Oliver Kamm

Thuggery with a green gag

This article appears in The Times today.

THE INTENTION of yesterday’s Greenpeace protest at the CBI conference was, the organisation’s spokesman said, “to stop Tony Blair delivering his speech”. Not since the author of Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson, evangelised for the English landscape and wartime fascism has British political debate seen a more explicit identification of the ecological cause with contempt for democracy.

Some might be tempted to treat seriously Greenpeace’s objections to nuclear energy, or GM crops, while not necessarily endorsing its tactics. That is misguided. Greenpeace’s determination to shut down debate is not aberrant hotheadedness but deeply held conviction. Its is an obscurantist illiberalism more appropriate to a cult than a pressure group.

Democratic politics recognises that the things we value, such as liberty and justice, cannot all be attained and made compatible with each other. In the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin, “the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realised is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent”. Economic policy deals with the central fact of scarcity, and our need to choose among competing claims to scarce resources. Most of us regard environmental protection as an important use for resources, and some rank it very high.

Greenpeace goes much further, believing that its own views on the environment are not mere preferences but moral imperatives. It short-circuits debate by declaring itself the winner, even in cases — such as its notorious campaign on the Brent Spar storage buoy — where its heedlessness of facts is no longer in dispute. Whereas the task of government is to trade off benefits against costs, including the opportunity costs of choices not taken, Greenpeace selects the benefits while paying no costs at all.

While all pressure groups are vulnerable to the charge that they advocate policy while insisting someone else picks up the tab, Greenpeace is a case apart. Its campaigning extends to vandalising GM crops and now a thuggish disregard for free speech. Another campaigning group, Fathers 4 Justice, neatly demonstrated, by hurling projectiles at the Prime Minister and handcuffing a minister, that some of its members were entirely unsuited to the responsibilities of fatherhood. Greenpeace has likewise given definitive evidence that its voice should be discounted and derided in public debate.

UPDATE: The number of people who have written to me demanding to know why I have presented as something sinister Greenpeace's stirring record of Non-Violent Direct Action (known to the elect as NVDA, I believe) causes me to regret having edited out one piece of information from my original draft on grounds of space. The agency report of the demonstration cited Greenpeace as declaring that its members "would heckle and throw missiles at Blair if [their demands] were refused". Heckling is neither here nor there (though would have been discourteous and inapt in this case, as opposed to a Commons or election speech). Throwing missiles to prevent someone from speaking is, on the other hand, a disgrace, and on no sensible criteria a nonviolent form of protest. Greenpeace's methods, ethos and ideology are anti-democratic, and democratic government should ignore its submissions.

UPDATE II: Greenpeace has contacted me to say that the agency report I have linked to is mistaken, and that its protestors made no threat to throw missiles at Tony Blair. I quoted the agency report in good faith, and after a similar report appeared in The Times yesterday, but I naturally accept Greenpeace's word on this point and am happy to post this correction. I do not, however, revise my judgements about the organisation in any way from those I published in The Times. I consider Greenpeace's conduct to be an affront to democratic politics and, by its deliberately coercive nature, far removed from any legitimate concept of nonviolent protest.

Chomsky and balance

The Guardian's (or rather its Readers’ Editor’s) incapability in reading critically (if at all) the writings of Noam Chomsky and Diana Johnstone on Bosnia is a serious matter. If it weren’t so serious, there would be something wry in my receiving so many emails from admirers of Professor Chomsky which insist indignantly that Ms Johnstone cannot be termed a denier of Serb war crimes, because she acknowledges that Serb war crimes took place.

If you are thinking of writing to me along similar lines, please think carefully before doing so. Someone who denies that war crimes took place is not necessarily giving the answer ‘zero’ to the question ‘how many died?’ Recall, for example, that in the Lipstadt/Penguin libel suit brought by the pseudo-historian David Irving five years ago, “Irving radically modified his position: he accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin” (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). Even the world’s most ostentatious denier of the greatest crime in modern history does not deny a deliberate programme of mass killings.

The relevant question in the case of Diana Johnstone’s writings is whether she systematically downplays the nature and extent of Serb atrocities in Bosnia. The relevant question about Chomsky’s attitude to Ms Johnstone is whether he endorses her conclusions. On both of these issues, the evidence is clear. As I have said, I shall return to this subject as soon as I am able to.

What is less serious, and goes beyond mere wryness, is Chomsky’s own judgement on his terrible ordeal of having been asked tricky question by his Guardian interviewer, Emma Brockes. One of my regular correspondents points out that Chomsky has compared his plight at the hands of Ms Brockes to the murder of Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Does Chomsky really say that? Chomsky assuredly does, on his blog at ZNet:

[B]ear in mind that while this case [the Guardian interview] was extreme, it’s close to a historical universal that dissidents are subject to ugly treatment, which takes various forms: vilification, defamation, slanders, lies in more free societies where the power to coerce is limited: imprisonment or exile in the old Soviet Union; in a US dependency, like El Salvador, having your brains blown out by an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington. Nov. 17 was the anniversary of the brutal execution of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in El Salvador in 1989, by the Atlacatl brigade, which had already compiled a vicious record of slaughter of the usual victims, bringing to a symbolic close the hideous decade in Central America that opened with the assassination of an Archbishop who was a “voice for the voiceless” while saying Mass, by similar hands. Since we are the agents, it passed in silence. Imagine if something remotely similar had happened at the same time in, say, Czechoslovakia. That does really merit comment, to put it mildly.

The full story is incomparably worse, and there are many others like it. Those, I think, are the topics that should concern us when we consider the modes of silencing dissent in Western societies.

Noam Chomsky is the world's top public intellectual.

Henry Jackson's legacy

Stephen Pollard writes in The Sunday Times about the launch last week at the House of Commons of the Henry Jackson Society:

Jackson was a traditional New Deal liberal, a trade unionist who believed in nationalisation and price controls, and a civil rights campaigner. But his real impact, and his legacy, lay not in domestic but international politics. He was an implacable opponent of the received foreign policy wisdom of détente with the Soviet Union. As the Henry Jackson Society’s founding statement puts it: “He believed that this was an unprincipled accommodation, which abandoned the wider cause of human rights, as well as compromising security. Jackson’s core belief was that democratic governments should consider the internal character of foreign states when dealing with them.”

Like Stephen, I was at the Society's launch, and I'm glad to be a signatory of its statement of principles. Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson was the best President America never had. He twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1972 and 1976, but proved unacceptable to his party owing to his views on national security.

After visiting Buchenwald shortly after its liberation, Jackson became an advocate for an interventionist foreign policy to challenge totalitarianism. But far from being a stereotypical proponent of state power, he was a disinterested advocate of human rights, believing that the spread of liberty was the key to Western security. Against the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger, he carried a Congressional amendment tying trade concessions to the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration. He opposed aiding apartheid South African-backed rebels in Angola. On economics, he was a New Dealer, urging what now appears a remarkable degree of state intervention. He was an early conservationist, and a supporter of civil rights. Personally, he was a man of unostentatious philanthropy. Politically, he exemplified the belief that strong defence was a bipartisan cause as well as a mainstay of liberal principle.

Jackson did not live to see the fall of Communism, but his principles did much to secure it. In common with the Henry Jackson Society, I believe those principles to be more apposite than ever in a post-Communist world where genocide and repressive regimes are a threat to our liberty as well as an affront to our values. A nice demonstration of the acuity of its analysis is that the Society has already been attacked in The Guardian by a columnist who insists “the case against Milosevic has in no way been proven”.

Henry Jackson was a leading figure in the most successful political coalition of modern times: the movement to support oppressed peoples in Eastern Europe and assist their liberation from totalitarianism. Since 9/11, supporters of a liberal foreign policy have been negligent in building a comparable base of support. The Henry Jackson Society has important work in filling that role. As we learned during the Bosnian war, an informal alliance of conservative quietists and left-wing ‘anti-imperialists’ is the last quarter from which to expect a reputable or realistic foreign policy, yet it is to them that the task of forming policy will fall if we allow it.

Chomsky and that 'correction'

I have devoted much time over the last few days to assessing The Guardian’s correction to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky, and the newspaper's withdrawal of that interview from its site. I’m sorry not to have written more speedily, but necessarily this has been a painstaking exercise. The inquiries are now complete and the evidence is in place. This, in broad terms, is my conclusion.

I have been reading Chomsky for around 25 years, and in that time have read, I believe, every political book he has ever written or (as many of them comprise undemanding ‘interviews’) otherwise produced. I wrote the ‘anti' piece for Prospect magazine’s coverage of its poll for top global intellectual last month, in which I detailed Chomsky's record of sophistry in political judgement and sharp practice in the handling of source material. I hope at some point to write a volume evaluating Chomsky’s entire political output. But, while counting myself well-informed on his works, I had still not fully appreciated till this past weekend how insubstantial are his objections to the Guardian interview, how tawdry were his interventions on the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and how excessively generous has been my previous assessment of his position. The Guardian’s correction requires a point-by-point analysis to be appreciated properly. I can however conclude summarily that it ought not to be referred to as a correction, because its characterisation of Chomsky’s stance is manifestly not correct.

At this stage, I shall not be setting down in detail the conclusions that I, working with two other writers who have experience of Chomsky’s methods, have come to. The reason is that we hope our evidence will generate a correction – a real one this time – to The Guardian’s ‘correction’, and the proper course in making that case is to present it in private rather than publish it beforehand. In the meantime, I’ll draw your attention to two relevant pieces of information about a central aspect of this case.

The first is an article published today by Cambridge historian Marko Attila Hoare on the web site of the Henry Jackson Society (of which I’m a signatory). Dr Hoare is a specialist in Bosnian history and a former war-crimes investigator of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, who has worked on the case against Slobodan Milosevic. He writes:

[T]he Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them.

This leads to the second piece of relevant information, which I alluded to in my last post. The Guardian’s correction, written by its readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, states: “Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone… have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech.” Mayes states that The Guardian accepts this claim. Yet if you consult Chomsky’s ‘open letter’ to Ordfront in 2003 you find a diferent line. Referring to Serb war crimes, Chomsky states (emphasis added): "Johnstone argues -- and, in fact, clearly demonstrates -- that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication."

And for a succinct assessment of Ms Johnstone’s writings on this subject, see Dr Hoare’s article. You might want to consult also, for a representative sample of her arguments, her brief comment on - and having close family and friends who witnessed the outcome of similar atrocities in the earlier (Bosnian) war, I find it grotesque to have to type these words - 'The Racak Hoax'.

I have over the last few days received a great deal of abusive mail on this subject, and I have replied to each in turn with the same observations. Every judgement I made in my post rebutting Chomsky’s complaints is correct (and I have challenged my correspondents to find a single factual error), and understated; Chomsky's support for Diana Johnstone is not “related entirely to her right to freedom of speech”; and Chomsky has clearly distorted the independent source he cites as having favourably reviewed Ms Johnstone’s book.

This is all I have to say on the matter now in public. Be assured that the case is being worked on in private, and minutely.

UPDATE: Diana Johnstone has a 'right of reply' today (23 November) in The Guardian, in which she says, of the newspaper's 'correction': “Despite this welcome retraction, the impression might linger from Ms Brockes's confused account that my work on the Balkans consists in denying atrocities.”

To quote Marko Attila Hoare:

To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica [in her book Fools' Crusade]: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians.

In addition to this, and to Ms Johnstone's remarks on the 1999 massacre that she calls 'The Racak Hoax', consider her recent piece 'Srebrenica Revisited', 12 October 2005, in which she condemns "shrinking the concept of "genocide" to fit the circumstances"; explains the atrocity as one part of the exigencies of war ("War is a life and death matter, and inevitably leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime"); and - more than that - depicts it as a normal part of warfare ("this was, then, a 'massacre', such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces").

When you consider, further, that Chomsky has endorsed the accuracy of Ms Johnstone's conclusions, and not merely her right to publish them, you can see immediately that The Guardian's 'correction' of Emma Brockes's interview cannot be correct. But, as I say, this case will now be presented in private, by me and others.

Chomsky and The Guardian

Several readers have asked my response to The Guardian's publishing a correction to Emma Brockes's interview with Noam Chomsky and removing that interview from their web site. Be assured that the matter has not escaped my attention, and I have views on it, which will be set out fairly shortly after certain inquiries have been made and relevant information assembled. At this stage, I merely refer to my earlier post on Chomsky's complaints, and specifically my judgement that Chomsky works not by denying Bosnian serb war crimes took place but by deflating their moral significance.

The central issue raised by The Guardian's apology is the statement: "Ms Brockes's misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky's views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre." I shall have more to say on this, but please note that there are directly relevant documents either referred to or linked to in my earlier post.

"Textification", I ask you

The Independent reports on "a scheme which claims to promote understanding of English literature's classics via the mobile phone":

The project will send text message quotations and plot summaries of seven works, from Milton's Paradise Lost to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, to mobile phones to act as an aide-memoire for undergraduates. The mobile phone company behind the scheme yesterday denied it was guilty of a poetry-crushing gimmick. Instead, Dot mobile, a service for students, pointed out that its messages were devised by the media-savvy academic, John Sutherland, emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London.

I gave my views on this in a discussion with media-savvy academic John Sutherland on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. It's the segment at 8.22am, and will be on the programme's web site just till tomorrow.

The mobile phone company's spokesman declares in a press release:

We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy.'

Where a charge is denied even before anyone has had the oportunity to make it, it's a fairly reliable indicator that somewhere down the line are the stirrings of conscience, or at least of embarrassment.

UPDATE: The recording has now been replaced on the BBC web site by today's programme, but my comments are in this report.

Financial markets, regulation & hedge funds

I have an article in the December issue of Prospect magazine, published today, on financial market regulation and hedge funds. The blurb runs:

The apparent arbitrariness and irrationality of financial markets do not inspire the admiration of liberal-inclined people. But many professionals in the financial markets also accept that there are structural failings in the system. Financial capitalism needs reform if it is to have popular legitimacy, but it needs the right kind of reform. Tighter regulation to constrain footloose capital is mainly a chimera.

The link requires a fee, and I have every expectation that, unless I enter the caveat now, some of my most frequent correspondents on the subject of, e.g., Noam Chomsky will write to me forcefully expressing their views on the value for money that paying for an article by me represents. Fair enough, but Prospect is an excellent publication, and I recommend taking out a subscription here.

Chomsky's complaints

Emma Brockes's interview with Noam Chomsky in The Guardian continues to reverberate. I have sent this email today to the newspaper's editor, Alan Rusbridger.

Dear Mr Rusbridger,

I see that Noam Chomsky has accused The Guardian and Emma Brockes of having conducted a “defamation exercise” against him. Having read Professor Chomsky’s complaints in his letter to your newspaper and in his statement at the weekend, I recommend you discount them. You have already provided him with the courtesy of your columns to press his case, and there is little further you either can or ought to do to mollify him.

Professor Chomsky is liberal with his charges of ‘invented contexts’, but he is vague in stating what the inventions comprise. The sole specific charge he makes concerns Ms Brockes’s rendering of his views on the Bosnian war and Srebrenica. On my reading of Chomsky, Ms Brockes’s account was fair and reasonable editorial comment. Chomsky does not work by frontally denying that human rights violations take place; his technique is instead to diminish the moral significance of crimes committed by opponents of the Western democracies. The use of tendentious and sometimes outlandish analogies (e.g. the US is in need of ‘denazification’; former US Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan advocated Nazi-like policies; violence under the Khmer Rouge was more like the vigilante killings in post-Liberation France than the genocide of Nazi Germany; 9/11 was no worse than Clinton’s bombing of a pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan, in which a nightwatchman died) is a staple of Chomsky’s political argument. The cumulative effect is to debase the currency of moral condemnation of Nazism, Khmer Rouge genocide, and Islamist terror. Chomsky's comments about Serb atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo fit this pattern. In his latest book of ‘interviews’, Imperial Ambitions, 2005 (p.127), Chomsky states: “If civilians managed to flee Falluja, they were allowed out – except for men. Men of roughly military age were turned back. That’s what happened to Srebrenica in 1995. The only difference is the United States bombed the Iraqis out of the city, they didn’t truck them out. Women and children were allowed to leave; men were stopped, if they were found, and sent back. They were supposed to be killed. That’s universally called genocide, when the Serbs do it. When we do it, it’s liberation.”

This has been a consistent line in Chomsky’s references to Serb war crimes. In his 1994 book of ‘interviews’ The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, he gives a tortuous explanation couched in the language of Hurd-like pragmatism on why it was “not so simple” to bomb Serb encampments. He then refers to the notorious war criminal Arkan by comparing him to Western leaders, before adding hurriedly, "It doesn't absolve him in any respect, of course." It is a perfectly defensible proposition, and one Ms Brockes is entitled to advance, that the whole tenor of Chomsky’s argument is to temper the notion of Serb atrocities by the habitual rhetorical device of pronouncing the US as guilty of comparable and greater crimes.

The same approach characterises Chomsky’s references to the Kosovo war. His book A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West (2000) contrasts what he sees as the hypocrisy of western responses to East Timor relative to Kosovo. Not every charge Chomsky makes against US foreign policy is wrong (and the East Timor case was a shameful piece of US Cold War realpolitik): what is wrong is Chomsky's deployment of these cases to soften culpability for Serb atrocities. That seems to me the only proper characterisation of his insistence that “KLA actions (possibly with CIA involvement) [were] designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response" (p. 114) and evidenced a “tactic of provoking massacres to elicit Nato intervention” (p. 112).

Let me turn now to Chomsky’s remarks on the Diana Johnstone book Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato and Western Delusions (2003). Chomsky says: “I did express my regret: namely, that I did not support Diana Johnstone's right to publish strongly enough when her book was withdrawn by the publisher after dishonest press attacks, which I reviewed in an open letter that any reporter could have easily discovered.”

The open letter he refers to is published on the Internet here. Like everything else I have cited, it falls squarely in the category of minimising Bosnian Serb crimes - not by denying they took place but by deflating their moral significance. Chomsky refers to “terrible but much lesser crimes of Racak and Srebrenica” as compared with East Timor, and he disputes the use of the term genocide. He describes Ms Johnstone’s book as having been “very favorably reviewed, e.g., by the leading British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy” and this point is clearly important to him. He buttresses it with this coda: “I don't read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone's book differs so radically from that of Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone's book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.”

I am attaching a pdf file of the reviews section of the March 2003 edition of International Affairs, against which you can check Chomsky’s account (the relevant review is on p. 453). Aside from his careless errors (International Affairs is the journal not of the Royal Academy, which is an arts organisation, but the Royal Institute of International Affairs; the review’s author is Richard, not Robert, Caplan), Chomsky scarcely gives a reliable account of Caplan’s review. Caplan does give credit to Johnstone for stressing that atrocities were committed not only by the Serbs, and for that reason describes the book as ‘well worth reading’. But Caplan states baldly: “The book also contains numerous errors of fact on which Johnstone, however, relies to strengthen her case. For instance, the 1996 SIPRI yearbook (an 'authoritative source'), which she invokes in support of her claim that the number of people killed in the Bosnian war has been exaggerated, actually offers the higher estimate (250,000) that she challenges (p. 55). … Johnstone herself is very selective. She omits any discussion of Milosevic's own assault on the constitutional order (by abolishing Vojvodina's and Kosovo's autonomy); of the irregular if not extra-legal means he employed to remove the political leadership of Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo; or of the extensive materiel and other support he provided to some of the most vicious Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

As you will be aware, Chomsky’s manipulative use of source material is one of the principal charges made against him by academic historians and other critics. If you examine the letter he has sent to you, the material he has published elsewhere castigating your colleagues, and the review I have attached, you will gain an insight into why this is. Chomsky describes as ‘a very favourable review’ a sceptical article, written in the diplomatic language of Chatham House, that faults Johnstone for precisely the charge that Emma Brockes raised in her interview with Chomsky: downplaying Serb culpability for the horrors of the Bosnian war. In the circumstances I believe the proper course for The Guardian is clear: to reject Chomsky’s complaints, and accept the praise that you deserve for running one of the few probing interviews that Chomsky has encountered in recent years.

Sincerely,

Oliver Kamm

UPDATE: The Guardian did not reject Chomsky's complaints, a matter on which I shall have detailed comments shortly in light of the matters set out above.

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.

On Chomsky: readers respond

I've received a lot of letters and emails in response to my article in Prospect and posts about Noam Chomsky. Here's a kind thought from a reader:

I really find it amazing that you actually congratulated the Guardian on this dishonest and shoddy piece of journalism from Emma Brockes. I think your own critical faculties are seriously in doubt if you can believe that this childish "interview" has any merit whatsoever, regardless of any position that you have on Chomsky's integrity. It seems anyone who throws dirt in his direction is just fine and dandy with you. Anyway good luck with your book of apologetics for the latest round of imperial military adventurism.

Another writes, in relation to the Prospect article:

It seems a shame that someone with your obvious talents should be devoid of compassion for your fellow human beings. Perhaps I've misunderstood the thrust of your arguments, but it seems to me that you somehow derive some benefit from conflict, war, human suffering, butchery, carnage and torture. I can't help feeling that that would be a waste of a human being, and an educated and erudite one at that. If only you could focus your life's energy to some constructive purpose, but perhaps you believe that's what you're doing already.

One Joshua Smith, apparently fearing that I might infer from the sagacity of his remarks that he is a man of mature years, introduces himself as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland before coming to the meat of his observations:

I would have thought for someone who floods Amazon with these endless one-star reviews, whose blog is filled with sniveling anti-Chomsky ruminations, and whose claim to fame beside neo-conservative t-shirts rests almost solely on splaying and filleting Chomsky, would have come better prepared with substantial arguments and real sources, not tracks from an audio CD that you clearly didn't listen to. That kind of tripe may go unnoticed at Front Page Magazine, but not out here in the real world where facts actually matter. Perhaps the fact that this is the best you could do is proof enough that Chomsky is indeed the world's top public intellectual, especially in matters of US foreign policy.

The audio CD that Mr Smith alludes to is one that includes Chomsky's well-known speech at MIT on 18 October 2001, when he declared, of US policy in Afghanistan:

Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don’t know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months….very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that’s just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe.

Mr Smith is right that I didn't listen to the audio CD: instead I read the transcript here. Chomsky has never retracted these absurd and speedily-refuted remarks, which I'm slightly taken aback even Mr Smith would wish to defend. So far from being genocidal, the US-led bombing of Afghanistan and toppling of the Taliban precipitated the largest return of refugees (3.5 million of them) that the UNHCR has participated in for 30 years.

Once more: I thought Emma Brockes's interview with Chomsky in The Guardian was a fine piece of work, and I wish I'd done it. What made it stand out from the usual run of Chomsky interviews was that it posed, fairly and reasonably, difficult questions that Chomsky clearly preferred not to discuss but which were highly pertinent to his political writings. Recall that what Chomsky thinks of as an 'interview' is not an especially taxing procedure. Here is one example of the technique of his regular 'interviewer', David Barsamian in the recently-published Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World, 2005, p. 122 (I shall be reviewing this book in a future issue of the on-line journal Democratiya, and ought perhaps to reveal in advance that my judgement will not be a favourable one):

CHOMSKY: [I]t's gotten to the point that the New York Times is publishing on the front page photographs and accounts of major US war crimes.

BARSMIAN: Are you referring to the November 8, 2004, issue of the New York Times, which showed US troops occupying a hospital in Falluja?

CHOMSKY: Yes.

An exchange of this type, where an adulator outdoes himself in enthusiasm to feed his master with cues, is not properly termed an interview. Not even the most accommodating of professional political interviewers - say, Sir David Frost, to whom I mean no disrespect - would get away with this. It is to The Guardian's credit that it displayed a still courteous but less reverential approach to Chomsky; critical readers would expect it to do no less.

This is not relevant to the interview - Ms Brockes's work stands on its own merits, which are considerable - but I find her approach bears favourable comparison to Chomsky's own methods of carrying on a public conversation. Chomsky's vulgar abuse of Vaclav Havel (which I discuss here) marks a low point, but Chomsky can rarely encounter a critic without engaging in what the philosopher Michael Walzer has referred to (in the New York Review of Books, 16 August 1984 - link requires fee) as "graceless sarcasm [and] impersonal and self-righteous hatred".

Examples are legion. I came across one recently in my cuttings files, and that I had forgotten. During the first Gulf War, Michael Ignatieff wrote a spirited column in The Observer defending the forcible expulsion of Saddam's forces from Kuwait, and criticising a number of anti-war writers, including John Pilger, Paul Foot and Noam Chomsky. The next issue published long letters of protest from Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and Lady Antonia Fraser (and a short one from me in Ignatieff's defence - which tells you how few must have been the supportive letters). Chomsky's argument will be familiar to my readers (the 'what about East Timor?' rhetorical question), and I fear so will be the terms in which he describes Ignatieff. It isn't enough to call Ignatieff wrong: Chomsky has to denounce him as a Stalinist (he refers to 'The Ignatieff School of Falsification', an allusion to a work by Trotsky called The Stalin School of Falsification).

After 9/11, Chomsky maintained his polemical methods but cranked up the volume. When Christopher Hitchens criticised him, Chomsky responded with accusations of - what, exactly? Dishonesty, stupidity, racism? He never made it explicit, he just sprayed around unworthy insinuations:

That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of the Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.

As I commented recently, when the political theorist Jeffrey Isaac accused Chomsky of cynicism over his remarks on the bin Laden network, Chomsky responded not with a defence of his position, and not even with just his customary abusive remarks about his opponent's dishonesty and puerility, but with a diatribe against Isaac's supposed apologetics for mass murder. No, I understate: an accusation not even of apologetics, but of culpability, for atrocities:

The remainder [of Isaac’s argument] is just a series of childish fabrications, random shots without even a hint of evidence or argument. No person of even minimal moral or intellectual integrity would engage in such practices.

One can appreciate Isaac's distress over the revelation of his inability to construct a justification for his support for state violence in one of the cases discussed, and more strikingly, of his culpability for the massive atrocities in the analogue. Even his efforts to defame without evidence pale into insignificance in comparison with the cold savagery with which he views his own passive acquiescence in what he knows -- or can easily discover -- to be perhaps the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust [East Timor], peaking in the late 1970s, continuing since, escalating again from early 1999, and continuing today in ways that we would condemn with justified fury if Serbia were the guilty party.

The most extraordinary thing about Chomsky's boorishness, spite and vulgarity unaccountably passed me by when I first commented on this passage. Among all his imprecations against liberal and intellectually-weighty figures with whom he disagrees politically - men such as Walzer, Hitchens, Isaac, Havel, Ignatieff, Abba Eban - a few stand out: that they are apologists for state violence and atrocities, Stalinists, racists, and so forth. (He makes an explicit accusation of racism in a foul tirade against Leo Casey, a critic who had exposed Chomsky's math abuse over the bombing of Sudan in 1998.) Yet Chomsky has written altogether differently of one man who, more than anyone else in public life, genuinely can be called a racist and an apologist for state violence - in fact, an apologist for the greatest atrocity committed by any state in modern history.

I modestly believe I have written the definitive short account of Chomsky's defence of the political legitimacy (not the factual accuracy) of the claims of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and also definitively disposed of the frivolous, false and rather repugnant claim made by Chomsky's defenders that his intervention in the case was merely an unexceptionable defence of free speech. Make what you will of this discrepancy in Chomsky's treatment of honourable men and a bigoted, fraudulent, racist crank. Let it never be gainsaid, however, that, according to the readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy, Chomsky is the foremost living public intellectual.