When Historians Go Retarded - Up Next on Fox!

Some of you may have heard of the kerfuffle over Ward Chuchill's comments about the 9/11 attacks, calling the victims "little Eichmanns" for being pawns in the global capitalist imperialist yadda yadda yadda.

Now, Churchill's books "Agents of Repression" and others about the US government's repression of civil rights movements are, sadly, excellent. It would be a lot easier if I could write him off as a total whackjob, but sadly he doesn't fit the stereotype of the Illuminati-fearing cabin-occupier.

That said, many of the government deaths on 9/11 were police men and firefighters. These people were civil servants like Eichmann in the broadest sense, but it's worth pointing out some obvious differences between them and Eichmann.

• Eichmann actively constructed a death industry responsible for one of the 20th century's largest mass murders.
• The firefighters and policemen who died in those towers died trying to save lives, not end them.
• Any actual "little Eichmanns" in New York had, by and large, escaped the fate Churchill wishes on them.
• While certainly not every casualty of 9/11 was so honorable, none of the people in New York, and likely few of those killed in Washington, had any active role in forming US policy.
• Just to repeat, Eichmann was all about the active policy formation.

You can see my point: Even if you bought Churchill's premise - that by profiting from our western way of life, we reinforce an unjust system (a view I'm not unsympathetic to) - you have to equate passive and active roles. Is a bystander, watching a house burn, as culpapble as an arsonist? Um, no. Further, to equate your average American with the holocaust not only unnecessarily slurs more-or-less innocent people, but cheapens the actual horror and evil of the holocaust a bit further. Ward Churchill should feel lucky - he's doing the work of Ernst Zundel, and unlike Zundel isn't in jail because of his idiocy.