Faurisson affair

The Faurisson affair was an academic controversy following publication of a book, Mémoire en défense (1980), by French professor Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier, and the inclusion of an essay by American linguist Noam Chomsky, entitled "Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression", as an introduction to Faurisson's book.

Faurisson has since been convicted under French law for his Holocaust denial on several occasions, including in October 2006, when he was sentenced to a three-month suspended sentence by the Paris correctional court, for denying the Holocaust on an Iranian TV channel.

The Faurisson affair damaged Chomsky's reputation in France, a country he did not visit for almost thirty years following the affair. Translation of his political writings into French was delayed until the 2000s.

In December 1978 and January 1979, Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon, published two letters in Le Monde claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews did not exist.

As a result of a TV interview, he was found guilty of defamation and incitement to racial hatred and given a suspended 3-month prison term, and a 21,000-franc (€3,200) fine. In addition he was ordered to pay for the reproduction of the judgement in national newspapers and television. This latter requirement was dropped after he appealed.

In the fall of 1979, American scholar Noam Chomsky contributed his name to a petition—signed by roughly 600 people, many disgraced academics, including Holocaust deniers Serge Thion, Arthur Butz, John Tuson Bennett and Mark Weber—concerning the affair:

A number of French intellectuals criticized Chomsky's signing of the petition, describing the extent of Faurisson's Holocaust denial and his ties to neo-Nazi groups. In particular, Pierre Vidal-Naquet criticized the wording of the petition as "scandalous", saying that it implied Faurisson was a serious researcher and not a forger:

Vidal-Naquet said that Faurisson was not barred from access to public libraries or archives, and the only archive to ban him was the private Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris. Vidal-Naquet believed that decision was entirely consistent with its declared mission, "the fact that the staff of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, challenged in its fundamental activity, that of the memory of the crime, should --after years of forbearance-- refuse to serve Faurisson seems perfectly normal to me".

Chomsky subsequently wrote an essay entitled Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression, in which he attacked his critics for failing to respect the principle of freedom of speech. Chomsky wrote:

Chomsky granted permission for the essay to be used for any purpose. Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume used it in 1980 as a preface when publishing a book by Faurisson, without Chomsky's knowledge. Later Chomsky requested that the essay not be used in this manner, since he believed the French intellectual community was so incapable of understanding freedom of speech that it would only confuse them further, but his request came too late for the book to be changed. Chomsky subsequently said that asking for the preface to be removed is his one regret in the matter.

Chomsky's essay sparked an even greater controversy. Critics such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet attacked him for defending Faurisson personally against charges of anti-Semitism and upholding his work as historical inquiry:

Vidal-Naquet offered the following argument to substantiate his characterization of Faurisson as an anti-semite:

John Goldsmith writes that "Unsympathetic critics used it as an opportunity to brand Chomsky with anti-Semitic labels, but even critics potentially sympathetic to Chomsky's political views felt his remarks showed lack of judgment."

Other critics held that Faurisson's statements were the archetype of anti-Semitism, and that the logical conclusion of Chomsky's statement would be that Nazism was not anti-Semitic. The main argument for this is that Holocaust deniers are not interested in truth, but "motivated by racism, extremism, and virulent anti-Semitism".

Responding to a request for comment, Chomsky doubled down, arguing that Faurisson's right to express and publish his opinions on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints. The affair generated controversy among scholars both in France and the United States.

In a response to a letter circa 1989–1991, Chomsky said:

In "His Right to Say It", published in The Nation, Chomsky stressed the conceptual distinction between endorsing someone's view and defending his right to say it:

Chomsky's defense was attacked in turn. Critics said that his defense went beyond free speech arguments, and that it included a defense of Faurisson's "work".

Chomsky's biographers have expressed a range of views on the Faurisson affair. In Chomsky: Ideas and ideals, Neil Smith writes: 'Chomsky should perhaps have foreseen the negative effect of his activity and refrained from writing the way he did. Perhaps, but on balance perhaps not. Even had he seen the furore which would erupt and the degree that would ensue, the moral doctrine of defending freedom of speech is probably higher.'

In Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, Robert Barsky says 'Chomsky's tactics may not always be the most appropriate in light of the causes that he supports but the values transmitted by his work are, according to virtually any reasonable measure, consistent with those of the libertarians.' Barsky also points out that although the Faurisson affair 'has had a harmful and lasting effect on Chomsky ... Chomsky has refused to back down on the issue, even refusing to admit a momentary lack of judgment.'

Two other biographers, Milan Rai and Chris Knight, both refer to the Faurisson affair in the context of Chomsky's uncompromising support for academic freedom for everyone including 'war criminals'. In Chomsky's Politics, Milan Rai quotes Chomsky saying that he even 'supported the rights of American war criminals not only to speak and teach but also to conduct their research, on grounds of academic freedom, at a time when their work was being used to murder and destroy.'

In Decoding Chomsky, Chris Knight refers to Chomsky's 1969 threat to 'protest publicly' if fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) academic Walt Whitman Rostow was denied a position at the university. Chomsky certainly considered Rostow, a prime architect of the Vietnam War, as a 'war criminal' but insisted that MIT must stick to its principles of academic freedom - principles expressed when MIT's President Howard Wesley Johnson stated that the university should be a 'refuge from the censor, where any individual can pursue truth as he sees it, without any interference.' Johnson's motivation for talking about academic freedom at this time of anti-war student unrest was largely to prevent any interference with MIT's various military-funded research laboratories. But, Knight claims, Chomsky also believed he had to extend the principle of academic freedom to unusual lengths because any 'less libertarian policy might have undermined his own conflicted position as an anti-war campaigner working in a laboratory funded by the US military.' Knight concludes that Chomsky's subsequent position on Faurisson 'did not imply any sympathy towards Holocaust denial. It was simply a logical extension of a principle common to all Western universities – one which his management at MIT felt obliged to uphold with special tenacity in view of what its own researchers were doing.'

Paul Berman, writing in Tablet in 2018, says that Chomsky's biographers have largely accepted his claim that his defense of Faurisson was entirely on free speech grounds, and that Chomsky did not defend Faurisson's actual positions or arguments. Berman, however, argues that Chomsky did in fact defend Faurisson substantively. Berman says that Chomsky adopted an "oddly respectful tone toward Faurisson" and that he "left the clear implication that Faurisson is a scientific-minded researcher, with conclusions or findings that ought to be accorded the kind of respect that is accorded to any authentically scientific researcher."

• Vérité Historique ou Vérité Politique Archived 2012-11-03 at the Wayback Machine - Serge Thion, November 1979
• Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression Archived 2007-10-06 at the Wayback Machine — Noam Chomsky, October 1980
• His Right to Say It Archived 2014-10-10 at the Wayback Machine — Noam Chomsky, The Nation, February 1981
• The Denial of the Dead — Nadine Fresco, Les Temps Modernes, June 1980 (revised 1981)
• A Paper Eichmann — Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Esprit, September 1980 (revised 1992)
• On Faurisson and Chomsky — Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Democracy, April 1981 (revised 1987)
• Partners in Hate — Werner Cohn (includes the text of the petition signed by Chomsky in the fall of 1979)
  • Reply to Werner Cohn Archived 2005-02-04 at the Wayback Machine — Noam Chomsky, Outlook, June 1989
• The Chorus and the Cassandra — Christopher Hitchens, Grand Street, Autumn 1985

Video

• Noam Chomsky, Holocaust denier? from Manufacturing Consent
• Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate Christopher Hitchens, University of Toronto