Reply #90: An article of Interest

[chlamor]

My feeling on this issue is that for the most part we are so, so far off the mark not only on Churchill's right to say what he said but in our willingness to deeply face the brutal realities which he points to not only in this essay but in his large body of academic work. The entire mode of discussion could not have been orchestrated more perfectly by the Right. Instead of using this controversy to deal with past and present horrors that we all are partly responsible for we are looking at foibles of an individual. When will we ever learn? I hope you will read this article.




Look in the Mirror

Ward Churchill and White America

By RAFAEL RENTERIA


It's the frontline of a war. Those of us who have not seen our colleagues or mentors purged from the academy can grasp neither the pain of it nor the stakes. Those who are purged are those who dream, for all of us, of a more natural condition, those who have not partaken in the great forgetting of their humanity that characterizes pre-fascist America.

But those of us who have seen it firsthand know the venal face of what America is becoming. I have often joked that those who have never been to jail have no education, no true sense of the meaning of the violence that permeates this culture, like blood seeps through the bandage covering the wound of an Iraqi child.
<snip>
I am no one in particular, no one famous whose name you would recognize. But I have been on the frontline of the culture wars, and this is my dispatch.
<snip>
I want to speak to you in your isolation, I want you to be in touch with your despair as I speak. I want you to remember what you already know -- the Earth is dying; oil is running out; Iraq is only the first in what will be a series of resource wars, as the impacts of global warming and peak oil cause the infrastructure we call globalization to collapse.
And if you are a white American, I want to remind you that you have no real idea why a Black poet like Michael Datcher would write a poem after 9-1-1 entitled "I blow myself up on you." You have no education. No, you cannot imagine it. But as I stood in the convenience store, exhausted from a sleepless night, I heard voices chattering and clamoring on a radio that normally played only bad pop music. They were clamoring in outrage about an airplane striking a building in New York. I laughed. Although it had not yet been written, I understood the poem.
<snip>
This is the shadow in the mirror. This is the ghost of missiles screaming in the darkened sky of Baghdad. This is your inner demon. Look at it. In the mirror. The events of 9-1-1 are America's mirror. This is what it means to be bombed, in the Sudan, in Bethlehem and Belgrade. Horror.
<snip>
One shows an implacable face to the enemy. This is the way of war. They never had any regrets and we, the Mexicans, we, the Palestinians, we, the Afghanis, Iraqis and Iranians, we the Black, we the Red, are the enemy.
<snip>
Read Stannard's American Holocaust. Hitler was a piker, a Johnny-Come-Lately, a zero. Spain and Britain slaughtered 120 million of my ancestors before Hitler ever hit the scene. He learned from them, from you. Lebensraum was a new way of saying Manifest Destiny, Concentration Camp was a new way of saying Reservation, the Final Solution was only a new way of saying the only good Indian.
<snip>
And it's that "nothing more" that is killing the Earth, that allows the US, which is not yet a fascist state, to have the highest incarceration rate in the world ­ America incarcerates its enemies, Red and Black, just as Hitler incarcerated his enemies, the Jews. It persecutes its writers who speak with the voice of the subjugated peoples ­ the enemies ­ within.

http://www.counterpunch.org/renteria02262005.html