full interview:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20001571/site/newsweek/" . . . NEWSWEEK: Any regrets over calling 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns”?
Ward Churchill: No. I never have any particular regrets about calling things by their right name. And it’s about time we stop pretending that Americans are in a completely different analytical category from everyone else in the world, and are somehow exempt from the consequences of their actions.
Let’s be clear for a moment: how do you define a “little Eichmann”?
Exactly as Hannah Arendt did. [Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist whose work included coverage of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel. She coined the phrase “banality of evil,” suggesting great evil emerges from ordinary people accepting and participating in misguided premises of the state, rather than driven by sociopaths and fanatics.]
And how do you think she defined it?
Well, that’s a scholar, a Jewish scholar … who very self-consciously (considered) the aftermath of what happened to the Jewish people in the hands of the Nazis. She attended the Eichmann trial. And she probably intimated as much that she intended in confronting a monster. And what she confronted was a little, nondescript mouse of man, a consummate bureaucrat, petty individual, who didn’t even necessarily agree with some of the policies he had been in a position to implement, but who took his identity, who took his sense of self-esteem, prestige, possibility of advancement—all which is fairly important to people—from discharging his organizational responsibilities in a superior manner.
(The public backlash) was just a visceral reaction. .…What Eichmann did was arrange train schedules, the logistic structure for the delivery of Jews and materials to the camps, and the transport from the camps, things like the gold fillings from teeth. We’re talking ugly business here. But he wasn’t handling the gold. He wasn’t killing the Jews. Not even the Israelis accused him of that. He was absolutely instrumental in a technocratic, bureaucratic, very sterile-organization sense for rendering the process efficient.
But how can you possibly compare the victims of 9/11 to that of a man shipping the gold fillings from murdered Jews?
Those (9/11 victims) who were engaged in the international-financial operations, which were the motive cause for U.S. policy … in full knowledge of what effects were on juvenile populations, sweatshops, and so forth—that’s the anchor there. Implement policy for profit, to maximize profit, to increase dividends, blah, blah, blah. Which also, by the way, increases their commission, establishes their stature, leads to their promotion trajectory, leads to their quality of life, and in full knowledge—they may suppress it—of the carnage that is induced in this profit-maximization profile. …Basically, I said you are accountable for what you do in the world. And … if you are profiting from carnage … you are the moral and philosophical equivalent of Adolf Eichmann. You don’t like that, change the behavior. That’s not who you want to be, stop acting like that.
So the behavior of every 9/11 victim is a moral equivalency to Eichmann’s support of the Holocaust?
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask what the moral equivalency would be of the half-million Iraqi children that died in Iraq from U.S. sanctions? Those children were reduced to less than no value. Now if you were the parent of one of those children … how are you going to ultimately respond? You want security from that kind of retaliation, stop killing their kids. Stop acting like your kids are important and theirs are utterly irrelevant. Stop acting, as [former secretary of State Madeleine] Albright put it, that we have decided that it’s worth the cost of their pre-12-year-old children to convey what George Bush the first said, “What we say, goes.” . . . "
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