Monday, December 12, 2005
Gnats, gadflies & projection: the Chomsky-stalkers are loose again. posted by Richard Seymour
Some issues present all the appearances of being designed to separate the gnats from the gadflies, and this is such a one. Ian Mayes, the estimable Readers' Editor of The Guardian is receiving a bit of flack from three belligerent Chomsky-bashers who are disappointed that Emma Brockes' fraudulent 'interview' with Noam Chomsky was removed from The Guardian website after a complaint about it was upheld. Two of these are well-known centre-left writers - Francis Wheen of Private Eye, and David Aaronovitch of The Times. About this pair you know enough to vomit enough. Accompanying these born again Blimps in signing a 4,500 word epistolary challenge to Mayes' decision is the salubrious Mr Kampf, a somewhat obsessive polemicist who runs his own rather dull website in which he indulges his monomaniacal pursuits. He also resides from time to time in Murdoch's Augean Stable and David Horowitz's conspiracy site, and gives all the impression of begging entrance to the Republic of Letters. He even occasionally allows his reader a salacious glimpse of his many and various belle-lettrist exchanges with flatterers, botherers, court eunuchs, visiting dignitaries and so on. He is also given to multiple howlers. Example of which, his glowing citation of a book he evidently had not read to support a conclusion that it did not support and which, at any rate, were absurd to anyone who knows the topic. Others might include "reviewing" a book he had evidently not read on the basis of an entirely separate article that did not say what he claimed it did, and about which he offered criticisms that showed he didn't understand the material he was discussing. Or the miscitation of the contents of an article which misrepresented a document he had not read to criticise an author who had read it for making a statement about it which happened to be entirely and exclusively correct. If I had, for some weird reason, discussed these straightforward and unambiguous matters of fact in The Guardian (suspend your disbelief), I don't think even the most extraordinarily scrupulous Ian Mayes would have cause to censure or censor me.
Because of the well-known and less well-known facts about all of these authors, I rarely bother to consult their writings these days. I almost wish I had continued to read Kampf's dispatches from the front, despite all, just to be subjected to this delectable portion of enticement:
I have devoted much time over the last few days to assessing The Guardian’s correction to Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky, and the newspaper's withdrawal of that interview from its site. I’m sorry not to have written more speedily, but necessarily this has been a painstaking exercise. The inquiries are now complete and the evidence is in place.
Leiter Reports responded to this urgent, if somewhat gnomic, missive, describing it as "sophomoric posturing" - which almost seems insulting until you read what they've got to say about his 'arguments' (I speak loosely, of course). At any rate, Kamm's research is now complete, the letter has been signed, sealed and delivered, and Ian Mayes has deferred the matter to the ombudsman. Anxious nail-biting must await the scorned MIT professor: will his cunning ruse be exposed, or will the liberal media once more cover up his crimes against America?
For, let us be clear about this, what this matter is really all about is not Chomsky's statements about Srebrenica, Cambodia or anything else, it is about his hostility to American imperialism. For all the charges that Chomsky 'denies' the Srebrenica massacres or the Khmer Rouge atrocities, the only story that obtains here is that some delusional apologists for US policy are in denial about its crimes - in the former Yugoslavia, in Indochina, and especially in the Middle East. All of the voluble hyperbole about Chomsky from his stalkers - 'intellectual dishonesty', 'denial', 'apologist' - is projection.