Genociding Ward Churchill for over a 20th of a century

CNews 30April08

It's Spring, so we shouldn't be surprised that the Churchill Tree is bearing its first poison fruit. (ht, urk!, Snapple over at DrunkaBlog, where Drunka's already posted the news, but with funnier commentary.)
Excerpt:

Hawaiian sovereignty activists calling themselves the "Hawaiian Kingdom Government" surrounded Iolani Palace this morning, refusing to let state employees either enter or exit the historical site, saying the palace and surrounding grounds are property of the "Hawaiian Kingdom."

Talk about your coinkydink: Back in 2005, the Hawaiian Independence Blog was talking about just this sort of action.

Update: We note that the "Minister of the Interior" of the "Hawaiian Kingdom" is University of Hawaii-Manoa (professorial digs of Ward's cronies Ruth Hsu and Haunani-Kay Trask) poli-sci Ph.D. candidate David Keanu Sai. Update update: The blogmaster over at hawaiiankingdom.info tells us that Sai is with some other group calling itself Hawaiian Kingdom, and that Sai is not affiliated with the group that briefly occupied Iolani Palace. So Churchill's rabble-rousing in Hawaii incited the talk, talk Hawaiian Kingdom peeps instead of the fight, fight Hawaiian Kingdom peeps. Man, that's gotta burn his ass to a crisp.

The Myth of Ward Churchill's Scholarship

Courtesy of an anonymous correspondent, we've recently come into possession of Ward Churchill's 2007 Social Text article entitled "The Myth of Academic Freedom."* We'd publish it here, but it has a pesky copyright notice attached that seems to suggest a prohibition of same, so instead, we'll post the statements we find particularly laughable, and (of course), our reasons for finding each of them so darn funny.

Here's a taste, from Churchill's background section "On The Home Front" and covering academic freedom issues in Colorado during the past century:

[...A] “free speech” area outside the student union has been named in honor of Dalton Trumbo, a one-time UCB student and celebrated novelist/screenwriter who successfully resisted blacklisting by [Senator Joseph] McCarthy.

Pretty much everyone resisted blacklisting by Senator McCarthy for the very simple reason that McCarthy compiled no blacklists. Maybe The Perfesser is thinking of HUAC. Confidential to The Perfesser: Our Congress is bicameral. You could look it up.

In any case, as we continue slogging through prose turgid by even Churchill's standard, we'll post more hilarities. Approximately half of the entire screed is a paraphrase of chunks of Jon Wiener's Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower (lucky for Churchill he's no historian), which The Perfesser was thumping as long ago as his visit to Salida over two years ago to speak to an audience comprised mostly of bewildered pensioners and backwoods conspiracy theorists.

Oh, one unexpected pleasure in reading The Perfesser's exercise in mythology is learning that Hamilton College stopped payment on Churchill's speaking fee check.

Update: Relentless PB reader Noj points out that we'd called Tail-Gunner Joe "Eugene" (now corrected; we blame the usual tainted Metamucil). Noj also points out that Social Text and its editors were the victims of Sokal's Hoax, which showed pretty conclusively that the publication's claims to peer review were as specious as The Perfesser's claims to scholarship.

* The entire article is available from Social Text's website, but the price of even a two-day single-PC access to it is ridiculously exorbitant.

nota bene: Yes, we know—The title of this post has little to do with the post itself, but Churchill's fabrication of "history" is already well-proven. We just wanted to remind everyone.

CNews 28April08

PB reader Wm. T. Sherman (@sspats be unto him) directs our attention to an excellent evisceration of the claims of some Churchill cronies, in this case, some supporters of the Duke University 'Group of 88'.

CNews 22April08

CNews 17April08

CNews 10April08

Roger Sandall offers a piercing insight into Australia's (and by extension, the entire Western World's) intellectual confusion over the handling (and mishandling) of Aborigene affairs, said confusion most recently coalescing into Australia proclaiming a national "Sorry Day" (soon, we're guessing, to be followed by Australia proclaiming a national "Sheepish Embarrassment At Our Own Fatuous Self-Righteousness Day"*) (ht Waldo Pepper)
Excerpt:

How can a national apology for removing Aboriginal children, in February [of this year], be so speedily followed in March by a request from outback Aborigines themselves—a plea given great prominence in the country’s leading paper—that their children should for their own safety be taken from their home communities and educated elsewhere? How can Aboriginal realities (“We need to get the children out of here”) be so deeply misunderstood by white bien pensants?

Beyond this is the matter of denial. How is it that at the very time when nothing remotely resembling traditional Aboriginal culture any longer exists at places like Aurukun, where the community has fallen into a cesspit of mutually reinforcing pathologies, the Australian intelligentsia adheres to a vision of indigenous culture that exists—if it exists at all—largely in the metaphysical realm?

* * *

The answers to these questions (and they are answers that would certainly have interested Marx) lie in an intractable ideology widely shared by those on the white and urban side of the racial divide—a hodgepodge of notions as intellectually confused and politically paralysing as anything to be found anywhere today.

The first involves the eschatology of the old millenarian Left. By the 1960s it finally sunk in that the proletariat had failed its historic mission and that revolution was off the agenda. For true believers (and Australia still has many) this was like announcing that Jesus had cancelled the Second Coming and that Heaven itself was in doubt. A gloomy black hole opened in the moral and emotional life of the socialist faithful.

What could fill it? Who could replace the “workers”? Where was there another social group that could be idealised as simultaneously virtuous, deserving, communal, and oppressed? The answer was obvious. In these fateful circumstances Aborigines inherited the sentimental hopes of many of the Australian Left. This was an awesome responsibility: from the 1960s on, lots of political emotion became involved in Aboriginal affairs for reasons having little to do with the actual lives or needs of indigenes themselves.

CNews 9April08

"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."

"I regard Professor Churchill’s scholarly work as having made major contributions in ethnic studies and with respect to Native Americans. This assessment is reinforced by Churchill’s worldwide reputation, as well as by the high regard with which he is held by students."