My home state of Colorado has been abuzz with controversy recently over an essay written by the head of the University of Colorado’s ethnic studies department. The uproar surrounding Professor Ward Churchill’s essay, “On The Justice of Roosting Chickens,” has reached epic proportions locally and nationally.
What could he have written to cause such a stir?
Well, take your pick. How about that the victims of Sept. 11 were “little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers” (a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of executing Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”). Or how about that the victims were “military targets, pure and simple” and that they accepted this fact when they stepped into their offices in the 110-story building each day?
In the most notorious section of his essay, he writes: “True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire … and they did so both willingly and knowingly.” Churchill implies in his essay that by participating in our capitalist economy they volunteered to be targets. If this is the case, then Churchill himself, along with you and me, are targets as well.
Gimme a break. To say that these men and women, who rode the elevators to their offices at Regional Alliance Small Contractors, for example, attended work knowing that they were volunteering to be military targets is ludicrous. These men and women were like everyone else; they were contractors, retailers, attorneys, publishers and yes, a handful of investment bankers. They were not government-chosen targets, awaiting their destinies.
After saying his piece on Sept. 11, Churchill moves his attention to our military actions. In this section, Churchill mocks President George Bush’s mention of the terrorists as “cowards” and says that the cowards are in fact our own soldiers, who themselves sustain “all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade.”
Churchill also has a section titled, “Meet the ‘terrorists,'” in which he criticizes our use of the word when referring to 9/11. Last time I checked, a person strategically flying a commercial airliner into an office building, killing thousands of citizens, would be classified as a terrorist.
These statements have brought Churchill to the head of a huge controversy: the debate over the right to free speech and whether or not those rights include limitations.
Churchill, who is paid more than $100,000 a year by Colorado taxpayers, is in a battle with Governor Bill Owens and almost every other state representative over whether or not he should be allowed to make statements like these.
This question of limitations is one that haunts me. As a communications major and history minor, I love the Constitution and appreciate the rights it guarantees me, especially that of free speech. However, one must ask, does the First Amendment give you the right to say anything you want? The age-old question of whether one is protected enough to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre comes to mind.
It’s ironic to me that Churchill, who patronizingly refers to President George H. Bush, President Bush and the American public as “freedom-loving,” is now fighting to protect these rights we assume as free people. Is Churchill not a freedom-loving American?
Churchill did not write these statements as an opinion column for The Denver Post. Instead, he tried to pass them off as academic literature, funded by a state institution.
So much for academic integrity.
