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Bin Laden Endorses Chomsky
By Benjamin Kerstein / September 8, 2007
At least Osama bin-Laden, despite being a psychotic mass murderer, knows who his friends are.
While the exact date of the taping cannot be determined by bin Laden's words, he suggests it was made in August by saying, "… just a few days ago, the Japanese observed the 62nd anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by your nuclear weapons." The anniversary was on Aug. 6. He goes on to call Noam Chomsky "among one of the most capable of those from your own side," and mentions global warming and "the Kyoto accord."
One could call this humorous if it weren't so obviously true, in the sense that Chomsky is indeed one of those most capable of accomplishing binLaden's goals of driving the West to surrender and destruction. Of course, they are both psychopaths with a Sadean fetish for mass murder, tyranny and death. Great minds, such as they are, apparently think alike.
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Francois:
All sarcasm and no arguments. But that only sells for a very short time as an opening salvo. Now its time to rip me apart.
>> I won't even go into your claim that "formal languages and formal grammars is pure math," since I think it's funny enough to let it stand on its own.
Why not? You think its funny, so we laughed with you, now its time for you to stop your sarcastic clowning and actually say something smart, like why formal languages and formal grammars are NOT math.
Go!Â
Alex-
I look forward to reading your comments, not only because I tend to share your viewpoints, but because I love your passionate and burly style. “Very Russian”, I’d say, but I’d be talking through my hat because I don’t know any Russians. But that’s the reputation you guys have.
But I’ve got to disagree with you about the Chomsky/Mahler imbroglio. I think that Chomsky’s a giant in both his technical work and in his political analysis, but I disagree that his prominence in the former has any bearing on the latter. As I mentioned in another post, Linus Pauling’s brilliance regarding chemical bonds provides no reason to accept his wacky theories of nutrition, nor does Shockley’s obvious mastery of electronics lend any credence to his theories of race.
Appeals to authority are not the way to counter young Mahler. He is of course as wrong as tits on a rooster regarding Chomsky, but not because Chomsky is a great linguist and Mahler is a stripling who has no right to challenge the great man. He is wrong because he believes certain inaccuracies about Zionism, about the interests of US power, etc. A superannuated person of great scientific accomplishments may also believe these lunacies and may challenge Chomsky from this perspective, and be as wrong as little Mahler.
Anyway, write on. “An air balloon of chutzpah with a dick”-how I wish I’d come up with that.
Ismail
Ahhh, I see. Wikipedia defines science. And science applies to “Creation”. QED Oh, and “BTW”, regarding the Nobel prize in mathematics: you’re wrong (see e.g. here http://mathforum.org/social/articles/ross.html). I won’t even go into your claim that “formal languages and formal grammars is pure math,” since I think it’s funny enough to let it stand on its own.
There is no argument. There is nothing to argue here. There is no subject. When an insolent puppy like you tries to gnaw on a shoe of a giant like Chomsky he just needs to be taken by his ears and thrown back to his puppy bin. What's here to argue about?
See, when I mentioned your mother I said "God bless her", because even the appearance of hostility toward an opponent's family is off limits for civilized people. But its all wasted on you anyway.Â
I'd just like to point out that you haven't been able to make one coherent argument so far, you just continue to attack me personally. Maybe the "I'm old and you're young" arrogance that characterizes your every word is meant to bait me into becoming as unhinged as you. I've got better things to do, though you are good for a laugh.  So keep commenting. I just pity your children, if you have any.
Francois:
By definitions:
Science is an act of application of scientific method to the study of the Universe (Creation if you will). Good definition of scientific method is here:Â http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_methodÂ
Since we are a part of Universe (Creation) – all our natural extentions are potential subjects to such an application including languages, ergo linguistic is science. By the same token MATH is not a science because its subject is pure model – a non-material non-natural phenomena. This is BTW, why there is no Nobel Prize for math.
>> And you keep making claims about Chomsky being a mathematician -any references?
Francois, formal languages and formal grammars is pure math.Â
Pizdyets. Alex, you’re a fat, pompous cunt. Brilliance in one field does not necessarily beget brilliance in others. Math, physics, and linguistics mean shit when you’re telling people Pol Pot is okay.
On your definition of science (Chomsky as a “scientist”). I know I’m going to piss off a few friends, but how exactly does linguistics count as a science? Maybe “social science” would be more accurate? And you keep making claims about Chomsky being a mathematician -any references? It’s the first time I hear about this.
Urgent message to Craig, Michael, Tahl et al:
You absolutely have next week’s “Jewciest Comments”
I give you Alex’s, “An air balloon of chutzpah with a dick” (see above)
Priceless.
Adam:
Now that was, finally, a real good-old Yiddish comment! Next time I am in Boston, the drinks on me.
Mahler:
You are not interested in Chomsky's work because you are yet another uneducated boy with bad manners. An air balloon of chutzpah with a dick. You talk about "classless"? You, a fresh-hatched uneducated nobody, with your (God bless her) mother's milk still fresh on your upper lip, who called one of the most respected Jewish scientists in the world "delusional"? I guess you are also not interested in Albert Einstein's work either and for you he is yet another "delusional" yid who never approved of Palestine being divided and voiced his opposition to the raise of Zionist nationalism.Who cares about math and physics or math and linguistics when you do not need no math or any of this shit to be a Mighty Jew At A Checkpoint!
There is one game at which Jews excel undeniably – education. You want to be a proud Jew – get some.
Thank you for proving my point. I have yet to meet a single person who holds Chomsky in as hopelessly high regard as you do who can still be a mensch.Â
Ok, reduce what I said to "amateurish psycho-babble diagnostics". Like the chick who shits on the world just to prove that he is alive, you can shit on me in the most conceited and classless manner just to prove that you disagree.Â
I don't share your elitist estimation of Chomsky's acomplishments. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the post-Vietnam era the university has been inundated with "scholars" in positions and with honors that they don't deserve. I judge Chomsky by the merits (or lack thereof) of his writings on Israel, Zionism, and the US. Frankly, I could care less about his work in linguistics or mathematics. As Will Rogers said, "You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects." It would be nice if Chomsky and his late colleague Mr. Said (Ph.D in Literature!) could have internalized this when it came to the Middle East.
it was kind of nice to hear bin Laden compliment a yid.
This post is such tripe it's not even worth responding to. I will respond, however, to Z-bird, who, while claiming to support rationality does a u-turn in his description of Chomsky as a 'washed out communist'. Z, care to enlighten us further with your precious political insight?
And, Alex Chaihorsky, I couldn't agree more!
Mahler:
This is what I love about our people – every time a brand-new chick hatches from the egg, he immediately feel the urge to shit all over the world just to prove that he is alive. Dear boy, you do not have to agree with Professor Chomsky, most of us do not, to one extent or another, but please, spare us your amateurish psycho-babble diagnostics!
You are calling "delusional" one of the brightest minds of this century, a brilliant mathematician and linguist whose books are studied by generations of scientists all over the world. An MIT Professor Emeritus. And may I ask you what have you done in your enlightened life?
You do not agree with his politics – that is fine. You want to criticize his ideas – very good. But do not make a fool of yourself and your parents who brought you up by flaunting your insolence.
One doesn't need bin Laden as a reference when judging Chomsky. Chomsky is a self-referential clown. Like Edward Said brilliantly tapped into post-colonial, post-Vietnam guilt in order to make people accept his faulty polemic as dogma, Chomsky brilliantly taps into people's conceit to have them accept his screeds as dogma. His and his followers' behavior can only be defined as "a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact" aka, the clinical definition of delusional.
I endorse Chomsky too. I do not endorse Bin Laden. Imagine that. I was going to write a whole rebuttal about how Chomsky is arguably our nation’s greatest scholar. But then I realized that you also have a blog called AntiChomsky and have whole posts dedicated to describing how he is an anti-Semite complete with unattributed quotes, so you’re probably not interested in me telling you that he’s alright to like. So rather than wear out my keyboard trying to explain to you why your blog is bunk I’ll gently say for the benefit of other readers that Noam Chomsky is not the enemy. He has made a career out of doing his best to illuminate what goes on behind the curtain. And though he has a tendency to overstate ideas for sake of emphasis, he is the best at what he does, and he has a fantastic brain that everyone should get to know.
What national tragedy?
>>At least Osama never denied the Holocaust, while Chomsky wrote the forward to Faurissons Holocaust denial book.>>
See? Osama – good, Chomsky – bad. This is what happens when we make a religion out of national tragedy.
At least Osama never denied the Holocaust, while Chomsky wrote the forward to Faurissons Holocaust denial book.
Regarding Bin Laden’s affection for Chomsky:
A cockroach enjoys a gourmet meal as much as you and I do. Doesn’t make the food any less excellent.
Q.E.D.
By the way, what are we to make of lad Kerstein dropping these turds (here and on the “Objective Antisemitism” thread) and then disappearing? Is he humiliated? Uninterested? Tangoing with Batya?
Maybe this can be the new Jewcy win-a-teeshirt challenge; where’s lad Kerstein?
I've tangoed with Ben Kerstein before. Suffice it to say that it doesn't matter who "endorses", i.e. shapes for his own purposes. Bin Laden can say whatever he wants, it doesn't make Chomsky a jihadist.
 For example, if I were to publish something that attracted adherents from my natural enemies (Chomsky is not a jihadist needless to say, nor is he communist), it wouldn't matter. Fine, take my words and comment however you like. Have your own fantasy.
1) let x=2+2
2) [multiply by x-1] x(x-1)=(2+2)(x-1)
3) x^2 -x=2x+2x-2-2
4) [subtract 3x] x^2-4x=x-4
5) [multiply by x-5] (x-5)(x^2-4x)=(x-5)(x-4)
6) x^3-9x^2+20x=x^2-9x+20
7) x(x-4)(x-5)=(x-4)(x-5)
8) [divide by x-4] x^2-5x=x-5
9) [add 4x] x^2-x=5x-5
10) x(x-1)=5(x-1)
11) [divide by (x-1)] x=5
Since we started with x=2+2, therefore 2+2=5
I just tremble in fear what would happen if, at some point in the future Bin Laden says something like 2+2=4. I think we will have to re-write all the math textbooks and legislate that 2+2 =5! Because we, as a proud and brave nation just cannot slavishly agree with the enemy!
BTW, this country has such an experience.
In 1897 a Bill was introduced to Indiana House to legislate "pi" number to equal exactly 3!
Some Dr. Edwin Goodwin of Posey County (as far as we know with no apparent connection to Mr. Kerstein) was (understandably!) irritated with the natural value of "pi" being 3.14159 26535 89793 23846.………… and proposed "as a gift to the State of Indiana" his version of the laws of Universe. By sheer dumb luck, a math teacher was present as a tourist on the gallery during the introduction and raised such a hell, that the fathers of the State listened and thus the reputation of the State of Indiana was saved.
Apparently no such teacher was looking over Mr. Kirstein's shoulder while he was writing this fabulous piece. But not all is lost. People wise up with time. As I said in a different discussion on Mr. Kerstein's articles,"Objective Antisemitism" – "Let us give this guy another 25 years".
P.S. Michael Weiss: I know that you are not at all Prof. Chomsky's fan and you could have just said nothing, so it speaks to your honor that you did speak up. My hat goes off to you, Sir. there is no bigger honor in life than to have honorable opponents.
Chomsky and bin Laden share similar views on the Holocaust. Chomsky wrote a forward in Holocaust denier Faurisson’s book. Google Chomsky and Holocaust and you will find a lot of stuff.
Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis
The name Robert Faurisson represents the most obvious (but not the most significant) connection between Chomsky and the neo-Nazis. Faurisson is a French hate-filled crank, a one-time lecturer in literature at the University of Lyon, right-wing, and deeply anti-Semitic. (17) As we shall see presently (and although he denies this heatedly), Chomsky seems to have taken to this gentleman and has, in any case, seen fit to keep political company with him.
Faurisson says that he is proud that his writings are distributed by partisans of both the left (La Vieille Taupe) and the right wing (Ogmios). The fact is that, in each case, these are tiny sectarian groupings. Ogmios is a Parisian bookstore-cum-movement that belongs to the anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, extreme right wing of the French political spectrum. It is reported to have received financial aid from the government of Iran. (18) Far more important to Faurisson is La Vieille Taupe (“The Old Mole”) under the leadership of Pierre Guillaume, a small group of self-styled leftists who publish Faurisson’s booklets and pamphlets, advertise them, publicize them, propagandize for them. It is they who are the friends of Chomsky, and it is through them that Chomsky was recruited to his present position as grand patron of the neo-Nazi movement. (At the time of this writing, Ogmios and La Vieille Taupe have joined forces to publish a new anti-Semitic review, Annales d’Histoire RĂ©visionniste.)
Since the 1960′s, Faurisson says, he has devoted innumerable hours to what he considers a very deep study of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. He has written some books and articles on the subject and summarizes his “findings” as follows:
The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which opened the way to a gigantic political-financial swindle, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal victims of which are the German people ÂÂ but not its leaders ÂÂ and the entire Palestinian people. (19)
Faurisson and his associates on both sides of the Atlantic are pleased to call this Holocaust-denial their “revisionism.” They urge, and I cannot disagree, that fair-minded persons in free countries must keep open minds when confronted with reasonable or at least reasoned challenges to conventional wisdom. Perhaps, who knows, Napoleon never existed, perhaps the earth is flat, perhaps the Jews persecuted Hitler rather than vice versa, perhaps there was no such thing as a Holocaust of European Jews. All these nice opinions have their advocates and we shall have occasion to look at some of them in due time. In theory all received truth can and must be constantly re-examined in the light of new evidence, and we should be thankful to scholars and other reasonable men when they can confront us with thoughtful skepticism. But when, on the other hand, an outrageous point is advanced without regard for its truthfulness or for any rule of logic or evidence, when it is made simply to injure and defame, in that case, surely, we are justified in being less than respectful to the would-be “revisionist.”
In my preparations for this essay on Noam Chomsky it fell upon me to read what Faurisson has to say and even to correspond with him. I can report that his challenge to our knowledge of the Holocaust does not meet any criteria of moral or intellectual honesty, of seriousness of purpose, of intellectual workmanship. All that is apparent is hatred of Jews and an effort to hoodwink his audience. No wonder he has not found a single scholar to take him seriously. Obviously I do not intend to argue against his thesis myself any more than I would argue with a man who says that he has been eaten by a wolf. But it is necessary to give an indication of the intellectual level of Faurisson’s propaganda so that the reader can get some inkling of why he is ostracized by all decent men.
The heart of Faurisson’s argument is based on his assertion that Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust are simply liars and that they are liars because they are Jews. Professor Rudolf Vrba, a colleague of mine at the University of British Columbia, was a witness to the exterminations at Auschwitz and is one of the very few to have survived. Faurisson names him a liar and a Jew and asserts that all who have had anything to do with bringing the Auschwitz facts to light — witnesses, investigators, magistrates, etc. ÂÂ are either Jews or, in one case, “probably a Jew.” (20) The Jewishness of a witness or writer, throughout Faurisson’s opus, is enough to destroy his credibility in Faurisson’s eyes. (He does make exception for Chomsky and the two or three other Jews who have rallied to him in a veritable paroxysm of self hatred.)
Faurisson is a practitioner of what might be called the Method of Crucial Source, a favorite among cranks. The Method consists of seizing upon a phrase or sentence or sometimes a longer passage from no matter where, without regard to its provenance or reliability, to “prove” a whole novel theory of history or the universe. More often than not the Source in question is a newspaper item ÂÂ after all, what cannot be found in some newspaper somewhere, at some time.
Among the many little booklets and leaflets which Faurisson and his left-wing publishers distribute by mail and in person, pride of place must go to a very pretentious pamphlet of twenty-four pages which contains the French translation of an interview ÂÂ a long text by Faurisson interspersed with a few helpful questions by the interviewer ÂÂ originally published in an Italian magazine in 1979. (21) This short pamphlet has 61 footnotes in very small print as well as a lengthy footnote to a footnote. Clearly it represents a major effort at presenting the gist of what Faurisson considers his proof that the Holocaust never happened.
One of Faurisson’s basic claims is that Hitler’s actions against the Jews were of the same order as Jewish actions against Hitler, one provoking the other as it were (p. 15). To prove that there had been a Jewish “war” against Hitler as early as March of 1933, Faurisson devotes his one and only pictorial illustration in this pamphlet to a reproduction of the front page of the Daily Express of London, dated March 24, 1933, which indeed bore a main headline “Judea Declares War on Germany.” Sub-heads read “Jews of All the World Unite ÂÂ Boycott of German Goods.”
Now Faurisson claims as his particular specialty the analysis of disputed documents and sources. (As Nadine Fresco has shown, these claims add a touch of lunacy to his malice. (22)). Here he uses the Daily Express as his Crucial Source, and, I suppose, the reader who is likely to be impressed by his propaganda may not ask about the nature of this newspaper in those days.
In 1933, the Daily Express was a sensationalist mass circulation paper run by Lord Beaverbrook, a man of often eccentric views who felt no compunction about using his headlines to promote favorite causes or to denounce pet peeves.(23) During the early years of the Hitler regime he thought that Britain should avoid alliances with France and other threatened European countries. In a private letter in 1938, he expressed the fear that “The Jews may drive us into war.” (24) But his most famous pronouncement of the period, delivered in the very same front-page headline style as the “Judea Declares War” item of 1933, came on September 30, 1938: “The Daily Express declares that Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year either. Peace agreement signed at 12:30 a.m. today.” (25)
To Faurisson, nevertheless, Daily Express headlines represent the most weighty proof of what happened in history. And so important is this Crucial Source to the “revisionists” that Faurisson’s California outlet, the “Institute for Historical Review,” sees fit to use it with just a bit of embroidery of its own: “Is it true that Jewish circles ‘declared war on Germany?’ Yes it did. The media the world over carried headlines such as ‘Judea Declares War on Germany.’” (26)
Faurisson has been the object of legal challenges because of his strident, exhibitionist, unscrupulous defamations of Holocaust witnesses and respected scholars of the Holocaust. He has also been suspended from his post at the University of Lyon for similar reasons. The court cases, of which Faurisson and his accomplices are inordinately proud because of the tremendous publicity they derive from them, (27) are similar in nature to the Keegstra and Zundel trials in Canada. Here too neo-Nazi publicists have been brought to court under statutes that derive from the law of libel: freedom of speech is held to be no excuse when it can be shown that falsehood is spread deliberately for purposes of inflaming hatred. Faurisson has traveled to Toronto in the Zundel trial as an “expert witness” on matters of truth vs. falsehood, but the jury was not persuaded by him and convicted Zundel.
When freedom of speech encroaches upon or is said to encroach upon other human rights, thoughtful civil libertarians will wish to look at the particulars of the case rather thoroughly. Chomsky says that he sees no need for such concerns, holding that “one who defends the right of free expression incurs no special responsibility to study or even be acquainted with the views expressed.” (28) So presumably spreading deliberate falsehood ÂÂ say the representation of a consumer product as safe when in fact it is dangerous ÂÂ would enjoy Chomsky’s enthusiastic defense. In any case it is a devotion to freedom of expression, he says, that has led Chomsky so frequently and so energetically to come to the defense of Faurisson. We shall have to examine this claim in more detail presently.
The relationship between Chomsky and Faurisson’s publisher, La Vieille Taupe (29)
(hereafter VT), has been chronicled in two remarkably revealing documents in 1986. (30)
The first, by far the longer, is a narrative written by VT’s leader, Pierre Guillaume; the second, much briefer, is a commentary on this narrative by Chomsky. Taken together, these documents tell us things that might well cause embarrassment among Chomsky’s American supporters.
Guillaume begins by telling us that he first met Chomsky some time in 1979, having been introduced by Serge Thion, another member of the VT group whom we shall encounter again. Guillaume told Chomsky about Faurisson at this meeting. Faurisson had begun to have various legal problems. Then, says Guillaume, several months later, and without any other contact having taken place between them, Chomsky signed and promoted the following petition (reproduced by Guillaume in its original English):
Dr. Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the “Holocaust” question.
Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.
We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him.
We strongly support Professor Faurisson’s just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.
It is the publication of this petition in French newspapers, with Chomsky’s name on top, that caused the first great consternation among Chomsky’s left-wing supporters in France and elsewhere. The lamentable Alfred Lilienthal, the only other Jew of any notoriety with anti-Semitic connections, was also among the first signatories to the petition. (31)
Many civil libertarian readers objected to the petition’s use of the word “findings” to characterize Faurisson’s propaganda, seeing it as an endorsement of Faurisson’s work and thereby going beyond a defense of freedom of speech. Chomsky has tried to parry this objection by denying that “findings” means what it means. (32) But it might also be pointed out that the petition describes Faurisson as being, among other things, “respected” for his “document criticism.” In fact Faurisson enjoys no such respect unless we count the anti-Semitic lunatic fringe. (33) In any case, according to Faurisson himself, (34) the petition was originally drawn up not by a neutral civil libertarian but by Mark Weber, an American one-time professor of German who changed careers to become an apparently full-time “revisionist” propagandist. (35)
According to Guillaume, the petition played a decisive role in gaining public acceptance for the “revisionist” movement in France. And most of all, according to Guillaume, it was the prestige of Chomsky’s name that helped the crusade of Holocaust-denial.
Next, Guillaume proceeds to tell us how helpful Chomsky has been to the VT movement in other ways. At a time when the VT movement suffered from ostracism on all sides, when, moreover, Chomsky could have published a French version of his Political Economy of Human Rights (written with Edward Herman) with a French commercial firm, Chomsky nevertheless stood by his friends of the VT and published his book with them. He, Guillaume, would have understood had Chomsky wanted to keep his distance from the VT in public. But no, Chomsky proved steadfast.
After the appearance of the petition, Guillaume tells us, Chomsky received a great many letters of complaint which he shared with Guillaume. Chomsky told Guillaume that the principle of freedom of expression was threatened by such letters and that he wished to reply to them in a public way. Consequently Chomsky composed a text of approximately 2,500 words, Quelques commentaires Ă©lĂ©mentaires sur le droit Ă la libertĂ© d’expression, “Some elementary comments concerning the right of free expression.” In it he declared that everyone should have the right of free speech, including fascists and anti-Semites, but that, as it happens, Faurisson is neither one of these. Instead, according to Chomsky, Faurisson is best described as “a sort of apolitical liberal.” For reasons that will become clear in a minute, this text later became known as “Chomsky’s Preface.” (36)
According to Guillaume, Chomsky sent this text to Serge Thion, VT’s writer and propagandist, asking him to make the best possible use of it. The text was dated October 11, 1980. On December 6 Chomsky seems to have had second thoughts and wrote a follow-up letter to Guillaume and complained that, the state of hysteria in the world being what it is, the whole fight against imperialism could be sabotaged by a campaign that would associate him with neo-Nazism. (Chomsky was never one to understate the importance of his own personality for the fate of the world.) Therefore, if it isn’t too late, Chomsky strongly suggests that his text not be made part of a book by Faurisson.
But, alas for Chomsky and the whole anti-imperialist movement, it was too late. The book by Faurisson, with Chomsky’s text as preface, had already appeared. When Guillaume and Thion telephoned Chomsky on December 12, Chomsky’s reaction ÂÂ all this according to Guillaume ÂÂ was firm, clear, and completely reassuring: he now stood by his preface and declared his letter of retrieval to be null and void.
What a friend we have in Chomsky!
Guillaume next reiterates the steadfastness of Chomsky’s support and even confesses that without it the intrepid little original band of “revisionists” may never have grown to its present strength. And all this is so remarkable, according to Guillaume, since Chomsky is being victimized in his own country, the United States, where the imperial ideology of the West has somehow been able to raise its ugly head once again. As a result, Chomsky, according to Guillaume, has had his home audience greatly reduced and his popularity endangered.
Guillaume is not insensitive to the problems posed by Chomsky’s ritualistic affirmations that his, Chomsky’s, views are “diametrically opposed to those of Faurisson.” Yes, but Guillaume understands the difference between a truth and a wink, n’est-ce pas (p. 163, my translation) :
Each time that Chomsky has said that his opinions remain “diametrically opposed” to those of Faurisson, he has done so in terms that are absolutely incapable of hurting Faurisson; and he has always indicated, by a word or a phrase, that his “diametrically opposed” view was more a matter of opinion than of scientific knowledge.
Guillaume replies here to criticism from one Chantal Beauchamp, who, presuming to be more “revisionist” than he, had objected to VT’s collaboration with what she apparently regarded as an inadequately neo-Nazi Chomsky. Guillaume can reassure her even further (pp. 167-8, my translation) :
Chomsky was involved in very taxing struggles ….. Dramatic events were taking place in the Middle East. His own work ÂÂ the exposure … of American imperialism there, of the realities of Zionism and of the state of Israel ÂÂ took on an immediate significance, something that could lead to practical results. How is this work less important than Faurisson’s … ?
The important work of Faurisson is the denial of the Holocaust. The important work of Chomsky is the struggle against Israel. And the common denominator of these, in the eyes of Guillaume and his followers, can only be anti-Semitism.
Now comes the most interesting part. Guillaume has told us how close a political friend Chomsky has been, how he had sacrificed self-interest to political principle by publishing his book with VT rather than commercially, how Chomsky’s “diametric opposition” to Faurisson did not really mean what it said, how Chomsky’s work concerning Israel is part of the same overall cause as Faurisson’s denial of the Holocaust. And now, after all that, Guillaume says that he submitted his report to Chomsky for possible corrections or disagreements. So Chomsky was given the opportunity to tell his story should it differ from that of Guillaume. And it turns out that Chomsky indeed has a demurral that he needs to press, and which Guillaume magnanimously publishes as a sort of addendum to his own report. It seems that Guillaume had gotten one very important point completely wrong. It is not at all true, says Chomsky, that he is less popular now in his own country than he had been in the days of Vietnam. “I cannot accept even a fraction of the many speaking invitations that I receive, and now it’s no longer, as it was in the sixties, a matter of speaking to five people in a church. Now there are real crowds at colleges and in the community.” That is the sum total of Chomsky’s correction. It confirms, in the most direct way possible, the close political collaboration between Chomsky and the French “revisionists.”
Not only did Chomsky publish his Political Economy of Human Rights with Guillaume’s organization. He also prepared a special booklet for Guillaume, not published anywhere else, of some of his self-justifying correspondence concerning the Faurisson affair. This publication, RĂ©ponses inĂ©dites, (37) carries Chomsky’s name as author and Guillaume’s initials, “P.G.,” as editor. Guillaume explains that Chomsky had personally reviewed all translations from English to French.
For his part, Faurisson very frequently uses the Chomsky connection in his ceaseless pursuit of some sort of credibility. Bill Rubinstein of Australia reports that he had originally learned of the Chomsky-Faurisson connection only when an Australian Faurisson supporter flaunted correspondence that showed Chomsky furnishing Faurisson with information and advice. (38) It is just about impossible to come across a French “revisionist” publication ÂÂ be it by Guillaume, Thion, or Faurisson himself
that omits the obligatory reference to Chomsky’s patronage. (39)
What does Guillaume’s movement do to deserve such warm friendship from the famous linguist of MIT ?
The tiny movement of La Vieille Taupe, though having a history of quite different concerns that I will sketch later, seems to be doing little but Jew-baiting these days. Through a micro-empire of publishing enterprises, operating under its own name and such others as Spartacus, Éditions de la DiffĂ©rence, etc., the movement brings out a flood of “revisionist” and anti-Semitic propaganda. First and foremost it publishes numerous writings by and about Faurisson. It also features several titles by the late “left-wing” anti-Semite Paul Rassinier and the notorious “The Myth of Auschwitz” by the German neo-Nazi Wilhelm Stäglich.
Recently Guillaume and Ogmios have started to publish a very pretentiously-presented quarterly journal Annales d’Histoire RĂ©visioniste. In appearance this magazine resembles a scholarly publication but its function is to show that the Holocaust never happened. The first two issues contain, among other items, translations of articles that have previously appeared in the California neo-Nazi journal Journal of Historical Review. (40)
In the spring of 1985 the movie Shoah was showing in Paris and VT’s leader Pierre Guillaume, obviously seeking more notoriety, personally proceeded to hand out leaflets in front of the theater. The leaflets denounced the “political-financial” swindle by all those who claim that Jews were killed by the Nazis. As Guillaume tells the story, the incident became the basis of a defamation suit against him brought by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. (41)
VT’s anti-Semitism is not confined to Holocaust-denial. It has discovered something it apparently thinks is a very clever find. It so happens that the young Bernard Lazare, later one of the founders of left-wing Zionism, wrote a curious little book in the years before the Dreyfus affair made him a partisan for Jewish rights. This self-hating early book, Anti-Semitism, Its History and Causes, is actually not at all a discovery of La Vieille Taupe. It has been used by anti-Semites and anti-Semitic movements from the days of Dreyfus to the days of Vichy. It is a curious hodgepodge of accusation and self-accusation, particularly bitter about the Talmud and its alleged influence on the Jews. The book can tell us very little about its professed subject but it has consistently been cited by anti-Semites as confirmation and justification of their hatred. (42) There is no possible reason for anyone but an anti-Semitic organization to republish it now. VT has proceeded to issue a new edition over the legal objections by members of the Lazare family and the organization Friends of Bernard Lazare. (43)
La Vieille Taupe is among the very smallest of the tiny political sects of Paris yet it publishes as if it were a major institution. The physical appearance of VT products is very professional and certainly belies the very marginal nature of the organization. I recently sent a one-paragraph note to the group in which I requested a list of its publications. By return air mail I received twelve books and pamphlets. Eight of these were marked with list prices that amounted to a total of 456 French francs. I estimate the four other items to come to at least another fifty francs, or a total of approximately 500 francs for the material in the package. Since the postage cost a further 148.50 francs, the value of the gift that I received from La Vieille Taupe amounts to 648.50 francs, or about $117 in US currency. I am obviously not the only person to enjoy this kind of largesse. I know nobody in the group, as far as I can tell nobody in it knows me, and I did no more than express a simple request for a book catalog. Where does the money for all this come from? Ogmios, a bookstore of the extreme right wing which is associated with VT in various enterprises, has been linked to the government of Iran (see above). The source of Vieille Taupe’s own obviously substantial finances has so far remained a mystery.
Chomsky has of course been criticized for his involvement with Faurisson and the VT movement, not least within the Left. Chomsky has sought to meet all such objections by saying a) that he does not agree with Faurisson but is merely defending freedom of speech; b) that Faurisson and the VT are being maligned by opponents; and c) that the whole affair is unimportant and should not be discussed. Of these three arguments only the first ÂÂ the civil rights argument ÂÂ needs detailed examination, which we shall give it later. The other points can be dealt with more summarily.
Chomsky has persistently misrepresented the politics of Faurisson and VT. In his famous “Preface” he calls Faurisson a liberal. (44) He has also seen fit to praise Serge Thion, Faurisson’s associate, as a “libertarian socialist scholar” (45) without mentioning that Thion has for the last nine years or so written lengthy books and articles to the effect that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie. Both Bill Rubinstein of Australia and I have sent detailed proof of Faurisson’s anti-Semitism to Chomsky. I have most recently sent him Faurisson’s article which declares all witnesses to the Holocaust at Auschwitz to be Jews and liars because they are Jews, (46) but Chomsky has remained obdurate. To Rubinstein he wrote the following:
I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic 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 anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work …
Rubinstein has published this excerpt from a letter that Chomsky sent him. (47) As he does routinely, Chomsky objected to the publication of his correspondence but he has not denied either the authenticity or the accuracy of the passage.
Chomsky and his friends ordinarily try to suppress all information concerning his neo-Nazi connections. The best publicized case of such suppression involves the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson who wrote the biographical sketch of Chomsky in the British publication Biographical Companion to Modern Thought. Sampson wrote a laudatory description of Chomsky’s linguistics but allowed himself the following few words of reservation about his politics:
He forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book ÂÂ which Chomsky admitted he had not read ÂÂ that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).(48)
Sampson has now told the story of how Chomsky was able, through his influence with American publishers, to ban Sampson’s contribution from the American (Harpers) edition of this reference work. (49)
A new book of almost 500 pages, The Chomsky Reader, has now been published by Pantheon under the editorship of James Peck. (50) It purports to “[bring] together for the first time the political thought of America’s leading dissident intellectual.” The work is well indexed. It contains no reference to Faurisson, La Vieille Taupe, Guillaume, “revisionism,” or to any other topic that might give the reader an inkling of Chomsky’s neo-Nazi involvements. The one mention of Thion suggests that this French neo-Nazi is actually no more than a Marxist intellectual.
If Chomsky likes to bad-mouth the Communists from time to time, they, on their part, know how to appreciate an ally and are willing to lend a hand in the cover-up. The Communist magazine Canadian Jewish Outlook (now known simply as Outlook) ran an article in October of 1983 (51) that praised Chomsky’s attacks on Israel but completely suppressed any mention of his role in the neo-Nazi movement. Communists are usually sensitive to neo-Nazism but in the case of Chomsky there are obviously other considerations. (52)
I have spoken so far only of Chomsky’s connections with the neo-Nazis of France, who seem to have been responsible for his recruitment to the cause. But the “revisionist” movement also has an American branch and Chomsky has become embroiled on this side of the Atlantic as well.
In its very first volume in 1980, the California-based Journal of Historical Review carried an article about Jews by a Doctor Howard F. Stein that turned out to be something of an omen of the journal’s future. (53) Even to someone well acquainted with anti-Semitic propaganda, Doctor Stein’s piece must have come as a surprise for the sheer audacity of its malice. And as it happens, Doctor Stein’s piece also foreshadowed themes later taken up by Chomsky.
The Journal of Historical Review described Stein as an Associate Professor of Medical-Psychiatric Anthropology in Oklahoma. By now he has written quite a few articles ÂÂ all in psychobabble ÂÂ in various fringe journals of “humanistic psychology.” He has also lectured at the mecca of New Age psychology, the Esalen Institute of California. And Doctor Stein is Jewish.
In his appearance for the “revisionists” Stein presented a rather straight-forward theory about the Holocaust: it is a Jewish myth. It seems that Jews have always fantasized about a Holocaust, from the very beginning of their history. They have always needed to be victims. Today they fantasize that they were victims of the Germans during the Second World War and they are completely insensitive to the great sufferings of non-Jews, in particular Germans and Arabs. Doctor Stein also refers the reader to an earlier article he had written in which he proposed that Jews are afflicted by a “Samson complex.” (54) Like Samson in the Bible, it seems, Jews today are bound for self-destruction and seek to arrange matters so that they can destroy the rest of the world in the process. This is a view that Chomsky has also adopted, as we shall see.
I think that it is an open secret that we have in the United States an intellectual underclass of self-described “academic” journals. These dreary periodicals cater to the foolish vanity of college administrators who wish to see “publications” by their teachers. Stein’s articles, looked at purely from the point of view of scholarly competence, must scrape the very bottom even of this material: there is not a shred of evidence to be found in his many pages of jargon and free-floating confabulation. By itself that would be as harmless as is almost all this underclass pulp. But Stein’s writings have enlisted jargon-mongering in the cause of spite and hate, and this indeed jettisons them into a category quite by themselves.
Doctor Stein has achieved some international recognition for his contribution to the hatred of Jews. The French journal of the “revisionists,” edited by our friend Pierre Guillaume, has published a French translation of the original 1980 article. (55)
Compared to Stein’s malice, other JHR articles will seem commonplace. The last issue I received, that of Winter 1986-7, carries the article by Faurisson on Höss that I have already mentioned. It carries another piece complaining about an unjust persecution of the (Nazi) German American Bund in the United States during World War II. A book review tells us that when the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, “essentially, the German decision was Jewish, since Jews oppose intermarriages, and insist on their own built-in laws. The Germans also had to fear Polish inspired pogroms against the Jews. The wall prevented that as well.” Yes, that’s why we need the “revisionists” to set us straight about what happened in history.
Canadian Customs authorities have declared this nice journal to be hate literature and have restricted its import into Canada. Consequently I have been unable to check every issue of it and I do not know how often Chomsky has contributed to it. I do have before me the issue for Spring 1986 containing an article by Noam Chomsky, “All Denials of Free Speech Undercut A Democratic Society.” (56) This piece contains about 2,200 words and is reprinted from the Camera of Boulder, Col.
Subscribers to the JHR also receive lists of books and tapes that the “revisionists” find necessary for a proper education. Some of this material is signed Noontide Press, which, like the Institute for Historical Review, is located in Torrance, California. My latest Catalogue of Historical Revisionist Books, dated Fall 1986, contains, among other items, the following titles: The Zionist Connection II by Alfred M. Lilienthal; Communism with the Mask Off by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky. A special book list of Noontide Press dealing with what it calls “Jewish Studies” contains The International Jew by Henry Ford, Sr., The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, “translated from Russian,” The Plot Against Christianity by Elizabeth Dilling (“A shattering exposĂ© of the anti-Christian hate campaign propounded in the Babylonian Talmud”), and other such classics.
The Institute also sells two separate tapes of a speech that Chomsky gave against Israel, and here are some excerpts from its publicity for these tapes:
This lecture … is, to put it mildly, devastating. In two hours of uninterrupted cannonade directed squarely at U.S. foreign policy with regard to Israel, Chomsky ranges brilliantly over such topics as Israeli imperialism … the role of the Anti-Defamation League (“… one of the ugliest, most powerful groups in America”)/ Media suppression, distortion, hypocrisy, and the “Memory Hole.” An intense two-and-a-half hour mini-course on the political issue of our age, including Chomsky’s answers to audience questions.
I have repeatedly called Chomsky’s attention to the Nazis’ use of his name and his materials, suggesting that he disassociate himself from these people, but he has just as repeatedly remained obdurate to such suggestions.
Is it a Matter of Freedom of Speech ?
As we have seen, Chomsky boasts that he will defend the freedom of expression of anyone, any time, presumably regarding anything, and that he does not need to see disputed material in order to defend its right to be heard and published. (57) Bill Rubinstein has already pointed out that this proposition can hardly be taken seriously since there must be limits to freedom of speech in any society. An immediate example is the necessity for prohibiting commercial fraud. But Chomsky is completely mindless in his declarations for unrestricted freedom; neither fraud, nor defamation, nor public mischief of any sort can deter what he is pleased to call his Enlightenment values. Some of his more extravagant postures on these matters are reminiscent of extremist “libertarians” from Caligula to Charles Manson. We shall look into some of the antinomian sources of his political thought later in this essay.
To Chomsky there is no question that the “revisionist” neo-Nazis should be given complete freedom of speech in Western countries (attempts to restrain them have so far been made only in West Germany, France, and Canada). He never tires of exclaiming that freedom of expression should know no limits, his citation of Voltaire settling the matter to his satisfaction.
I myself have been less than happy with the prosecution of the neo-Nazis in Canada, and I am not convinced that the legal prosecution of Faurisson in France is justified. But the issue is a great deal more complex than Chomsky lets on because questions of both defamation and fraud must be addressed. Faurisson and his followers have engaged in an unbelievable campaign of libel and slander ÂÂ always couched in very personal terms ÂÂ against the scholars and the witnesses of the Holocaust. Furthermore, as the transcript of the Zundel trial in Canada has shown, it seems clear that the “revisionists” are motivated by malice and not by any historical conviction. I am fortunately not called upon to vote for or against a gag on these Nazis. But if I were, and if a study of all the details of a given individual case were to convince me that freedom of speech should prevail, I know that I would still be very far indeed from being a friend to the gentleman in question.
As is generally the case when extremists face legal difficulties, the neo-Nazis today have two kinds of supporters: those who wish them well because they are sympathetic to their cause on the one hand, and civil libertarians on the other. Since nowadays nobody likes to be recognized as a Nazi sympathizer, just about everyone who supports the neo-Nazis today calls himself a civil libertarian. The trick is to tell who is who.
There is of course no difficulty to this. We all know civil libertarians. We know who they are, what they do, how they do it. In America they are akin to the founders and leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and, like them or not, they are liberal by persuasion, liberal by style and culture. They have a record of defending various kinds of unpopular groups, not just one. They will give legal aid to Nazis but they will not associate with Nazis, will not collaborate with Nazis politically, will not publish their books with Nazi publishers, will not allow their articles to be printed in Nazi journals. (58) On these counts alone Chomsky is no civil libertarian.
Chomsky misleads us when he tells how he was recruited to the Faurisson cause. He tries to create the impression that it was civil libertarians who recruited him: “In the fall of 1979, I was asked by Serge Thion, a libertarian socialist scholar with a record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, to sign a petition … ” (59) The plain truth is that Thion was already a partisan of Faurisson at the time, a man second only to Faurisson himself in the propaganda that declares the Holocaust to be a Jewish lie. Insofar as Chomsky is a political friend of Thion’s, and this certainly seems to be the case at least as late as 1987, (60) Chomsky must be considered a political friend of these neo-Nazis and not the disinterested champion of free speech that he pretends to be.
There is also the issue of Chomsky’s relationships to the civil liberties of individuals and causes that he particularly dislikes: first those who have dared to criticize him, and second the Jews who are persecuted in Russia and in the Arab world. On these matters Chomsky’s record is anything but civil libertarian.
We have seen that the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, having published some mildly critical remarks on Chomsky in a British work of reference, saw himself banned from the American edition of that work. Chomsky denies that he was instrumental in this ban, but his testimony is not convincing because he also argues in favor of censoring Sampson (61 :
With regard to a book, readers can form their own conclusions. But an entry in a reference work is something quite different. Readers rely on the reputation of the editors to guarantee that what is presented is accurate, not fabrication and mere slander as in this case; and the editors surely have a responsibility to justify this trust.
Chomsky does not revoke his principle of absolute freedom of expression of everyone. It’s just a matter of a little exception that he finds necessary: general books may enjoy freedom, certainly, but books of reference, well, that’s an entirely different story. Chomsky is fond of making up obfuscating little rules like that. But who is fooled by that? The record here is very clear: Chomsky will gladly violate his professed principles if it is a matter of silencing his critics.
Are there any other limits to Chomsky’s generosity on the matter of civil rights?
Chomsky says that he has been privately active on behalf of individual dissidents in the Soviet Union, but he has never, insofar as I have been able to find out, endorsed or aided the movement to allow the emigration of Soviet Jews. I have written to him about that, and I have also most particularly asked him to intervene on behalf of the Jews of Syria. (62) I was rewarded by a number of vituperative letters from him, but on the matter of the oppressed Jews he has remained absolutely obdurate. So when he tells us that he never refuses to sign petitions on behalf of civil rights (63) he forgets to mention that he does make a tiny little exception when it comes to the rights of oppressed Jews, his own people.
To round out the picture of Chomsky’s relationship to Faurisson and the neo-Nazi movement, something needs to be said about Chomsky’s repeated assurances that he disagrees “diametrically” with Faurisson, that in his opinion the Holocaust did occur. In fact Chomsky has very few words to say about the subject, but they are words that he uses often. He allowed, by way of an obiter dictum in an earlier book Peace in the Middle East, that the Holocaust had been “the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history.” Now, whenever his relationship to the neo-Nazis is in any way challenged, he trots out these very same words, quoting himself verbatim, neither adding nor subtracting from this ten-word formula. The abracadabra nature of this declaration carries little evidence of conviction and certainly lacks in persuasive power. Nevertheless, with respect to the historical reality of the Holocaust and when writing for an American audience, Chomsky does not wish to be counted among the neo-Nazis.
On the other hand, as we have learned from Guillaume above and from the published record as well, Chomsky is also very careful not to let this little disagreement with the neo-Nazis spoil his good relationship with them. He wrote to Rubinstein that there is nothing anti-Semitic about Holocaust-denial; he agreed with Guillaume that belief on his part in the historical reality of the Holocaust is a purely personal opinion ÂÂ a sort of quirk ÂÂ and is not to be regarded as implying criticism of the “scholarly” work done by Faurisson.
Chomsky has a well-earned reputation as a vituperative political polemicist. He has a ready store of invective and he is not stingy with it when attacking the state of Israel and anyone to whom that state is dear. But aside from the ten-word self-exculpatory formula that I have shown, Chomsky has never, to my knowledge, seen fit to criticize Faurisson or any other neo-Nazi. His “diametric” disagreement with such people is obviously not something that occupies him very seriously.
Now that we have seen some of the ways in which Chomsky has embroiled himself with the neo-Nazi movement I would like to consider why and how this could have happened. I do not propose to speculate, in the manner of the ineffable Doctor Stein, about unconscious psychological quirks or motives. The public record alone is quite explicit and suggests two roots of Chomsky’s current neo-Nazism:
A) There is an old ultra-left doctrine of malign equivalence according to which all worldly government is equally evil. Chomsky and his friends, under cover of this neutralist faith, have gone beyond it to suggest that government and society in the West are in fact the most evil of all.
B) Certain embittered assimilationist Jewish individuals have long held that the Jews as a group ÂÂ their religion, their society, their leadership ÂÂ are in every way despicable, are authors of their own misfortune, constitute a danger to the peoples of the world. This set of opinions is technically known as “self-hatred” and we shall have to return to it below.
These two tendencies, the self-hatred of some Western intellectuals and the self-hatred of certain Jews, are perhaps unexceptionable when moderate and separate. But Chomsky ÂÂ it is said that he is a brilliant man ÂÂ has combined them, twisted them into new forms of absurdity, invested them with all of his academic prestige and all of his physical and mental energy, and he has rarely shrunk from embracing the most extreme and the most hateful consequences.
From Marlen to Faurisson
Faurisson is of course not the first to propose preposterous ideas or to use pseudo-rational methods in the process. Jacques Baynac and Nadine Fresco have recently reminded us that a certain Jean-Baptiste PĂ©rès denied as early as 1827 that Napoleon ever existed. (64) Today there is a California-based Flat Earth Research Society International, only a stone’s throw from our Institute for Historical Review, whose leaflet assures us that it can “… prove [the] earth flat by experiment, demonstrated and demonstrable. Earth Flat is a Fact, not a ‘theory’ … Australians do not hang by their feet under the world.” There is proof for everything.
It is one of the misfortunes of the left wing, both in Europe and America, to have been afflicted with more than its share of Flat Earthers. Many of these marginal socialist and anarchist illuminati are adepts of the doctrine of malign equivalence, i.e. they see all government as basically “capitalist” including that of the Soviet Union, and they find all “capitalist” rule to be equally reprehensible. The autobiographical part of the new Chomsky Reader (65) shows us how Chomsky has adhered to such doctrines, from his earliest days to the present. But we shall also see how both he and La Vieille Taupe have gone beyond this anarcho-Marxist tradition to arrive at what amounts to a justification of Nazi Germany.
Chomsky tells us (on page 14 of The Chomsky Reader) that he was fascinated by the “Marlenites” when he was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. This was about 1944 or 1945. Insofar as I can reconstruct it now, this ex-Trotskyist splinter group thought that the war was “phony” and that the Western Allies, the Soviet Union, and the Axis powers were all conspiring together against the international proletariat. All sides represented the bourgeoisie (including the Stalin “burocracy,” as Marlen liked to spell it), all sides oppressed the workers, all sides were in every way morally equivalent. Chomsky now says that he “never really believed the thesis, but … found it intriguing enough to try to figure out what they were talking about.”
I want to linger just a bit on the subject of the Marlenites. On the surface it would seem that there is little similarity between this small band of 1940′s New York revolutionists and the Chomsky of today. The Marlenites had strange ideas but they were no apologists for the Nazis, so compared to Chomsky and his French “revisionists” they were models of sanity, of moderation, of judiciousness. But as it happens the Marlenites do afford us some insight, first into the atmosphere of the little radical groups that constitute the lineal forebears of today’s left-wing neo-Nazis, and second into the methods of historiography that Chomsky and his friends employ today.
It so happens that I myself had a brush with the Marlenite organization Leninist League, as it was then called. It was, at the time, led by the veteran New York splinter-group radical George Spiro. Like all American Bolshevists in those days, Spiro used a pseudonym in the hope of warding off the FBI. (The leadership of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party having been sent to jail in 1941, this precaution was not as fanciful as it would seem today.) When Spiro chose his “party name” he wanted to honor his (temporary, as it turned out) heroes and picked Marlen, Mar for Marx and len for Lenin.
My first experience with the Marlenites predates Chomsky’s by about four years. I was fourteen in late 1940 or early 1941 when I attended a meeting in Spiro’s apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I had been invited by the Marlenite who distributed propaganda to one of the group’s larger rivals, and I can’t now remember whether this other group had been of the Shachtmanite or the Cannonite wing of the Trotskyists.
Spiro and his Marlenites struck me as not much different from other Trotskyists in the manner in which they conducted their business except that the group was even smaller and even further removed from the common sense of the world. They seemed to have had an even more intense conviction of being the very small elite that alone knows all the esoteric truths about capitalism, war, the class struggle, the future of humanity. It was a matter of very heavy Rechthaberei, of disputatious knowing-it-better.
When I first met Spiro he had already accomplished a considerable political journey. He had been expelled from the Communist Party and had joined the Trotskyists. He had next joined a splinter group led by Hugo Oehler and Thomas Stamm to found the Revolutionary Workers League, in opposition to the “official” Trotskyist organization. But soon thereafter he had discovered that Oehler and Stamm and in fact Trotsky himself were traitors to the working class, so he had left all these groups, with a very small band of followers in tow, to found his Leninist League and to declare World War II to be “phony.” I don’t think that the number of these Marlenites ever exceeded a dozen or so.
I went to see Spiro again around 1956, in the same Lower East Side apartment where the earlier meeting had taken place. He told me then that the intervening years had brought him one disappointment after another. His researches had led him to see that not only Stalin and Trotsky had been traitors to the proletariat but that Lenin had been of the same stripe. And even the writings of Marx could not withstand his careful inspection. Spiro (he had by then abandoned his pseudonym for obvious reasons) discovered that yes, old Karl Marx himself had really been nothing but an anti-Semite in disguise. When I asked him about the other Marlenites whom I had met some fifteen years earlier, Spiro revealed to me that they, too, had been unmasked by him for what they really were, a bunch of anti-Semites. (66)
Spiro was by then a mellow old man and I must say that I was shaken, not only by his madness but also because of the kernel of truth that his madness all but hid. He gave me a copy of what I take to be his last opus, Marxism and the Bolshevik State. (67) I am glad that I kept this volume. At one time in my life I owned other Marlenite literature but unfortunately I discarded it all except for that last big book.
Marxism and the Bolshevik State has 1100 closely-printed pages, divided into 78 chapters, and gives evidence of a tremendous mental energy on the part of its author. Its thesis can readily be surmised by some of the chapter headings: The Stalin-Trotsky Betrayal of the British Workers; Lenin Disrupts the Potential World Revolutionary Army and Navy; Marx’s Personal and Political Insincerity; A Marxist-Ignored Phenomenon in the Ancient and Medieval Class Struggles ÂÂ The Jewish Scapegoat; Marxist Anti-Semitism in the United States; Marxism’s Hand in Creating the Reactionary Zionist State; Marxism ÂÂ The Last Bulwark of Anti-Semitism and Christianity. The book denounces all known government ÂÂ i.e. it embraces the doctrine of malign equivalence ÂÂ but it also holds open the promise of a new day, when, presumably under the guidance of enlightened leaders like Spiro himself, “Mankind will attain superabundance of the fruits of its labors, will plan its own history, will gradually gain mastery over the globe…” (p. 1077).
Spiro could read German and Russian in addition to English, and he has perused thousands of old books and especially old newspapers, apparently all in the Reference Division of the New York Public Library. Whenever he saw something that he liked he would carefully note it and cite it in his book. As he himself explains the method in his preface:
In the body of the work for example, we cite a parenthetical remark by Lenin which, to our knowledge, has never been used as source material, and which is of greater value to an investigator of the true history of the Bolshevik State than a shelf of histories produced either by the bourgeoisie or by any historians of that State. (p. 14)
Spiro had no more critical sense about such sources than Faurisson and seemed to think that something printed in an old newspaper, if it tended to confirm his own convictions about history, constituted proof positive of the rightness of his cause. It would never occur to him to consult the work of the expert historians on a given subject, let alone to weigh one source against another. He was a completely self-educated erudite as well as a ceaseless polemicist and self-righteous moralist. Perhaps, had he acquired some sense of balance along the way, he could indeed have become what he thought he had become: an important thinker.
With all that Marlen-Spiro was a rather amiable old crank, and I think that the same can be said for the Flat Earthers, “Marlenites” all. If I now suggest that Chomsky and Faurisson are also adepts of the Marlen method of historiography I must immediately add that Spiro’s writings, with all their faults, were free of malice; there was vigorous polemic but there was no hate or vituperation. For these we must look to Professor Chomsky and his neo-Nazis associates.
In any case, Chomsky only gives the faintest of nods to Marlenism in his autobiographical musings. His real political mentors, he says, are Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, Anton Pannekoek, and some others. (68) These writers are the founders of “Council Communism,” and, as it happens, the very ones whom the “revisionist” La Vieille Taupe also claims as among its guides and teachers. Chomsky and VT thus have common professed ideological roots, Council Communism, and Chomsky is less than forthright when he suppresses this ideological tie in his autobiographical sketch and elsewhere.
But what is Council Communism? (69)
The beginnings lie in a small sect of left-wing, oppositionist German Communists in the 1920′s who were in revolt against Moscow’s domination of the German Communist party. Basing themselves partly on the anti-Bolshevist writings of Rosa Luxemburg, the group developed profound differences with the Communist International on organizational matters. It rejected the notion of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as exercised by a party or state, advocating, instead, independent councils of workers as the government of socialism. Under the influence of writers like Paul Mattick and Karl Korsch (both of whom emigrated to the United States where they died after the war), Council Communists became fierce opponents of Stalin, were persecuted by both Stalin and Hitler, and in general maintained standards of political ethics that were widely admired.
Council Communists were much more consistent than Trotskyists in their opposition to Bolshevist tyranny but they shared certain attitudes with both Trotskyists and anarchists during the Second World War. Wherever they could exist in Europe and America, these little groups and grouplets held to a radical anti-war position; they thought that neither the Axis nor the Allies merited their support. Unlike most of the Trotskyist groups, both Council Communists and the anarchists applied this anti-war position to the Soviet Union as well as to the West and the Axis. But none of these groups, and nobody in them, had anything but hatred for the Nazis. They all supported the resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, and culturally and practically, insofar as they had any influence anywhere, they were part of the overall anti-Nazi front of all decent people. The current pro-Nazi position of La Vieille Taupe is, as far as I know, the first time that a group with authentically left-wing origins has broken this front.
The history of La Vieille Taupe has been told by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Alain Finkielkraut. (70) A group of ex-Trotskyists led by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort broke with Bolshevism in the late 1940′s to start a movement called Socialisme ou Barbarie (71) with ideas broadly resembling those of the Council Communists. Many splits and mergers later, toward the end of the 1960′s, one of the resulting grouplets called itself La Vieille Taupe. By about 1970, VT began to develop ideas and activities that contrast very sharply with any of its ideological ancestors. It had inherited a thorough-going rejection of “bourgeois” society, and had inherited also a tendency to equate “capitalist tyranny” with “fascism.” But now, partly under the influence of certain ultra-leftist Italians (Bordigists), it began to reject the one article of faith that had hitherto been a common denominator for everyone on the left: anti-Fascism.
At first it was a matter of declaring Nazism as no worse than the “bourgeois” capitalism of the West, of finding the Axis as no more guilty than the Allies of crimes against the working class. Such, roughly, were the ideas of the first anti-Semitic writer whom Vieille Taupe saw fit to promote: the ex-Communist, ex-concentration camp inmate Paul Rassinier, now deceased (“Revisionists” from Paris to California still accord him pride of place as the father of their particular branch of knowledge). But going from Rassinier on to Faurisson, whom VT discovered in 1978 and has promoted ever since, the group became more and more openly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi, a process which reached a sort of apogee in 1986 when it published the 520-page screed of one of the most strident of the German post-War Nazis, Wilhelm Stäglich.
In preparation for this essay I corresponded with some veterans of Council Communism and other far-left wing groups in France and elsewhere. My informants were unanimous in their observations that Guillaume and his Vieille Taupe, apart from his two or three tiny fronts groups, are absolutely and completely alone in this trajectory from anti-Stalinist radicalism to neo-Nazism. As one particularly knowledgeable correspondent put it: “Neither the Trotskyists nor the Council Communists can be held even indirectly responsible for Guillaume’s wanderings.” Authentic Council Communists will not have anything to do with him. Paul Mattick was one of the respected thinkers of this movement, and his son, Paul Mattick, Jr., wrote to me as follows: “A few years ago, Guillaume offered to publish a French translation of my father’s last book, but we (my mother and I) of course refused him the right, as we do not want to be associated with these crazy people.”
Estimates of the number of Guillaume followers range from about ten to about thirty. Veterans of the left wing shun him, scholars laugh at him. But Guillaume does have two things going for him. First, as we saw, he seems to have ample finances; second, he has Noam Chomsky.
***
The safety and welfare of the State of Israel mean a great deal to most Jews today no matter where they happen to live. There is a minority to whom Israel does not matter much, and an even smaller minority who are critical of both Israel and the Zionist enterprise. And after we have thought of all these categories and try very hard, we can find still others: there is an individual here or there who hates Israel so much that he is willing to aid the neo-Nazis in an attempt to dismantle the State. There is the sad Alfred Lilienthal, tireless pro-Arab propagandist and speaker at neo-Nazi conventions; there is the eccentric Dr. Howard Stein who translates Julius Streicher’s propaganda into psychobabble; and there is Noam Chomsky.
Some individual Jews have always turned against their own people. We call such people “self-haters” after the title of some biographical sketches describing such unfortunates during the Weimar republic. (72) It is of course anyone’s inalienable right, in a free society, to be a self-hater, and most such cases are sad rather than interesting. The psychology of how and why a person reaches that stage, especially when that person has had the benefit of every privilege of Western society, is not something that I can claim to understand. All I can do here is to demonstrate the methods, the ways and means, of Chomsky’s crusade against Israel and the Jews.
The Alleged “Documentary” Basis of Anti-Zionism
Chomsky’s most ambitious book about the Jews and Israel, published in 1983, is entitled The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. It purports to review the history and current status of the Arab-Israel dispute as well as the role of the United States in it. Like other political writings of Chomsky’s, this one has been widely praised by his supporters for its wealth of “facts” and documentation. As we have seen, too, the book is featured as a prized item on the book lists of organized anti-Semitism.
The violence between Arabs and Jews ÂÂ who did what to whom and when ÂÂ is naturally a field of much contention among those who write about the two peoples. Two events in the modern history of Arab-Jewish relations have most particularly demanded the attention of both scholarly and propagandistic writers: the riots of 1929 in Hebron and elsewhere, and the War of Independence in 1948. Enough about these is known to serve as touchstones for those who would write rationally about Arabs and Jews. I propose to examine Chomsky’s treatment of these two events, not only to study his point of view but also to see whether his methods conform to a modicum of scholarly objectivity.
The 1929 Violence
Chomsky devotes two paragraphs, one of main text and one long footnote, to the 1929 events. The text, on page 90, reads as follows:
The [Arabs] never accepted the legitimacy of [Balfour's] point of view, and resisted in a variety of ways. They repeatedly resorted to terrorist violence against Jews. The most extreme case was in late August 1929, when 133 Jews were massacred. The “most ghastly incident” was in Hebron, where 60 Jews were killed, most of them from an old Jewish community, largely anti-Zionist; the Arab police “stood passively by while their fellow Moslems moved into the town and proceeded to deeds which would have been revolting among animals,” and a still greater slaughter was prevented only by the bravery of one member of the vastly undermanned British police. (4) Many were saved by Muslim neighbors.*
I have shown the footnote references ÂÂ one marked (4), the other with an asterisk ÂÂ as they appear in Chomsky’s original. Footnote (4) is found on page 169, and says “Ibid., pp. 109-10, 123,” a reference to Crossroads to Israel by Christopher Sykes. The footnote marked by an asterisk is found on the bottom of pages 90 and 91 and reads:
* The massacre followed a demonstration organized at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to counter “Arab arrogance” ÂÂ “a major provocation even in the eyes of Jewish public opinion” (Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, p. 96). See Sheean, in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, for a detailed eyewitness account. This provocation was organized by Betar, the youth movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist organization, which is the precursor of Begin’s Herut, the central element in the Likud coalition. The very name, “Betar,” reflects the cynicism of this fascist-style movement, which, in Flapan’s words, described Hitler “as the saviour of Germany, Mussolini as the political genius of the century,” and often acted accordingly. The name is an acronym for “Brith Yosef Trumpeldor” (“The Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor”). Trumpeldor was killed defending the northern settlement of Tel Hai from Bedouin attackers; Jabotinsky “opposed the Labour call for mobilization to help the threatened settlements” (Flapan, p. 104).
Chomsky here acknowledges that a slaughter of the Jews of Hebron had taken place and he borrows words from Sykes to show that this had been “ghastly.” He writes the word “ghastly” and his reproduction of the word ÂÂ though borrowed from Sykes and in quotation marks ÂÂ may well be used later by him and his friends as proof of his sensitivity to Jewish suffering. As we have seen, Chomsky is fond of such self-exculpating formulas.
But Chomsky is also quick to give us two separate sets of justification for the Arab assassins at Hebron. The first comes at the very beginning of the main paragraph: the killings were part of the “resistance” of Arabs against the Balfour plan for a Jewish national home. (73) The second is more elaborate and takes up the whole of the asterisked footnote: it seems that the killings were “provoked” by a “fascist-style” Jewish youth organization, Betar.
How does Chomsky document his charge of “provocation?”
He cites three references in this footnote: a) Simha Flapan concerning the import of Betar’s demonstration in Jerusalem; b) Vincent Sheean, the “eye witness” to the same demonstration; and finally c) Flapan again, this time concerning the nature of Betar.
a) Betar’s demons
There is nothing more cowardly or foolish than ad hominem attacks like this. It’s sole value is in its ironic humor. If Chomsky were the man Kerstein claims him to be, he would sue for libel. He’d have a pretty good case, too.
both bin Laden and Hugo Chavez endorse his work. While clearly (despite my intellectual misgivings about Chomsky) this is not Chomsky's fault or a direct indictment of his scholarship, it is still kind of funny. I wonder if they can write blurbs for upcoming works?
Of course, they are both psychopaths with a Sadean fetish for mass murder, tyranny and death.
Benjamin, this is ludicrous. I spend half my time on this site arguing against sloppy moral equivalence; do I need one of my own bloggers resorting to the tactic now, too?
I'm no fan of Chomsky but anyone who instinctively does the opposite of whatever bin Laden wants is just as enthrall to his influence as someone who actually follow the nutcase. Â
If bin Laden endorses Nike do I have to wear Reebok? If Hitler liked blue, do I have to paint my house green? If I don't, does it make me unpatriotic? Am I then "emboldening the enemy," as the neocons love to say? Â
Chomsky is a washed out communist with nothing worthwhile to offer, but if you want to attach his ideas, do it directly rather than send cheap shots based on his undesired fans.Â
–Z
I still say that Benjamin and Batya are the same person.
Dumbest.Post.Ever
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