Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky - New York Public Library
18 replies, posted
[video=youtube;szIGZVrSAyc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szIGZVrSAyc[/video]
Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek finance minister) and Noam Chomsky discussing the EU, the Greek crisis, and neoliberalism at the New York Public Library.
Why would I listen to a narcissist and a genocide denier talk about something that doesn't exist?
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50230866]Why would I listen to a narcissist and a genocide denier talk about something that doesn't exist?[/QUOTE]
Why would I want to read your dumb post that contributes nothing to this thread
[QUOTE=Asgard;50230874]Why would I want to read your dumb post that contributes nothing to this thread[/QUOTE]
At least it doesn't take 1 hour 43 minutes to do so
for a moment my mind processed that Noam Chomsky was just a clever play on Gnome Chompski
[editline]30th April 2016[/editline]
it appears i'm stupid, and that's where chompski's name was derived from in the first place
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50230891]At least it doesn't take 1 hour 43 minutes to do so[/QUOTE]
That's the length of time my lifespan's been shortened by reading it
[QUOTE]discussing the EU, the Greek crisis, and neoliberalism at the New York Public Library. [/QUOTE]
It's funny because "Neoliberalism" is essentially a product of left-wing rhetoric and doesn't really exist.
The reason for this is because "neoliberalism" is supposed to be the spread of capitalistic free trade which results in the exploitation of developing countries. When the painfully obvious reality is that many of the problems in the world are caused by a lack of free trade capitalism on the part of developed states rather than too much of it.
For example both the US and the EU maintain high tariffs on their incoming goods which subsidising their own whilst working hard to prevent genuine free trade. The result of this is developing countries are unable to sell their produce to the developing states for a fair price and are therefore forced to become economically dependent on the developed countries. This is literally the opposite of both free trade and capitalism.
Therefore if "neoliberalism" really existed then the US and the EU would have no tariffs or subsidise their goods, which would lead to the developing countries actually being able to improve their economies.
[QUOTE=The mouse;50231865]It's funny because "Neoliberalism" is essentially a product of left-wing rhetoric and doesn't really exist.[/QUOTE]
Neoliberalism is just a word that describes the policy adjustment that has been made since Reagan/Thatcher towards austerity, privatization, and "free trade agreements".
As Chomsky has pointed out before, no part of the term "free trade agreement" accurately describes what takes place in a free trade agreement.
[QUOTE=daschnek;50232608]Neoliberalism is just a word that describes the policy adjustment that has been made since Reagan/Thatcher towards austerity, privatization, and "free trade agreements".
As Chomsky has pointed out before, no part of the term "free trade agreement" accurately describes what takes place in a free trade agreement.[/QUOTE]
A word that descibes nothing. '''''''Neoliberal''''''' society is willing to spend over 40% of GDP on government spending, have progressive income taxes, bail out banks and have an extensive welfare state (regardless of cuts). There is no monolithic ideology behind what our current society looks like. Our country is not 'neoliberal', but rather a mix of influences, as wide as socialist, conservative, liberal, free market, and in the US, libertarian. Instead of acknowledging this, they decide to just attach a word, add 'neo' to it because it sounds scary, and then blame all our problems upon this phantom enemy. It is equally hilarious as pathetic because they are blaming their problems upon something that doesn't exist in any way, so they are essentially wasting their time. I think the fact that noone can give a proper definition in what 'neoliberalism' is that distinguishes it from other broadly right-wing ideologies, and the Wikipedia page itself admits this, should tell you all you need to know about this rubbish.
Either way, the fact people take Chomsky seriously on anything but linguistics is somewhat amusing. Chomsky is a brilliant linguist, mediocre political scientist and unbelievably appalling historian. I don't think he really claims that much to be the latter two but for some reason people love listening to him on them. Varoufakis is an obvious narcissist, though I won't deny that he probably has a degree of expertise in economics.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50232675]A word that descibes nothing.[/QUOTE]
It describes, again, a general tendency towards austerity, privatization, and free trade. Take any example of something that Chomsky would call "neoliberal". You'll see those three general tendencies.
The rest of your argument doesn't make any sense because neoliberalism isn't so much an ideology with a set of prescriptive rules, but a tendency towards implementing a (very selective) interpretation of classical liberal policies in the economy. That's likely the origin of the "neo" - it's not classical liberalism anymore, now is it? (Not that it ever was)
[QUOTE]Either way, the fact people take Chomsky seriously on anything but linguistics is somewhat amusing. Chomsky is a brilliant linguist, mediocre political scientist and unbelievably appalling historian. I don't think he really claims that much to be the latter two but for some reason people love listening to him on them. Varoufakis is an obvious narcissist, though I won't deny that he probably has a degree of expertise in economics.[/QUOTE]
The old "academics should only be taken seriously in field of study" argument means nothing. Chomsky, from what I understand, does little work on linguistics these days. His biggest contributions to the field began and ended during the 50s and 60s, and he's dedicated a large portion of his time to philosophy and political activism for most of his long adult life. He's as qualified to talk about these subjects and be taken seriously as anyone else in academia is.
I don't know anything about Varoufakis, so I can't argue about him.
[QUOTE]It describes, again, a general tendency towards austerity, privatization, and free trade. Take any example of something that Chomsky would call "neoliberal". You'll see those three general tendencies.[/QUOTE]
Vague enough to be meaningless. If you asked twenty people spouting 'neoliberalism' what it mean you would get twenty different answers because you don't know what you're talking about, other than it is right wing and you don't like it. You're fighting a phantom. Give it up and stop using buzzwords instead of arguments. If you're simply describing a set of three policies in a 'general trend', why do you need a buzzword for it? You just don't want to address the arguments and instead rest on the fact that 'neoliberal' simply sounds new and scary.
[editline]30th April 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE]The old "academics should only be taken seriously in field of study" argument means nothing. Chomsky, from what I understand, does little work on linguistics these days. His biggest contributions to the field began and ended during the 50s and 60s, and he's dedicated a large portion of his time to philosophy and political activism for most of his long adult life. He's as qualified to talk about these subjects and be taken seriously as anyone else in academia is. [/QUOTE]
You can listen to him, I just don't understand why so many people seem to love this guy so much. He's just some left-wing dude spouting the same tropes as everyone else. I would simply emphasise the number of appalling mistakes that he has made due to his biases, going as far as endorsing genocide denial in the Balkans, showing that maybe you shouldn't trust him nearly as much as you do.
[editline]30th April 2016[/editline]
It is something that sort of exists, but calling it 'neoliberalism' makes the pretence of it being a coherent ideology, when in reality it simply is not. Leftists want a buzzword to describe society as a whole, which they don't like, and as such came up with it (or, to be more accurate, took an old word and recycled it).
[QUOTE]"Is there such a thing as a ‘neo' gene?" With this query Irving Kristol opens his 1995 essay, "An Autobiographical Memoir." His life, he recalls, has been a series of such "neo's": neo-Marxist, neo-Trotskyite, neo-socialist, neo-liberal, and, finally, neo-conservative. "No ideology or philosophy," he explains, "has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment."[/QUOTE]
'Neo', for some reason, makes it sound scary, which is perfect for the people who like to use it. Of course, 'neo' has legitimate uses, and isn't inherently bullshit, but you can see where people are going with it.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50232866]Vague enough to be meaningless. If you asked twenty people spouting 'neoliberalism' what it mean you would get twenty different answers because you don't know what you're talking about, other than it is right wing and you don't like it. You're fighting a phantom. Give it up and stop using buzzwords instead of arguments. If you're simply describing a set of three policies in a 'general trend', why do you need a buzzword for it? You just don't want to address the arguments and instead rest on the fact that 'neoliberal' simply sounds new and scary.[/QUOTE]
Then what do you recommend that we call it? Should every sentence about neoliberalism start by describing the list of policies? I'm not a big fan of the term neoliberal myself, I like to make it more clear cut: market fundamentalism. However, I see why neoliberal exists as a sort of leftist shorthand. It's not there to scare anyone, it just quickly describes the tendency we want to criticize.
Ask 20 leftists about neoliberalism, and you'll get the list of tendencies I described, or specific policy measures. Proposed privatization of the NHS for UK people, proposed privatization of Social Security in the US, lowered government spending on public services such as transportation, "free trade agreements", and so on.
[QUOTE]You can listen to him, I just don't understand why so many people seem to love this guy so much. He's just some left-wing dude spouting the same tropes as everyone else. I would simply emphasise the number of appalling mistakes that he has made due to his biases, going as far as endorsing genocide denial in the Balkans, showing that maybe you shouldn't trust him nearly as much as you do.[/QUOTE]
Chomsky never advocated for genocide denial. It sounds more like you've read what others say about him than actually reading what he said.
[url]http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2596[/url]
This is a very one sided piece, so I will give more sources on top of it, though it gives a good history of Chomsky and genocide denial to suit his political needs.
Apologetics for holocaust denial:
[QUOTE]Thirty years ago, a French lecturer called Robert Faurisson was the most fervent of the deniers. In the mid-Seventies he began to propagate the notion that everything you thought you knew about fascism was a lie. The Nazis had not run extermination camps. The judges at Nuremberg coerced the testimony of alleged camp survivors out of them. The Diary of Anne Frank was a fake. All accepted history was a gigantic fraud that covered up a plot by scheming Jews to get their hands on German gold and Palestinian land. 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 - but not its leaders - and the entire Palestinian people. Obsessional racism underpinned the work of Faurisson and the other Holocaust deniers. It is hard to squeeze into their tiny minds, but maybe race hatred mattered more to them than the political calculation that denial was essential if fascism was to be rehabilitated. People throw the charge of ‘racist' around far too freely today and fail to separate inconsequential prejudice from all-consuming intolerance.
The Frenchman who defines himself by his fixation on Jews or the Serb whose hatred of Bosnian Muslims is at the core of his identity wants to humiliate the objects of his loathing beyond endurance. What could be more degrading to the Jew or Bosnian than to scream that their parents had not been gassed in Auschwitz or their daughter had not been gang-raped at Trnopolje? If they protest, what could be more satisfying than to turn to them and say that they are filthy swindlers exploiting the decency of their credulous audience the better to take its money?
The Left of the Seventies was generally against antisemitism - with the perhaps predictable exception of the terrorist wing of the German far left - and there was uproar in France when Faurisson published. Demonstrators roughed him up, critics brought court actions and the administrators of his University suspended him. At moments such as these principled people must ask themselves a hard question. Voltaire never said, ‘I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it' - a biographer put the words in his mouth in 1906 - but it remains true. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to lie and defame, and if Noam Chomsky had merely signed a petition that defended Faurisson's freedom there would have been no complaint. What happened, however, was that the admired leftist, the scholar whose first political writings were against fascism, went way beyond a statement of elementary principle and gave comfort to neo-Nazi groups around the world.
The petition Chomsky signed was a work of real propaganda that painted Faurisson as a seeker of truth who was being unjustly targeted for reputable research. He was ‘a respected professor of twentieth century French literature and document criticism', it read, who ‘has been conducting extensive research into the "Holocaust" question'. The scare quotes around ‘Holocaust' and the petition's assertion that the Jew-baiter was a historian who had made reputable ‘findings' infuriated French leftists. They assumed Chomsky was a busy man who had added his name to the petition without realizing what he was signing. Not so. When pained fans contacted their idol and filled him in on the background, he refused to think again. Despite being given chapter and verse on Faurisson's belief that Europe's greatest crime hadn't happened and that the Jews had declared war on Hitler, Chomsky insisted that as far as he could determine he was ‘a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort'.[/QUOTE]
Secondary source: [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair[/url]
[QUOTE]Chomsky subsequently wrote an essay entitled Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression, in which he attacked his critics for failing to respect the principle of freedom of speech. Chomsky wrote:
[I]Let me add a final remark about Faurisson's alleged "anti-Semitism." Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi -- such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here -- this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.[8]
[/I]
...
John Goldsmith writes that "Unsympathetic critics used it as an opportunity to brand Chomsky with anti-Semitic labels, but even critics potentially sympathetic to Chomsky's political views felt his remarks showed lack of judgment."[10]
Other critics held that Faurisson's statements were the archetype of anti-Semitism, and that the logical conclusion of Chomsky's statement would be that Nazism was not anti-Semitic. The main argument for this is that Holocaust deniers are not interested in truth, but "motivated by racism, extremism, and virulent anti-Semitism".[11][/QUOTE]
Apologetics for the Khmer Rouge:
[QUOTE]I think I can understand why Chomsky had to do just that. If you believe that America is in need of ‘denazification' and that a corrupted corporate media covers up this truth with lies, you are bound to have difficulties with real fascism. All around you, mainstream defenders of America say that she has fought the worst systems the human race has produced and point to the evidence in the media and elsewhere which proves the moral superiority of democracy. The danger when you reject the mainstream is that you defend anyone else who is against the mainstream and challenges its version of history. Maybe I'm trying too hard on his behalf. Maybe Chomsky was just a shallow dogmatist who could never own up to a mistake. He certainly wasn't a fascist. Like his successors in the twenty-first century who made excuses for Islamism, Baathism and wife burning, he couldn't join the gang but couldn't denounce it either for fear of the psychic consequences the admission there were worse ideas in the world than Western democracy would bring.
So he dabbled on the fringes of the totalitarian right, and the fringes of the totalitarian left as well.When America pulled out of Indochina and Pol Pot's armies took over Cambodia, Chomsky and his collaborator Edward S. Herman poured scorn on the journalists who pointed out that there were even worse ideas than the disastrous American campaign in Southeast Asia. It took most outside observers a few months to grasp that they were right because the reports of what the Paris-educated Marxists who led the Khmer Rouge were doing to Cambodia were incredible. The communists emptied the cities and killed anyone who excited the smallest paranoid suspicion. They murdered the literate and the numerate for being dangerous intellectuals and town dwellers for being bourgeois reactionaries. They went on to wipe out Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian ethnic minorities for being agents of foreign powers, Buddhists and Muslims for being religious subversives and the old and the frail for failing to work hard enough on the collective farms. Overall, they killed about one-fifth of the population.
Exposing the terror was a ferociously hard task as the communists sealed Cambodia's borders and made it a giant prison. Francis Ponchaud, a French priest, painstakingly assembled the first reliable account by interviewing thousands of refugees who had made it over the border. Ponchaud was hardly a conservative. He was a Khmer-speaking man of the Left who had initially welcomed Pol Pot's victory. What he heard forced him to change his mind. He came up with a book whose title has entered the language, Cambodia: Year Zero. If there was any doubt, his findings were supported by the reports of Jon Swain of the London Times and Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who saw the Khmer Rouge force the sick to crawl out of hospitals to the collectivized countryside. Once again, neither Swain nor Schanberg was a supporter of the American war effort.
Chomsky found the patient uncovering of an uncomfortable truth intolerable. While conceding that Year Zero was a ‘serious' he and Edward Herman accused the priest of playing ‘fast and loose with quotes and with numbers' and of having ‘an anti-communist bias and message'. The New York Review of Books, which had given Ponchaud deserved praise, was guilty of ‘extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions'. Its articles were a living example of how history was ‘manufactured' to lull the masses into accepting capitalist propaganda as fact. By contrast, Chomsky and Herman hailed as brave dissidents two authors who reprinted the propaganda broadcasts of Pol Pot's radio station. Chomsky concluded that if there were crimes in Cambodia, they were a reaction to the US saturation bombing campaign.[/QUOTE]
Secondary source: [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman[/url]
[QUOTE]Linguist Noam Chomsky and scholar Edward S. Herman were among the academics who examined the conflicting reports of the situation in Cambodia in 1977. On June 6, 1977, Chomsky and Herman published an article in The Nation which contrasted the views expressed in books by Barron and Paul, Ponchaud, and Porter and Hildebrand, and in articles and accounts by Butterfield, Bragg, Kahin, Cazaux, Shanberg, Tolgraven and others. Chomsky and Herman noted the conflicting information in the various accounts, and suggested that after the "failure of the American effort to subdue South Vietnam and to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina" that there was now "a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of the United States in a more favorable light". This rewriting of history by the establishment press was served well by "tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom." They wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" because "refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear."[12]
In support of their assertion, Chomsky and Herman criticized Barron and Paul's Murder in a Gentle Land book for ignoring the U.S. government's role in creating the situation, saying, "When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the American attack". They give several examples to show that Barron and Paul's "scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny," and they conclude that, "It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience."[12]
Chomsky and Herman had both praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Year Zero, writing that it was "serious and worth reading" and "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary."[12] In the introduction to the American edition of his book, Ponchaud responded to a personal letter from Chomsky, saying, "He [Chomsky] wrote me a letter on October 19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way it [Year Zero] was being misused by anti-revolutionary propagandists. He has made it my duty to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly, according to him, those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle Land."[13]
A different response appeared in the British introduction to Ponchaud's book.
"Even before this book was translated it was sharply criticized by Mr Noam Chomsky [reference to correspondence with Silvers and the review cited in note 100] and Mr Gareth Porter [reference to May Hearings]. These two 'experts' on Asia claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. They say there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. They accuse me of being insufficiently critical in my approach to the refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a valid source... "After an investigation of this kind, it is surprising to see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees should reject their very significant place in any study of modern Cambodia. These experts would rather base their arguments on reasoning: if something seems impossible to their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach which they accuse others of not having?"[14]
By contrast, Chomsky portrayed Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Refuting Chomsky on the question of documentation, researcher Bruce Sharp found that 33 out of 50 citations in one chapter of Porter and Hildebrand's book derived from the Khmer Rouge government and six from China, the Khmer Rouge's principal supporter.[15]
Chomsky and Herman dismissed reports by the "mass media" of extensive Khmer Rouge atrocities and instead cited "analyses by highly qualified specialists...who have concluded that executions [by the Khmer Rouge] have numbered at most in the thousands." They cited the "extreme unreliability of refugee reports."[12]
Veteran Cambodia correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation article that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."[16]
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."[17] Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee testimony" believing that "their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer Rouge government, 'including systematic distortion of the truth.'"
Beachler cited reports that Chomsky's attempts to counter charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted of writing letters to editors and publications. He said: "Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver of the New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words."[18] Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to the New York Review of Books. Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of what he [Chomsky] said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda."[19][/QUOTE]
Endorsement of genocide denial in Bosnia:
[QUOTE]Nor, as Chomsky proved, could they provide a guide to their own countries' foreign ministers. After their Cambodian triumph, he and Edward S.Herman teamed up again to condemn the hypocrisy of the Kosovo war of 1999. Turkey was guilty of ‘massive atrocities' against the Kurds, they said. Indonesia had perpetrated ‘aggression and massacre' of ‘near-genocidal levels' in East Timor, while Israel had organized ‘murderous and destructive' operations in Lebanon. Typically, words failed the linguist when he came to discussing the Serb nationalist crimes in Kosovo - they weren't ‘massive atrocities' at ‘near genocidal' levels but a ‘response', as he cutely put it, to attacks by the Muslim Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Pol Pot's alleged ‘response' to the American bombing of Indochina, the massacres were, by implication, not the responsibility of the put-upon Serb nationalists. Yet for all his circumlocutions and double standards, what Chomsky said about the treatment of the Kurds, Lebanese and Timorese was true, and prompted the question: what should the West do instead?
Answer came there none, for in Chomsky's universe the West was at fault whatever it did. If it intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, it was wrong. If it imposed sanctions against Saddam's Iraq, it was wrong. And if it colluded with Turkish, Israeli or Indonesian oppression, it was wrong again.
...
It had to be. Without denial, they would have to admit that liberal democracies weren't solely motivated by the dictates of the corporations but had on occasion a reasonable desire to end conflicts. As with the Holocaust deniers, the anti-war revisionists went for the abiding memories. The Yugoslav equivalents of the gas chambers at Auschwitz were Srebrenica and the pictures of the wild-eyed starving men behind the barbed wire at Trnopolje. Both had to be denied if the project of blackening the belated interventions in the Balkans was to stand a chance of succeeding. Its prime movers weren't Western leftists but their Serbian allies. Bosnia was partitioned, as the Foreign Office wanted, and partition held out the prospect of a new conflict, as it always did.
If Serb nationalists could deny the crimes of the previous war successfully, the crimes of the next would be easier to contemplate. In 2004, Nerma Jelacic went up the mine roads to Omarska and found that a protective scab had covered the old wounds. She was a stranger in her own country. In 1991, when she was 15 years old, she had celebrated New Year's Eve with Muslim and Orthodox friends in her home town of Visegrad. As a bright teenager from a secular family, she watched the partygoers and assumed that religious differences were the least important thing about them and her. Three months later she woke up and learned a basic lesson of totalitarian politics: you are who your assassins say you are.
[I]In the deep of a warm spring night, a light and a crackling sound awoke me. Through a blind, I saw dozens of houses belonging to my Muslim neighbours on fire, male inhabitants rounded up by men in uniforms. Some would come back beaten and bruised; others were never heard from again. Checkpoints sprang up across town, manned by a mix of drunken paramilitaries and regular army units. The war was not official yet - but in Visegrad it had started, with murders in surrounding villages and beatings of influential Muslims from the town.
[/I]
Many among her family and friends were raped or murdered or both. Jelacic and her parents got out and into Britain as part of the Major government's token attempt at refugee relief. She learned English fast and well, and my employers at the Guardian and Observer took her on. I thought she would surely stay but she returned home because she had to know what happened next to the survivors. She went to Omarska with Vulliamy.
Bosnian children shyly thanked him for saving their parents' lives, but local Serb nationalists were in furious denial. ‘There was no camp here,' security guards at the entrance to Omarska told them. ‘It was all lies, Muslim lies, and forgery by the journalists.' A Bosnian Muslim woman told them no one had apologized or even admitted that crimes against humanity had taken place. ‘They say they know nothing about the camps. There are 145 mass graves and hundreds of individual graves in this region, and we invite the local authorities to our commemorations, but they never come.'
Denial in the rich world began with the British Revolutionary Communist Party. It was once the most ultra of the ultra-left groups, which attracted wealthy but not very bright recruits who provided the funds to allow the party to operate in some style. What the RCP hated was reform that would prolong the ‘capitalist' system and avert the glorious day when communism came. RCP activists would disrupt demonstrations to protect the National Health Service or against apartheid and cry that saving hospitals from closure and ending white rule in South Africa were distractions from the revolution. In the Nineties, they belatedly gave up on communism and accepted market economics. Nothing unusual in that, you might think, except that the party moved as a disciplined unit. The politburo instructed the rank and file to abandon Leninism, and as good Leninists, the rank and file obeyed and U-turned as one.
The comrades regrouped first around the magazine LM (previously Living Marxism) and then a successful think tank called the Institute of Ideas. The British media loved the LM crowd because they were ‘contrarians'who could be relied on to fill space and generate controversy by saying the opposite of what everyone else was saying - an affectation most people get over around puberty. If the majority of progressive opinion was against genetically modified foods, the RCP was for them. If the majority of progressive opinion was against the Rwandan and Balkan genocides, the RCP denied them.
It hadn't really changed. To deny the Bosnian camps the RCP reached for classic technique of the conspiracy theorist. Professor Werner Cohn defined it as the Method of the Critical Source. It is a ‘favourite among cranks', he explained, and ‘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'.
The crank LM welcomed was one Thomas Deichmann, a German leftist and apologist for Serb irredentism who tried and failed to discredit the testimony of camp survivors when he helped the defence team for Dusko Tadic, one of the organizers of the Omarska and Trnopolje atrocities, during the war crimes trials at The Hague. One night as he was sitting at home, he had a Chomskyan epiphany of his own. For the umpteenth time he was poring over the pictures that had convinced the public that Bosnia had seen real crimes against humanity. They stood like a lion in the path of all who wanted to enjoy denial. Deichmann's wife glanced at the familiar faces of Fikret Alic and his fellow prisoners and asked: ‘Why was this wire fixed to poles on the side of the fence where they were standing? As any gardener knows, fences are, as a rule, fixed to the poles from outside, so that the area to be enclosed is fenced-in.' That was it. That was enough to produce Deichmann's eureka moment.
If Deichmann had wanted to test his wife's theory, he might have examined the evidence collected by the International Criminal Court, talked to refugees or tracked down Fikret Alic, who was living in exile. Alic no longer looked a handsome young Bosnian after camp goons had broken six of his ribs, his jaw and nose, kicked out all his teeth and left his body with around a hundred scars from stab and burn wounds, but he was available for interview. Deichmann saw no need to talk to survivors. He had his key to all the mythologies: an old wives' tale from his own wife about how gardeners fixed wire to fences.
The truth flooded in on him and he realized how the cunning reporters had produced one of the most outrageous lies in the history of journalism with the aid of trick photography. In a piece LM ran under the headline, ‘The Picture that Fooled the World', he explained the significance of the fixing of the barbed wire on the posts.
The prisoners weren't prisoners at all, but free men standing outside the camp's perimeter fence. The double-dealing journalists had gone into the camp and filmed them from the inside looking out, then pretended that their cameras were on the outside looking in. They had made black white and free men captives with camera angles so they could ‘manufacture consent' for a war of free-market aggression. He double-checked with Serb guards who assured him that Trnopolje was a ‘collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished'. A few of the reports of rapes and murders may not have been invented, he conceded, but the truth was that without the protection of selfless Serb soldiers there would have been many more. Such was the critical source for LM. ITN sued and the jury awarded punitive damages for malicious libel. There is no disgrace about fighting a libel case in London and going down with all guns blazing.
The High Court has on occasion ignored honestly collected evidence and awarded enormous damages to Robert Maxwell, Jeffrey Archer and many another brazen crook. However, in his study of the Trnopolje case Professor David Campbell of Durham University, noted that LM didn't fight. It couldn't because it had no honest evidence. Once the former Trotskyists were hauled out of the murk of conspiratorial politics and required to justify themselves in open court, Deichmann and Mick Hume, the editor of LM, accepted that what they said wasn't true. They agreed that inmates could not come and go as they pleased. When a brave Bosnian doctor who had risked his life to pass film to ITN and the Guardian took to the witness box, they and their lawyers sat as quiet as church mice and didn't bother to cross-examine him when he said that far from protecting ‘refugees' camp guards murdered and raped their wretched captives.
‘Lies have gone faster than a man can ride post,' wrote Dr Arbuthnot, and the new technology of the Internet made them fly faster still. Once the lie about the faked massacres in Bosnia was up and running, the public demonstration of the malice of LM had no effect whatsoever. Hate mail flew in at the reporters - one writer told Vulliamy he was a ‘piece of shit' who was ‘probably a nasty little Jew'.
Cries of ‘lies' echoed around the Net like screams in a madhouse as hundreds of Serb and leftist websites and magazines claimed the concentration camps had never existed and the Bosnians had murdered themselves. Meanwhile, leftish publishers denounced the belief that Muslims needed rescuing as a ‘humanitarian illusion' and the prosecution of war criminals as nothing more than ‘victors' justice'. Among their offerings was Fools' Crusade by Diana Johnstone. It carried praise from Chomsky's collaborator Edward S.Herman and purported to show how ‘massive deception and self-deception by the media and politicians' allowed the wars against Milosevic to reinforce the ‘hegemony' of the United States.
It feels superfluous to note that far from dismissing Thomas Deichmann as a loon who preferred his wife's views on the correct hanging of garden fences to the verifiable accounts of survivors, Johnstone accepted without comment his account of the taking of the camp pictures, and treated him as a reliable source whose work ‘provided the background to this famous image'.
She then moved on to the second abiding memory - the dead of Srebrenica - and wondered whether they were really dead at all and not living somewhere else and laughing at the stupidity of the idiots who mourned them. Johnstone first put scare quotes around the ‘Srebrenica massacre' and then spat it out. There had been no deliberate attempt at genocide, she said, and many of those among the alleged 8,000 Muslim dead ‘were presumed to have made it safely into Muslim territory'. As she later explained, the duplicitous ‘Muslim authorities never provided information about these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing, that is, among the massacred'. She was prepared to condemn Serb nationalists for killing only 199 Muslims in Srebrenica. As for the remaining 7,800 or so, ‘there is still no clear way to account for the fate of all the Muslim men reported missing in Srebrenica. Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of "genocide".' Bosnians may have been swapped in prisoner exchanges; maybe they made it to other Yugoslav towns; maybe they moved abroad. . . who knew?
Lots of people, actually. The court in The Hague had thousands of pages of witness statements, and in 2003 the Bosnian Serb leadership admitted responsibility and gave a hideous picture of the mechanics of the massacre. Colonel Dragan Obrenovic, the deputy commander of the Srebrenica pogrom, said, ‘I'm guilty for what I did and did not do. Thousands of innocent people were killed, only the graves remain.' His confession had as much effect as the capitulation of LM. Evidence had no place in the developing nihilist mentality.
When the staff and readers of Ordfront, a left-wing Swedish magazine, revolted after its editor gave Johnstone a platform, the heroes of the new left rallied to Johnstone. Tariq Ali - whom we last saw hastily dropping the opponents of Saddam Hussein - Arundhati Roy, the future Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter and - inevitably - Noam Chomsky defended her in an open letter to the Swedish magazine.
As with the Faurisson and the Holocaust deniers, Chomsky couldn't confine himself to upholding Johnstone's freedom to write and speak, which no court or police officer was denying her. He and his friends built up her credentials and said they regarded Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as ‘an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition'. When the gang surrounded the Bosnians, the boy was back on the edge again, not denying genocide but darting in with praise for the ‘outstanding' Johnstone and then stepping back.
The conspiracy theory was kept going, not with outright denial of massacres but with morsels of doubt to whet the appetites of those who would move on to stronger meat. Srebrenica wasn't the end of it. Chomsky joined the apologists for the Serbs who were saying that the pictures of the Bosnian camp inmates were an outrageous forgery. He told an interviewer from Serb television that, ‘there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped Western opinion, and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barbwire'. ‘A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out,' the Serb interrupted. ‘You remember!' the pleased Chomsky replied. ‘The thin man behind the barbwire, so that was Auschwitz and we can't have Auschwitz again.' All Holocaust deniers are antisemites, and some might say that those on the far-left who discounted the serb camps were motivated by an Islamophobic hatred of Bosnian Muslims.
This view fails to get to what ailed the radical left at the turn of the millennium. They lacked the steadiness of purpose to be consistent, and even racism requires consistency. Their phobia was a fear of America and the West and modernity. If the West had ended up being for the Serbs and against the Bosnians, they would have been for the Bosnians and against the Serbs. Theirs was a rootless affliction.[/QUOTE]
Secondary source: [url]http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/[/url]
[QUOTE]Dear Noam,
I hope you are very well. I’m writing a column for the Guardian today about genocide denial, in which Edward Herman will feature prominently. I have just finished reading his book The Politics of Genocide. It contains a revisionist and wildly inaccurate account of the Rwandan genocide, as well as some eminently contestable statements about the massacre at Srebrenica.
I note that in your foreword you neither endorse nor disown the specific statements the book contains. But I think most readers would see the fact that you wrote the foreword as an endorsement of the book.
Is that how you see it? Do you accept the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Srebrenica? If not, in what respects do you reject them?
I know that the time difference doesn’t give you a great deal of time to respond, so I’ll ask the Guardian to stretch the opportunity to the last minute: namely 1730 British summer time today. I would need only a couple of sentences from you, if you wanted to respond.
Many thanks,
With my best wishes, George[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]I purposely mentioned only one aspect of the book, which I do think is important, particularly so because of how it is ignored: namely the vulgar politicization of the word “genocide,” now so extreme that I rarely use the word at all. The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it “genocide” so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion. It amazes me that intelligent people cannot see that...etc.
Constant bullshit from Chomsky. Read if you want to.[/QUOTE]
Tertiary source: [url]https://www.david-campbell.org/2009/11/14/chomskys-bosnian-shame/[/url]
Chomsky is either a thoroughly nasty individual or a fool. I suggest he is a bit of both. Either way, he is at the very least a political incompetent who should not be taken seriously on any of these matters.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50233327]
Chomsky is either a thoroughly nasty individual or a fool. I suggest he is a bit of both. Either way, he is at the very least a political incompetent who should not be taken seriously on any of these matters.[/QUOTE]
Again, these are all pieces where other people talk about his views, aside from very short snippets. If he had denied a genocide, you could just point to the part of his works where he says it. There's a large number of his essays published freely, and such information would not be hard to find.
Using the Faurisson affair against Chomsky is extremely low, borderline intellectually dishonest. Chomsky had barely heard of Faurisson's work at the time and only knew that he was facing prosecution for writing a book. I'd defend Faurisson too, in that case.
It is [I]one[/I] thing condemning an attack on free speech. I would be tempted to do so myself, even in the case of genocide deniers. It is quite another giving glowing, positive descriptions of blatant racists and genocide deniers. Chomsky repeatedly went above and beyond respecting their right to speak, suggesting it wasn't free speech he was truly interested in.
[B]Chomsky's preface to [I]The Politics of Genocide[/I] can be found here[/B]: [url]https://libcom.org/files/Edward_Herman_and_David_Peterson_The_Politics_of_Genocide__2010.pdf[/url]
The book, as fellow hater of neoliberals Monbiot notes, contains gross distortions of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia to serve a political point. Chomsky doesn't go as far as fully endorsing all of the conclusions within the book, however, I think writing a preface should tell you all you need to know about his opinions on this.
[B]Chomsky's essay, used as a preface by Faurisson in [I]Mémoire en défense[/I][/B]: [url]https://chomsky.info/19801011/[/url]
The last paragraph is the damning one as it shows he is either a complete moron or a liar. This is more forgivable: He stupidly gave Faurisson the right to use it how he wanted, and I think in many ways, he can be slightly let of the hook on this one. Still an incredible blunder.
[B]Chomsky and Herman on the Khmer Rouge[/B]: [url]https://chomsky.info/19770625/[/url]
I think you don't want to face the truth about this man. One mistake is forgivable, and perhaps Faurisson is that one mistake. But this is three mistakes. Three denials to suit his politics. That is completely unacceptable.
[editline]30th April 2016[/editline]
He rarely goes as far as outright denial. Instead he goes down the route of 'just questioning the facts' and throwing out smoke and mirrors in order to further his politics through confusion.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50233589]It is [I]one[/I] thing condemning an attack on free speech. I would be tempted to do so myself, even in the case of genocide deniers. It is quite another giving glowing, positive descriptions of blatant racists and genocide deniers. Chomsky repeatedly went above and beyond respecting their right to speak, suggesting it wasn't free speech he was truly interested in.
[B]Chomsky's preface to [I]The Politics of Genocide[/I] can be found here[/B]: [url]https://libcom.org/files/Edward_Herman_and_David_Peterson_The_Politics_of_Genocide__2010.pdf[/url]
The book, as fellow hater of neoliberals Monbiot notes, contains gross distortions of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia to serve a political point. Chomsky doesn't go as far as fully endorsing all of the conclusions within the book, however, I think writing a preface should tell you all you need to know about his opinions on this.
[B]Chomsky's essay, used as a preface by Faurisson in [I]Mémoire en défense[/I][/B]: [url]https://chomsky.info/19801011/[/url]
The last paragraph is the damning one as it shows he is either a complete moron or a liar. This is more forgivable: He stupidly gave Faurisson the right to use it how he wanted, and I think in many ways, he can be slightly let of the hook on this one. Still an incredible blunder.
[B]Chomsky and Herman on the Khmer Rouge[/B]: [url]https://chomsky.info/19770625/[/url]
I think you don't want to face the truth about this man. One mistake is forgivable, and perhaps Faurisson is that one mistake. But this is three mistakes. Three denials to suit his politics. That is completely unacceptable.
[editline]30th April 2016[/editline]
He rarely goes as far as outright denial. Instead he goes down the route of 'just questioning the facts' and throwing out smoke and mirrors in order to further his politics through confusion.[/QUOTE]
Except where are the actual genocide denials in these three examples? The preface used by Faurisson just has a paragraph where Chomsky doesn't want to call Faurisson an anti-Semite. That's not an endorsement of any kind. Chomsky didn't intend for it to be an endorsement, or for that matter, a preface.
Chomsky was wrong about the Khmer Rouge, and terribly wrong, but he never denied the genocide that took place there once the reports were confirmed. He only questioned the reports of refugees being published in news media as they came out.
Being wrong about something isn't the same as being immoral or a liar, and it also has little bearing on whether or not his other positions are correct.
Why is he writing a preface to a book specialising in swivel-eyed genocide denial other than to endorse it?
[editline]1st May 2016[/editline]
His dealings with Cambodia 'just questioning the facts' were ridiculous. The evidence of what was happening was overwhelming from very early on, but because he couldn't accept what was happening due to his politics, he chose to muddy the waters.
[editline]1st May 2016[/editline]
I doubt you'd extent such nice benefit of the doubt to someone who positioned himself on the right instead of the left. If I chose to write a preface, broadly agreeing with the conclusions, of a tract which 'questioned the facts' of the Holocaust, or muddied the waters completely denying against overwhelming evidence the existence of My Lai, I doubt you would be so sympathetic.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50233748]Why is he writing a preface to a book specialising in swivel-eyed genocide denial other than to endorse it?[/QUOTE]
Perhaps it's because the book has little to do with genocide denial. It just has genocide in the title, and you don't agree with the views in it. It doesn't take a stance that any of the genocides in it didn't happen.
[QUOTE]
His dealings with Cambodia 'just questioning the facts' were ridiculous. The evidence of what was happening was overwhelming from very early on, but because he couldn't accept what was happening due to his politics, he chose to muddy the waters.[/QUOTE]
His dealings with Cambodia were just criticisms of US policy there and criticism of the media taken to conclusions that weren't correct. That doesn't make it genocide denial and it also doesn't make his critique of neoliberalism less accurate.
[QUOTE]I doubt you'd extent such nice benefit of the doubt to someone who positioned himself on the right instead of the left. If I chose to write a preface, broadly agreeing with the conclusions, of a tract which 'questioned the facts' of the Holocaust, or muddied the waters completely denying against overwhelming evidence the existence of My Lai, I doubt you would be so sympathetic.[/QUOTE]
And you would be correct, as most of the serious works of genocide denial have come from the right and still do. It has little to do with Chomsky, who didn't deny a genocide and doesn't look upon genocide denial very favorably - as he stated in the preface to The Politics of Genocide.
The book has everything to do with genocide denial and is considered as such by enough people that I don't need to read the bollocks myself.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Herman#Denial_of_the_genocide_of_Tutsis_in_Rwanda_in_.22The_politics_of_genocide.22[/url]
[QUOTE]In The Politics of Genocide, (co-authored with David Peterson, Foreword from Noam Chomsky, 2010) Herman argues that some genocides such as Kosovo and Rwanda in 1994 have been heavily publicized in the West to advance a specific economic agenda, eventually leading to a minority controlled government of pro-Western and pro-business Tutsi, while other genocides, such as in East Timor, have been largely ignored for the same reason.
On Rwanda, Herman and Peterson wrote that the Western establishment has “swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down” (p. 51); the RPF not only killed Hutus, but were the “prime génocidaires” (p. 54); there was “large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before the April–July 1994 period (p.53); this contributed to a result in which “the majority of victims were likely Hutu and not Tutsi” (p. 58).[25]
Some authors like John Pilger,[26] Dan Kowalik,[27] Hans Köchler[28] or the editors of Media Lens.[29] commended the book. The book sparked reactions from different authors and journalists like Gerald Caplan,[30] George Monbiot[31] or James Wizeye, first secretary at the Rwandan High Commission in London.[32] Herman and Peterson replied.[33]
In the academic field, Rwandan history and genocide specialists like Martin Shaw, Adam Jones, or the Rwanda specialist Linda Melvern dismissed the quality of the analysis presented and consider it as genocide denial.[34][35]
For instance, Prof. Adam Jones writes : "[Herman] has demonstrated no past familiarity or competence with this case, and yet he advances what is probably the most systematic denial of the Tutsi genocide I have ever read, at least from anyone who’s not on trial for genocide or defending them. Herman and Peterson present an interpretation of the events in Rwanda from April to July 1994 that is a straightforward inversion of the reality accepted, and studied in intimate detail, by every major scholar and investigator of the subject. I am not aware of a single exception in comparative genocide studies and scholarship on Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. This is quite analogous to declaring that the Jewish Holocaust did not occur, and in fact, the real victims were Germans slaughtered by Jews."[35][/QUOTE]
I'm not even going to address the Khmer Rouge anymore, you are just being silly at this point and denying reality.
[editline]1st May 2016[/editline]
[url]http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/genocide-denial-expert-assessments/[/url]
[QUOTE]Statement by Professor Adam Jones, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction.
“Ed Herman’s shift from unmasking atrocities, as with Vietnam, to denying and concealing them in the cases of Srebrenica and Rwanda, is one of the most depressing things I have witnessed on the left. Herman began grinding a denier’s axe on Srebrenica soon after the events — perhaps out of some nostalgic attachment to the oppressive and atrocious ‘Yugoslav’ government of Slobodan Milosevic. His more recent intervention on Rwanda is truly his nadir. He has demonstrated no past familiarity or competence with this case, and yet he advances what is probably the most systematic denial of the Tutsi genocide I have ever read, at least from anyone who’s not on trial for genocide or defending them.
“Herman and Peterson present an interpretation of the events in Rwanda from April to July 1994 that is a straightforward inversion of the reality accepted, and studied in intimate detail, by every major scholar and investigator of the subject. I am not aware of a single exception in comparative genocide studies and scholarship on Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. This is quite analogous to declaring that the Jewish Holocaust did not occur, and in fact, the real victims were Germans slaughtered by Jews. Herman and Peterson contend that the ‘only well-organized’ killing force in Rwanda during this period was the Tutsi-dominated RPF. The RPF certainly committed major and possibly genocidal atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, claiming tens of thousands of victims. But this was dwarfed by the Hutu holocaust of Tutsis, which exterminated up to a million people. Herman and Peterson completely obfuscate the agents of ‘Hutu Power,’ the killing squads that roamed every corner of Rwanda available to them for week after week, hunting down every last ragged Tutsi survivor they could find, checking in and out of their day’s duties like clockwork. They were organized and mobilized by an apparatus of hate that sprang into immediate action when the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994. How much detailed pre-planning of the killing there was is a legitimate question. But to baldly deny that systematic and generalized killing of Tutsis occurred in those three apocalyptic months is to deny the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, and to do it in such a casual and malicious way that it leaves me slack-jawed.
“There is also a sense in which, while not racist in themselves, Herman and Peterson’s contentions rely on the racism once described by a central object of their criticism, the late Alison Des Forges. Talking about western inaction during the Tutsi genocide of 1994, she said that ‘Rwanda was simply too remote … too poor, too little, and probably too black to be worthwhile.’ Most people today have trouble telling Hutus from Tutsis in a country so distant from centers of power. And hey, who really cares anyway? That’s the type of widespread ignorance and callousness that Herman and Peterson exploit — the kind they need, if their nonsense is to slide past.”
***
Statement by Linda Melvern, investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed and Conspiracy to Murder.
“The work of Herman and Peterson is genocide denial; it is presented under the guise of scholarly debate. It is a part of a number of statements and articles aimed at obfuscating, distorting, minimising or even denying the genocide of the minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
“A programme of genocide denial was begun in April 1994 as the massacres spread. It was devised by the génocidaires themselves. Its aim was to prove to the world that the huge number of civilian deaths in Rwanda was due to “fighting” in a resumed civil war. This view was actively promoted by the Rwandan ambassador sitting in the UN Security Council in New York. Later on the campaign shifted focus and the perpetrators began desperately to try to prove that a plan to eliminate the Tutsi had never existed — there had been no Conspiracy to Murder. This one great lie would become the foundation stone of the defence case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). It is a view actively promoted by key defence lawyers from the ICTR who claim that the genocide of the Tutsi is “a myth”. They maintain that “ a standard account” of events — or what has even been called an “idealised history” of events — is deeply flawed. Herman and Peterson have relied on genocidaires and their lawyers for their accounts of what they believe took place.
“There is overwhelming evidence to counter this common denial. The conclusions of the UN Security Council’s Independent Commission of Experts in December 1994 reported to the Council that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide had been “massively violated” in Rwanda between April 6 and July 15. The experts had found “overwhelming evidence” to show that the extermination of the Tutsi had been premeditated and planned months in advance; a conspiracy to destroy Tutsi is confirmed as fact by judges at the ICTR.
“Over the years the manipulation of the evidence and disinformation has influenced journalists, students and academics. In France, in Belgium, in the USA, in Canada and in the UK the denial of the genocide of the Tutsi has served to detract from continuing efforts to investigate the circumstances of what happened; in my own case have been attempts to try to prevent publication of on-going research.”
***
Statement by Professor Martin Shaw, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals / University of Roehampton / University of Sussex
“Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing.
“They misrepresent Monbiot, a widely respected radical journalist, as a cog in a Guardian-Observer propaganda machine which – in turn – is simply churning out a version of something called the ‘Western party-line’. Such crude, amalgamated constructs not only make serious debate difficult, but are also designed to damage one of the most important arenas for critical information and debate in the mainstream media – in precisely one of the areas in which it has been strongest, reporting on and debating crimes against humanity.
“Herman and Peterson do this because, as I have argued in my full review in the Journal of Genocide Research, their Politics of Genocide ‘does not stop at raising … counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial.’ Deniers need to block out key information and misrepresent opponents to support their perverse world-views. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen puts it in a classic study, ‘One common thread runs through the many different stories of denial: people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’
“What is the information which disturbs Herman and Peterson? They cannot accept what has now been established by extensive and rigorous enquiry, that in 1995 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, who were captured by Bosnian-Serbian forces, were murdered in cold blood. They suggested in their book that the case was ‘extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings’. This is a classic genocide denial mechanism (which can be traced back to the Armenian genocide), representing genocidal killing as really only war, suggesting that the victims were not really civilians (they might have been killed in battle), or if they were, as killed accidentally in the course of fighting.
“Herman and Peterson believe that their trump card against Monbiot is that he ‘fails to mention that … we point out that the Bosnian Serbs “had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety”.’ What this shows, however, is that they do not understand genocide, which involves not just indiscriminate attacks on entire populations, but narrower, targeted violence – as often against men of military age (as potential resisters) as against women (whose sexual violation completes the humiliation of a community).
“They also cannot accept that an exceptionally large, fast campaign of mass murder was carried out by Rwandan Hutu Power forces in 1994, claiming that the ‘great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million’. Claiming that Monbiot’s objections are ‘laughable’, they ridicule him for running ‘to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources’.
“Yet the principal academic reference for Herman and Peterson’s claim is an unpublished paper, ‘Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time’, which they attribute to Christian Davenport and Allan Stam and source to Davenport’s website, dated to 2004. Yet on page 37 of the same paper (which while citing a database compiled jointly with Stam, is attributed only to Davenport and dated 2008), are printed in black and white the following unequivocal conclusions: ‘we find that the majority of killings take place in the zone under government control (accounting for approximately 990,000 deaths). They are the ones directly responsible for almost all of the political violence.’ (Accessed on 17 October 2011)
“A charitable explanation could be that Davenport’s paper has been updated since 2004, and this conclusion added since then, although 2008 was still well before The Politics of Genocide went to press. But Herman and Peterson can hardly have missed a clear line of argument which, while qualifying previous accounts of the Rwandan genocide, does not undermine the conclusion that the majority of killing in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Hutu Power forces. The difference is that Davenport and Stam want to raise questions about the narrative of genocide; Herman and Peterson want to fully overturn it.
“So they are sloppy with their sources: it is they, in the nice phrase they use against Monbiot, who are ‘hit-and-run intellectuals’, scooping up quotes and references without due care. As Cohen says, in denial ‘information is … somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.’ We find bucket-loads of all these tendencies in Herman and Peterson – and their patron, Chomsky. Indeed one suspects that, as Cohen continued, ‘the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’
“The remaining question is why do the Chomskyites do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include, that like their fellow deniers in the former LM coterie, they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.”
***
Statement by Dr Marko Attila Hoare, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, London.
“The extent of Herman’s and Peterson’s cynicism in their misuse of source material is simply breathtaking. Thus, they make much of the findings of Mirsad Tokaca’s Research and Documentation Centre (RDC), that total Bosnian war deaths – narrowly defined – were approximately 100,000. Yet where the RDC’s findings contradict Herman’s and Peterson’s revisionist scribblings, they pass over them in silence. Thus, they continue both to deny the Srebrenica massacre and to parrot the myth that Bosnian Muslim forces themselves massacred thousands of Serbs in the Srebrenica region. Yet the RDC’s findings have comprehensively disproved the latter myth while providing further strong evidence – if any were needed – that Serb forces massacred over eight thousand Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995.
“The RDC’s figures show that 81.06% of all war deaths from the Podrinje region – where Srebrenica and the surrounding Serb villages are located -during the whole of the war were Muslims (a total of 16,940 civilians and 7,177 soldiers) while 18.73% were Serbs (870 civilians and 4,703) soldiers. The RDC’s figures show that 10,333 people from the Podrinje region were killed during 1995; that over 93% of these were Muslims; and that 9,328 out of the 10,333 were killed during the single month of July. Conversely, the RDC has specifically investigated the Serb death-toll in the Bratunac municipality, where the bulk of Bosnian Army killings in the Srebrenica region are alleged to have taken place, and concluded that 119 Serb civilians and 448 Serb soldiers were killed there during the whole of the war. All this from a source that Herman and Peterson themselves loudly trumpet.”[/QUOTE]
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