Thursday, January 27, 2005

Diluting Eichmann

LGF has a very timely post today - timely as today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the deadliest of the death camps where over three million Jews died. Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish section of the Gestapo, was directly responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution and executed for crimes against humanity in Israel in 1962 - the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel.

Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been invited to discuss an essay he wrote the day after 9/11 at Hamilton College. Churchill described the victims of 9/11 as "Little Eichmanns".

As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.


Eichmann can't been that terrible now if there were 3,000 of them in the World Trade Center alone?

Churchill is a freak. You can read the entire article here. Now I know all I need to know about the University of Colorado at Boulder and Hamilton College, for that matter.

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