Let's talk about Noam Chomsky from the point of view of a Bernie Sanders supporter, progressive, and a Bosnian-American. (Thread).
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.
After the reporters published their findings, some of the prisoners were shipped to different concentration camps, which were often much worse than Trnopolje. Others were taken out for execution.
One example is the Koricani Cliffs Massacre (Aug. 21, 1992). Over 200 Bosnian prisoners were taken from the Trnopolje concentration camp and were told they were part of a prisoner exchange.
The men were taken to the cliffs of Mount Vlasic and were executed by being shot in the back while kneeling on the edge of the ravine. One of the men being executed was Mujo Alic, Fikret Alic's own cousin.
Question for Chomsky: What kind of a "refugee camp" or "place where people were free to leave" involves being told you are part of a PRISONER exchange and being taken away for execution?
About three years ago, Bosnia's Institute for Missing Persons uncovered the remains of 137 people at the ravine. During the previous exhumations, the Institute uncovered the remains of 117 people.
During his time as prisoner of the Trnopolje concentration camp, Dr. Idriz kept a small hidden camera. When the reporters came, he was able to hand over the camera, containing undeveloped film, to reporter Penny Marshall and she hid it under her jacket.
Using the camera he kept hidden, Dr. Idriz had taken pictures of the beaten and tortured Bosnians who had been brought for his treatment.
Dr. Idriz's testimony was so powerful that the defense did not even bother to try to cross-examine him. LM did not put forth even one witness who had visited the concentration camp they claimed was fake. The 12-member jury returned a 12-0 verdict against LM.
Although some individuals had retracted their support for LM after their embarrassing display in court, Chomsky has not. In fact, in 2006, he gave an interview to a Serb television station where he repeated the same obvious falsehoods as before.
What's hypocritical about Chomsky is that he would (rightly) argue that western governments downplay the atrocities committed by the US but then he would go on to (wrongly) downplay or outright deny the suffering of groups of people when it supports his anti-imperialist stance.
Chomsky never mentions the countless testimonies of survivors & all of the rulings in courts that include the Int'l Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Int'l Court of Justice, US Court of Appeals (see Kadic v. Karadzic), & the Bosnian state courts.
Questions for Chomsky: Were all of the rulings in all of these different courts wrong? Were all of the survivors of these concentration camps just lying? Were all of the women who testified to rape just lying? What about all of the bones uncovered around the concentration camps?
Please watch this 46-minute documentary where survivors and journalists speak (it's worth taking the time to watch it):
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