Most of you have probably heard of the Ward Churchill controversy. This is the prof from the University of Colorado who wrote an essay after Sept 11 to the effect of "Hey, we had it coming." At the time, nobody was paying attention because, honestly, it was a time where (thankfully) the advice and commentary of nutballs on the left and right was more or less being ignored.
But the ConservaBorg are always looking for a juicy new target. Now that they got CNN exec Eason Jordan to resign over nothing, they need a new distraction so we won't pay attention to national security issues (like granting clearance to what looks like the King Nutball, JD Guckert, so he could disrupt press conferences with softball questions). By the way, where is Gary Aldrich on all this? You remember that joker? He was the former Secret Service agent who slimed Clinton with a book about how they were sloppy with security clearances, had low moral character (I imagine Guckert's apparent role as a gay male prostitute puts him a shade below, say, the TravelGate players), etc. He's got himself a columnist gig with some ConservaBorg outlet. I wonder if he'll use it to criticize Bush over something like this?
Ok, ok, I'll stop kidding.
Anyway, back to Churchill. Recently, lots of right-wing nutballs have been trying to get Churchill fired from his tenured position, and there's a big hubbub on the right over how horrible academia is for letting guys like this speak out. How this is just another example of the Marxist/Communist/Liberal/pro-terrorism people in control of developing the minds of our young people, etc. Well, David Neiwert over at Orcinus offers some background.
It seems there are a lot of crazy academics out there spouting off theories that are downright offensive to most Americans regardless of political affiliation. Yet for some reason, the right-wing noise machine doesn't seem to care. Hmmm, see if you can spot the pattern here:
-- James Everett Kibler, a University of Georgia English professor. A founder of the secessionist and white-supremacist League of the South, Kibler is mostly noted for his outspoken admiration for defenders of slavery and white upper-class rule.
-- Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, who promotes a historical view of Abraham Lincoln as a wicked man "secretly intent on destroying states' rights and building a massive federal government."
-- Clyde Wilson, a University of South Carolina history professor. Wilson is another League of the South founder, and remains an unapologetic neo-Confederate. He says the only thing wrong with The Birth of a Nation is that it was too sympathetic to Lincoln.
-- Donald Livingston, a philosophy professor at Emory University. He has recently been focusing his work on "the philosophical meaning of secession." According to the SPLC, at a 2003 "Lincoln Reconsidered" conference, "he said that 'evil is habit-forming' and no habit is as evil as believing that Lincoln acted out of good motives."
And that's just the currently active neo-Confederates working in Southern universities. Some of those no longer active in academia include Grady McWhiney, now retired as a University of Alabama professor;
Outside the South, there are a number of problematic professors of various kinds, notably eugenics sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.
These include Kevin MacDonald, a Cal State-Long Beach evolutionary psychologist who testified on behalf of David Irving at his libel trial in London. MacDonald has argued "that anti-Semitism can be understood as a natural byproduct of a Darwinian strategy for Jewish survival," and insists that "Jewish behavior must be part of any adequate explanation of the recurrent persecution of Jews."
Then there was Glayde Whitney, a Florida State University psychology professor who liked to teach his students the basic precepts of white supremacy, i.e., that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Whitney also was a subscriber to Holocaust-denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Most notably, he was closely aligned with David Duke, the notorious white supremacist, and wrote the foreword to one of his racist screeds. Whitney died in 2002, much to chagrin of right-wing extremists everywhere.
As Neiwert points out, it is interesting how right-wingers are quick to call us liberals racists for opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez (aka "Mr. Torture"), but they let all these nuts off the hook. Quite the opposite, they support and provide for these idiots. At least when a liberal like me sees someone like Churchill, we just shake our heads and move along. We don't sign them to fucking book deals, pay them to be members of our think tanks or quote them in our research ("Bell Curve" bibliography, anyone?).
Posted by Observer at February 16, 2005 02:26 PMComments on entries can only be made in pop-up windows while those entries are still on the main index page. Sorry for the inconvenience this causes, but this blocks about 99.99% of the spam the blog receives.
Oh my God. That is awful. I had no idea there were people that twisted being allowed to teach at the college level. And near my own home no less. Grrr...
Don't even get me started on the Holocaust folks. My anger becomes palpable and dangerous. I've been to Aushwitz and Dachau, and I don't care who you are, it's almost impossible to go to either of those places and feel nothing.
On another matter, if you ever want your kids to read about the Holocaust in a format they would enjoy, try the Maus I and Maus II graphic novels. I believe the author is Art Spiegleman. Not for the very young, but it doesn't shirk the issues and the metaphor of the Germans as cats andthe Jews as mice is a powerful one on so many levels. Having had 20 of 23 members of my paternal grandfather's family killed in the Holocaust, I get a little mortified at the sheer audacity and stupidity of people who claim it never happened.
Posted by: Liz on February 16, 2005 03:30 PMSo, here's a hypothetical...
Which is worse, claiming that something horrific never happened (e.g. the Holocaust) or claiming that something false happened to justify something horrific (e.g. Iraq was involved in 9/11)?
That is not an attempt to trivialize the Holocaust or anything... I know that so far Bush has not managed to rack up millions of casualties among innocent Iraqis (although I am not sure whether or not he's planning on stopping shy of that number). It is simply intended as a thoughtful question.
Posted by: Seattle Astronomer on February 16, 2005 05:07 PMWhat's horrible is that back in the day of the Holocaust, it was possible to be a relatively informed citizen of any country (including Germany) and not really know for sure what was going on. So in a sense, their ignorant support of Hitler in Germany was understandable. And so was the reluctance to fight on the part of England et al.
With Bush, what galls me is not that he's an awful president (relative to other presidents ... no president of the US has been in the same league as Saddam, Hitler, etc. in terms of basic evil). No, I could live with that if I could see a fragment of acceptance and shame of that fact on the part of his supporters, including the corporate media.
The part that makes me angry is that people who fucking KNOW better are enabling the worst administration since Hoover to drag America down both domestically and abroad. They are presiding over the swan dive of America from an era of greatness, and they seem pretty pleased with themselves about the whole thing.
The Moron Americans aren't much better, guilt-wise, but at least they can say that the media isn't giving them a clear picture of what's going on. Instead, it's a bunch of "some say 2+2 = 5. Other so-called academics, who may or may not be homosexual or working for some liberal media outlet, disagree. We report, you decide."
I think Kevin Drum was saying the other day about so-called intellectuals and how they justify supporting Bush. I'll have to post something about that tomorrow.
Posted by: Observer on February 16, 2005 06:55 PMJust FYI, I've never heard of Ward Chuchill.
Posted by: Humbaba on February 18, 2005 11:03 AMIf you've never heard of the guy, you don't read ConservaBorg blogs like InstaPundit, The Corner, Powerline, etc. and don't pay attention to Fox News, CNN, most major network national news broadcasts, USA Today, WSJ and most editorial pages in papers around the country. Or talk radio.
Unfortunately, that set of media powers saturates the minds of a very large number of people and turns them into mush.
Posted by: Observer on February 18, 2005 11:11 AMI read CNN and the Seattle PI for most of my news, and occasionally I'll watch some local TV news when B is watching it.
Why the heck would I read a conservative blog? I don't read your blog for the political stuff. I only read blogs that are either funny or I sorta know (or know of) the person.
Posted by: Humbaba on February 18, 2005 01:51 PMFeff giggles again about blogs as write-only memory.
Posted by: Feff on February 18, 2005 03:42 PMI certainly use my blog to remember things.
Oh, and I use a custom My.yahoo with a bunch of other media feeds, and I get funny news off Fark.
Posted by: Humbaba on February 18, 2005 09:11 PMOne of the recent things featured on Fark were some clips from a radio station down here and one of their shows. Look for a couple of references to BaD radio, especially my favorite bit on the station at this point, Homer Call of the Week.
I think Fark (and Sports by Brooks) has the audio clips up, but I don't know if it includes the guys breaking down the calls, pointing out the defeated disinterest of the losers, the Ceremonial Blaming of the Refs, the annoying jubilant laughter of the color guy, etc.
Posted by: Observer on February 18, 2005 10:46 PMAnother radical professor (in addition to the slavery apologists and holocaust deniers mentioned above) on the public dole that you'll never heard mentioned on Faux news or on the Sean Hannity radio show is Arthur Jensen, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkley. He has promoted the notion that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, and he has recieved significant funding from a racist group called the "pioneer fund" to conduct his "scientific research."
On the matter of Abraham Lincoln; however, I must say that I have read much of Abraham Lincoln's own writings, and to a certain extent those who question his motives have a valid point. It's a historical fact that Lincoln didn't believe in the equality of the races. In fact in, his debate with Senator Douglas on September 18, 1858, he stated "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races [applause] - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jorors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I belive will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." To his credit, he did oppose slavery; however, he himself stated that his paramount objective in waging the Civil War was not to destroy slavery, but to preserve the Union. In a letter to Harace Greeley published in the New York Tribune on August 25, 1862, he stated "If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save thte Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery."
Posted by: Ben on March 9, 2005 12:20 AMYeah, Jensen is cited repeatedly in the ConservaBorg favorite, "The Bell Curve". The intellectual inconsistency would boggle the mind if it weren't for the fact that it is so clearly a cynical ploy by right-wing talking heads to manipulate the Moron American. It's crazy like Fox.
Posted by: Observer on March 9, 2005 03:34 AM