Geoffrey R Skoll
Aug 22, 2017 · 1 min read

It’s one thing to contemplate the bureaucratic functionaries in the Nazi state, but quite another to look at those in one’s own country. Ward Churchill wrote a piece shortly after 9/11 in which he pointed out that the World Trade Center was filled with (not exclusively to be sure, but mainly), ‘little Eichmans,’ by which he meant the bureaucrats who were starving and otherwise killing millions of people around the world as functionaries of global capitalism. For this he was pilloried and fired from his tenured faculty job. For myself, I teach courses on terrorism and related phenomena in which students learn that the biggest, most genocidal terrorists in the world today are functionaries for the US government and various US companies. Since the claim is that the United States is run by the people (false, but that is the claim), at the end of the course I warn students that now they know and can no longer claim ignorance. So what about all the people in the USA who are in that sense, little Eichmans. Who is willing to take responsibility? Some people might want to read Karl Jasper’s slim book, ‘German Guilt.’

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    Geoffrey R Skoll

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    Semi-retired professor in social science, revolutionary, abolitionist