Ward Churchill and David Irving: Full of Hubris and Hoisted on their own Petard

There is an interesting article by Walter Plywaski in The Daily Camera comparing the modus operandi of David Irving and Ward Churchill,

Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for fabricating and plagiarizing in his published writings, sued the university, claiming he was "unfairly targeted for controversial remarks he made post-9/11. CU found him to be a plagiarist with poor academic integrity." (Daily Camera, March 3).

The author argues that

both Churchill and Irving exhibit the same kind of hubris: both felt, and feel, that nothing they could state, no matter how outrageous, could hurt them. Both of these two self-defined geniuses forgot the basic principle of being a successful prevaricator and that is: do not bring attention to yourself when you know perfectly well you have things that you wish to hide or at least not have generally discussed. Both of these two men used either bogus "historical research" works or, when unable to find data for their ideology, created the data out of whole cloth.

Regarding Churchill's court case, the author observes that

Churchill and his attorneys don't even bother to defend their case by solid evidence against the accusations of plagiarism, subterfuge and scholastic inappropriateness made by CU. Instead, their thrust seems to be to try to disregard such charges and claim that Churchill is being persecuted because of his merely unpopular (but very shrill!) article in which he claimed that the victims of the Twin Tower attack of 9/11 were nothing other but "little Eichmanns."

Both Irving and Churchill could have gone along spreading their nefarious lies and fabrications and, in Churchill's case, plagiarism [not one of Irving's "sins" as far as I know] had they not both been blinded by their hubris,

Had Irving not sued me, we would never have exposed the extent of his lies and distortions. Had Churchill not reveled in saying the outrageous there would not have been the in depth investigation of his plagiarism and his lies about his academic record.

[once again thanks to Sara Salzman for bringing this to my attention]

A final [I hope] word on Ward Churchill

The Eugene Or. Register -Guard has an editorial praising both those who protected Ward Churchill's right to free speech and the university process which uncovered his many lies, fabrications, plagarisms and the like.

While I agree in essence, I keep asking why didn't anyone look at his credentials, articles, and claims [about Native American ancestry for example] before this whole thing blew up? Were they so excited about getting a supposed Native American on faculty that they were willing to ignore some of the warning signs?

How about the fact that he did not have a Ph.D. and yet was made chair of a department? [Apparently he was honest about this and yet the university hired him anyway.]

Was the university willing to make such a serious compromise [the Ph.D. is the university union card] a reflection of how little it thought of a deparmtnet of Ethnic Studies [which is where Churchill was housed]?

If this is indeed correct, it's behavior such as this which gives affirmative action its bad name.

In the end the university acquitted itself well. Before that however....

Firing Ward Churchill: Univ of Colorado President in today's Wall St. Journal

Previous posts on this topic

In an excellent and hard hitting piece in today's Wall St. Journal University of Colorado President Hank Brown makes it clear why Ward Churchill was fired. In short, Churchill proved himself to be a falsifier of history, a plagiarizer, and someone who, when his mistakes are revealed, blames everyone but himself.

In short he is antithetical to all a university should stand for.

My question is: how did this guy get hired in the first place? How did he get promoted to the chair of an academic department? If he hadn't shot off his mouth about Little Eichmann's would the truth have come out? [Rumor has it that people had been complaining for a long time but no one took their complaints seriously.]

See also Marty Peretz's comments on this.

Ward Churchill [the one who called the 9/11 victims (and me) Eichmanns] fired: But not for that

Ward Churchill who claimed to be a Native American but was not and who called the 9/11 victims, particularly those who worked in finance and investment, "little Eichmanns" was fired yesterday by University of Colorado.

He had called me an Eichmann for ignoring the genocide of Native Americans in my book Denying the Holocaust because I was destroying another people. [If that makes sense to you let me know.]

Some free speech advocates will rise up to his defense. They should not. He was not fired for this.

A university committee investigated and found, according to the Rocky Mountain News,

# Historical facts: Churchill manufactured events in which European Americans intentionally spread smallpox to kill Indians. In one such event, the Army is said to have distributed tainted blankets to Mandan Indians. But no evidence backs the claim.

Elsewhere, Churchill claimed the United States adopted a formal racial code to identify Indians, similar to the code used by the Nazis to identify Jews. U.S. law includes no such code, legal scholars say.

# Plagiarism: Churchill published an essay on water issues in Canada that closely resembles a pamphlet by a Canadian environmental group. He also borrowed a work on fishing rights originally published by Canadian scholar Fay Cohen.

# Falsifying sources: Churchill wrote essays under the names of other people, which he then cited as independent sources in his footnotes.

In the academic world these are capital offenses. Watch now as Churchill hits the trail and presents himself as a victim...

Related posts

AlterNet on Denial, C-SPAN ... and Ward Churchill

Bill Weinberg has weighed in on the C-SPAN controversy - and on Ward Churchill. Some excerpts:

Holocaust Denial, C-SPAN and Ward Churchill

C-SPAN is attempting to 'balance' a Holocaust studies professor with a denier; Ward Churchill's stab at 'moral equivalence' falls flat.

Over 200 historians have signed a petition in protest of C-SPAN's plan to pair coverage of a lecture by Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust studies at Georgia's Emory University, with one by David Irving, the notorious Holocaust revisionist. Irving, author of Hitler's War and other books, sued Lipstadt in his native U.K. after she called him out as a revisionist in her own book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory British courts dismissed the suit in 2000, finding that Irving deliberately misrepresented historical evidence. Lipstadt's book on the case, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, has just been published.

[...]

In a 1991 speech, Irving told his audience that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz." This is the kind of voice to which C-SPAN is about to loan credibility.

In Lipstadt's own blog, History on Trial, she notes that another one of her prominent critics is supposed American Indian scholar Ward Churchill, who recently gained notoreity by calling 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns."

[...]

[...]Churchill allows his own valid critique to be dismissed as the ravings of a nut. Recognition that the industrial destruction of indigenous lands and culture in the western hemisphere constitutes genocide (as defined under international law) can be lumped in with the pseudo-history of an Irving – or (more to the point) Churchill's own witless cheer-leading for mass murder in the 9/11 attacks.

[...]

So a nuanced sense of history is called for to really make sense of these issues – an unlikely prospect in an atmosphere degraded by cynicism and fealty to shallow sound-bites.

Meanwhile, if C-SPAN capitulates and drops the Irving segment, it will merely confirm the perception in the growing ranks of Jew-haters that "the Jews" control the media. Unless some honest and courageous voices are brought to the debate quickly, this affair will be a lose/lose no matter how we slice it.

Ward Churchill says Deborah Lipstadt is the same as Adolf Eichmann

see: http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=10532

Long before he called the people in the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns," Ward Churchill had written that there was "no difference.... between a Deborah Lipstadt and an Adolf Eichmann." His comments were prompted by the fact that I do not equate the treatment of the Native Americans with the Holocaust.

For his rather incomprehensible ramblings on this point see:
www.othervoices.org/2.1/churchill/denial.html