WardChurchill – ILANA MERCER

D’Souza’s Epic ‘America’ Error

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 08:19:50 +0000

There are certainly good things about Dinesh D’Souza’s film “America: Imagine a World Without Her,” as sharp-eyed critics like Jack Kerwick have observed. But those don’t matter much for this reason: The central question asked and answered by the film maker is premised on an epic error of logic.

But first, in honor of Bad Eagle, a friend and a great American, it is imperative to counter D’Souza’s claim about the fate of the Amerindians at the hands of the U.S. government. The late Bad Eagle, aka David Yeagley, was the namesake and great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle.

According to D’Souza, Native Americans were decimated not by genocide or ethnocide, but by diseases brought from Europe by the white man.” Not entirely true. In his magisterial “History of the American People,” historian Paul Johnson, a leading protagonist for America, details the “destruction of the Indians” by Andrew Jackson.

Particularly poignant are Red Eagle’s words to Jackson, on April 14, 1814, after the president-to-be had rampaged through villages, burning them and destroying crops in a ruthless campaign against the Indians east of the Mississippi: “I am in your power. My people are gone. I can do no more but weep over the misfortunes of my nation.” Jackson had just “imposed a Carthaginian peace on 35 frightened Indian chiefs,” forcing them to part with the lion’s share of their ancestral lands.

As moving is the account of another philoamerican, philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville. The Frenchman describes a crowd of displaced Choctaw warriors—having been subjected to ethnic cleansing (in today’s parlance): “There was an air of ruin and destruction, something which gave the impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn’t witness it without a heavy heart. … it is an odd coincidence that we should have arrived in Memphis to witness the expulsion, or perhaps the dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of the oldest American nations.”

Facts fudged notwithstanding, D’Souza’s theories about “America,” good or bad, can be dismissed out of hand because of rotten reasoning. The reader will recognize the central error of logic in the following excerpts from interviews conducted by D’Souza’s biggest booster, Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

In “Bill Ayers, Dinesh D’Souza debate [on]American values,” both Kelly and D’Souza “challenge” the Weather Underground terrorist-cum-educator Ayers for his part in the “blame America first” crowd; for holding that “American history is a series of crimes visited upon different [peoples],” for his contention that, in their words, “America is bad,” “America is a force for evil.”

Noodles neoconservative D’Souza: “America is benign in the way it exercises its power.” “America has made mistakes. But there is a difference between making a mistake and doing something inherently wicked.”

Is the reader getting the gist of the D’Souza doozie?

The duo’s almost-identical exchange with Ward Churchill, former chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado, should instantiate D’Souza’s cock-up, amplified by megaphone Megyn Kelly:

“Is there anything good about America?” the anchor asks the author of the screed “Some People Push Back.” Kelly continues to conflate the “we” pronoun with the U.S.: “The United States of America; have we done any good?” D’Souza, for his part, doubles down with the example of immigrants to the U.S.: “They’re coming here, voting with their feet, leaving everything that matters behind. Are they coming to an evil empire?”

My reply to Dinesh should give the game away:

Good immigrants come to America to be part of the “little platoons” that make up its glorious private economy: the people of Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Amazon, Google, Marriot, Mattel, FedEx, Costco, Coca-Cola, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and millions of local franchises run by innovative, everyday Americans.

Bad immigrants come to America to partake of the state. Or the very thing D’Souza and his cheerleader call “America.”

“Is America a good country? Are we a bad country?”: The two professional gabbers collapse the distinction between “America” and the U.S. government. This is a mistake. The state is not the same as America. Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing “America.” It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the “little platoons” of America, as Edmund Burke described a man’s social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the “bad” category to the state, on the ground that they hate “America.”

One might say that D’Souza’s case for “America” is undergirded by a confusion of category.

“Dinesh D’Souza is winning,” writes National Journal’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood. The jigging dance steps might be premature. D’Souza’s is a box-office success. The statist meta-structure of his argument for “America,” however, is rooted in error. Serious thinkers should give it no quarter.

On this front, D’Souza, Da Kelly and their acolytes are out to lunch.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Praag.org, Quarterly Journal & Junge Freiheit
September 19, 2014

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Don’t Silence Ward Churchill, Sack Him*

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 07:00:00 +0000

“All great truths begin as blasphemies,” said Bernard Shaw.” But not all blasphemies are the beginnings of great truths, a distinction worth remembering when it comes to Ward Churchill.

The chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado gained notoriety for calling the victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns.” By this he meant that those murdered in the Twin Towers were not innocent, but deserved what they got. “They were civilians of a sort,” wrote Churchill in an essay titled Some People Push Back.

“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.”

“Payback can be a real motherfucker,” this subtle chap gloated. For al-Qaeda, Churchill had only compliments. They were “combat teams” and “secular activists” who made “gallant sacrifices.”

An impenitent Churchill later pardoned food-service workers and janitors; apparently the glib Nazi metaphor was intended only for stockbrokers, bankers, and the likes. You see, Marxists hate the division of labor—the hallmark of civilization, prosperity, and individuality. Churchill’s ilk also refuse to believe that “Pizza Hut opening an outlet in Lima is not the modern equivalent of Pizarro descending on the Incas,” to quote Henri Astier. Churchill’s claptrap caused one impressionable 9/11 victim to distance himself from the peaceful, productive commerce his (deceased) father had conducted on the 104th floor of the north tower.

For placing Churchill and his frothy verbiage on center stage, we have Hamilton College’s Nancy Rabinowitz to thank. The professor had invited Churchill to speak about “American Indian activism” (his field of “expertise”), as part of the college’s Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. (Churchill is the author of tracts such as Fantasies of the Master Race, and From a Native Son.)

The Project was founded to “help women, gays, blacks and Hispanics on a predominantly male campus.” Since gays are men too, and some blacks and Hispanics are saddled with the Y chromosome, this original mission statement is confusing but unambiguous. Translation: the “pale, patriarchal, penis people,” and what’s left of western civilization, are the targets of The Project’s agitprop. Similar programs proliferate on campuses across the country, including the University of Colorado.

Churchill, who has also served as the acting director of the American Indian Equal Opportunities Program at CU, may not be a real Indian chief, but he takes the lead when it comes to reducing everything to a discourse of the ‘excluded’ and ‘oppressed.’

He is joined by all the other mediocre minds in the country’s cultural studies departments—Ethnic, Women, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies—and in the humanities and comparative literature enclaves, where they manufacture dogmas about victims and oppressors. Government commissions have gleefully codified these dead-wrong doctrines into law, giving blacks, women, Indians, and gays (the list is still under construction) the power to displace and destroy unprotected species (white men, for instance).

And the torchbearer for this “tradition” dares to defile the free traders of the World Trade Center? The temerity!

Before Churchill, the Kirkland cretins had courted another PR disaster by inviting Susan Rosenberg, a 1960s radical and a convicted felon, to be “artist/activist-in-residence.” I realize there are conflicting views about Rosenberg’s culpability in the crime for which she was convicted. The point is immaterial to my argument, which is that Rosenberg, like Churchill, is a political agitator, not a scholar. When Hamilton administrators called her “an award-winning writer,” they were referring to the PEN award for prison writing. When they dubbed her “a teacher who offers a unique perspective as a writer,” they were crediting her criminal record. Some résumé requirements!

Unlike Rosenberg, Churchill is not violent, but he is a fraud and an imposter. He lies about his ancestry (his impressive hairline is the only Indian thing about him), his paratrooper’s pedigree, and his service in Vietnam. He also appears to be a plagiarist. A perusal of his and Rosenberg’s piss-poor prose (she also dabbles in poetry) is enough to establish that UC, to say nothing of an elite liberal arts college like Hamilton, owes its students a lot better.

The Churchill contretemps illustrates the need to distinguish between academic freedom and free speech, as Roger Kimball has done, with reference to the work of sociologist Edward Shils.

“Academic freedom is not the freedom of academic individuals to do just anything, to follow any impulse or desire, or to say anything that occurs to them. It is the freedom to do academic things: to teach the truth as they see it on the basis of prolonged and intensive study, to discuss their ideas freely with their colleagues, to publish the truth as they have arrived at it by systematic methodical research and assiduous research.

Although Academic freedom includes political freedom, it is nonetheless desirable that teachers should not expound their own political or moral preferences and values in their classes … academic freedom is the freedom to seek and transmit the truth. It does not extend to the conduct of political propaganda in teaching.”

Libertarians should, naturally, reject Kimball’s view that the law circumscribe free speech. Only the owner of the proverbial crowded theater can permit or forbid his patrons to disrupt a screening with bogus cries of “fire.” Hamilton is a private establishment (although “private” is a misnomer in contemporary America, as taxpayers pay for Federal and State Assistance Programs). It’s up to Hamilton’s proprietors and patrons to decide the limits—or lack thereof—of free speech and academic freedom. When alumni begin to protest and potential students and donors scuttle, the Kirkland kooks (and CU, for that matter) will be forced to contemplate their errant ways.

This is not to say that Churchill’s tirades are bereft of any truth. He makes some good points, the one about the American people’s torpidity being an example. But, unless one is a magpie, one doesn’t rummage through verbal garbage in search of bright objects.

Churchill is not the answer to getting university students to think critically about American foreign policy; a rigorous, unpoliticized, liberal education that teaches law, history, philosophy, and literature is. This was once a tradition on American campuses. The tradition is dead. Its killers—Churchill and company—are at large in the ideology-driven, unscholarly covens across America’s campuses, where they indoctrinate rather than educate.

* For this column, at once libertarian and patriotic, the writer was fired from Antiwar.com, for which she had been a fortnightly, regular contributor. The editor accused me of “sounding like Ann Coulter.” Fifteen years hence, he proceeded to worship the good lady and echo the views herein.

* Image: ward.churchill.fox.news.youtube

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