Die drei Raben

Criticizing the equivocal: Noam Chomsky, Critics, and Reddit

silentiumau find's faults with Krauts video in two "major" areas; 1) that he confuses Bosnian Serbs / Republika Srpska with Serbians residing in Serbia / Milošević regime and 2) accused Milošević's Serbia of planning to commit genocide against Albanians in Kosovo. These are areas I considered places of artistic license in helping Kraut, if removed they wouldn't have really served as his original work. But I generally find them irrelevant to the larger picture. What I do find interesting is his "nitpicks" section - which is relevant to my contributions to Krauts video.

Back in 2006, Noam Chomsky cited the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report titled "Srebrenica, a Safe Area Reconstruction, Background, Consequences and Analyses of the Fall of a Safe Area" as a 'Dutch government' report, which it is not. He explicitly claimed, to a New Statesman reporter:

So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible - their troops were there - and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick. (emphasis added)

Elsewhere, in his RTS interview with Danilo Mandic, Chomsky made the exact same claim: 

Now, there is a little problem with that: namely there was an extensive, detailed inquiry into it by the Dutch Government, which was the responsible government, there were Dutch forces there, that’s a big, you know, hundreds of pages inquiry, and their conclusion is that Milosevic did not know anything about that, and that when it was discovered in Belgrade, they were horrified. Well, suppose that had entered into the testimony? (emphasis added)

silentiumau replies to Kraut's accusation that Chomsky misrepresented the report is as follows:

Well, what exactly is "not true" here? There seems to be a motte and bailey going on:

• On the one hand, yes, it is "not true" that the Dutch Report "concluded that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it." The Report at most states that it is "not known whether Milosevic had any knowledge." 

• On the other hand, the Report most certainly does not say the opposite, that Milosevic ordered it and thereby had knowledge of it. 

So this seems to be a case of Chomsky misreading or misinterpreting a source. Which is something that should be called out, but is hardly a sign of anything nefarious. Especially since Kraut misreads sources fairly often, as we'll see in the next example.

silentiumau seems confused. This is the relevant excerpt from the "Dutch Report":

It is also not known whether Milosevic had any knowledge of the continuing Bosnian-Serb offensive that resulted in the occupation of the enclave. After the fall of the enclave, Milosevic made no mention to that effect to the UN envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg – he was too much of a poker player to reveal anything. On the other hand, Milosevic did express himself clearly later, in 1996, when he dropped the question to a group of Bosnian-Serb entrepreneurs as to ‘what idiot’ had made the decision to attack Srebrenica while it hosted international troops when it was obvious that, in any event, the enclave would eventually have been bled dry or become depopulated. It is not clear to what extent that statement had been intended to clear his responsibility for those events. (emphasis added)

In Chomsky's version the report 'acquitted' Milošević in relation to Srebrenica, and showed he was "horrified", but the report states this statement was "intended" to "clear his responsibility for those events." The problem was never the report that it claimed he "ordered" it. It's the conclusion of the report is inconclusive. So most of this argument is built on inaccurate assumptions. Nor was Kraut trying to allege that Milošević "ordered" Srebrenica. 

What of the "UK Parliamentary Report"? silentiumau says that Kraut "totally misread that part of the report".  Actually, he didn't (nor was it "totally misread" but I'll return this later), this error lies at my feet. Though we should probably quote Chomsky's own words first:

The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas. (Emphasis added)

Now Chomsky is explicitly alleging a "British parliamentary inquiry" has established "most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas".  Now, there is two relevant House of Commons reports (Foreign Affair and Defense), and this "astonishing conclusion" appears in neither. What likely influenced Chomsky's claim was the following excerpt from the Defense report:

The Foreign Secretary told the House on 18 January 1999 that— "On its part, the Kosovo Liberation Army has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces." (Emphasis added)

What's important is Chomsky's claim that "most of the [war] crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas" is not reflected in this comment. Now, I must admit, when I first read this I reached the mistaken conclusion that Chomsky must've just made the mistake of confusing the issue of ceasefire breaches and "crimes against insert group". However, the correction is Chomsky assuming the Foreign Secretary comment, which was only relevant for the time period between 16 October 1998 and 15 January 1999, showed the KLA was responsible for "more [war] crimes" than Serbian "security forces" up to January 1999. silentiumau analysis of this quote is as follows:

1. the KLA not only committed more ceasefire breaches than the Yugoslav (i.e., Serbian) security forces

2. but also "was responsible for more deaths" than the Serbians!

Meaning he believes it corroborates Chomsky's claim, which it certainty doesn't. First off, "more deaths" is all-inclusive. Second, Chomsky does not clarify this quote was only relevant for a three-month period. Third, "until this weekend" was in relation to the Račak massacre (which Chomsky was aware of) where 45 Albanians were killed by Serb forces. Now, Kraut's mistake was he showed the wrong quotes at 12:48 of his video. This was outside my control. 

(Update: In conversation on Reddit silentiumau agreed that this quote didn't confirm Chomsky's claim.)

Just so it cannot be alleged that I only learned of this quote from silentiumau, here is a screenshot from October 3rd from Mett (where he copied what I wrote in a DM group that I have since left):

Now, let me cover what I see as the last relevant bit of silentiumau's critique. I will quote at length in this instance:

I'll close by repeating what I wrote elsewhere recently:

What I hate about the "HE DENIES THE BOSNIAN GENOCIDE!" crowd is that when they say that, they want you to think that Chomsky is engaging in something beyond the pale like Holocaust Denial and is therefore a nutjob.

Except, Chomsky acknowledges that Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8000 Bosniaks:

To repeat, in that article there is not a word, not a hint, about the two issues of obsessive concern to western intellectuals – 8000 outright murders without provocation in Srebrenica, and assignment of responsibility for perhaps 1 million deaths in Rwanda.

His opinion is that:

The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it “genocide” so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion. It amazes me that intelligent people cannot see that.

https://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/

You can strongly disagree with Chomsky's opinion. You can call it dumb or whatever. But to call that opinion "genocide denial" shows an utter inability to discern nuance.

I heavily disagree with silentiumau in this instance. Chomsky, at this time, was under fire for writing the forward to The Politics of Genocide - written by his past co-author Edward Herman (and David Peterson).  A work which denies both the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides and he praised the final conclusion that:

[d]uring the past several decades, the word ‘genocide’ has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th Century for which the term originally was coined often appears debased.

I feel in his email exchange with Monbiot, Chomsky was reserved about his positions. In 2013 he'd go on to contradict silentiumau's claim that he "acknowledges that Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8000 Bosniaks". In Chomsky's own words:

Jonathan Freedland: Well you say a "couple of thousand", but people claim and would argue that the figure is much higher then that.

Noam Chomsky: Well, the figures debated. But then you don't really know. I mean the highest figures that are given are around 8,000. There has been an intensive effort... when enemies carry out an atrocity, this huge effort that goes into finding every piece of a bone and DNA analysis and try to get the biggest number you can. When we carry out a comparable atrocity no one even investigates it.

Jonathan Freedland: And the Bosnian woman, who wrote to me on Twitter, said that you were often cited by Serb propaganda. "That professor Chomsky agrees with us." Does that trouble you if you were being held up in prayed in aid by the Serbs?

Noam Chomsky: I'm quoted by Iranian propaganda because I say things critical about the United States. [I] can't help that. I can't help what they do, but I think we otta tell the truth about it. The truth is it was an atrocity, [but] nothing like what is claimed in the British press. Bad atrocity. (...)

silentiumau in a comment writes: 

Do you notice how in the first 30 minutes of the video, when Kraut debunks Chomsky's claims, he actually goes to the sources that Chomsky cites and tries to argue that they don't say what Chomsky claimed they said? 

Do you notice how in the last 15 minutes of the video, Kraut didn't do that? Chomsky cited Phillip Knightley, and Kraut didn't read out anything from Knightley. Hmm, could that be because in this case, Chomsky cited Knightley accurately?

No, the reason why Kraut didn't discuss Philip Knightley is that I didn't think it was that important. It's easy to moralize about the Living Marxism controversy because the magazine's case was easily refuted. David Campbell wrote a two-part essay in the Journal of Human Rights back in 2002 demonstrating as much.

But what about Philip Knightley? Searching http://chomsky.info/ one can discover, in a retracted interview from the Guardian, Chomsky stating:

You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and ‘we can’t have Auschwitz again.’ The intellectuals went crazy and the French were posturing on television and the usual antics. Well, you know, it was investigated and carefully investigated. In fact it was investigated by the leading Western specialist on the topic, Philip Knightly, who is a highly respected media analyst and his specialty is photo journalism, probably the most famous Western and most respected Western analyst in this. He did a detailed analysis of it. And he determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on, well and there was one tiny newspaper in England, probably three people, called LM which ran a critique of this, and the British (who haven’t a slightest concept of freedom of speech, that is a total fraud)…a major corporation, ITN, a big media corporation had publicized this, so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper for lible. Now the British lible laws were absolutely atrocious. The person accused has to prove that the, what he’s reporting is not done in malice and he can’t prove that. So and in fact when you have a huge corporation with batteries of lawyers and so on, carrying out a suit against the three people in the office, who probably don’t have the pocket-money, it’s obvious what is going to happen. Especially under these grotesque lible laws.

Now, ignoring that Philip Knightley's name is spelled wrong, what did Knightley say about the photograph of Fikret Alic? A 2000s Guardian article record Knightly stating: 

Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, a book about how truth has been distorted through wars throughout the ages. He believes Deichmann may have gone too far but did raise a legitimate concern: "The case shows the problems of war journalism. It's too easy to take one single incident and use that as a base to generalise about what's happening everywhere.

"In television journalism, it's risky to allow one seductive image to drive the story and to mould the story around that seductive image."

For those with no direct experience of the wars that stained the last century, it is the defining image that conveys the suffering and emotion far better and with greater ease than reading thousands of words.

The defining image of the Spanish civil war was taken by Robert Capa in 1936, and was portrayed as showing a Republican soldier at the exact moment he was shot.

Knightley says the way this image was portrayed was misleading and illustrates the dangers of war reporting: "I spent six months looking into it and no one wanted to talk about it. I was told the negatives had been lost."

Capa's picture appeared in Life magazine a year after he sent it back from the battlefield, and only then did the caption contextualise it as showing the death of a soldier: "It could be a Republican soldier slipping over in a field," says Knightley.

Meaning Knightley was mostly concerned that people's interpretation of the war would be formulated by a single still.  But according to Chomsky, Knightley concluded "it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire" and the photograph staged. Where did Chomsky get this impression? Well, we have communication between Knightley on Helene Guldberg, who was the owner of Living Marxism.  Knightley's 'analysis' can be read here. It didn't take long, to find that the aforementioned David Campbell had already detailed multiple flaws in Knightley's 'analysis' as presented on the website. Knightly in his 'analysis' makes unsupported assumptions about the reporters, saying Fikret Alic's photograph played center stage in their reporting:

I have no way of knowing what the ITN team members said or decided when they were compiling their report after their visit to Trnopolje. But I know enough about television war reporting to be able to say that once they saw the image their camerman had captured of an emaciated Fikret Alic with the stand of barbed wire across his chest, that image then drove and dominated their report. Their words were chosen to fit the image whether the facts justified them or not. (Emphasis added)

But as Campbell states "the sequence of Fikret Alic at the barbed wire fence runs for 20 seconds in Marshall’s story and a mere five seconds in Williams’." So, Alic did not “dr[i]ve and dominate” the existing reports. Knightly in his 'analysis' conflates the phrase "concentration camp" with images of Auschwitz, thereby stating Trnopolje "was not a concentration camp in the Second World War sense.” Once again, Campbell, on point, states this "betrays an impoverished historical knowledge about the phenomenon both of concentration camps generally and the vast Nazi system of labour". Knightly also further claims the photograph "changed the course of the war". Which is, again, completely unfounded.

Closing thoughts

While some criticism's levied by silentiumau are interesting, Kraut is allowed to think outside the framework of the legal process even if I disagree with his choices. All of his "nitpicks" have been shown to be nonsequiturs or just wrong. Hopefully, this was interesting for the readers.

Notice: This is not the final version, but it is complete. I'll eventually go over it and run through the necessary corrections in grammar. This version should be seen as a draft.

Appendix - Transcript of Noam Chomsky's interview with John Freedland