Johnson's column about Ward's essay

Bill Johnson has a column in today's RMN that contextualizes Ward's essay as it compares to that of another professor.The title of his column is Churchill not alone in pointing accusatory finger.Bill Johnson notes that Ward's premise is also shared by U.S policy experts. Bill Johnsons article is more thoughtful and discerning than those being penned by the redfaced reactionaries.

I was curious about this so I pulled up his photo to see if there was some noticable difference between him and the other "opinion shapers" that have been blathering about Ward.

Here is Bill Johnson's photo.



I stared for quite some time before it hit me. He wears glasses and the others guys don't. It's possible that may be the reason he understands that "some people push back" while the other guys don't. Does anyone else notice another difference between Bill Johnson and his counterparts?

Here is an exxcerpt from his column.

What struck me the most, though, is how familiar it all was. The Eichmann reference clearly was stupid and was designed to be incendiary. A fair reader of the essay will not, though, be tripped up by it. In no way was he saying children, police officers and firefighters deserved to die.

Instead, he is saying they were the enemy's "collateral damage," no different from the innocent Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese and a host of others who have been killed when our military weapons miss and, sometimes, hit their targets.

The familiarity of what Ward Churchill wrote comes from the books and extensive articles in national publications that have been written in recent years on this very subject, with the same accusatory finger for Sept. 11 pointed directly at the U.S. and its citizenry for closing a blind eye to our country's adventures overseas.

"(We) now have several thousand of our own disappeareds, and we are badly mistaken if we think that we in the United States are entirely blameless for what happened to them.

"The suicidal assassins of Sept. 11, 2001, did not 'attack America,' as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy."

Chalmers Johnson wrote this in the Nation magazine on Oct. 15, 2001, about the same time Ward Churchill wrote his essay.full column