Thanks Michael, now how about an English translation of all the letters in French?
-Chip
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Michael Pugliese
> Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 5:35 PM
> To: lbo-talk
> Subject: Re: Alterman on Chomsky
>
>
> Professor Noam Chomsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology, is the
> world's greatest living philosopher of linguistics, as well
> as the best-known
> critic of American foreign policy and a formidable defender
> of intellectual
> freedom. In a letter commenting on my earlier paper about Holocaust
> revisionism, Professor Chomsky summed up the issue in a nutshell:
>
> 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%3D
> FINKIELKRAUT%
> 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
>
>
>
>