Ward Churchill Retreats

...sort of:

Speaking to a sympathetic audience of more than 400 people at U.C. Berkeley on Monday, University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill said that his comment characterizing World Trade Center workers as "little Eichmanns" has been widely distorted.

But of course - comparisons to Nazi mass-murderers are so easy to misunderstand....

Still under intense fire for linking 9/11 victims with Nazis, Churchill suggested that the conservative campaign against him had a chilling effect to any who would criticize government or society.

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, the very fate of the First Amendment itself (which is functionally null & void in the academic bog in which he bottom-feeds) hinges entirely on the fate of this cigar-store Indian's credibility withstanding the public scrutiny it was never intended to undergo - and to which he feels himself entitled to be exempt.

Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the "little Eichmanns" comment was "a single phrase" from a 2001 essay that has been seized upon from his more than 20 books, close to 70 book chapters and about 100 articles, prefaces, forewords and so forth.

Because it is emblematic of the body of his crypto-marxist commentary and writings, yes.

The Eichmann phrase was meant "to analogize a technocratic elite at the core of empire to be, not Eichmann per se, but 'little Eichmanns,'" he argued.

"Eichmann himself in his own context symbolized those nameless bureaucratic functionaries who performed in an absolutely conscienceless and immoral fashion. In knowledge that their functions created carnage, they did their jobs.

"That is what Hannah Arendt found that Eichmann manifested," Churchill added, referring to Arendt's book on Eichmann and her popularizing of the phrase "the banality of evil."

"That was his meaning," Churchill added, "not the horror of the man per se, not his monstrosity, because ultimately what she confronted when she confronted him was not the monstrous but the banal, the everyman dimension of the Nazi functionary who made the Holocaust work."

Except, of course, that "Eichmann himself" was not a "nameless, bureaucratic functionary," but, "headed Gestapo Department IV B4 for Jewish Affairs, serving as a self proclaimed 'Jewish specialist' and was the man responsible for keeping the trains rolling from all over Europe to death camps during the Final Solution." He was a top Nazi and one of Himmler's deputies, which is why the Israelis hunted him down in South America and brought him to the Holy Land for trial and execution.

This, in turn, illustrates how flimsy Churchill's dissembling is. Celebrities by definition cannot symbolize the obscure masses; that's why they're "nameless." Even if they could, the innocuous context he now seeks to substitute could have been serviced just as adequately by any number of metaphors that would have run a much smaller chance of being "interpreted" as a vicious, scurrilous slander of nearly three thousand American civilians whose only "crime" was being in the wrong place at the wrongest of times. And this is a reflection of the intellectual sloth of a hard-Left professoriate that sees no need to defend extremist views in honest, rigorous debate when they can simply muzzle their opponents by fiat (or any means necessary) instead. Especially since that's the only way their extremist views can survive.

Would it kill ol' W.C. to just admit that he meant exactly what his comment suggests, which was to denounce his own non-marxist countrymen as Nazis? Hell, it's not as though he's going to pay any tangible price for it - or that there are many other of his comrades in the DisLoyal Opposition who value even dishonest self-restraint.