Nonsense...here Chomsky is flat out wrong. I WOULD call those that deny an American holocaust of Indians racist, for I could think of no other justification for denying the obvious. The same is true of those that deny the slaughter by Columbus and his ilk. The same is true for the sanctimoniuous Wiesel. So, since I disagree with Chomsky on whether Wiesel is a racist, I say the others are racists and that leaves his repsonse as bullshit. This is arrogance pure and simple. Chomsky SHOULD have denounced the guy in stronger terms instead of a finessee et-tu Brute type of argument. He didn;t and rather than say "I was wrong" he got cute. He is too valuable a person to have bee marginalized so easily by the very people who hate him the most -- the rabid zionists and their supporters in the American press. As for the Alterman bashing, Nathan is dead on....yeah the guy is wrong about stuff, but then again every single person on this List is wrong to about one third of the list.
Jeffrey Fisher <jfisher at igc.org> wrote: On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 10:58 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> [For "an alternative interpretation of Chomsky's final paragraph," why
> not
> read what he writes? --CGE]
because it's so much easier--and requires far more googly cleverness!--to assign guilt by association. clearly if the british fascists quote chomsky approvingly, out of context or otherwise, then chomsky approves of them and supports holocaust denial/revisionism along their lines, regardless of anything he might actually say anywhere else. so why bother reading it?
j
>
> ...[elsewhere] I was asked whether the fact that a person denies the
> existence of gas chambers does not prove that he is an anti-Semite. I
> wrote back what every sane person knows: no, of course it does not. A
> person might believe that Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews in some
> other
> way without being an anti-Semite. Since the point is trivial and
> disputed
> by no one, I do not know why we are discussing it.
>
> In that context, I made a further point: even denial of the Holocaust
> would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that
> point
> too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern
> history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans
> are
> capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an
> anti-Semite. That suffices to establish the point at issue.
>
> The point is considerably more general. Denial of monstrous atrocities,
> whatever their scale, does not in itself suffice to prove that those who
> deny them are racists vis-a-vis the victims. I am sure you agree with
> this
> point, which everyone constantly accepts. Thus, in the journal of the
> American Jewish Congress, a representative of ASI writes that stories
> about Hitler's anti-gypsy genocide are an "exploded fiction." In fact,
> as
> one can learn from the scholarly literature (also Wiesenthal,
> Vidal-Naquet, etc.), Hitler's treatment of the gypsies was on a par with
> his slaughter of Jews. But we do not conclude from these facts alone
> that
> the AJC and ASI are anti-gypsy racists. Similarly, numerous scholars
> deny
> that the Armenian genocide took place, and some people, like Elie
> Wiesel,
> make extraordinary efforts to prevent any commemoration or even
> discussion
> of it. Until the last few years, despite overwhelming evidence before
> their eyes, scholars denied the slaughter of some 10 million native
> Americans in North America and perhaps 100 million on the [South
> American]
> continent. Recent studies of US opinion show that the median estimate of
> Vietnamese casualties [resulting from the Vietnam War] is 100,000, about
> 1/20 of the official figure and probably 1\30 or 1\40 of the actual
> figure. The reason is that that is the fare they have been fed by the
> propaganda apparatus (media, journals of opinion, intellectuals, etc.,
> "scholarship," etc.) for 20 years. We (at least I) do not conclude from
> that fact alone that virtually the whole country consists of
> anti-Vietnamese racists. I leave it to you to draw the obvious
> analogies.
>
> In these and numerous other cases, one needs more evidence before
> concluding that the individuals are racists. Thus in the case of Wiesel,
> it is quite likely that he is merely following the instructions of the
> Israeli government, which doesn't want Turkey embarrassed. In short,
> denial of even the most horrendous slaughter does not in itself
> establish
> the charge of racism, as everyone agrees. Since that is obvious and
> undeniable, one naturally questions the motives of those who deny the
> truism selectively, and produce charges such as those you relay.
>
> You ask whether one wouldn't at least suspect the motives of someone who
> denies genocide (the Holocaust, in particular). Of course. Thus, I do
> suspect the motives of Wiesel, Bernard Lewis, the anthropological
> profession, the American Jewish Congress and ASI, Faurisson, Western
> intellectuals who systematically and almost universally downplay the
> atrocities of their own states, and people who deny genocide and
> atrocities generally. But I do not automatically conclude that they are
> racists; nor do you. Rather, we ask what leads them to these horrendous
> conclusions. There are many different answers, as we all agree. Since
> the
> points are again obvious, a rational person will proceed also to
> question
> the motives of those who pretend to deny them, when it suits their
> particular political purposes. In this respect too the Faurisson affair
> is
> far from "settled," as you put it; in fact, the issues have yet to be
> addressed. In fact, they will never be addressed, because they reveal
> too
> much about Western intellectual culture...
>
> [Chomsky,
> http://monkeyfist.com:8080/ChomskyArchive/essays/kolodney_html]
>
>
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