Chomsky and Faurisson

I noted in my last post a curious discrepancy in Noam Chomsky's treatment of Michael Ignatieff (among others) and the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Chomsky's characteristic complaint against liberal writers is to denounce them as Stalinists, apologists for state violence, and (in some cases) racists. In the case of Faurisson, a man who really is a racist and an apologist for the greatest act of state violence in modern history (for he claims it never took place and is all a hoax concocted by international Jewry), Chomsky issues no such strictures. Why this discrepancy exists is a point I shall come on to in the next post; at this stage I merely draw it to your attention.

Coincidentally, a few hours after I posted that observation, Faurisson popped up again. One of my regular correspondents has sent me an interview with Faurisson carried by the Tehran Times on 10 November. In it, Faurisson denounces a UN Assembly resolution marking a day to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. He declares:

For many years now I have been telling my acquaintances in the Muslim world that the Jews and the Zionists want to impose the religion of the alleged "Holocaust" of the Jews on the whole world. It is normal that Jews and Zionists should seek to foist such an imposture on us, for it is the sword and the shield of the Jews in general and of the Jewish State in particular. It is also normal that the Jews and the Zionists should have got the UN to submit to their will to power and so decree that every year the six billion people who inhabit the Earth shall be reminded of the "Holocaust". The Muslim world has been awakening from its too long torpor for only a few years. It ought to have listened to the revisionists long ago and denounced out loud the sham of an alleged German project to exterminate the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged six million Jewish victims.

And in case any readers of the Tehran Times should be misled by the byline stating that Faurisson is a scholar, the man is at pains to state exactly what it is that his 'scholarly' research is about:

The Jews' power stems directly from the Western world's near-total belief in the phenomenal lie of the "Holocaust". You needn't look any further.

It is well-known that Chomsky intervened on Faurisson's behalf in certain events a quarter-century ago. At that time Faurisson was a lecturer in twentieth-century French literature at the University of Lyons-2. (Contrary to the claims of Holocaust deniers and some astonishingly ignorant hagiographers of Chomsky, such as Professor Neil Smith in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, Faurisson is not and has never been any kind of historian.) After Faurisson had expounded his views on the Holocaust, his university suspended his lectures and he was convicted in a civil (not a criminal) case, brought by two anti-racist organisations, of 'falsifying history'.

Now, there is a respectable libertarian case against the treatment that Faurisson received. But even though I am opposed to legal proscriptions of Holocaust denial and regard the courts as the wrong place in which to judge historical evidence, I consider that case to be mistaken. Chomsky, characteristically and with absolutely no regard to the facts, condemns the Faurisson trial as 'a case where a fascist law was applied' (Chronicles of Dissent, 1992, p. 349) but in fact 'falsifying history' is a literal description of what Faurisson was found to have done. Faurisson manipulated his historical source material in order to hide references within it to the gas chambers. That case having been proved, and given that the fraud Faurisson conducted was directly related to his supposed academic specialism (a pseudoscientific approach to explicating the meaning of texts), Faurisson had no further business teaching in any reputable academy. The issue of free speech was altogether another kettle of red herrings, for Faurisson's free speech was not in question or under threat.

However, I accept that a defence of Faurisson on strict libertarian grounds, while mistaken, is not an ignoble position. Had Chomsky's defence of Faurisson taken that form, my criticisms would be different: they would be on grounds purely of Chomsky's interpretation of the facts, rather than about his principles. Instead, Chomsky defended the content of Faurisson’s beliefs and not merely Faurisson’s right to express those beliefs. By 'defending the content of Faurisson's beliefs', I mean not that Chomsky defended their factual accuracy but that he defended their political legitimacy. In his essay misleadingly entitled Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression, Chomsky declared, “As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort”. In a letter to the historian Professor William D. Rubinstein in 1981 (cited by Rubinstein in the Australian magazine Quadrant, October 1981, and quoted by Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah, 1991, p. 176), Chomsky wrote (emphasis added):

I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be antisemitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work.

Let me leap on 24 years to Faurisson's interview this week. I note that the same interview has been cited in two other web logs, by my friends at Harry's Place and, from that source, by the economist Brad DeLong. Both sites carry reader comments, or rather complaints, along the lines of (I paraphrase) 'why rake all this up now?' and 'it all happened such a long time ago'. In the interests of providing factual material for that line of discussion, wherever it may take place, I'll cite one of those comments and answer it, because it is a standard line among those who maintain wrongly that Chomsky's remarks about Faurisson were an unexceptionable defence of the right to free speech. Here is that reader comment (the first one under DeLong's post):

Faurisson said all that [in the Tehran Times] a quarter century after Chomsky's comment. Is there evidence of such disgusting utterances, and that Chomsky knew of them, prior to 1980? This seems a little unfair to Chomsky.

From the defensive tone of the third sentence, I infer that DeLong's correspondent intended the questions in the second to be strictly rhetorical. In fact they have direct answers. The answers are 'yes' and 'yes'. When Chomsky wrote his 'relatively apolitical sort of liberal' and 'no hint of antisemitic implications' comments, he already knew the character of Faurisson's writings, which did indeed comprise 'disgusting utterances' of unabashed antisemitism. I have demonstrated this, by referring closely to Chomsky's own words on the matter. The relevant post, which is my main one among many others on this subject, is here. (It also demonstrates, incidentally that a claim often recited by Chomsky's defenders - that Faurisson had misused Chomsky's comments when publishing them as a preface to his book - is flatly contradicted by what Chomsky said at the time.)

What should be the interpretation of Chomsky's behaviour in the Faurisson affair is a further question, and one that I believe is central to how we should judge Chomsky's political thought overall. I shall deal with this in the next post, which will be a general comment on Chomsky's politics. (I then intend to leave this subject for the time being and move on to other matters; there has been a lot of Chomsky on this site over the past month because of his place in the Prospect/FP poll.) But the facts of Chomsky's intervention are not open to dispute. We know he had read, and was in possession of, detailed and sourced material demonstrating Faurisson's bigotry. He chose, however, to describe Faurisson in terms very different from, say, the obscene and sneering abuse he considers appropriate for Vaclav Havel. Make of that what you will; I have already come to my judgement.