Conversation

One of the most depressing aspects of being a progressive is seeing a cult-like following of Chomsky.

Clearly, Chomsky has made serious contributions on many issues. However, my own background, & the background of many others, will forever be a barrier to appreciating such work b/c his views on concentration camps & genocide in 1990s Bosnia are outright despicable & shameful.

For Chomsky, such views are not limited to Bosnia (e.g., Rwanda), but here I will focus on Bosnia b/c that's my area of expertise.

Unlike Germany in World War II, Serbia & the Bosnian Serb entity were not defeated in the 1990s (Western intervention stopped that) & were never forced to come to terms with the war crimes the Serbs committed in the 1990s.

In fact, for all the war crimes the Serbs committed in the 1990s, they were rewarded with their own entity in Bosnia. Thus, denial, including genocide denial, is a serious issue.

Chomsky has tremendously helped the nationalists who deny war crimes, including genocide, committed in Bosnia by giving them the fuel with which they can sustain themselves.

All of this is done by Chomsky out of sheer ignorance, willful or otherwise. Indeed, Chomsky's pronunciations of the names of major Bosnian towns is laughably incorrect.

The Aug. 17, 1992 issue of TIME featured an emaciated Bosnian prisoner named Fikret Alic. The image was based on the reporting of Ian Williams and Penny Marshall.

In 1997, Living Marxism magazine (LM) published an article titled "The Picture That Fooled the World" in which they questioned the two reporters over their 1992 report on the two concentration camps.

Please note how LM zoomed in on the top part of Alic to conceal his starved body.

LM was a magazine that had previously been known for opposing gun control after the massacre of a large number of school children in 1990s Scotland.

LM had also taken a far right-wing position on many other issues, including being against the protection of the environment, against the "nanny state," & against laws protecting animals from abuse.

The LM article had been based on Thomas Deichmann's Feb. 1997 article & attempt to defend war criminal Dusko Tadic (convicted 1997) where Deichmann unsuccessfully argued that the emaciated men were not prisoners but were refugees who were outside of the enclosure & free to leave.

Deichmann had no experience of the war and his argument had not been made by anyone during the war. In fact, in preparing his article he had only interviewed the Serb guards that ran the concentration camps and local Serbs.

Deichmann made no attempts to interview a single prisoner of the concentration camp. He did not interview Alic or Dr. Idriz (we'll talk about him soon).

The completely flimsy foundation (Deichmann) upon which LM's argument had been based did not bother Chomsky. But it gets much worse.

ITN and reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams sued LM for libel. The trial began on Feb. 28, 2000.

At no point during the trial did LM show even the slightest degree of credibility. The trial demonstrated that LM's article was completely without merit.

Deichmann had prepared for the court a misleading (as the jury would discover during the course of the trial) depiction/map of Trnopolje concentration camp. In the depiction, he showed the fence that continued on the east side but suddenly stopped half way through.

The jury asked: Why did the fence on the east side of the camp suddenly discontinue to leave a gap?

The basic response of Deichmann was that he did not have ITN's footage of that part of the concentration camp and so he simply left the fence out of the map.

However, ITN's footage included abundant views of the east side of the concentration camp which clearly showed a fence.

Deichmann eventually admitted that he had not seen the full footage since it was first released in 1992. Thus, he was creating maps, writing articles, and defending later convicted war criminals on a 5+ year old memory that was clearly incorrect.

Deichmann's argument that the prisoners were free to leave turned out to be completely idiotic. But the argument lacks a lot of relevance given the documented torture, rape, and killings that took place in the Trnopolje concentration camp.

At no point did LM try to focus on the victims of the concentration camp.

One of ITN's witnesses was Dr. Idriz Merdzanic. In May 1992, he was captured by the Serb army and taken to the Trnopolje concentration camp where he was forced to treat the Bosnians who the Serbs had beaten and tortured.

He slept on the floor, with no electricity, no water, and no medicine. His area was a hall away from where Serbs took Bosnians for beatings and torture. He heard their screams. At night, the women were raped.

Dr. Idriz was in the same area as another two doctors. The other two doctors would later be transferred to the Omarka concentration camp, where Serbs tortured Bosnians in some of the most sadistic ways imaginable.

One of those doctors would end up being murdered in the Omarska concentration camp.

Dr. Idriz testified that before the arrival of the reporters, steps were taken to rapidly improve the concentration camp and the same happened after the reporter's pictures and video of the camp came out.

Show replies

Replying to

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Thread Reader App

@threadreaderapp

Jun 23, 2020

Halo! here is your unroll:

Thread by @DINOin280: Let's talk about Noam Chomsky from the point of view of a Bernie Sanders...

: Let's talk about Noam Chomsky from the point of view of a Bernie Sanders supporter, progressive, and a… threadreaderapp.com/thread/1274725 Have a good day.

threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @DINOin280: Let's talk about Noam Chomsky from the point of view of a Bernie Sanders supporter, progressive, and a Bosnian-Americand). One of the most depressing aspects of being a progre...

Replying to

Great thread, Dino. Chomsky and his acolytes find it impossible to accept that US foreign policy might ever be possibly right, for whatever reason, so they have to deny the underlying facts.

@UnalSevilay

Jun 23, 2020

Replying to