This is an exerpt from my posted essay titled "Attack of the Fringe People" in which i quote Ward Churchill explaining his inflamitory statement to Democracy Now host, Amy Goodman:
. . . But if one actually reads his essay, and finds the rationale behind the reference to the 9/11 victims as “little Eichmanns,” it is easy to see why that part of the story was mostly left out of the media coverage. When one finds out that the sanctions we imposed on Iraq were largely responsible for the deaths of a half million of their children, one begins to find a need to question what exactly is behind the omission of such important information. When Madeline Albright acknowledged in a 60 Minutes interview that “the price is worth it,” she implicated all of us in this atrocity. Where is the democratic process that is supposed to protect against such a horrible mistake?
When Amy Goodman asked Churchill about his “little Eichmanns” comment, he explained that it was based on the impression of Adolf Eichmann on the German political theorist Hannah Arendt when she attended his trial expecting “to confront the epitome of evil . . . something monstrous” (3). Churchill’s response to Amy is the most important thing to come out of my research on this topic, and given the weight of the controversy surrounding it, I think it’s best that I quote him directly:
". . . what [Arendt] encountered instead, was this nondescript little man, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, a guy who arranged train schedules, who, as it turned out, ultimately didn’t even agree with the policy that he was implementing, but performed the technical functions that made the holocaust possible, at least in the efficient manner that it occurred, in a totally amoral and soulless way, purely on the basis of excelling at the function and getting ahead within the system that he found himself. He was a good family man, in his way. He was loved by his children, participated in civic activities, was in essence the good German. And she [Arendt] said, therein lies the evil. It wasn’t that Eichmann was a Nazi or a high official within Nazidom, although he was in fact a Nazi and a relatively highly placed official, but it was exactly the reverse: that given his actual nomenclature, the actuality of Eichmann was that anyone in this sort of mindless, faceless, bureaucratic capacity could be the Nazi. That he was every man, and that was what was truly horrifying to her in the end. That was a controversial thesis because there’s always this effort to distinguish anyone and everyone irrespective of what they’re doing from this polarity of evil that is signified in Nazidom, and she had breached the wall and brought the lessons of how Nazism actually functioned, the modernity of it, home and visited it upon everyone, calling for, then, personal accountability, responsibility, to the taking of responsibility for the outcome of the performance of one’s functions. That’s exactly what it is that is shirked here, and makes it possible for people to, from a safe remove, perform technical functions that result in (and at some level, they know this, they understand it) in carnage, emiseration, the death of millions ultimately. That’s the Eichmann aspect. But notice I said little Eichmanns, not the big Eichmann. Not the real Eichmann. The real Eichmann ultimately is symbolic, even in his own context. He symbolized the people that worked under him. He symbolized the people who actually were on the trains. They were hauling the Jews. He symbolized the technicians who were making the gas for I.G. Farben. He symbolized all of these people who didn’t directly kill anybody, but performed functions and performed those functions with a certain degree of enthusiasm and certainly with a great degree of efficiency, that had the outcome of the mass murder of the people targeted for elimination or accepted as collateral damage. That’s the term of the art put forth by the Pentagon."
When a society doesn’t possess the enough character and psychological integrity to put its own actions on the table for open discussion within the institutions of higher learning and development, or when the participants in the self evaluation of a nation are chastised for participating in the democratic process, it ceases to be a free and open society . . .
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