Ann Coulter: Full of Crap

As usual.

Not once on this blog have I addressed anything Ann Coulter has ever written, said or done. She usually has no idea what she's talking about, and it's a waste of what little time I have to blog to address her asinine writing. But the issue she discusses this time is interesting enough for me to take a stab at it.

The issue I'm referring to is the article Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado, wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks. In the article he argues that essentially, America had it coming on 9/11 because of our foreign policy in the Middle East and around the world. Ann Coulter of courses seethes at the notion that someone could get away with making such inflammatory comments without being justly punished by righteous American patriots. She goes to great lengths to argue that Ward Churchill deserves the appropriate punishment of societal condemnation and censure, which is not actually censorship anyway since by definition only governments may censor. Ted Rall has a much more reasoned response to this column, though his talk about "collective guilt" for the actions of our government around the world will rile any right-wingers.

But what really caught my attention is a little discussed element of the issue, which is the fact that Ward Churchill claims to be Native American, and has written quite a bit on Native American issues in his academic career.

For those of who you who aren't in the know, I'm half Cherokee, and as a result any issue that concerns Native Americans is of interest to me. I have to admit that upon first reading about Churchill I didn't recall hearing of him before, but after Coulter's column it finally dawned on me..."Oh yeah, THAT Ward Churchill." Churchill is what you could refer to as a Native American activist, and he has based most of his academic and social policy career on issues affecting Native Americans. In fact, understanding the article he wrote after 9/11 is not really possible without understanding his perspective on Native American issues; anyone who looks at 9/11 with Ward Churchill's perspective is probably going to be spending a lot of time considering how 9/11 was a response to American foreign policy that has often been harmful to third world nations. Frankly, I think Churchill is a nut. He's hardly representative of Native American scholarship, but unfortunately such scholarship seems to draw the attention of the rest of the world only when it's controversial and inflammatory(see Vine Deloria for example.) Coulter also takes him to task for the fact that his lineage as a Native American is uncertain at best. Like most white people she doesn't understand that Native Americans are willing to accept almost anyone into their culture, and recognize them as a Native American, regardless of their actually ethnicity; for her it's all about the color of the skin and whether you can "prove" your Native heritage with paperwork. But what really got me was this assertion she made here:

In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 "little Eichmanns," Churchill has said:

The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn't understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn't be accepted for another hundred years.

This is so stupid it's hard to know how to respond. First off, the idea that Europeans deliberately spread disease among Native American populations is really not that revolutionary. It's been proffered repeatedly in scholarship concerning the history of European/Native relations, and only recently have right-wing academics attempted to downplay this historical evidence, as part of their effort to counter-balance the relatively recent upsurge in scholarship concerning the long history of atrocity and tragedy afflicted upon Native American populations. But Coulter's reasoning gives the European settlers less credit then they deserve. That they did not understand the specific mechanism of disease does not mean that they did not understand that it could be transmitted by contact between a person and the belongings of someone who had been infected. They may not have know that smallpox was transmitted as a virus, but they certainly knew that giving someone the clothes or blankets off of a person dead of smallpox was one way to transmit the disease. In addition, there exists historical evidence that European settlers engaged in just such activities(this is evidence of only one incident; there are others.) That Coulter couldn't bother to engage in the simple Google search it takes to reveal this is not unusual.

Beyond that though, Coulter simply engages in peddling stereotypes in the title of her two columns, "The Little Injun That Could" and "Not Crazy Horse, Just Crazy". In seeking to demeaned Churchill's Native American heritage, she demeans all Native Americans in the process. Coulter may peddle stereotypes regarding Native Americans, but God forbid Churchill peddle stereotypes concerning white Americans and their role in the world.

I don't honestly know how representative Ward Churchill is of Native American opinion. I think the average American would be surprised to know that many Native Americans have long memories concerning the conquest and extermination of their ancestors, and it colors their view of the world today. But I think they'd also be surprised to know that in no way do most Native Americans sanction the murder of other human beings, no matter the reason. Such a nuanced opinion is clearly beyond the likes of Coulter.