Read your pamphlet with interest. I am surprised to learn that the Labor government intends to introduce the principle that the state will henceforth determine historical truth. One begins to wonder what the Second World War was about. (9) (9) Letter from Professor Noam Chomsky to David Botsford, 27th April 1998, p. 1.
http://216.239.35.120/translate_c? hl=en&u=http://www.digiweb.com/igeldard/LA&prev=/search%3Fq%3DFINKIELKRAUT% 2BTHION FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, DISSENTING HISTORIANS, AND THE HOLOCAUST REVISIONISTS David Botsford http://aaargh.vho.org/engl/DBfreedom1.html http://members.tripod.com/~revisionismo/revisionism_in_english.htm
The Unfailing Solidarity of Noam Chomsky with Revisionists
"However scandalous are your ideas, if you have no right to express them, you loose what is the essence of democracy and freedom" (Chomsky in Le Monde, 1 Sept. 1998)
The unfailing solidarity of Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist, with the Revisionists deals with one very specific issue: he claims for them, as for anyone else, the complete freedom of thinking and speaking out. Full stop.
It would seem to be a menial task, a kind of triviality which would not deserve further commentaries. In fact, his demand, uttered about twenty years ago, has not ceased to create a scandal. As a matter of fact, whenever Noam Chomsky, an activist involved in the critique of the State, with an anarchistic background, criticizing most of all the US State and its imperialist policies, starts a speech in front of an ever-growing audience, in North America, or in front of the medias, there is always a guy or a small group in the public to complain in a more or less bitter way about Chomsky's involvement with the revisionists, materialized by a text he has written and which has been used as a foreword to the pretrial defence tract issued by Faurisson in 1980, his Memoire en defense. So that, Chomsky, after twenty years, has to repeat, every evening, that the freedom of expression is a whole, cannot be cut into pieces and that Revisionists, whatever their views that he does not share at all, have the same right as anybody else to talk freely without being victimized by a stupid repression. This question reappears in each of Chomsky's intervention in the press, TVs and elsewhere. We know how irritating the recurrence of these silly questions can be, launched by the Lobby spokespersons, the supporters of an aggressive Israel and the enemies of freedom. Day after day, in a thousand articles and interventions, Chomsky has to claim again and again his solidarity with our basic rights. We greet his constancy and we know that the bonds of friendship and solidarity which united us before the emergence of the revisionist question maintained themselves unadulterated because they are rooted in the same critique of the State, of its violence and its lies, of the classes and the groups that use its power to impose their private interest over the toiling people who feed them.
We'll return on the way Chomsky got involved in this matter because the tales that evoke this question in order to blame him are generally not fully accurate. We'll display our attempts to straighten up the record and the reception we met. We'll sort some of the commentaries that this affair triggered and we'll try to answer, if we have not done it already, to the least stupid of them. We'll pick up some rejoinders by Chomsky from the multitude of them.
But before going farther, it is useful to point out what are the political objectives of Noam Chomsky. He is trying, through his many interventions, to help to create in the public opinion a trend which would bear on the US foreign policy in order to stop expansion, exploitation, the support to dictatorships, the terror triggered by the role of world policeman that the US bestowed upon themselves and all by themselves. Chomsky considers that anything that would distract him from this line of action is of secondary importance and should be dismissed. This is exactly how he reacted when, in 1979, in one of his last trips to Paris, the revisionist question was explained to him by Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume. This very fast and methodic mind did not blink nor outright reject the idea of a possible absence of the gas chamber in the archetypal image of the fate of the Jews in the Nazi camps. But he could not conceive either any link between this question and the continuation of his work of undermining the US foreign policy. He then decided not to involve himself in the study of this question and to keep as a working implement the views that he had acquired as a youth in the leftwing Zionist movements he had approached at the time. As we said at the start, no one is under the obligation to get involved in this affair. If those who do get involved are then under the control of rationality, those who stay outside cannot provide well-grounded opinions on the core of the question. We provide here an exemple of Chomsky's interventions, a speech he delivered last year in the heart of occupied Palestine, at Birzeit University, to a packed Palestinian audience. The title was "National Sovereignty and Democracy in the Third World".
As a starter we recommend the interview published by Le Monde on Sept. 1st. We consider as very significant the fact that this newspaper which in the last 15 years has exhibited the worst bad faith and the most violent hostility towards Chomsky, guilty of judging the Parisian intelligentsia as mediocre and deeply committed to Stalisnism, is now, all of a sudden, opening its columns to him. Something weird is happening in the wonderland of the journalists.
Then, to make everything clear, we display the text by Chomsky which started the prairie fire. We have it in English and in the French translation which was used as a foreword to the Faurisson defence tract. Look at what Christopher Hitchens has to say about it: "Chomsky's seven-page comment received more attention in the international press, as Paul Berman noted, than any other piece of work for which he had been responsible." We can see very well that twenty years later this text still raises hair on many bald heads. He later gave his reasons in a famous Nation article (Feb. 1981), His Right to Say it. Its conclusion was: "It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers."
We then proceed to the way a recent biographer accounts for Chomsky's involvement in what he calls the Faurisson Affair and the Pol Pot Affair. There is a great need here for corrections. Then we'll see how Serge Thion, as an actor at the time, explains how things happened.
Other versions will be displayed, including the one given in 1985 by the British effete essay writer Christopher Hitchenswho tried to save Chomsky from his old daemons, i.e. his own very principles. Hitchens was to meet more Revisionists later, in the flesh.
It is necesseray, at this stage, to refer to the pamphlet broiled in the dark recesses of ultra- Zionismunder the pen of Werner Cohn. This is a typical police approach of politics which we consider as mainly farcical.
We are adding another pamphlet which has been widely seen as mythic because it was difficult to find. And there is no English version for it: "Réponses inédites à mes détracteurs parisiens", or "Unpublished replies to my Parisians detractors", in fact letters to newspapers which strangely failed to publish them. The standard of French journalism is among the lowest on this planet, we are sad to report. After that, the French press and the French "intellectuals" built a wall of silence around Chomsky. This wall broke down only last month with the Le Monde interview, and we do not know for sure why it broke down.
These questions have been taken up in a recent biography of Chomsky which is not entirely devoid of mistakes, by a R. Barsky. We can consider now as classical, for instance, the mistake attributing to Thion or the Vieille Taupe Group the initiative of a petition, signed by Chomsky, to demand the respect of the right of Professor Faurisson. Even Chomsky himself seems to believe this! It was the doing of Mark Weber, who later rose to become the present-day director of the Institute of Historical Review. This petition reached Paris only later. As for the rest, this biography, written with a kind of tired sadness, brings forth some factual elements. We have extracted the pages dealing with the Faurisson and Pol Pot affairs, as well as some considerations on the French intellectuals, in particular those producing these heaps of crap that are ponderously called "postmodernism". We find them ludicrous. The choice is there between the original English version and a (rather poor) French translation.
What we always found stricking was the need in which Chomsky's opponents found themselves to invent and lend him opinions they found thus easier to fight.. It has been the case of a particularly disgusting underdog called Claude Roy who, as a former royalist, fascist, stalinian, socialist, turned liberal,was an usual writer in Le Nouvel Observateur. In 1980, Serge Thion had to vigorously intervene to dismantle his castle of lies and deceptions. "Le Documensonge de la semaine" <snip> http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/fran/revu/TI98/TI981021.html