One of the only Americans to have the correct response to September 11 as it happened. The academy never forgave him.
I haven’t seen a good obituary yet (just from places like CBS and the NYT) so I’ll just edit this post later with a link once we find a better source.
Highly recommend his book Marxism and Native Americans, it’s a very engaging critique of white communists.
Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America is also a really neat essay about leftists in America debilitating their own movements through insistence on pacifism (which he argues is racist).
Thanks! I have Agents of Repression but haven’t come across the others.
RIP
His appearance on Bill Mahr’s show in 2005 was important to creating the initial cracks in my comfortable liberal world view. He presented ideas which I found genuinely shocking and repulsive… ideas that stuck with me and acted as nucleation points for the development of a new fundamental world view. Someone needed to say it, and Ward said it, at significant personal cost to himself.
And all the little Eichmanns who ended his career are still on tv 20 years later, whining about cancel culture
The academy was also a bunch of little Eichmanns
RIP
it’s always a good barometer to judge academics who are genuine and who are the compatible left. Churchill, Parenti, Finkelstein (I’m sure I missed a lot more) academic careers were destroyed because they dared to tell the truth against Empire. Then you have the Chomsky and Zizek academics who have long successful academic careers.
Steven Thrasher’s fight is ongoing.
Meanwhile, a major academic building at my last school was named after a university bigwig who enforced MCarthyism and the blacklist . . .
