WHY THE FRENCH HATE CHOMSKY
DIANA JOHNSTONE
CounterPunch
June 14 2010
A Letter Which Grew Into an Article
Dear Noam,
It was a long-awaited pleasure for your many friends and admirers to
see you in Paris. I know it was tiring, but you mustn’t think you wore
out your voice for nothing. I’m afraid you might get such a negative
impression from certain media which seemed to have “learned nothing
and forgotten nothing”. However, I think that the rude treatment you
received from Le Monde in particular merely highlights the importance
of your visit and the deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky
has in France.
Excuse me for neglecting your primary field, linguistics, in my
analysis. I am not qualified to speak about that. But I tend to
believe that the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in
France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as
the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy. Yes, we know
there are many more, but Chomsky is by far the best-known the world
over. My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic
moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause
of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To
my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of
Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was
essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American
critic of United States imperialism.
I need to put this argument in context.
The end of the Second World War split Europe between two groups of
satellites of the two major victorious powers. The political methods of
the Soviet Union made the satellite status of Eastern Europe obvious
to everybody, and notably to the citizens of those countries, who
were aware of the coercion keeping them in the Communist bloc.
In the West, American wealth, the ready complicity of native
ruling classes and the far more sophisticated methods of political
persuasion, dramatizing a largely imaginary “Soviet threat”, succeeded
in convincing the satellite countries that they were voluntary allies
of the United States.
This worked most of the time. There were a very few temporary
exceptions. Sweden, never having been conquered or liberated, had
moments of fairly genuine independence, notably under Olof Palme
(whose timely assassination has brought Sweden gradually into the
arms of NATO). In the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle took major steps to
regain political independence for France, notably by criticizing the
US war in Indochina and seeking to strengthen relations with Third
World countries. This drive was shattered by the events of May 1968,
and after the fall of de Gaulle, a normalization process got underway
to secure US hegemony in France once and for all.
Now, it is precisely because France was the scene of the strongest
impulses for independence that the normalization process had to be
the most vigorous.
The vanguard of this process was the media operation called “les
nouveaux philosophes” launched in the mid-1970s. I was in Paris
at the time and saw this happening. The attacks on Chomsky were
an integral part of this campaign, designed to discredit the large
international movement against the US war in Vietnam as “naïve” or as
“apologists for the Gulag”, etc. This was a broad and many-faceted
political campaign led by the media to turn the public, especially
the youthful left, away from the Communist Party, from social Gaullism
(Chaban-Delmas), from solidarity with the third world, toward “human
rights”, meaning especially the human rights of dissidents in countries
whose governments were opposed by the United States.
Power Intellectuals
The role of French intellectuals in this process is quite varied
and sophisticated.
To start with, the nature and role of “power intellectuals” is very
different, sometimes even opposite, in the United States and in France.
In the United States, the power intellectuals (the “new mandarins”),
and they are numerous, work directly for the government, in think
tanks or as advisers and editorialists. Their “thinking” aims to
enforce the power of the United States in the world.
In France, the situation is nearly opposite, because the real “power”
for which the French power intellectuals are working is not France,
but the United States, considered the necessary protector of “the
West”, including Israel.
In France, intellectuals working for the government traditionally
come from the best schools and indeed usually are concerned with
French interests. In private, they often express discontent with
France’s subservience to US policy. But they are largely invisible
to the general public and their advice on international affairs tends
to be overruled by politicians.
Instead, the real “power intellectuals” in France are media stars who,
in one way or another, justify France’s subservience to the United
States. The basic idea of the old “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy
is that fascism is “the French ideology” and that the French people and
government are not to be trusted. Thus the basic political aim of the
French power intellectuals is to render France impotent by inserting
it firmly into the Atlantic Alliance, NATO and the European Union.
Whereas American power intellectuals tend to be pro-US nationalists,
French power intellectuals are essentially anti-French. In cartoons
and films, the French working class are portrayed as racist boors.
Since the 1969 film “Le Chagrin et la Pitié”, the pendulum has swung
away from celebration of the French Resistance to self-flagellation
for crimes against Jews committed under Nazi occupation. The
very existence of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front have,
for nearly thirty years, contributed mainly to strengthening an
opposing attitude of anti-nationalism. Justified criticism of the
European Union for tearing down social welfare in favor of globalized
finance capital is stigmatized as archaic and unacceptable French
nationalism. The dominant center left has abandoned both economic
issues and anti-militarism in favor of a human rights ideology more
concerned with the Dalai Lama (about which France can do nothing)
than with the deindustrialization of France. The human rights left
has largely abandoned economic policy to the EU and military policy
to NATO and its boss, the United States.
In various ways, the “humanitarian” power intellectuals exemplified by
Bernard Kouchner work to promote the American “three Vs” division of
humanity: Villains, Victims and Victorious Saviors. This particular
fateful triangle serves as the procrustean bed for all major world
events, starting of course with World War II as it is now taught in
most schools: the drama of a Villain (Hitler), Victims (the Jews) and
the Victorious Savior (the United States armed forces). (Increasingly
neglected are the Versailles Treaty, the economic depression, Hitler’s
anti-bolshevism, the battle of Stalingrad and numerous other not
insignificant details.)
Forced into the same mould, with perhaps even more distortion of
reality, the Yugoslav crisis served to enforce the basic model. The
French power intellectuals were in the front lines of this media war,
eager to strengthen the image of peoples as mere passive victims of
“genocidal dictators” with their only hope of salvation lying in
rescue by NATO.
The Euston group in Britain performs the same function, with less
brio. Everywhere, the point is to hold together the Western Alliance
against the rest of the world.
French Philosophers
Of course, some contemporary French essayists do criticize the United
States from time to time. “Le Monde des livres” listed some of these –
Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, et alia –
as proof that the French have such great intellectuals that they have
no need to hear what Chomsky has to say.
Even though they are of course very different from each other, certain
differences between contemporary French philosophers on the one hand
and Chomsky on the other deserve mention.
First and foremost is the question of facts. Chomsky’s criticism
is laden with facts, a substance that seems to elicit ennui among
contemporary French thinkers. No doubt the importance of the essay
in the French educational system has bred a world of “philosophers”
whose skill at manipulating fact-free ideas was the guarantee of
a distinguished career. Louis Althusser confessed as much in his
autobiography, admitting that he not only knew few facts but that he
knew few works of philosophy – but he had learned how to synthesize.
This raises the question of the social usefulness of such philosophy.
If the social object is to entertain, then the French school
reaches its goal – mystification is often far more entertaining than
straightforward descriptions of reality. On the other hand, if the
object is to help readers reach their own understanding of reality,
especially political reality, then their first need is to be provided
with the basic relevant facts, which most people do not have time
to ascertain through their own research. Thus Chomsky is useful to
citizens by providing them with the raw material to develop their
own ideas in a way that the purveyors of ready-made but flimsily
supported ideas are not.
Two other differences concern ethics and clarity of thought.
Chomskian ethics focus on critique of the abuse of power in one’s own
society. This does not imply rejection of that society, as in some
ways Chomsky is very pro-American. But the basic attitude is that
one has both the duty and the possibility to combat abuse of power
in one’s own society, whereas this is difficult if not impossible
regarding foreign, and especially antagonistic societies.
In recent decades, French intellectuals have, in contrast, tended to
adopt a dualistic ethics, and to take sides between “camps”. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the “socialist camp”, this dualism
has centered on the West, “home of human rights”, versus the rest of
the backward world. This has led to total misunderstanding of Chomsky,
whose criticism of the United States has nothing to do with choosing
some opposing “camp”.
As for clarity, the emphasis on stylistic complexity in the elite
French school system has led to the notion that whatever is clear
is not “deep”. A certain obscurity is supposed to suggest profundity
(Pierre Bourdieu made deliberate use of this prejudice by using long
sentences for simple thoughts. He once told American philosopher John
Searle that to be taken seriously in France, at least twenty percent
of what one writes needs to be incomprehensible
In part because of these differences, there is a natural antagonism
between Chomsky and his French contemporaries. This has become
intertwined with the political controversies. First, in the case
of Cambodia, Chomsky’s concern for getting the facts straight and
avoiding exaggeration was grossly misinterpreted as an expression
of sympathy or support for the Khmer rouge. This was a clash between
someone for whom facts are the basis of opinion and others for whom
opinion comes first, and facts are of minor significance.
Next, in the more explosive Faurisson case, the simple fact of
defending the principle of free speech was interpreted as support
for Robert Faurisson’s theses, despite Chomsky’s insistence that
the two things were quite separate. In this case, it is impossible
to determine where honest philosophical difference leaves off and
exploitation for the purposes of discrediting Chomsky as critic of
US imperialism picks up.
The “Gayssot law” and State Religion
Nobody could have been fully aware at the time, around 1980, of where
the “Faurisson affair” would lead. The uproar over the literature
professor who undertook to challenge the accepted historic fact that
gas chambers were used to exterminate Jews in Nazi concentration
camps turned out to be a key event in a process that has led to the
establishment of the Holocaust, or “Shoah” (the Hebrew religious
term now commonly used in France) as a sort of religion of memory
and repentance, raised to the status of official dogma.
Far from following Chomsky’s advice to let issues be settled by free
debate, the French National Assembly in July 1990 adopted an amendment
to an 1881 law on press freedom known as the “Gayssot law”, after
the Communist member who introduced it. This amendment specifically
calls for punishment of anyone who publicly “contests” (questions or
disputes) “the existence of one or several crimes against humanity”
as defined by the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal statute and which have been
committed “either by members of an organization declared criminal”
under that statute or “by a person found guilty of such crimes
by a French or international jurisdiction”. The Nuremberg crimes
against humanity are listed as “murder, extermination, enslavement,
deportation, and all other inhuman acts committed against civilian
populations” as well as “persecutions for political, racial or
religious motivations”.
Generally, this law has been used to prosecute or silence persons
who do not in fact contest, dispute or question the existence of
the above-named crimes in general, but who question the use of
gas chambers to commit mass genocide. Since actual “negation” of
Nazi persecution of Jews is nearly nonexistent, the law has been
brought to bear especially on persons who, because of their general
political orientation, are suspected of concealed anti-semitism. Such
was the lawsuit brought against Bruno Gollnisch, a leading member
of the National Front. Gollnisch, a professor of Asian studies at
the University of Lyon, merely dodged a question about the Holocaust
during an interview, saying that it was an issue for experts. The case
against him was finally dismissed on appeal to the highest court in
France, but meanwhile he had been suspended for five years from his
university position.
This sort of law has effects that go beyond its immediate application.
First, it has contributed to the sacralization of the Holocaust, or
“Shoah”, which has increasingly been regarded less as an historic
event than as a sacred dogma. In a secular state where traditional
religions are excluded from public schools, only the Shoah demands
both the mental and emotional adherence traditionally reserved for
religion. Its place in the school curriculum grows as the teaching
of history in general shrinks.
Initially, Nazi crimes were taught as contrary to humanity in general,
but as identification of victims has been increasingly centered
on Jews, the effect is to implicitly divide school children between
potential victims, namely the Jews, and everyone else, whose innocence
is less assured. This amounts to a reversal of the much-decried
Medieval stigmatization of Jews as “Christ-killers”. Today, non-Jews
are in the uncomfortable position of being the descendants of
“Jew-killers” (or perhaps of those who failed to save Jewish children
from deportation to Auschwitz).
One inevitable effect is to encourage other ethnic communities to
stress their own status as historic victims, especially victims of
“genocide”. Africans, Armenians, Muslims and others all feel that
the tragedies of their own ancestors deserve comparable respect and
commemoration. This rivalry in victimhood may lead to extensions of the
Gayssot law, or of an earlier law against incitement to racial hatred,
to prosecute persons who consider the term “genocide” inappropriate
in regard to tragic events in the Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia, etc.
Making history an object of reverence rather than of curiosity marks a
subtle but serious regression from the secular values of free inquiry.
It contributes to an atmosphere of self-censorship, of “political
correctness” that encourages intellectual timidity rather than
boldness. The political effect is to instill in children the world
view of the Three Vs, in which the Victorious Savior is represented
by the United States, and France is a semi-culpable bystander.
Times Are Changing
For much of the younger generation, the Shoah cult, with annual
obligatory commemorations and constant reminders of the “duty of
memory”, is getting to be as boring as any other imposed religion. It
cannot inhibit criticism of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The
guilt trip may be coming to an end.
Your visit to Paris during the last five days of May came at a time
when there are signs that the ideological winds are changing, and
one such sign was the generally youthful turnout for your talk at
the Mutualité hall, sponsored by the monthly newspaper, Le Monde
diplomatique.
Contrary to Le Monde diplomatique, Le Monde, once a respected newspaper
of reference, has become the flagship of “la pensée unique” and
pro-Atlanticist subservience to the United States and the EU.
First the daily published a silly report by its reporter who failed
to get into the College de France to hear Chomsky’s main speech and
wrote a complaint about being left outside. A few days later, Le
Monde went on to publish a hatchet job in its weekly books section,
ignoring important new books and digging up the Faurisson affair
in order to pile heaps of praise on Chomsky’s critics, without the
slightest echo of Chomsky’s own arguments in favor of free speech.
But on the other hand, at the end of your visit to Paris, you were
interviewed on the popular late night show, Ce soir ou jamais, which
gave you a chance, after all these years, to answer the leading
questions put by the host, Frédéric Taddei. The show is popular,
and viewers who went to bed early can easily find it on the internet.
This TV interview was favorably commented on by Marianne, which in
recent years has become France’s most widely read weekly magazine.
Marianne stressed the “strange silence of the media” concerning
Chomsky’s visit, and in particular their failure to cite his sharp
criticism of the Israeli attack on the Free Gaza flotilla, which
had occurred that morning. The magazine cited Chomsky’s own words
to explain this media neglect: sometimes consciously, sometimes
unconsciously, we tend to filter out what we don’t want to see or
hear if it makes us uncomfortable.
Chomsky clearly still makes some people in the French media
uncomfortable.
But not all. There was, of course, a big spread in Le Monde
diplomatique, a co-host of the visit, with a long article by Professor
Jacques Bouveressse, Chomsky’s host at the Collège de France. Daniel
Mermet of the popular afternoon radio program “la-bas si j’y suis”
broadcast Chomsky’s meeting with labor leaders. The Catholic newspaper
La Croix ran an informative article on the visitor.
Back in February 2003, then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin gave
a speech to the UN Security Council opposing the US attack on Iraq. His
speech won enthusiastic international applause. It seemed that France
might recover an independent voice. But fear of US retaliation for
such impertinence was a factor in the subsequent Sarkozy alignment
with the US and Israel. However, this brings no visible rewards,
other than to share in the Afghan quagmire, and to alienate much of
France’s own Arab population. Years of George W.
Bush, the war in Afghanistan, uncritical U.S. support for Israel’s
serial crimes, the financial crisis and growing disillusion with the
European Union are undermining popular acceptance of France’s passive
allegiance to US imperialism.
The pendulum swings. Sarkozy’s fiercest political enemy, Villepin,
is back on the scene, calling for France to “learn the lessons of
Vietnam, of Algeria, of colonialism”, to withdraw from Afghanistan,
and recognize that the world is changing. The West can no longer
dictate its will to the world, where new powers are emerging, Villepin
insists. He is far out of power, but his words resonate. The paradox is
that Chomsky, who is considered anti-French because of his disdain for
French intellectuals, actually provides support to those who want to
recover French national independence in order to play a constructive
and peaceful role in the multipolar world of tomorrow. At least,
he helps to free speech.
With best regards,
Diana Johnstone
A French version of this text can be obtained from the author at
[email protected]
Diana Johnstone is author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and
Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at
[email protected]
From: A. Papazian
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone06142010.html