Beyond the fringe II

This post is by way of postscript to my account yesterday of the curious phenomenon of hard-right Diaspora Zionists who see in the late Slobodan Milosevic an intimation of the godly. The views of these people on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are of course, in their rejection of a two-state territorial settlement, far removed from those of Israeli voters and the Israeli government. I find their tone and content contemptible ("THERE IS ONLY A MILITARY SOLUTION," screams the IsraPundit website on its masthead). But the singular aspect of their world view is their stance on the Balkan wars. One of my correspondents makes an interesting observation on this point and I quote his email with permission.

I've noticed this tendency as well. Some of it appears an earnest, if nefarious, attempt at revisionism with the contemporary context of Islamism (which merely reduces Balkan issues to the diametric opposite perspective that western countries are said to have held). Others can't even certainly be described as "right-wing" given that the tendency to conspiracy theories lends credence to nominal left causes e.g. of the Cold War when those forces conflict with the US; this is true even when hysterics on the PLO eclipse those on Islamist terrorist groups. A veritable microcosm of all this is to be found at "Emperor's New Clothes".

Among the unsavory apologia for Milosevic and a few good points lost in a morass of hyperbole and hatred can be found an argument between the site's founder and Noam Chomsky over the extent of the latter's support for the Serbs. Jared Israel and some of these others have done the unthinkable: they have made Chomsky seem utterly agreeable in comparison.

This is quite true, and I'd recommend following the link to the exchange between Israel and Chomsky. I have written quite a lot on this site critical of Chomsky, but I have also said which criticisms I reject. Chomsky is not a "self-hater"; he is not a totalitarian; he is not an antisemite. Nor is he a supporter of the late Slobodan Milosevic. The best way to characterise his politics is to say that he is a cynic. (This is the judgement of the political theorist Jeffrey Isaacs in a superb short piece - the best thing that has ever been written on Chomsky's political writings - that focuses on 9/11. My own objections to Chomsky are summarised in a piece I wrote for Prospect magazine in 2005.)

Jared Israel is not a cynic; he is a fanatic. His exchange with Chomsky is extraordinary. Chomsky ends up observing to an interlocutor that Israel is "completely beyond any rational discussion", and of course he's right. (Note incidentally Israel's concluding remark: "At that point Chomsky responded, in an email, which I have unfortunately misplaced, that he had learned that I'd posted our correspondence to an email discussion list, and he refused to continue an exchange with someone who had no respect for privacy, or words to that effect." I strongly sympathise with Chomsky's position on this. The conventions of civilised debate still apply in the Internet age.)

The Balkan historian Marko Attila Hoare has done valuable work in dissecting the writings of what he calls the Left revisionists, who "downplay, deny or minimize the crimes of the Milošević regime, its security forces and its proxy forces in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. They blame the media for ‘exaggerating’ these crimes in order to justify Western military intervention."

I'm not aware that there has been similar work done on the hard-right version of the same phenomenon, which makes the same claims using the same spurious methods. Broadly, as my correspondent says, we are in the field of conspiracy theory here, and the hard-right Zionist version is but a facet of this. It is tempting to infer that, in its monocausal assessment of international political developments, this stance is the obverse of traditional antisemitic conspiracy theory, but I don't think that's right. Strictly, the hard-right Zionist version is the same conspiracy theory, with the same cast of characters (particularly "secret societies" such the Bilderberg Group), but with the anti-Jewish elements artfully removed. It is incidentally viscerally anti-American; the US government is supposedly an illegitimate authority ceaselessly scheming to bolster Islamists and betray the Jews.

It is a rum business, and I will return to it.