{"id":2065,"date":"2006-01-16T06:51:03","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T13:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2065"},"modified":"2006-01-16T06:51:03","modified_gmt":"2006-01-16T13:51:03","slug":"chomsky-and-holocaust-denial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2065","title":{"rendered":"Chomsky and Holocaust Denial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The Debate Link<\/a>, David links to a news story<\/a> about an upcoming conference on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Iranian government. Since the president of Iran has called the Holocaust a “myth,” David quite reasonably predicts that the conference will be an appalling morass of anti-semitism.<\/p>\n

So far, so good. David then goes on to say:<\/p>\n

So my only question is this: which Westerners are going to show up and support one of the world’s most despicable ideologies on its home turf? Will we say David Irving? Noam Chomsky? The architects of Great Britain’s boycott of Israeli universities?<\/div>\n

My goodness.<\/p>\n

David Irving is a flat-out Holocaust denier. But to put Chomsky – or activists who organize a boycott – on the same level as Irving is unsupportable.<\/p>\n

The primary evidence linking Chomsky to Holocaust denial is that he once wrote an essay defending the free-speech rights of Robert Faurisson<\/a>, a Frenchman who has been (justifiably, as it turns out) accused of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. Chomsky’s essay was later reprinted, without his knowledge, as the introduction to one of Faurisson’s books.<\/p>\n

Nearly all of Chomsky’s essay was a well-worn argument for free speech. A single paragraph addressed Faurisson himself. Here’s the most controversial passage in Chomsky’s introduction:<\/p>\n

Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort. In support of the charge of anti-Semitism, I have been informed that Faurisson is remembered by some schoolmates as having expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the 1940s, and as having written a letter that some interpret as having anti-Semitic implications at the time of the Algerian war. I am a little surprised that serious people should put such charges forth — even in private — as a sufficient basis for castigating someone as a long-time and well-known anti-Semitic. I am aware of nothing in the public record to support such charges.<\/div>\n

In retrospect, this is a stupid thing for Chomsky to have written; under the circumstances, if Chomsky wasn’t willing to undertake a thorough review of all of Faurisson’s writings, he should have simply said “I don’t know his work well enough to comment on the matter” and left it at that. Instead, Chomskey concluded from the weakness of the evidence presented to him, that Faurisson probably wasn’t an anti-semite. That conclusion is wrong, I believe, but the error is understandable; there is no need to say “Chomsky supports Holocaust denial” in order to plausibly explain Chomsky’s error.<\/p>\n

Chomsky also argued<\/a> that, in principle, it was possible to doubt the facts of the Holocaust without being motivated by hatred of Jews:<\/p>\n

…Even denial of the Holocaust would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that point too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite.<\/div>\n

I think Chomsky’s argument here is disingenuous. Logically, he is correct – it is possible for an ignorant schmuck (such as myself, when I was about 17) to take Holocaust denial seriously without hating Jews. But while Holocaust denial is not, in and of itself, absolute proof of anti-semitism, it’s certainly grounds for a very strong suspicion. The real-world association between Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is too obvious to be reasonably ignored.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the equation, it is clear that Chomsky does not doubt the existence of the Holocaust. In 1969, he wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I remember reading an excellent study of Hitler’s East European policies a number of years ago in a mood of grim fascination. The author was trying hard to be cool and scholarly and objective, to stifle the only human response to a plan to enslave and destroy millions of subhuman organisms so that the inheritors of the spiritual values of Western civilization would be free to develop a higher form of society in peace. Controlling this elementary human reaction, we enter into a technical debate with the Nazi intelligentsia: Is it technically feasible to dispose of millions of bodies? What is the evidence that the Slavs are inferior beings? Must they be ground under foot or returned to their “natural” home in the East so that this great culture can flourish, to the benefit of all mankind? Is it true that the Jews are a cancer eating away at the vitality of the German people? and so on. Without awareness, I found myself drawn into this morass of insane rationality — inventing arguments to counter and demolish the constructions of the Bormanns and the Rosenbergs.<\/p>\n

By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.<\/p><\/div>\n

Chomsky has returned to this formulation several times, applying it not only to Nazis but to Holocaust deniers. So in 1992, he wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…The Holocaust was the most extreme atrocity in human history, and we lose our humanity if we are even willing to enter the arena of debate with those who seek to deny or underplay Nazi crimes.<\/div>\n

Chomsky does arguably revise history a little – discussing that 1969 comment as if it were referring to Holocaust deniers, rather than to the Nazis themselves – but that’s a little besides the point. Chomsky simply cannot be fairly accused of advocating Holocaust denial. The suggestion that he’d endorse the Iranian conference is unwarranted.<\/p>\n

I won’t discuss the British petition to academically boycott two Israeli Universities, which I assume is what David is referring to. Instead, I’ll refer readers to this link<\/a>; Ilan Pappe’s and Henri Picciotto’s essays demonstrate by example that it is possible to support boycotts and divestment campaigns against Israel without being anti-semitic or supporting Holocaust denial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The Debate Link, David links to a news story about an upcoming conference on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Iranian government. Since the president of Iran has called the Holocaust a “myth,” David quite reasonably predicts that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-palestine-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}