Ward Churchill September 11 Attacks Essay Controversy - The Essay

The Essay

In "Some People Push Back," Churchill argued that the effects of decade-long economic sanctions on Iraqis, together with Lyndon Johnson's support of Israel's "dispossession/displacement of Palestinians" during the 1960s, and the history of Crusades against the Islamic world, had contributed to a climate in which 9/11 was what he called a "natural and inevitable response."

The "Roosting Chickens" phrase comes from a 1963 Malcolm X speech during which he refers to the John F. Kennedy assassination, saying that after Kennedy's "twiddling his thumbs" at the killings of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, he "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon."

Most controversially Churchill referred to the "technocrats" working at the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." This phrase is an allusion to Hannah Arendt's depiction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as an ordinary person promoting the activity of an evil system—a study she made in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Churchill wrote, concerning statements that the attack had targeted "innocent civilians":

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. 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.

Churchill compared the American people to the "good Germans" of Nazi Germany, claiming that the vast majority of Americans had ignored the civilian suffering caused by the UN sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s. Churchill characterized these sanctions as a policy of genocide that caused the deaths of 500,000 children.

The essay was later expanded into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights gave Churchill's volume an honorable mention in December 2004.