“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”
–Luke 6:45

In an interview (“Dismantling the Politics of Comfort”) appearing in an online magazine called Satya, Ward Churchill claimed that more 9/11s may be necessary. Then he remarked: “You have to have an eradication of the beast, not a retraining of the beast’s performance.” And in case the professor would like to hide behind his metaphor—that even students who hate poetry could understand, he continues, “I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.”

After this response, the interviewer asked him, “So what does that look like?” In other words, what do you envision for the contintent, once the US is out of it? To which Churchill responded:

There’s no U.S. in America anymore. What’s on the map instead? Well let’s just start with territoralities [sic] often delineated in treaties of fact—territoralities [sic]* of 500 indigenous nations imbued with an inalienable right to self-determination, definable territoralities which are jurisdictionally separate. Then you’ve got things like the internal diasporic population of African Americans in internal colonies that have been established by the imposition of labor patterns upon them. You’ve got Appalachian whites. Since the U.S. unilaterally violated its treaty obligations, it forfeits its rights—or presumption of rights—under international law. Basically, you’ve got a dismantlement and devolution of the U.S. territorial and jurisdictional corpus into something that would be more akin to diasporic self-governing entities and a multiplicity of geographical locations. A-ha, chew on that one for awhile.

*(I think he meant “territorialities,” because “territoralities” is not a word. But the meaning of “territorialities,” status or condition of a territory, does not work in the context here. Churchill might not be responsible for the inaccurate spelling of “territorialities,” but he is accountable for its usage.)

Churchill’s remark is an example of the immature speech and thought patterns that purple his verbose writings. The crux of his suggest is that the continent be separated into 500 self-governing territories. Other wise he’s just repeating his wish that the US cease to exist.

Churchill’s speech and writings are filled with the verbosity and obtuseness that the general public has come to think of when they refer to people in higher education as eggheads. But even as the guy on the street calls an intellectual egghead, he still has a level of respect for the intellectual. Just because the average Joe can’t understand all the pomposity of the intelligentsia, doesn’t mean that the intelligentsia is not important—just irrelevant in Joe’s ordinary life.

Churchill’s fulminations really are irrelevant to truthful discourse, and they do not add to our knowledge base. But who really cares about an obscure professor tauting an unpopular point of view? All he wants is
exactly what al Qaeda wants: the US off the planet. Can you image bin Laden’s glee at finding not only an award-winning American filmmaker on his side, but now a tenured university professor?


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