What is one to make of the extraordinary fuss over Guardian writer Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky (”Chomsky: As flaky as the next man”, November 4)? Why should readers so desperately defend the honour of a famous man who lives thousands of miles away, has no immediate relevance to South Africa, and has the wit, means and standing to defend himself?
The complaints started coming in to the M&G even before Chomsky’s demand for a retraction to the British newspaper, and peaked with The Guardian‘s decision to pull the interview from its website.
Common to many complaints is the hard left’s characteristic tone of outraged moral whipcracking. Noting The Guardian‘s retraction of Brockes’s ”consciously fabricated and defamatory interview”, reader Antonio Fortin demanded that we remove the article from the website; publish corrections and an unequivocal apology; redirect all website requests for the interview to the corrections or The Guardian‘s article ”Guardian pulls Chomsky interview”; and build in a ”permanent redirect” to deflect future requests for Brockes’s article. This, he said, ”may help to salvage the reputation of the M&G”.
One could be excused for thinking Fortin himself had been horribly defamed.
Two findings of The Guardian readers’ editor — relating to the headline and the publication of a letter by Chomsky — do not apply to the M&G. The third was that in referring to atrocities in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, Brockes apostrophised the word ”massacre”, incorrectly suggesting that Chomsky denied a massacre had occurred.
This we published. But it is far from clear that Brockes ascribed a flat denial to Chomsky — elsewhere she cites him as believing the massacre ”was probably overstated”. In a lengthy quotation which Chomsky nowhere denies, he attributes the overstatement to ”a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in Western culture”.
In short, Chomsky does try to minimise the Srebrenica atrocity, contrary to the finding of The Guardian correspondent in the Bosnian town whom he concedes is ”a good journalist”. Brockes cannot be accused of misrepresenting his essential position.
No doubt Chomsky’s point is that the West has been guilty of far worse enormities in its dealings with the Third World, and he is right. But for the victims and their families, a massacre is a massacre, and he is grossly insensitive to belittle it.
Much the same could be said of his slighting remark about the Jewish pogroms, which he also does not deny. That he himself is Jewish does not make his attempt to minimise the historical persecution of the Jews any less offensive.
So what is all the over-the-top clamour really about? There is a clue in Fortin’s complaint about the interview’s ”generally mocking tone”. The suggestion appears to be that, because of a kind of ”benefit of clergy”, Chomsky should be immune from mockery. Brockes’s real sin is to show disrespect for one of the major saints in the hagiology of the left.
The left has a depressing tradition of guruising radical thinkers — consider the worshipful climate around Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s — and of cracking whips over its articles of faith.
But the Brockes saga illustrates that Chomsky is not infallible. Apart from his eccentric stance on Srebrenica, his complaint to The Guardian tends to confirm Brockes’s depiction of him as an arrogant and cantankerous old man.
”It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me,” is the haughty preamble. Not for such an exalted personage to stoop to the mean business of justifying himself! He closes by superciliously dismissing the bulk of Brockes’s interview as ”mostly what one might expect to find in the scandal sheets about movie stars … and of no further interest”.
Even less flattering to Chomsky is his silly claim that the interview was carefully planned ”exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre”, and that The Guardian set out to get him because he honoured renegades and ”commie rats”. The latter canard is justified with reference to photographs accompanying The Guardian article — one of him with Fidel Castro and another with journalist John Pilger.
At best, this reflects ignorance of The Guardian and its political line — it is not the Daily Telegraph.
Chomsky’s suggestion that journalists invented the term ”pilgerise” because they were infuriated by Pilger’s ”incisive and courageous reporting” is also off-mark. Guardian writer George Monbiot has a substantially similar take on world politics, but does not arouse the same antagonism. What infuriates even those sympathetic to Pilger’s perspective is his pious and self-aggrandising tone.
The M&G was built on the notion that there are no sacred cows; that every idea and every trafficker in ideas is open to question. Chomsky has been a force for good in the world, particularly in highlighting the recurrent crimes of American imperialism. But there is no reason to accord him special treatment.