Saturday, Aug. 09, 2003 - 3:24 a.m.

Ward Churchill

Tonight was the beginning of the Break The Chains Conference on prisoner support/prison abolition issues. It's taking place in Eugene, and organized by local anarchists primarily for other anarchists.

The main keynote speaker was Ward Churchill, advocate of violent, bloody revolution. Last year, I read his book, Pacifism as Pathology, and was enraged and disgusted with it. I thought it was a pack of lies and exaggerations, and misdirections. I was sure that he was being intentionally intellectually dishonest by setting up straw man arguments to bolster his case.

And as an ardent pacifist, I was deeply saddened and frustrated with his glib, even joyful, approach to what he saw as the necessity of killing.

But tonight I had a chance to ask him a few questions before his speech. I decided that instead of confronting him with accusations and name-calling, it might better serve to genuinely ask him questions, in case I had misunderstood his intentions in the text.

Sure enough, as I approached, I overheard him quoting Franz Fanon, "freedom is cutting the throat of your colonizer."

A physically huge man who fervently believes in violence is a little difficult to approach with contrary views. But nevertheless, I went up to him and asked if he was willing to answer some questions I had. He said he was up for two questions. So I said, "The only work of yours I've read is Pacifism as Pathology..."

"Writing that wasn't work," Churchill interjected, "it was a pleasure".

I continued, "and I really appreciated how you laid low the hypocrisy of liberal pacifism, but I was confused when you wrote that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were nonviolent resisters. [Aside from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising], weren't they basically not resisting at all?"

Churchill countered that those Jews indeed engaged in strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience, but it got them nowhere. I confessed that my historical knowledge must be weak in that area, for I never heard of that. In any case, his book does not ennumerate any concrete examples of Jewish nonviolent resistence during that era.

I also asked why he bothered saying that liberal pacifism isn't revolutionary, since liberals are by definition not revolutionary, and they seldom claim to be, and certainly don't ever claim they want to overthrow the government.

Churchill took issue with me using the term, "pacifist" for these people, since real Gandhian pacifists are brave and not averse to getting hurt. He said that while they don't want revolution in the sense of overthrow, they still think that their kind of nonviolence is "revolutionary" enough to change the world. It still seems like a straw man argument to me.

Anarchy Man asked Churchill, "do you consider yourself to be an anarchist?"

Churchill hemmed and hawed that yes, he was very similar to an anarchist in that he opposes the State, and that local anarcho badboy Johnny Z. considers him to be an anarchist.

"But are you opposed to all forms of authority?" pursued Anarchy Man.

"No," said Churchill, "If you call a plumber to fix your sink, that plumber is an authority on plumbing, and if you think you know as much as he does about it, you're an idiot."

I couldn't believe that a learned man like Churchill was making the age-old ignorant error of blurring together authoritativeness with authoritarianism. Anarchy Man clarified that he meant authority in the sense of a threat of punishment to enforce obedience. Churchill again countered with a hypothetical scenario of a war in which your army has decided to be silent but you irresponsibly get drunk and throw a loud party, jeopardaizing everybody. Churchill said that since our lives are interconnected, coercion is necessary to preserve society. He said that the problem would be solved by locking the drunk person in a closet with a towel in their mouth.

Churchill addressed Anarchy Man, "tonight, we'll put you in a closet with a towel in your mouth." Churchill has a sense of humor, albeit an intimidating one.

Later that night...

Churchill delivered the most firey and intelligent anarchist speech I have ever heard. It reminded me of a return to olden times, when Emma Goldman was enthusiastically received by large crowds. I wish I could strap Starhawk down, make her watch his speech, and if she couldn't learn how to be a better orator on her own, then I would pay her money to give his speech verbatim instead of her own, and deliver it with the same immense passion he did. The only ways Churchill's speech could have been better in my eyes would have been if he had included a critique of the dominator paradigm, plugged Nonviolent Communication, and made concrete recommendations about what to do.

He started by speaking of several court cases in which racial minorities and political activists got very harsh sentences compared to far worse crimes committed by the likes of Michael Milken and the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. He went on to speak of recent revelations of vast corruption in foresics labs both in the FBI and with other law enforcement bodies, in which evidence against thousands of defendents has been systematically forged in order to get convictions. "Power dictates the terms of struggle," he said. The power he was referring to was the power of the elite Delta Force, Hostage Rescue Teams (paramilitary units that never actually rescue hostages, but actually engage in assassinations), SWAT teams, and militarized police, and the Prator guidelines which gives the president the power to use the military against US citizens within US borders.

He spoke in very simple language, but made sure to drop the names Locke, Heidigger, and Baudrillard just to reassure the audience that he's actually a well-read intellectual.

He defined freedom as living free of regulation. I question the validity of that definition, but I had to admire its rhetorical utility. Since this definition makes freedom quantifiable, Churchill was able to say that the United States is the most unfree nation on earth, because the total of Federal, state, county, and city laws and ordinances adds up to a greater amount of regulatory text than in any other country. He said he's been to repressive countries like Libya, but only in the United States can one get a ticket for walking outside the painted lines of a crosswalk. He dared the audience to think of one aspect of daily life in America that isn't regulated. Someone suggested that smiling wasn't regulated. Churchill shot back that Jerry Rubin served 30 days in jail in 1969 for smiling at a cop. The charge was disorderly conduct. But I'm still pretty sure it's worse in somewhere like China, even if China has fewer laws on the books.

Churchill made the excellent (even anarchist) point that additional laws can not free us, since laws by their nature abridge freedom. To work within the system, to pass additional laws, is to just give more power to the system of oppression.

[Paraphrasing:] Yes, we need to get the US out of Central America, and we need to get the US out of Iraq, these are all very important, but the overarching necessity is to get the US out of North America and off the planet! [Exact quote:]

"The only alternative is to BRING THIS MOTHER-FUCKER DOWN!!!"

The standing-room-only crowd of 300 rose to its feet applauding and roaring their approval.

It almost made me think, for a moment, that maybe it is possible.

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