May 4th, 2003, 11:22 AM
Chomsky......no friend of the Jews.
Preface to the 1994 Edition
Avram Noam Chomsky, a famous linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for his left-wing politics. It is the gravamen of this book, however, that these politics derive as much from the extreme right wing Â*Â* particularly right-wing anti-Semitism Â*Â* as from the rhetoric of the American Left.
***
In March of 1989, not long after the appearance of the first edition of this book, A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times wrote a column to mark the tenth anniversary of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The column was generally favorable to Israel, although he also chided Israel for what he called its "historical error Â*Â* the refusal to recognize the reality of the Palestinian people and passion."
One of Rosenthal's points was that Jordan is a Palestinian state (Jordan's territory is situated in the original British mandate of Palestine), and Rosenthal opposed the creation of a second Palestinian state in this territory. This was enough to once again provoke Noam Chomsky's legendary bile. He wrote:
We might ask how the Times would react to an Arab claim that the Jews do not merit a 'second homeland' because they already have New York, with a huge Jewish population, Jewish-run media, a Jewish mayor, and domination of cultural and economic life. (1)
As it happened, Rosenthal did not use either the words or the concept of a "second homeland." Nonetheless, Chomsky saw fit to put these words between quotation marks to attribute them to Rosenthal. Chomsky habitually, as we shall see in the body of this book, misrepresents the writings of others. But let that pass for the moment.
What is actually most noteworthy in this passage is Chomsky's unpleasant tone about the Jews of New York and the fact that his malice does not conform to familiar "anti-Zionist" left-wing doctrines. Chomsky's target here is very simply Jews, without any pretense whatever about being "anti-Zionist-but-not-anti-Semitic."
When Chomsky wrote these words, there was indeed a Jewish mayor in New York, and a large Jewish population. There were Jews in the media on all levels. There were also many Jews in cultural and economic pursuits in New York. These facts are not in dispute.
But what are "Jewish-run media?" What is meant by a Jewish "domination of cultural and economic life?" These hateful expressions are staples of traditional anti-Semitism. They suggest that Jews do not act as individuals but only as agents of a larger Jewish cabal. The anti-Semitic propagandist says that Jewish artists and business men and journalists do not pursue such professions as other men would. No, to him such Jewish men and women are "running" the media, "dominating" culture and the economy, all in their capacity as Jews, all for the sake of a Jewish design.
But wait a minute. Is it Chomsky himself who makes these anti-Semitic allegations? Or is it some unnamed anti-Semitic Arab? Chomsky does not say. Nor is he explicit, assuming that it isn't he but rather his hypothetical Arab who is speaking, in telling us whether he would regard the accusations as justified.
But what he fails to do explicitly he does by indirection. By mixing legitimate facts with allegations of "running" media and "dominating" culture, all in the same sentence and in the same tone, he endorses and justifies the anti-Semitic assertions. And he does all this without taking direct responsibility. Chomsky, as always, is Â*Â* what is the word Â*Â* clever.
Actually we have here a fine example of the well-known Chomskyan method of devious ambiguity. He says the anti-Semitic thing by very clear implication, and then, with the wink of complicity to his neo-Nazi following that we shall encounter again, there is a built-in explanation of it all to his left-wing following: it is not I who would ever say such a thing, not I at all, but how can I help it if an oppressed Arab makes such interesting observations?
***
Hidden from tourists and from most of its citizens, the fringes of Israeli society harbor a fair number of babblers, seers, zealots, and other assorted know-alls. Such people are of interest mainly to social scientists and journalists who make a living describing the quaint and the curious. Ordinary Israelis merely shrug a shoulder: surely Jews, like everyone else, are entitled to a quota of maniacs.
But even in Israel, tolerant as it is of the eccentric and the deranged, the case of Israel Shahak gives pause. Without a question, he is the world's most conspicuous Jewish anti-Semite. His specialty, moreover, is quite rare these days even among non-Jewish anti-Semites; quite rare, that is, since the demise of the Nazis. Like the Nazis before him, Shahak specializes in defaming the Talmud. In fact, he has made it his life's work to popularize the anti-Talmud ruminations of the 18th century German anti-Semite, Johann Eisenmenger. (2)
Now a retired chemist, Shahak travels the world to propound a simple thesis: Jews (with only a rare exception Â*Â* guess who that might be) are evil. The Talmud teaches them to be criminal, and Zionism compounds the evil. Naturally, Shahak is an active, enthusiastic supporter of the most militant Arab terrorists.
Shahak's most recent tract, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London and Boulder, Colorado, 1994) demands that Jews repent of their own sins and of the sins of their forefathers. First of all, says Shahak, Jews should now applaud, retroactively, the "popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past," for instance the Chmielnicki massacres of 17th century Ukraine. These were "progressive" uprisings, according to Shahak.
Concerning the Jews of our day, Shahak reveals that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery. Moreover, he tells us, "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshipping God... but on the other he is worshipping Satan."
On its own, being so hopelessly crackpot, Jewish History, Jewish Religion would hardly find enough buyers to pay for its printing. But this little booklet is not on its own. It has a foreword by a famous writer, Gore Vidal, who tells us that he, Vidal, is not himself an anti-Semite. And it carries an enthusiastic endorsement, right on its cover, by Noam Chomsky. Says Chomsky: "Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value." (3)
So that is how scholarship is judged these days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
***
Since the present book first appeared in 1988, there have been a number of other works, on Holocaust-denial and related subjects, that have been critical of Chomsky. But on the whole I have not found these discussions fully satisfactory. These authors have mentioned some of the more conspicuous examples of Chomsky's outrageous behavior without coming to grips with what I would regard as the underlying problem of the Chomsky phenomenon.
As this book will document in detail, Chomsky gave his name in support of Robert Faurisson, the well-known French neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. He has published in the neo-Nazi's journal. He went out of his way to have his books published by French neo-Nazis. He has promoted the anti-Semitic idea that the Jewish religion is basically anti-social. Nevertheless, the tenor of Chomsky criticism, as that of Chomsky admiration, has been to stress the image of Chomsky as a partisan of the political Left. Chomsky's use of anti-Semitic rhetoric Â*Â* often not at all veiled by "anti-Zionism" Â*Â* has by and large been ignored by his critics and sympathizers alike. (His handful of fully initiated followers, of course, are another matter).
How can we account for this negligence?
First, there is Chomsky's well-known deviousness, which we observed in his commentary on Rosenthal's writing. But that alone could hardly have misled the knowledgeable and sophisticated authors who have written about him (although it may indeed have played a part in certain instances).
Second there is the obscurity of much of the Chomsky publication enterprise. Some of his most malicious pronouncements have been reported in very small ultra-leftist and neo-Nazi publications, and often in French, thus remaining hidden from the general American reader. (4) The single most revealing description of his intimate involvement with the neo-Nazis was written in French by Chomsky's neo-Nazi associate, Pierre Guillaume, and was published by a very obscure neo-Nazi publisher in Paris. (I report on this essay in some detail Â*Â* on pages 52-62 Â*Â* and I ask the reader to pay particular attention to it). But, on the other hand, Chomsky has also made blatantly anti-Semitic statements, for instance his talk of "genocidal" teachings in the Jewish religion, in The Fateful Triangle, an accessible and widely-reviewed book.
In other words, Chomsky's famous ability to obfuscate and the obscurity of most of his publications can only partially explain why his neo-Nazi involvements have escaped wide-spread criticism.
In my view there has been a more fundamental obstacle to an understanding of the Chomsky phenomenon. I think that there is a persisting state of mind that divides the political world into "left" versus "right" and sees the "Left" as essentially incapable of primitive Jew-baiting. Even sophisticated writers can occasionally fall into this trap.
All informed people, of course, know that there has been an anti-Semitism of the Left. Recently often disguised as "anti-Zionism," left anti-Semitism has a history that goes back well into the nineteenth century. (5) Most recently is was propagated by the Soviet Union as long as it existed, by the splinter grouplets of the Left, and, not least, by the political propaganda of left-liberal Protestant Christianity. (6) But the rhetorical style has typically been different from the anti-Semitism of the Right. Where the latter was generally couched in racist or religious terms, identifying itself with chauvinist and xenophobic prejudices, the Left tended to use a Marxist, left-wing, humanistic vocabulary.
This difference in rhetoric has led to the false assumption that Left and Right are ideologically and socially incompatible, and that the two anti-Semitisms Â*Â* the left and the right Â*Â* similarly preclude one another. Consequently it is mistakenly taken for granted that a proponent of left-wing ideas cannot possibly be involved with old-fashioned Jew-baiting. Chomsky's most characteristic stance Â*Â* that of the left-wing gladiator battling "Zionism" Â*Â* turned out to be a very effective cover for him.
***
Benito Mussolini began his political life as a left-wing revolutionary socialist. When he founded Fascism, he abandoned neither the methods nor the doctrines of his early anti- "bourgeois" resentments. Similarly, Hitler's revolution, "national socialism" in its self-description, used the methods, ideology, and personnel of left-wing radicals. In many parts of pre-war Europe, individual Communists, Nazis, and anarchists, brawling with one another in the streets like Crips and Bloods (7), nevertheless found it easy to move from one camp to the other as occasion demanded. (8)
The basic common ground of this Left-cum-Right, ultra-radical demimonde consisted of anti-Semitism, the worship of violence, and unrestrained mendacity, in short, a rejection of bourgeois respectability. These elements have fashioned a certain milieu that has persisted to our day.
Today's sects that openly declare themselves both Nazi and left wing Â*Â* the "National Bolsheviks" of Europe, for instance, or the Third Position people in France and Italy Â*Â*remain obscure and hidden from readers of the mainstream press. (9) Such obscurity has also enveloped La Vieille Taupe (to be described in this book), Chomsky's main transmission belt to the neo-Nazis. But while this milieu has often been concealed, especially in the post-war years, it occasionally does emerge and then gains public attention. When it does, it is virulent, much like the cholera. We think for a time that we have conquered it when we don't see it; but the vibrio persists hidden, ready to cause an epidemic when circumstances allow.
After the Six Day War of 1967 the Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with Israel and the international Communist movement embarked on a bitter propaganda campaign against the Jewish state. In the course of this Communist crusade, the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was deliberately blurred. Anti-Stalinist Communists like the Trotskyists went further. Eager to outbid the Moscow-dominated movement, they began to use anti-Semitic language heretofore restricted to the radical Right: the Jews of Israel (not just the "capitalists" among them) were now an "oppressor nation;" Jews worldwide were depicted as a caste of "usurers." (10) (As we shall see, it was the anti-Stalinist extreme Left from whom Chomsky first learned his politics.)
But such fringe movements are hardly noticed by the public. It took certain notorious individuals to obtain substantial publicity, and this despite the generally fanciful, outrageous, and ridiculous nature of their public statements. These people were able to exploit a prominence or notoriety that came to them fortuitously. There are a number of such individuals, but, not counting Chomsky himself, the best known might well be Jacques Vergès.
Vergès is a French lawyer of mixed French-Vietnamese parentage, a former member of the Communist Party, later active in the New Left. He came to worldwide attention about ten years ago when he acted as defense lawyer for Klaus Barbie, a Nazi official in Lyon during the Occupation who was eventually convicted, in Lyon, of multiple murder. (11) Marcel Ophuls' remarkable documentary Hotel Terminus provides more than a few revealing insights into Maître Vergès' character and activities.
Vergès, like Chomsky, is still counted as a prominent man of the Left. He is active in the worldwide movement against the United States and Western democracies. He agitated against the French war in Algeria. He is vehemently on the side of Arab terrorists, both as defense lawyer and propagandist. At the same time he is also active in the network of Nazi recalcitrants and the neo-Nazi movement. According to Erna Paris, author of the book Unhealed Wounds, Vergès was initiated into the Nazi network by François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi financier whose resources apparently derive from Jewish money that was stolen during the war by the Nazis. It is Genoud's funds that probably financed the Barbie defense, as well as various Arab terrorist groups. Paris says that Genoud "personifies a hybrid of ultra-Left and neo-Nazi extremism .... One might even say he created the type." (12)
Vergès conducted Barbie's defense by staging a combination of street theater and burlesque. He asserted that the true war criminals were not the Nazis during the Second World War; no, the true criminals are the Jews, the Jews both during the war and now as Zionists, and also the French Resistance during the war. Furthermore, the government of France is guilty because of its Algerian war and similar offenses. For such reasons, said Vergès, Barbie should be acquitted. The Lyon court disagreed, to be sure, but not before Vergès had gained worldwide publicity for himself and for his ideology of the absurd.
In the summer of 1994, Vergès was once more in the news. Once again his striking, exotic face, familiar to us from the movie Hotel Terminus, seems to mock us with its characteristic superior smile. This time Maître Vergès represents the famous "Carlos" (Ilich Ramirez Sánchez), accused in Paris of numerous murders on behalf of Arab terrorist groups. But now there are also reports of East German government records that implicate Vergès himself as a member of terrorist organizations. (13)
Vergès and Chomsky share a common political program and a common style of violence and vituperation. They are anti-Israel without restraint. While they work with the Left in opposition to Western democracy, and in fact depend heavily on Left support, they are also unashamedly supportive of the neo-Nazis, especially on matters relating to Jews.
And here we have the true significance of the Chomsky phenomenon. Together with Vergès and a handful of other relatively prominent individuals in America and Europe, he has succeeded in rescuing old-fashioned Jew-baiting from the extinction it might otherwise have suffered in the post-Hitler world.
There is one more thing. Unlike Vergès, Chomsky is a Jew, and this fact is surely of some interest. I have been asked by some readers to speculate on the psychology of a Jew who behaves in this manner. Unfortunately I have nothing to offer that would not already have occurred to the attentive reader. After all, Chomsky is not the first Jew in history, nor the last, surely, to devote his life to this kind of enterprise.
***
Since the first edition of this work, Chomsky's ties with the neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review have been strengthened.
The IHR's publishing and bookselling arem is called Noontide Press. Holocaust-denying is only one part of the anti-Semitic menu of this supermarket of Nazism. The latest NP catalog is dated 1995. Among its offerings we find Nazi-made moviews that are banned in Germany because of their brazen propaganda (pp. 29, ff), as well as the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion (p. 10), books by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels (pp. 10 and 12), a book by the later Father Coughlin (p. 7Chomsky is represented by five separate items: The Fateful Triangle (p. 16); Necessary Illusions (p. 11); and Pirates and Emperors (p. 12). Chomsky, according to the IHR, "enlightens as no other writer on Israel, Zionism, and American compliciy." (p. 4).
Since the first edition of this book, also, Chomsky and his friends have produced a further flood of propaganda. There is a "Common Courage Press" in Maine and a "Black Rose Books" in Canada, as well as other enterprises, all churning out propaganda pamphlets by Chomsky and his helpers. Z Magazine and Lies of Our Time, among others, publish his articles. The Pacifica radio network tirelessly broadcasts tapes of his speeches. (14) Finally, the Chomsky group has been able to appropriate Canadian public funds to produce a hagiographic movie, Manufacturing Consent, with Chomsky as subject.
Chomsky has not changed his themes in this avalanche of words. Most of what he has to say amounts to the simple claim that the United States and Israel are to be blamed for the ills of the world.
The Chomskyana that appeared before the current peace negotiations always praised the PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat; until very recently, Chomsky was the very model of a Jew for Arafat. But now that Arafat negotiates with the enemy, Chomsky has suddenly turned viciously anti-Arafat. On April 17, 1994, Chomsky spoke at the Berkeley (California) Community Theater saying that "Something's Happening." (15) Suddenly he finds "corruption" in the PLO, a PLO dictatorship, and an Arafat who is selling out. The whole peace process is a joint Israeli-American plot. In the absence of an unconditional surrender by Israel, Chomsky leaves no doubt that he will oppose and denounce any letup in the intransigent Arabs' war against the Jews.
Finally, as we have already seen, Chomsky has recently awarded his urgent recommendation to Israel Shahak's scurrilous tract against the Talmud and the Jews.
Chomsky will soon enter the eighth decade of his life. Some men and women similarly possessed Â* Vanessa Redgrave is apparently among these Â* have seen a decline of inspiration from the Furies as they grow older. But others have become crustierand more and more outrageious. Let us hope, for his sake no less than for ours, that Avram Noam chomsky, son of a noted Hebrew scholar and himself exposed to Hebrew learning in his youth, will find the peace of moderation as he enters his old age.
***
The first edition of this book was published by Americans for a Safe Israel. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who helped with that edition: Herb Zweibon, Erich Isaac, Rael Jean Isaac, and Frances Besner Newman who designed the original cover. Since AFSI is active in supporting the right-wing opposition to the present (Labor) government of Israel, it has been suggested to me that my book may be identified with that point of view. I do not think that these matters are relevant to the Chomsky issue, but many readers have raised them, and I can see no harm in clarifying my personal position. I am not a member of AFSI, and, unlike AFSI, I am (cautiously) happy about the current peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO.
For helping with the new edition, I am grateful to Jon Haber, Hillel Stavis, and Gabriel Schoenfeld.
The Hidden Alliances of Noam Chomsky
Everyone knows Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his linguistics and his left-wing politics. But the fact that he also plays an important role in the neo-Nazi movement of our time Â*Â* that he is, without any doubt, the most important patron of that movement Â*Â* is well known only in France. Much like a bigamist who must constantly strain to keep one of his families secret from the other, Chomsky and his most initiated supporters try to prevent his liberal and left-wing followers from knowing too much about his other, his neo-Nazi life.
Chomsky has said that his contact with the neo-Nazis is strictly limited to a defense of their freedom of speech. He has said that he disagrees with the most important neo-Nazi article of faith, viz. that the Holocaust never happened. But such denials have not prevented him from prolonged and varied political collaboration with the neo-Nazi movement, from agreement with it on other key points, nor Â*Â* and this has proven essential for the neo-Nazis especially in France Â*Â* from using his scholarly reputation to promote and publicize the neo-Nazi cause.
Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928. He is the son of the noted Hebraist William (Zev) Chomsky and was educated in the progressive schools of his parents' milieu. Later, apparently because he was thought to be exceptionally brilliant, he was awarded a bachelor's and even a Ph.D. degree in linguistics without going through any required courses or formalities. Today he is Institute Professor at MIT and author of numerous and highly influential books on the nature of language. His work is respected by scholars and admired by the public. It would be difficult to find a more prestigious figure in American, or, for that matter, in international academia.
But if we judge by the treatment he has received in the press, his fame rests most of all on his involvement with the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's. In the decade from 1966 to 1975 The New York Times Index mentioned him a total of ninety-five times, eighty-two times for political activities and the rest for scholarly work.
Since 1976, Chomsky's public notoriety having noticeably declined, the Index awards him just twenty-one references, again mostly Â*Â* in seventeen cases Â*Â* for his politics. But whether the news item deals with politics or linguistics some mention is almost invariably made to Chomsky's academic status and it seems doubtful that without it his politicking would have been at all newsworthy.
I have tried to find references in The New York Times to Chomsky's neo-Nazi involvements and could find only two items, out of the over one hundred devoted to him, that allude to this side of his activities. The story is quite different in France where Le Monde and other publications regularly refer to Chomsky's relationship to the French neo-Nazi propagandist Robert Faurisson. But in America there is little to deflect the casual observer from an impression of Chomsky as an eminently reasonable academic who may, at the very worst, sometimes get a bit overly zealous in his pursuit of the good (i.e. left-wing) society.
One characteristic of Chomsky's political writings that does raise immediate questions about his judgment is his obvious animus toward the United States and Israel. He occasionally says bad things about most of the governments of the world but it is Israel and the United States for which he reserves his extraordinary vitriol. Chomsky is careful not to justify Hitler explicitly but his writings create the impression that the Nazis could not have been any worse than the "war criminals" of the United States and Israel today. Moreover, and this is indeed curious, almost all references to Nazis in his books turn out to be denunciations of Nazi-like behavior on the part of Israelis.
But it is well known that Chomsky is Jewish and his anti-Israel stance, when not examined closely enough to reveal its radically malevolent kernel, is sometimes considered as a liberal Jew's way of leaning over backward to be fair to the other side. As for the anti-Americanism, well, that is surely something quite in vogue ...
Chomsky's writings are often praised by his admirers as packed with "facts." And indeed there are many footnotes and many references to apparently esoteric pieces of information. But I have found that these references, at least those that deal with crucial points, simply do not check out. Sometimes the source is impossible to track down, sometimes it is completely misquoted, very often it is so patently and completely biased that no responsible scholar could have taken it at face value. Later in this essay I shall demonstrate these problems by examining Chomsky's treatment of two important episodes in the history of Israel. In regard to Chomsky's treatment of U. S. foreign policy, Stephen Morris has already demonstrated Chomsky's sleight-of-hand methods back in 1981. (16)
But none of this Â*Â* not his strident left-wing politics, not his bitter anti-Israel activism, certainly not his disreputable scholarship on matters political Â*Â* seems to interfere with what still amounts to a very high prestige in wide circles of educated America. It remains to be seen what will happen when his neo-Nazi connections get to be more widely known.
Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis
The name Robert Faurisson represents the most obvious (but not the most significant) connection between Chomsky and the neo-Nazis. Faurisson is a French hate-filled crank, a one-time lecturer in literature at the University of Lyon, right-wing, and deeply anti-Semitic. (17) As we shall see presently (and although he denies this heatedly), Chomsky seems to have taken to this gentleman and has, in any case, seen fit to keep political company with him.
Faurisson says that he is proud that his writings are distributed by partisans of both the left (La Vieille Taupe) and the right wing (Ogmios). The fact is that, in each case, these are tiny sectarian groupings. Ogmios is a Parisian bookstore-cum-movement that belongs to the anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, extreme right wing of the French political spectrum. It is reported to have received financial aid from the government of Iran. (18) Far more important to Faurisson is La Vieille Taupe ("The Old Mole") under the leadership of Pierre Guillaume, a small group of self-styled leftists who publish Faurisson's booklets and pamphlets, advertise them, publicize them, propagandize for them. It is they who are the friends of Chomsky, and it is through them that Chomsky was recruited to his present position as grand patron of the neo-Nazi movement. (At the time of this writing, Ogmios and La Vieille Taupe have joined forces to publish a new anti-Semitic review, Annales d'Histoire Révisionniste.)
Since the 1960's, Faurisson says, he has devoted innumerable hours to what he considers a very deep study of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. He has written some books and articles on the subject and summarizes his "findings" as follows:
The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which opened the way to a gigantic political-financial swindle, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal victims of which are the German people Â*Â* but not its leaders Â*Â* and the entire Palestinian people. (19)
Faurisson and his associates on both sides of the Atlantic are pleased to call this Holocaust-denial their "revisionism." They urge, and I cannot disagree, that fair-minded persons in free countries must keep open minds when confronted with reasonable or at least reasoned challenges to conventional wisdom. Perhaps, who knows, Napoleon never existed, perhaps the earth is flat, perhaps the Jews persecuted Hitler rather than vice versa, perhaps there was no such thing as a Holocaust of European Jews. All these nice opinions have their advocates and we shall have occasion to look at some of them in due time. In theory all received truth can and must be constantly re-examined in the light of new evidence, and we should be thankful to scholars and other reasonable men when they can confront us with thoughtful skepticism. But when, on the other hand, an outrageous point is advanced without regard for its truthfulness or for any rule of logic or evidence, when it is made simply to injure and defame, in that case, surely, we are justified in being less than respectful to the would-be "revisionist."
In my preparations for this essay on Noam Chomsky it fell upon me to read what Faurisson has to say and even to correspond with him. I can report that his challenge to our knowledge of the Holocaust does not meet any criteria of moral or intellectual honesty, of seriousness of purpose, of intellectual workmanship. All that is apparent is hatred of Jews and an effort to hoodwink his audience. No wonder he has not found a single scholar to take him seriously. Obviously I do not intend to argue against his thesis myself any more than I would argue with a man who says that he has been eaten by a wolf. But it is necessary to give an indication of the intellectual level of Faurisson's propaganda so that the reader can get some inkling of why he is ostracized by all decent men.
The heart of Faurisson's argument is based on his assertion that Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust are simply liars and that they are liars because they are Jews. Professor Rudolf Vrba, a colleague of mine at the University of British Columbia, was a witness to the exterminations at Auschwitz and is one of the very few to have survived. Faurisson names him a liar and a Jew and asserts that all who have had anything to do with bringing the Auschwitz facts to light -- witnesses, investigators, magistrates, etc. Â*Â* are either Jews or, in one case, "probably a Jew." (20) The Jewishness of a witness or writer, throughout Faurisson's opus, is enough to destroy his credibility in Faurisson's eyes. (He does make exception for Chomsky and the two or three other Jews who have rallied to him in a veritable paroxysm of self hatred.)
Faurisson is a practitioner of what might be called the Method of Crucial Source, a favorite among cranks. The Method consists of seizing upon a phrase or sentence or sometimes a longer passage from no matter where, without regard to its provenance or reliability, to "prove" a whole novel theory of history or the universe. More often than not the Source in question is a newspaper item Â*Â* after all, what cannot be found in some newspaper somewhere, at some time.
Among the many little booklets and leaflets which Faurisson and his left-wing publishers distribute by mail and in person, pride of place must go to a very pretentious pamphlet of twenty-four pages which contains the French translation of an interview Â*Â* a long text by Faurisson interspersed with a few helpful questions by the interviewer Â*Â* originally published in an Italian magazine in 1979. (21) This short pamphlet has 61 footnotes in very small print as well as a lengthy footnote to a footnote. Clearly it represents a major effort at presenting the gist of what Faurisson considers his proof that the Holocaust never happened.
One of Faurisson's basic claims is that Hitler's actions against the Jews were of the same order as Jewish actions against Hitler, one provoking the other as it were (p. 15). To prove that there had been a Jewish "war" against Hitler as early as March of 1933, Faurisson devotes his one and only pictorial illustration in this pamphlet to a reproduction of the front page of the Daily Express of London, dated March 24, 1933, which indeed bore a main headline "Judea Declares War on Germany." Sub-heads read "Jews of All the World Unite Â*Â* Boycott of German Goods."
Now Faurisson claims as his particular specialty the analysis of disputed documents and sources. (As Nadine Fresco has shown, these claims add a touch of lunacy to his malice. (22)). Here he uses the Daily Express as his Crucial Source, and, I suppose, the reader who is likely to be impressed by his propaganda may not ask about the nature of this newspaper in those days.
In 1933, the Daily Express was a sensationalist mass circulation paper run by Lord Beaverbrook, a man of often eccentric views who felt no compunction about using his headlines to promote favorite causes or to denounce pet peeves.(23) During the early years of the Hitler regime he thought that Britain should avoid alliances with France and other threatened European countries. In a private letter in 1938, he expressed the fear that "The Jews may drive us into war." (24) But his most famous pronouncement of the period, delivered in the very same front-page headline style as the "Judea Declares War" item of 1933, came on September 30, 1938: "The Daily Express declares that Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year either. Peace agreement signed at 12:30 a.m. today." (25)
To Faurisson, nevertheless, Daily Express headlines represent the most weighty proof of what happened in history. And so important is this Crucial Source to the "revisionists" that Faurisson's California outlet, the "Institute for Historical Review," sees fit to use it with just a bit of embroidery of its own: "Is it true that Jewish circles 'declared war on Germany?' Yes it did. The media the world over carried headlines such as 'Judea Declares War on Germany.'" (26)
Faurisson has been the object of legal challenges because of his strident, exhibitionist, unscrupulous defamations of Holocaust witnesses and respected scholars of the Holocaust. He has also been suspended from his post at the University of Lyon for similar reasons. The court cases, of which Faurisson and his accomplices are inordinately proud because of the tremendous publicity they derive from them, (27) are similar in nature to the Keegstra and Zundel trials in Canada. Here too neo-Nazi publicists have been brought to court under statutes that derive from the law of libel: freedom of speech is held to be no excuse when it can be shown that falsehood is spread deliberately for purposes of inflaming hatred. Faurisson has traveled to Toronto in the Zundel trial as an "expert witness" on matters of truth vs. falsehood, but the jury was not persuaded by him and convicted Zundel.
When freedom of speech encroaches upon or is said to encroach upon other human rights, thoughtful civil libertarians will wish to look at the particulars of the case rather thoroughly. Chomsky says that he sees no need for such concerns, holding that "one who defends the right of free expression incurs no special responsibility to study or even be acquainted with the views expressed." (28) So presumably spreading deliberate falsehood Â*Â* say the representation of a consumer product as safe when in fact it is dangerous Â*Â* would enjoy Chomsky's enthusiastic defense. In any case it is a devotion to freedom of expression, he says, that has led Chomsky so frequently and so energetically to come to the defense of Faurisson. We shall have to examine this claim in more detail presently.
The relationship between Chomsky and Faurisson's publisher, La Vieille Taupe (29)
(hereafter VT), has been chronicled in two remarkably revealing documents in 1986. (30)
The first, by far the longer, is a narrative written by VT's leader, Pierre Guillaume; the second, much briefer, is a commentary on this narrative by Chomsky. Taken together, these documents tell us things that might well cause embarrassment among Chomsky's American supporters.
Guillaume begins by telling us that he first met Chomsky some time in 1979, having been introduced by Serge Thion, another member of the VT group whom we shall encounter again. Guillaume told Chomsky about Faurisson at this meeting. Faurisson had begun to have various legal problems. Then, says Guillaume, several months later, and without any other contact having taken place between them, Chomsky signed and promoted the following petition (reproduced by Guillaume in its original English):
Dr. Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the "Holocaust" question.
Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.
We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him.
We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.
It is the publication of this petition in French newspapers, with Chomsky's name on top, that caused the first great consternation among Chomsky's left-wing supporters in France and elsewhere. The lamentable Alfred Lilienthal, the only other Jew of any notoriety with anti-Semitic connections, was also among the first signatories to the petition. (31)
Many civil libertarian readers objected to the petition's use of the word "findings" to characterize Faurisson's propaganda, seeing it as an endorsement of Faurisson's work and thereby going beyond a defense of freedom of speech. Chomsky has tried to parry this objection by denying that "findings" means what it means. (32) But it might also be pointed out that the petition describes Faurisson as being, among other things, "respected" for his "document criticism." In fact Faurisson enjoys no such respect unless we count the anti-Semitic lunatic fringe. (33) In any case, according to Faurisson himself, (34) the petition was originally drawn up not by a neutral civil libertarian but by Mark Weber, an American one-time professor of German who changed careers to become an apparently full-time "revisionist" propagandist. (35)
According to Guillaume, the petition played a decisive role in gaining public acceptance for the "revisionist" movement in France. And most of all, according to Guillaume, it was the prestige of Chomsky's name that helped the crusade of Holocaust-denial.
Next, Guillaume proceeds to tell us how helpful Chomsky has been to the VT movement in other ways. At a time when the VT movement suffered from ostracism on all sides, when, moreover, Chomsky could have published a French version of his Political Economy of Human Rights (written with Edward Herman) with a French commercial firm, Chomsky nevertheless stood by his friends of the VT and published his book with them. He, Guillaume, would have understood had Chomsky wanted to keep his distance from the VT in public. But no, Chomsky proved steadfast.
After the appearance of the petition, Guillaume tells us, Chomsky received a great many letters of complaint which he shared with Guillaume. Chomsky told Guillaume that the principle of freedom of expression was threatened by such letters and that he wished to reply to them in a public way. Consequently Chomsky composed a text of approximately 2,500 words, Quelques commentaires élémentaires sur le droit Ã* la liberté d'expression, "Some elementary comments concerning the right of free expression." In it he declared that everyone should have the right of free speech, including fascists and anti-Semites, but that, as it happens, Faurisson is neither one of these. Instead, according to Chomsky, Faurisson is best described as "a sort of apolitical liberal." For reasons that will become clear in a minute, this text later became known as "Chomsky's Preface." (36)
According to Guillaume, Chomsky sent this text to Serge Thion, VT's writer and propagandist, asking him to make the best possible use of it. The text was dated October 11, 1980. On December 6 Chomsky seems to have had second thoughts and wrote a follow-up letter to Guillaume and complained that, the state of hysteria in the world being what it is, the whole fight against imperialism could be sabotaged by a campaign that would associate him with neo-Nazism. (Chomsky was never one to understate the importance of his own personality for the fate of the world.) Therefore, if it isn't too late, Chomsky strongly suggests that his text not be made part of a book by Faurisson.
But, alas for Chomsky and the whole anti-imperialist movement, it was too late. The book by Faurisson, with Chomsky's text as preface, had already appeared. When Guillaume and Thion telephoned Chomsky on December 12, Chomsky's reaction Â*Â* all this according to Guillaume Â*Â* was firm, clear, and completely reassuring: he now stood by his preface and declared his letter of retrieval to be null and void.
What a friend we have in Chomsky!
Guillaume next reiterates the steadfastness of Chomsky's support and even confesses that without it the intrepid little original band of "revisionists" may never have grown to its present strength. And all this is so remarkable, according to Guillaume, since Chomsky is being victimized in his own country, the United States, where the imperial ideology of the West has somehow been able to raise its ugly head once again. As a result, Chomsky, according to Guillaume, has had his home audience greatly reduced and his popularity endangered.
Guillaume is not insensitive to the problems posed by Chomsky's ritualistic affirmations that his, Chomsky's, views are "diametrically opposed to those of Faurisson." Yes, but Guillaume understands the difference between a truth and a wink, n'est-ce pas (p. 163, my translation) :
Each time that Chomsky has said that his opinions remain "diametrically opposed" to those of Faurisson, he has done so in terms that are absolutely incapable of hurting Faurisson; and he has always indicated, by a word or a phrase, that his "diametrically opposed" view was more a matter of opinion than of scientific knowledge.
Guillaume replies here to criticism from one Chantal Beauchamp, who, presuming to be more "revisionist" than he, had objected to VT's collaboration with what she apparently regarded as an inadequately neo-Nazi Chomsky. Guillaume can reassure her even further (pp. 167-8, my translation) :
Chomsky was involved in very taxing struggles ..... Dramatic events were taking place in the Middle East. His own work Â*Â* the exposure ... of American imperialism there, of the realities of Zionism and of the state of Israel Â*Â* took on an immediate significance, something that could lead to practical results. How is this work less important than Faurisson's ... ?
The important work of Faurisson is the denial of the Holocaust. The important work of Chomsky is the struggle against Israel. And the common denominator of these, in the eyes of Guillaume and his followers, can only be anti-Semitism.
Now comes the most interesting part. Guillaume has told us how close a political friend Chomsky has been, how he had sacrificed self-interest to political principle by publishing his book with VT rather than commercially, how Chomsky's "diametric opposition" to Faurisson did not really mean what it said, how Chomsky's work concerning Israel is part of the same overall cause as Faurisson's denial of the Holocaust. And now, after all that, Guillaume says that he submitted his report to Chomsky for possible corrections or disagreements. So Chomsky was given the opportunity to tell his story should it differ from that of Guillaume. And it turns out that Chomsky indeed has a demurral that he needs to press, and which Guillaume magnanimously publishes as a sort of addendum to his own report. It seems that Guillaume had gotten one very important point completely wrong. It is not at all true, says Chomsky, that he is less popular now in his own country than he had been in the days of Vietnam. "I cannot accept even a fraction of the many speaking invitations that I receive, and now it's no longer, as it was in the sixties, a matter of speaking to five people in a church. Now there are real crowds at colleges and in the community." That is the sum total of Chomsky's correction. It confirms, in the most direct way possible, the close political collaboration between Chomsky and the French "revisionists."
Not only did Chomsky publish his Political Economy of Human Rights with Guillaume's organization. He also prepared a special booklet for Guillaume, not published anywhere else, of some of his self-justifying correspondence concerning the Faurisson affair. This publication, Réponses inédites, (37) carries Chomsky's name as author and Guillaume's initials, "P.G.," as editor. Guillaume explains that Chomsky had personally reviewed all translations from English to French.
For his part, Faurisson very frequently uses the Chomsky connection in his ceaseless pursuit of some sort of credibility. Bill Rubinstein of Australia reports that he had originally learned of the Chomsky-Faurisson connection only when an Australian Faurisson supporter flaunted correspondence that showed Chomsky furnishing Faurisson with information and advice. (38) It is just about impossible to come across a French "revisionist" publication Â*Â* be it by Guillaume, Thion, or Faurisson himself
that omits the obligatory reference to Chomsky's patronage. (39)
What does Guillaume's movement do to deserve such warm friendship from the famous linguist of MIT ?
The tiny movement of La Vieille Taupe, though having a history of quite different concerns that I will sketch later, seems to be doing little but Jew-baiting these days. Through a micro-empire of publishing enterprises, operating under its own name and such others as Spartacus, Éditions de la Différence, etc., the movement brings out a flood of "revisionist" and anti-Semitic propaganda. First and foremost it publishes numerous writings by and about Faurisson. It also features several titles by the late "left-wing" anti-Semite Paul Rassinier and the notorious "The Myth of Auschwitz" by the German neo-Nazi Wilhelm Stäglich.
Recently Guillaume and Ogmios have started to publish a very pretentiously-presented quarterly journal Annales d'Histoire Révisioniste. In appearance this magazine resembles a scholarly publication but its function is to show that the Holocaust never happened. The first two issues contain, among other items, translations of articles that have previously appeared in the California neo-Nazi journal Journal of Historical Review. (40)
In the spring of 1985 the movie Shoah was showing in Paris and VT's leader Pierre Guillaume, obviously seeking more notoriety, personally proceeded to hand out leaflets in front of the theater. The leaflets denounced the "political-financial" swindle by all those who claim that Jews were killed by the Nazis. As Guillaume tells the story, the incident became the basis of a defamation suit against him brought by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. (41)
VT's anti-Semitism is not confined to Holocaust-denial. It has discovered something it apparently thinks is a very clever find. It so happens that the young Bernard Lazare, later one of the founders of left-wing Zionism, wrote a curious little book in the years before the Dreyfus affair made him a partisan for Jewish rights. This self-hating early book, Anti-Semitism, Its History and Causes, is actually not at all a discovery of La Vieille Taupe. It has been used by anti-Semites and anti-Semitic movements from the days of Dreyfus to the days of Vichy. It is a curious hodgepodge of accusation and self-accusation, particularly bitter about the Talmud and its alleged influence on the Jews. The book can tell us very little about its professed subject but it has consistently been cited by anti-Semites as confirmation and justification of their hatred. (42) There is no possible reason for anyone but an anti-Semitic organization to republish it now. VT has proceeded to issue a new edition over the legal objections by members of the Lazare family and the organization Friends of Bernard Lazare. (43)
La Vieille Taupe is among the very smallest of the tiny political sects of Paris yet it publishes as if it were a major institution. The physical appearance of VT products is very professional and certainly belies the very marginal nature of the organization. I recently sent a one-paragraph note to the group in which I requested a list of its publications. By return air mail I received twelve books and pamphlets. Eight of these were marked with list prices that amounted to a total of 456 French francs. I estimate the four other items to come to at least another fifty francs, or a total of approximately 500 francs for the material in the package. Since the postage cost a further 148.50 francs, the value of the gift that I received from La Vieille Taupe amounts to 648.50 francs, or about $117 in US currency. I am obviously not the only person to enjoy this kind of largesse. I know nobody in the group, as far as I can tell nobody in it knows me, and I did no more than express a simple request for a book catalog. Where does the money for all this come from? Ogmios, a bookstore of the extreme right wing which is associated with VT in various enterprises, has been linked to the government of Iran (see above). The source of Vieille Taupe's own obviously substantial finances has so far remained a mystery.
Chomsky has of course been criticized for his involvement with Faurisson and the VT movement, not least within the Left. Chomsky has sought to meet all such objections by saying a) that he does not agree with Faurisson but is merely defending freedom of speech; b) that Faurisson and the VT are being maligned by opponents; and c) that the whole affair is unimportant and should not be discussed. Of these three arguments only the first Â*Â* the civil rights argument Â*Â* needs detailed examination, which we shall give it later. The other points can be dealt with more summarily.
Chomsky has persistently misrepresented the politics of Faurisson and VT. In his famous "Preface" he calls Faurisson a liberal. (44) He has also seen fit to praise Serge Thion, Faurisson's associate, as a "libertarian socialist scholar" (45) without mentioning that Thion has for the last nine years or so written lengthy books and articles to the effect that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie. Both Bill Rubinstein of Australia and I have sent detailed proof of Faurisson's anti-Semitism to Chomsky. I have most recently sent him Faurisson's article which declares all witnesses to the Holocaust at Auschwitz to be Jews and liars because they are Jews, (46) but Chomsky has remained obdurate. To Rubinstein he wrote the following:
I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work ...
Rubinstein has published this excerpt from a letter that Chomsky sent him. (47) As he does routinely, Chomsky objected to the publication of his correspondence but he has not denied either the authenticity or the accuracy of the passage.
Chomsky and his friends ordinarily try to suppress all information concerning his neo-Nazi connections. The best publicized case of such suppression involves the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson who wrote the biographical sketch of Chomsky in the British publication Biographical Companion to Modern Thought. Sampson wrote a laudatory description of Chomsky's linguistics but allowed himself the following few words of reservation about his politics:
He forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book Â*Â* which Chomsky admitted he had not read Â*Â* that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).(48)
Sampson has now told the story of how Chomsky was able, through his influence with American publishers, to ban Sampson's contribution from the American (Harpers) edition of this reference work. (49)
A new book of almost 500 pages, The Chomsky Reader, has now been published by Pantheon under the editorship of James Peck. (50) It purports to "[bring] together for the first time the political thought of America's leading dissident intellectual." The work is well indexed. It contains no reference to Faurisson, La Vieille Taupe, Guillaume, "revisionism," or to any other topic that might give the reader an inkling of Chomsky's neo-Nazi involvements. The one mention of Thion suggests that this French neo-Nazi is actually no more than a Marxist intellectual.
If Chomsky likes to bad-mouth the Communists from time to time, they, on their part, know how to appreciate an ally and are willing to lend a hand in the cover-up. The Communist magazine Canadian Jewish Outlook (now known simply as Outlook) ran an article in October of 1983 (51) that praised Chomsky's attacks on Israel but completely suppressed any mention of his role in the neo-Nazi movement. Communists are usually sensitive to neo-Nazism but in the case of Chomsky there are obviously other considerations. (52)
I have spoken so far only of Chomsky's connections with the neo-Nazis of France, who seem to have been responsible for his recruitment to the cause. But the "revisionist" movement also has an American branch and Chomsky has become embroiled on this side of the Atlantic as well.
In its very first volume in 1980, the California-based Journal of Historical Review carried an article about Jews by a Doctor Howard F. Stein that turned out to be something of an omen of the journal's future. (53) Even to someone well acquainted with anti-Semitic propaganda, Doctor Stein's piece must have come as a surprise for the sheer audacity of its malice. And as it happens, Doctor Stein's piece also foreshadowed themes later taken up by Chomsky.
The Journal of Historical Review described Stein as an Associate Professor of Medical-Psychiatric Anthropology in Oklahoma. By now he has written quite a few articles Â*Â* all in psychobabble Â*Â* in various fringe journals of "humanistic psychology." He has also lectured at the mecca of New Age psychology, the Esalen Institute of California. And Doctor Stein is Jewish.
In his appearance for the "revisionists" Stein presented a rather straight-forward theory about the Holocaust: it is a Jewish myth. It seems that Jews have always fantasized about a Holocaust, from the very beginning of their history. They have always needed to be victims. Today they fantasize that they were victims of the Germans during the Second World War and they are completely insensitive to the great sufferings of non-Jews, in particular Germans and Arabs. Doctor Stein also refers the reader to an earlier article he had written in which he proposed that Jews are afflicted by a "Samson complex." (54) Like Samson in the Bible, it seems, Jews today are bound for self-destruction and seek to arrange matters so that they can destroy the rest of the world in the process. This is a view that Chomsky has also adopted, as we shall see.
I think that it is an open secret that we have in the United States an intellectual underclass of self-described "academic" journals. These dreary periodicals cater to the foolish vanity of college administrators who wish to see "publications" by their teachers. Stein's articles, looked at purely from the point of view of scholarly competence, must scrape the very bottom even of this material: there is not a shred of evidence to be found in his many pages of jargon and free-floating confabulation. By itself that would be as harmless as is almost all this underclass pulp. But Stein's writings have enlisted jargon-mongering in the cause of spite and hate, and this indeed jettisons them into a category quite by themselves.
Doctor Stein has achieved some international recognition for his contribution to the hatred of Jews. The French journal of the "revisionists," edited by our friend Pierre Guillaume, has published a French translation of the original 1980 article. (55)
Compared to Stein's malice, other JHR articles will seem commonplace. The last issue I received, that of Winter 1986-7, carries the article by Faurisson on Höss that I have already mentioned. It carries another piece complaining about an unjust persecution of the (Nazi) German American Bund in the United States during World War II. A book review tells us that when the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, "essentially, the German decision was Jewish, since Jews oppose intermarriages, and insist on their own built-in laws. The Germans also had to fear Polish inspired pogroms against the Jews. The wall prevented that as well." Yes, that's why we need the "revisionists" to set us straight about what happened in history.
Canadian Customs authorities have declared this nice journal to be hate literature and have restricted its import into Canada. Consequently I have been unable to check every issue of it and I do not know how often Chomsky has contributed to it. I do have before me the issue for Spring 1986 containing an article by Noam Chomsky, "All Denials of Free Speech Undercut A Democratic Society." (56) This piece contains about 2,200 words and is reprinted from the Camera of Boulder, Col.
Subscribers to the JHR also receive lists of books and tapes that the "revisionists" find necessary for a proper education. Some of this material is signed Noontide Press, which, like the Institute for Historical Review, is located in Torrance, California. My latest Catalogue of Historical Revisionist Books, dated Fall 1986, contains, among other items, the following titles: The Zionist Connection II by Alfred M. Lilienthal; Communism with the Mask Off by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky. A special book list of Noontide Press dealing with what it calls "Jewish Studies" contains The International Jew by Henry Ford, Sr., The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, "translated from Russian," The Plot Against Christianity by Elizabeth Dilling ("A shattering exposé of the anti-Christian hate campaign propounded in the Babylonian Talmud"), and other such classics.
The Institute also sells two separate tapes of a speech that Chomsky gave against Israel, and here are some excerpts from its publicity for these tapes:
This lecture ... is, to put it mildly, devastating. In two hours of uninterrupted cannonade directed squarely at U.S. foreign policy with regard to Israel, Chomsky ranges brilliantly over such topics as Israeli imperialism ... the role of the Anti-Defamation League ("... one of the ugliest, most powerful groups in America")/ Media suppression, distortion, hypocrisy, and the "Memory Hole." An intense two-and-a-half hour mini-course on the political issue of our age, including Chomsky's answers to audience questions.
I have repeatedly called Chomsky's attention to the Nazis' use of his name and his materials, suggesting that he disassociate himself from these people, but he has just as repeatedly remained obdurate to such suggestions.
Is it a Matter of Freedom of Speech ?
As we have seen, Chomsky boasts that he will defend the freedom of expression of anyone, any time, presumably regarding anything, and that he does not need to see disputed material in order to defend its right to be heard and published. (57) Bill Rubinstein has already pointed out that this proposition can hardly be taken seriously since there must be limits to freedom of speech in any society. An immediate example is the necessity for prohibiting commercial fraud. But Chomsky is completely mindless in his declarations for unrestricted freedom; neither fraud, nor defamation, nor public mischief of any sort can deter what he is pleased to call his Enlightenment values. Some of his more extravagant postures on these matters are reminiscent of extremist "libertarians" from Caligula to Charles Manson. We shall look into some of the antinomian sources of his political thought later in this essay.
To Chomsky there is no question that the "revisionist" neo-Nazis should be given complete freedom of speech in Western countries (attempts to restrain them have so far been made only in West Germany, France, and Canada). He never tires of exclaiming that freedom of expression should know no limits, his citation of Voltaire settling the matter to his satisfaction.
I myself have been less than happy with the prosecution of the neo-Nazis in Canada, and I am not convinced that the legal prosecution of Faurisson in France is justified. But the issue is a great deal more complex than Chomsky lets on because questions of both defamation and fraud must be addressed. Faurisson and his followers have engaged in an unbelievable campaign of libel and slander Â*Â* always couched in very personal terms Â*Â* against the scholars and the witnesses of the Holocaust. Furthermore, as the transcript of the Zundel trial in Canada has shown, it seems clear that the "revisionists" are motivated by malice and not by any historical conviction. I am fortunately not called upon to vote for or against a gag on these Nazis. But if I were, and if a study of all the details of a given individual case were to convince me that freedom of speech should prevail, I know that I would still be very far indeed from being a friend to the gentleman in question.
As is generally the case when extremists face legal difficulties, the neo-Nazis today have two kinds of supporters: those who wish them well because they are sympathetic to their cause on the one hand, and civil libertarians on the other. Since nowadays nobody likes to be recognized as a Nazi sympathizer, just about everyone who supports the neo-Nazis today calls himself a civil libertarian. The trick is to tell who is who.
There is of course no difficulty to this. We all know civil libertarians. We know who they are, what they do, how they do it. In America they are akin to the founders and leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and, like them or not, they are liberal by persuasion, liberal by style and culture. They have a record of defending various kinds of unpopular groups, not just one. They will give legal aid to Nazis but they will not associate with Nazis, will not collaborate with Nazis politically, will not publish their books with Nazi publishers, will not allow their articles to be printed in Nazi journals. (58) On these counts alone Chomsky is no civil libertarian.
Chomsky misleads us when he tells how he was recruited to the Faurisson cause. He tries to create the impression that it was civil libertarians who recruited him: "In the fall of 1979, I was asked by Serge Thion, a libertarian socialist scholar with a record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, to sign a petition ... " (59) The plain truth is that Thion was already a partisan of Faurisson at the time, a man second only to Faurisson himself in the propaganda that declares the Holocaust to be a Jewish lie. Insofar as Chomsky is a political friend of Thion's, and this certainly seems to be the case at least as late as 1987, (60) Chomsky must be considered a political friend of these neo-Nazis and not the disinterested champion of free speech that he pretends to be.
There is also the issue of Chomsky's relationships to the civil liberties of individuals and causes that he particularly dislikes: first those who have dared to criticize him, and second the Jews who are persecuted in Russia and in the Arab world. On these matters Chomsky's rec
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