Ward Churchill Quotes

The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.

A great many intelligent and compassionate people have called residential schools a national tragedy. And they were. But perhaps “tragedy” is the wrong term. It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since, as Ward Churchill points out, the schools were national policy

If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker.

Could it be that toxic mimics are toxic because they ignore responsibility, they ignore relationship, they ignore presence, they substitute control for fluidity and choice?

At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The spirit of Hannibal Lecter is thus at the core of an expansionist European 'civilization' which has reached out to engulf the planet.

The desire for a nonviolent and cooperative world is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations. This is the overarching principle of liberation and revolution. Undoubtedly, it seems the highest order of contradiction that, in order to achieve nonviolence, we must first break with it in overcoming its root causes. Therein lies our only hope.

The so-called “liberal establishment” today is a leftwing establishment. Unlike Buckley, I identify with 50s liberals like John F. Kennedy, whose politics in my view were identical to Ronald Reagan’s. My political enemies today—Ward Churchill, bell hooks, Cornel West, Nicholas DeGenova, the editors of The Nation—have views of capitalism that are identical to those of the Cold War “progressives” who supported the Communist bloc and its cause. They have absolutely nothing in common with JFK or the liberal establishment at Yale in the 1950s whom William F. Buckley opposed.

The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, including those who went on what they thought were suicide missions, had a higher rate of survival than those who went along. Never forget that. The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. Never forget that either. --Derrick Jensen

There can be no question that the entirety of the continental United States has been expropriated from its original, indigenous inhabitants, with incalculably harmful consequences accruing to them in the process. From a moral perspective, it should be equally clear that no humane solution to the overall issues confronting any American radical can reasonably be said to exist, should it exclude mechanisms through which to safeguard the residual land base and cultural identities of these people.

One need not wait for the post-collapse future to find evidence that pacifism amounts to suicide in the absence of a just social order. Even Ward Churchill, a former college professor and self-described radical leftist, had reached the conclusion that calls for unadulterated pacifism are logically and ethically incompatible with his own stance as an indigenist Native American intellectual who seeks to seriously challenge the ongoing colonization of North America. Churchill’s essay “Pacifism as Pathology” demonstrated the naivety of thinking that every historical conflict, in retrospect, could have been solved by peaceful negotiation.[

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. Churchill, speech in the House of Commons (1940)

Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered.