The Chomsky - Casey - Hitchens Debate

Second Reply To Casey

Apologies to participants in the forum for wasting timethat is scarce and needed for important matters on such transparent nonsense,but I presume this will be the last time.

Casey's primary argument is that I am guilty of the crimeof "moral equivalence." He reaches this conclusion on the basis of mybrief "quick reaction" (as it is labeled) in response to queries fromjournalists immediately after the Sept. 11 atrocities. The moral equivalence isthis. There is a single sentence that mentions "Clinton's bombing of theSudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies andprobably killing tens of thousands of people," though how many "no oneknows" -- the primary reason being that the matter was considered souninteresting in the West that there was no careful investigation.

The rest of the "quick reaction" discussed theSept. 11 attacks, describing them as "major atrocities," committedwith "wickedness and awesome cruelty," noting that it "is not indoubt...that this was a horrendous crime."

According to Casey, this description of Sept. 11 is"morally equivalent" to a bare unadorned statement of the facts ofClinton's bombing. Since no sane person could accept this absurd conclusion, andCasey is surely sane, we conclude that he plainly does not mean what he issaying. The only explanation that comes to mind is that he seeking to cover upfor something else. What that is, he is kind enough to tell us, in his angrydenial of his responsibility for the crimes for which he is plainly responsible,as I am too, for exactly the reasons I stated, and will not repeat.

The rest of his letter attempts to conceal all of this witha cloud of distortions and irrelevancies, though fortunately he has dropped manyof the weirdest charges (e.g., that the most knowledgeable of the sources citedwas an "employee" who lived in Cairo, and therefore somehow lackscredibility). I will cite every example that I can find that is at all relevant.

Casey again claims to find a contradiction between theestimate that the destroyed plant produced 50% of Sudan's pharmaceuticalproducts and 90% of its "major" pharmaceutical products. Evidently,there is no contradiction. We can therefore dismiss his extensive fulminationsin an effort to obscure his original elementary error, now repeated.

Casey claims that by stating that Hitchens is obviously nota racist I was saying that he is a racist, disguising my intent by the fancifulmeans he suggests. By precisely the same logic, I was saying that Hitchensreally did believe that everything written by the nefariousChomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein alliance was directed to him personally and no oneelse; and I am now saying that Casey really does believe that Clinton's bombingof the Sudan was a "horrendous crime" committed with "wickednessand awesome cruelty, etc., which he claims -- but obviously does not believe --is "morally equivalent" to an unadorned statement of fact. Etc.Plainly, we may disregard all of this.

Casey claims that I proclaimed that Jonathan Belke"must be right" in his estimate that within a year tens of thousandshad "suffered and died" as a result of the atrocity that Casey islaboring so hard to deny. As he knows, from the outset I insisted on the preciseopposite: that that the numbers are not known and that all estimates musttherefore be speculative. It is quite possible that the estimate for the firstyear by the most knowledgeable of those cited is too low, as is suggested byother evidence that I have summarized elsewhere. We may dismiss this as well.

Casey triumphantly observes that there are differentversions of the "quick reaction" I sent to journalists, in response totheir queries, in the first days. Absolutely true, for one reason, because thequestions posed were different. Thus the first response does not include thelong final paragraph on ways to respond that is included in all the others.Furthermore, in response to queries from honest readers, I changed"killed" to "caused the death," the obvious meaning. And inresponse to others who noted a contradiction between my statement that deaths inthe Sudan were unknown and were greater than 6000, I changed "do not reachthe level" to "may not reach the level" (a significantunderstatement, according to the evidence available, which I partiallyreviewed). That's it.

Casey also claims that I was so embarrassed by thisstatement that I excluded it from composite interviews later posted. One minuteof research would have revealed to him that I had no hand at all in thecomposite interviews, put together by Michael Albert from many long and detailedinterviews in national media around the world, excluding all short responses,including this one. And two minutes of inquiry would have revealed to him thatin some of these later interviews, broadcast and posted weeks ago, I went intothe effects of the Sudan bombing in much more detail. And maybe three minuteswould have revealed that I have mentioned the crime repeatedly in earlier years,in the hope of eliciting some concern about it and interest in doing somethingconstructive, as I've done with regard to many other cases of severeconsequences of crimes for which we share responsibility and could mitigate ifwe chose, the continuing killing of innocents in Laos and Vietnam, forexample.

And a few weeks wait will reveal to Casey that in a shortbook to appear compiled from many interviews (9-11, Seven Stories press), thereis considerably more discussion and additional relevant evidence, included fortwo reasons: one, because although this is a very minor illustration of thecrimes for which Casey shares responsibility, nevertheless it had very severehuman consequences; and two, because of the hysterical reaction from Casey and afew others when the plain, elementary, easily available facts are presented,which provides us with some insight into certain elements of the society --marginal, fortunately.

The rest is hopelessly irrelevant to anything I wrote orsaid, so I will ignore it. If serious readers feel that I have overlookedsomething that is relevant, I'll be glad to consider it.

I will add only one comment, which, although a truism, isperhaps worth noting, since some, at least, do not seem to comprehend it. Tobegin with, if we are even minimally serious, we apply to ourselves thestandards we rightly apply to others: more precisely, harsher standards, becauseit is our actions for which we are responsible and that we can modify. In thecase of official enemies who have committed crimes, we count not only those whothey personally murdered, but those who died as a consequence of theiracts.

To move from abstract to concrete, consider the crimes ofCommunism in the 20th century. These have received enormous publicity, reachinga peak with the publication of the "Black Book" in France and then inthe US, with major reviews in early 2000 expressing amazement and horror at thedepths to which humans can descend. The centerpiece of the accusation was theChinese famine of 1958-61, which accounted for 1/3 of the grim total. Of course,no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or thathe "intended" that any die at all.

Rather, these crimes were the outcome of institutional andideological structures of the Maoist system, as discussed in the primaryscholarly work on the topic by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his colleague JeanDreze. These charges are unchallenged, and rightly so. I will not elaboratebecause I have done so elsewhere in a ZNet commentary in January 2000, reprintedand extended in _Rogue States_.

It is taken for granted, rightly of course, that the crimesare not mitigated by the obvious lack of intent. These are crimes that flow fromdeep-seated institutional and ideological structures, like the bombing of theSudan, and innumerable more severe cases. Nor would the worst of the crimes ofCommunism be mitigated in the slightest if it were discovered that something inMao's personal life might have had some role in the orders that led to the crime(as is speculated, dubiously in my view, with regard to this minor crime of theClinton administration).

If anyone were to argue, in extenuation, that Mao did notpersonally kill or intend to kill the victims, or that the crime that is thecenterpiece of the indictment of Communism is mitigated by the fact that it wasa failure of information (as Sen and Dreze argue) or had to do with something inMao's personal life, they would be dismissed with contempt as apologists foratrocities. And if these apologists actually shared the responsibility for thecrimes, as Casey does in the present case, the judgment would be far harsher,and rightly.

I will not insult the intelligence of readers by spellingout the conclusions that follow at once for the case at hand.