14 November 2005 (updated 17 November)
14 November 2005 (updated 17 November)
By Noam Chomsky
This is an open letter to a few of the people with whom I had discussed the
Guardian interview of 31 October, on the basis of the electronic version,
which is all that I had seen. Someone has just sent me a copy of the printed
version, and I now understand why friends in England who wrote me were so outraged.
It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep
away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the matter
has some more general interest, so perhaps it's worth reviewing what most readers
could not know. The general interest is that the print version reveals
a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to
construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre. It's
of general interest for that reason alone.
A secondary matter is that it may serve as a word of warning to anyone who is
asked by the Guardian for an interview, and happens to fall slightly to the
critical end of the approved range of opinion of the editors. The warning
is: if you accept the invitation, be cautious, and make sure to have a tape
recorder that is very visibly placed in front of you. That may inhibit
the dedication to deceit, and if not, at least you will have a record. I
should add that in probably thousands of interviews from every corner of the
world and every part of the spectrum for decades, that thought has never occurred
to me before. It does now.
It was evident from the electronic version that t was a scurrilous piece of
journalism. That's clear even from internal evidence. The reporter
obviously had a definite agenda: to focus the defamation exercise on my denial
of the Srebrenica massacre. From the character of what appeared, it is
not easy to doubt that she was assigned this task. When I wouldn't go along,
she simply invented the denial, repeatedly, along with others. The centerpiece
of the interview was this, describing my alleged views, in particular, that:
....during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably
overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees
with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly
teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)
Transparently, neither I nor anyone speaks with quotation marks, so the reference
to my claim that "Srebrenica was so not a massacre," shown by my using
the term "massacre" in quotes, must be in print — hence "witheringly
teenage," as well as disgraceful. That raises the obvious question:
where is it in print, or anywhere? I know from letters that were sent to
me that a great many journalists and others asked the author of the interview
and the relevant editors to provide the source, and were met by stony silence
— for a simple reason: it does not exist, and they know it. Furthermore,
as Media Lens pointed out, with five minutes research on the internet,
any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre,
never with quotes. That alone ends the story. I will skip the rest,
which also collapses quickly.
More interesting, however, is the editorial contribution. One illustration
actually is in the e-edition. I did write a very brief letter in response,
which for some reason went to the ombudsman, who informed me that the word "fabrication"
had to be removed. My truncated letter stating that I take no responsibility
for anything attributed to me in the article did appear, paired with a moving
letter from a victim, expressing justified outrage that I or anyone could take
the positions invented in the Guardian article. Pairing aside, the heading
given by the editors was: "Fall out over Srebrenica." The editors
are well aware that there was no debate or disagreement about Srebrenica, once
the fabrications in their article are removed.
The printed version reveals how careful and well-planned the exercise was, and
why it might serve as a model for the genre. The front-page announcement
of the interview reads: "Noam Chomsky The Greatest Intellectual?"
The question is answered by the following highlighted Q&A, above the interview:
Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?
A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough
It is set apart in large print so that it can't be missed, and will be quoted
separately (as it already has been). It also captures the essence of the
agenda. The only defect is that it didn't happen. The truthful part
is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough
opposed the Swedish publisher's decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not "Diane,"
as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked
in the Swedish press. As Brockes presumably knew, though I carefully explained
anyway, there is one source for my involvement in this affair: an open letter
that I wrote to the publisher, after editors there who objected to the decision,
and journalist friends, sent me the Swedish press charges that were the basis
for the rejection. In the open letter, readily available on the internet
(and the only source), I went through the charges one by one, checked them against
the book, and found that they all ranged from serious misrepresentation to outright
fabrication. I then took — and take — the position that it is
completely wrong to withdraw a book because the press charges (falsely) that
it does not conform to approved doctrine. And I do regret that "I
didn't do it strongly enough," the words Brockes managed to quote correctly. In
the interview, whatever Johnstone may have said about Srebrenica never came
up, and is entirely irrelevant in any event, at least to anyone with a minimal
appreciation of freedom of speech.
The article is then framed by a series of photographs. Let's put aside childhood
photos and an honorary degree — included for no apparent reason other than,
perhaps, to reinforce the image the reporter sought to convey of a rich elitist
hypocrite who tells people how to live (citing a comment of her own, presumably
supposed to be clever, which will not be found on the tape, I am reasonably
confident). Those apart, there are three photos depicting my actual life.
It's an interesting choice, and the captions are even more interesting.
One is a picture of me "talking to journalist John Pilger" (who isn't
shown, but let's give the journal the benefit of the doubt of assuming he is
actually in the original). The second is of me "meeting Fidel Castro."
The third, and most interesting, is a picture of me "in Laos en route to
Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese."
That's my life: honoring commie-rats and the renegade who is the source of the
word "pilgerize" invented by journalists furious about his incisive
and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable
of is ridicule.
Since I'll avoid speculation, you can judge for yourselves the role Pilger plays
in the fantasy life of the editorial offices of the Guardian. And
the choice is interesting in other ways. It's true that I have met John
a few times, much fewer than I would like because we both have busy lives. And
possibly a picture was taken. It must have taken some effort to locate
this particular picture, assuming it to be genuine, among the innumerable pictures
of me talking to endless other people. And the intended message is very clear.
Turn to the Castro picture. In this case the picture, though clipped, is
real. As the editors surely know, at least if those who located the picture
did 2 minutes of research, the others in the picture (apart from my wife) were,
like me, participants in the annual meeting of an international society of Latin
American scholars, with a few others from abroad. This annual meeting happened
to be in Havana. Like all others, I was in a group that met with Castro.
End of second story.
Turn now to the third picture, from 1970. The element of truth is that
I was indeed in Laos, and on my way to Hanoi. The facts about these trips
are very easy to discover. I wrote about both in some detail right away,
in two articles in the New York Review, reprinted in my book At War
with Asia in 1970. It is easily available to Guardian editors,
because it was recently reprinted. If they want to be the first to question
the account (unlike reviewers in such radical rags as the journal of the Royal
Institute of International Affairs), it would be very easy for a journalist
to verify it: contact the two people who accompanied me on the entire trip,
one then a professor of economics at Cornell, the other a minister of the United
Church of Christ. Both are readily accessible. From the sole account
that exists, the editor would know that in Laos I was engaged in such subversive
activities as spending many hours in refugee camps interviewing miserable people
who had just been driven by the CIA "clandestine army" from the Plain
of Jars, having endured probably the most intense bombing in history for over
two years, almost entirely unrelated to the Vietnam war. And in North Vietnam,
I did spend most of my time doing what I had been invited to do: many hours
of lectures and discussion, on any topic I knew anything about, in the bombed
ruins of the Hanoi Polytechnic, to faculty who were able to return to Hanoi
from the countryside during a lull in the bombing, and were very eager to learn
about recent work in their own fields, to which they had had no access for years.
The rest of the trip "to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese"
is a Guardian invention. Those who frequent ultra-right defamation
sites can locate the probable source of this ingenious invention, but even that
ridiculous tale goes nowhere near as far as what the Guardian editors
concocted, which is a new addition to the vast literature of vilification of
those who stray beyond the approved bounds.
So that's my life: worshipping commie-rats and such terrible figures as John
Pilger. Quite apart from the deceit in the captions, simply note how much
effort and care it must have taken to contrive these images to frame the answer
to the question on the front page.
It is an impressive piece of work, and, as I said, provides a useful model for
studies of defamation exercises, or for those who practice the craft. And also,
perhaps, provides a useful lesson for those who may be approached for interviews
by this journal.
This is incidentally only a fragment. The rest is mostly what one might
expect to find in the scandal sheets about movie stars, familiar from such sources,
and of no further interest.
The Guardian later apologised to Chomsky, see Corrections
and clarifications: The Guardian and Noam Chomsky, The
Guardian, 17 November 2005
See also: