Publishing in the Western world is an enterprise whose success depends on freedom of expression enjoyed in Western countries. Reputable publishers know this, and do not lightly accept restraints on that freedom. Eminent historians have a duty to their subject; they do not readily collaborate with attempts to conceal historical truth, particularly when the truth in question relates to episodes having the gravest possible implications for current political life. These points are axiomatic.
Or so I supposed until very recently. In the last few months I have had an experience which calls them into question. The experience has staggered me. It may be that I am naive, and that such incidents are commonplace; but I do not think so. The reader must judge for himself.
In January, 1982, I was asked to contribute an entry to a dictionary of twentieth-century thinkers which was to be published in Britain by Fontana/Collins under the title Biographical Companion to Modern Thought, and in America by Harper & Row as Twentieth-Century Culture. The book promised to be a respectable, indeed distinguished, publication. It was edited by Alan Bullock (Lord Bullock), one of the most eminent figures in the British academic world: author of the standard biography of Adolf Hitler, Founding Master of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1969 to 1973, chairman of a galaxy of committees concerned with educational issues, and loaded with honors among which a Life Barony and a Fellowship of the British Academy are only two of the most prestigious. (According to the contract I signed, Lord Bullock was the editor of the book and R. B. Woodings, who handled day-to-day dealings with contributors, was his assistant; the eventual title page listed Woodings as co-editor.)
My assigned subject was Noam Chomsky, a complex man who has made his mark in several different areas of life: as a professor of linguistics, who virtually single-handedly turned that subject into a major focus of attention for philosophers and psychologists, and as a political activist, who came to wide public attention during the Vietnam War as perhaps the foremost figure in the movement of radical opposition to American actions in Southeast Asia, and who more generally propounded (and continues to propound) an anarcho-syndicalist version of socialist theory. My qualifications for writing about Chomsky, briefly, were that I too am a professional linguist with radical political interests; in 1979 I published a book analyzing the links between Chomsky’s linguistic and political ideas.
I sketched Chomsky’s many faceted career as accurately as I could within the roughly five hundred fifty words allotted. The bulk of my essay was either laudatory or evaluatively neutral. In one short passage dealing with Chomsky’s recent activities, however, I could not avoid a negative tone. Chomsky has slipped somewhat from public view in the ten years since American withdrawal from Vietnam; yet those years have seen him engaged in what are possibly the most remarkable and controversial actions of his career to date. Both of them relate to episodes of genocide: in Indochina, and under Nazism. I alluded to these actions in the following words, which amounted to about one twelfth of the whole essay:
he forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book—which Chomsky admitted he had not read—that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).
I sent my essay into Lord Bullock’s assistant Mr. Woodings; he expressed warm approval of it; the book appeared, in Britain, about a year later; and that, I assumed, was that.
That was not that. This spring, shortly before the American edition of the book was due to appear, Lord Bullock’s assistant got in touch again. To cut a long story short, Chomsky had complained to Fontana/Collins about the inclusion in my essay of the words just quoted and had threatened Harper & Row with a libel action if these words appeared in their paperback edition of the book. (He was apparently too late to catch the small American hardback edition.) I pointed out that what I had written was no more than the truth, that publishers of a serious reference book of this kind had a duty to give an all-round assessment of its subjects rather than letting the subjects censor their own entries, and that an essay on Chomsky’s career which went into detail on his theories of mathematical linguistics while remaining silent on these more controversial topics would imply a degraded scale of moral values. But all to no avail. Harper & Row insisted that the libel threat must be taken seriously, and, when I would not allow my own name to stand under a mutilated version of my text, Lord Bullock and Mr. Woodings announced that they would replace what I had written (in the American and any future British reprinting of the book) with an entry of their own. I have read the Bullock/Woodings version of Chomsky’s career; it skates over Chomsky’s recent political activities with an anodyne remark that he has “continued to be involved in controversy” on (unnamed) issues.
Thus American users of what promises to be a standard work of reference are deprived of information about one of the most significant facets of the public activities of one of its more important subjects, on the sole ground that the subject himself objects to this aspect of his career being recorded. This, surely, is an extraordinary state of affairs.
The episode raises two questions in my mind. In what way does Chomsky believe that my words misrepresented his actions (since, to threaten a libel suit, he must surely claim that what I wrote is somehow false)? And, even if Chomsky does believe that I deviated from the truth, how in terms of his own stated principles can he justify the use of a legal threat to suppress my freedom of expression? Let me first consider the issue of my accuracy.
My statement that Chomsky has “forfeited authority as a political commentator,” in the first place, is an assertion about other people’s recent views of Chomsky, and the strong terms used by many commentators make the phrase “forfeited authority” a restrained one. To Ian Robinson, the British literary scholar, Chomsky is “plainly too crazed to be taken seriously.” Martin Peretz, the editor of The New Republic, calls him simply “a fool.” Fred Halliday, a leftist political writer, uses the term “pariah,” and quotes the editor of “a liberal U.S. journal” as saying “There is no way we could publish Chomsky now.” Presumably, in face of a chorus of published remarks like these, I was not expected to tell Harper & Row’s readers that Chomsky was currently at the zenith of his political influence.
But doubtless Chomsky’s real objection was to the examples I mentioned in my parenthesis rather than to the general conclusion I drew from them. So let us look at the relevant facts. Both in the Cambodia and in the Holocaust cases it will be appropriate to begin by reminding the reader of the historical background.
In the years before Communist regimes took control in South Vietnam and Cambodia, it was an open question how well or badly they would treat their subjects if they did eventually gain power; widely different forecasts could reasonably be defended by various commentators. Noam Chomsky’s opinion lay at the optimistic extreme of the spectrum. In 1973 he expressed his view of the North Vietnamese regime by quoting from a RAND study by Konrad Kellen called “1971 and Beyond: The View from Hanoi”: “ ‘The Hanoi regime is perhaps one of the most genuinely popular in the world today. The 20 million North Vietnamese . . . find the system just and the labor they do rewarding.’” Chomsky argued that the Viet Cong guerrillas were winning the war for South Vietnam because of “‘the progressive social and economic results’ shown by their programmes. As elsewhere in Indochina, it was the success of the Communist-led forces in gaining popular support through successful programmes that led to the American effort” (the internal quotation here is from William Nighswonger, at one time a senior official in the Agency for International Development in South Vietnam). Many people (myself included) opposed the Vietnam War because we believed that it was being fought in a supremely callous fashion and that the human misery caused by the war itself outweighed the misery likely to be caused by Communist rule. But for Chomsky this was not an appropriate motive for opposition to the war: “The principle that we should retract our claws when the victim bleeds too much is hardly an elevated one,” he wrote in 1969. For Chomsky the American engagement in Indochina was wrong because it was not a matter of helping one side in a struggle between rival Indochinese factions: rather, it was a “war against the peoples of Asia,” as he wrote in 1971. The South Vietnamese government was a mere “American puppet regime,” whereas the Viet Cong were “dying for their country and defending it, with indescribable heroism.” Chomsky wrote much more about Vietnam than about Cambodia, because the American engagement in Vietnam lasted much longer; but his preference for the cause of Communist insurgents as against that of non-Communist governments applied to Cambodia as much as to South Vietnam (cf. his words “As elsewhere in Indochina” just quoted).
After the Communists won, things turned out very differently from what these quotations suggest. What happened in South Vietnam was bad enough. Hundreds of thousands of people, including many who had been opponents of the U.S.-backed Thieu regime, were herded into barbaric prison camps where the conditions killed many, sent many others mad, and crippled others for life. Year after year, thousands of Vietnamese prefer to put to sea in tiny boats, often to be sexually brutalized and killed by pirates, or to die of drowning or thirst, rather than to remain in Communist Vietnam. Yet this pales by comparison with events in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975.
The entire population of Phnom Penh was forced to evacuate the city instantaneously and engage in long forced marches to resettle in empty countryside, without the equipment needed for home building or agriculture. This applied even to hospital patients: British medical personnel reported that surgical operations were interrupted at gunpoint by Khmer Rouge cadres demanding that patients leave the city immediately. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who was an eyewitness, described how
the strongest dragged pitifully along, others were carried by friends, and some were lying on beds pushed by their families with their plasma and drip bumping alongside. I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm. . . .
Any sign of dissidence was punished by death. One refugee reported that “some people tried to argue with the Khmers Rouges—a druggist in particular. The Khmers Rouges cut off his head before my eyes.” Another refugee “saw the Khmers Rouges arrest about twenty young men with long hair; they shot them before our eyes.” Army officers and civil servants were systematically rounded up and, in Khmer Rouge parlance, “sent to the Higher Organization” (killed). Near Phnom Penh (according to Ponchaud) “an entire company was massacred, with their wives. The children stood by crying as their parents were shot before their eyes. ‘Why are you crying over enemies,’ they were told; ‘if you don’t stop we’ll kill you too.’”
Those who went to a quick death at the hands of the Higher Organization were a small minority; many times more met a slow death through starvation and overwork. Suon Phal, a student, described how “We didn’t have any oxen so we formed a team of eight men to pull the plough. Several of my comrades, exhausted by this work, began spitting blood and died.” According to Ponchaud, “The human organism was used to the extreme limit of its physical endurance, no effort was made to spare it and it was never given a day of rest.” At the end of 1975, for unknown reasons, the Khmers Rouges relocated many Cambodians a second time. Ponchaud writes that “this second deportation was even more deadly than the first, for people’s systems were weaker and could not take the journey . . . . [A doctor reported that] people were gaunt as skeletons, their legs full of abscesses. Another witness says that some people fell under the train on purpose and committed suicide. He speaks of two hundred and fifty such suicides near Mongkolborey. Yet another says, ‘On the road to Phnom Srok there were tens of thousands of people from Phnom Penh, all gaunt and lifeless, marching in columns . . . . Some were laughing and dancing, shouting and eating raw rice, many had gone crazy from fatigue, privation and fear.’” At the end of 1975, estimates of the number of Cambodians killed by Khmer Rouge treatment in the nine months since the end of the war ranged from 800,000 to 1,400,000 (out of a total population of about seven million).
The English language lacks terms adequate to the dreadfulness of this historical episode. Yet it seems to have been perpetrated almost frivolously, if that word can be used without insulting the memory of the dead. The fortunes of war changed, and in August 1980, Khieu Samphan, the former Khmer Rouge prime minister, was himself a refugee from a Vietnamese invasion which had conquered most of Cambodia. In an interview with Western journalists he dismissed the ideology in whose name hundreds of thousands had been murdered, almost as if he were a businessman urging the public not to dwell on last year’s unprofitable sales line: “Communism is dead. To reject communism once and for all is undoubtedly the best way of uniting all Kampucheans in the anti-Vietnamese crusade. . . . For them [Cambodians] communism is synonymous with misery. . . .”
The English language lacks terms adequate to the dreadfulness of this historical episode.
Nobody suggests that Western commentators such as Noam Chomsky could have foreseen these horrors. The fact remains that all Chomsky’s considerable political influence had been exerted in order to support the Communist cause and to undermine the forces which opposed Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge insurgence. That being so, there were two decent courses of action available to Chomsky once he discovered what their victory meant in practice. He could have publicly acknowledged that he had made a colossal mistake of political judgment; or he could simply have remained silent. He did neither.
Instead, Chomsky used the Cambodian episode as a peg on which to hang a series of sanctimonious tirades against the political partisanship of the Western media. (Some of these writings were co-authored with E. S. Herman; I assume that Chomsky stands by the various documents he has published whether as sole author or as co-author, and I do not distinguish the two categories in what follows.) According to Chomsky, the Western press gave prominence to Cambodian massacres, accepting every allegation as true and printing exaggerated figures of numbers killed, because the Khmers Rouges were Communists; where comparable atrocities were committed by “our” side, they were swept under the carpet by a combination of governmental obfuscation and commercial pressure on press freedom. Why, he repeatedly asked, have the Western media not paid comparable attention to the atrocities committed by the U.S.-supported Indonesian government in ex-Portuguese East Timor? (A puzzling question: East Timor is extremely remote, lacking a friendly frontier across which refugees can escape with their stories, and yet my daily paper, the London Times, has in fact carried reasonable coverage of the continuing Indonesian atrocities.)
For Chomsky, the Cambodian episode was a demonstration of how “intellectuals often tend to provide services for state propaganda,” as he wrote in 1981. In the case of “bloodbaths committed by official enemies,” as in Cambodia, the Western media overlook the likelihood that refugees will retail exaggerated or fabricated accounts of the horrors of the regime they have left, and unquestioningly quote the highest available estimates of numbers killed. Chomsky noted that George McGovern was widely reported in 1978 as quoting a figure of 2.3 million Cambodians killed under the Khmers Rouges, a figure that was almost certainly too high (though Chomsky does not mention the figure quoted by the Communist government of Vietnam—a source presumably untainted by subservience to U.S. interests—which was three million).
Faced with events as terrible as those which occurred in Cambodia, a natural reaction is to feel that their horror makes our petty day-to-day concerns fade into insignificance. Reading Chomsky’s repeated pedantic, self-righteous quibbling in response to the many writers who have objected to his position on the Cambodia massacres—most of whom can be shown to have distorted a remark of Chomsky’s by quoting out of context here, or overlooked some qualification in his writing there, as is almost impossible to avoid in practice and as Chomsky has in turn done when discussing his critics—it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that, in Chomsky’s mind, the most important issue raised by events in Cambodia is the correctness of Noam Chomsky’s line. As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Libertarian Review in 1977:
Chomsky and Herman dismiss accounts of Cambodian refugees as “at best second-hand.” Apart from a striking callousness toward the victims of terror, one wonders how we can get more first-hand accounts of a country which has been tightly sealed off from the outside world by its rulers. There is also the Chomsky-Herman statement that Cambodian executions “have numbered at most in the thousands,” the “at most” striking a piquant note reminiscent of Stalinist apologetics of the 1930s. . . . After stating that Samphan concedes a million deaths during the war, they assert that “nowhere in [an interview reported to have been given by Khieu Samphan to an Italian journalist] does Khieu Samphan suggest that the million post-war deaths were a result of official policies …” And yet, the report of the interview . . . says as follows: the Italian correspondent: “If 1 million persons died in the fighting, what happened to the remaining 1 million?” To which Samphan replied: “It’s incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals.”
It should be said that there is now real doubt about the authenticity of this interview, but that scarcely seems relevant to Chomsky’s comment on Samphan’s statements as reported.
Chomsky has never actually denied that a large proportion of the population of Cambodia was murdered by the Khmers Rouges. He could not deny it. Instead, he has consistently tried to change the subject—to suggest that this is not the central issue of recent Cambodian history. William Shawcross is a writer with impeccable credentials as an opponent of American imperialism: his book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, is a widely respected indictment of America’s secret and illegal war in Cambodia between 1969 and 1975. In 1981 Shawcross commented on Chomsky’s writings about Cambodia:
By continually concentrating on mistakes which journalists and writers made and on the way in which western governments exploited the stories out of Kampuchea, he deflected attention from the far more important issue. . . . His political influence is such that he could have played an important part in mobilizing opinion against the Khmer Rouge. . . . Instead Chomsky’s well-known views helped lull many people throughout the world into the idle illusion that the horror stories about the Khmer Rouge were either planted by the CIA, fabricated by journalists or both. That is a sorry role.
Let me now turn to the other case of genocide to which my essay on Chomsky alluded: the Nazi Holocaust of the early 1940s. Here there is scarcely any room for dispute about the important facts, and educated Americans and Britons are fairly well aware of them. Several million men, women, and children were deliberately murdered, often in unimaginably cruel ways, for no reason other than their ancestry. This was not a case (as, arguably, Cambodia was) of a small, backward nation being caught up in global political struggles beyond the comprehension of its inhabitants. Early-twentieth-century Germany was one of the heartlands of Western civilization; it had about as good a claim as any nation in the world to represent the summit of mankind’s achievements in the domains of art, philosophy, technology, and commerce. Surely it is vitally important, not just as a duty to the memory of the victims of Nazism but also as a duty to ourselves and our descendants, to keep alive the knowledge of what happened under the Nazis. The Holocaust has crucial lessons to teach us about the fragility of civilization, the dangers of excessive respect for authority, the fact that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and that “it could happen here.”
The Holocaust has crucial lessons to teach us about the fragility of civilization.
Memories are short, and many of the acts carried out on a routine basis in Nazi Germany are difficult to contemplate without nausea. I do not wish to dwell at unnecessary length on harrowing details, but let me remind the reader of the caliber of evil under discussion by quoting just one horror to stand for the many whose details are readily accessible in our libraries. It happened that, the day after Chomsky’s threat of litigation was first reported to me, the London Times reported the death in Chile of Walter Rauff, the last surviving major Nazi mass-murderer. In 1941, Rauff had taken charge of the SS murder squads, who at the time were executing their many victims by shooting. “The most important consideration for me,” Rauff told a postwar interrogator, “was that the shootings were a terrible ordealfor the men concerned, which could be relieved by using a gas lorry.” So Rauff invented and ordered the construction of mobile gas chambers, forerunners of the fixed gas chambers that would be introduced in the camps in mid-1942. As Tom Bower wrote in the Times:
Whole families would be sealed in a lorry and driven to a pit for burial. As the lorry fumes slowly filled the container, there would inevitably be hysterical, frantic sounds from within. . . . [An inspector reported that] the SS operators were being hampered by a series of unfortunate teething problems. . . . The victims’ faces were “horribly distorted”; bodies—described in one memorandum as “the cargo”—were covered with excrement and vomit. . . . [T]he SS squads . . . complain[ed] of headaches. . . .
These things, and many others equally horrible, occurred not long ago, just a few hundred miles from where I am sitting. Surely we can have few public duties more solemn than that of maintaining the memory of what the Nazis did, doing nothing that might help to blur that memory or hide from future generations the risks of allowing authoritarian tendencies to go unchecked.
Unfortunately, there are a number of Nazi apologists in France, the United States, and elsewhere, who profess to believe, and try to persuade others to believe, that the Holocaust never happened: stories of six million victims of Nazi murder are the “hoax of the twentieth century,” to quote the title of one of their books. Robert Faurisson, an associate professor at the University of Lyons, was a member of this group, who came to widespread public attention in 1980–81 as defendant in a number of criminal and civil actions arising out of a book he had written propagating the no-holocaust theory; he was suspended from his teaching post in order to avoid student disturbances. In July 1981 Faurisson was found guilty of incitement to racial hatred and violence, and was found to have libeled a Jewish historian whom he had described as a “manipulator” and “fabricator” of documents. Faurisson was given a three-month suspended sentence and had to pay about four thousand dollars in fines and damages as well as massive legal costs.
While Faurisson’s case was pending, Chomsky lent his support to Faurisson in two ways. He put his name to a petition calling for freedom of speech for Faurisson; and he contributed a six-page preface to a new book by Faurisson, Memoir in defense against those who accuse me of having falsified history—this book argues specifically that Nazi camps had contained no such things as gas chambers. (The translation of Faurisson’s title, and further translations below, are my own.) I have read Faurisson’s Memoir. It is cleverly done; a young person with little independent awareness of the facts might be impressed. I do not believe that a serious student of the Nazi period could take the argument seriously.
These two actions provoked an uproar in France and elsewhere on the Continent. Chomsky’s response to this uproar has consistently been to insist that what he did was no more than to uphold the freedom to express opinions irrespective of their merit or lack of merit. I agree with Chomsky that Faurisson is entitled to that right (and I share with Chomsky some doubts about the French laws under which Faurisson was punished, just as I object to the analogous laws in my own country). Nevertheless, Chomsky’s response is quite unacceptable, for several reasons.
In the first place, the petition Chomsky signed is far from presenting Faurisson as someone whose views, though ludicrous and abhorrent, must on principle be allowed to be expressed: “Dr Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years. . . . Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the ‘Holocaust’ question . . .” The petition states that attempts have been made to end Faurisson’s research by “denying him access to public libraries and archives,” which is apparently false. It describes Faurisson as “making his findings public”—the word “findings,” according to my understanding of English and according to the Oxford English Dictionary (though, Chomsky has since claimed, not to him), connotes truth or authoritativeness rather than mere opinion.
There is a duty to defend freedom of expression even for Nazi apologists; there is no duty to talk about them as if they were earnest, unjustly slandered seekers after truth. Nevertheless, the petition signature was possibly a minor misjudgment. In a totally different league of seriousness was the preface for Faurisson’s book. The reason why distinguished men are invited to contribute prefaces to books by undistinguished authors—as Chomsky must be well aware— is that they help the books to sell (and thus to propagate the ideas they contain). Noam Chomsky’s name is included on the cover of Faurisson’s book in bold capitals—for what purpose, other than to attract potential readers’ attention? Certainly, Chomsky does not suggest that he agrees with Faurisson’s argument; he states that he has not read the book, though he has said elsewhere that he is familiar with the general nature of Faurisson’s opinions. But that is not the point: a preface by a famous man achieves its public-relations result simply by existing, rather than by what it says. When the book was published, I was living in Switzerland and reading the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, surely one of the most soberly unsensational newspapers in the world. After noting that Chomsky presents the issue as one of freedom of expression, it commented: “This famous linguist has written a preface to a book which he has not himself read, without sparing a thought for the fact that with his fine-sounding name he is lending Faurisson moral support with respect to the issue of substance too.”
Furthermore, Chomsky’s preface is not exclusively about the free-speech issue. The last of its six pages is an attempt to exonerate Faurisson from the charges of anti-semitism and neo-Nazism. Chomsky suggests that Faurisson is “a relatively apolitical sort of liberal.” In November 1980 this apolitical liberal announced on French radio that “the alleged massacre in gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews is part of one and the same lie, a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and international Zionism.”
Chomsky reacted with fury (his word) to the storm of criticism that broke over him in the wake of the Faurisson affair. In a Le Monde interview he commented loftily that the French were “hysterical” on the subject; French intellectual life was infected by a “taste for the irrational and a contempt for facts.” His innocent action would have aroused no special attention in a country such as the United States which possessed a proper respect for civil liberties, Chomsky explained, apparently oblivious to the reasons why Nazi genocide might be a more sensitive issue for Frenchmen than for someone who spent the war years as a teenager in Pennsylvania. Or perhaps “oblivious” is not the right word; Chomsky noted that “under the German occupation, collaboration with the occupier was very common in France— but the fact that Frenchmen still feel guilty is no reason for them to try to stop someone expressing his views.”
An interviewer for Libération invited Chomsky to “take your position to the logical extreme: would you have contributed a preface to Mein Kampf?” Chomsky twice evaded the question.
Chomsky seems to have felt that some retreat was necessary.
Nevertheless, faced with such unanimity of criticism, Chomsky seems to have felt that some retreat was necessary. He claimed in Le Monde that “I never authorized the publication of my text as either a preface or a note in Faurisson’s book.” Even if that were true, Chomsky immediately destroyed its moral force by adding that the use as a preface “does not displease me. I do not feel that it has been used in an inappropriate way.” But in any case it is very difficult to take Chomsky’s disclaimer at face value. A few days later he explained that Faurisson’s publisher had asked him to write a text and that Chomsky told him “to use it as he wished. He chose to put it in the book.” What else could he have done with it? Furthermore, at a date when it was too late to change the contents of the book, Chomsky wrote a letter to the publisher which ran in part as follows:
I have received a pile of letters from France demanding that I retract the piece I sent you on civil liberties and on Faurisson. The general tone of what these people write shows that the general level of hysteria is so high that no-one will pay any attention to the facts anyway, and the whole anti-imperialist effort will be undermined by a campaign to associate me with neo-Nazism. Reluctantly, I am finally inclined to agree. I don’t know what the present situation is. If publication is not already in hand, I definitely suggest that you do not put [my piece] in a book of Faurisson’s (or in what you were intending to publish), but either drop the piece or publish it elsewhere. I’m sorry . . . .
This letter, quoted by the recipient and never disowned by Chomsky, implies (a) that at the time he wrote it Chomsky expected his essay might be used, with his approval, in a book by Faurisson, and (b) that Chomsky’s reason for withdrawing approval was not that he had become aware of moral objections to this course of action but that he saw it as a tactical error which might hamper Him in furthering his own political goals.
We all make mistakes. I have done things in my time of which I am ashamed (and I try to learn from them). Chomsky’s errors in connection with the Faurisson affair were grave ones, but he would deserve respect if, realizing what he had done, he had loudly and decisively dissociated himself from Faurisson’s views and expressed contrition for the support he had unthinkingly lent to the case of neo-Nazism. He had every opportunity to do this. Instead, he responded (and continues to respond) to criticism with the same brand of angry, pedantic quibbling as in the Cambodian case—quibbling which seems to reveal no awareness of the enormity of the human issues he has entangled himself with. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, writing in Esprit, concludes that it is clear “what makes Chomsky run. What matters to him isn’t gas chambers; it has very little to do with Faurisson, and only secondarily with freedom of expression. First and foremost it is Noam Chomsky.”
What was I to make of these episodes in my thumbnail sketch of Chomsky’s career? Surely it would have been bizarrely irresponsible to ignore them. After careful thought I included the passage I have already quoted, which seemed (and still seems) to me both decently restrained and as accurately informative as possible, given the extreme complexity of the facts that I had to squeeze into a few dozen words. There was no suggestion from the editor or from either publisher that they saw my remarks as out of place in a book such as they were producing—until Chomsky’s libel threat was received, and they set out to escape what I saw as their moral obligation to continue to print the essay I had written.
As far as Chomsky’s threat is concerned, I do not believe it had any legal substance. I am advised that even under English libel law, which is notoriously far more favorable to plaintiffs than American law, what I wrote could not have given rise to a successful action. Indeed, it seemed that Lord Bullock’s side did not take the threat of legal action seriously themselves. My immediate reaction, when first informed that Chomsky had complained about my wording, was to offer detailed references to substantiate my statements. Lord Bullock’s assistant replied, with amusement, that Chomsky’s letter itself gave so much detail about his interventions as to make substantiation by me quite unnecessary. Even when, later, Harper & Row announced that they were disposed to take Chomsky’s threat seriously, Lord Bullock’s assistant admitted that he did not believe that Chomsky had a chance of winning an action. And it is very difficult to accept that Harper & Row was sincere in claiming to believe that Chomsky had a case, seeing that they never asked me to substantiate any of the points I had made in the offending passage (as I could easily have done), despite the fact that truth is a complete defense to a libel charge under American law. If one seeks an explanation of Harper & Row’s willingness to yield to Chomsky’s demands, it is perhaps more relevant to note that Chomsky is an influential and, presumably, profitable author and that Harper & Row is the publisher of some of Chomsky’s best-selling books and of a successful series of which Chomsky is co-editor (just as, for its part, Fontana/Collins is Chomsky’s main publisher in England). Even if a libel action had been a plausible possibility, this would surely have been a case for “sue and be damned”; but I do not believe that anyone involved in this episode regarded the prospect of litigation as anything more than a convenient pretext.
Lord Bullock seemed to wish me to believe that the libel threat left him no options —though this was never said in so many words, and it is manifestly untrue. In his position, even if I were genuinely frightened of a risk to my personal finances from hypothetical litigation, I would far rather omit an entry altogether than accept political censorship by its subject. As Hitler’s biographer, Lord Bullock should know better than most that the historical truth about Nazism is not a trivial matter about which influential men can be allowed to indulge in thoughtless posturing in the unnoticed margins of their careers.
But I accept that Lord Bullock was under pressure from his publishers, Harper & Row. It is they who must receive the lion’s share of blame for this sorry episode. The role of Harper & Row in the affair is to my mind unspeakable. It is beyond my comprehension how the staff of a respectable publishing house could bring themselves to yield precipitately to Chomsky’s demands, whether or not this was in their firm’s financial interest. I for one intend to avoid buying books published by Harper & Row in the future. To do so would feel too much like spitting on the graves of millions of victims of Nazi and Cambodian genocide.
Finally, what of Noam Chomsky?
Chomsky is a man for whom freedom of expression is a central concern. He recurs again and again in his comments on the Faurisson episode to the importance of freedom of expression, and the duty to grant it not merely to those who use it in ways we approve but also to those who use it in ways we dislike. The right to express falsehoods is as sacred as the right to express truths. “I had thought . . . that all of this was settled in the eighteenth century,” Chomsky remarks, portraying himself as baffled by criticism of his Faurisson preface; he quotes as axiomatic the ringing words attributed to Voltaire: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”
Chomsky is a man for whom freedom of expression is a central concern.
What can one say of a man who angrily insists that freedom of expression is an absolute value, taking precedence over respect for the laws of a civilized and friendly nation, when it is a question of protecting lies about the murder of millions; but who rushes to law in order to suppress freedom of expression, when it is a question of the truth about Noam Chomsky?
Actual legal censorship is of course quite limited in scope in the Western world. But sometimes business relationships can be used to suppress the expression of views which the law does not concern itself with. Chomsky has urged, with passion and rhetorical skill, that commercial considerations produce a “corporate censorship” in the West comparable to the state censorship that occurs elsewhere. No doubt there is a measure of truth in this. Yet the only individual whom I personally have known to make use, as it seems, of this censorship mechanism is Noam Chomsky.