Colorado fascist brings shame to all he comes near

Should a serious research university consider hiring a fascist?

This question doesn't have an easy answer. After all, prior to World War II Europe produced several brilliant political theorists and philosophers who could be characterized as fascists, or proto-fascists, including Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.

Whether, post-Auschwitz, it's possible even in theory to advocate similar views in intellectually plausible ways is an interesting question. It is not, however, a question that has any relevance to the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, despite the obvious fascistic streak in his writings and public performances.

• The worship of violence as a purifying social force. This often manifests itself as an aggressive and romanticized militarism that produces a kind of cult of the warrior and that advocates violent action as a mechanism for social change, and an appropriate way of crushing dissent.

• 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, who are characterized by turns as demonically clever conspirators plotting to undermine the possibility of a virtuous society and soulless automatons mindlessly carrying out the orders of a vast and evil bureaucracy.
  This dehumanization often leads to 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. The supposed virtues and sins of a nation or people are ascribed to all of its individual members, so that, for example, one speaks of "the Jew" (meaning all Jews collectively and each Jewish person individually) being responsible for the decadence of modern culture.

Anyone who reads widely in the collected works of Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in the anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone.