CHOMSKY'S GENOCIDAL DENIAL
By: Dr. Marko Attila HoarePHOTO: Dr. Marko Attila Hoare - a leading historian in the field of South East Europe, in particular of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
In the realm of politics, there are those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves: proud of what we stand for, we are not afraid to state our positions as clearly as possible, so there is no danger of misunderstanding; we call a spade a spade, and are ready to face the music. On the other hand, there are those who are embarrassed by their own position: they dissemble; muddying the waters so that what they really think is vague and hidden; when confronted by those who recognise them for what they are, they lash out in fear and shame, denying what everyone knows to be the truth.
Two very interesting parallel cases were highlighted in the Guardian newspaper on 17 November. It was reported that David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving is well known as a Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist, yet when accused of this by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, he attempted to sue her for libel, resulting in his crushing courtroom defeat. Yet he apparently remains ashamed to accept the label that he has inevitably earned. According to the Guardian: ‘Mr Irving has said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He also contends that most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.’ In other words, lacking the moral courage to say proudly ‘Yes, I deny the Holocaust !’, Irving seeks refuge in the claim that he is merely concerned with the accuracy of details and interpretation. Thus, the Holocaust denier does not merely deny the Holocaust; he denies his own denial. Of course, no rational person would accept such a plea at face value.
On the same day (17 November), a new twist emerged in another saga of genocide-denial: the Guardian printed a grovelling apology to Noam Chomsky for a none-too-flattering interview with him carried out by the award-winning journalist Emma Brockes, published by the Guardian on 31 October, in which Brockes cites Chomsky as having said that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was 'probably overstated' and was not even an actual massacre. Chomsky prides himself on being a resolute champion of freedom of speech; on this ground, he has defended the right of Holocaust-deniers to publish what they want; and condemned Britain’s libel laws. Yet faced with Brockes’s exposure of his position, he and his circle of fans retreated from their pro-free-speech position, and organised a campaign of denunciation of Brockes, bombarding the Guardian with letters of complaint, and eventually bullying this spineless newspaper into issuing an unequivocal apology and retraction.
In his letter of complaint to the Guardian, published on 2 November, Chomsky writes: ‘As for her [Brockes’s] personal opinions, interpretations and distortions, she is of course free to publish them, and I would, of course, support her right to do so, on grounds that she makes clear she does not understand.’ Yet as a result of the Chomskyite campaign against Brockes, the Guardian readers’ editor reported on 17 November: ‘The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.’ Just fancy that ! More shamefully still, the Guardian also apologised for having published a letter by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, alongside Chomsky’s on 2 November. Pervanic said he was ‘shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes’s.’ Yet in the words of the Guardian readers’ editor’s grovelling piece of self-criticism: ‘While he has every sympathy with the writer [Pervanic], Prof Chomsky believes that its publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false... With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint, and that is regretted.’ So much for respecting the right of a concentration-camp survivor to state his opinion.
The irony is all the greater, as the Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them. Nor, it should be said, was Johnstone murdered, tortured or driven out of her home, like hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens in the 1990s, whose rights Chomsky has never got round to championing. But assuming the right of a Western author not to have her writings rejected by publishers on political grounds is a more worthy cause than the right of Balkan untermenschen to life and limb, it remains to be seen whether Chomsky’s fellow left-wing libertarians will engage themselves in defence of Brockes as forthrightly as they did in defence of Johnstone.
What was it about Brockes’s interview that so rattled Chomsky ? Chomskyite ire focussed on the question-and-answer headline that introduced the interview:
Q. [Brockes]: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated ?
A. [Chomsky]: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.
This was a paraphrase, rather than a literal quotation, and one that was written by the newspaper rather than by Brockes herself, and for which she therefore cannot be held responsible. Nevertheless, it accurately summed up the essence of the matter: Chomsky had supported Johnstone, who claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. In his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November, Chomsky claimed it was simply a matter of defending freedom of speech: ‘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... 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.’
Chomsky therefore claimed his defence of Johnstone’s freedom of speech had been misrepresented as denial of the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, Brockes’s portrayal of Chomsky’s alleged denial of Srebrenica was at the heart of Chomsky’s complaint. According to Brockes, Chomsky claimed ‘that during the Bosnian war the ‘massacre’ at Srebrenica was probably overstated.’ Brockes elaborated thus on Chomsky’s style: ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things that 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.’ Chomsky’s outraged response was that ‘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.’ The Guardian readers’ editor accepted the validity of Chomsky’s complaint, and threw in an apology to Johnstone for good measure: ‘Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’
The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?
Johnstone, for her part, denies it to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica - some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’'. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).
To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been 'executions'; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved - against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an 'enclave'. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial - she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre - it is an apologia for the Serb forces. The Guardian readers’ editor’s claim that ‘Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre’ is, therefore, at least half untrue.
But what about the other half, i.e. Chomsky ? An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'
In the same letter, Chomsky makes much of an allegedly positive review of Johnstone's book in a British foreign-affairs journal: 'I also know that it has been very favourably reviewed, e.g., by the British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.' He then continues, with his own idiosyncratic logic: ‘I don’t read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford [sic]. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.’ The essence of what Chomsky is saying, is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good.
There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky's claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the 'Royal Academy'; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as 'Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal'; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone's book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: 'Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia... Yet for all of the book's constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case... Johnstone herself is very selective.'
Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s - and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.
The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) - a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) - a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard - far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika - was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard - in full colour - at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone's book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.
Perhaps it would be unfair to label Chomsky a Srebrenica massacre-denier simply because he praises uncritically Johnstone’s massacre-denying book and endorses its conclusions. A fuller picture of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica, however, can be gleaned from his interview with M. Junaid Alam of Left Hook on 17 December 2004, where he states that ‘Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.’ The key words here are ‘retaliation’, ‘apparently’ and ‘estimates’; the slaughter 'apparently' took place; the thousands killed were mere 'estimates'; they were, in any case, simply 'retaliation' for earlier Serb crimes. Note that while Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes - the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. Read carefully, nothing that Chomsky says actually contradicts Johnstone's massacre-denying claims cited above.
Chomsky then goes on to compare the Serb behaviour favourably with that of the Americans in Fallujah: ‘Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out.’ Chomsky does not mention the thousands of Bosnian women and children raped and murdered by Serb forces in other parts of Bosnia; nor those blown to bits by the Serb shelling of Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns, choosing instead to focus on the sparing of the women and children of Srebrenica. Johnstone, too, makes much of this: ‘one thing should be obvious: one does not commit ‘genocide’ by sparing women and children’. In fact, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of Jewish adult males in the USSR in 1941 before they began the systematic extermination of Jewish women and children, and the Nazis, unlike the Serb forces a half century later, were not being restrained by the democratic Western media.
Chomsky again compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with American behaviour at Fallujah in his article ‘Imperial Presidency’ (Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, vol. 39, no. 1), where he wrote of ‘Srebrenica, almost universally described as ‘genocide’ in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.’ Not quite massacre denial, it is true; more of a massacre minimisation - since Chomsky nowhere recognises the figure of eight-thousand Muslim dead, it is entirely possible that he reduces the massacre to the fraction suggested by Johnstone, and therefore denies it to all intents and purposes. And he is certainly at pains to contrast 'the Serbs' favourably with the Americans.
One might criticise Brockes for not giving a more nuanced portrayal of Chomsky’s vague yet complex view of the Srebrenica massacre - were it not for the fact that Chomsky is notorious for the deliberate use of obscure and confusing language, designed to muddy the waters as to his real views, and the use of verbal trickery aimed at confusing his opponents. Take his 2001 exchange with Christopher Hitchens over the question of whether the US bombing of Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998 was a crime equivalent to 11 September:
Chomsky stated: ‘That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.’
Hitchens replied: ‘Since his [Chomsky’s] remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I ‘must be unaware’, he writes, that I ‘express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.’ With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.’
Chomsky then pulled his sleight-of-hand: ‘Hitchens claims that I accused him of a ‘propensity for racist contempt.’ I explicitly and unambiguously said the opposite.’
Given such word games and obfuscation, Chomsky should hardly complain when an earnest interviewer fails to interpret his well-camouflaged position as he would have it. Had he so wished, he could have avoided the entire imbroglio with Brockes by telling her unambiguously: ‘I recognise that several thousand Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995'. Yet one rather suspects he wanted to have his cake and eat it: to put forward a ‘position’ that was compatible with those of the outright deniers, like Johnstone, but that nevertheless allows him formally to deny being a denier himself.
Instead of taking responsibility for his own insincerity and double-talk, he chose to punish the messenger - Brockes. He has then failed on two occasions - his letter published in the Guardian on 2 November and his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November - to state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces. Nor is it true what Chomsky claims, that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.' I have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky describes Srebrenica as a 'massacre'; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims. Chomsky’s actual position on Srebrenica must remain an open question until he can actually bring himself to speak and write in plain English - for which nobody should hold their breath. Under these circumstances, the Guardian readers’ editor had no need to issue its apology, and had no right to impugn the journalistic professionalism of Brockes. It is to Brockes, not to Chomsky, that the Guardian should be apologising.
The outrage of Chomsky and his fellow-travellers over his portrayal as a Srebrenica massacre-denier is particularly ironic, given that several of these fellow-travellers are themselves overt Srebrenica deniers. Chomsky is notorious for having gone on record in 1977, in an article co-written with a certain Ed Herman, as claiming that Khmer Rouge atrocities were being exaggerated by the Western media (‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, The Nation, 25 June 1977). Recently, the same Ed Herman founded a ‘Srebrenica Research Group’ to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened. In his essay ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, Herman writes that ‘the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least’. Herman concludes: ‘The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ [note the quote marks] is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars... But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomised by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 ‘missing’ - who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines - was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.’
In this way, Chomsky’s close collaborator Herman unashamedly holds a view that Chomsky is outraged to have attributed to himself. Both Chomsky and Herman are regular contributors to the website ‘ZNet’ - a haven for neo-Stalinist die-hards, several of whom are outright Srebrenica deniers. The publication of Herman’s above-cited article was greeted with uncritical approval by ZNet blogger David Petersen, who praised its ‘powerful analysis’. The same Petersen then reacted with outrage when Brockes attributed the same Srebrenica-denying view that he himself endorses to his comrade Chomsky, describing her interview as ‘lies, smears and more lies’. Just fancy that ! If to deny the Srebrenica massacre is shameful - which it is - why do Johnstone, Petersen and Herman do so ? But if they really think that the Srebrenica massacre did not happen, or was vastly smaller and more justifiable than is usually claimed, why should they be so outraged at Chomsky being described as a denier ? The answer brings us back to where we began: the Chomskyites and ZNet people are, at heart, embarrassed by their own position. In this, too, they resemble the controversial British historian recently arrested in Austria.
In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word 'genocide' in quotes - this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Indeed, the genocide-denial of Johnstone, Chomsky and their circle goes far beyond questioning the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky was among those who supported the campaign in defence of Living Marxism (LM), the lunatic-fringe magazine that accused the news agency ITN of fabricating the existence of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, on the basis of the writings of Thomas Deichmann, an amateur journalist and supporter of the Serb-nationalist cause. Deichmann claimed the camps in question were merely 'detention centres', and - although he had never visited them himself - presumed to know them well enough to claim that the pictures ITN had taken of them were deliberately intended to 'mislead' the Western public as to their true nature. ITN sued LM for libel, and the magazine was unable to produce a single witness who had actually seen the camps at first hand, whereas eye-witnesses such as Vulliamy testified as to their true, horrific character. LM's resounding defeat in the libel trial has not stopped Johnstone, in a recent commentary on the Chomsky-Brockes affair in the left-wing American magazine Counterpunch, from repeating LM's already discredited lies: "The issue raised by LM had to do with the way photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates, but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust." The campaign against Brockes has therefore simultaneously become a campaign to rewrite the history of the Bosnian war to deny that genocide took place.
Chomsky's denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM's lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O'Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian - with this proud record - should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
In the realm of politics, there are those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves: proud of what we stand for, we are not afraid to state our positions as clearly as possible, so there is no danger of misunderstanding; we call a spade a spade, and are ready to face the music. On the other hand, there are those who are embarrassed by their own position: they dissemble; muddying the waters so that what they really think is vague and hidden; when confronted by those who recognise them for what they are, they lash out in fear and shame, denying what everyone knows to be the truth.
Two very interesting parallel cases were highlighted in the Guardian newspaper on 17 November. It was reported that David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving is well known as a Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist, yet when accused of this by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, he attempted to sue her for libel, resulting in his crushing courtroom defeat. Yet he apparently remains ashamed to accept the label that he has inevitably earned. According to the Guardian: ‘Mr Irving has said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He also contends that most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.’ In other words, lacking the moral courage to say proudly ‘Yes, I deny the Holocaust !’, Irving seeks refuge in the claim that he is merely concerned with the accuracy of details and interpretation. Thus, the Holocaust denier does not merely deny the Holocaust; he denies his own denial. Of course, no rational person would accept such a plea at face value.
On the same day (17 November), a new twist emerged in another saga of genocide-denial: the Guardian printed a grovelling apology to Noam Chomsky for a none-too-flattering interview with him carried out by the award-winning journalist Emma Brockes, published by the Guardian on 31 October, in which Brockes cites Chomsky as having said that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was 'probably overstated' and was not even an actual massacre. Chomsky prides himself on being a resolute champion of freedom of speech; on this ground, he has defended the right of Holocaust-deniers to publish what they want; and condemned Britain’s libel laws. Yet faced with Brockes’s exposure of his position, he and his circle of fans retreated from their pro-free-speech position, and organised a campaign of denunciation of Brockes, bombarding the Guardian with letters of complaint, and eventually bullying this spineless newspaper into issuing an unequivocal apology and retraction.
In his letter of complaint to the Guardian, published on 2 November, Chomsky writes: ‘As for her [Brockes’s] personal opinions, interpretations and distortions, she is of course free to publish them, and I would, of course, support her right to do so, on grounds that she makes clear she does not understand.’ Yet as a result of the Chomskyite campaign against Brockes, the Guardian readers’ editor reported on 17 November: ‘The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.’ Just fancy that ! More shamefully still, the Guardian also apologised for having published a letter by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, alongside Chomsky’s on 2 November. Pervanic said he was ‘shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes’s.’ Yet in the words of the Guardian readers’ editor’s grovelling piece of self-criticism: ‘While he has every sympathy with the writer [Pervanic], Prof Chomsky believes that its publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false... With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint, and that is regretted.’ So much for respecting the right of a concentration-camp survivor to state his opinion.
The irony is all the greater, as the Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them. Nor, it should be said, was Johnstone murdered, tortured or driven out of her home, like hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens in the 1990s, whose rights Chomsky has never got round to championing. But assuming the right of a Western author not to have her writings rejected by publishers on political grounds is a more worthy cause than the right of Balkan untermenschen to life and limb, it remains to be seen whether Chomsky’s fellow left-wing libertarians will engage themselves in defence of Brockes as forthrightly as they did in defence of Johnstone.
What was it about Brockes’s interview that so rattled Chomsky ? Chomskyite ire focussed on the question-and-answer headline that introduced the interview:
Q. [Brockes]: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated ?
A. [Chomsky]: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.
This was a paraphrase, rather than a literal quotation, and one that was written by the newspaper rather than by Brockes herself, and for which she therefore cannot be held responsible. Nevertheless, it accurately summed up the essence of the matter: Chomsky had supported Johnstone, who claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. In his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November, Chomsky claimed it was simply a matter of defending freedom of speech: ‘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... 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.’
Chomsky therefore claimed his defence of Johnstone’s freedom of speech had been misrepresented as denial of the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, Brockes’s portrayal of Chomsky’s alleged denial of Srebrenica was at the heart of Chomsky’s complaint. According to Brockes, Chomsky claimed ‘that during the Bosnian war the ‘massacre’ at Srebrenica was probably overstated.’ Brockes elaborated thus on Chomsky’s style: ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things that 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.’ Chomsky’s outraged response was that ‘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.’ The Guardian readers’ editor accepted the validity of Chomsky’s complaint, and threw in an apology to Johnstone for good measure: ‘Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’
The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?
Johnstone, for her part, denies it to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica - some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’'. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).
To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been 'executions'; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved - against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an 'enclave'. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial - she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre - it is an apologia for the Serb forces. The Guardian readers’ editor’s claim that ‘Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre’ is, therefore, at least half untrue.
But what about the other half, i.e. Chomsky ? An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'
In the same letter, Chomsky makes much of an allegedly positive review of Johnstone's book in a British foreign-affairs journal: 'I also know that it has been very favourably reviewed, e.g., by the British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.' He then continues, with his own idiosyncratic logic: ‘I don’t read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford [sic]. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.’ The essence of what Chomsky is saying, is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good.
There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky's claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the 'Royal Academy'; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as 'Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal'; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone's book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: 'Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia... Yet for all of the book's constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case... Johnstone herself is very selective.'
Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s - and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.
The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) - a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) - a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard - far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika - was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard - in full colour - at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone's book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.
Perhaps it would be unfair to label Chomsky a Srebrenica massacre-denier simply because he praises uncritically Johnstone’s massacre-denying book and endorses its conclusions. A fuller picture of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica, however, can be gleaned from his interview with M. Junaid Alam of Left Hook on 17 December 2004, where he states that ‘Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.’ The key words here are ‘retaliation’, ‘apparently’ and ‘estimates’; the slaughter 'apparently' took place; the thousands killed were mere 'estimates'; they were, in any case, simply 'retaliation' for earlier Serb crimes. Note that while Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes - the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. Read carefully, nothing that Chomsky says actually contradicts Johnstone's massacre-denying claims cited above.
Chomsky then goes on to compare the Serb behaviour favourably with that of the Americans in Fallujah: ‘Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out.’ Chomsky does not mention the thousands of Bosnian women and children raped and murdered by Serb forces in other parts of Bosnia; nor those blown to bits by the Serb shelling of Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns, choosing instead to focus on the sparing of the women and children of Srebrenica. Johnstone, too, makes much of this: ‘one thing should be obvious: one does not commit ‘genocide’ by sparing women and children’. In fact, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of Jewish adult males in the USSR in 1941 before they began the systematic extermination of Jewish women and children, and the Nazis, unlike the Serb forces a half century later, were not being restrained by the democratic Western media.
Chomsky again compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with American behaviour at Fallujah in his article ‘Imperial Presidency’ (Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, vol. 39, no. 1), where he wrote of ‘Srebrenica, almost universally described as ‘genocide’ in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.’ Not quite massacre denial, it is true; more of a massacre minimisation - since Chomsky nowhere recognises the figure of eight-thousand Muslim dead, it is entirely possible that he reduces the massacre to the fraction suggested by Johnstone, and therefore denies it to all intents and purposes. And he is certainly at pains to contrast 'the Serbs' favourably with the Americans.
One might criticise Brockes for not giving a more nuanced portrayal of Chomsky’s vague yet complex view of the Srebrenica massacre - were it not for the fact that Chomsky is notorious for the deliberate use of obscure and confusing language, designed to muddy the waters as to his real views, and the use of verbal trickery aimed at confusing his opponents. Take his 2001 exchange with Christopher Hitchens over the question of whether the US bombing of Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998 was a crime equivalent to 11 September:
Chomsky stated: ‘That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.’
Hitchens replied: ‘Since his [Chomsky’s] remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I ‘must be unaware’, he writes, that I ‘express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.’ With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.’
Chomsky then pulled his sleight-of-hand: ‘Hitchens claims that I accused him of a ‘propensity for racist contempt.’ I explicitly and unambiguously said the opposite.’
Given such word games and obfuscation, Chomsky should hardly complain when an earnest interviewer fails to interpret his well-camouflaged position as he would have it. Had he so wished, he could have avoided the entire imbroglio with Brockes by telling her unambiguously: ‘I recognise that several thousand Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995'. Yet one rather suspects he wanted to have his cake and eat it: to put forward a ‘position’ that was compatible with those of the outright deniers, like Johnstone, but that nevertheless allows him formally to deny being a denier himself.
Instead of taking responsibility for his own insincerity and double-talk, he chose to punish the messenger - Brockes. He has then failed on two occasions - his letter published in the Guardian on 2 November and his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November - to state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces. Nor is it true what Chomsky claims, that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.' I have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky describes Srebrenica as a 'massacre'; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims. Chomsky’s actual position on Srebrenica must remain an open question until he can actually bring himself to speak and write in plain English - for which nobody should hold their breath. Under these circumstances, the Guardian readers’ editor had no need to issue its apology, and had no right to impugn the journalistic professionalism of Brockes. It is to Brockes, not to Chomsky, that the Guardian should be apologising.
The outrage of Chomsky and his fellow-travellers over his portrayal as a Srebrenica massacre-denier is particularly ironic, given that several of these fellow-travellers are themselves overt Srebrenica deniers. Chomsky is notorious for having gone on record in 1977, in an article co-written with a certain Ed Herman, as claiming that Khmer Rouge atrocities were being exaggerated by the Western media (‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, The Nation, 25 June 1977). Recently, the same Ed Herman founded a ‘Srebrenica Research Group’ to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened. In his essay ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, Herman writes that ‘the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least’. Herman concludes: ‘The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ [note the quote marks] is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars... But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomised by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 ‘missing’ - who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines - was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.’
In this way, Chomsky’s close collaborator Herman unashamedly holds a view that Chomsky is outraged to have attributed to himself. Both Chomsky and Herman are regular contributors to the website ‘ZNet’ - a haven for neo-Stalinist die-hards, several of whom are outright Srebrenica deniers. The publication of Herman’s above-cited article was greeted with uncritical approval by ZNet blogger David Petersen, who praised its ‘powerful analysis’. The same Petersen then reacted with outrage when Brockes attributed the same Srebrenica-denying view that he himself endorses to his comrade Chomsky, describing her interview as ‘lies, smears and more lies’. Just fancy that ! If to deny the Srebrenica massacre is shameful - which it is - why do Johnstone, Petersen and Herman do so ? But if they really think that the Srebrenica massacre did not happen, or was vastly smaller and more justifiable than is usually claimed, why should they be so outraged at Chomsky being described as a denier ? The answer brings us back to where we began: the Chomskyites and ZNet people are, at heart, embarrassed by their own position. In this, too, they resemble the controversial British historian recently arrested in Austria.
In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word 'genocide' in quotes - this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Indeed, the genocide-denial of Johnstone, Chomsky and their circle goes far beyond questioning the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky was among those who supported the campaign in defence of Living Marxism (LM), the lunatic-fringe magazine that accused the news agency ITN of fabricating the existence of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, on the basis of the writings of Thomas Deichmann, an amateur journalist and supporter of the Serb-nationalist cause. Deichmann claimed the camps in question were merely 'detention centres', and - although he had never visited them himself - presumed to know them well enough to claim that the pictures ITN had taken of them were deliberately intended to 'mislead' the Western public as to their true nature. ITN sued LM for libel, and the magazine was unable to produce a single witness who had actually seen the camps at first hand, whereas eye-witnesses such as Vulliamy testified as to their true, horrific character. LM's resounding defeat in the libel trial has not stopped Johnstone, in a recent commentary on the Chomsky-Brockes affair in the left-wing American magazine Counterpunch, from repeating LM's already discredited lies: "The issue raised by LM had to do with the way photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates, but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust." The campaign against Brockes has therefore simultaneously become a campaign to rewrite the history of the Bosnian war to deny that genocide took place.
Chomsky's denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM's lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O'Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian - with this proud record - should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.
posted by Srebrenica Genocide at 5:33 PM
38 Comments:
OK, you convinced me and PROVED beyond doubt that Johnstone made some big mistakes (e.g. about the Nazi collaborator Mihailovic).
You also showed clearly that Chomsky was wrong to support Johnstone, not noticing such mistakes and acting under the influence of other political views he shared with Johnstone.
However, I am appaulled to see Chomsky -in turn- treated rather unjustly (by you) as a "genocide denier". His disagreement with the term genocide, as regards Srebrenica, is not in itself genocide denial. It is TERMINOLOGY DENIAL.
There are plenty of terminology deniers who are NOT history deniers. And Chomsky's goal, I think, was not to deny Serbian crimes, but to draw attention to the denial of other crimes (e.g. Falutza). He is NOT an expert on Bosnia, he is an expert on the flaws of American policies.
And you are probably not an... expert on Chomsky. If you were, you would understand more deeply even his mistakes, as well as his basic motives, I think.
NOBODY is perfect! :)
In any case, I agree totally with this blog's brave and accurate exposure of the GENERAL genocide committed against muslims in Bosnia.
Whether or not Srenrenica itself, taken out of context, constitutes "genocide", is NOT my biggest worry or lexicographical concern. Whatever we prefer to call it, genocide DID take place, one way or the other...
Omadeon, I assume your comments were directed to Dr. Hoare who wrote the article?
Although Chomsky never explicitly stated that he denies genocide in Srebrenica, he convinced me that he is indeed a genocide denier. Off the record, I exchanged few E-mails with him and I encourage you to do the same. Ask him about the genocide in Srebrenica and he will show you his real face. He is not that smart after all, but he is the expert in "language" - he can twist words and sentences and trick you into believing whatever you want to believe. And then if you challenge him, he will find a way to exploit his "language tricks" and leave you on the dry.
After you exchange few E-mails with him, then come back and let us know how you feel about Chomsky again. I did not want to publish the contents of E-mails I exchanged with him few years ago, but I have no doubt that he is a genocide denier, because he told me so.
Omadeon, what happened at Srebrenica was genocide. There is a Genocide Convention which defines the crime in law and there are ICTY judgments which carefully set out the principles the judges have applied in determining whether a particular set of facts satisified the criteria for proof of genocide.
If Chomsky has any quibbles he needs to discuss the principles applied by the judges. I'm not aware he's done that. What he has done is describe Diana Johnstone's work as outstanding, which from the extracts I've read it is clearly not, so he is simply providing moral support for her arguments.
Chomsky has also described her comments about Omarska as probably correct and Ed Vulliamy's reporting as probably incorrect. He's basically happy to suggest Ed Vulliamy is lying. He's talking in the face of a court judgment that found LM, whose arguments Johnstone endorse, were wrong.
Chomsky doesn't "not notice" mistakes, he ignores them as he sees fit. He is happy to defend the freedom of speech of people like Johnstone and Faurisson, but he objected to having Kemal Pervanic's views expressed alongside his own in The Guardian.
I've never encountered Chomsky. I have met Ed Vulliamy and heard Kemal Pervanic and I'm confident that both are honest and trustworthy.
Chomsky may not specifically have denied that genocide took place at Srebrenica in so many words but he gives support and comfort to genocide deniers and impugns the credibility of people who take the opposite view.
If Chomsky is not an expert on Bosnia he should keep his mouth shut about Johnstone and Vulliamy. He is a professional academic who should know the principles of intellectual debate.
Genocide is a lexographical concern because the rule of law is about words having meaning.
@owen,
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanations.
The deeper one digs for the truth and the more honestly one digs, the more... troubles one gets! :)
As a rule, I don't trust terminology. I trust FACTS.
And I accept everything you say about Srebrenica because the evidence shows it is a FACT.
However, intellectual fights are going on, because e.g. Turkey doesn't really want to call the Armenian genocide a "genocide", while the Armenians insist (and I tend to agree with them), etc.
So.......
I hear that BECAUSE Noam Chomsky supports someone ELSE who is a genocide denier, then... Chomsky must ALSO be a genocide denier!
Well, since Dr. Hoare explicitly regards... Kemal Ataturk as one of the "TWO greatest men in the world who contributed most to human emancipation" (instead of a perpretator of genocides - which he WAS).
...then, according to this logic, Dr. Hoare himself must be a... much bigger genocide denier than Chomsky! (hehe)
I think we should stop
"demonizing by implication".
(Ah well, poor old Chomsky is COMPLETELY clueless, apparently, about the worst mistakes of Johnstone... tsk, tsk, tsk)
P.S. I have spent several hours reading Dr. Hoare's FIERCE criticisms against Chomsky in various other web pages. I TEND to believe that there is some serious misunderstanding here, or various exaggerations, but I have NOT finished yet; only just started. This... mystery MUST be solved, my new BIG troubles have... only just began.
On the whole, I find this situtation extremely disturbing and troublesome.
I hope I have grown out of my... old tendency to idealize people, or the tendency to divide up the world into "goodies" and "baddies" (something Dr. Hoare DOES, from time to time - this is ALSO a fact I discovered).
Therefore, this is even more serious and alarming: Chomsky is suddenly accused of all kinds of things that (IF valid) are ultimately disturbing indications that he MIGHT have been extremely wrong, absolutely obstinate, and so on.
Well, even if this IS the case, I must also resist the tendency to attribute to him an "evil motive" (as Dr. Hoare so fiercely insists in so many ways). He MAY have been totally wrong, or totally misled, but I find it VERY hard to believe that he is an... evil man who rejoices in propagating conscious lies.
Alas, I will NOT be surprised if even the world's greatest, most sincere intellectuals, can ALSO be very wrong, deeply immersed in their own... VIRTUAL WORLD. This can be true of anyone, of course, INCLUDING Dr. Hoare.
If Dr. Hoare is right, then humanity (not JUST Chomsky) is on the verge of VERY SERIOUS capacity for absolutely TOTAL and DEVASTATING intellectual self-delusion.
However, we need to learn one thing: To investigate with an open mind; rediscover WHAT is the truth, each one of us, uninfluenced and independent of ALL bias, ALL prejudice, even and (especially) our OWN prejudices.
I rest my case (to investigate).
omadeon,
Nobody is denying that Noam Chomsky is intelligent, especially when it comes to his professional skills with linguistics. However, the issue here boils down to how this intelligence is used. Being intelligent does not mean being smart, and it certainly does not mean being of good character, authoritative, or/and objective.
Noam Chomsky is anti-imperialist, he sees himself as a socialist, he clearly has an agenda - he tends to side with parties who are opposed to the so called "American imperialism." He associates himself with genocide deniers. For example, he co-authored a book with one of the most prominent Srebrenica genocide deniers, Edward S. Herman. He loaned his support to another genocide denier Diana Johnstone on the grounds of free speech. He readily takes Serb point of view when it comes to the fall of Srebrenica and blames it on the Bosniak attacks on heavily militarized Serb villages around Srebrenica. However, he never mentions the fact that Serb villages around Srebrenica were military bases from which Serbs staged a brutal siege on Srebrenica and used heavy artillery to shell and kill Bosniak refugees on a daily basis.
Bosniaks were fighting for their mere survival in the Enclave. They couldn't sit silent while Serbs attacked them and prevented humaniarian food convoys from reaching Bosniak refugees trapped in the Srebrenica ghetto; Bosniaks had to defend themselves. But Chomsky, who is no authority on genocide, does not see it that way. He readily takes discredited Serb point of view because 'Serboslavia' was a socialist country and Serbs also happen to be largely 'anti-american' - a characteristic almost always associated with the whole notion of the anti-imperialism.
When it comes to Kemal Attaturk, I am not expert on him. However, I know that he contributed greatly to the secularization of Turkey - and a secular society is something that I strongly support. Whether or not Ataturk was complicit in a genocide is up to the international courts to decide. Sure, he is dead, but - for the purpose of a fact - the court can still hold him and Turkey complicit in a genocide if they find them guilty. How do you, or anybody else, know that he is guilty? Do you realize how extremely difficult it is to prove the charge of genocide? I do.
I have spent hours and hours of my time just reading, examining, and dissecting both the trial chamber and the appeals chamber judgements (Krstic, Blagojevic/Jokic, Erdemovic, Vasiljevic, Lukic, Krajisnik...) and I can tell you it is extremely hard to prove the charge of genocide in front of the international judges.
Why do we need international judges, after all? It is becasue the the history is a 'social science,' it's your opinion against mine. Go to your library, take 5 different books on the same topic and you will get completely different interpretations of the same historical event. That is why we need international courts to examine allegations of genocide(s), as well as the allegations of the number of victims that perished in the alleged genocide. In this regard, I am proud to say that the Srebrenica genocide is not a matter of anybody's opinion; it's a judicial fact recognized first by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and subsequently by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
I hope that the Bosnian Genocide also gets recognized in a case against Radovan Karadzic. So far, Bosnian genocide was recognized in a judgement against Nikola Jorgic handed down by the state of Germany and subsequently upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.
Omadeon, both Noam Chomsky and Marko Hoare hold very forceful, polemical, views. I disagree quite strongly with Marko Hoare on some of the stances that he takes. I think he is insufficiently critical of the motives and outcomes of Western intervention. But I don't have any reason to believe that he holds his views dishonestly.
I once admired Chomsky for the stance he took on issues like East Timor. But his observations now strike me as motivated by his outrage in principle against US imperialism rather than a careful appreciation of the facts on the ground, particularly in relation to Bosnia.
There's a lot to be outraged by in the history of US imperialism, certainly, but Chomsky's selective outrage led me to feel doubtful about either his judgment or his motives.
I don't know enough about Chomsky's championing of Robert Faurisson to speak with confidence on the subject but my impression is that Chomsky argues from a theoretical perspective without examining the substance.
I'm doubtful whether the right to free speech should be considered to include the right deliberately to misrepresent the truth in a way that threatens the basic rights and even existence of the subjects of the discourse. So I disagree in principle with Chomsky's apparent commitment to an absolute right of freedom of speech. Chomsky's complaint about having Kemal Pervanic's words as a survivor of Omarska printed alongside his own letter in The Guardian makes me doubtful of the scope of that commitment, but my real anger with and disgust at Chomsky comes from elsewhere.
In areas of controversy, objective analysis often involves suspending belief, a priori, in the versions of any of the parties directly involved, even when personal experience of the parties is pretty convincing. The danger is that resolute "impartiality" allied with ignorance can end up with the observer getting close to colluding with the perpetrators, for example in the "all parties were guilty of atrocities" argument.
Comsky's persistent endorsement of Johnstone's work as "outstanding" is strange and from the excerpts I've seen perverse. His apparent unfamiliarity with the mountains of evidence about what happened at Srebrenica is odd and unsupported by any real arguments of substance. But perhaps Chomsky's assertion of ignorance of his subject allows him a get-out.
However he has no such excuse to fall back on when he expresses his support of Johnstone's depiction of Omarska as just a temporary refugee camp as probably correct, because he has considered and rejected the alternative position, stating that Ed Vulliamy's reporting is probably incorrect. As I understand it he has said that explicitly, not simply leaving it to be understood from his approval of Johnstone.
Vulliamy is certainly a committed journalist, but that commitment comes from an understandable anger at what he has seen. I know of no-one who has successfully challenged the truth of what he wrote about his visit to Omarksa. There is plenty of evidence from trials at The Hague to confirm that what he reported was in fact just a shadow of the grim reality and there are survivors who have said that the Vulliamy (and his colleagues)'s publicisation of the camps saved their lives - no "probably" inserted.
So when Chomsky denies Vulliamy's truthfulness, that makes me doubt Chomsky's academic rigour and dispute his good faith.
Well, I tend to agree with you (people in this blog), on every single issue that I have (so far) investigated. It's been a shattering experience for me, as a Greek who has been exposed to one-sided pro-Serb propaganda, for so many years, to discover the Bosnian side of the story. Fortunately I am NOT a nationalist, nor a "Christian Orthodox jihadist" (hehe) so I kept an open mind.
As you probably noticed, I wrote a new blog-post about Dr. Hoare's views, but to cut short a long story of too many words (in my blog) I will only copy here (for your benefit) some short, probably useful conclusions:
1) About Noam Chomsky...
I do NOT deny that he ALSO made some big mistakes, apparently, mistakes of opinion that are typical symptoms of... OLD AGE and a powerful but... occasionally obstinate Mind.
The BEST critique of Chomsky I found (as regards Bosnia), which -however- does NOT label him a "genocide denier", but it criticises rationally and factually his mistakes of opinion about Bosnia and all the other people (Ed Herman et.al.) whose views he wrongly endorsed (or collaborated with), is
"A simple request", by Michael Bérubé -IMHO a great post,sprinkled with extremely useful links)
2)
(something new) I believe, however, that -in the case of Chomsky- the "easy way out" is a dubious demonizing label like "genocide denier", which can -however- be seriously damaging for your own _just cause_: It puts on the reader enormous pressure, to EITHER accept this demonization and turn completely against Chomsky (easier if one ALREADY dislikes him but VERY difficult otherwise), boilling down to a "Bush-logic" of "either with us or against us".
O.T.O.H. the kind of critique that I mentioned in (1), together with the fact that Chomsky CAN of course be QUITE wrong (in his old age -especially!!!) is I believe much more productive, useful to the reader AND positive for your own blog's Cause.
3) Finally, as regards TRUE genocide deniers, If ANY reader is interested in exercising his/her ability to REASON, or wishes to TEST one's... SANITY of mind, I recommend reading the following... PILE OF BULSHIT (excuse me...):
http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=6082
...about Alexander Dorin, who has written a book FULL of PROVED lies - in Serbian,
IGNORING the FACTS,> e.g. reported in your post
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2009/07/dna-results-reveal-6186-srebrenica.html
Comments in the former blog-post ( http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=6082 ) also indicate an alarming degree of... LUNACY.> We'd better >study all this (AND your blog) VERY carefully, in Greece, just in case we... flip out in similar ways (to these guys)! :)
omadeon,
By publishing genocide denial book in Berlin, Alexandar Dorin has violated German laws against genocide denial. Why is Bosnian community sitting silent? They should file a criminal complaint against him in Germany.
Omadeon, I was quoting from memory. Checking back I find that I've misrepresented Chomsky, though I think it's reasonable for me to claim that it was in detail rather than in substance.
Chomsky, as reported by Emma Brockes, said that "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work."
I didn't like Emma Brockes's interview when I read it, but nevertheless for all her unfortunate way of putting things and the stupid headline, Chomsky says enough in confirmation of his known position for it to be legitimate to quote from the interview. Subjewct to accuracy of reporting, "Hysterical fanaticism" is not a linguistically careful or intellectually honest analysis of of most people in the West's concern about Srebrenica.
"And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."
As Brockes noted ITN didn't think what LM had published was false - the UK courts found that it was false, after LM decided not to challenge the evidence offered by Dr Idris Merdzanic, the doctor at Trnopolje.
LM went bankrupt to avoid having to pay the award and costs. They emerged almost immediately as Spiked and allies, so there was no question of LM's views being stifled, the bankruptcy was just a way of avoiding responsibility for their actions and words.
Chomsky believed that LM was probably correct and in his stance on LM and Diana Johnstone it didn't matter whether they were right or wrong.
So it was LM that Chomsky chose to champion as probably correct even after they had been shown not to be.
The remark about Ed Vulliamy was that "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."
So I was wrong in saying that Chomsky had said in so many words that Vulliamy was probably incorrect. But all the same, in essence he is saying that Vulliamy was supporting a story that was "probably not true" - again, in spite of the judgment.
Chomsky then went on to refer to Lewsi MacKenzie. "But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written that most of the stories were complete nonsense."
Chomsky knows very well that MacKenzie was in charge in Sarajevo in 1992 and had no involvement in Srebrenica and no special knowledge. MacKenzie's article in the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2005 was certainly an exercise in genocide denial. He refutes the Appeal Chamber decision in the Krstic and disregards compeltely its reasoning on the issue of the survival of the women and children.
Chomsky is just too slippery. This is an academic who has made his reputation as a theorist of language. And yet too often he challenges only one version of the truth and uses language in a way that communicates support or criticism while avoiding committing himself to any definite critical judgment himself.
I'll split up a fairly lengthy lift from JUSTWATCH of a current exchange between Ian Williams and Noam Chomsky.
Omadeon, I'll leave it to you to draw whatever you choose from it. All I have to say that like Ian Williams I was taken aback by Chomsky's reference to "my uncontroversial observation, well-known to everyone familiar with the Kosovo events, that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo."
That is not the way Kosovars themselves see it and once again, Chomsky is not an "innocent". He is reasserting a position that others better placed than him have contradicted. The Milutinovic judgment bears reading, and so do the reports of the ongoing proceedings in the Djordjevic case.
From JUSTWATCH
Chomsky on 17 August
Foreign Policy In Focus
August 17, 2009
- Commentary -
Kosovo, East Timor, R2P, and Ian Williams
By Noam Chomsky
Editor: John Feffer
www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6363
Foreign Policy In Focus
August 17, 2009
- Commentary -
Kosovo, East Timor, R2P, and Ian Williams
By Noam Chomsky
Editor: John Feffer
In a discussion www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6320 of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in Foreign Policy In Focus, Ian Williams vehemently denies my uncontroversial observation, well-known to everyone familiar with the Kosovo events, that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo." He declares that this familiar observation "isn't only untrue but morally unpalatable in its spurious causality, like claiming that the British air raids
on Germany precipitated the Nazi gas chambers."
Williams doesn't explain what he regards as untrue and morally offensive, so let us review carefully what he should certainly know well, and ask what might support his charges.
There is massive evidence about Kosovo in impeccable Western sources, never questioned. That includes two compilations of documents by the State Department, detailed reports of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe Kosovo Verification Mission monitors, a British parliamentary inquiry, reports of NATO, the UN, and more. As I wrote www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22227 in the paper on R2P to which Williams refers, the results are unequivocal: The worst atrocities began as the bombing started (to be precise, there was a slight increase a few days earlier when the monitors were withdrawn, over Serbian objections,
in preparation for the bombings). On March 27, NATO Commander General Wesley Clark informed the press that the vicious Serbian reaction was "entirely predictable." He added shortly after that the sharp escalation of atrocities had been "fully anticipated" and was "not in any way" a concern of the political leadership.
Clark clarified the matter further in his memoirs. He reports that on March 6, 1999, he had informed Secretary of State Madeline Albright that if NATO proceeded to bomb Serbia, "almost certainly [the Serbs] will attack the civilian population," and NATO will be able to do nothing to prevent that reaction. Correspondingly, the Milosevic indictment kept to crimes after the bombing, with a single exception, which we know could not have offended the consciences of the United States, the United Kingdom, and their supporters, as discussed in my R2P paper.
We may ask, then, what is untrue and morally offensive in my repeating uncontroversial facts that Williams doesn't happen to like. Was it untrue and morally offensive, for example, for General Clark to inform the White House and the press that the bombing would precipitate the worst atrocities - correctly, as it quickly turned out?
...
[Blogger will only allow 4096 characters, so I've removed references to Indonesia/East Timor etc., just kept the Balkans. Also it forced me to remove http:// before every www reference]
...
/Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, foreign policy expert, and
contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus./
Ian Williams's reply
www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6376
Foreign Policy in Focus
August 21, 2009
- Commentary -
Response to Chomsky
By Ian Williams
Editor: John Feffer
I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky makes an ex cathedra observation does not make it "uncontroversial" - not even when he hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood on my hands." He still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is surprised that I find this untrue - let alone morally unpalatable.
One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world "precipitate" shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them. ...
One can certainly accuse the West of neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but it was Milosevic and his regime that deprived the Kosovars of their rights and then began to kill and deport them. It was that regime that had recently killed up to 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose dismembered and reburied bodies are still being found. There was no NATO bombing to blame for that rather shameful inaction.
In fact, faced with that cold-blooded massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to fear the worst in Kosovo.
I would recommend that Chomsky read the judgment www.icty.org/x/cases/milutinovic/tjug/en/jud090226-e1of4.pdf of the UN war crimes tribunal, after it had considered the evidence of 113 witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for the defense, not to mention tens of thousands of pages of documents submitted by both sides. It found five Serb officials guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he attributes to NATO. It concludes www.icty.org/x/cases/milutinovic/tjug/en/jud090226-e4of4.pdf that "the direct testimony from many witnesses demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian population was fleeing from the actions of the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO bombing and the KLA."
... the report added that "there is no doubt that a clandestine operation consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies originally buried in Kosovo and transferring them to Serbia proper took place during the NATO bombing" and adds that the "great majority of the corpses moved were victims of crime and civilians, including women and children."
In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the tribunal noted www.icty.org/x/cases/milutinovic/tjug/en/jud090226-e3of4.pdf that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise - an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above - to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance. And now this could all be done with /plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well/ [italics mine]." The blame-shifting certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky, but the judges looked at the mass of evidence and decided to the contrary.
Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world. Even with that in mind he would surely like to reconsider his implied comparison of the United States with Nazis. ("It would be like raising the question of why Nazis didn't intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by local forces in the regions they occupied.")
The United States is often, but not always wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but not always right. The United States was certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in the near contemporary situation in Western Sahara, and I have been reporting on those injustices for many decades.
…
[add http:// before all www links]
…
--
/Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author.
@Owen,
Thank you for taking the trouble to bring here all this information, presenting both sides, of Chomsky and Williams. Of course, Ian Williams IS right. However, did he demonize Chomsky as a "genocide denier"? I don't think so... (unless it eluded my attention and/or he said it elsewhere). Quite frankly, I don't think it is a just label and I don't think it adds anything to the case against Chomsky's obstinate... fallacies of Manicheanism (PROVABLY worsening with... old age).
However, I like all this, since it's becoming a creative, fact-based dialog where Chomsky's mistakes can be brought to light and discussed fairly.
What he said about NATO bombings in Kosovo strikes me as PARTLY true, but not entirely true. I've read a number of texts about this and came to the conclusion that... it was quite natural for Serb atrocities to be intensified as soon as the bombings started. One can compare this to the well-known fact that just before the end of world-war II, the Nazis intensified the extermination of Jews even though they knew (by _that_ time) that the war was lost.
Well, Chomsky seems like an obstinate, highly opinionated, Manichean-thinking old man, if he really thinks (in addition to what I explained) that Cause and Effect can be... reversed, to the level of claiming that NATO bombings actually CAUSED the ethnic cleansing. DOES he believe this?
hmmm....
To be honest with you I am very skeptical about those bombings, for other reasons: (1) they were done without army ground operations, which were probably quite necessary, (2) they were done from a very high altitude, thereby causing too many mistakes and civilian casualties, (3) when military targets were exhausted, there is evidence to suggest that some NATO pilots started hitting civilian targets deliberately, (4) SOME explicitly civilian targets WERE hit deliberately, e.g. the TV building in Belgrade containing journalists, (5) they completely destroyed most life resources in Serbia, causing excessive, mostly unnecessary grave damages to that country.
All this (not to mention the pollution caused by depleted uranium) made many people protest, at the time; people who did NOT like Milosevic, did NOT deny the genocide in Bosnia, did NOT like the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo by the Serbs, etc.
And (surprise-surprise) WHAT were such honest critics of NATO policy called, at the time, throughout the internet? - They were called "genocide deniers" (or "Milosevic sympathisers"), and so on.
Well, THIS kind of unjust demonisation is a mistake that I think we should avoid. Not only it is unjust, it also destroys healthy debate. It is itself a form of Manicheanism (which is a trait of... Chomsky -hehe).
Meanwhile, there are plenty of REAL genocide deniers, out there, e.g. the infuriating Alexander Dorin, who I think should be sued and go to jail. Unfortunately, he is Swiss and this probably explains why he was not YET sued for his books (written in German and translated to Serbian). Dorin created "spiritual food" for the benefit of ALARMING CULTS, fusing together genocide denial, German nazism AND Serbian nationalism (even... Greek nationalism). We ought to watch this out!!
Well, perhaps we should also... inform.... Chomsky about all this, telling the old man that there is ANOTHER enemy today, potentially much more dangerous than his preferred... (you-know-who) "Source of All Evil"(tm): the rise of Neo-nazism!
P.S. I said Alexander Dorin is Swiss, but this is ONLY an assumption. He could be Russian or Serb, or anything. However, he IS based in Switzerland.
Omadeon, I think the point that Ian Williams is making is that Chomsky prefers to hold the West accountable for the atrocities as if there was no plan in place before the bombing began. As always Chomsky shifts the focus of attention away from the people with direct responsibility.
The bombing was in a number of respects both wrong and incompetent. After Somalia the US was reluctant to risk involvement on the ground, hence the inaction in Bosnia and Rwanda. While other allies disagreed with the US, the basic issue was whether effective intervention was possible without US involvement and as far as the US was concerned the only intervention that the US electorate was considered willing to accept was by air.
What was the prospect if no intervention at all was agreed. Was it so unreasonable to expect a repetition of atrocities that had been carried out elsewhere?
Your criticism of the bombing campaign is legitimate. But I'm not inclined to include the attack on the television tower as one of the unjustifiable aspects of it. The stern critics of the role of the western media very rarely if ever mention the contribution RTS made to Milosevic's military-political effort. Are you aware of the the advance warning that was given that the tower was going to be bombed? Do you know the reason why sixteen civilians were in the tower when it was bombed? They had been allowed to go to into work when the senior staff including the Director who knew of the warning had taken care to absent themselves. The question is why. And also why people don’t mention the fact. Dragoljub Milanović, the Director of RTS, sacrificed the lives of his employees. That's not just me saying so. Milanovic was tried and sent to prison for causing the death of the employees - it's not a secret.
I don't understand either why you want to portray the people who continued to vote for Kostunica, Seselj, Nikolic, as a principled democratic opposition to Milosevic. Of course there was people with moral principles who opposed Milosevic and spoke out against him, but those are the people who were (and still are) labelled traitors to their country by the people you don't like being called "genocide deniers". The "genocide deniers" are the people who were disinclined to ask questions when life was OK for them and somebody else was suffering, who closed their eyes then to what happened in Eastern Slavonia and Bosnia and Kosova and today are attacking the ICTY for trying and sentencing the great Serb hero Milan Lukic. When the Milosevic regime started to make life uncomfortable for them they suddenly discovered an outrage that disappeared against once Kostunica was happily ensconced. Why don't you like those people being called genocide deniers? Daniel and I and other people have wasted more than enough of our time here and elsewhere dealing with their refusal to acknowledge that Srebrenica was more than a Muslim outrage on perpetrated on Serb villagers as part of the ongoing global Western conspiracy against Serbia. They don't deserve to be lumped in with the brave people who did speak out when it hurt to.
They don't deserve to be defended by you, and nor does Chomsky. The message I've taken on board is that Chomsky doesn't want to know about anything that doesn't suit his world view. That's what's fundamentally disreputable about him. He won't accept that Diana Johnstone writes rubbish about Srebrenica. If he wants to defend her freedom of speech let him say that she's an apologist but he supports her right to be an apologist, rather than weasel his way around the situation. I'm not inclined to waste any more time giving him a let-out based on any supposed "Manichaean view of the world". He is intellectually dishonest when he demands other people must be honest. If you want to allow him the get-out of his Manichaeanism, that's your choice. But honesty has nothing to do with age.
Omadeon, Dorin is a fish swimming in a drying-up swamp. His analysis of "salon racism" is based on hios own "salon research" - Ivanisevic's multiply discredited propaganda, Civikov's past-sell-by-date allegations that the ICTY bases its findings on Erdemovic's evidence alone.
"“There is no way the Serb Army could have captured seven or eight thousand Muslim fighters and male civilians and execute them somewhere, partly because that was technically impossible,” Dorin said. He explained that, among else, there was never enough Serb soldiers who could carry out a crime on such scale."
He needs to get his head around the fact that these issues have been dealt with and come up with something more than a sun goes round the earth argument.
Dorin feeds the excitement of a lot of over-excited proto-fascists and lost romantics, who are not without their dangers, but these are simply not serious people. If Dorin had any substance he'd be coming up with some sort of significantly controvrsial new pseudo-research, but this material is just rehashed.
According to a post at http://www.apisgroup.org/article.html?id=5166
Alexander Dorin is the pseudonym of a "schreibende Publizist" - i.e. not an academic historian, some sort of puff doctor. He's the son of Bosnian parents who were "supporters" of Tito's Yugoslavia.
So it looks like he's part of the usual gang, maybe part of Ivanisevic's Karadzic support team.
Well, http://www.jungewelt.de/2009/07-11/118.php
I guess that means he's not Nebojsa Malic or St Svetlana from Sacred Byzantine Blogs
Owen,
you said something I did NOT know:
The stern critics of the role of the western media very rarely if ever mention the contribution RTS made to Milosevic's military-political effort. Are you aware of the the advance warning that was given that the tower was going to be bombed? Do you know the reason why sixteen civilians were in the tower when it was bombed? They had been allowed to go to into work when the senior staff including the Director who knew of the warning had taken care to absent themselves. The question is why. And also why people don’t mention the fact. Dragoljub Milanović, the Director of RTS, sacrificed the lives of his employees. That's not just me saying so. Milanovic was tried and sent to prison for causing the death of the employees - it's not a secret...
Well, it may not be a secret but it remains a deeply buried secret in Greece. It's the first time I hear this!!!
As regards some people in the net who I said were wrongly labeled "genocide deniers", I was NOT talking about Serbs, but mostly human rights activists who spoke out against the bombing (in discussion with... American "patriots", i.e. US nationalists, at the time).
I also was personally labeled a "Milosevic sympathizer", by such people, those days, within seconds of saying something critical against the bombing. This was extremely unjust since I was one of the few Greeks who were _completely_ opposed to Milosevic (even though I had very little knowledge of Serb atrocities in the Bosnian war at the time).
BTW, I think Greece owes an apology to Bosnia, for the one-sided support of Serbia by most Greeks.
We should also do major corrections in... Greek wikipedia, which is still inexcusably pro-Serb and ALMOST genocide-denying (e.g. with MakKenzie's propaganda as a "reference").
I will now proceed using your comments as starting-points for further investigation...
Owen:
the message I've taken on board is that Chomsky doesn't want to know about anything that doesn't suit his world view.
I have to agree with you there. This is unfortunately what I also conclude. INFORGIVABLE in the case of a serious intellectual esteemed worldwide, this is also certain...
However, I have seen SO MANY people make the same mistake, without even realizing it, that I've come to believe it's not really dishonesty but a fundamental human trait of DEFENSIVENESS against "Cognitive Dissonance". Not only Chomsky but LOTS of people do it. In fact ALL religious people do it as well, AUTOMATICALLY and BY DEFINITION. Humanity IS deluded, to a very large extent.
Well, if people stopped doing this, my dear Owen, the world would be free of most problems, most bigots, most atrocities, most scapegoating..
Daniel, Owen,
Omadeon is a Greek nationalist and chauvinist who is currently attacking me on his blog for the crime of having a 'Turkish' name (Attila).
Omadeon says:
'If his parents gave him this name, then… it was UNWISE of him to promote it; he ought to have signed his posts using the name “Marko Hoare” to AVOID accusations of pro-Turkish, anti-Greek bias (not to mention the savagery of Attila the Hun -hehe)'
In other words, he thinks that people who have 'Turkish' names should change them, to make themselves sound less Turkish - a proposed ethnic purification. I very much doubt he brings up the 'savagery of Alexander the Great' when debating with people called Alexander.
He also puts quotation marks around 'Macedonia' and 'Macedonian' when referring to the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian nation. Or else he uses derogatory terms such as 'Slavo-Albanian Macedonia'.
I initially thought he was a moderate Greek nationalist with whom it might be possible to have a civilised debate. But on closer inspection, he's just another vulgar chauvinist with a blog.
Dr. Hoare,
With respect, I think you have completely misunderstood what I said in my blog, about your middle name.
First of all, I did not say you should... literally change your middle name; secondly I interpreted your middle name "Attila" (perhaps wrongly - NOT knowing you) as signifying a certain nationalistic CONTENT or INTENT, which I also found... puzzling because "Attila" is associated with war-crimes, as well as a historical leader of invasions in Europe - or not?
Now, I am really very very sorry, if this has offended you, and (for compensation) I would encourage you to protest as strongly as you like, in my own blog, about this. I will NOT argue if this has appeared offensive to you; if it IS really your REAL name (and not an internet-knickname for... flame-wars as I had suspected) I apologize. What else can I say? Greek humour is NOT always good...
However, I would also suggest you check out my views again, in calmness; I consider it a grossly slanderous, irrational demonisation, to be labeled a "Greek nationalist"!!!
After all, the whole point of my creative dialog here, with Owen, and my only small disagreement with him (and you0, is my objection to the use of demonizing labels like "genocide denier" to people who do NOT really deserve them. Equally, the use of slanderous labels like "nationalist" for someone like me who spent a LOT of time fighting nationalism (in my own country).
Well, why don't you come over to my blog, criticize me AS FIERCELY as you wish, presenting your views, or even... insult me? I give you my WORD OF HONOUR that you can do this freely without ANY censorship (and without ANY demonizing "retaliation" on my part).
With... anti-nationalist Appreciation, all the best to you, Dr. Hoare!
P.S. I think that my occasional disagreement with some of the things you say does NOT cancel-out the _value_ of what you are saying, especially for Greek people who need to LEARN the "OTHER SIDE of the story".
P.S.2 What's wrong about calling Macedonia "Slavo-Albanian"? Does it not consist of Macedonian Slavs and Macedonian Albanians, mostly? (not to mention 2.5 million non-Slavic, ethnic-Greek Macedonians in Greece)?
Dr. Hoare, you CAN do much better than this. You sound like an extreme anti-Greek (or pro-Macedonian) nationalist!
Ah well... (sigh)
There are OFFICIAL negotiations between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia about the "name dispute", and quite frankly (as an ANTInationalist) I don't care WHAT name is chosen, provided it IS accepted by **both** sides.
The logical implication of your demonisation (of me) is that... ALL international negotiations should stop, that Greeks are chauvinistic nationalists and that the other side's nationalism is fine; Well, THIS IS NOT international cooperation, nor "anti-nationalism": it's just bias, in favour of ONLY ONE side...
Marko, some of Omadeon's comments certainly make me uneasy, but I don't have the impression that he is simply a "vulgar chauvinist" - he has raised a number of issues in relation to the Greek "volunteers" at Srebrenica in defence of Takis Michas, as you'll see from his comments at Visegrad Genocide Memories - http://genocideinvisegrad.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/interview-greek-journalist-sued-for-writing-about-the-presence-of-greek-paramilitaries-in-bosnia/
He has a reflective style of writing which seems to be based on an openness to both sides of an argument that I'm not completely happy with, but willing to accept at face value at the moment.
Certainly I've shared your experience countless times of getting into discussion with people who appeared interested in a genuine exchange of views only to find myself deliberately manoeuvred into a corner where I was supposed to accept something intolerable as a legitimate argument. At the moment I don't feel I'm at that stage.
I find the comment about your name pretty idiotic and offensive. Nevertheless I'm aware that quite a few of the people we engage with on-line can be quite clueless about the way what they perceive to be a throwaway bit of humour is actually pretty offensive when read in the cold black on white of a blog comment. If there's a pattern of genuine confrontation in your exchanges, then that sort of comment is inexcusable, but given his apparent open-mindedness on other matters perhaps he deserves an opportunity to respond and explain.
madeon, I agree with you, we all find a lot of difficulty abandoning our preconceptions. I'm no better than most people but once I'm convinced the person I'm talking to is honest and trustworthy I'll grit my teeth and try to persuade myself to throw the baby off the sledge.
What I find so difficult to take with Chomsky is that he's a man whose profession and life's work is the use of language and yet he uses language so often to avoid being held accountable for what he says.
The world is never going to be free of preconceptions, they're part of our armoury of self-defence in a complex world. But if we don't know how to abandon them as soon as we know they're wrong, we let them them become a weapon of self-destruction.
I appreciate your openness in our discussions, but I have to say I am confused by some of the things you say. And I find it unfortunate to say the least that you choose to comment on Marko's name.
I hope that it was an unfortunate mistake, but I think that you owe him an explanation. The vast majority of us are given our names by our parents and gladly accept them. Our names are like our skin - they are part of us but no-one is entitled to assume that they are us. Too many people have been slaughtered because of their name, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland via all points on the compass.
Marko holds strong opinions and he's quite confrontational but he is honest and he's a ferocious champion of the oppressed and victimised. You're perfectly entitled to criticise his views but insinuation and speculation are not fair citicism.
I suspect that you are someone with strong views to express like Marko and you may not always be aware how your comments may be interpreted. I'm aware I may have misinterpreted some of your comments myself. If so I apologise.
Mr. Hoare is capitalizing on whatever good reputation he has in order to net-slander others. He was never accused of "having a turkish name". There IS a question regarding his use of a name connected with barbarity and brutality, but the whole criticism on his views regards his bias, which makes him look even more vehement than Gruevsky himself.
I don't expect my comment to be posted, of course.
Oh, and by the way, someone who openly supports one faction's nationalism is never entitled to accuse others of the same, much less SLANDER them (Omadeon was among the first who publicly denounced the Greek justice system's trial travesty that deemed a well-known neo-nazi author "innocent" of violating the country's anti-racism legislation, although one of his books openly urged the readers to commit violent crimes against Jews: here are his - extremely critical of the Greek justice system - posts: http://omadeon.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/greek-nazi-justice/ and http://omadeon.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/nazi-lie-causes-greek-travesty-of-justice/ ). If a person who writes openly against ALL nationalisms (including Greek nationalism) is a... nationalist, then either Mr. Hoare is intellectually challenged or a slanderer; since you can't be an idiot and get a PhD, I'll go with the latter.
Now, of course, that you have the posts available for your review (and there are MANY more anti-nationalist articles in his blog), it's no longer "Hoare's word against Omadeon's", so Mr. Hoare can no longer throw around the weight of his academic titles to scare off and slander anyone critical of his writings.
Personally, I am far more critical against Mr. Hoare than Omadeon and no PhDs and academic tenures impress me - it's what one teaches, not his/her teaches tenure that leads me to form an opinion. And Mr. Hoare's slanderous conduct, along with his unabashed adoption of the most extreme nationalism utilized by FYROM's government, only serves to discredit him as an academic.
P.S.
Should this comment be rejected, I am also going to post it elsewhere in order to expose Mr. Hoare's conduct.
@Owen
Thanks a lot for your balanced views and your HONOURABLE defense of my... sincerity and NON-chauvinism, which is an (unexpected) GREAT "plus" for this blog, as well.
The issue is RESOLVED. It would not be resolved, if my comments were not allowed expression, so this is a pleasant surprise, which honours the blog itself.
Ah well, I must restrain my own... expressive excesses, and also my fondness of... BORAT-the-movie extreme humour! :) As I said, Dr. Hoare is welcome to speak out... against me, in my own blog, so that we do not pollute the great discussion here with an off-topic, troublesome dispute.
BTW, I DO owe Dr. Hoare an explanation (the apology I already expressed):
As regards Alexander "the great" FEW people have escaped my... benign mockery of their name if they were misfortunate enough to have been NAMED after this... Great historical monster - there was even a SPECIAL historical satire post in my blog about "Big Alex the PSYCHO"). :)
@The Heretic
THANK you, too; VERY VERY much, but... let's NOT continue this RESOLVED issue; ALL unnecessary conflicts are... unnecessary (a tautology! -hehe)
Omadeon called me a 'prostitute' on his blog, so I'm afraid he has no right to complain about being harshly treated here. He has shown himself to be incapable of conducting a debate in a civilised manner.
Attacking someone for having the name 'Attila' is simply an expression of anti-Turkish or anti-Asian racism. Anyone who makes such attacks has no right to call themselves an 'anti-nationalist'.
Unless, of course, they make similar attacks on people who use names like 'Alexander','Philip', 'Louis', 'Nicholas', etc., which were the names of various European aggressors whose human rights records were not better than that of Attila the Hun. But I do not believe Omadeon has ever attacked anyone for being called 'Alexander' or 'Philip'.
For the record, I was named after the Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_J%C3%B3zsef
Only someone with a very profound ignorance of Europe's cultural heritage would associate the name 'Attila' with barbarity and war-crimes. Or possibly someone with an aversion to things that sound Turkish, which I suspect is the case in this instance.
Anyone who writes about Macedonians the way that Omadeon does has no right to call themselves an 'anti-nationalist'.
He clearly does not respect the right of the Macedonians to call themselves what they want, and insists on denigrating them by using such terms as 'Slavo-Albanian Macedonia', which would be like calling Greece 'Slavo-Albanian-Turkish-Greek Greece'.
Let us be clear:
1) The Macedonian nation and language exist, and anyone who says they don't is a Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian chauvinist, or one of their supporters
2) The people of the Republic of Macedonia, Greek Macedonia and Bulgarian Macedonia all have an equal right to call themselves 'Macedonian' if they wish. Greece can call its northern province 'Macedonia' if it wants, and the Republic of Macedonia can call itself 'Republic of Macedonia' if it wants. That is the only fair compromise.
3) Greek nationalists are simply lying when they accuse the Republic of Macedonia of seeking exclusive use of the name 'Macedonia'. The Macedonians are not trying to prevent Greece from calling its northern province 'Macedonia'. It is Greece which is seeking exclusive control over how the name 'Macedonia' is used.
4) 'Slavic' is a linguistic, not a modern ethnic category. Calling the majority population of the Republic of Macedonia 'Slavs' is like calling the Italians 'Latins' or the English 'Germanics'. It is up to the Macedonians themselves whether they feel a 'Slavic' identity or not; nobody else has the right to impose this identity on them.
5) Ethnic Macedonians are NOT simply descended from Slavs who came over to the region in the Middle Ages, and modern Greeks are NOT simply descended from ancient Greeks. All modern European nations have extremely mixed ethnic origins, including the Macedonians, Greeks, English, Croats, etc.
Language can be a poor guide to ethnic origins. The irony is that in terms of their genetic origins, Greeks and Albanians are MORE Slavic than Macedonians and Bulgarians. And modern ethnic Macedonians have a stronger genetic linkage than ethnic Greeks with the Ancient Macedonians.
http://say-macedonia.blogspot.com/2008/10/genetic-comparison-of-balkan-nations.html
6) The current conflict between Greece and Macedonia is a conflict between an aggressor (Greece) and a victim (Macedonia).
If Macedonia ever tries to force Greece to change its name, then I am on the side of Greece. Until that time, the only honourable position for any anti-nationalist is to support Macedonia against Greek aggression, as we supported Bosnia against Serbian and Croatian aggression in the 1990s, and as people should rightly have supported Cyprus against Turkish aggression in the 1970s.
Being 'even-handed' between a stronger aggressor and a weaker victim simply means supporting the aggressor.
In one of my earlier comments, which I deleted, I noted that Dr. Marko Attila Hoare never mentioned that Serb crimes around Srebrenica took place long before Bosniaks attempted to break out the siege of Srebrenica. After re-reading his article, "Chomsky's Genocidal Denial", I noticed that I was wrong. In fact, Marko correctly explained that:
"She [Diana Johnstone] is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia."
Marko's observation was correct. Although Serb sources persist in justifying genocide by stating that the Srebrenica massacre was 'retaliation' of Serb forces for Bosniak attacks on Serb-held villages around Srebrenica, the U.N. Report 53/35 demolished this Serbian claim by concluding the following:
"Even though this accusation is often repeated by international sources, there is no credible evidence to support it. Dutchbat personnel on the ground at the time assessed that the few 'raids' the Bosniaks mounted out of Srebrenica were of little or no military significance. These raids were often organized in order to gather food, as the Serbs had refused access for humanitarian convoys into the enclave. Even Serb sources approached in the context of this report acknowledged that the Bosniak forces in Srebrenica posed no significant military threat to them. The biggest attack the Bosniaks launched out of Srebrenica during the more than two years which is was designated a safe area appears to have been the raid on the village of Visnjica, on 26 June 1995, in which several houses were burned, up to four Serbs were killed and approximately 100 sheep were stolen. In contrast, the Serbs overran the enclave two weeks later, driving tens of thousands from their homes, and summarily executing thousands of men and boys. The Serbs repeatedly exaggerated the extent of the raids out of Srebrenica as a pretext for the prosecution of a central war aim: to create geographically contiguous and ethnically pure territory along the Drina, while freeing their troops to fight in other parts of the country. The extent to which this pretext was accepted at face value by international actors and observers reflected the prism of 'moral equivalency' through which the conflict in Bosnia was viewed by too many for too long."
The Trial Judgement in Naser Oric case makes it clear that Serb villages around Srebrenica were nothing else but heavily militarized bases from which Serbs launched brutal attacks on Bosnian Muslim villages, as well as on the town of Srebrenica itself. As stated in the Judgement, quote:
"Between April 1992 and March 1993, Srebrenica town and the villages in the area held by Bosnian Muslims were constantly subjected to Serb military assaults, including artillery attacks, sniper fire, as well as occasional bombing from aircrafts... During this period, Srebrenica was subjected to indiscriminate shelling from all directions on a daily basis. Potočari in particular was a daily target for Serb artillery and infantry because it was a sensitive point in the defence line around Srebrenica. Other Bosnian Muslim settlements were routinely attacked as well. All this resulted in a great number of refugees and casualties."
Furthermore, the internationally acclaimed Research and Documentation Center found that:
"The allegations that Serb casualties in Bratunac [just outside of Srebrenica], between April 1992 and December 1995 amount to over three thousand is an evident falsification of facts. The RDC research of the actual number of Serb victims in Bratunac has been the most extensive carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and proves that the overall number of victims is three to nine times smaller than indicated by Serbia and Montenegro." (you can read more about it in our Questions & Answers page.)
As an update to my comments above, I notice that Omadeon wrote a letter to the New York Times last year, in which he:
1) Asserted the Greekness of the Ancient Macedonians and of Alexander the Great;
2) Demanded that the Macedonians change their name to 'Slav Macedonians';
3) Attacked the New York Times for its criticism of Greek policy.
http://omadeon.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/the-new-york-times-editorial-board-of-imbeciles/
If that's 'anti-nationalism', then I'm Alexander the Great.
Well, since Dr. Hoare and I have (in the meantime) used private e-mails to CLARIFY and RESOLVE certain issues, here is a summary:
I would never -even remotely- have an evil intent to call Dr. Hoare "a prostitute". This WAS a tragic misunderstanding, based on... another big misunderstanding AND a big gaffe (on my part): I simply had NO idea that "Attila" is an actual REAL name, in so many countries. I didn't even know it's a valid name in Turkey, imagining (about the few occasions when I encountered a person with that name) that this name celebrated the... Turkish invasion in Cyprus or the destruction of Europe by Attila the Hun (which I found puzzling).
So, I speculated very frivolously (I must admit) that OTHERS MIGHT try to insult Dr. Hoare by making a dirty PUN about his name!
My apologies to Dr. Hoare were long and detailed. I think he was very pleased with them; ALSO saying (in the end) that he NO LONGER thinks of me as a "chauvinist" (which was very honourable of him)!
(wow...) It's UNBELIEVABLE how much unnecessary conflict exists in the internet because people just do NOT bother to COMMUNICATE, but we DID, and we succeeded 100%! :) (I wish... Balkan countries DID THE SAME -hehe)
Now... as regards Alexander being Greek or Macedonia being "forced" to change its name, AGAIN there are misunderstandings, caused by the fact that my detailed thoughts on these issues are in OTHER posts (which Dr. Hoare hasn't read).
1) I do NOT believe anyone should be "forced", but -instead- I believe in AN AGREEMENT with Greece that does NOT cause long-lasting hatred by nationalists; WHAT name is chosen I have NO intent of imposing, but only made a _suggestion_, among many other possible names (like everyone else who wants negotiations to SUCCEED).
2) As regards the "Greekness of Alexander", although I personally despise him (and made a mockery of him) I DO believe he was an ancient Greek. I also believe we should STOP thinking about the past and achieve in THE PRESENT a lasting peace.
ALL I did in THAT post, was to chastise a bit the NY Times, for being TOO one-sided. In fact, that post's DISCUSSION was one of the MOST MODERATE AND SUCCESFULL PEACE-MAKING DISCUSSIONS about the "name dispute", in which people from BOTH countries participated creatively to RESOLVE certain issues... WITHOUT flames or insults, in hundreds of comments! :)
Well, if anyone STILL thinks of me as a "nationalist" after these clarifications, ALL I have to do NOW, is... refer that person to Dr. Hoare who... understands me NOW, MUCH, MUCH MORE! :-))))))
PLEASE CONTINUE without anything else Off-topic!
Unnecessary Conflicts have been PROVED... Unnecessary! :)
It's not as simple as that, Marco. First you have to understand that the greek society is extremely nationalist. What passes for "extremism" in Western Europe (e.g. the notion that any ethnic minority is a direct threat to the territorial integrity of the nation) is generally assumed to . Most Greeks understand the social contract as "the state, acting on behalf of the nation, grants the people certain rights" instead of the opposite. According to our constitution, sovereign entities are the People and the Nation. Entire disciplines, such as Archaeology, History and Ethnography (which is called "laography" i.e. "people"-o-graphy otherwise it would be a treacherous recognition of other ethnic groups in greek soil) are targeted towards serving greek nationalist ideology. Hell, even "nationalism" is redefined in the greek language, signifying "extremely aggressive nationalism" (say Hitler, or the Turks, or somebody else in general). The word for "good" nationalism is "patriotism" and I've almost never seen the word used for anything else besides greek nationalism. The degree of alignment to the nationalist viewpoints is somewhat between 90-95%
It basically goes like this: almost everyone acknowledges that alexander the great was greek, that "the slavs" are technically trying to steal a part of "our" history bla bla bla. The difference between "nationalists" and "moderates" lies only in the proposed course of action. There is a spectrum of opinions ranging from "kill the bastards!" (which is perceived as nationalist by everyone) to "veto their use of the name everywhere" (which is currently perceived as "the right thing to do").
At the least-nationalist (and by far the smallest) end of the spectrum you can find views such as omadeon's ("Alexander the Great was a lunatic nobody in their right minds should waste any energy arguing about, though he _was_ greek and it would take a macedonian nationalist not to see that"), which are generally considered "unpatriotic" by the vast majority of the population. My personal view of course (basically: "the Macedonians are right and we are making complete arses of ourselves") is considered openly treacherous and anti-greek.
My point is: give the guy a break. He really is anti-nationalist in the context of the society he comes from. So maybe he still shares some nationalist notions in the matter of Macedonia, but he is open to discussion and would gladly be proven wrong. This simply is not what a nationalist does.
Hopefully, that's cleared up the misunderstandings and now we can focus again on what's really important in the context of this blog, that the Greek Volunteer Guard are not allowed to intimidate Takis Michas or take comfort from apologists for the genocide at Srebrenica.
Owen
"is generally assumed to "
Forgot to complete the sentence: "is generally assumed to be the starting point of every discussion, the moderate and realistic viewpoint". Sorry for comment pollution. Excellent blog btw, and the current post totally changed my mind about Chomsky.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/events_details.asp?EventsID=1332
Chomsky is going to give a AI lecture on 30 October 2009.Sick!
I know that I am commenting on an article posted some time ago, but it is still an issue today.
What I have to say is short and concise:
Concerning Chomsky, Johnstone and other history revisionists, is largrly a question of them protesting against the established views and policies of the West. They are protesting the globalization that is carried out on USA's terms, they are protestings USA's geo politics. Now for the most important point: They percieve everything that the USA does as wrong and negative. Ergo, the USA's bombings of Serbia in 1999 is a clear violation of international laws (which IS a grey-zone, but that's another discussion), and also, the USA lead NATO bombings of Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 was wrong. The USA opposed the wars that Serbia was waging, ergo the Serbs (Milosevic, Karadzic, etc) must be the good guys, because the USA has proved historically that they are the bad guys!
So you see, these quasi-intelectuals revisionist stances only go hand in hand with their resentment of US-policies. Unfortunately, innocent people get hurt by their claims, and these claims make a good growing ground for future revisionist claims, making it possible for even worse atrocities to occur in the future.
Let's not forget that Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for sovereignty in 1992 and was recognized by most of the world's nations, AND was accepted as a member of the UN. Unfortunately, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina were denied the right to defend themselves because of the UN embargo on weapons. If the Bosnian government army was able to buy arms and other equipment, the war would have been less of a war along ethnic lines as it in the end turned out to be, since many Serbs and Croats fighting for Bosnia eventually changed sides.
Oh well...
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