More on Churchill - and Fascism

Belmont Club revisits the Churchill controversy (the professor who called the people who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11, “little Eichmans.”)

Austin Bay links to an opinion piece written by Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, describing his fellow faculty member Ward Churchill as "a pathetic buffoon" peddling a fascist ideology. The most interesting part of Professor Campos' article lies in his description of fascism, all the elements of which, he argues, are present in Churchill's work.

As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:

The worship of violence as a purifying social force.

A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.

The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents ... demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.

The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter.