Ward Churchill vs. Bill O'Reilly

Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, and Derrick Jensen, to name a few, are speaking at a student rally on free speech at Ward Churchill's old work place, The University of Colorado at Boulder.

Bill O'Reilly of the O'Reilly factor stated on his show that Ward Churchill rewrites history...

....

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

How many of you out there have read Ward Churchill's work?

Wow...

That's a lot...

Anyway, even amongst his fellow academics they state, almost complain, that he footnotes rather heavily. If you are a right winger, let me explain since you won't understand anything beyond a soundbite. A foot note is inserted when one refers to the works of someone else. For example, if I quoted Bill O'Reilly in an academic work, I would put a number in the upper right hand of the word that you would then refer to at the end of the piece. You look at the end of the piece for the corresponding number, and voila (wah-lah), I show the reference from whence I extracted the information. I know, a little much isn't it sound bite right wingers. Heck, I doubt you even made it this far before falling asleep or wandering off to watch Bill O'Reilly or Anne Coulter. If you are still with me, you, YES! YOU!, are then offered the opportunity to look up the information referred to in the footnote yourself and see if it is true or there is something that is being left out. Knowing the amount of footnotes used by Ward ("The Ghosts of 9-1-1: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," from his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," a 20 page essay, has 179 footnotes) you would know that he doesn't "rewrite" history, he gathers information and puts it in a comprehendable essay for the reader to gather information.

The thing, however, is that Americans HATE information. Information, ESPECIALLY FACTUAL, gets in the way of the unsubstantiated belief that this is "the land of freedom." It gets in the way of the belief that "my relatives fought for freedom in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan." When folks are so heavily vested in lies, it is difficult to get them to hear truths. Then, they fight back with rhetoric at the least and violence at the most. They never fight back with substantiated facts. Americans, you gotta Love 'em, or eventually they'll try to kill you for not kneeling before their allegations of greatness.

So, anyway, for you all that made it this far, this is the offending PARAGRAH, not just the tiny "little Eichman's" bit, that got Bill O'Reilly, and thus the right wingers, wound up so tight about Ward which eventually led to a campaign not to educate your children, but to fire Ward Churchill for not kneeling before the status quo. Please, unlike the right wing, read the whole paragraph. It is gleaned from the essay "Sometimes They Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," by Ward Churchill.

"As for those in the World Trade Center... Well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. 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. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

Now, excuse me here for using my head, I know how much thinking is so offensive to the right wing types, but to me, it doesn't sound like Ward is referring to all the folks in "The Two Towers" as being "little Eichman's." It sounds to me like he is referring to the power brokers and financiers whose decisions have slaughtered millions currently, and their predecessors, historically. Let me just remind you all that over 200 U.S. corporations helped fund the Nazi's, including Brown Brothers Banking which Prescott Bush was a board member, IBM, Ford, GM, General Electric, etc. And let's not forget, either, how Douglas McCarthur absolved of crime and then recruited members from unit 731 of the Japanese military. You know, the folks that performed vivisections on folks to see how much torture they could take before dying. Mmm, mmm. Some crimes, no matter how horrific, are seen as fine and dandy. Another fine example, Bikini Atoll. Wanting the understand the effects of radiation on the human body, in 1946, the U.S. tested two atom bombs on the island of Bikini, making it uninhabitable (a legally defined act of genocide). They then studied the radialogical health effects on the U.S. servicefolks that they exposed to the lethal stuff. The service men not only didn't know they were being exposed, they were lied to and were not paid any extra.

So, try reading beyond two words with the explanation of those two words used by a war mongering chicken hawk (chicken hawk: one who doesn't do his own killing but asks your kids to do it for him), Bill O'Reilly. Education, knowledge, is something dangerous to these folks, because if you really knew what they were talking about, you wouldn't listen anymore and their advertising revenue would dry up. They'd be out of a job.