Warren's latest post, immediately below this one, looks at the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill, the university professor and essayist who argued that the WTC victims somehow had it coming. Unlike Warren, I don't believe it is "tough" to determine whether the guy should get canned.
No doubt about it, Churchill's words are incendiary. But so what?
The United States, rightly, lets nazis march in Skokie; it lets Holocaust deniers publish their grotty little websites; it lets communists release their Stalin hagiographies; it lets anarchists agitate, in words if not in actions, for the overthrow of the state.
No sweat. Rather than having been weakened, the republic has trived under all that constitutional permissiveness. Because of it, I think. Dissent makes America a better place, a true marketplace of ideas (even, horrors, really unpopular ones). That crazy, unfettered, annoying, glorious pandemonium attracts some of the world's best and brightest.
The way to fight 'bad' speech is with better speech. As if on cue, Ward Churchill's essay has been sliced and diced, attacked, dissected, and pelted with counter-arguments. That is as it should be. While I could hardly disagree more with his "little Eichmanns" pronouncement, he has the absolute right to write what he did; and by furthering the discussion and forcing people to look at the atrocities of 9/11 in a different light (you did read his piece, didn't you?), Churchill has done a quintessentially American thing.
The people clamoring for Churchill's dismissal no doubt see themselves as patriots. But I have a different word for those who wrap themselves in the flag without bothering to remember the freedoms it stands for: hypocrites amnesiacs.
[posted by Rogier]
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