I suspect that what sends Vidal-Naquet up the tree and around the bend is his perception that Chomsky, in the "Chomsky Preface", is dodging and weaving according to the style of rhetoric we expect from someone like David Irving. Chomsky says that he doesn't know and doesn't care to learn about Faurisson's work--yet he does know it well enough to say that Faurisson appears to be an apolitical liberal. Chomsky says that he doesn't know much about Faurisson's critics--yet he does know them well enough to accuse them of making unwarranted accusations of anti-semitism. Chomsky says that he did not authorize the preface--yet he did tell Thion to use it where he could...
I must say that the more I reread this stuff, the more closely I am driven to a judgment of insanity--or, at least, that Chomsky genuinely does not understand what he has written, or what the rules of English-language communication are. If you are going to write that Faurisson is an apolitical liberal and that his critics are making unwarranted accusations of anti-semitism, you cannot claim--either in your opening paragraph, or afterwards in _The Nation_--that your sole aim was to make a Voltairean defense of free speech without leading people like me to conclude that you have either lost your hold on reality or are engaged in a cynical propaganda exercise because next to no one will bother to check your claims against what you really wrote.
And this is not an isolated incident. Consider Chomsky and Herman's, "Distortions at Fourth Hand, for example," with its claims that the stories of an ongoing Cambodian genocide have been disproven by "analyses," published in places like the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review, by "highly qualified specialists" "stud[ying] the full range of evidence available," which concluded that "executions have numbered at most in the thousands." Yet the reference to the Economist appears to refer to one letter to the editor. And the reference to the Far Eastern Economic Review appears to refer to several articles by Nayan Chandha--a much thinner and less convincing base of pro-Khmer Rouge evidence than Chomsky appears to have convinced himself exists.
Or consider _After the Cataclysm_, with its claim--in 1979! three years after the Year Zero!--that we need to suspend judgment of the Khmer Rouge regime because no "serious study" of it exists, and that "if a serious studyŠ is someday undertaken, it may well be discoveredŠ that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive responseŠ because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.Š"
Or consider Chomsky's claim that U.S. military intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was aimed at shoring up the military position and political power of the Bosnian Muslims, which the U.S. government had selected as "their Balkan clients" for "cynical great power reasons."
I think that whatever has gone wrong with Chomsky's mind with respect to Faurisson--and something has gone wrong, and it is not anti-semitism, or neo-Nazism, but something else--has gone wrong in other issue areas as well, and led to political judgments that, in my view at least, were disastrously awry with respect to the Khmer Rouge and to Milosevic.
Brad DeLong