{"id":670,"date":"2005-11-17T23:04:28","date_gmt":"2005-11-17T23:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/?p=670"},"modified":"2005-11-17T23:04:28","modified_gmt":"2005-11-17T23:04:28","slug":"retractaciones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/2005\/11\/retractaciones\/","title":{"rendered":"Retractaciones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ya que la prensa est\u00e1 llena de retractaciones, una que me parece muy importante.
\nA ra\u00edz de la publicaci\u00f3n de la lista de los diez intelectuales m\u00e1s influyentes seg\u00fan las revistas \u201cProspect\u201d y \u201cForeign Policy\u201d, en la que Noam Chomsky (Ver \u00ab[\u00abLos m\u00e1s influyentes\u00bb: http:\/\/www.junjan.org\/weblog\/archives\/2005\/10\/18\/los_ms_influyentes.html]\u00bb) obtuvo el primer lugar, se desat\u00f3 una nueva oleada de odio (o quiz\u00e1s envidia) contra Chomsky. Los art\u00edculos contra su persona se hicieron multitud desde la \u00abintelectualidad\u00bb neoconservadora. El asunto lleg\u00f3 a su climax cuando el peri\u00f3dico (de \u00abizquierdas\u00bb) \u00ab[\u00abThe Guardian\u00bb:http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/]\u00bb public\u00f3 el art\u00edculo de Emma Brockes \u00abThe Greatest Intellectual?\u00bb<\/em> el 31 de Octubre, art\u00edculo que en forma de entrevista novelada atacaba fuertemente a Chomsky y que sirvi\u00f3 como \u00abprueba final\u00bb o \u00abpiedra de toque\u00bb para todo tipo de art\u00edculos conservadores, \u00absi lo dice The Guardian que son de izquierdas debe ser verdad\u00bb<\/em>. Deb\u00eda ser la primera vez que no cuestionaban un art\u00edculo de tal fuente.
\nEn resumen, el art\u00edculo usaba la t\u00e9cnica \u00abmoista\u00bb cl\u00e1sica. Citar y extractar declaraciones de Chomsky sobre Srebrenica, eliminar su contexto, cambiar la intenci\u00f3n del autor y finalmente atribuirle inombrables cr\u00edmenes. T\u00f3pico.
\nPero tras las contrar\u00e9plicas por parte de [\u00abAlexander Cockburn\u00bb:http:\/\/www.counterpunch.com\/cockburn11052005.html], \u00abDavid Peterson\u00bb:http:\/\/blog.zmag.org\/index.php\/weblog\/entry\/chomsky\/ ([\u00aby dos\u00bb:http:\/\/blog.zmag.org\/index.php\/weblog\/entry\/chomsky1\/], [\u00aby tres\u00bb:http:\/\/blog.zmag.org\/index.php\/weblog\/entry\/chomsky2\/]), y del propio [\u00abNoam Chomsky\u00bb:http:\/\/www.zmag.org\/content\/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9110]; The Guardian, [\u00aba rega\u00f1adientes\u00bb:http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/corrections\/story\/0,3604,1644017,00.html], no ha tenido m\u00e1s remedio que retirar el art\u00edculo y disculparse.
\n\u00bfSe retractar\u00e1n ahora los difamadores de segunda fila? Claro que no.
\nPara que conste, y emulando al blog de [\u00abDavid Peterson\u00bb:http:\/\/blog.zmag.org\/bloggers\/?blogger=peterson], voy a publicar el art\u00edculo original (ahora desaparecido) y la contestaci\u00f3n de Chomsky, dado su evidente inter\u00e9s.
\nEnlaces:
\n– \u00abSmearing Chomsky – The Guardian in the Gutter\u00bb:http:\/\/www.medialens.org\/alerts\/index.php, MediaLens
\n– \u00abGuardian Fabricates Chomsky Quotes in Bid to Smear World’s Number One Intellectual\u00bb:http:\/\/www.counterpunch.com\/cockburn11052005.html, por Alexander Cockburn
\n– \u00ab‘Thick as Autumnal Leaves’: The Guardian’s Mock Interview with Noam Chomsky\u00bb:http:\/\/blog.zmag.org\/index.php\/weblog\/entry\/chomsky\/, por David Peterson
\n– \u00abCorrections and clarifications\u00bb:http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/corrections\/story\/0,3604,1644017,00.html , The Guardian.
\n– \u00abThe Guardian en las cloacas\u00bb:http:\/\/www.rebelion.org\/noticia.php?id=22623, por David Edwards
\n– \u00abSrebrenica Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for More War\u00bb:http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/johnstone10122005.html por Diana Johnstone
\n– \u00abSrebrenica: 10 a\u00f1os\u00bb:http:\/\/www.junjan.org\/weblog\/archives\/2005\/07\/10\/srebrenica_10_aos.html<\/p>\n


\nArt\u00edculo de Emma Brockes, \u00abThe Greatest Intellectual?\u00bb<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\nThe Guardian (London) – Final Edition
\nOctober 31, 2005
\nSECTION: Guardian Features Pages, Pg. 8
\nHEADLINE: G2:
\nBYLINE: Emma Brockes<\/strong>
\nQ: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?
\nA: My only regret is that I didn\u2019t do it strongly enough.<\/em>
\nDespite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical\u2019s radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston. He works here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos. There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to mention the fig rolls when there is undocumented suffering going on in El Salvador?
\nOstensibly I am here because Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world\u2019s top public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. He believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclev Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends itself to television appearances, like no 37, the thinking girl\u2019s pin-up Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and dispenser of \u201cgarbage\u201d. Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible croak and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written dismissively: \u201cThe beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.\u201d Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and \u201cusing your intelligence to decide what\u2019s right\u201d.
\nThis is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren\u2019t as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the \u201cmassacre\u201d at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things 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.)
\nWhile his critics regard him as an almost compulsive revisionist, Chomsky is more mainstream now than ever as disgust with the Bush government grows; the book he put out after the twin towers attacks, called 9-11, sold 300,000 copies. Given that until recently he worked full-time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there remain suspicions over how he has managed to become an expert, seemingly, on every conflict since the second world war; it is assumed by his critics that he plugs the gaps in his knowledge with ideology.
\nChomsky says this is just laziness on their part and besides, \u201cthe best scientists aren\u2019t the ones who know the most data; they\u2019re the ones who know what they\u2019re looking for.\u201d
\nStill, of all the intellectuals on the Prospect list, it is Chomsky who is most often accused of miring a debate in intellectual spam, what the writer Paul Berman calls his \u201ccustomary blizzard of obscure sources\u201d. I ask if he has a photographic memory and Chomsky smiles. \u201cIt\u2019s the other way round. I can\u2019t remember names, can\u2019t remember faces. I don\u2019t have any particular talents that everybody else doesn\u2019t have.\u201d
\nHis daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low opinion of the mainstream media (to summarise: it is undermined by a \u201csystematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people\u201d. I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get into it with Chomsky and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is \u201chunting for documents, or historical data. It\u2019s a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions . . . There\u2019s a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it\u2019s true.\u201d
\nIs there? It\u2019s clear, suddenly, that Chomsky\u2019s opinion can be as flaky as the next person\u2019s; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most people I know don\u2019t believe anything they read on the internet and he says, seemlessly, \u201cyou see, that\u2019s dangerous, too.\u201d His responses to criticism vary from this sort of mild absorption to, during our subsequent ratty exchange about Bosnia, the childish habit of trashing his opponents whom he calls \u201chysterical\u201d, \u201cfanatics\u201d and \u201ctantrum throwers\u201d. I suspect that being on the receiving end of lots \u201chalf-crazed\u201d nut-mail, as he calls it (he gets at least four daily emails accusing him of being a Mossad agent, a CIA agent or a member of al-Qaida), has made his defensive position rather entrenched. Chomsky sighs and says that he has never claimed to have a monopoly on the truth, then looks merry for a moment and says that the only person who does is his wife, Carol. \u201cMy grandchildren call her Truth Teller. When I tease them and they\u2019re not sure if I\u2019m telling the truth, they turn to her and say: \u2018Truth Teller, is it really true?\u2019\u201d
\nChomsky\u2019s activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as \u201cworking-class Jews\u201d, most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family,\u201d he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can\u2019t help qualifying as \u201cnot very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed.\u201d
\nThe house in Philadelphia was crowded, full of aunts and cousins, many of them seamstresses who weathered the depression thanks to the help of the International Ladies Garment Union. Chomsky was four years old when he witnessed, from a passing trolley car, strikers outside a textile plant being beaten by the police. At 10 he wrote his first political pamphlet, against the rise of fascism in Spain. \u201cIt was all part of the atmosphere,\u201d he says.
\nThe Chomskys were one of the few Jewish families in an Irish and German neighbourhood, and Chomsky and his brother fought often in the street; he remembers there were celebrations when Paris fell to the Germans. His parents kept their heads down and until their deaths, he says, \u201cnever had an idea of what was going on outside\u201d.
\nChomsky had a choice of role models. There was his father\u2019s family in Baltimore, who were \u201csuper-orthodox\u201d. \u201cThey regressed back to the stage they were at even before they were in the shtetl , which is not uncommon among immigrant communities; a tendency to close in and go back to an exaggerated form of what you came from.\u201d He smiles. \u201cIt\u2019s a hostile world.\u201d
\nOr there was his mother\u2019s family in New York, who crowded into a big government apartment and got by solely on the wages of a disabled uncle, who on the basis of his disability was awarded a small newsstand by the state. Chomsky chose the latter and his radicalism grew out of the time he spent, from the age of 12, commuting to New York at weekends to help on the newsstand.
\n\u201cIt became a kind of salon,\u201d he says. \u201cMy uncle had no formal education but he was an extremely intelligent man – he\u2019d been through all the leftwing groups, from the Communists to the Trotskyists to the anti-Leninists; he was very much involved in psychoanalysis. There were a lot of German emigres in New York at the time and in the evening they would hang around the newsstand and talk. My uncle finally ended up being a pretty wealthy lay analyst on Riverside Drive.\u201d He bursts out laughing.
\nIt was a time, says Chomsky, when no one knew what was going to happen. They discussed the possibility of a socialist revolution, or of the country collapsing entirely. Anything seemed possible. Compared with these sorts of discussion, he found high school and, later, college, \u201cdumb and stupid\u201d. He was thinking of dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania when he met his second mentor, Zellig Harris, a linguistics professor who encouraged him to pursue his own academic interests. Chomsky had grown up in a household where language was important; his parents spoke Yiddish and his father wrote a PhD on 14th-century Hebrew, which the young Chomsky read with interest. And so he pursued a study of linguistics and many years down the line formulated a ground-breaking theory, that of \u201cuniversal grammar\u201d, the idea that the brain\u2019s facility for language is innate rather than a function of behaviourism.It sounds to me as if he was an arrogant young man who thought, with some justification, that he knew more than his teachers. Chomsky bridles at the word arrogant and says: \u201cNo. I assumed I was wrong and took for granted that the standard approach (to linguistics) was correct.\u201d
\nEven though he went on to study at Harvard, he still, in a rare concession to the romance of outsidership, describes himself as \u201cself-taught\u201d.
\nThere were only a couple of years in the mid- 1950s when he gave up activism altogether. He had met and married Carol Schatz, a fellow linguist, and they had three young children. Chomsky had to choose whether to commit himself to activism or to let it go. The Vietnam war protests were getting under way and, if he chose the former, there was a real danger of a jail sentence, so much so that Carol re-enrolled at college in case she had to become the sole breadwinner. But Chomsky was not, he says, the sort of person who could attend the occasional demo and then hope the world would fix itself.
\n\u201cYeah, my wife tried to talk me out of it, just as she does now. But she knows I can be stubborn and that I\u2019ll carry on with it as long as I\u2019m ambulatory or whatever.\u201d
\nThese days, Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone\u2019s \u201coutstanding work\u201d. Does he regret signing it?
\n\u201cNo,\u201d he says indignantly. \u201cIt is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn\u2019t do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work.\u201d
\nHow, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?
\n\u201cLook,\u201d says Chomsky, \u201cthere 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\u2019re a traitor, you\u2019re destroyed. It\u2019s totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. 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.\u201d
\nThey didn\u2019t \u201cthink\u201d it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.
\nBut Chomsky insists that \u201cLM was probably correct\u201d and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. \u201cIt had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong.\u201d It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. \u201cAnd if they were wrong, sure; but don\u2019t just scream well, if you say you\u2019re in favour of that you\u2019re in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers.\u201d
\nEh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a \u201cfanatic\u201d, I say. These are serious, trustworthy people.
\n\u201cLike who?\u201d
\n\u201cLike my colleague, Ed Vulliamy.\u201d
\nVulliamy\u2019s reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine.
\n\u201cEd Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true.\u201d
\nBut Karadic\u2019s number two herself (Biljana Plavsic) pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity.
\n\u201cWell, she certainly did. 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.\u201d
\nAnd so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co\u2019s \u201ctantrums\u201d over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it\u2019s because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. \u201cThat\u2019s such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people\u2019s necks, so we don\u2019t see our victims. I\u2019ve seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You\u2019ll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie about that suffering.\u201d Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.
\nYou could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it. \u201cWell, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the economy. I\u2019m certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system; does that mean that I shouldn\u2019t try to make it a better society?\u201d
\nOK, let\u2019s look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a share portfolio? He looks cross. \u201cYou\u2019d have to ask my wife about that. I\u2019m sure she does. I don\u2019t see any reason why she shouldn\u2019t. Would it help people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It\u2019s only rich, privileged westerners – who are well educated and therefore deeply irrational – in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit peasants in southern Colombia, they don\u2019t ask me these questions.\u201d
\nI suggest that people don\u2019t like being told off about their lives by someone they consider a hypocrite. \u201cThere\u2019s no element of hypocrisy.\u201d He suddenly smiles at me, benign again, and we end it there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Respuesta de Chomsky:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nThis is an open letter to a few of the people with whom I had discussed the Guardian interview of 31 October, on the basis of the electronic version, which is all that I had seen. Someone has just sent me a copy of the printed version, and I now understand why friends in England who wrote me were so outraged.
\nIt is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it\u2019s worth reviewing what most readers could not know. The general interest is that the print version reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre. It\u2019s of general interest for that reason alone.
\nA secondary matter is that it may serve as a word of warning to anyone who is asked by the Guardian for an interview, and happens to fall slightly to the critical end of the approved range of opinion of the editors. The warning is: if you accept the invitation, be cautious, and make sure to have a tape recorder that is very visibly placed in front of you. That may inhibit the dedication to deceit, and if not, at least you will have a record. I should add that in probably thousands of interviews from every corner of the world and every part of the spectrum for decades, that thought has never occurred to me before. It does now.
\nIt was evident from the electronic version that t was a scurrilous piece of journalism. That\u2019s clear even from internal evidence. The reporter obviously had a definite agenda: to focus the defamation exercise on my denial of the Srebrenica massacre. From the character of what appeared, it is not easy to doubt that she was assigned this task. When I wouldn\u2019t go along, she simply invented the denial, repeatedly, along with others. The centerpiece of the interview was this, describing my alleged views, in particular, that:
\n.\u00ab…during the Bosnian war the \u201cmassacre\u201d at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things 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.)\u00bb<\/em>
\nTransparently, neither I nor anyone speaks with quotation marks, so the reference to my claim that \u201cSrebrenica was so not a massacre,\u201d shown by my using the term \u201cmassacre\u201d in quotes, must be in print \u2013 hence \u201cwitheringly teenage,\u201d as well as disgraceful. That raises the obvious question: where is it in print, or anywhere? I know from letters that were sent to me that a great many journalists and others asked the author of the interview and the relevant editors to provide the source, and were met by stony silence \u2013 for a simple reason: it does not exist, and they know it. Furthermore, as Media Lens pointed out, 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. I will skip the rest, which also collapses quickly.
\nMore interesting, however, is the editorial contribution. One illustration actually is in the e-edition. I did write a very brief letter in response, which for some reason went to the ombudsman, who informed me that the word \u201cfabrication\u201d had to be removed. My truncated letter stating that I take no responsibility for anything attributed to me in the article did appear, paired with a moving letter from a victim, expressing justified outrage that I or anyone could take the positions invented in the Guardian article. Pairing aside, the heading given by the editors was: \u201cFall out over Srebrenica.\u201d The editors are well aware that there was no debate or disagreement about Srebrenica, once the fabrications in their article are removed.
\nThe printed version reveals how careful and well-planned the exercise was, and why it might serve as a model for the genre. The front-page announcement of the interview reads: \u201cNoam Chomsky The Greatest Intellectual?\u201d The question is answered by the following highlighted Q&A, above the interview:
\nQ: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?
\nA: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough<\/em>
\nIt is set apart in large print so that it can\u2019t be missed, and will be quoted separately (as it already has been). It also captures the essence of the agenda. The only defect is that it didn\u2019t happen. The truthful part is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough opposed the Swedish publisher\u2019s decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not \u201cDiane,\u201d as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked in the Swedish press. As Brockes presumably knew, though I carefully explained anyway, there is one source for my involvement in this affair: an open letter that I wrote to the publisher, after editors there who objected to the decision, and journalist friends, sent me the Swedish press charges that were the basis for the rejection. In the open letter, readily available on the internet (and the only source), I went through the charges one by one, checked them against the book, and found that they all ranged from serious misrepresentation to outright fabrication. I then took \u2013 and take \u2013 the position that it is completely wrong to withdraw a book because the press charges (falsely) that it does not conform to approved doctrine. And I do regret that \u201cI didn\u2019t do it strongly enough,\u201d the words Brockes managed to quote correctly. 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.
\nThe article is then framed by a series of photographs. Let\u2019s put aside childhood photos and an honorary degree — included for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, to reinforce the image the reporter sought to convey of a rich elitist hypocrite who tells people how to live (citing a comment of her own, presumably supposed to be clever, which will not be found on the tape, I am reasonably confident). Those apart, there are three photos depicting my actual life. It\u2019s an interesting choice, and the captions are even more interesting.
\nOne is a picture of me \u201ctalking to journalist John Pilger\u201d (who isn\u2019t shown, but let\u2019s give the journal the benefit of the doubt of assuming he is actually in the original). The second is of me \u201cmeeting Fidel Castro.\u201d The third, and most interesting, is a picture of me \u201cin Laos en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese.\u201d
\nThat\u2019s my life: honoring commie-rats and the renegade who is the source of the word \u201cpilgerize\u201d invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule.
\nSince I\u2019ll avoid speculation, you can judge for yourselves the role Pilger plays in the fantasy life of the editorial offices of the Guardian. And the choice is interesting in other ways. It\u2019s true that I have met John a few times, much fewer than I would like because we both have busy lives. And possibly a picture was taken. It must have taken some effort to locate this particular picture, assuming it to be genuine, among the innumerable pictures of me talking to endless other people. And the intended message is very clear.
\nTurn to the Castro picture. In this case the picture, though clipped, is real. As the editors surely know, at least if those who located the picture did 2 minutes of research, the others in the picture (apart from my wife) were, like me, participants in the annual meeting of an international society of Latin American scholars, with a few others from abroad. This annual meeting happened to be in Havana. Like all others, I was in a group that met with Castro. End of second story.
\nTurn now to the third picture, from 1970. The element of truth is that I was indeed in Laos, and on my way to Hanoi. The facts about these trips are very easy to discover. I wrote about both in some detail right away, in two articles in the New York Review, reprinted in my book At War with Asia in 1970. It is easily available to Guardian editors, because it was recently reprinted. If they want to be the first to question the account (unlike reviewers in such radical rags as the journal of the Royal Institute, International Affairs), it would be very easy for a journalist to verify it: contact the two people who accompanied me on the entire trip, one then a professor of economics at Cornell, the other a minister of the United Church of Christ. Both are readily accessible. From the sole account that exists, the editor would know that in Laos I was engaged in such subversive activities as spending many hours in refugee camps interviewing miserable people who had just been driven by the CIA \u201cclandestine army\u201d from the Plain of Jars, having endured probably the most intense bombing in history for over two years, almost entirely unrelated to the Vietnam war. And in North Vietnam, I did spend most of my time doing what I had been invited to do: many hours of lectures and discussion, on any topic I knew anything about, in the bombed ruins of the Hanoi Polytechnic, to faculty who were able to return to Hanoi from the countryside during a lull in the bombing, and were very eager to learn about recent work in their own fields, to which they had had no access for years.
\nThe rest of the trip \u201cto Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese\u201d is a Guardian invention. Those who frequent ultra-right defamation sites can locate the probable source of this ingenious invention, but even that ridiculous tale goes nowhere near as far as what the Guardian editors concocted, which is a new addition to the vast literature of vilification of those who stray beyond the approved bounds.
\nSo that\u2019s my life: worshipping commie-rats and such terrible figures as John Pilger. Quite apart from the deceit in the captions, simply note how much effort and care it must have taken to contrive these images to frame the answer to the question on the front page.
\nIt is an impressive piece of work, and, as I said, provides a useful model for studies of defamation exercises, or for those who practice the craft. And also, perhaps, provides a useful lesson for those who may be approached for interviews by this journal.
\nThis is incidentally only a fragment. The rest is mostly what one might expect to find in the scandal sheets about movie stars, familiar from such sources, and of no further interest.
\nNoam Chomsky <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ya que la prensa est\u00e1 llena de retractaciones, una que me parece muy importante. A ra\u00edz de la publicaci\u00f3n de la lista de los diez intelectuales m\u00e1s influyentes seg\u00fan las revistas \u201cProspect\u201d y \u201cForeign Policy\u201d, en la que Noam Chomsky (Ver \u00ab[\u00abLos m\u00e1s influyentes\u00bb: http:\/\/www.junjan.org\/weblog\/archives\/2005\/10\/18\/los_ms_influyentes.html]\u00bb) obtuvo el primer lugar, se desat\u00f3 una nueva oleada de… Leer m\u00e1s »Retractaciones<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[114],"class_list":["post-670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-divagaciones","tag-chomsky-peterson-srebrenica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}