On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality (ISBN 1902593790) is a book written by controversial scholar Ward Churchill published in 2003. The "Roosting Chickens" of the title comes from a 1963 Malcolm X speech about the assassination of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy, as the violence that Kennedy did not stop "was merely a case of 'chickens coming home to roost.'"
Churchill used the term "Roosting Chickens" in a short essay Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens first published on September 12, 2001. In that article, Churchill alleged that the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States by "terrorists" were "Islamic East"'s "acts of war" against the "Crusades" waged by the "Christian West" (e.g. Arab-Israeli conflict and The First Gulf War) throughout the late 20th century.
Background
The original Some People Push Back essay was written on the next day of September 11, 2001 when people were still in confusion. And the book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens was published in 2003, before the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and many other war atrocities of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are publically known or even took place (See also: Human rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq).
Topics
It goes without saying that wars are cruel in nature. In Churchill's original Some People Push Back essay, he pointed out some practices done by the U.S. armed forces that, accorded to him, violated widely-accepted Principles of Warfare:
- 1991 US "surgical" bombing of [ Iraq's ] water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.
- ... it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior -- the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.
- All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. ... In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
Strategic bombing (since the World War II) and carpet bombing (widely used in the Vietnam War) are frequently regarded as forms of state terrorism by their criticizers. The "precision bombing" of Baghdad during the First Gulf War had used smart bombs and non-nuclear cruise missiles. Therefore, officially, the bombing of Baghdad was not indiscriminated or overkill.
The "Highway of Death"
However, judged by the fact that the "collateral damages" of that war were in the order of thousands, if not more, civilian lives (e.g. the February 13, 1991 bombing), the "precision bombing" seemed not to be the case to some people. The war atrocities also included the infamous "Highway of Death" where an unknown number of defeated Iraqi soldiers and fleeing civilians were killed and buried and the equally infamous "bulldozer assault" where possibly thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive during February 24-25, 1991. The deaths directly caused by the U.S. had become unbearable to many war criticizers. The indirect deaths caused by the decade-long sanctions were even less justifiable on the ground of humanity.
Conclusions
Since he claims that it was the U.S. who started violence in the first place, he argues that it is not unimaginable that "some people push back".
Churchill believes that those who were killed by destruction of the World Trade Center were not "innocent civilians":
- As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire -- the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved -- and they did so both willingly and knowingly. (http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html)
Consequences
Although not widely publicized at the time, Churchill's remarks about World Trade Center victims became the center of considerable attention and controversy in January 2005 when Hamilton College of Clinton, New York invited him to give a speech. As a result, the speech was cancelled, citing "credible threats of violence". In an extraordinary step, the University of Colorado Board of Regents ordered an investigation into whether Churchill should be fired, and publicly apologized for Churchill's writings about the September 11, 2001 attacks. Churchill resigned his position as chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department but remained a professor.
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