WELCOME!

Seeing Ward Churchill on Bill Maher's HBO show last night (3/4/05) made me dive into the issues swirling around him after having just let them slide for some time. Yes, I'd heard of him & seen some of the coverage, but, quite frankly, there's more important stuff going on.

But, overnight, it jelled with my recent thoughts of starting this blog and seemed like as good a door to enter the fray as any. So welcome to the first installment of EarthCitizen, a work in progress. I don't know everything and don't know I'd want to, so this is as much an opportunity for me to learn from you as it is to share my views. I welcome your comments, pro or con, and thank you in advance for participating.

Anyway, back to the subject... Better yet, before continuing, please read Ward Churchill's actual essay:

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html

At a very basic level, I agree with him (as did Maher): US citizens desperately need to wake up to the fact that many things done in our name for decades, even centuries, have been WRONG from almost any sane point of view. Because we claim to be the world's defender of freedom, democracy and human rights and because of the incredible political, economic and military power we can wield, we have a greater responsibility than most countries to nurture and lead by example rather than dominate by guile or force. Sometimes we have indeed done that (one of the best, I think, was our involvement in the creation of the UN), but we've ignobly tried to justify hypocritical actions with patriotic mumbo-jumbo on too many occasions for me to accept.

As citizens of a country that's based on the principle of popular rule, we are ultimately responsible for such actions, at least in a moral sense. While we cannot change the past, we have a duty to ourselves, our children, and the rest of the planet to do whatever we can to ensure that the hypocrisy ends and that we treat other countries as we'd wish to be treated if the roles were reversed.

The fact that our culture has so much emotion invested in seeing itself as the world's shining star, the "one way to live," "a force for good," etc., makes it difficult to focus enough light into the deep, dark holes to see what's there and fix the problems -- or, in many cases, rescue long-stranded, forgotten parts of ourselves. We need to know what's "down there," so to speak, and I suspect when we gather up the courage to look, we'll find a wellspring of cultural creativity as well as less endearing traits.

Unfortunately, Churchill's essay and HBO appearance didn't help that effort at all.

Churchill's linking of the 9/11 terrorists' motives to certain events (the 1st Iraq war, Palestine) is basically accurate but simplistic, but to say some of the other events he mentions (Hiroshima, Native American massacres, for ex.) were more than remotely connected is a big stretch. Those events were certainly examples of the US capacity for irrational violence and hypocrisy, but painting with such a broad stroke only weakens the argument in this case. The fact that the terrorists could do what they did and some people found it acceptable is itself part of that broader problem.

He's right that the terrorists didn't attack WTC carelessly, and he wasn't (by far) the first to say that. It took courage and determination to plan & execute that, and the target WAS one of strong enough symbolic effect to make it militarily viable. Hell, we bombed some of Saddam's palaces even without knowing if anyone was there for the same largely symbolic reasons and routinely targeted financial districts in WW2. As several of the various sites I've read pointed out, many in the Muslim world believe war with the West (especially the US) started long before we invaded Iraq.

The terrorists' courage, however, didn't make the attack any less evil, since it showed a callous disregard for the well-being of others. Recognizing their act as evil doesn't make some of our policies and our years of self-serving mistreatment of the Middle East any less evil, for the same reason. To put it bluntly, those who believe "our" needs and well-being are somehow different from "their" needs and well-being are at best delusional. They can be expressed differently, but LIVING is obviously a prerequisite.

(For lots of MidEast history, politics, etc, see the blog "Informed Comment" at http://www.juancole.com/. I have no connection to him, but he seems to know what he's talking about.)

I have a problem with the WAY Churchill expresses his views more than the facts he uses -- what kind of reaction did he expect if he was comparing WTC victims to Eichmann? The analogy has a grain of truth when applied to the Pentagon victims b/c they WERE in fact coordinating our military, which at the time was entrenched in several Muslim nations, supplying arms to Israel, and sporadically bombing Iraq. (If the roles were reversed, we'd be pretty angry, too.) But a far better analogy for the WTC victims would be to the residents of WW2-firebombed Dresden: Guilty maybe of failure to protest/prevent our govt's hypocrisy & killing, but not of actually making them happen, as Eichmann did.

Saying things like that was almost guaranteed to have Churchill's opinion either ignored completely or attacked in ways that are based more in symbolism, out-of-context quotations, hysteria, and ignorance than in a thoughtful reading of the actual argument. Most people will avoid swimming in water that looks polluted. Less hyperbole and more evidence would've been far more effective intellectually... but garnered him a whole lot less publicity.

Conversely, we need publicity to get the chance to change the systemic problems that cause 9/11s, Indian massacres, Adolf Eichmanns, & even worse horrors, but getting that publicity has proven incredibly difficult without the hyperbole. The mainstream culture (or "Mother Culture," since it intellectually raises us) doesn't want to deal with the core ISSUES and tries to ignore them by focusing instead on the antics used to express them.

We'll definitely talk a lot about those things as this blog progresses...