Academic Freedom Versus American Nazis

Academic Freedom Versus Evil Empire
Last Updated June 29, 2005

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Bob Jensen's Video Links to Evil Empire Videos --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070910.htm

At least Karl Marx, Nozick, and Heilbroner had a visions
The extreme left does seem to have abandoned any idea of creating
a socialist utopia; today it is devoted solely to uncreative destruction.
Opinion Journal, February 11, 2005

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquence.
Ray Bradbury, FAHRENHEIT 451

The deconstructionists are mistaken when they argue that in literature text is everything. When we come to the subject of grand strategy, however, it is correct to say that context is everything. Nothing illustrates the point better than the interventionists’ habit of presenting every situation as a replay of Munich 1938.
War of the Worlds:
The West doesn’t have to choose between Huxley’s dystopian future and Islam’s medieval past
To view part of William Lind's essay Click Here

Democracy is Fragile: Know Its Enemies Better --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/DemocracyIsFragile.htm
The starting modules were as follows:

Behind Enemy Lines: Know Your Enemy
New scholarship sheds light on Osama bin Laden's rhetoric, charisma and complex religious and political vision

White Guilt and the Western Past: Why is America so delicate with the enemy?

Question: How will George Bush really go down in history in the long run?

George Shultz: Father of the Bush Doctrine

Jean-Francois Revel

The overall effect of Mexican immigration on the U.S. economy is trivial
Where is the real danger of the Mexican gusher into the United States?

Wall Street is Rotten to the Core

Fraud Conclusions

The End of the U.S., like the Roman Empire, is Near According to the Liberal Press --- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071029/holmes
This gloomy article offers no hope for any alternative for saving America, The U.S was a short experiment in Democracy before we become totally Orwellian --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Question
What was the most corrupt Executive Branch in U.S. government history?

Answer
Even though Clinton made some very contemptible pardons on his way out the door and Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, some clues are provided here --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1546760/posts
Jensen Comment
The problem, of course, lies in defining a criterion for being "corrupt." And there is the problem magnitude versus frequency. How does one really bad corrupt act offset a myriad of lesser corrupt acts? And how far does one go out on the "branch? Most importantly is the question of motive. One of the biggest lies perpetrated on all U.S. citizens, including Congress, was FDR's concealment of Executive Branch clandestine involvement in the early war against Hitler. On the heals of World War I, getting the U.S. involved in another European war would have certainly failed if put to the electorate at the time FDR decided the U.S. must become involved.

FDR's actions were far more clandestine and deceptive than the George W. Bush administration's actions to engage in war with Saddam. Whether Bush will become more revered (or despised) than FDR 50 years from now will take 50 years to resolve!" To date the costs of FDR's decision to go to war had immensely higher costs in terms of lives, casualties, and dollars than Bush's decision to go to war.

Is the U.S. military "broken and worn out?"
Speaking to a group in his district in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Murtha said that troops will leave Iraq in the next year because the Army is "broken, worn out and living hand to mouth." Such a vote of confidence! So not only does Murtha want to admit defeat and leave the battlefield, now he wants to say that the troops will be leaving because they aren't up to the task. If you read between the lines, Congressman Al-Murtha is saying the war is lost because the troops have failed.
Neal Boortz --- http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html

Should the U.S. military cut and run?
A destructionist without a realistic strategy for reconstruction
Most Iraqis are glad Hussein is gone, and most want the United States gone. When we admit defeat and pull out — not if, but when — the fate of Iraqis depends in part on whether the United States (1) makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations, and (2) allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.
Robert W. Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas --- http://www.hindu.com/mag/2004/12/19/stories/2004121900170200.htm

Questions Professor W. does not address in his zeal to bring down the U.S. "Empire":

With a whipped-dog U.S. military out of the picture, what all-powerful "international institution" will prevent the tribes of Iraq from covering the sands with their own blood in a state of anarchy?

Does he think these tribes are waiting for a U.N. resolution to end their disputes and fears?

Who will prevent the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan with renewed vigor to make women uneducated slaves?

Why should the wildfires of Jihad cease because the U.S. army cut and ran?

Why won't successes of terrorist tactics fan the fires until the entire globe is awash in fear and evil?

Who will prevent reinvigorated Islamic fundamentalists and a waning Israel from waging a WMD war if there is no "empire" to separate the two?

If the U.S. becomes impotent, why should the rest of the world suddenly stop all global wars?

Why won't some other empire emerge from the ashes that is far less humane than the U.S. empire?

The aim of the university is not to make ideas safe for students, but to make students safe for ideas.
Clark Kerr as quoted by David Shapiro at http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-15-06.htm

Why did a world-renowned liberal atheist professor join the Presbyterian Church?
Hint: It's not because evangelists Falwell and Hagge declare it's the only way through the Pearly Gates

My friend Bill Walker at Trinity forwarded the following link to an article by Robert W. Jensen from the Journalism Department at the University of Texas (no relation to Robert E. Jensen from Trinity University). Professor W is on the controversial "101 Most Dangerous Professors" list compiled by David Horowitz. Professor W (Robert W. Jensen) is indeed one of the leading liberalism writers and peace activists of the world. My main complaint about him is that he wants to deconstruct global business without out any practical reconstruction suggestions about how the world order conducts its economies. He's a journalist and most certainly is not an economist.

Professor W writes and speaks extensively about the United States being an "Evil Empire." One of his papers is entitled "The United States Has Lost the Iraq War, and That's a Good Thing" --- http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/index.html
My comments about his "Evil Empire" are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

Bill Walker forwarded the following link:

I don't believe in God. I don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don't believe in, nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I don't believe exists. Given these positions, this year I did the only thing that seemed sensible: I formally joined a Christian church. Standing before the congregation of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, I affirmed that I (1) endorsed the core principles in Christ's teaching; (2) intended to work to deepen my understanding and practice of the universal love at the heart of those principles; and (3) pledged to be a responsible member of the church and the larger community.
"Why I Am a Christian (Sort Of)," by Robert W. Jensen, AlterNet. March 10, 2006 --- http://www.alternet.org/story/33236/

Jensen Comment
Since Professor W is both an atheist and a liberal activist, William F. Buckley would probably find Professor W more suited for Yale than the University of Texas --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_and_Man_at_Yale
But I don't think Buckley anticipated an atheist who's becoming an intellectual pillar of the Presbyterian Church. That makes Professor W more suited to Princeton University.

June 12 Update
"Presbyterian church dismisses UT professor," by Andy St. Jean, The Daily Texan --- Click Here

UT journalism associate professor Robert Jensen has found himself at the center of many debates. This time, the conflict lies over his religious beliefs and membership in a local church.

The Presbyterian church he has been attending since last December was reprimanded Friday for admitting him as a member.

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church was told by the Mission Presbytery, the regional governing body of 157 Presbyterian churches in South and Central Texas, that the acceptance of Jensen into membership was "irregular." Furthermore, it was "void" because Jensen has said in the past he doesn't believe in God.

"I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that we don't understand," Jensen said.

In a March article that appeared on several Web sites and the Houston Chronicle, Jensen wrote a piece entitled "Why I am a Christian (Sort of)," in which his first line reads, "I don't believe in God."

St. Andrew's was directed to move Jensen from the active roll to the "baptized" roll, making him a non-voting member of the church. St. Andrew's is also ordered to work with representatives to come up with an appropriate process for receiving members in the future. The church may re-examine Jensen's membership after these changes are implemented.

"The whole issue turns on the fact that the Book of Order's only requirement is that a person believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior," said Terry Nelson, stated clerk of Mission Presbytery. The Book of Order is equivalent to the Presbyterian Church's constitution.

After the decision was rendered, the presbytery motioned to wait 45 days before applying the ruling.

This period will hopefully allow people to cool off after a fierce debate that had both sides using the church's law to make their point, Nelson said.

"I have never seen a presbytery where the stated clerk was put on the spot to know the rules in the Book of Order so much, because every attempt to get around or to abide by the rules was being made," Nelson said.

The Rev. Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, knew not everyone agreed with the decision to accept Jensen.

"Some people said, 'We want your head on a platter,'" Rigby said. "Jensen's membership was the perfect opportunity to come after us and take out a liberal church."

While on the surface the debate seems to concern Jensen's membership, there is a lot more to the argument, Rigby said.

"Can a modern mind be included in the church, or must we use medieval verbage?" Rigby said. "We are doing this for our children's children. If we don't address the times, we are going to lose a lot of people."

The vote, which may nullify his membership in the church, has nothing to do with whether or not he will still attend the church, Jensen said.

"If my membership is eventually declared null and void, I would still go," Jensen said. "The congregation at St. Andrew's has been very supportive and caring."

Everybody Should Read This: Evil Doers of the Future Extend Well Beyond Islamic Fundamentalists
Extremism, Terror, and the Future of Conflict
By Michael J. Mazarr Michael J. Mazarr is professor of national security strategies at the U.S. National War College and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the policy or position of the U.S. government or the National Defense University.

Hoover Institution's Policy Review, March 2006 --- http://www.policyreview.org/000/mazarr.html

When they briefly stated an intention to begin referring to a “global struggle against violent extremism,” certain officials in the Bush administration did more than implicitly acknowledge the vacuity of the idea of a “global war on terror.” They hinted, however obliquely, at something far more profound: a radical shift in the nature of conflict, what it means to be “at war.” From traditional notions of armies fighting armies in vast confrontations, the new concept seems to imply, the warfare of the future will look very different — twilight struggles against non-state networks of evildoers. This notion mirrors an emerging...

II

he theory of war that undergirds realpolitik is straightforward. For thousands of years, warfare has meant a clash of wills between opposing military forces on the field of battle, from which one side usually (though not always) emerged as a recognizable winner. The causes of such wars were the combination of an anarchic system of self-help that opened the way for aggressive and imperialistic campaigns of conquest, bitter competitions over scarce resources, escalating mutual security fears, and misperception and miscalculation. Conducting war meant the mobilization of resources and military units to defeat enemy forces in the field. It is from this basic concept — states at war employing organized military units — that most of the hallmarks of modern military science flow: the moral and physical clash of wills; the role of the decisive battle in a campaign; and the endless search for the enemy’s “center of gravity” and the “culminating point” of a conflict.

But we have been moving away from this paradigm for some time.² Centuries ago, military forces were very nearly divorced from the societies on behalf of whom they fought: crowds of adventurers out at the frontier and beyond, staging highly ritualized über-duels on grassy plains, while the home society went on farming and hunting and carpentering. To be sure, these armies would affect the surrounding societies in profound ways: They would recruit or dragoon young men who otherwise would be farming or cobbling; they would pillage the surrounding landscape as they passed through it; and they would sometimes draw abundant camp-following crowds. But the basic model was one of a quasi-independent army marching off to find its counterpart and slaughter it. Even by Napoleonic times, armies remained remarkably separable from their peoples, grand militarized playthings moving around the chessboard of strategy.

And playthings they were, because armies and navies were the instruments of their leaders — sometimes individual kings or tyrants, sometimes collective groups, but always leaders in search of some self-defined material end, the governing power goal of realpolitik. Philip of Macedon could decide that the time had come to unify the Greek city-states, and off went his army to battle. The Romans could elect to subjugate yet another frontier people, and the legions gathered up their equipment. Kings and princes in early modern Europe, reflecting perhaps the apotheosis of this practice, marshaled bands of expensive knights and attendants in what looks to modern eyes almost like an elaborate game. Even when wars emerged without clear power-seeking intent, issues of security dilemmas and power rivalries always hung about the proceedings.

In such a context, the enemy’s forces in the field embodied very nearly the entirety of the conflict. When they were destroyed, the enemy was vanquished. What “the people” thought about it, hacking away at their farms a thousand miles from the battlefield (or even right next door to it), usually had little or no bearing on the outcome — except when especially reckless leaders bankrupted the home front to such a degree that they were overthrown while on campaign. Even when forces became nimbler and strategy emphasized moving between, around, and behind an enemy to get at his capital or his industrial heartland, these supposedly indirect strategies mostly ended up in force-on-force butchery.

In its actual practice (as distinct from its consequences, which frequently transformed societies from the roots up), then, war stood apart from society, independent, self-regarding. Warfare was armies against armies, and when it became something more than that — the destruction of whole societies, for example — it remained largely in service of the narrower goal: to cripple the enemy’s military instrument, and thus compel his surrender. The character of war in this theory was fierce and brutal, built as it was around the organized employment of violence to break an enemy military’s will.³

All of this made sense in a world governed by the doctrine of realpolitik. From Thucydides onward, the concepts of a realist approach to world politics were clear enough: States sought power; there was no world authority to govern the resulting conflict; stronger states took what they could, weaker ones succumbed or hid under the protective umbrella of alliances. Above all, military power and the diplomatic and political influence that flowed from it was the coin of the realm for the players in the international game, the sine qua non in whose absence no other state powers or goals could be reliably sustained.

For centuries, perhaps millennia — from the Peloponnesian War through the German advocates of machtpolitik — this situation was not only admitted, it was frequently celebrated. The world was a great Darwinistic struggle and courageous peoples sought power and used it. Warfare was welcomed as a means of stiffening national character and a route to glory for individuals and cultures alike — a perverse notion that, sadly, has not quite been put to rest.⁴ Later, British and American realists mourned the reality of power politics and warned against imperial expansion, but pronounced both of them unavoidable given the twin natures of world politics and human nature. Either way, as a positive doctrine or an empirical analysis, realism spoke to a world governed by unconstrained power rivalries, tragic misunderstandings, and, ultimately, force-on-force military confrontations.

III

ith this background, it becomes clear that one claimed shift in the nature of war does not, in fact, describe any change at all. It goes under the current name of “transformation,” but even the concept is hardly new. Transformation is the child of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) — itself a grandson of maneuver warfare and blitzkrieg, which have their roots in the renewal of strategic thought following the First World War. As one analyst explains it, attrition warfare (an especially slaughterous variant of the canonical force-on-force style) aspired to the annihilation of enemy forces. Maneuver warfare targets

the coherence of the adversary’s combat systems, methods, and plans. The hope is that a very selective action can have a cascading effect — an effect disproportionately greater than the degree of effort. An analogy from architecture would be the removal or destruction of the keystone of an arch . . . the removal of which disrupts the stability of the system, resulting in its destruction.⁵

But the “system” is still the enemy military capability. Maneuver warfare is just a more elegant way of dealing with the usual force-on-force confrontation.

And so are its descendants. The Soviet theorists of the “military-technical revolution” — who were themselves influenced by American writings, and whose concepts Americans then translated into the RMA — were interested in more or less the same things as the German blitzkriegers: slicing up, destabilizing, and defeating enemy forces, only this time with weapons energized by a revolution in microelectronics, computing power, precision strike, and automation. Radical new concepts of command and control, “networked” organizations, “information dominance” — this and much else on the Defense Department’s transformation menu — therefore reflects the latest and most efficient elaboration of the principles of maneuver warfare. Some of the documents of the Office of Force Transformation point to a broader agenda,⁶ but if we look at the practical efforts of the Defense Department — where its budget goes, what its troops are trained to do, how its operations are conducted — the emphasis remains stubbornly on the force-on-force route to military victory. The primary modernization agendas of the services today speak to the same deep-rooted goal: finding tanks, planes, ships, and people that belong to the enemy and making them explode.

Transformation advocates have grown dextrous in the use of bold terms. They call the whole enterprise “network-centric warfare” and speak of “information superiority” and “shared awareness.” They refer to “systems of systems” and “linked platforms of sensors, shooters and commanders in seamless webs,” and talk of the increased speed and greater lethality with which military operations will now operate.⁷ But whatever the language, network-centric warfare reflects principles that have governed force-on-force warfare for centuries: Rapid, effective command and control that allows you to get inside an enemy’s “decision loop” has been the goal of the great captains of history for centuries; precision-guided weapons are just the latest and most effective effort to hit enemy forces as accurately as possible.

Some elements of the transformation agenda speak to so-called “information warfare.”⁸ Like notions of transformation and “network-centric warfare,” accounts of information warfare generally say very little about what the thing actually is.⁹ Some writers have used the term “cyberwar,” by which they appear to mean the by now conventional idea that warring powers will try to destroy the computer systems of their opponents.¹⁰ One account points to the rise of domains that do not require physical force to attack, and the resulting extension of warfare “beyond the traditional military realm.”¹¹

This is not the first time military strategists have pointed to the potential of new technologies to overcome age-old truths about war. Yet Clausewitz wrote the epitaph of “perfect information dominance” some time back: fog and friction. There will never be sensors numerous, accurate, or reliable enough to create a perfect information picture. There will never be information architectures capable of sharing the resulting information widely, perfectly, or quickly enough to allow forces in the field to rely on it.¹²

As partial evidence, we have a number of recent examples. In Kosovo, the Serbs managed to accomplish a vast amount of movement and operations without NATO knowledge.¹³ In the Iraq War, despite the full-scale application of sensor and communications technologies greatly more advanced than those of Operation Desert Storm, the most frequent military engagement may have been the venerable “movement to contact” — steaming ahead until you encounter the enemy, then groping your way around the battlefield until you find the right tactical answer for him. The Third Armored Division famously stumbled into the biggest conventional battle of the war without advance warning. Iraqi commanders were able to move huge units around the battlefield without being seen or detected, until more Americans on “movement to contact” orders plowed into them. The immense success of the U.S. and allied drive to Baghdad was far more a product of the tactical skill of middle-level U.S. commanders than it was a victory for sensors and “network-centric operations.”

IV

t is hardly surprising that all of this transformational and network-centric jargon would add up to so little in the way of truly new theories of warfare. These concepts are all about tactics and implementation; they have nothing to say about the causes of war, or the strategic implications of those causes.

From a definitional standpoint, there are at least three concepts at work in any discussion of “warfare.”¹⁴ First is the character of battle — the clash of arms where one army physically meets another. This is the meeting point that generates statements about the “unchanging nature of war” — violence, blood, courage, willpower, and so forth. At a second level we find the form of warfare, the tactics and operational art governing units in battle — infantry war versus blitzkrieg, insurgency versus classical force-on-force duels. Whereas the character of battle may be eternal, the form of warfare constantly evolves, responding to new technologies, new tactics, and new social organizations. But then we come, finally and most fundamentally, to the nature of conflict. This is the highest strategic level of analysis and deals with the causes and character of severe political-military-socioeconomic disputes in the international system. International conflict generates the context for warfare, but also much else — Schellingesque bargaining games, coercive diplomacy, deception and artful dodges short of warfare and battle.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What frightens me is the possible breakdown in confidence that our nation states can protect us. This may give rise to an explosion of militias with war lord mentalities. The becomes much more frightening with the possible availability of cheap dirty bombs and biological weapons.

Absurd free speech quotes from the left side of the world that may be helping GOP win elections
Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, --- http://class.csueastbay.edu/ethnicstudies/Roxanne_Dunbar-Ortiz.php
Jensen Comment: I wonder if Professor Dunbar-Ortiz researched current Afgan women before asserting as a fact that their life is no better now than under the Taliban that would not even allow women to become educated to a point of being able to read and write. I'll just bet Professor Dunbar-Ortiz never did a simple Google search to find http://www.rawa.org/ (a site that would have been banned by the Taliban under threat of execution).

Professor Dunbar-Ortiz has a regular column at http://www.counterpunch.org/
The cavalry sent into the wild west of New Orleans had orders to pen in the starving black population that had been abandoned in order to protect property. It is not a sad or shameful day for the United States; it is a typical day in the United States for the poor, magnified.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz --- http://www.counterpunch.org/dunbar09072005.html
Jensen Comment: Thousands upon thousands of victims in New Orleans are refusing to leave when given stern warnings and ample opportunities to be transported to welcoming shelters. Many of the Katrina victims were poor but they were hardly "starving" before or after Katrina flooded New Orleans. Out of the 326,000 black residents in New Orleans, what proportion actually starved to death each year Professor Dunbar-Ortiz? I have a pharmacist friend in San Antonio who is working actively to coordinate city-wide prescriptions for a large number of Katrina victims. She says that many of the victims' health problems stem from being overweight and/or from poor diets high in fat, sugared sodas, and alcohol. An abnormally high percentage the adult victims have diabetes. And virtually all school children before Katrina could get free meals in their schools. They were not starving if their parents allowed them to go to school.

Tank Fills for Bush Bashers --- http://www.bestoftheblogs.com/ and http://www.thenation.com/ with the blogs at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7
Jensen Comment: Thus far most of the hate fuel at the above sites is poured on the Bush rather than on the failures of Louisiana officials, especially the mayor who did not use his hundreds city busses to evacuate thousands of poor people while he was demanding that people with cars to evacuate New Orleans. Directing hate at Bush for Iraq is one thing, but I think the the above sites would have more credibility if they weren't so obvious about using the Katrina disaster as a Bush bashing political opportunity. It's not much an opportunity for them, however, since they're mostly preaching to a choir of long-time bush haters.

How can the media and professors achieve greater credibility?
You probably observed that I quote a lot from both The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and The New York Times (NYT). Both have credibility in spite of their opposing biases on the editorial pages. The WSJ is unapologetic in its biases for financial institutions and business enterprises. And yet the WSJ is the best place to look for damning criticism of particular accounting firms, financial institutions, and corporations. CEOs live in fear of WSJ reporters. For example, when Enron was riding high, before the Watkins memo, WSJ reporters did some very clever investigations and wrote articles that commenced the slide of Enron share prices (particularly dogged reporters named John Emshwiller and Jonathan Weil). The NYT sometimes has editorials that make me want to vomit. But the Business Section of the NYT is one of the best places to go for balanced coverage of business and finance news.

Usually, there's nothing wrong with admitting your biases to the public or your students. What's wrong is to let these biases unbalance your coverage and a willingness to admit when the side you favor is wrong when it appears to you that it is wrong or when the side you oppose is being unfairly blamed. And it is also wrong to categorize people as either being right or left. For example, I lean to the right in terms of economics and business and taxes, but I'm 100% behind abortion, birth limits, stem cell research, minority/gay rights, gay marriage, career helpers for mothers, and Darwin.

I think the U.S. government and its military have made monumental strategic errors since 9/11. But it is absurd to characterize the U.S. as a mean-intentioned Evil Empire. I think diversity includes hiring some political conservatives in most academic departments where political viewpoints may matter, and I think Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are just as dangerous as one-sided liberals like Professor Dunbar-Ortiz and the others mentioned at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

I generally distrust our main television networks because those like NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN pretend to be objective when their liberal biases are overwhelming after witnessing an event like Katrina or Volcker's shocking UN Report. Fox has opposing biases, but Fox admits its biases up front and does not pretend that be unbiased. We often must look to the blogs or various newspapers for more balanced coverage.

For one year in a think tank, my office was next to a very nice man who had deeper thoughts than me. Unlike today's superficial destructionists, he left us with a vision.
Nozick (1938-2002) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University until his death. His first book, Anarchy, State and Utopia astonished the philosophical world and made the discussion of liberty and property rights respectable again in scholarly circles. A former radical leftist, Nozick was converted to the libertarian perspective as a graduate student, mostly through reading the works of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Below is an interview with Nozick from 2001.
"An Interview with Robert Nozick," by Julian Sanchez, July 26, 2001 --- http://www.lfb.com/index.php?action=help&helpfile=nozickinterview.html
A slightly more printable version is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NozickInterview.htm

Humanitarianism Terrorism: Terrorists Must "Push On"
In his essay, Ward Churchill claims the terrorist attack can be seen as an act of "humanitarianism," as "medicinal," a "tonic," "reality therapy." Churchill predicts that the terrorists will continue to "push back." Churchill adds, "As they should. As they must. And as they undoubtedly will. There is justice in such symmetry."
Ari Armstrong, Boulder Weekly --- http://www.boulderweekly.com/libertybeat.html

And what of the people murdered at the World Trade Center? Churchill writes, "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... [T]hey 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."

Continued in the article

My essay on "Hypocrisy in Academia and the Media" --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm
My unfinished essay on the "Pending Collapse of the United States" --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm

A Marine's Book on How to Commit Fraud and Make Money With a Pack of Atrocity Lies
What is sad is how the media did not try to confirm his claims before reporting them as facts!

"Marine who confessed to abuses lied to gain celebrity," by Ron Harris," St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Salt Lake Tribune, November 6, 2005 --- http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_3188630

WASHINGTON - For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who would listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq. In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Among his claims: Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters. Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head. Tractor-trailers were filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery. Massey's claims have gained him celebrity. Last month, Massey's book, Kill, Kill, Kill, was released in France.

His allegations have been reported in nationwide publications such as Vanity Fair and USA Today, as well as numerous broadcast reports. Earlier this year, he joined the anti-war bus tour of Cindy Sheehan and he's spoken at Cornell and Syracuse universities, among others. News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey's claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn't.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and reporters from the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.

Massey, 34, was discharged in December 2003, shortly after returning from Iraq due to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. He began turning up in the press and broadcast last spring with stories about military atrocities. Massey's primary thrust has been that Marines from his battalion - some of whom, he told a Minneapolis audience were ''psychopathic killers'' - recklessly shot and killed Iraqi civilians, sometimes, he said, upon orders from their commanders.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Yet another deconstructionist with no vision of reconstruction
“One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. He meant not the classical liberal who believed in individual freedoms and small government but the leftist liberal who glorified communist experiments and disdained middle-class life. To Orwell, the existence of intellectuals who loved the Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked “bourgeois liberty” despite the pleasing bourgeois circumstances of their own lives, and identified with revolutionary movements that would speedily ship them off to camps—this was a fact in need of explanation. The same puzzle is presented by today’s leading leftist intellectual, Noam Chomsky. For 40 years, in books, lectures, articles, and TV and radio shows, Chomsky has pioneered the leftist critique of Western imperialism, media conglomerates, and U.S.-style capitalism. The charges he raises are familiar—corporations subjugate the Third World, mass media peddle pro-capitalist propaganda, etc.—but he evidently has the ability to make them seem fresh; millions idolize him as the clear-eyed conscience of the times. Further to his advantage, while Chomsky’s discourse is extreme and accusatory, his demeanor is equable and deliberate. He is, after all, a distinguished professor at MIT and the most renowned linguist of the 20th century. For many, the combination of virulent radicalism and reasoned temperament is wholly seductive, and attacks upon Chomsky by conservatives and centrists have only granted him a martyr’s aura. Chomsky’s antipathy toward the U.S. government has never wavered. Even 9/11 was fitted to the theme of U.S. guilt. The killing of 3,000 Americans, accompanied by the “you had it coming” glee of some leftists abroad, put many American progressives on the defensive. But not Chomsky. In the weeks after the attacks, he systematically interpreted them as a logical outcome of U.S. history and policy.
Mark Bauerlein "Deconstructing Chomsky: America’s leading leftist intellectual sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest," ReasonOnLine, April 2005 --- http://www.reason.com/0504/cr.mb.deconstructing.shtml
On the The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95

Anti-simitism at City College of New York
Leonard Jeffries is a longtime faculty member at the City College of New York (CCNY) and a onetime head of its Black Studies Department. He is also one of the leading proponents of Afrocentrism—a school of dubious intellectual merit that judges Western civilization to be irredeemably racist and demands a corrective curriculum glorifying African peoples and culture. But Jeffries subscribes to more than just cultural chauvinism. He is also a black supremacist, claiming whites to be genetically inferior to blacks, and an inveterate anti-Semite, apportioning to "rich Jews" the blame for everything from the allegedly anti-black content of Hollywood movies to the transatlantic slave trade. Jeffries' black supremacist views first came to public notice in the spring of 1988, when a white student, writing in the CCNY campus newspaper, catalogued the host of anti-white theories that Jeffries routinely advanced in one of his classes, Black Studies 101. Jeffries had been teaching at CCNY since 1972, when he was tapped to head the Black Studies department and was almost instantly granted tenure, thanks in no small part to a CCNY administration determined to appease a surging militancy among blacks on campus. Still, this was the first time that his bigotry had been aired in public.
DiscoverTheNetworks.Org --- http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1964

Why are Ward Churchill and Robert W. Jensen and Jane T. Christensen and a few others so Controversial?

I (Robert E. Jensen) am a simple professor of bookkeeping. I make no pretenses at being a scholar on social history or communication. In a way, my perspective is that of the average unsophisticated American citizen who learns about how two of many leftist professors are calling for the dismantling of the U.S. military and U.S. business.

In my naive way, I think that Ward Churchill and Robert W. Jensen are controversial because they have violated the trust the academy places in not abusing the power of academic freedom. At best this abuse is only in the words they've unfortunately chosen to take their cases to the American public. If they were only preaching to their choirs in obscure academic journals and conferences, then who would care? But when they or their audiences took their cases to the American media with Nazi and Evil Empire accusations, the people of America did and will continue fight back against what they perceive as unjust accusations.

If Churchill and Jensen are really trying, as they profess, to spark debate and influence policies of America in better directions, then they have merely used inappropriate language on their banners. But if they really think America is the major source of all that is wrong with the world in our quest for Evil Empire dominance and exploitation of the world, then they are an embarrassment to the academy.

This essay commenced with a previous essay on hypocrisy in academia with respect to asymmetrical silence regarding racist language (words and pictures) directed at Condoleezza Rice --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm

Then as chance would have it all hell broke loose in early February (including prime time nightly television news) with respect to Ward Churchill's characterization of 9/11 victims as part of the Nazi regime of the United States. Indirectly Churchill calls for the dismantling of the U.S. Nazi regime in much the same manner as Robert W. Jensen from the University of Texas directly calls for dismantling of the "Evil Empire" of the United States military and business economy. Both Churchill and Robert W. Jensen have wonderful statements about their intentions and academic freedoms. You can read these at the following links:

Ward Churchill's statement about academic freedom ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyChurchill.htm

Robert W. Jensen's statement about academic freedom --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyrWjensen.htm

Jane T. Christensen (now deceased) blamed it on the Israel --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm#Christensen

Other Evil Empire Expounders on Campuses

Portland State University Professor expounds U.S. as an evil empire
Free Republic, July 9, 2005 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1439761/posts

Amanda Byron, Graduate Program in Conflict Resolution

Portland State University (Portland, Ore.) Professor Amanda Byron, a faculty member of the "Conflict Resolution Graduate Program" at PSU.

Among the courses she teaches are the following:

Introduction to Conflict Resolution

Enmification: The Art and Consequence of Enemy Making

Facilitation

Restorative Justice

Of these, the curiously titled course "Enmification" deserves some attention. Here is the course description from her website --- http://www.conflictresolution.pdx.edu/Faculty/Bios/Byron.htm

A Grades Assigned by The New York Times
A few days early, the New York Times offered valentines in its news pages to left-wing lawyer Lynne Stewart, convicted in court of aiding terrorists, and hailed by the Times because her "compassion is legendary." The Times also tossed rhetorical roses to hard-left Professor Ward Churchill, who wrote that the World Trade Center victims were like Nazis, "little Eichmanns," but which the Times described as a sad symbol of "academic expression under fire." The Times further described Churchill as a symbol of "supposed liberal bias in academia."
Times Watch, February 14, 2005 --- http://www.timeswatch.org/twarticles/2005/20050211.asp

Is the U.S. Military an Evil Nazi Empire?

What amazes me is the power of inappropriate words in both the academy and the media. One such phrase is "Evil Empire" which immediately brings to mind Darth Vader and the quest for total military occupation and evil control of the galaxy. Another inappropriate vocabulary is any word or phrase that brings to mind the Nazi image of storm troopers, extermination camps, and a quest to have military dominance over the entire world.

Let me first approach this from the standpoint of America's military might. It is ludicrous to equate the U.S. military to anything related to the Nazis or to an Evil Empire. Americans as a populace despise having their troops on foreign soil. Whenever our troops were overseas the political pressures to bring them home became immense across the entire spectrum from left to right. This was certainly the case when America in its own stupidity got drawn into World War I --- which was only one of hundreds of wars between kings in Europe. Americans wanted and got our troops back home as quickly as possible.

Franklin Roosevelt operated in secret to initially engage us in World War II, because if he'd been open and honest, his voters would've never let him become involved in another European war. When this giant war was over, America provided Europe with the Marshall Plan to ignite European economies and democratic governance. For a short time American troops occupied Japan, but they were there only long enough to help restore the Japanese economy and commence a democracy. During the highly unpopular "police actions" in Korea, Viet Nam, and Bosnia, pressures could not have been stronger bring our troops home. And now Americans want our troops back home from Afghanistan and Iraq as soon a some type of democratic regimes can be commenced in those countries (which may be an impossible dream).

In the strongest sense, Americans do not want their troops stationed on foreign soil. How we get ourselves into these messes is complicated, often honorable but not always 100% honorable. What's important is that the American public has democratic control of its governing process to an extent that America cannot have military domination of the galaxy as an objective. It is easy to look back at the Viet Nam war as an example of terrible foreign policy, but after all these years we tend to forget the genuine fears of a communist take over of the world from Soviet and Maoist threats that really did exist at the time. Sure we've made terrible mistakes that have destroyed millions of lives both at home and abroad, but to attribute Evil Empire lust or Nazi intentions to our actions is just plain evil in itself and inaccurate.

Is U.S. Global Business and Evil Nazi Empire?

Because of the labor exploitations and environmental disregards, it is easy to paint a black picture of multinational corporations and global business in general. But to blame all of this on the United States is neither fair nor accurate. Multinational corporations evolved out of European colonialism, and to this day the multinationals of Europe and Japan are much more dominant than the U.S. multinationals. European and Japanese banks are much more dominant in global economies than U.S. banks. And as far as U.S. global business in general is concerned, no other nation raised more concerns and taken more action to correct human exploitation. Without a doubt we've made mistakes by supporting evil dictators and unscrupulous CEOs. Without doubt we've depleted life in the sea but not to the same extent as Russia and Japan. Without doubt we've contributed to destruction of rain forests but not to the extent of other nations, including poor people themselves burning off jungles to raise their meager crops. Without doubt we've lived in affluence and not done as much as possible to help the billions of impoverished people in the world. I personally think we can and will do more as soon as we can find some means where 99% of all of our well-intentioned aid does not get diverted into domestic and foreign frauds and corruption. I have no answer to how to eliminate the massive and seemingly inevitable frauds in the United Nations (read that Unified Nepotism) and the U.S. Government in Washington DC (read that Donate Cash).

In any case, Professor W will partly get his wish for dismantling U.S. business. It will unravel itself. Just as United Airlines and U.S. Airways are going down the tubes due to under funded pension plans, I predict that the U.S. economy will take a nose dive due to entitlement promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and retirement benefits for the military.

Their report, "Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050," predicted that within 40 years, the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China - the BRICs - would be larger than the US, Germany, Japan, Britain, France and Italy combined. China would overtake the US as the world's largest economy and India would be third, outpacing all other industrialised nations.
"Out of the shadows," Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 2005 --- http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2005/02/04/1107476799248.html

No nation on earth has had more freedom of the press and more freedom of speech than the United States. These are the great underlying powers that rise up and put our greedy business leaders on the dock --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm

Why are Ward Churchill and Robert W. Jensen so Controversial?

Conclusions

I don't think Ward Churchill should lose his job over this incident even though I do think he violated the trust we place in academic freedom of speech and debate. My recommendation would be that he make a public apology to the people he accuses of being "little Eichmanns" including victims of the 9/11 attacks and all persons in business. Since he’s all set to sue, one wonders if he’s hoping to be fired.

And to Robert W. Jensen, I would simply make an appeal that if you really believe the U.S. military and U.S. business should be dismantled, then you first spell out very clearly what think is a truly feasible way of being safer and living better in the United States. It's easy to be critical even when using appropriate language. It's vastly more difficult to find something feasible to take its place in many instances. Give us your vision of a realistic or even an unrealistic utopia.

What is Inappropriate Language?

I have more to say about this at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm

February 3, 2005 message from Aaron Konstam

I agree that calling "technocrats" little Eichmanns is inflammatory language that could be expressed in other terms and be less offensive.

In the same way a member of the royal family appearing in Nazi dress is offensive and transcends his rights to free speech.

Further, to say that Eichmann did not kill anyone directly but just organized the bureaucracy that led to their deaths is a kind of sophistry that would apply to many ruthless dictators. --

=======================================================================
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place. San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

On February 5 another professor responded as follows:

Interesting reading. My reaction is that I think two professors—Churchill and R. W. Jensen--are in the process of learning another lesson about academic freedom: Although we may have the freedom to voice our thoughts, it does not mean that we can escape accountability for what we say.

February 4, 2005 reply from Paul Williams [williamsp@COMFS1.COM.NCSU.EDU]

Bob, et al,

I know there will be collective "Groan, it's him again," but I want to elaborate a bit on Bob's observation, particularly about Churchill's remarks.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on this incident this morning and quoted Churchill as having his remarks woefully misunderstood. I don't disagree with Bob that the "form" of his expression was ill-chosen, but this incident also illustrates how academic freedom (and freedom of speech in general) is always at risk. From accounts I've read, Churchill didn't exactly compare the victims of 9/11 to Nazis; he referred to them as little-Eichmanns. This is obviously a reference to Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her observations of the Eichmann trial were chronicled in the book, where she coined the now clichéd expression "the banality of evil." What was so remarkable about Eichmann was his unremarkableness. He was quite an ordinary cog in a machine whose purpose was unspeakably evil. He went to work in the morning, did his job conscientiously and with precision, then went home and socialized with his friends. According to Arendt, he was by all accounts a banal little man engaged in banal activities whose consequence was the efficient, dispassionate extermination of millions of people. We just observed the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. At the ceremony the sound of trains was played, and it you heard it, you what a horrifying chilling sound it was -- those trains, carrying a human cargo to slavery and horrible death.

That trains were chose as symbolic of the horror and true evil of Auschwitz is telling. The story of the German railway and the role of accountants is a chilling example of the banality of evil. The cost of shipping people to the death camps came out of the budget of the Gestapo. Accountants at the German railroads were meticulous in the preparation of the charges made to the Gestapo; railway accountants performed their job with admirable efficiency and professional integrity. Gestapo personnel were charged a roundtrip adult fare, adults sent to the death camps were charged a one way fare, and children were given the one way childrens' discount. Bills were meticulously prepared with apparently little thought given to the ends being served. For those interested Guy Adams and Danny Balfour recount this and other examples in a book titled Unmasking Administrative Evil. As you are all familiar, it has been documented that IBM played a particularly important role in providing the information technology that enabled the identification and rounding up of people to be enslaved. General Motors supplied the German army with trucks. Simply a business proposition -- give the customer what they want. In 1934, Fortune magazine extolled the virtues of Mussolini and Facism (Joel Bakan, The Corporation). Financial backing for the ascendance of the Nazi party in Germany was provided mostly by German industrialists. The connections between big business and facism are not exactly a historical secret. This Churchill affair illustrates how political discourse in the US is being shaped by by language we academics should view with great skepticism.

What Arendt's "banality of evil" implies is that evil is an adjective that we use to describe actions. In that sense of evil, we are all capable of doing evil things, while not being necessarily Evil. Avoiding evil requires a certain attention to what one is really up to. We should probably resist self-delusion and self-righteousness. "Evil" empire connotes an understanding of evil as some disembodied quality, something with an existence all its own. Something out there ready to envelop us. Satan maybe! This seems to be Bush's meaning of evil. Thus, we're good, they're evil. Evolution has made us all evil and good (Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil). Some more evil than good; some more good than evil, but all possessed of a repetoire of behaviors that befit, when appropriate, the use of the adjectives, good and evil. Has American business done evil things -- you bet it has. Indeed one could argue that the corporate form, which is a being created in law to have but one single-minded purpose -- to increase the wealth of shareholders (Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.) can legally do little but engage in exclusively avaricious behaviors (of course, one of the seven cardinal sins). Corporations are, in law, institutionalized avarice, so they do warrant a certain amount of skepticism and, perhaps, a great deal of watching. (Yes, they do provide "jobs," but jobs are our punishment for the Fall). Academics who enjoy a freedom no one else has (quoting Tony Tinker), which is the freedom to tell the truth (small "t"), know, by the very nature of what we do, that what most people believe with blood-thirsty passion, has already been or will eventually be demonstrated to be nonsense. Are Ward Churchill and Robert W. Jensen Evil? They certainly aren't warlocks. Seems political correctness is a cudgel wielded with equal vigor even by those who know the Truth.

PFW

February 4, 2004 reply from Bob Jensen

Thanks Paul,

I want to prove that others even reply with longer messages. This writer from Trinity University prefers to remain anonymous.

Bob

To: Jensen, Robert; Haines, Harry W Subject: Re: Churchill answers his critics

Thanks, Robert. And thanks, Harry, for posting the message. Do either of you know how to subscribe to the mailing list?

Churchill's words were insensitive, but many overlook a more subtle aspect of his argument.

Aaron K. writes that "to say that Eichmann did not kill anyone directly but just organized the bureaucracy that led to their deaths is a kind of sophistry that would apply to many ruthless dictators." It is understandable that Aaron would feel morally outraged at such a claim, but this is precisely why Eichmann is so important.

Ever since Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann, he has functioned as a potent signifier of thoughtlessness that tolerates and fails to recognize organized injustice. Arendt's nuanced ethical argument is worthy of consideration.

An excerpt from Bethania Assy's essay on Arendt is appended to this message. It may help to contextualize Churchill's provocative remarks.

The frightening thing about Eichmann's monstrosity was his ability to rationalize his participation in the holocaust, and his inability to critically evaluate the situation. According to Assy, "This normality opened up the precedent regarding the possibility that some attitudes commonly repudiated by a society - in this case the Nazi German attitudes - find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen, who has not reflected on the content of the rules."

She continues, "In fact, it was not only Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters. One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were monstrous."

The gap that separates each one of us from Eichmann is not as great as we would like to believe.

It does not mean that any of us deserve to die.

+ The victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11th deserved to live.

+ The victims of the terrorist attacks in Spain deserved to live.

+ Those who died of hunger as a result of the Iraqi sanctions deserved to live.

+ The American soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan deserved to live.

+ The Iraqi civilians who have become collateral damage beneath the bombs of America jets deserved to live.

+ Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE who was brutally murdered by militants in Iraq, deserved to live.

+ The 200,000 people who died during the Guatemalan genocide deserved to live.

+ And so on.

Churchill's other point is that we should not be *surprised* when the chickens come home to roost. National security analysts affiliated with our foreign policy establishment have made similar arguments for years, but they wisely use the more euphemistic phrase "blowback."

Churchill's inflammatory and insensitive language provides unfortunate ammunition to those who seek to restrict speech on college campuses, but he raises important issues.

We continue to make enemies. In the eyes of many, our invasion of Iraq is a violation of international law. Amnesty International draws our attention to the continuation of torture at Guantanamo Bay ( http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511452004 ). The images of Abu Ghraib still haunt all who believe in human dignity and the promise of liberty.

Like Eichmann and his fellow citizens, we blind our eyes and close our ears. The world has been down this road before.

JP

---

From Bethania Assy's essay on Arendt posted at:

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContAssy.htm

Eichmann in Jerusalem (2) was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, (3) who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in April 15, 1961. The New York Times had announced Eichmann's capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, in May 24, 1960. Israel and Argentina had discussed Eichmann's extradition to Israel, and the United Nations finally decided the legality of Jerusalem Trial. After the confirmation that Eichamnn was to be judged in Israel, Arendt asked The New Yorker's director, William Shamn, to do a complete report of the Eichmann case in Israel.

Arendt's first reaction to Eichmann, "the man in the glass booth," was - nicht einmal unheimlich - not even sinister." (4) She argues that "The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous." (5) Arendt's perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann's ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: "... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think." (6) (emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: "When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence." (7)

Eichmann had always acted according to the restrict limits allowed by the laws and ordinances. Those attitudes resulted in the clouding between virtues and vices of a blind obedience. In fact, it was not only Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters. One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were monstrous. Behind such terrible normality of the bureaucratic mass, who was able to commit the greatest atrocities that the world has even seen, Arendt addressed the question of the banality of evil. This normality opened up the precedent regarding the possibility that some attitudes commonly repudiated by a society - in this case the Nazi German attitudes - find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen, who has not reflected on the content of the rules.Richard Bernstein highlights this "normal and ordinary behavior" of the bureaucratic mass in not thinking about the real meaning of the rules themselves, in the sense that they would behave in the same manner in the manufacturing of either food or corpses. "We may find it almost impossible to image how someone could 'think'(or rather, not think) in this manner, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are 'in essence the same' and where this can become 'normal', 'ordinary' behavior. This is the mentality that Arendt believed she was facing in Eichmann... ." (8) Eichmann has brought up the radical danger of "such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness." (9)

February 4, 2005 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [JGangolly@UAMAIL.ALBANY.EDU]

The postings of Paul and the one from Trinity illustrate an important point: the need to examine any statements in the context in which they are written. In philosophy (at least legal philosophy with which I am a bit familiar), it is done through hermeneutics. Exegesis of text plays a very important role in law. In received accounting research, unfortunately, our infatuation with numbers makes the possibility of hermeneutics remote, except for the critical accounting research stream.

Getting to the subtle argument using "little-Eichmans" of Ward Churchill that was lost on most readers, I was compelled to reread what I wrote a long time ago in our paper in CPA. Here is an excerpt:

The naive positivist zeal in jurisprudence to rid itself of even allusions to fairness and such other concepts with moral or ethical connotations has not quite succeeded and , in our view , as it will become clear below , analogous efforts in the discussions of the GAAP are bound to fail in accounting . Legal positivism has had difficulties wrestling with profound questions such as the following : Are transparently unjust laws (such as those in Nazi Germany) laws at all? Even Hart (1983 , p . 77) , a stalwart of the legal positivist school , has had to grudgingly concede the importance of moral issues in the matter of laws . In discussing a case in which a post second-war West German appeals court , in holding a wife (who , in wishing to be rid of her husband , had deprived her husband's liberty by denouncing him to the Nazi authorities for his alleged statements against Hitler) guilty , rejected the argument that her husband had been so deprived by a German court (for violating a statute) on the ground that such a Nazi statute was ''contrary to the sound conscience and sense of justice of all decent human beings'' , Hart grudgingly yet eloquently admits ,

'' . . . if we have learned anything from the history of morals it is that the thing to do with a moral quandary is not to hide it . Like nettles , the occasions when life forces us to choose the lesser of two evils must be grasped with the consciousness that they are what they are . The vice of this use of the principle that , at certain limiting points , what is utterly immoral can not be law or lawful is that it will serve to cloak the true nature of the problems with which we are faced and will encourage the romantic optimism that all the values we cherish ultimately will fit into a single system , that no one of them has to be sacrificed or compromised to accommodate another . '' (1983) .

Hart speaks of minimum morality of law ; even Austin (1954) and Bentham (1961) have considered it a moral obligation to resist grotesquely iniquitous laws. ... ...

Jagdish

February 4, 2005 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

I am really, truly, enjoying the political discussion. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed such an extensive thread this much. Even though it might be a tiny bit off topic, it is good to exercise my mind once in a while. (I fall somewhere between Paul and Bob and Jagdish... which doesn't narrow it down much, does it?!)

My granddaddy, Louie Chesley Hammock, who we all called "Paw", never finished elementary school. He was a dirt-poor hard-scrabble cotton farmer born in the late 1800s in the deep piney woods of southern Georgia. He fathered ten kids, raised seven to adulthood, fought in France in WWI and again at age 60 in WWII, and lived to 90 eating turnip greens, black-eyed peas, blood sausage and cornbread.

Although he had little formal schooling, and even less respect for the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and a special disdain for law, he sure had some insightful sayings about life.

Some of his teachings I still remember, teachings that would apply directly to the thread:

"If you know too little, your life will be full of problems. If you know too much, your life will also be full of problems. Even if you know just enough, you'll still find lots of problems, -- enough to keep you busy, anyway."

"You needn't waste your time with high-falutin' philosophical musings. All that matters is that you try to treat everybody else the way you want to be treated. If you try as hard as you can to do that, you'll be doing the best you can possibly do, and no amount of thinking about it or using fancy language to describe it or readin' what other people have to say about it, will allow you to do any better."

"Hitler was a really bad guy. You run into bad guys every now and then. But running across a bad guy now and then doesn't mean it's all right to start disrespectin' authority. Just because you can point to someone who led his followers astray doesn't mean that you can justify not following a leader, sometimes blindly. If people didn't follow leaders, especially ones that know more than them, nobody would go anywhere."

"It's a crying shame that most of the time you hear the name Hitler, it's to justify someone's argument with authority. My experience has been that there aren't nearly as many Hitlers in the world as some people would have you believe. At least not in the company I keep, anyway."

"Most of the time when people argue, what they're arguing about isn't worth arguing about."

"When two people argue about which way is better, most of the time it don't matter who wins or which path they take: when they go down either path, they'll be taking other forks down the road which can almost always bring them out at the same place, or at least at one just as good. No matter how un-doable a choice may appear, there will be other choices you'll face further down the road which a lot of the time will bring you out on the same creek when its all over and done with."

"When someone gets in trouble for something he said, it's probably 'cause he shouldn'ta said it in the first place. Just 'cause you have the freedom to say something doesn't mean you ought to say it. If it gets you in trouble, you probably shouldn'ta oughta said it. Very few people are really smart enough to say something worthwhile that gets them into trouble. For every ten thousand people that get in trouble for what they say, there's only one or two of them that had somethin' that really needed to be said anyway. The rest of 'em shoulda kept their mouth shut, and iff'n they'd thought about it for two seconds, they coulda known that before they said it."

------

The older I get, the more I find myself thinking about these lessons. While I enjoy (mainly from a personal-entertainment perspective) the debates, discussions, dialogs and "arguments", I have to agree with Paw that most of the time, what we say isn't worth some of the trouble it causes us. Most of us like to think that the exercise of our academic freedom is worth the sacrifice we make to exercise it, when in reality most of us just aren't smart enough to say something valuable enough to make it worth the trade-off. My personal opinion is that Ward Churchill falls (with me) in this very category.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

February 4, 2005 reply from Haines, Harry W [hhaines@trinity.edu]

Bob,

I don’t mean to be overly critical, but I must tell you there’s no danger that you might be confused with UT’s journalism Jensen or that a social historian or media studies scholar might possibly suspect you have membership in their disciplines, so not to worry. Specifically, your essay’s theoretical weakness is based on a lack of rigorous semiotic or content analysis, as well as on a decontextualized reading of paradigmatic and syntagmatic codes which the essay merely assumes. In short, the claims are unwarranted. Because of your admitted lack of academic expertise in these areas, however, I have to wonder what compels you to share what you yourself identify as an unsophisticated and naïve critical analysis with the rest of us, particularly when Professor Churchill (a man I now suspect was smeared by shallow journalism) and the “other” Professor Robert Jensen have not presumed to comment publicly on the mysteries of bookkeeping. I’m attaching a report circulating today (I believe from AAUP) that reveals the names of some professors excluded from President Bush’s Social Security road show when it hit Fargo. Reminds me of that news photo taken at a Bush rally during the campaign, the one where a young woman is dragged off by her hair for apparently resisting the dominant ideology. Just in case you missed it, I’m attaching it here, because I think it has great metaphorical value in reference to the “Intellectual Diversity” propaganda campaign now directed against the social institution to which we all belong.

Harry

February 5, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Harry,

It's much, much, much easier to dismantle an economic engine than the put the pieces back together.

Thank you Harry for not being "overly critical." Being "overly critical" means deleting my messages without even reading them. You've not been overly critical.

Your note wanders off into Bush bashing. In the two documents in question, I never revealed my position on the Bush dynasty one way or another. And I avoided mentioning some things like the article by Robert W. Jensen entitled "The United States has lost the Iraq War, and that's a good thing," Dallas Morning News, June 6, 2004.

This entire thread started with what I considered inappropriate language (racist and sexist) that threaded its way from Prissy Rice to Herr Churchill to Darth W. Jensen. It has been about language. Never has it been about policy except when I questioned the word "dismantling" the U.S. business system and the military that protects it. So please keep Bush and the Iraq war out of this. I was also pleased to hear from some Jews privately who said they are offended by Ward Churchill's use of the language.

I felt compelled to comment because I really was ashamed of what I perceive as the academy's hypocrisy of telling us we can't use some languages in any contexts (including humor on TigerTalk) and then our teachers remain silent when the banned languages are directed against the establishment (e.g., Condoleezza Rice). I was particularly pleased that I provided you with at least one illustration of racism in the media that you are now putting into your class materials. I conclude that even for you there has been some incremental benefit of my messages that "lack of rigorous semiotic or content analysis." Fortunately some of my smarter friends have added a bit more rigor to my essay at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm .

I feel so compelled to comment on Robert W. Jensen because, for a long time, I've thought that his very public calls (as a journalism professor he is quite good at using the media) for dismantling the U.S. business system are superficial and academically out of touch with the academic theory of economics and business. He pretends to be a scholar of business since he's out to "dismantle" our business system. By the way, I've sometimes been contacted by email and phone by people who think my middle initial is W. Some have mistakenly praised me and others wanted W. tortured and dunked. Producers of the O'Reilly Factor even contacted me to serve as Bill O'Reilly's foil until they discovered that I (E.) wasn't really out to dismantle the U.S. business system.

Nowhere have I seen Professor W propose a viable system to rise up from the ashes after he has the U.S. business system successfully dismantled. And he mistakenly blames the U.S. for the globalization of business, a point which I tried to briefly correct in my essay. Apparently he's not concerned with the much more dominant multinational corporations and banks from Europe and Japan (and soon to be China). One of the major reasons France hated our invasion of Iraq was that Saddam had contracted to give French multinational companies control of one of Iraq's very best oil fields.

How do we dismantle foreign business in our electoral process? Our limits to jurisdiction would be to give our global business to the rest of the world. If our electoral process succumbs to the urging of Professor W and dismantles business, other nations will gladly grab up the offshore interests currently owned U.S. businesses.

It's much, much, much easier to dismantle an economic engine than the put the pieces back together. Professor W is incapable of providing us with any rigor about how societies realistically provide for themselves in the real world. He's certainly not an economist or a business theorist. And in terms of pretenses of scholarship, it amazes me on how Professor W has claimed to be an expert on just about every topic in the world except possibly geochemistry and astrophysics --- http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/freelance.htm

And I really don't object to your questioning of my credentials to speak out on hypocrisy, because questioning of credentials is part of the territory in the academy. Just don't make jokes about Norwegians. And I really don't like to gloat, but since you questioned my credentials to speak out on social issues, I emerged from bookkeeping for a bit when I was once a Guggenheim Fellow and also a Fellow (twice) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. But I must admit that in those days I was much more into statistics than "semiotic content" of signs and language codes. That is your bailiwick Harry, and I respect you for your scholarship in that field.

I have posted your comments at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

Thanks Harry,

Bob E. Jensen

February 9, 2005 message from Bob Jensen

In fairness to Colorado, Ward Churchill's strong leanings were very well known when he was given tenure. Colorado can hardly be viewed a bastion of bigotry in terms of faculty or administration who could have blocked him at the mountain pass when he applied for tenure. I suspect Colorado has tried as hard as most large state universities to achieve greater diversity. I doubt that Colorado blocked out gays, African Americans, Moslems, native Americans, or any other individuals just because they had anti-establishment leanings. In fact tenure has been granted in cases where individuals had no doctoral degrees.

There are concerns being raised about his truthfulness when he applied for tenure, but I assume these concerns were addressed before tenure was granted --- http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/005070.php

The family of his deceased wife claims he lied on his resume, but CU claims that the truthfulness of his ethnicity claims are not part of the current dispute --- http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/buffzone_news/1,1713,BDC_2448,00.html

The unfortunate focus in Professor Churchill's case is on one phrase. I've received messages from professors who think that one word was a gross violation of academic freedom. I've received a greater number of messages who, in varying degrees, side with Churchill. I've included some of these messages at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

You are correct, Harry, that this is becoming a face off, and these kinds of face offs are very divisive and lead to exaggerated hatreds that the academy prefers not happen (at least I hope they prefer this not happen). There are times when these can be lose-lose outcomes. The hole becomes deeper now that Churchill himself is accused in the media of being part of a conspiracy to forcefully overthrow the government of the United States, which Churchill himself denies. But he may not be believed in some pockets of the world. I believe him when, as a war veteran, he despises war. But others may not be placated by his statement of position (an unapology) at the bottom of http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyChurchill.htm

I also want to stress that I'm not one of those who recommends firing Ward Churchill (or Professor W). I do think Ward Churchill owes some upset 9/11 victims an apology for falsely accusing them of something very bad that they were not. He might deny that he did not intend to upset those victims (including children), but the fact of the matter is that he did upset some of them very badly by calling them "little Eichmanns." What is so wrong in at least apologizing to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy (unless he really feels that every individual victim was part of a deliberate conspiracy in the same manner Eichmann conspired with the Third Reich).

At this point, Professor Churchill loudly proclaims that he's not going to "back down" even if an apology might settle the entire crisis. I stress "might" because an apology may not end the threats at this point, although his supporters have now admitted they grossly exaggerated these threats to the press. Nevertheless, things are getting way out of hand. It will probably be defused somewhat if Colorado keeps him on the faculty without any apology on his part. In that case, Colorado will have taken the correct action, but Ward Churchill would remain guilty of inflicting injury to already-wounded victims.

Since he’s all set to sue, one wonders if he’s hoping to be fired.

Bob Jensen

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ECONOMICS: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science by E Ray Canterbery (Florida State University) http://www.worldscibooks.com/economics/4079.html

February 7, 2005 message from Bob Jensen

I concluded the following (above) with respect to Ward Churchill at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

******************
I don't think Ward Churchill should lose his job over this incident even though I do think he violated the trust we place in academic freedom of speech and debate. My recommendation would be that he make a public apology to the people he accuses of being Nazis, including victims of the 9/11 attacks and American business.
*****************

If the academy's reaction is rougher than a request for an apology, then the academy may be over reacting. An example of what I consider an over reaction is the action of the President of Eastern Washington University that is entitled "Statement from EWU President Stephen Jordan on campus speakers Ward Churchill and Ron Jeremy," --- http://www.ewu.edu/x20655.xml

The safely and security argument to me seems contrived. We've had speakers at Trinity that probably were as much or more of a security risk. As I recall, one speaker at Trinity had a stalker group that followed that speaker about the country.

You can read more about Ward Churchill at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyChurchill.htm

I don't know much of anything about Ron Jeremy other than the titles of two of his movies. I won't comment about Jeremy other than to note that he suspiciously sounds like a porn star in such films as "Buttman at Nudes a Poppin' 7" and "What's the Lesbian Doing in My Pirate Movie?" I'm not at all certain, however, that these are truly pornographic since I've never seen the movies nor have I read any of the reviews. But I suspect there's a porn popper aspect to his films.

As far as I know, academic freedom allows non-pornographic performances from porn stars (whether or not Jeremy might be a porn star). Campus reaction may be negative, but I don't know that a porn star would either be in physical danger or cause physical danger. There are heckling dangers, but many speakers are in danger of heckling.

Bob Jensen

At least Karl Marx, Nozick, and Heilbroner had visions
The extreme left does seem to have abandoned any idea of creating
a socialist utopia; today it is devoted solely to uncreative destruction.
Opinion Journal, February 11, 2005
Bob Jensen's comments on this are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisyEvilEmpire.htm

Robert Nozick's Vision of Utopia

Jensen Comment
Robert Nozick was a radical leftist who became one of Harvard's renowned philosophers. He's best known for scholarly advocacy of a minimalist state. He was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Republicans are hypocrites. They preach competition but promote big government that protects and subsidizes anti-competitive oligopolies like agribusiness, oil companies, armaments, etc. Democrats want a maximal state with entitlements for health care, minimum wages, and welfare without any means of paying for their dreams. Robert Nozick advocated a minimal state but had a misunderstood view of caring for the poor.
Visions of a minimal (Utopian) state versus the rights of the poor --- http://world.std.com/~mhuben/wolff_2.html
I prefer Milton Friedman's negative income tax solution for the poor (as long as there are heavy fraud controls) --- http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NegativeIncomeTax.html

Note from Jensen
For one year in a think tank just above the Stanford University campus, my office was across the wall from very nice scholar who had deeper thoughts than me. Unlike today's superficial destructionists, he left us with a vision.
Nozick (1938-2002) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University until his death. His first book, Anarchy, State and Utopia astonished the philosophical world and made the discussion of liberty and property rights respectable again in scholarly circles. A former radical leftist, Nozick was converted to the libertarian perspective as a graduate student, mostly through reading the works of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Below is an interview with Nozick from 2001.
"An Interview with Robert Nozick," by Julian Sanchez, July 26, 2001 --- http://www.lfb.com/index.php?action=help&helpfile=nozickinterview.html
A slightly more printable version is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NozickInterview.htm
I might note that Hayek favored price system economics but denied being a conservative --- http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/fah1.html

Robert Nozick's Life and Death is described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick

Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia provided a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published in 1971.

Nozick almost single-handedly made libertarian political philosophy respectable within mainstream academia with the 1974 publication of his now-classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which garnered a National Book Award the following year. Anarchy, State, and Utopia argues, among other things, that a distribution of goods is just, so long as the distribution was brought about by free exchanges by consenting adults and were made from a just starting position, even if large inequalities emerge from the process. Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as rational beings, not merely as a means. For example, forced redistribution of income treated people as if they were sources of money (means). Nozick here challenges John Rawls's arguments in A Theory of Justice that conclude that inequalities must at least make the worst off better off in order to be morally justified.

Nozick, among the leading figures in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, made significant contributions to almost every major area of philosophy. In Philosophical Explanations, Nozick provides novel accounts of knowledge, free will, and the nature of value. The Examined Life, pitched to a broader public, explores love, death, faith, and the meaning of life. The Nature of Rationality presents a theory of practical reason that attempts to embellish notoriously spartan classical decision theory. Socratic Puzzles is a collection of papers that range from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics to animal rights, while his last production, Invariances applies insights from physics and biology to questions of objectivity in such areas as the nature of necessity and moral value.

Nozick was notable for his curious, exploratory style and methodological ecumenism. Often content to raise tantalizing philosophical possibilities and then leave judgment to the reader, Nozick was also notable for inventively drawing from literature outside of philosophy (e.g., economics, physics, evolutionary biology) to infuse his work with freshness and relevance.

Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer.

Charles Fourier Gets an F grade for his vision of utopia. Between 1841 and 1847, the Brook Farm community attempted to start a utopian society patterned after the visions of Fourier. Residents did not experience 120 years of unrestricted sexual delight. At least that was never mentioned by Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time at Brook Farm and presented a fictionalized portrait of it in his novel, The Blithedale Romance.
Humanity now looks forward to Guaranteeism and eventually Harmony, the final stage when the sea will become lemonade, peaceable species of animals will evolve, and people will live to 144 years, of which 120 years will be spent in unrestricted sexual delight. Then the seesaw will tip and humanity will work its way backward to Confusion before beginning another life cycle. These eight stages would repeat themselves endlessly.
Charles Fourier --- http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-163,pageNum-20.html
Jensen Note: Charles Fourier should not be confused with Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (who does get an A grade for good works in mathematics and physics).

Question: Who is the all-time best selling author in economics?
Clue: He was a socialist who eventually gave an F grade to socialism.
David Boaz, "The Man Who Told the Truth: Robert Heilbroner fessed up to the failure of socialism." ReasonOnline, January 27, 2005 --- http://www.reason.com/hod/db012105.shtml

Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist; if only a libertarian could write an introductory book on economics that could—like Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers—sell 4 million copies.

Reading some of Heilbroner's essays over the years, I admired his honesty about the meaning of socialism. Consider this excerpt from a 1978 essay in Dissent:

Socialism...must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity....

If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means...

The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated...and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan...

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal... Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.

Few socialists outside the Communist Party are willing to acknowledge that real socialism means trading our "Millian liberties" for the purported good of economic planning and "a morally conscious collectivity."

He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker:

"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism."

In The New Yorker again the next year, he reminisced about hearing of Ludwig von Mises at Harvard in the 1930s. But of course his professors and fellow students scoffed at Mises's claim that socialism could not work. It seemed at the time, he wrote, that it was capitalism that was failing. Then, a mere 50 years later, he acknowledged: "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right" about the impossibility of socialism. I particularly like the "of course." Fifty years it took him to grasp the truth of what Mises wrote in 1920, and he blithely tossed off his newfound wisdom as "of course."

Continued in the article

Our Students' Visions or Lack Thereof
Survey finds nearly three-quarters of students say it's very important to be very well off financially, while barely 40 percent say it's very important to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Students increasingly place a higher value on being very well off financially than developing a meaningful philosophy of life.
Stacy A. Teicher, "Survey: Freshmen in It for the Money," ABC News, February 12, 2005 --- http://abcnews.go.com/US/CSM/story?id=459348&page=1

Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.
Nicholas De Genova (then anthropology professor at Columbia University) as quoted by Ron Howell, "Radicals Speak Out At Columbia ‘Teach-In,’" NewsDay, March 27, 2003.

Also see http://www.meforum.org/article/pipes/1045

And see http://www.petitiononline.com/CARES/

NCWC President’s Statement
Concerning Professor Christensen’s Website and Coursework at North Carolina Wesleyan College --- http://www.ncwc.edu/presidents%5Fstatement.htm

During the past few weeks, the web site of Dr. Jane Christensen, who teaches Political Science at NC Wesleyan, has attracted a great deal of attention. In response, the College makes the following statement:

North Carolina Wesleyan College seeks to foster freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry. The College believes that the students’ educational experience should include a balanced and open approach to learning. As a United Methodist institution, we value diversity of opinion. The College fosters just and fair treatment for all groups in our society and does not condone hatred or violence of any kind. We seek to foster Judeo-Christian values. We value First Amendment rights, and academic freedom for our faculty and students.

Wesleyan is among the many colleges that permit faculty and students to create personal web pages that can be accessed through the College’s homepage. These personal pages represent the views of the individuals who create them, not the views of the College.

Professor Christensen’s views are not those held by the overwhelming majority of Americans. She presents alternative views that many find repugnant. There is no question but that students in her classes hear views and opinions different from the mainstream. It should be noted that our students are intelligent and thoughtful. They can, and often do, disagree with Professor Christensen, without academic penalty. Many students find themselves upset at the opinion and commentary that they are uncritical, or can be brainwashed.

Continued in Ian D.C. Newbould's letter

She's a professor with little backing for her outrageous claims: Should her university allow her