Ward Churchill, speaking earlier this week at the New School at the invitation of a group named Women of Color, was his usual over-the-top, vicious self. He:

  • equated American foreign policy with mass murder
  • reiterated in essence that the U.S. deserved what it got on 9/11
  • commented that “the only people who consider me controversial are little Eichmanns themselves” (infamously, of course, he compared the 9/11 victims to the technocrats employed by the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann)
  • and called the president of the campus, Robert Kerrey, a “mass murder [sic] and serial killer [like Charles Manson] to boot” for having served in Thanh Phong, Vietnam.

It is worth noting that Churchill also served in Vietnam, which as The New York Sun comments, is “an act for which he said he has spent the rest of his life apologizing.”

Might it not be interesting to see his military records? As writer Jack Kemp muses in an email to me, we might then glean whether Churchill received any injuries or medals in fighting and killing dark- skinned members of the Third World (something for the members of Women of Color to ponder). We might see how he was discharged from the military, honorably or not, and what training he received before arriving in Vietnam – that is, was Churchill a rifleman, an artillery or machine gun operator in this earlier incarnation? Indeed, it would be most interesting to see his records and to learn to what extent they might contradict his violent (and lucrative) anti-American rants these days.