"Little Eichmanns" - Part I

"Well, I guess he had it coming."


"We all got it coming, kid."

-- Unforgiven (1992)

Some remarks are no fun to defend. Case in point. Calling the victims of the World Trade Center attacks "little Eichmanns."

That's sure not a perspective that would have dawned on me but for Ward Churchill. When I think about the dead of 9/11 I think about it mostly through the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen's The Rising--to my mind the first great piece of art to emerge from that cataclysm. In The Rising, the dead are portrayed primarily as loved ones:

The Virginia hills have gone to brown
Another day, another sun goin' down
I visit you in another dream
I visit you in another dream

I reach and feel your hair
Your smell lingers in the air
I brush your cheek with my fingertips
I taste the void upon your lips
And I wait for paradise
And I wait for paradise

Or as heroes, like the Christ figure fireman in the title track, who sacrifices his life trying to save others.

That's how I want to remember them: as loved ones and heroes.

It's how America has generally remembered them. And America has dealt tenderly with their families--except, of course, those who too stridently insisted on a full accounting of the intelligence failures that led to the disaster. That was kinda gauche of them, really. One could point especially to Bill O'Reilly's famous meltdown last summer with Jeremy Glick, a critic of American foreign policy whose father perished on 9/11. O'Reilly was apoplectic that Glick had signed an anti-war advertisement that included the passage, "We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. . . we too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage -- even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City, and a generation ago, Vietnam."

A few years ago I heard historian Ira Berlin remark that the difference between history and memory is that history is subject to critical discussion but public memory is not. The 9/11 families who demanded a full accounting of the intelligence failure, the organization Peaceful Tomorrow, which came up with that antiwar advertisement, young Jeremy Glick, and now Ward Churchill have all butted up against the public memory of 9/11.

The victims of 9/11 were innocent victims of an innocent nation and, buster, don't you forget it.

Except.

Except the United States is not an innocent nation, because there are no innocent nations.

Except the victims of 9/11 were not innocent victims, because no one is innocent.

Just ask Jonathan Edwards.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince.

That is, of course, a passage from Edwards's most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which flowed from a Calvinist understanding of theology in which there's not a dime's worth of difference between the best and the worst of us. The people who went to work at the World Trade Center that fatal morning were no better and no worse than any of us. But from God's perspective, Edwards would insist, that's not saying much.

We tolerate that kind of jeremiad from preachers when they talk about promiscuity and gay marriage and teletubbies. They can go too far, of course. As is notorious, Jerry Falwell briefly laid the blame for 9/11 at the door of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" The resulting furor forced him to apologize.

But apparently we don't and won't tolerate that sort of thing from a professor who wants to remind us that the political economic system served by many of the victims of 9/11 is a system that has hurt people, both here and abroad--hurt them enough, in his view, as to invite retribution. And that the people who served the system were like "little Eichmanns"--a reference to Eichmann's famous remark at his 1962 trial that he wasn't responsible for anything that happened in the death camps because his job was just to organize transport to the camps and what happened on the other side of the gates was not his concern.

Is it reasonable to make such a comparison? Is it reasonable to insist that each of us ask what our system does and how we each contribute to helping it operate? We don't really want to go there. We won't even entertain the thought, it's so scary. Better to say Churchill's analogy is in sorry ass taste, and he's a dick, and a poser, and not even a real Cherokee, the putz.

Continue to Part II.