Comment on Chomsky Epstein Ties EXPOSED: 'Radicals' In the Mainstream Media Are COMPROMISED
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
We’ve known he was in there for years
Comment on Chomsky Epstein Ties EXPOSED: 'Radicals' In the Mainstream Media Are COMPROMISED
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
We’ve known he was in there for years
geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
BE wrote a pretty long response to someone claiming Chomsky denied the Bosnian and Cambodian genocide which was interesting, it’s underneath the pinned top comment. I’ll copy it down here:
Debunking all of you liberals trying to use a magical term (“genocide denial”) to attack arguments you do not know how to actually refute on their merits: The narrative goes that Noam Chomsky denied the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides, and also sometimes that he denied the Rwandan genocide.
The very charge of “genocide denial” is inherently very loaded; it’s an offshoot of the term “holocaust denier”, with the implication being that supposedly “denying” these genocides, regardless of any context, is exactly the same as denying the Holocaust, an event in the past which is one of the most well documented and evidenced historical occurrences ever. So it’s an inherently loaded and delegitimizing label, and one should be sceptical of it and analyse such claims, rather than taking them at face value and repeating them just because others have said such things about Chomsky.
Such labelling can be quite problematic, as it’s often utilised to attempt to silence those who question the evidence, or lack therefore, for claimed genocides that are said to be happening in the present. One recent example of this is with widespread claims of there being a “Uyghur Genocide”, with millions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, having been either put into concentration camps, murdered, or both. Yet years after these claims first surfaced, nothing even resembling sufficient evidence for such lofty claims has ever been provided. So in lieu of this evidence, the strategy, both when the claims first surfaced and still now, has been to shout down those who question the notion that such mass killings of Uyghurs are occurring by declaring them as “genocide deniers.” So those who claim there to have been a genocide have not, by any measure, provided adequate, verifiable evidence for their case, and yet still, the label is very liberally employed for cynical geopolitical reasons.
Such is the case with the “genocide denier” label for Noam Chomsky.
Firstly, it’s important to note that Chomsky has consistently critiqued the very existence of the term “genocide”, as he considers it highly politicised term that is rarely ever used in an objective manner and that it doesn’t serve a particularly useful purpose aside from that. For that reason, he is usually very reserved with the term, and the only cases where he’s used it consistently, without qualifications, is in regards to the Holocaust and the Native American genocide. So Chomsky does not often call events “genocides” not because he denies that the actual events occurred, but rather as a sort of protest against the use of the label itself, and its wide employment as for political purposes. He thus has a very high bar for evidence and severity before he will call something a genocide. This is fundamentally different to actually denying the events themselves, and is often wilfully mischaracterised by those looking to discredit Chomsky due to conflicting political views as being tantamount to him denying the events themselves. It is interesting how the term “genocide denial” has been manipulated from its original basis in Holocaust denial to the point that it now encompasses basically meaningless semantic disagreements like this, because Holocaust denial is entirely based around denial of the events themselves, rather than just semantics about applying a specific term to them. So it’s clearly quite a dishonest attempt to do mental gymnastics to draw an equivalence between the two for the purpose of delegitimising a political opponent. Secondly, it is important to remember that decades ago, when Noam Chomsky is accused of having engaged in ‘genocide denial’, the mainstream media had an effective monopoly on the dissemination of primary source evidence regarding contemporaneous events, which made it very difficult to form any sort of objective assessment regarding what was actually happening, as you invariably were operating off a very limited selection of information that was handpicked by the mainstream media to highlight – which almost invariably meant them trying to push a narrative on international events that favoured Western foreign policy aims.
Imagine how different the public’s understanding of the Gaza Genocide would be without the internet. Without smartphones with video and photo capabilities. Without social media. Without journalists within Gaza having any reliable means of communication with the rest of the world. If what information was chosen for dissemination was instead dictated by Israel itself, and by large global media outlets like the New York Times and BBC. Everything would certainly be totally different, practically unrecognisable. In the age of social media and the prevalence of the internet and smartphones, the mainstream media no longer has the monopoly over information that it did before. The reason that we know so much about the Gaza genocide and have such an absurd trove of evidence for it, practically as the events themselves are occurring, is specifically because of this. If the same events had instead happened 30 years ago, it would have taken years, or perhaps even decades, for the whole truth regarding these occurrences to be unravelled.
This was the environment that Chomsky was operating in when he was assessing the genocides in question.
These can be most clearly demonstrated by Chomsky’s contemporaneous skepticism regarding the mainstream media narratives on the Cambodian genocide. The context for this was that this was the mid-1970s, and the Vietnam War had just recently ended. Chomsky originally came to prominence as a political commentator in the 60s and early 70s for his skepticism regarding the American mainstream narrative about the Vietnam war, and once that war was over and the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, the same sort of narrative started being employed regarding Cambodia. In work that Chomsky contributed to regarding the Khmer Rouge, he critiqued the willingness of the mainstream media to make and accept claims regarding the Khmer Rouge committing genocide on relatively flimsy evidence, when they were, at the time, based almost exclusively in anecdotal accounts from refugees that were chosen to be highlighted by the mainstream media. He contrasted this with their previous blanket silence regarding the American atrocities in Cambodia that preceded the Khmer Rouge’s ascent to power. At the time, this was a reasonable position to take given the relative lack of accessible and available evidence to prove the scale of the atrocities, and the clear bias of the outlets that were disseminating this evidence, and that had been pushing the conclusion of genocide practically from long before it would’ve been possible for them to have seen any evidence of crimes on that scale having occurred.
This is not “genocide denial” in the slightest. Chomsky merely did not accept very firm and far-reaching conclusions that were being made for clear geopolitical reasons at a time when there was insufficient evidence available to back them up. That later on, it became clear that the mainstream media’s conclusions had been closer to the truth than the available evidence had suggested, does not mean that Chomsky’s very rational contemporaneous scepticism can be retroactively condemned just because now you have the benefit of hindsight, as someone with the internet at your fingertips who knows precisely what happened because it’s now been studied for 50 years.
In the 80s, once it became much clearer what had actually happened, Chomsky adapted his position, acknowledging the atrocities and even once referring to them as “Pol Pot’s genocide” directly, which is quite a lofty bar for him, given how reluctant he is to use that word without qualifications. Interestingly, the Western geopolitical line shifted in 1979 after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and the US government and media actually DEFENDING the Khmer Rouge, showing just how absurdly cynical their claims were, and only justifying Chomsky’s contemporaneous scepticism more.
If you are to use this term, “genocide denial”, then it has to actually be useful – and it’s certainly not useful if what it means is simply questioning the idea that genocide is presently happening in situations where is a massive lack of sufficient evidence for such claims. It is clear that accusing Chomsky of this charge in regards to Cambodia is not honest, and stems entirely from outrage that he assesses the quality and quantity of evidence for mainstream Western geopolitical narratives rather than uncritically accepting them.