans." Many Americans proudly proclaim that they vote for the man, not the Party, without realizing that Democrats and Republicans are exact opposites when removed from the electoral arena. More importantly, voting patterns seem to dramatically corroborate an inability among voters to perceive a difference in the political parties.

For example, George Bush (in theory a conservative Republican) and Barak Obama(in theory a liberal Democrat) shared 1 million votes in the recent elections. If you add up all the State legislators in the country you find that there are exactly the same number from each Party(3567). Most Presidential elections are won by a mere 1% margin. What has happened is that everyone has met in the homogenized middle. Politicians have moved toward voters and voters have moved toward politicians; not in an intellectual process but rather in a blind emotional process. All have met in one position in the very safe, comfortable, and harmonious middle to sing qumbaya around the camp fire. But in such a singular position very little change is possible, when clearly the U.S. must change as it faces a rapidly changing world, even a rapidly attacking world.

To avoid an ossified death in a stationary middle position that is continuously out flanked by our evolving adversaries we need the First Amendment and even the Ward Churchills that come with it.

Here is the essential Mr. Churchill:
"For five consecutive generations, from roughly 1880?1980, Native American children in the United States and Canada were forcibly taken from their families and relocated to residential schools. The stated goal of this government program was to ?kill the Indian to save the man.? Half of the children did not survive the experience, and those who did were left permanently scarred. The resulting alcoholism, suicide, and the transmission of trauma to successive generations has led to a social disintegration with results that can only be described as genocidal."
"All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date (as a result of UN sanctions prior to the current war) thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered ? are still suffering ? a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.""More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinian Muslims during the 1960s.""That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint."
"As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire ? the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved ? and they did so both willingly and knowingly."


Sadly, he makes some sense. We did commit near genocide against the Indians and Slaves, and hate to be reminded of it. We are the biggest arms merchant in the world and those arms do kill many people not the least of whom are Palestinian Muslims who indirectly counter attacked on 9/11.

While Churchill manages to exude a whole lot of anger over these issues and seems certain the U.S. is the devil incarnate, you do have to wonder if he's really just an obscure academic who has been screaming ever louder over a long career in the belief that it is the only potential way to reach the anti-intellectual, deaf, ossified majority in the vast middle of American politics. If this is true, and it might be even if he doesn't know it himself, maybe he's not such a bad guy, just a guy using an exaggerated position in an effort to be heard?

After all, we've done all we know how for Indians and Blacks, some would even argue we've hurt them further in our misguided efforts to help them. As a 3rd generation Italian American I, like most Americans, don't feel much responsibility, although a considerable amount of sympathy, for a history perpetrated mostly by Northern Europeans who lived here long before I was born. The blind support for Israeli aggression against Muslim Palestinians is deplorable but I think can largely be explained by our tremendous sympathy for Jews in the wake of the holocaust, and a concomitant blindness toward the Palestinians. So why should we be so up in arms about the easily dealt with things Churchill says, unless we are afraid on some level that he is somewhat correct or that he is threatening to expose our stupidity for having been blindly herded into the center for so long? Certainly it is not easy to imagine that our blind support of Israel has led us to blindly ignore the origins of the war on terror.

In fact much of the collectivist fraternity from the morally neutral center of American politics that has tried so hard to shame Mr. Churchill seems to be acting out of an insecurity derived from a subconscious realization that their position is, in fact, antithetical to free speech, but still must be defended if only to avoid the embarrassment of exposure. So, I say let's thank God for the First Amendment, but let's also pray it's defended strongly enough to keep the ossified middle (actually an another ingenious creation of our framers) slowly moving in the right direction.