And then there was the time my ex and I tried to drive demographers crazy.
It was within the first year or so of our marriage, when life was light, all things were easy, and the future stretched out endlessly before us. We were young, in love, and far more willing to spend money on a joke than seems remotely possible or polite today. So it was that when Wingding read an article in the Globe about exciting new developments in demography, we decided to have a little fun.
The catalyst was a piece claiming that the latest research into what we'd now call Big Data could be used to predict the thought patterns and purchasing habits of every household in America through knowledge of the said household's ZIP code. An arcane formula – aka, “an algorithm” - based on census data, voting records, and tax payments had been created that would tell a researcher with near-perfect accuracy what families in a specific ZIP code ate for breakfast, what brand of jeans their teenage daughters thought divine, which political party the adults would support, even what cars were parked in the driveway and television programs blared from the screen after a hard day's work at a specific type of job for a narrow range of companies. It all seemed quite absurd and slightly unnerving, and neither Wingding nor I thought it allowed much range for human foibles and individual tastes.
That was why we decided that our newly formed household would be what William James had called “the one white crow,” the anomaly that forced a researcher to believe in the unbelievable. We might have just begun our lives as productive citizens, and our apartment might not have been in a particularly great building or neighborhood, but by God we were going to be different.
And so, for just a few dollars, I subscribed to Mother Jones and he subscribed to Soldier of Fortune.
Mother Jones was the better deal. Not only were the articles much better written and in accordance with our actual political beliefs, we received a nifty little hand towel printed with an image of the President of the United States captioned “Official Ronald Reagan Doormat.” It wasn't actually big enough to be a doormat, but since it was all cotton and very washable, we spent many a merry hour encouraging our cat, Arwen, to hawk up hairballs right onto the President's grinning mug rather than, say, the floor next to our bed.
It served that purpose well, and still does, as I found out when I had to clean up some fresh effluvia from Gil the Wonder Cat while he was blowing coat this spring and the only thing in sight was the worn but still usable Official Ronald Reagan Doormat. A quality product, 10 stars, would definitely purchase again if MoJo reissued it with the current occupant's visage, highly recommended to all.
Soldier of Fortune, by contrast, was a fairly dreary collection of articles about the joys of being a mercenary, advertisements for products useful to mercenaries, and classifieds soliciting the services of mercenaries. From time to time there was an interesting piece on a particularly weird incident – Colonel Bo Gritz's “secret mission” to rescue imprisoned POW's in Laos that was torpedoed by him bringing along assorted women in POW/MIA t-shirts, which probably had every Viet Cong veteran in Indochina laughing himself sick, springs immediately to mind – but most of it was pretty dull unless you were a mercenary, which we most definitely were not.
Far more interesting was the disparate collection of mailing lists we ended up on. I began getting solicitations from every left-leaning publication and organization in America, while my husband received a veritable blizzard of invitations to join the NRA, the Moral Majority, and a stunning array of veterans' organizations even though he had a bad back and never would have passed a military physical. Most of these we discarded, although the most obnoxious conservative ones were sent to other equally obnoxious organizations in the pre-paid envelopes they'd thoughtfully provided. “Let them pay the postage,” Wingding said, and he wasn't wrong.
About the only solicitation we actually answered was one from an exciting new leftist magazine. This one, which was based in Boston, looked intriguing if a bit more radical than I usually liked, plus there was a chance I might be able to sell them a book or movie review. So I wrote out a check, sent it off, and for the next eighteen months or so Wingding and I were charter subscribers to Zeta, later known simply as Z.
To say that we were not prepared for what we got is putting it mildly.
It's not that we weren't in sympathy with the magazine's aims. Neither of us had any love for Ronald Reagan nor the conservative wave sweeping the country in the 1980's, and we were deeply disturbed by the growing influence of the Religious Right. We were definitely left of center, especially by the standards of the time, and the last I heard he hadn't changed his views in the ensuing years.
The problem was that neither of had ever encountered libertarian socialism before, let alone in such a densely theoretical form. Nor were we anticapitalist (my uncle Oscar had been mentored by one of the participants in the Pittsburgh Renaissance of the 1950's, still one of the most successful capitalist/labor partnerships in recent memory) or antigovernment (Wingding's family owned their own home thanks to a workman's comp settlement). America was flawed, no doubt about that, and much change was necessary, but way too many of the articles calling for deep structural change were written by authors who seemed to have little grasp of human nature, how governments actually work, or practical politics.
There were exceptions, of course. I still have vivid memories of a striking article about the politicization of African-American women's hair, which shook me to the core as I realized just how and why mainstream culture had turned a natural body part into a club to beat black women back into line and force them to spend huge amounts of money to keep their hair nice and straight and as white-looking as possible. It was literally the first time I'd had even the slightest clue that even the cosmetics and hairdressing industry had a deep anti-black bias, or heard of Madame C.J. Walker, and I was so impressed I renewed my subscription for an additional year in hopes that there would be more where that came from.
It wasn't to be, unfortunately, and then Wingding was laid off and we entered the Lost Decade, where we had to struggle for every dollar, my mother succumbed to Alzheimer's, and the best of Wingding died with his beloved grandmother. It was an awful time, when survival was all, and the last thing either of us needed was tenured professors and professional activists lecturing us in print about How Life Needed To Change when we were facing illness, foreclosure, and the death of far too many relatives one right after the other. Real life bore little resemblance to what we were reading in Zeta, and so we let our subscription lapse with little notice and no regret.
There our relationship with Zeta or Z or whatever name they go by now ended, and aside from that one article I didn't give the magazine a single thought for many, many years. Then I found out that one of the most revered contributors to Zeta had become unwittingly involved in an academic dispute in another country that included an unsavory stew of Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and some really unfortunate free speech absolutism. And if that weren't enough, that selfsame eminence gris had been embroiled in denying a second genocide, this one a good decade before Zeta hit the newsstands in and around Harvard Square.
What comes next is going to sound very harsh indeed, and I apologize in advance for upsetting anyone reading this diary. However, the plain truth is that if I'd known then what I know now, my attempt at gaslighting demographical analysis would have ended with Mother Jones.
Tonight I only bring you one book, but it's as wretched as an example of History So Bad It's Physically Revolting as it's possible get. The author, who began as a perfectly ordinary French academic with leftist sympathies, not only dove straight into the muck of far-right antisemitism, he dragged an American legend down the sewer pipe with him:
Mémoire en defense (Statement of Defense), by Robert Faurisson – like so many authors who appear in these diaries, there is absolutely nothing in Robert Faurisson's early life or career to indicate that he would one day write anything even slightly problematic, let alone ignite a major controvery. Born in England just before the Great Depression to Frenchman and his Scottish wife, Faurisson grew up in France during the 1930's and 1940's. He proved to be an excellent student, with particular expertise in literature and the classics, and it was no surprise that he passed the French teacher's exam with no difficulty in 1956, obtained a doctorate in 1972, and settled down to what should have been a secure university post in Lyon in 1973.
Nor is it much of a surprise when the young Faurisson had a brush radical politics in the early 1960's. French academia had little use for colonialism, and Faurisson was not the only ardent graduate student to be arrested on suspicion of terrorism for involvement in the OAS, a radical group that supported the Algérie francaise movement in its struggle to free the North African country from the colonial yoke. It's not even particularly noteworthy that Faurisson published an analysis of Arthur Rimbaud's Sonnet des voyelles as a piece of erotica, not a poem about vowels. A startling number of young scholars in France, America, and plenty of other countries come up with similar interpretations of everything from nursery rhymes to Sherlock Holmes, whether thanks to youthful hormones or a determination to wring every drop of meaning out of seemingly innocuous texts.
What is unusual is that just about the time Robert Faurisson landed that cushy teaching position in Lyon, he also became a Holocaust denier.
Just why or how this happened isn't clear. Claiming that Rimbaud wrote sexy poetry is not precisely the normal background for someone who thinks that Nazi atrocities were all a hoax perpetrated by unknown people for unknown reasons, and never mind all the Allied soldiers like my uncle Lou who had the traumatic experience of seeing a concentration camp right after it surrendered. Become a denier Faurisson did, however, beginning with a long and excessively clever letter to Yad Vashem where he laid out in excruciating detail just why his personal research proved definitively that the archival evidence was flawed, the witnesses had all lied, and the deaths of millions of European Jews (and presumably Roma, Sinti, Slavs, and all those political prisoners) were thanks to disease and coincidence, not a planned effort to eradicate untermenschen from the face of the Earth.
Needless to say, the staff at Yad Vashem was neither convinced nor impressed. Neither was the scholarly community as a whole. The Nazis had left literally millions of pieces of evidence that yes, they'd done their very best to obliterate Ashkenazic Jewry wherever they found it, and yes, that did include Robert Faurisson's home country. The idea that the Holocaust never took place was the province of cranks and neo-Nazis, not respectable scholars.
Alas for Faurisson's academic reputation, the province of cranks was exactly where he ventured next. Not content with trying to goad Yad Vashem into a debate, he spent much of the next several years writing and lecturing on behalf of the notorious Institute for Historical Review, which attempted to demonstrate that the Holocaust was the greatest lie of the twentieth century. This included testifying twice as an expert witness on behalf of Canadian Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel in his lawsuits with survivors (spoiler: Zündel lost), as well as laying the intellectual groundwork for the infamous Leuchter Report, a laughably inept “forensic analysis” by an American “expert” that purportedly proved that the gas chambers were a hoax (spoiler: they weren't)
Faurisson then turned his scholarly ire upon, God help us all, The Diary of Anne Frank. His 1978 “The Diary of Anne Frank – Is It Authentic?” claimed that the classic eyewitness account by a Dutch teenager was a forgery based on (once again) Faurisson's own unique brand of textual analysis. That Faurisson also blithely ignored the layout and architectural details of the Frank family's hiding place, or his misquoting of Anne's father Otto led to a lawsuit against Faurisson's publisher (spoiler: the publisher lost), made little difference. Faurisson was convinced he was right, evidence be damned, and that was that.
If that weren't bad enough, Faurisson followed up by sending yet more letters to Le Monde, this time claiming that the gas chambers did not exist. He even went on TV and said so in an interview that netted him a conviction for inciting race hatred, a three month jail sentence, and a hefty fine roughly equivalent to €3200.
Needless to say, this judgment did not sit well with the intellectual elite. Faurisson's views were loathsome, absolutely no question, but the judgment came far too close to suppression of unpopular speech than was comfortable. Nearly 600 leading scholars, professors, and intellectuals, including Serge Thion, Mark Weber, and Noam Chomsky signed a petition denouncing the judgment, calling Faurisson's legal troubles “a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence,” a “crude attempt to silence him,” and an “effor[t] to deprive [him] of his freedom of speech and expression.” The petition further claimed that “Fearful public officials” had attempted to stop Faurisson from performing his academic research by denying him access to libraries and archives (spoiler: they didn't, see below).
French intellectuals who were familiar with Faurisson's denialism and ties to neo-Nazis were outraged. They were particularly angry that such a well known political theorist as Noam Chomsky got involved, especially since Faurisson's “research” was so skewed as to verge on outright falsehood. One scholar, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, point black accused Faurisson of forgery, then pointed out that the only archive that had banned Faurisson was the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, which seemed entirely reasonable given their mission to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. Chomsky, who's never backed away from a fight, fired back in an essay, “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression,” which stated that even if Faurisson were an anti-Semite, the principle of freedom of speech required that he be allowed to say so.
There the matter might – might – have rested. Except that Faurisson decided to publish yet another denialist work, Mémoire en defense, and that was when the merde really hit the ventileur.
The book itself is not particularly noteworthy, any more than the average piece of Holocaust-denying junk. Faurisson was attempting to defend himself and his views, and unless one was another Holocaust denier he basically failed, which is not a surprise given the sheer quantity of evidence yes, Adolf Hitler and his devoted followers devoted precious time, manpower, and war materiel to obliterating several million people simply because they were bigots. There are probably neo-Nazis who think “oo, French intellectual who agrees with me, awesome!” but the average reader will beg to disagree.
The introduction is another matter entirely. Chosen by Faurisson defenders Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume, it is not only is it a ringing defense of free speech regardless of merit or truth, it contains a strangely apropos passage defending Faurisson himself. “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.... I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work,” wrote the distinguished author, who then doubled down by claiming that he viewed Faurisson not as the expert witness who'd backed Ernst Zündel in court, bated the world's leading Holocaust museum, and called Anne Frank's father a liar, but as “a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”
That the distinguished author had not actually known that Thion and Guillaume planned to use his essay as an introduction to Mémoire en defense did not seem to matter to Faurisson. The author in question had already publicly stated that he had no problem with this particular essay being used by anyone who had a printing press. For it seems that Thion and Guillaume had taken Chomsky at his word and used “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression” to introduce Faurisson's latest piece of denialism without bothering to inform Noam Chomsky.
Oops.
Vidal-Naquet was not the only French scholar who thought that Chomsky should have stayed out of what quickly became known as L'Affaire Faurisson, especially since Chomsky's essay/introduction made it clear he wasn't overly familiar with Faurisson's work to begin with. Nor was this the first time that Chomsky had been associated with the denial of a genocide. He and his friend Edward S. Herman had published a 1977 article in The Nation that severely critiqued the reports filtering out of Cambodia that something really awful had happened in the wake of the Communist revolution. The reports ranged from “the Khmer Rouge are engaging in genocide against their own people” to “there's been some collateral damage but beware of anti-revolutionary propaganda, especially accounts by refugees who might have worked for the Sihanouk regime,” and Chomsky and Herman were skeptical that the rumors of wholesale slaughter had much basis in fact.
Now. Based on what was definitively known in 1977, they might have had a point. Initial accounts of tragedies and atrocities are often inaccurate or even completely fictional – just look at the stories from the Great War about Belgian babies having their hands cut off, which are ever so much juicier than actual horrors like the needless destruction of the University of Louvain – and former members of an undemocratic regime obviously would have an axe to grind. However, the sheer number of stories about the Killing Fields, and the wealth of details provided by refugees, made Chomsky and Herman look like they were deliberately ignoring first-hand accounts purely on political grounds. Worse, they reserved their praise for works that depended heavily on information suplied by the Khmer Rouge and their major backer, the Chinese government, that touted the great achievements of the Khmer Rouge in reforming Cambodian society. Chomsky then proceeding to write numerous letters to leading editors and publications warning that Cambodian refugees could not be trusted (spoiler: they could), some nearly as long as Faurisson's missive to Yad Vashem, did not help matters at all.
I have been unable to determine if Robert Faurisson or anyone associated with him knew about this sordid little episode in Noam Chomsky's otherwise distinguished career before he was asked to sign the petition defending Faurisson's free speech rights. Faurisson (or Thion, or Guillaume) might well have assumed that someone who rejected the idea of the Killing Fields would be equally open to questioning the Holocaust (spoiler: Chomsky wasn't). He'd previously denounced the Holocaust as “the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history,” and stated that his defense of Faurisson's right to speak did not mean that he agreed with the Frenchman in any way. All he cared about was free expression, period, no matter how loathsome the opinions expressed might be.
That wasn't good enough for Pierre Vidal-Naquet. He went after Chomsky for allegedly defending Faurisson (spoiler: he didn't), in the following masterful if not entirely accurate denunciation:
“The simple truth, Noam Chomsky, is that you were unable to abide by the ethical maxim you had imposed. You had the right to say: my worst enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death or that of my brothers. You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy is a comrade, or a 'relatively apolitical sort of liberal.' You did not have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the colors of truth.” He then went on to offer several examples of Faurisson's personal antisemitism, including a claim that requiring Jewish children to wear the yellow star was “less concerned with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of German soldiers.”
So the debate raged, primarily but not entirely in France. Chomsky was a self-loathing Jew! He was dangerously naive! Faurisson had the right to speak! Americans needed to butt out! Denialists were motivated not by intellectual integrity but by racism! Faurisson needed to shut up! It's all political! No, it's not! Liar! Forger! Free speech! Genocide....
And so and so on and so on, to the point where even the legendarily combative French intelligentsia gave up, seemingly out of sheer exhaustion. Oh, Faurisson continued to make trouble – he claimed that “Hitler never ordered nor permitted that anyone be killed by reason of his race or religion” (spoiler: so very, very wrong) and got hit with another court fine – but his academic career continued until the French government finally made Holocaust denial a crime in 1990. Faurisson was promptly tried under the new law, convicted, and fired from his university position, and despite an appeal to the United Nations Human Rights Committee the dismissal stuck.
That didn't completely stop him from continuing to support Holocaust denial whenever he could. Most notably, Faurisson shifted to supporting the Iranian government's denialist position with a series of interviews and speeches in the 2000's. The French government fined him again for Holocaust denial, this time to the tune of €7500, but far be it from Faurisson to shut up despite advancing age and a ruined career. He celebrated his 80th birthday by appearing on a broadcast with French shock comedian/political activist Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, who had an assistant dressed in a concentration camp uniform present the crusty old man with an award for being an “insolent outcast.”
This time it was Dieudonné M'bala M'bala who got a slap from the French court for Holocaust denial, not that Faurisson particularly seemed to care. He was a hero in Iran, after all, and that made up for much. He was particularly pleased when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presented him with the equivalent of a Profile in Courage for his work in 2012, six years before he finally expired in 2018.
As for Noam Chomsky, he was (and probably still is) not pleased by the French response to his defense of Robert Faurisson's free speech rights. He claimed that the French simply did not understand free speech (spoiler: they do), that Faurisson's ordeal “was the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will affirm historical truth and punish deviation from it” (spoiler: not really), and accused those who did not rush to Faurisson's defense of “divert[ing] attention” from the issues at hand “with a flood of outrageous lies.” He might have had a point when it came to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, but the irony of claiming that Robert Faurisson's trouble stemmed from “Stalinist-Nazi doctrines” instead of his own work is, shall we say, fascinating.
Regardless, Chomsky's participation in L'Affaire doesn't seem to have hurt his reputation much if at all, at least in the United States. His biographers' reactions have ranged from gently chiding him for being naive to viewing the entire mess as evidence of unbreakable commitment to academic freedom, pointing out that Chomsky had also defended the right of Vietnam War architect Walter Rostow to teach at MIT despite his personal opposition to the war. Chomsky himself wrote an essay for The Nation (of course) where he once again pointed out the difference between supporting the right of an individual to say horrible things and agreeing with them, and that seems to be his final position on the matter.
As for Holocaust denial itself, it is unfortunately alive and well and flourishing throughout the world. Whether this is thanks in part to the work of Robert Faurisson is impossible to determine, but it's certainly not impossible. If anything, a French-trained intellectual would almost certainly have some lingering influence, at least in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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Have you ever heard of this less than delightsome incident in the life of Noam Chomsky? Been glad you didn't know about it when you subscribed to Zeta? Ever even heard of Zeta? Decided to drive demographers crazy by doing the unexpected? Have you read anything by Robert Faurisson? It's a steamy summer night in New England, so maintain your social distance and share....
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