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Title: We are All Complicit Author: Noam Chomsky Date: January 2006 Language: en Topics: a reply Source: Retrieved on 1st October 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200601__/ Notes: The published version is slightly truncated; the text reproduced below is Chomsky’s unabridged original. The article to which Chomsky is replying can be found at: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2005/11/forandagainstchomsky/
I turned with interest to Oliver Kamm’s critique of the “crude and
dishonest arguments” he attributes to me (Prospect, Nov. 2005), hoping
to learn something. And I did, though not quite what he intended;
rather, about the lengths to which some will go to prevent exposure of
state crimes and their own complicity in them. His substantive charges
are as follows.
To demonstrate “a particularly dishonest handling of source material,”
Kamm alleges that “[Chomsky] manipulates a self-mocking reference in the
memoirs of the then US Ambassador to the UN…to yield the conclusion that
Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like policies.” Kamm wisely evades the
statements of Moynihan that I quoted from his 1978 memoirs. The topic is
Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, condemned by the Security
Council, which ordered Indonesia to withdraw. But the order had no
effect. Moynihan explains why: “The United States wished things to turn
out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State
desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever
measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it
forward with no inconsiderable success.” He then refers to reports that
within two months some 60,000 people had been killed, “10 percent of the
population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the
Soviet Union during the Second World War” – at the hands of Nazi
Germany, of course. His comparison, not mine, as Kamm pretends. And his
clearly expressed pride: there is not the slightest hint of
self-mockery, and the only “manipulation” is Kamm’s, in his desperate
effort to deny truly horrendous crimes of state; his state, hence his
complicity.
Far more Timorese had been killed by the time Moynihan’s memoirs
appeared in 1978, thanks to immediate US military and diplomatic support
(or as Kamm prefers, Ford’s “indolence, at best”), joined by the UK in
1978 as atrocities were peaking, and continuing through the final
paroxysm of violence in August-September 1999, until Clinton finally
ordered a halt a few weeks later, under great international and domestic
pressure. Indonesia instantly withdrew, making it crystal clear who
bears responsibility for one of the closest approximations to true
genocide of the post-war period.
A noteworthy performance on the part of someone who condemns the “amoral
quietism” of those who do try to expose and terminate the terrible
crimes of their own state, where their actions can have the greatest
effect.
According to Kamm, I “deployed fanciful arithmetic to draw an
equivalence” between 9–11 and Clinton’s destruction of the al-Shifa
pharmaceutical plant, which produced half of Sudan’s supplies. The
equivalence is, again, his fanciful construction. Discussing the
“horrendous crime” committed on 9–11 with “wickedness and awesome
cruelty,” I mentioned that the toll may be comparable to the
consequences of Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan, about which I said
nothing further. This single phrase was a considerable understatement,
judging by the “fanciful arithmetic,” which Kamm again scrupulously
ignores, and which, as he surely knows, I reviewed in detail in response
to Kamm-style fabrications about this phrase. The review includes the
assessment of the German Ambassador to Sudan in the Harvard
International Review that “several tens of thousands” died as a result
of the bombing and the similar estimate in the Boston Globe by the
regional director of the respected Near East foundation, who had field
experience in Sudan, along with the immediate warning by Human Rights
Watch that a “terrible crisis” might follow, reporting very severe
consequences of the bombing even in the first few weeks. And much more.
One might wonder whether Kamm would react with his customary “amoral
quietism” if al-Qaeda had carried out a comparable act in a country
where people mattered. And if some enthusiastic supporter of al-Queda
then resorted to sheer deceit to dismiss it as insignificant.
It is instructive that none of the reports I cited aroused Kamm’s ire
when they appeared, and that he also fails to refer to prominently
published conclusions that go well beyond the equivalence he fabricates,
charging that the US bombing had “appalling consequences for the economy
and society” of Sudan (Christopher Hitchens, Nation, June 10, 2002). The
crimes of 9–11 were appalling enough, but plainly did not have such
consequences.
Kamm claims that I provided no evidence to support the judgment that the
US was bombing Afghanistan with the knowledge that it might lead to the
death of millions of people. It takes real talent to miss the extensive
evidence cited in the few pages I devoted to these matters.
The citations include the New York Times report three weeks before the
bombing that Washington “demanded [from Pakistan] the elimination of
truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to
Afghanistan’s civilian population,” and the Times report that the
numbers at risk of starvation were estimated to have risen by 50% a
month later, to 7.5 million. Also cited are reports in the Times of the
bitterness of fleeing aid workers who said that “The country was on a
lifeline and we just cut the line” by threatening to bomb; the report by
the UN World Food Program that the threat forced them to reduce food
supplies to 15% of what was needed and later that the bombing itself
caused them to terminate it entirely; warnings by major relief agencies
of a likely “humanitarian crisis of epic proportions in Afghanistan with
7.5 million short of food and at risk of starvation”; and a great deal
more. Also included was the urgent plea by 1000 Afghan leaders in late
October to terminate the “bombing of innocent people” and to adopt other
means to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could
be achieved without slaughter and destruction; and the denunciation of
the bombing by one of the anti-Taliban leaders who was most respected by
Washington and Hamid Karzai, Abdul Haq, who described the bombing as “a
big setback” for efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, carried
out because Washington “is trying to show its muscle, score a victory
and scare everyone in the world” but “don’t care about the suffering of
the Afghans or how many people we will lose.” I could not include the
later warnings by Harvard’s leading Afghan specialist that the bombing
was leaving “millions of Afghans…at grave risk of starvation”
(International Security, Winter 2001–02), though I did later, as Kamm
doubtless knows.
Once again, much more instructive than the transparent falsification is
Kamm’s cold indifference to the reports he claims do not exist.
Kamm next refers to my critique of some of the arguments offered to give
a retrospective justification for the bombing of Kosovo, which, as
anticipated, led to shocking atrocities. The critique was based on a
simple and accurate reductio ad absurdum: exactly the same logic should
have led those who advanced these arguments to call for the bombing of
Washington. For Kamm, this “gives an indication of the destructiveness
of Chomsky’s advocacy,” because I failed to consider that some reader
might call for bombing of Washington – someone with brain damage so
severe as to be unable to comprehend an elementary reductio, perhaps.
To demonstrate further how my “political judgments have only become more
startling over the past decade,” Kamm cites my statement that the
situation in Bosnia is “not so simple.” For Kamm, it must be simple,
contrary to mainstream scholarship; by doctrinal necessity, apparently.
I deteriorated further as a “prophet of the amoral quietism of the Major
government,” in Kamm’s rendition, by “depicting Milosevic’s regime as a
wronged party”: namely, by documenting the fact that NATO “moved at once
to violate” the agreements it had signed to end the Kosovo conflict. He
again wisely avoids argument, knowing that what he quotes is fully
accurate. Another illustration he gives of my “dubious arguments
leavened with extravagant rhetoric” is my correct statement that Bush’s
“pretenses for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing than
Hitler’s.” He does not try to refute the statement, but rather offers it
to show that I “liken America’s conduct to that of Nazi Germany” and
that my “judgment of the US” is that it is comparable to Nazi Germany, a
“diagnosis [that is] central to Chomsky’s political output.” The
inference is too ridiculous for comment, and he does not tell us of his
objection to the actual, and radically different, statement.
Proceeding further to demonstrate my “central” doctrine, Kamm misquotes
my statement that “We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in
the United States is dissent – or denazification.” The context, which he
again omits, is a 1968 report in the New York Times of a protest against
an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where children
could “enter a helicopter for simulating firing of a machine gun at
targets” in Vietnam, with a light flashing when a hit was scored on a
hut — “even though no people appear,” revealing the extremism of the
protestors. This was a year after the warning by the highly respected
military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall that “Vietnam as
a cultural and historic entity…is threatened with extinction …[as]… the
countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military
machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”
Apart from misquoting and omitting the crucial context, Kamm also fails
to tell us how one should react to this performance, apart from his own
standard reaction of tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes and his
dedicated efforts, failing with impressive consistency, to find
something to criticize in the efforts to terminate state crimes for
which he and I share responsibility, particularly so in a free society,
where we cannot plead fear in extenuation for silent complicity.