The Little Eichmanns

Prof. Robert Jensen writes that Ward Churchill has rights, and he’s right.

I take Churchill’s central thesis to be that (1) U.S. crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes around the world -- from the genocidal campaigns against indigenous people on which this country was founded, through the post-World War II assaults (both by the U.S. military and through proxy forces) on the people of the Third World -- are crimes, in legal and moral terms; (2) while contemporary non-state terrorism is a complex phenomenon, U.S. policies aimed at domination and control around the world are one of several key factors in spawning such terrorism; and (3) we must study that history and those connections if we want to prevent further crimes, whether committed by the United States or against U.S. citizens.

What goes for the USA goes some of the way for Australia as we are also a colonial-settler state that was built on the genocide of the indigenous population. The Australian colonial empire only extended to PNG, and our slave trade was limited to convicts and South Sea Islanders. Our chickens came home to roost at the Bali Bombing in October 2002. The likely motive for that is the about-face of the Australian government over E.Timor. Both the Indonesian military and radicals hated us for engineering the removal of their troops. Even Usama Bin Ladin cites this as a cause for all Muslims to avenge: the handover of Muslim territory to the Christians.

What seems to have got up everybody's nose is:

First, let’s go to the passage that has received the most attention, the labeling of the people described as a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” as “little Eichmanns.” Churchill has said that the passage clearly wasn’t intended to include the janitors, food-service workers, children, rescue workers, or passers-by who were killed, and there’s no reason to doubt him about that, even if the construction was ambiguous enough that many read it as a broader condemnation. But even accepting that narrow construction, the statement is still problematic. Are all the stock traders in the United States really equivalent to Adolph Eichmann? It’s true that Eichmann was a technocrat who helped keep the Nazi machinery of death running, not the person pulling the trigger, so to speak. But Eichmann was a fairly high-level Gestapo bureaucrat, directly involved in the planning of that holocaust. Is it accurate to think of all stock traders -- even if marked as “little” versions of Eichmann, implying a much lower scale -- as being in an analogous position? ...

This really raises deep ethical questions. How much of what I do every day contributes to the oppression of others? What we think of as means to get enough money to live could be hurting other people. Being a worker in a capitalist economy does not give an individual much choice - you want to eat, you have to work. If you want to keep your job, you have to follow orders. There is not much leeway for an individual.

For groups of people, the choices become greater. Only a mass movement can truly change society. But you have to start with yourself, not waiting for others.