The Observer’s Chomsky fetish
Chomsky is big enough to put up with this kind of rubbish, but can the Guardian or Observer, the most influential left-wing journal in the English-speaking world, really not find one journalist who doesn’t have a visceral dislike of Noam Chomsky? Sadly, but maybe predictably, for a newspaper made up of liberals pickled in the self-righteous playfields of Oxbridge liberalism, I guess they don’t
By Matt Kennard on Monday, July 5th, 2010 - 1,283 words.
New Chomsky title
Another Chomsky book, another bilious review in the Guardian/Observer.
It really staggers the mind that the newspaper that markets itself as a leading liberal voice in the English-speaking world continues to denigrate – in the most obtuse and ad hominem manner – the most influential and celebrated left-wing intellectual in the world today.
In the Observer yesterday was a “review” of the new Chomsky work Hopes and Prospects by one Rafael Behr. I must admit I haven’t read the book yet, but there’s not much indication that Mr Behr has either, so I don’t feel too presumptuous having a little look at the worthless piece of flatulence Behr produced.
As the chief leader writer of the Observer, Behr is the gatekeeper of the Oxbridge liberalism that his publication oversees, so maybe it wasn’t a surprise he doesn’t like Prof Chomsky: a lot of his esteemed colleagues have forged this path before, although this was write-up was particularly bad it has to be said.
As tantrums go, this was the most blubbering and weepy I’ve seen for at least a while.
I try to ignore reviews of Chomsky from the Guardian and Observer. But sometimes it’s like reading the back of the shampoo bottle when you’re on the bog because there’s nothing else to read. You know it’s going to be boring and formulaic, but there’s nothing else about so you have a gander. This Sunday was one of those shampoo bottle moments.
But let’s start at the beginning. This one is a real peach.
Behr starts by saying that tells us that: “US policymakers in the early part of this decade genuinely thought that liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein was a noble thing to do.” He doesn’t mention that the same people were friends with Saddam during the 1980s. But point taken, maybe Chomsky should have written: “Donald Rumseld really, really believed in taking democracy to Iraq and got really upset when far-left radicals accused him of not caring about the Iraqi people. He could never understand how he had sold Saddam chemical weapons to massacre the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign.”
He says Noam Chomsky is “off the scale completely”. Yeah, if you work for the Observer, sure.
He denigrates Chomsky for writing a “slightly different version of familiar hits”, the imputation being that saying opposite things from year to year is a sign of sophistication; if he had done a Hitchens and supported the devastation of Iraq, like the Observer, that would have been a sign of his balance, obviously.
It’s worth noting as an aside that the review doesn’t contain one quote, which is par for the course when the Obs liberals “unpick” Chomsky, straw man is much easier. Even so it means I don’t trust Behr when he writes: “The worst catastrophe to befall our species, Chomsky implies, was Columbus’s collision with an uncharted continent in 1492.” If he implies it, why not quote him so we can judge ourselves?
Some would say that the continent was “charted” by the people who happened to live there, but let’s ignore that.
Laughably, Behr castigates Chomsky for his “reluctance to adopt the mainstream vocabulary of “globalisation” – i.e. the vocabularly of the IMF and the World Bank. Oh, and the Observer, obviously. Because remember the “word implies everyone’s inclusion in a unified economic enterprise.” Excuse me? The word implies that if you read official literature from the IMF, probably not if you are a farmer in the developing world having your livelihood destroyed by this same “inclusive” consensus.
Some of what Behr characterises Chomsky’s ideas as is not straw man. And that’s the best bit of the review. I’m nodding my head when he writes (with a patronising tone, of course): “Free markets are an illusion” and the “US imperial model that emerged in the 20th century… borrowed heavily from the earlier British one”.
Of course, we can’t believe all that. Why? Because, Behr tells us, it’s a “cripplingly bleak philosophy”. Give us some sun, Chommo! But wait, isn’t the book called Hopes and Prospects? Is that a marketing ploy, or does Chomsky mention some of the places that hope is emerging, and you left it out, because it didn’t fit into your crumbling narrative?
But Behr is not finished yet. This boy has a straw man to build, and no “far left intellectual” is gonna stop him finishing up. His tantrum sinks so far by the end he reverts to the oldest and most hollow anti-Chomsky tropes. Its hard to read at this point, like a live version of an old Guardian review of an old Chomsky book. He asks Chomsky “Globalisation under the Chinese Communist party, anyone?” or “Anti-American exile in Tehran?”
Like that’s the only option. If you criticise a rapacious economic system that ruins countless lives all over the poor world through a rigged trade system you by definition support Chinese tyranny or Ahmadinejad. Good one.
But Behr has further to go. Behr would be placated he said if Chomsky showed “some occasional flicker of admiration for the achievements of western civilization”. Is this guy serious? I suppose, maybe Chomsky could write: “The US overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954 unleashing a 40 year civil war, which saw 200,000 murdered and a nation in such devastation it has never recovered. Oh, but also don’t forget that in 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven finished his Ninth Symphony.”
Now Behr is getting a bit teary. He implores Chomsky at the last to find it in his heart to recognise “the irony that he owes his considerable success to a system he despises”. Come on, Noam. Stop criticising the destruction of Iraq, the rise of the far-right in America, the iniquities of the “drug war”. Go do something useful! Talk about how much you love baseball and beef jerky!
“Does it bother him, perhaps, that he has lived the American dream?” is the line Behr finishes with, his pen delivering the final crushing blow to Chomsky’s intellectual edifice, rendering his 100′s of books useless and devoid of merit.
Behr’s tantrum is staggeringly empty of intellectual value; so bad in fact that it’s impossible to decipher from the review any of what is in the book apart from some strange cartoon character drawn up in the Observer news room. What it is useful for is a demonstration of what happens to the gatekeepers of liberal discourse when someone sits “a few mm’s to left of them” and upsets the righteous little bubble they reside in.
A couple of years back the Guardian sent its hard-hitting resident expert on theatre musicals, Emma Brockes, to do an interview that ended up so packed with lies and defamation she had to miraculously lose the tape of the interview when asked to produce it by the newspaper’s internal investigation into the shambles. The Guardian pulled it from their website, but you can still read it on Chomsky’s website.
In a 2006 review of Failed States by foreign editor, Peter Beaumont, it’s a similar story. Beaumont asks as he hits his crescendo: “Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?”
Chomsky is big enough to put up with this kind of rubbish, but can the Guardian or Observer, the most influential left-wing journal in the English-speaking world, really not find one journalist who doesn’t have a visceral dislike of Noam Chomsky? Sadly, but maybe predictably for a newspaper made up of journalists pickled in the self-righteous playfields of Oxbridge liberalism, I guess they don’t.
Oh, I didn’t mention Nick Cohen reviewed Hegemony or Survival in 2003. I can’t even be bothered to open that can of beans.
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Matt Kennard
United Kingdomkennardm
Matt Kennard graduated from the Journalism School at Columbia University as a Toni Stabile Investigative scholar in 2008. He has written for the Guardian, Salon and the Chicago Tribune, amongst others. In 2006 he won the Guardian Student Feature Writer of the Year Award.
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Yeah, I saw that review – pretty pathetic. Reads like a copy-n-paste of non-specific bits from other Chomsky-bashing reviews. It also encourages the "how dare he criticise our hero" brigade, which also tends not to shed any light on anything. And so we have this stupid back-n-forth between those who hate Chomsky and those who worship him. It wouldn't be so bad if the reviewer made points about specifics which could be debated, but the review is just a collection of petulant generalisations.
Getting away from all that, I may as well take this opportunity to plug Lakoff's book, 'The Political Mind', which has some *worthwhile* criticism of Chomsky, from a somewhat different perspective. Perhaps those who both worship and hate Chomsky could gain from an altogether different perspective on things, instead of a rehash of the same old bickering.
yeah nothing wrong with thoughtful criticism, but this is just trash, it's quite unbelievable it was printed to be honest. i don't think that defending chomsky from attack is akin to hero worship, he's the only mainstream voice saying these things, so it's worth watching out for the slanders for him.
Well, obviously it's not "unbelievable" that the review was printed, despite it being rubbish. (Think about it).
it's unbelievable to the extent that they've backtracked from all their previous little tantrums, but yet they still assign people they know are against him. or at least its unbelievable they don't tell them to focus on the text, not go off on these irrelevant rants
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This review of a review is quite laughable, written by a manchild who believes himself to uphold all fundamental human values and civil rights. This boy has a straw man to build. Kennards tantrum is staggeringly empty of intellectual value.
is what way?
Vagueness, namecalling and pejorization hardly constitutes a valid argument. Give us some specifics, please, John.
Exactly,
I took those sentences from Kennards review. You'll find ad hominem attacks, namecalling, vagueness his specialty. Well put sempervirens!
"Of course it is important to be right about crimes. But it is also important to maintain a culture of open debate, where there isn’t just ad hominem attack flying around"
Kennard writes this in his responses, after he wrote the same sentences I pointed to above. Wow, this guy is completely delusional.
Cute. Intentional misreading of my post shows you lack integrity, John.
Hi Matt,
As a Chomsky fan, and a journalist, I wonder what you make of the criticisms I posted here recently: http://danielsimpson.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/a-c…
Presumably, you think facts are sacred. In which case, what of Chomsky's Balkan circumlocutory misrepresentations, and Chris Hedges's interest in fluffing Chomsky instead of asking him why he denies what Hedges personally witnessed?
Best regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
I read the article you wrote, and we published it on CF, it got a lot feedback. I thought it was interesting and generated some light. I'm not against criticising Chomsky; in fact, I enjoy reading thoughtful criticism, it's so much of it just rhetoric with no value, it's just boring, like this review.
On the Balkans, I think his views are sometimes misrepresented because of the massive industry of anti-Serb propaganda. That's not to say that Milosevic and his generals didn't commit horrific crimes, I know they did. But to question the narrative set us by the NATO powers doesn't make you by definition a supporter of Serb nationalism.
And pointing out the support for the KLA from various quarters and other reasons for the NATO assault on Serbia doesn't make you an apologist.
Thanks Matt. Our article didn't misrepresent Chomsky: we showed how he misrepresents a number of incontestable facts, for example about the concentration camps in Bosnia. Chris Hedges has told the truth about them, but didn't want to ask Chomsky to do the same. Don't you think Chomsky should? When people ask him to, so that his many readers aren't misled, he's plain rude. Perhaps you should reread the article, rather than bringing the KLA into it.
I reread those pieces, and the first thing that strikes is that there’s literally one quote from Chomsky in the lot of them. I still don't quite understand what the beef is, is it purely that he's defended diana johnstone, and is guilty by association for things she's said.
i'm not trying to be facetious, i would just list some quotes of things that are factually wrong that he hasn't taken back ….
While our three articles on the Hedges interview of Chomsky do not quote Chomsky extensively, I referred in mine (the first article) to my compilation of Chomsky's misleading and false statements on the Balkan wars. You'll find that at http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Chomsky-denial… where I refute each of the numerous Chomsky statements I quote. I hope you will read that article and then begin to understand what the beef is.
Those statements by Chomsky cover Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia (and the LM controversy); Srebrenica; and Kosovo. For all Chomsky's acumen and valuable contributions on other subjects, he has not displayed an understanding of the key issue at stake in the former Yugoslavia, nor has he ever corrected his misstatements on the subject. Rather, he defensively digs himself into a deeper hole when challenged.
Thanks Roger — but that link's not working for me?
Did you and Daniel support the NATO bombing of Belgrade?
Hi again, it looks like a comma appended itself to the URL. Try:
http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Chomsky-denial…
I can't speak for Roger, but he's commented on the bombing in passing here – these are the relevant lines:
The genocide didn’t “disappear” in 2006; it was prevented in 1999. While Milosevic had a plan for mass killings and total expulsions of Albanians from Kosovo – a plan already underway by the time of the intervention – the plan could not be completed, due to NATO’s action. NATO and Clinton saved the Albanians of Kosovo, whether or not we like the way it was done, or the way the media portrayed it.
Lest I be accused of supporting “humanitarian intervention,” I will be clear that I do not believe humanitarian concerns were the primary motivation for NATO’s Kosovo intervention. Certainly there was pressure to prevent another Rwanda or Bosnia. But Western governments are entirely capable of ignoring humanitarian crises. NATO got involved because Milosevic was destabilizing the whole region, interrupting business as usual, and on track to start a war that could have involved NATO members on opposing sides. NATO’s rescue of the Albanians was a fortunate side effect.
http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=55…
Frankly, he sums it up pretty well. I was pretty ignorant in 1999 and didn't have a clear opinion. It was obvious that NATO was self-serving, and that humanitarian concerns don't trump others in policymaking. But it did seem that Something Needed To Be Done. I didn't support bombing because I couldn't see how that would solve the underlying problems (about which I knew little in any great detail), while killing innocent people in the meantime (as happened). Nevertheless, whatever any of us say now is kind of immaterial.
Hi once more – hopefully Roger's compilation will clarify the point.
If Chomsky were just standing up for freedom of speech (and therefore prepared to say very clearly that Johnstone, Herman and others are making things up, but of course free to do so), there'd be no "beef".
However, he not only doesn't do that (he and I exchanged an absurd number of words about Johnstone before he refused to in 2005), he goes further. He's still endorsing the LM lies as accurate (see for example the recent exchange with David Campbell, who's done work on the evidence and sent it to Chomsky, as linked in our articles).
Frankly (and I'm not trying to be facetious here either), as a reporter, I'd have thought you'd either have asked for supporting evidence before, or checked for yourself that it existed, if you doubted it.
Sorry, Matt – what is there about Chomsky's repetition of untruths about Trnopolje that is being misrepresented? If he got it wrong, it's open to him to correct his mistakes if he recognises them as such. If he doesn't, that's his position.
You seem to be suggesting that Chomsky's correct in what he says about Trnopolje and he's simply been misrepresented by anti-Serb propagandists. Where do you yourself believe the truth lies?
Can you give me a quote please? He supported LM being sued by a massive corporate news entity in the High Court, where is he repeating untruths? please provide quotes.
[Not clear what's happened most of my answer seems to have disappeared - will try again and break it up]
Matt, I'm sure you're aware that Chomsky has continued to support LM long after the High Court jury found that LM was wrong. You've obviously read the Brockes interview and whatever its failings as an interview Chomsky's equivocal answers on the subject are still quite revealing. LM lost the case when the court heard the evidence of the doctor responsible for treating the brutalised prisoners at Trnopolje. The jury awarded the journalists very substantial damages. LM just showed how a small organisation is perfectly capable of defending itself by folding, throwing off the chains of damages owed and re-emerging free of responsibilities as Spiked Online.
Chomsky could have justified his argument to Amnesty International, he could have done so to David Campbell. Instead he simply blustered. He falls back on Philip Knightley's speculative musings and then quits the field, leaving it to Herman and Peterson to try to make the case for him, blethering on about their fantasy Bosnian Genocide Lobbies and Thought Police, and now to you as well talking about the massive industry of anti-Serb propaganda. I'm afraid I'm not an industry but I do know some people who experienced terrible things at Serb hands that are not what I would describe as propaganda.
If you want the proof, look at the collusive interview he gave for RTS (Radio-Television Serbia) Online in 2006, six years on from the LM case. It starts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EehgwdJldeU. Chomsky's own transcript of the interview is at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20060425.htm. The most relevant section starts around one minute into Part 2 of 4 at http://www.youtube.com/user/crucifiedkosovo#p/a/u…. Search in Chomsky's transcript using the word "fraufulent".
Listen to Chomsky holding forth with authority. He's quite clear, he and his interviewer agree that ITN’s image of the emaciated Fikret Alic behind barbed wire was “fraudulent”. He dismissively refers to Alic as "the thin man [and then there was the fat man]". He's not interested in the High Court evidence or evidence from the trials of the individuals who were part of the Prijedor system. You'd think he's intimately familiar with his subject.
[Trying to post again, apologies if this ends up as multiples]
Chomsky could have justified his argument to Amnesty International, he could have done so to David Campbell. Instead he simply blustered. He falls back on Philip Knightley's speculative musings and then quits the field, leaving it to Herman and Peterson to try to make the case for him, blethering on about their fantasy Bosnian Genocide Lobbies and Thought Police, and now to you as well talking about the massive industry of anti-Serb propaganda. I'm afraid I'm not an industry but I do know some people who experienced terrible things at Serb hands that are not what I would describe as propaganda.
Chomsky can either justify his confident opinion about Trnopolje or he can accept he is mistaken. He won't do either. Instead all that happens is a troupe of hagiographers who ought to know better defend his right to rewrite history. As I asked – where do you believe the truth about Trnopolje lies?
Background:
For a detailed study of the camp system, and a dissection of LM's discredited claims see David Campbell’s two-part study: Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism. http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/… http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/…
The raw footage filmed by ITN at Omarska and Trnopolje is available on YouTube. There are eight further clips in the series (search for Srpski logori smrti – Prijedor)
For a description of the impact of Dr Merdzanic’s evidence at the libel trial, see two reports for the Guardian by Julia Hartley-Brewer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/mar/15/medialaw…
Dr Merdzanic also appears in “A Town called Kozarac” (Ed Harriman’s 1993 film for Channel 4’s Dispatches program), also available in five separate parts on YouTube. His interview spans the end of Part 3 / start of Part 4. It is worth comparing this with another interview of his in “Judgment”, an RTS joint production, which purports to debunk the evidence for the camps while showing more emaciated prisoners, the reality of enclosure and the eloquent message of Merdzanic’s body language.
All the ICTY Prijedor camp judgments (in particular those relating to Milomir Stakic and Dusko Tadic), are available online with transcripts of the evidence. http://www.icty.org/action/cases/4
Finally, “the thin man” Fikret Alic describes the reality of his imprisonment and survival, in an interview for Bosnian Television (with English subtitles). http://www.youtube
It's extraordinarily difficult leaving Comments – I've posted eveyrhting 4 and 5 times. Apologies for losing the link to the Fikret Alic interview – here goes again – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2sO-XcI9FQ
Hopefully it'ill survive the posting intact this time.
Hi Owen,
I think the comments system will filter stuff that has a number of links as spam protection….. could that be it?
That sounds the most probable explanation. Breaking it up into pieces seems to have worked in the end.
I hope you cottoned on that you're meant to search on "fraudulent", not "fraufulent", apologies for miskeying.
Plenty of examples here, as linked in the article you've reread:
http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Chomsky-denial…
I am not familiar with Chomsky's statements about the Balkans, but whatever they may be does not affirm or negate anything else he has written. I believe that the attempt to hang someone's entire credibility because they may be wrong about one or two things is rather fatuous. Any given claim stands or falls on it own merit, so let's stick to the merit, or lack thereof, of "Hopes And Prospects," unless you want to make a case for dismissing an author's entire body of work because they make an erroneous claim. If you prefer the latter, then go ahead, I'm all ears.
I would think Chomsky's alleged errors about the Balkans would be a subject for a separate article, not a review of "Hopes And Prospects."
Or I should say, "a review of a review of "Hopes And Prospects."
Hi sempervirens. You wrote:
'I would think Chomsky's alleged errors about the Balkans would be a subject for a separate article, not a review of "Hopes And Prospects."'
Fair enough, but I wasn't suggesting that anything anyone writes ought to mention them. It was noteworthy that Chris Hedges ignored them, because he reported facts that Chomsky denies. I wonder if Matt would do the same, were his own reporting (and first-hand knowledge) similarly rubbished?
Chomsky has some insightful things to say. But you need to read him as carefully as he says you should read the New York Times. I say so having worked for the latter, and resigned in disgust.
http://danielsimpson.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/blo…
If you're not familiar with the background, I suggest reading up on it. Some examples here to be going on with:
http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Chomsky-denial…
Matt,
the best response to the likes of Behr and Cohen is to write your own review..Publish it here on CF.
I am not surprised when Chomsky gets criticised on issues like Iraq War or globalisatin. That just means his books have worked. The kind of stuff he writes about, and the opinions that he has, he is surely not trying to win a popularity contest. It is meant to upset and ruffle a few feathers and that is exactly what it has done. Similar to how Arundhati Roy's works are reviewed in India.
Sorry, left off the link to the Fikret Alic interview with 60 Minuta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2sO-XcI9FQ.
I wrote to Kennard a couple of days ago pointing out that he appeared to be accusing my friend Emma Brockes (whose Chomsky interview was in 2005, not "a couple of years back") of fakery. I'm sufficiently old-fashioned a journalist to believe that writers who make such claims should be prepared to back them up and to withdraw them if they can't.
Kennard has evidently chosen the third option of hoping the question will go away if he ignores it, which is why I'm posting it here. Taken with his complaints of the "massive industry of anti-Serb propaganda" and his incomprehension of the informed points raised by Daniel, Roger and Owen (none of whom, incidentally, shares my iniquitous Blairite politics), I'll know how seriously to take him when I see his name in future.
Hi Oliver,
Thanks for the date of the Brockes interview, will change accordingly. Just out of interest, as an "old-fashioned journalist" how many times have you done important interviews and then found you've lost the tape when asked to produce it?
On the other point. I don't find the points raised by Daniel, Roger and Owen to be incomprehensible. I just wanted specifics, and the link I was provided with is long, and will take me a while to get through.
You're digging yourself in deeper. Emma didn't "lose the tape when asked to produce it". John Willis, The Guardian's External Ombudsman, examined the whole affair of the Chomsky interview at the request of David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen and me. Willis's report stated:
"The original interview was tape recorded but unfortunately the tape has been partially recorded over. A transcript of sorts exists but the most contentious section of the interview was not available on tape. No one seems to doubt that this was genuine." http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/may/25/leader…
It's clear you haven't troubled to read either the interview or Willis's report, but don't let that stop you from accusing The Guardian and The Observer of being formulaic. More important, your insinuation against Emma that she engaged in deception is shared by, on the evidence of Willis's report, no one. As far as I'm aware not even Chomsky claims that Emma attributed words to him that he didn't utter.
In short, you've failed to conduct even the minimal requirements of investigative journalism – viz. reading publicly available sources – and thereby produced an article that is arguably legally actionable and certainly baseless and incompetent.
This is before we even get into the matter of this "massive industry of anti-Serb propaganda", a phrase that suggests your investigations into the Balkan wars of the 1990s might also do with expansion.
Still looks fishy to me, that the interview leads to an investigation and "the most contentious section" has been taped over. You could also say lost (in a figuarative sense). "I did an interview last week and happened to tape over the section I needed and lost it."
"As far as I'm aware not even Chomsky claims that Emma attributed words to him that he didn't utter."
Well as he didn't record it he couldn't prove it one way or the other as there's no record anymore. He's a smart guy but he can't remember verbatim everything he says in interviews.
As for anti-Serb propaganda, I don't know why that's so controversial. When a collection of nations go to war, usually its media organs start churning out reams of condemnation of the official enemy. Surely you'd agree with that. Some of it might be true, but some it might not.
OK, the discussion is at an impasse. It's fruitless to try reasoning with that sort of obtuseness and evasiveness, and I'll merely summarise the outcome.
You claimed that Emma had engaged in fakery, yet you didn't trouble to read either her interview or the Ombudsman's report into it. Now that I've remarked on the baselessness of your claim that she had dishonestly pretended to have lost the tape, you prefer to brazen it out rather than correct yourself. Thus you've changed your story, while pretending you haven't, to insinuate that Emma deliberately taped over incriminating evidence. And as you have no grounds for saying this whatsoever – you've no idea even whom the recording equpiment belonged to, let alone the sequence of events – you feebly resort to a position that can't be refuted, viz. that it "still looks fishy to me".
That's not how journalism works. In our profession we assemble evidence, and if we haven't got it then we don't pretend otherwise. And you haven't got it. More to the point, instead of admitting that you've got this wrong, you're now spinning a hypothesis that literally nobody has ever argued, viz. that the reason Chomsky didn't accuse Emma of fakery is that he wanted to but couldn't prove it. Can you not grasp that, in his complaints to the Guardian after that interview, Chomsky never said that Emma had falsely attributed quotations to him? No participant in that affair claimed it, which is why John Willis wrote as he did.
It's a secondary point in this discussion, but if you regard the experience of Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s as "a collection of nations going to war", then I have a pretty good idea of the sum of your knowledge of recent political history.
"Looks fishy to me" sounds like the same sort of suggestion of professional miscoonduct without solid evidence that Chomsky himself goes in for the Brockes interview, when he tells her that Ed Vulliamy probably got it wrong about Trnopolje.
It is ironic indeed to witness Komm assume a position of authority on matters of journalistic integrity. Komm, who is seemingly incapable – insofar as I’ve read him – to make substantiated arguments.
Curious readers would do well to read the exchange between Chomsky and Komm.
Here you will find Komm’s “critique” of Chomsky, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2005/11/forandagainstchomsky/
Chomsky’s reply, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200601–.htm
Finally, Komm’s 250 word rejoinder, which revealingly ignores most of the points raised by Chomsky, falling instead into characteristic redundancy. For instance, his obdurate obsession with Chomsky’s appropriate prescription -given the context, which Chomsky describes in his reply – for American society, namely “a kind of denazification”.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/02/7302-letters/
One will find, I think, that it is “fruitless to try reasoning with that sort of obtuseness and evasiveness” that so characterizes the work of Fromm. For those that wish to recount in more detail the exchange – I have you in mind, Oliver – well, what better time and place?
Lastly, about the article, well written, funny, and aside from what is utterly trivial given the subject matter, the issue of Emma Brockes, spot on.
Of course the 250-word rejoinder ignored most of Chomsky's points. I only had 250 words in which to respond to him, which allowed me space to point out one extraordinary characteristic of his article. The magazine had already carried my attack on Chomsky and his reply, and it was kind of David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect – who was under no obligation to continue the discussion – to allow me in addition a letter to make that particular point against Chomsky that I believed needed to be said.
One criticism that I'd made in my original piece was that Chomsky was dishonest in his handling of his source material. In his reply he had sought to counter this charge by claiming that I'd misquoted him – yet I'd quoted him accurately, as I was able to prove with a page reference to the work in question. So in answer to the charge of dishonesty, Chomsky lied to the readers of Prospect – directly, provably and and without any possibility of dispute.
As for Kennard's article, I've already said to him, in the email he was diffident about acknowledging, that it's one thing for our respective views of Chomsky to differ. But if he makes a charge of deceit against a working journalist, he'd better be prepared to defend it; and if he can't, then he should withdraw it. What's become obvious from this exchange is that Kennard was clueless on his subject subject, had failed to check his thesis, and lacks the integrity to acknowledge his error, as evinced by his unsophisticated evasions. If he persists as a journalist, then that sort of behaviour is liable to prove costly to him and his employer, and to undermine any serious points he has to make, which on the evidence of this article will be rare.
Convenient, isn’t it, that the concision demanded of you in an editorial allowed you to gloss over and ignore many of Chomsky’s points. You claim that you “believe that writers who make such claims should be prepared to back them up and to withdraw them if they can't.” You have obviously not backed up a number of the charges Chomsky refuted; do you therefore withdraw them?
Let’s take a quick example to be more concrete. You accuse Chomsky of providing “judgment without evidence,” with regards to his view that that bombing Afghanistan would likely cause millions of Afghans to starve. The inconvenient fact is that it’s not his view at all, something that is smack in the face obvious if you bothered to read the man you incessantly attempt to discredit and slander. Thus, Chomsky observed that “it takes real talent to miss the extensive evidence cited in the few pages I devoted to these matters.” Let’s hear what you have to say about, well, you… “In short, [I]'ve failed to conduct even the minimal requirements of investigative journalism – viz. reading publicly available sources – and thereby produced an article that is arguably legally actionable and certainly baseless and incompetent.”
I think, Oliver, before you condemn others for the very acts you yourself are so guilty, you should identify the blatant discrepancies between your work and the journalistic tenets you laud, and rise to the bar you so pompously set for others.
For all Kamm's bluster, his huge outrage is based on two points:
1. I said the interview was a couple of years ago; it was in 2005. Shock, horror.
2. I said she lost the tape, when in fact it had been taped it over. Shock, horror. (and it could have been read that way anyway)
3. I insinuated she lost the tape on purpose. Still strikes me as strange she would allow a contentious interview she had done to be taped over, after finding it had been investigated.
Kamm is a glorified proof reader, his modus vivendi is to bluster and bully his way on comment boards. It's really not worth engaging him, which is why I ignored his email. It's impossible to argue with him without him calling you stupid and unaware of the facts. It's very tedious.
P.s. probably what pisses him off the most is the Guardian ruled against him and took the article down.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/17/thegu…
Matt Kennard, Chomsky has posted his interview with Emma Brockes at his website. He has not retracted his observation that the believes Ed Vulliamy probably got his reporting of Trnopolje wrong. Do you believe that Chomsky is right about Trnopolje?
I assume that he kept the interview on his website as an example of ridiculous journalism.
Chomsky said he was "probably wrong", right? I don't have sufficient knowledge of the case to pass judgement.
Although I would say the mania of people on this board about this case and Chomsky's opinions on the Balkans does prove his point about how devout this debate has become.
The point about Chomsky and the Balkans is that he accuses others of tacit acquiescence in horrendous crimes and yet obscures the truth about the horrendous crimes himself. If you can't see that repeating untruths about crimes is secularly important and something slightly different from mania, God help the Financial Times.
You don't deal with the points people make, you slide over them by dealing with superficialities. You've acknowledged that you insinuated that Brockes had fiddled her interview and disposed of the materials. You demand evidence but you don't seem that bothered with it yourself. OK, say that you're not interested, by all means, but don't make out that you're a journalist, this is all playboy stuff.
You're only 26 so maybe you're not expected to know much about the Balkans and the Bosnian war, but please try and take serious issues seriously.
“If you can't see that repeating untruths about crimes is secularly important and something slightly different from mania, God help the Financial Times.”
Of course it is important to be right about crimes. But it is also important to maintain a culture of open debate, where there isn’t just ad hominem attack flying around. Chomsky is mercilessly attacked for one comment in which he doubted one bit of reporting, and defending the right to free speech of a scholar. He might be wrong, I don’t know because I don’t have the requisite knowledge of the incident to judge, but it helps if we can just maintain a level of civility.
“You don't deal with the points people make, you slide over them by dealing with superficialities.”
I’d say that was Kamm’s tactic. I have asked for the opposite, I wanted to get behind all the hysteria and look at the claims made against Chomsky, which I was provided a link to. I’m still working my way through.
“You've acknowledged that you insinuated that Brockes had fiddled her interview and disposed of the materials.”
Without being inside Brockes head, how can anyone disprove her claim?
“You demand evidence but you don't seem that bothered with it yourself. OK, say that you're not interested, by all means, but don't make out that you're a journalist, this is all playboy stuff.”
That’s complete rubbish. I didn’t say I wasn’t bothered with evidence. I’m not bothered with Kamm. He has a nasty history in which he has bullied and tried to end the career of a journalist Neil Clark for writing a bad review of his book. He supported the invasion of Iraq, and the massacres in Lebanon in 06 and Gaza in 08-09. He’s on a witch hunt.
I just don’t have time to debate with someone like that, I find his bullyboy tactics unsavoury. He can do his peacocking somewhere else.
“You're only 26 so maybe you're not expected to know much about the Balkans and the Bosnian war, but please try and take serious issues seriously.”
That’s a hollow point. Age doesn’t matter. I know enough about the Balkans and the Bosnian war. I just don’t know the specifics of the wrangle between Chomsky and Vuillamy. Is that too hard to understand?
No. What's hard to understand is why you're so flippant about serious subjects if that's not to do with age and unfamiliarity.
You seem to be saying that you're not interested in the need to provide evidence before you make assertions. In this world no-one has to disprove anything just because you say that it's so, you're the person who has to prove what you are claiming. If you can't, you can't simply find a sneaky way round the side door by insinuating it. Surely that's not the journalistic ethics they teach at the Columbia University Journalism Course?
And of course it's this side door insinuation that I object to in Chomsky. He has no personal knowledge and has done no personal research about what are matters of life and death. When someone like Marshall, Williams, Vulliamy, who's been there and seen it contradicts him he portrays them as unpfrofessional. because it suits his thesis he denies the terrible experiences that people have endured, and he tells them that he knows better than they know what that experience was.
That's why people are angry, an anger that you trivialise with your references to mania and devotion.
Forget the fact that it's the Balkans. Just remember that the place of which he speaks with such assurance is a place where people were murdered, raped and tortured. Certainly other people have been murdered raped and tortured elsewhere, but this is a particular location of which he speaks with authority, not hesitation, praising some journalists' work, justifying others' and denigrating others'.
It's not a subject on which he made just one passing comment (in which case how easy it would have been for him to deal with the matter if he had had the humility to acknowledge his essential ignorance on the subject) work), Does his discussion with Danilo Mandic suggest any hesitation born of uncertainty with an unfamiliar subject? In the Mandic interview it's Chomsky who picks up on the subject and refers back to the discussion of the issue in the Brockes interview a year previously. Chomsky' claims familiarity with LM position regarding Trnopolje and the work of Philip Knightley on the subject. He professes admiration for Diana Johnstone's work on the the Bosnian war which he described as outstanding – a meaningless puff unless he considered himself to have some familiarity with her subject. No, this wasn't one isolated comment, doubting one bit of reporting. Go back to the RTS interview and listen to the confidence of Chomsky's assertions.
Does an authority like Chomsky speak off the top of his head without knowing what he's saying or meaning what he says?
Chomsky never went to Trnopolje. He has never justified his comments with any evidence provided to him by people who were there. All he says flies in the face of the evidence offered by the people who were there. He can't and he won't substantiate his insinuations. For someone who has built a reputation for "telling the truth" to the powerful, to be accused of denigrating the experience of the oppressed by not telling the truth should be a very serious accusation, to be responded to seriously, rather than dismissed as what you seem to find the entertaining notion of a"holy issue".
If you are a serious journalist you should be taking this seriously, not flicking the substance of the issue off into the long grass . You don't seem to understand the difference between reporting facts and voicing guesses that fit your interpretation. It is important, it's what journalism boils down to.
Mike Darlington, you quoted Noam Chomsky's "We are All Complicit" in which he criticises Oliver Kamm for his own "standard reaction of tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" and observes that "in a free society we cannot plead fear in extenuation for silent complicity".
I disagree with Oliver Kamm's views in a number of areas, but certainly not with regard to his anger about Chomsky's distortion of the truth and his sanctimonious humbug. When it comes to "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" I hear those accusations against Kamm echoing in Chomsky's own tenacious commitment to the lie about the Prijedor camps.
Chomsky denies the reality of Trnopolje, he maligns the reporters who observed that reality, he disregards the eye-witness testimony and the findings of the courts, and above all, he never once acknowledges that behind Trnoplje itself was the main subject of the reporters' coverage, the death camp at Omarska. That – Omarska and the system of ethnic cleansing and genocide of which it was part – is the horrendous crime in which Chomsky remains tacitly acquiescent as he continues to defend LM's long-discredited arguments about Trnopolje.
As far as silent complicity is concerned, speaking from the comfort of his Boston office Chomsky had the opportunity to speak truth to power when he gave his interview for RTS. He severely criticised Serbia's Western enemies in the Balkan wars but instead of mentioning, even in passing, the Serbian government's record of atrocity and the contribution that RTS as the state propaganda machine had made to the horrors of ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, he continued to push the line that Trnoplje was just a refugee camp line and the emaciated condition of Fikret Alic and other arrivals acquired in Keraterm and elsewhere were just thinness, alongside examples of fatness.
Chomsky's not naive. The evidence is all there for him to inspect about murder, rape, torture and privation at Trnopolje, let alone the other camps in the system. He's been challenged on the subject enough times, over enough years. He knows that there's more to the reporting of the camps than an attempt to demonise the Serbs. He doesn't even challenge the evidence, he chooses to disregard it. Was Omarska a horrendous crime? Will Chomsky say anything about it? Or does he prefer to remain tacit? What was that about obtuseness and evasiveness?
Mike Darlington, you quoted Noam Chomsky's "We are All Complicit" in which he criticises Oliver Kamm for his own "standard reaction of tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" and observes that "in a free society we cannot plead fear in extenuation for silent complicity".
I disagree with Oliver Kamm's views in a number of areas, but certainly not with regard to his anger about Chomsky's distortion of the truth and his sanctimonious humbug. When it comes to "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" I hear those accusations against Kamm echoing in Chomsky's own tenacious commitment to the lie about the Prijedor camps.
Chomsky denies the reality of Trnopolje, he maligns the reporters who observed that reality, he disregards the eye-witness testimony and the findings of the courts, and above all, he never once acknowledges that behind Trnoplje itself was the main subject of the reporters' coverage, the death camp at Omarska. That – Omarska and the system of ethnic cleansing and genocide of which it was part – is the horrendous crime in which Chomsky remains tacitly acquiescent as he continues to defend LM's long-discredited arguments about Trnopolje.
As far as silent complicity is concerned, speaking from the comfort of his Boston office Chomsky had the opportunity to speak truth to power when he gave his interview for RTS. He severely criticised Serbia's Western enemies in the Balkan wars but instead of mentioning, even in passing, the Serbian government's record of atrocity and the contribution that RTS as the state propaganda machine had made to the horrors of ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, he continued to push the line that Trnoplje was just a refugee camp line and the emaciated condition of Fikret Alic and other arrivals acquired in Keraterm and elsewhere were just thinness, alongside examples of fatness.
Chomsky's not naive. The evidence is all there for him to inspect, about murder, rape, torture and privation at Trnopolje, let alone the other camps in the system. He's been challenged on the subject enough times, over enough years. He knows that there's more to the reporting of the camps than an attempt to demonise the Serbs. He doesn't even challenge the evidence, he chooses to disregard it. Was Omarska a horrendous crime? Will Chomsky say anything about it? Or does he prefer to remain tacit? What was that about "obtuseness and evasiveness"
Aplogies for repost in error
Mr Kennard, it's your prerogative to ignore correspondence you don't wish to reply to, you may have little time for me or my work, and you may find it tedious to have to be asked to justify your claims, but you still have a professional obligation to check your statements. You accused a working journalist of fakery. There could be no more serious charge against a writer, yet you made it without having read what you were commenting on, and you've been totally unable to substantiate that claim when challenged. All that's open to you is an unfalsifiable assertion of what "strikes" you or "seems" to you to be the case.
Apart from the practical issue that you will cause trouble that way for yourself and any publication you write for, there are professional ethics involved. Whether Emma Brockes committed fakery or not is a matter of fact, not of opinion. To establish facts, you have to investigate them: it's not enough to be on the side of the angels. Just ask yourself whether, in light of this discussion, your colleagues at the Financial Times – a newspaper I know well and greatly respect – would be impressed with the diligence of your research and your readiness to correct error.
I cannot prove that Ms Brockes purposefully lost the recording of the interview, nor can you do the opposite. We have to take her word for it, which I cast doubt on, based on the fact I know that as a professional journalist if you do an important interview for a national newspaper (or any) you make sure just in case anything is contended afterwards that the recording is preserved.
If she did honestly lose it by recording over it, then that's terrible professional behaviour and a disrespect to her interviewee who has no recourse to check anything he is alleged to have said. In that respect, the Guardian was right to take it down. Do you disagree with that?
Besides that, the interview was a complete hatchet job. She had her angle when she went and would have got those results whatever was said.
Those things combined — that Brockes doesn't seem unprofessional and obviously had an angle — makes me doubt the official story.
You're simply going round in circles. I pointed out that you had accused a working journalist of fakery without having the evidence for it, and without even having read what you were purporting to comment on. You've confirmed that that's right. All you're able to cite are your own subjective impressions, which are no evidence at all. And you then accuse someone else of "terrible professional behaviour". Your age is beside the point, but your inexperience is obvious and material.
Ok I agree we are going round in circles. I have one question. How would I prove the assertion that she lost the recording on purpose? It would have to be her own testimony surely? Something which I'm guessing will not be forthcoming.
In the absence of that, I'm taking a guess at what happened, having evaluated the facts of the debacle. I can't get inside Ms Brocke's head, the only way to obtain incontrovertible proof.
I don't see how this has to do with inexperience. Journalists analyse and speculate on the motives of people all the time.
We can call an end to this though.
You accused a write of fakery. You're totally unable to substantiate that defamatory claim, and in the course of your remarks have demonstrated that you hadn't even read the interview that you were commenting on. You attempted to salvage your position by throwing out a new claim that literally nobody, including Prof Chomsky, made at the time. And you don't see what this sort of behaviour has to do with inexperience?
Sorry I have read the interview. In the paper at the time, and more recently.
I have done no salvaging. It wasn't a new claim. It was in the article. Did you read it?
Sweetheart, you are doing exactly what you are accusing Matthew of doing…attributing words and thoughts he's never communicated to him ["in the course of your remarks have demonstrated that you hadn't even read the interview that you were commenting on"].
You know, you two could always get a room….
Oliver –
Do you not have a leader to write?
Or indeed, anything better to do than pick on people [viz you were mean to my mate Emma so thrrrrpt to you].
Despite being an experienced strong-willed stakeholder, you are showing signs of an emerging rabid tendency. Bitten by any squirrels lately?
It's lonely behind the paywall, I'm sure. But in a world where there's a killer on the loose doing a Bear Grylls in Northumbria, an oil rig on the spill and an impending food crisis in the Sahel, don't you have some journalism to do?
Sadly, although Rupert Murdoch has now helpfully confined the bulk of Oliver Kamm's smirking pomposity behind a pay wall, I see he is polluting this blog. Kamm made an idiot of himself over the Brockes interview, and he made an idiot of himself while attempting to critique Chomsky's use of source material on the Balkans.
In the first case he defended a manifestly factually incorrect interview not by arguing that it was factually correct (because it clearly wasn't), but by suggesting [1] that Brockes was “entitled” to her “interpretation” of Diane Johnstone's book, and that this somehow rendered her untrue claims regarding Chomsky acceptable – this from the grand defender of scholarly accuracy.
In the second case he emitted a stream of cretinously incompetent and/or dishonest claims on the Balkans, which are easily found to be false [2]. In fact several of his criticisms regarding Chomsky's inaccurate use of source material relied on his own inaccurate use of source material.
He has of course never offered a substantive response to these criticisms. Instead he has continued blustering, as amply demonstrated here. The aim, I assume, is to preserve some pretence of credibility among those who haven't checked his claims. We are talking here about a person who ceaselessly witters about scholarly accuracy but silently deletes his own inaccurate pieces without explanation [3]. This is a grandiloquent advocate of bringing "constitutional government" [4] to Iraq who also believes that "any democrat" would be glad that Salvador Allende's government fell to the Pinochet coup [5]. In other words he's at best a flagrant hypocrite, however much he pretends otherwise, and also either extremely stupid or flat-out dishonest.
[1] http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/chomsk…
[2] http://indecent-left.blogspot.com/2006/08/oliver-…
[3] http://indecent-left.blogspot.com/2006/09/anti-ch…
[4] http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_def…
[5] http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.fan.noam-cho…
Great piece of writing, Matt – honest and refreshingly bullshit-free.
Kamm: “the reason Chomsky didn't accuse Emma of fakery is that he wanted to but couldn't prove it. Can you not grasp that, in his complaints to the Guardian after that interview, Chomsky never said that Emma had falsely attributed quotations to him? No participant in that affair claimed it…”
Chomsky on "Emma":
“… her piece de resistance, the claim that I put the word ‘massacre’ in quotes. Sheer fabrication. She and the editors know perfectly well that there is nothing like that in print, or anywhere, certainly not in the interview: people don't speak with quotation marks. That's why they allowed her to refer vaguely to the phrase she invented, so as to insinuate that it is in print — which she knows, and the editors know, is a lie. Just ask them to produce the source”. (Email to Media Lens, November 2, 2005: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051104_smearin…
Right, Kamm asked me to produce evidence of lies and defamation. I merely quoted from the Guardian investigation.
Lie: Chomsky never put Srebrenica massacre in quotation marks.
Defamation: The Guardian's readers' editor, Ian Mayes, said today in a corrections and clarifications column printed in the paper, that no question in that form had been put by interviewer Emma Brockes to Prof Chomsky and that "the headline was wrong and unjustified by the text".
Of course, we don't know how much else was fabrication because the tape was deleted, either very unprofessional or very cynical. Both should be condemned.
The Guardian made the right decision to take it down, I think the matter should have closed at that point. It's really uninteresting in the grand scheme of thing.
Matt, you have an agenda, and I have an agenda. Everyone does, especially opinionated people who work in the media. Facts are something else. Brockes got one wrong (the massacre in quotes line – though it applies to the people whose work Chomsky endorses, while persistently refusing to state clearly that their work "is" wrong, as opposed to "may be").
You might think it's a minor point to insist that Chomsky sticks to facts, but presumably you wouldn't if Chomsky were making it about some craven hack?
Do you regard your interest in serious issues as "mania", or your positions in a polarised debate as "devout"?
If not, why not?
It seems to me there is only so far one can take a debate in which a major piece of evidence, i.e., the tape of the interview, has been compromised beyond usability. At a point, it all becomes speculation, Kamm's against Kennard's. I do believe that such cavalier treatment of a significant piece of evidence by the interviewer casts a pall of doubt over her claims.
I thank all of you for enlightening me about this controversy over Chomsky's alleged remarks about recent history in the Balkans, and maybe we will learn more in coming years. I am looking forward, though, to having this debacle behind us so we can get back to other important current events in the world, such as empire, oil, and war.
Sempervirens, there's no "alleged" attached to his remarks about Trnopolje – they're in the RTS interview (Chomsky also refers to the Brockes interview there).
Matt, did you ever get round to investigating the substance of Trnopolje and assess the value of Chomsky's contribution?
I guess you just moved on.
Roger Lippman's file on chart of Chomsky's position on the Balkans contains an admixture of rebuttal and hysteria.
It's fair to conclude that Chomsky's characterization of Trnopolje is wrong. The 1994 security council report on the camps categorically refers to Trnopolje as a "concentration camp."
But Lippman claims "Trnopolje was not simply a transit camp, and it was also not simply a death camp-it was both", even though the UN report he cites says: "Albeit Logor Trnopolje was not a death camp like Logor Omarska or Logor Keraterm, the label «concentration camp» is none the less justified for Logor Trnopolje due to the regime prevailing in the camp."
Lippman further claims that Chomsky "is on record" claiming that the killings in East Timor in 1999 was worse than Srebrenica. This claim is established by misrepresenting the following passage as a direct comparison of the killing in East Timor in 1999 and Srebrenica in 1995:
"And to continue, Swedes who display their outrage over these examples of Serbian genocide clearly have the duty of informing us of their far more bitter condemnations of the massacres (again with decisive US-UK backing) through 1999, leaving maybe 5-6000 civilian corpses, according to the Church in East Timor and the leading Western historian of Timor, the British scholar John Taylor — all BEFORE the paroxysm of terror in late August 1999, after which the US and UK (and for all I know, Sweden) continued to support the Indonesian murderers who were already responsible for the death of about 1/3 of the population in pure aggression decisively supported by the US and UK (and when it came time to make some profit from it, Sweden). Perhaps they have issued bitter condemnations of their Western allies (and Sweden). If so, they have a right to use the term "genocide" in the case of the terrible but much lesser crimes of Racak and Srebrenica."
The case in point was not that Indonesian violence in East Timor through 1999 was a "lesser crime" than Serb massacres in Srebrenica in 1995, it was that Indonesia's legacy of aggression and mass slaughter in East Timor and its continuation (with strong US/UK backing and complicity) right through 1999 constituted the greater crime.
Lippman then cites Oliver Kamm, who claims that Chomsky takes a statement from Robin Cook wildly out of context. Revealingly, Kamm ignores Defense Minister George Robertson who also concluded that “up until Racak [15-16 January 1999] the KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been” and the internal documents from Germany's foreign office which opines that "Single instances of excessive acts of violence against the civil population, e.g. in Racak, have, in world opinion, been laid at the feet of the Serbian side and have aroused great indignation. But the number and frequency of such excesses do not warrant the conclusion that every Albanian living in Kosovo is exposed to extreme danger to life and limb nor is everyone who returns there threatened with death and severe injury."
One can take issue with Chomsky's false assertions about Trnopolje or the state of refugees in Kosovo prior to the bombing, or his description of the exact levels of violence prior to the bombings, but it seems to me that little of what i read in significantly detracts from the rather damning evidence that points to the deliberate US sabotage of Rambouillet or the inherently suspect humanitarian rationale for the massive assault against Serbian bridges, power plants, and economic infrastructure.
Matt, I think it's fair to say as Bassiouni did in 1994 that Trnopolje was not a death camp like Omarska and Keraterm, it was primarily a concentration and transit camp, but nevertheless it still was a death camp. Prisoners at Trnopolje were taken out and shot and buried in concealed graves. Other prisoners were beaten and died from their injuries. Since Bassiouni reported to the UN, we have had more detailed accounts and evidence about Trnopolje in the Prijedor trials and the ITN libel trial, confirming what Chomsky denies and what he resists acknowledging.
That is the point. Chomsky criticises others for not telling the truth. And yet he himself is determined not to acknowledge that not only did he continue to repeat an untruth that he was readily able to check for himself, he did so with his own emphasis in speaking to an organisation, RTS, responsible for distorting the truth in a way that he fiercely criticises in others.
My criticism of Chomsky's reference to Racak, Srebrenica and East Timor is not that there is any question that Indonesia's actions in and against East Timor was other than a terrible crime and arguably genocidal (I say arguably because I don't know enough to speak with sufficient confidence). My quarrel with Chomsky is over the way in which he slides away from acknowledging the substance of what happened at Srebrenica (and Bosnia) by changing the subject, comparing the situations at Racak and in East Timor (elsewhere he refers specifically to Liquica).
I'm not aware of any sustained effort to suggest that what happened at Racak was a crime of genocide. Chomsky uses a straw argument to change the ground of the debate. I assume that Chomsky's reference to "Swedes" here has to do with his defence of Diana Johnstone in the Ordfront affair, in which case this is not an abstract discussion of the crimes of Indonesia, it is a change of subject in support of a notorious questioner of the truth about events at Srebrenica. Chomsky's challenge to those Swedes could equally be directed at himself and the way that he shrinks Serbia's aggression and encouragement of mass slaughter in Bosnia down to Srebrenica for the purposes of his confrontation with them. Not to mention the way he shrinks Prijedor to Trnopolje and turns a blind eye to Omarska.
But equally importantly he makes out that the use of the term genocide is a matter of personal choice and interpretation. Elsewhere he has expressed his own preference for how the word should be interpreted. But he pays no regard whatsoever to the Genocide Convention, its intentions, its wording and the way that the ICTY and ICJ deliberated over the evidence before reaching their formal conclusions.
Chomsky persistently challenges others and questions their intellectual honesty but he avoids looking in the mirror to confront a teller of truth who is reluctant to accept the truth. You seem to accept that Chomsky made false assertions about Trnopolje but you too seem keen to turn your eyes quickly elsewhere and avoid reflecting on the implications of Chomsky's resort to falsehood.
Matt, to fill in the details of "a UN Report": the report in question is the Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), United Nations Security Council document S/1994/674 – 27 May 1994, known more commonly as the Bassiouni Commission
Report. The report itself can be found at http://www.his.com/~twarrick/commxyu1.htm. The index to the general contents of the Annexes is at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/
The index to the Annexes will point you to Annex V, The Prijedor report, which is at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/V.htm
The camps are discussed in Chapter VIII, “The concentration camps”.
This Chapter contains all that Chomsky ignores when he says that Ed Vulliamy probably got it wrong and when he suggests that the international outrage was simply directed at demonising the Serbs.
The quote: “Albeit Logor Trnopolje was not a death camp like Logor Omarska or Logor Keraterm, the label «concentration camp» is none the less justified for Logor Trnopolje due to the regime prevailing in the camp.” is the final paragraph of Section C of Chapter VIII, which is devoted to Trnopolje (Sections A and B describe Omarska and Keraterm). In the section you will find passages such as:
“Killings were not rare in the camp, nor was the infliction of torture. Harassment in general is claimed to have been the rule and not the exception. Rapes were reportedly the most common of the serious crimes to which camp inmates were subjected. The nights were when most of the injustice was performed. The nightly terror of possibly being called out for rape or other abuses was reportedly a severe mental constraint even for short-term detainees in the camp. Many detainees reportedly never
returned after venturing with or without explicit permission outside of the camp. Other former detainees report that there were times when they were ordered to bury non- Serbs, who had been killed, in fields and meadows near the camp.
The allegation is that on one occasion some camp inmates had their hands and feet chained and were forced to lay down on the ground in the camp enclosure. Then, tractors were driven over their legs. Those who did not perish from their injuries relatively quickly, were later shot dead. Guards had taken up positions to prevent fellow prisoners from assisting those in agony. Reportedly, mainly wealthy people were shackled and killed. It is said that in the camp this kind of execution took place at
least on four different occasions.”
This is why I am so angry at Chomsky and find it so hard to understand why he is revered and defended.
[Part 1 of several comments]
Finally, a bit of progress. Matt Kennard says that Chomsky makes "false assertions about Trnopolje" and "the state of refugees in Kosovo prior to the bombing." I'm looking forward to signs that Kennard's epiphany would lead him to have some doubt about Chomsky's usefulness as a source on ex-Yugoslav issues.
Owen has ably responded to Kennard's citation of a UN report that says "Albeit Logor Trnopolje was not a death camp like Logor Omarska or Logor Keraterm, the label «concentration camp» is none the less justified for Logor Trnopolje due to the regime prevailing in the camp." I would add that Kennard simply misinterpreted or misunderstood the quoted language. True, Trnopolje was not a death camp like (in the same way as) the others, but it was still a death camp – that is, a place where Bosnians were murdered – among other things, and part of the system of Serb death camps.
[Continued below]
Regarding Chomsky's characterization of "the terrible but much lesser crimes of Racak and Srebrenica," Kennard says:
> The case in point was not that Indonesian violence in East Timor through 1999 was a "lesser crime" than Serb massacres in Srebrenica in 1995, it was that Indonesia's legacy of aggression and mass slaughter in East Timor and its continuation (with strong US/UK backing and complicity) right through 1999 constituted the greater crime.
Let's try to compare apples to apples. If Chomsky is talking about 5000-6000 killed in East Timor up to August 1999, and comparing that with the Srebrenica and Racak massacres, clearly he is downplaying the latter two by characterizing them as "much lesser crimes" even though the Srebrenica death toll was higher than 6000.
If he is talking about the Bosnia and Kosovo wars in comparison with the entire East Timor conflict, that's another matter. The East Timor war was every bit as horrible as the Balkan wars, or more so, but to characterize one as a "much lesser crime" than the other is absurd and silly.
[Continued below]
Whether or not Oliver Kamm overlooked George Robertson's testimony, it is essentially the same as Robin Cook's, and Chomsky, who characterizes the testimony as "the committee's conclusion," is wrong regardless. As are Robertson and Cook (and Kennard for relying on them). Robertson's language, so similar to Cook's, may have been referring only to the period of the cease-fire, which began October 16, 1998, and was essentially ended by the Racak massacre, though it had been widely violated in various ways for its entire period. If Robertson meant to extend the period of discussion back a year or two, he is clearly ridiculous, which Kennard should know if he purports to know anything about Kosovo. He ought to read "Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo" in all its horrible detail. (Human Rights Watch, October 1998 http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/kosovo/ )
[Continued below]
Other reports on the extent of Serbian crimes in Kosovo before and after Racak are listed at http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Articles-repor… . They provide extensive evidence that contradicts the German claim that Serbian "excesses do not warrant the conclusion that every Albanian living in Kosovo is exposed to extreme danger to life and limb nor is everyone who returns there threatened with death and severe injury." The German documents that Kennard mentions, without citation, sound as if the author had just come to consciousness at the beginning of 1999, and, like Kennard, knew nothing of what came before – the Serbian campaign of killings, burning of villages, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Albanians, not to mention Serbia's decade-long creation of a system of apartheid in Kosovo. Mr. Kennard, if you don't know about this, do your homework rather than reflexively denying it just because Chomsky does.
[Continued below]
Matt, what is the German analysis you cite?
Finally, while Kennard concedes that some of Chomsky's statements are false or questionable, he does not see what that has to do with "the deliberate US sabotage of Rambouillet." Well, of course that's a separate issue. Kennard's claim of US sabotage is contradicted by experts such as Alex Bellamy[1], Tim Judah[2], and Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon[3], who have written in detail about the Rambouillet talks, the breakdown of which led to the NATO intervention. (Kennard would do well to read these experts on the subject of Rambouillet, rather than relying on uninformed and prejudiced secondary sources like Chomsky and the neo-Stalinists who appear to influence him.) These writers, among others, have demonstrated the degree to which the Serbian participants refused to engage in serious negotiations.
[Continued]
Bellamy writes that, late in the negotiations, the Serbs put forth a "counter-proposal" that essentially called for a continuation of the status quo, after weeks of negotiations during which "the FRY [Yugoslavia] had not moved an inch toward compromise," not even offering Kosovo the autonomy it had enjoyed from 1974 to 1989. Judah reports that even the Russian representative was shocked by the counter-proposal and the fact that "whole chapters that had taken months of work were simply crossed out and replaced with other clearly unacceptable paragraphs or nothing at all." This continued the pattern of negotiating in bad faith that Milosevic had followed since 1991.
[Continued]
Kennard starts out by saying "Roger Lippman's file on chart of Chomsky's position on the Balkans contains an admixture of rebuttal and hysteria." So, where's the hysteria? Nothing he attributes to me is characterized by him as hysterical, and most of his critique of my writings is based only on his lack of familiarity with the subject.
[1] Alex Bellamy, "Reconsidering Rambouillet" http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Reconsidering….
[2] Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge
[3] Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo
[End]
To clarify – rhl47 is me, Roger Lippman.