I do change my mind, when the argument and evidence are overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly against me. Why, in the past six months alone, I have changed my mind on whether Yasser Arafat is a possible partner for peace, and on whether Harry Dexter White was a Soviet agent.
I really would welcome an opportunity to change my mind in a leftward direction on *something*. But that ain't the way things are working. Right now, for example, I feel my mind changing on Chomsky. I used to take Hitchens's account at face value (yes, often a mistake): I used to think (mendacious as I find Chomsky's history of the Cold War, his running interference for Milosevic, et cetera) that on Faurisson Chomsky had been smeared by Dershowitz and company--that Chomsky had set out just to defend free speech, had fallen into a trap jointly laid by American Likudniks like Alan Dershowitz (who wanted to paint Chomsky as an anti-semitic nutboy to neutralize his critique of Israeli policy) and French holocaust deniers (who wanted to paint Chomsky as one of them to add his authority to their cause).
But now I don't think Hitchens's account can be sustained. Chomsky's claims to have been concerned only with freedom of speech seem to be impeached by his own writings, which show a desire to defend Faurisson that seems to me quite extraordinary when coupled with his attacks on historians like, say, Lucy Dawidowitz as "Stalinist-Fascists".
There's something else going on here...
Brad DeLong