> <http://www.zmag.org> <http://www.zmag.org> FOREIGN POLICY
>
> In his “Thoughts” on Chomsky, under the title “My Very,Very Allergic Reaction
> to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic,” Brad DeLong is long on
> name calling, smears by selective choice of decontextualized words and
> sentences, straightforward misrepresentation, and numerous assertions
> unsupported by evidence
> (http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html
> <http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/00015.html> ). He is
> short on tolerance of viewpoints that he doesn’t like and very short on just
> plain intellectual integrity. His preening self-regard and pomposity in
> straightening out Chomsky and his misguided “surprising number” of “followers”
> is also impressive.
>
>
>
> In his first two paragraphs he makes the point that Chomsky’s admirers “form a
> kind of cult,” but no evidence is given supporting this insult, which is a
> familiar form of smear to denigrate people admiring someone with whom one
> disagrees. He then compares teaching such folks to teaching Plato to pigs. So
> his opening is pure name-calling.
>
>
>
> In his next paragraph he tries to engage in substance, and this effort is
> worth a close look. He says: “Consider Chomsky’s claim that: ‘In the early
> 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian
> Muslims as their Balkan clients
’ On its face this is ludicrous. When the
> United States selects clients for cynical great power reasons it selects
> strong clients—not ones whose unarmed men are rounded up and shot by the
> thousands. And Bosnian Muslims as a key to U.S. politico-military strategy in
> Europe? As Bismarck said more than a century ago, ‘There is nothing in the
> Balkans that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.’ It holds
> true today as well: the U.S, has no strategic or security interest in the
> Balkans that is worth the death of a single Carolinian fire-control
> technician. U.S. intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was ‘humanitarian’
> in origin and intention (even if we can argue about its effect). Only a
> nut-boy loon would argue otherwise.”
>
>
>
> The first substantive statement in this paragraph, that the United States
> always selects strong clients, is truly “ludicrous”: the United States
> supported the Nicaraguan contras, Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola, the little
> rag-tag forces in Nicaragua that it organized to invade Guatemala in 1954,
> Somoza’s Nicaragua, the Florida and Nicaragua-based invasion force for the Bay
> of Pigs, the remnants of Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated army in northern Burma
> following the victory of the communists in China in 1949, Chiang’s Taiwan
> from 1949, the Persian Gulf Emirates, and many other similarly “strong
> clients.” The implication that because the Bosnian Muslims were shot in large
> numbers they couldn’t have been U.S. clients is not only a non sequitur, it
> also flies in the face of massive evidence that they were U.S. clients, as any
> serious book on the subject makes clear (e.g., Lord David Owen’s Balkan
> Odyssey, Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy, or Diana Johnstone’s Fools’
> Crusade). This client status is not even controversial. DeLong’s ignorance
> of this subject area is apparently close to complete, as he fails to note that
> our Bosnian clients also shot a lot of unarmed men, and that we, in
> collaboration with the Saudis and Bin Laden , ferried massive supplies and
> mujahadin troops into Bosnia (as described in detail in the Dutch report on
> Srebrenica) and bombed the Serbs on behalf of our Bosnian Muslim client in the
> lead-up to the Dayton agreement.
>
>
>
> His next sentence about the Bosnian Muslims as “a key to U.S.
> politico-military strategy in Europe” misrepresents and therefore lies about
> Chomsky’s language—Chomsky didn’t say “key...in Europe,” he said merely that
> the U.S. selected the Bosnian Muslims as clients in the Balkans, a narrower
> statement. DeLong then gives his quote from Bismarck, a phony parade of
> “learning” as we can’t know whether Bismarck was correct or whether he even
> believed what he said, and what was true a century back might not be true now.
>
>
>
> DeLong then goes on to say that it is true today that the United States has no
> strategic or security interest in the Balkans. It goes without saying that he
> doesn’t offer evidence on this point or discuss contrary facts and views. Many
> analysts have pointed to: (1) the huge U.S. military base built in Kosovo,
> which must have some security interest function; (2) the fact that the NATO
> intervention destroyed the one independent political body in Europe not
> integrated into the Western political economy--Yugoslavia--and facilitated
> that integration; (3) the importance of the Caspian oil area and the interest
> of Western oil companies in possible Balkans transport routes; (4) the link
> between the Kosovo War and the April 1999 celebration of the 50th anniversary
> of the birth of NATO with an imminent NATO military triumph; (5) the possible
> interest of the United States in reasserting its domination of NATO by taking
> the lead in the Balkans struggles; and (6) the admissions by Clinton, Blair,
> and Defense Secretary Cohen that the “credibility of NATO” was a prime reason
> for the bombing.
>
>
>
> But DeLong knows that all this is irrelevant because the U.S. intervention was
> based on “humanitarian” motives! This is one of those higher patriotic truths
> that DeLong grasps by intuition. But although Clinton and Blair were
> proceeding on the basis of humanitarian motives, you can be sure DeLong will
> not stop to explain why both of these humanitarians were consistent supporters
> of, and arms suppliers to, both Suharto and the Turkish regime that was
> ethnic-cleansing Kurds throughout the 1990s. The same Blair who fought for
> humanitarian ends with Clinton in 1999 also claims to have been fighting for
> humanitarian ends with Bush in Iraq in 2003. I wonder if DeLong buys that
> patriotic line now, or is it only a highly moral Democrat like Clinton who
> will pursue humanitarian ends? I should mention that Andrew Bacevich’s
> recent book, American Empire, highly praised in the mainstream, asserts
> strongly that the United States had no humanitarian concerns at all in its
> Balkans war-making and that Clinton’s resort to force was merely to establish
> “the cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American power.”
>
>
>
> So who is the “nut-boy”—Chomsky, or the man who misrepresents his target’s
> language, regurgitates foolish patriotic truths, displays abysmal ignorance on
> matters on which he writes as if an authority, and rules out evidence and
> rational discourse on these matters?
>
>
>
> After this proof of Chomsky as a nut-boy, DeLong has a few lines on what
> Chomsky admirers say when he presents them with that nut-boy phrase on Bosnia.
> No quotes from the admirers, just alleged paraphrases, with words like “Oil
> pipelines!” with an exclamation point, but no serious analyses or answers—just
> cute little putdowns.
>
>
>
> One paraphrased reply mentions Chomsky’s “insights.” DeLong then goes on as
> follows: “Insights? Like his writing a preface for a book by Robert
> Faurisson,” which he follows up with selective partial quotes like that
> Chomsky said that Faurisson seemed to be “a relatively apolitical liberal” and
> that Chomsky admitted to “no special knowledge” of the topic Faurisson dealt
> with and hadn’t read anything by Faurisson “that suggests that the man was
> pro-Nazi.”
>
>
>
> Neither Chomsky nor his ”followers” ever claimed these phrases were
> “insights”—that is the trick of a smear artist, who searches for vulnerable
> language in the target, takes the words out of context, and elevates them to
> supposed “insights.” Note too the illogic—it was an alleged “insight” to write
> a “preface.” Note also the dishonesty in not mentioning that the preface was
> only written as an independent avis and inserted in the book as a preface
> without Chomsky’s prior approval (see Chomsky’s “The Right to Say It,” The
> Nation, Feb. 28, 1981:
> http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8102-right-to-say.html).
>
>
>
> Most important in this phase of the smear enterprise is DeLong’s refusal to
> recognize that the avis was solely a defense of the right of free speech and
> that from beginning to end that was all the struggle was about for Chomsky. It
> was certainly not about Faurisson’s views or in any way a defense of those
> views, and DeLong fails to mention that Faurisson was dismissed from his job
> teaching French literature because the authorities claimed they couldn’t
> defend him against his enemies, and he was brought to court not for his
> political views but for “Falsification of History” (in the matter of gas
> chambers) and for “allowing others” to use his work for nefarious ends. This
> was a major civil liberties case in which, for perhaps the first time in the
> West, a court decided that the state has a right to determine historical
> truth.
>
>
>
> DeLong wants to deflect attention from this important issue to Faurisson’s
> views, which he presents in an unattributed quote which refers to Faurisson as
> “a guy whose thesis seems to be” (and then comes a rhetorical statement about
> a big lie). DeLong latches on to Chomsky phrases in the avis that Faurisson
> seemed to be a “relatively apolitical liberal,” and was not necessarily
> pro-Nazi--a view Chomsky arrived at after talking with several of Faurisson’s
> leading critics in France, who were unable to provide any credible evidence of
> anti-Semitism or neo-Naziism--but DeLong fails to note Chomsky’s statement in
> the avis that Faurisson might indeed be an anti-Semite or Nazi as claimed, but
> that that would have no bearing on the issue of freedom of speech (see the
> avis at:
>
> http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8010-free-expression.html
> </chomsky/articles/8010-free-expression.html> ). DeLong also fails to mention
> Chomsky’s repeated expressions of horror at the Holocaust as “the most
> fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history” and his statement
> that we “lose our humanity” if we even enter into debate with those who deny
> or try to diminish Nazi crimes. Note also the dishonesty in suppressing
> Chomsky’s repeated statements that he has signed free speech petitions for
> numerous Soviet bloc victims without knowing their views, or even with an
> awareness of their obnoxiousness--which he didn’t mention-- but never suffered
> criticism, or DeLong-type smear jobs, for not having researched the exact
> beliefs of these civil liberties victims.
>
>
>
> DeLong says, “Would it be better not to misrepresent Faurisson’s beliefs? Not
> to claim that he is a relatively apolitical liberal? Not to say that you have
> seen no evidence that Faurisson is pro-Nazi? It is, after all, a much stronger
> defense of free speech to say that you are defending a loathsome
> Holocaust-denier’s right to free speech because free speech is absolute, then
> to say that poor Faurisson—a relatively apolitical liberal—is being persecuted
> for no reason other than that some object to his (unspecified) ‘conclusions’.”
> As noted, DeLong’s statement that Chomsky “misrepresents Faurisson’s beliefs”
> is false. His second point is also false, because if the free speech issue
> involves protection of a man accused of “loathsome” views, who is being
> attacked for those views, both the nature of those views and the fact that he
> is being attacked for them are of some importance, even if they are not
> central. But Chomsky made it clear that he thought the views of civil
> liberties victims—loathsome or not—were irrelevant in decisions as to whether
> they should be defended, a point that every civil libertarian takes for
> granted. DeLong’s smear objective compels him to skirt around this principled
> position.
>
>
>
> DeLong’s last line is an obscurantist masterpiece in which he stumbles over
> his own rhetorical effusion: Faurisson was being “persecuted”--this is irony,
> suggesting that he got what was coming to him, although DeLong is of course a
> believer in free speech! And “some object to his (unspecified)
> ‘conclusions’”—again, heavy-handed irony in which Faurisson’s evil views, that
> people like Chomsky are unwilling to openly acknowledge or deny, are opposed
> by good people who have been allegedly “persecuting” him. When he says that
> the bad folks are complaining that Faurisson was persecuted “for no other
> reason” than objections to his unspecified conclusions, does he mean that
> there was another reason to go after him, or is that just reinforcing the
> point that the “(unspecified) conclusions” were quite enough?
>
>
>
> As with Bosnia, DeLong gives a list of three straw-person answers on Faurisson
> from Chomsky “supporters,” again without citation or quotes, but with much
> sarcasm and sneers, as he continues his hit-and-run smear job.
>
>
>
> DeLong then takes up Chomsky’s crimes in treating Cambodia. He starts with a
> quote from our 1979 book After the Cataclysm (ATC):
>
>
>
> “If a serious study...is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered
that
> the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response
because they dealt with
> fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial
> system
.Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken.”
>
>
>
> DeLong comments: “Reflect that it was published three full years after the
> Cambodian Holocaust of the Year Zero. Ask yourself whether this is an
> uncovering or a covering of the crimes of an abominable regime.” The answer is
> that a single stripped-down quote taken out of context and that speculates
> about what may come from a future study tells nothing to an honest person.
> DeLong naturally fails to acknowledge that our stated aim in the book was not
> to uncover crimes but to see how the “facts have been interpreted, filtered,
> distorted or modified by the ideological institutions of the West” (ATC, vii).
> For DeLong, as for the mainstream, this was an illegitimate objective.
>
>
>
> DeLong seems to think that the “holocaust” occurred instantaneously upon the
> takeover of the KR in 1975. He pretends that full data on this closed regime
> were readily available for a book published three years later. He fails to
> mention that in speculating here Chomsky (and this writer, his co-author) also
> raised the possibility that the worst charges might also turn out to be true
> when all the facts are in, and that we were drawing no conclusions about where
> the truth lies in this range of descriptions (ATC, 293). He suppresses the
> fact that our reference to the “positive response” was taken mainly from
> Francois Ponchaud’s Cambodge annee zero, where Ponchaud speaks of the “genuine
> egalitarian revolution,” the ”new pride” of miserably oppressed peasants in
> constructive work, and first time women’s participation. Ponchaud’s book was
> widely cited as an authoritative source as well as a condemnation of the KR,
> so citing it and acknowledging its finding of positive features in the KR
> revolution wouldn’t suit DeLong’s purpose; nor would Long attack Ponchaud as
> an apologist for the “crimes of this abominable regime” although Ponchaud’s
> positive statements are unqualified, whereas DeLong goes into a tantrum about
> a speculation of ours saying that these explicit conclusions may turn out to
> be correct. We quoted similar material from David Chandler and Richard Dudman,
> highly respected analysts of Cambodia. DeLong suppresses our use of these
> sources as well in order to make it appear that any positive notions were
> unique to his smear target. He suppresses the fact that Ponchaud himself
> complimented Chomsky for his “responsible attitude and precision of thought”
> in his writings on Cambodia.
>
>
>
> DeLong continues: “But it gets worse. Go back to your Nation of 1977, and
> consider the paragraph”—then quoting us that “Space limitations preclude a
> comprehensive view,” but that specialists writing in the Far Eastern Economic
> Review, Economist, and Melbourne Journal of Politics have studied the evidence
> and concluded “that executions have numbered at most in the thousands
”
> DeLong then quotes at length an ally attacking these source references, and
> DeLong himself says he looked through the Economist and couldn’t find
> anything written by the Economist staff on the subject. “So why does Chomsky
> lie about these ‘highly qualified specialists’? The claim that it is ‘space
> limitations’ rather than ‘non-existence’ that prevents their being named
> cannot be a claim in good faith, can it? And why would anyone lie for Pol Pot,
> unless they were either a nut-boy loon or were being mendacious and malevolent
> in search of some sinister and secret purpose?”
>
>
>
> DeLong’s statement that Chomsky lied here is itself a plain lie. Our
> references were exactly correct. DeLong couldn’t find anything written by the
> Economist “staff,” but he knows full well that the reference was to a letter
> to the editor, published in and therefore provided by, the paper, by Cambodia
> demographer W. J. Sampson, an economist-statistician who was living in Phnom
> Penh and worked in close contact with the government’s central statistics
> office. Sampson’s work is cited with respect by Nayan Chanda, at the time the
> most highly respected journalist in Southeast Asia, writing for the Far
> Eastern Economic Review (ATC, 231f). Sampson was at least as “highly qualified
> [a] specialist” as anybody on the staff of the Economist. DeLong knows that we
> cited many other “highly qualified specialists” just one year later in After
> the Cataclysm, so his sneer about the “non-existence” of these sources is
> another dishonest suppression and shows that his own “good faith” and
> intellectual integrity are non-existent.
>
>
>
> DeLong and his ally claim that Chomsky said that Khmer Rouge killings were “at
> most in the thousands,” and that Chomsky had implied that this was “a
> conclusion of an article
[by Nayan Chanda in] the Far Eastern Economic
> Review.“ DeLong and friend also note that the author Chanda says “the numbers
> killed are impossible to calculate.” DeLong’s ally asserts that “Chomsky
> presented the Far Eastern Economic Review as confidently denying the
> possibility that killings were vastly higher, but Chanda specifically denies
> such knowledge and confidence.” First of all, we did not attribute the “at
> most in the thousands” statement to Chanda, but to Sampson. Second, we
> ourselves quoted Chanda’s statement that “the numbers killed are impossible to
> calculate,” that DeLong implies we neglected (ATC, 229). Third, we quote
> Chanda saying that the testimony from refugees and others “leaves no doubt:
> the number of deaths has been terribly high” (229), so the statement that
> Chomsky denied “the possibility that killings were vastly higher” is another
> lie.
>
>
>
> DeLong ends on Cambodia asserting that “Chomsky not only said that there
> wasn’t conclusive evidence that the Khmer Rouge were genocidal butchers, he
> wrote—falsely—that there was reliable evidence that they weren’t genocidal
> butchers.” This is one more flat, outright lie. We never said, or hinted,
> anything like this. We cited every serious source available at the time on the
> KR killings, including Ben Kiernan, Michael Vickery, Stephen Heder, David
> Chandler, Chanda, Ponchaud, and State department Cambodia experts Charles
> Twining and Timothy Carney. We quoted Twining’s estimate of killings--in the
> “thousands or hundreds of thousands,” but with admitted difficulty in getting
> valid numbers. We quoted Twining’s superior Richard Holbrooke’s estimate of
> “tens if not hundreds of thousands “ for “deaths” from all causes. The State
> Department’s Timothy Carney estimated the deaths from “brutal, rapid change”
> (explicitly not “mass genocide”) as in the hundreds of thousands (ATC,
> 159-160). We took no position on the accuracy of these numbers, but did note
> that they were far below the widespread mainstream claims of two million
> massacred. On DeLong principles, the State Department analysts and Holbrooke
> are liars and apologists for Pol Pot, downplaying the “conclusive evidence”
> that he was a genocidal butcher.
>
>
>
> DeLong never mentions that our book was explicitly aimed at countering the
> huge and lie-rich propaganda barrage on Cambodia that began upon the KR entry
> into Phnom Penh in April 1975, a barrage and lies which only served a
> political and ideological purpose and did not help the Cambodians in any way
> whatsoever. DeLong of course ignores our comparative analysis of the
> difference in treatment of Indonesia in East Timor and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
> A larger fraction of the population of East Timor died in the wake of the
> Indonesian aggression than died in Cambodia under Pol Pot (where many of the
> deaths were residuals of the starvation conditions facing the KR in April
> 1975). The East Timorese mass killings were positively supported by the U.S.
> government, and in contrast with Pol Pot’s killings those in East Timor were
> readily subject to U.S. influence and control. Brad DeLong does not condemn
> these killings as genocide and assail its perpetrators and apologists for
> practical support of genocide. Doesn’t this make him an apologist for
> genocidal butchers?
>
>
>
> DeLong never mentions that estimates of the numbers killed by the U.S. Air
> Force in its bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1975 run into the hundreds of
> thousands, which on his terms should make Nixon and Kissinger into “genocidal
> butchers.” He has never so described them, nor assailed those who neglect
> this “genocide.” He never mentions that the United States defended and
> supplied the KR after its ouster by the Vietnamese in 1978, which allowed the
> KR to continue to attack Cambodians; this doesn’t elicit his indignation over
> support for genocidal butchers. With a turn in U.S. policy toward China and
> the Khmer Rouge in 1977-1978, we find Douglas Pike, former U.S. government
> specialist on Vietnam, and later head of the University of California
> Indochina Archives, writing in November 1979 about the “charismatic leader”
> Pol Pot, leader of a “bloody but successful peasant revolution with a
> substantial residue of popular support” and where most of them “did not
> experience much in the way of brutality.” This great warmth toward the
> genocidal butchers, long after the facts were in, and after the escalated KR
> killings in 1977 and 1978, has produced no allergic reaction in Brad DeLong.
>
>
>
> In his book The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, in a chapter
> entitled “Science: Handmaiden of Inspired Truth,” Robert A. Brady noted how
> often scientists carelessly “assume that the attempt to think rigorously in
> one field automatically implies thinking rigorously whenever one thinks about
> anything at all.” When he does this “he is merely allowing himself to
> abandon rational criteria in favor of uncritical belief.” Brady pointed out
> that such “uncritical belief” is often the conventional wisdom, in which God
> and country rank high. Could it be that just as Brad DeLong, by an act of
> patriotic faith, explains Clinton’s wars in the Balkans as based on
> humanitarian motives, so also he offers implicit apologetics for U.S. policy
> in Cambodia and East Timor based on the same deep-seated chauvinistic biases?
> Could these underpin his “allergic reaction” and intellectually degraded and
> dishonest smear job on Chomsky?
>
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