This is a lovely response that might possibly come under the heading of,
when confronted with inconvenient facts or ideas, concentrate all of your
energy on attacking the character of the person or group propagating them
rather than actually using evidence and logic to dispute the claims.
Chomsky, incidentally, writes rather explicitly and rather emphatically
about this tendency and about the responsibilities of intellectuals and
citizens when confronted with crimes and atrocities in the world.  From
Powers and Prospects, "Writers and Intellectual Responsibility":

"Let's return to the more crucial aspects of the question:  seeking and
telling the truth about things that are important.  The obligation to do so
may seem transparent, but it is not, at least in certain cultures--
including ours, as examples I gave illustrate.  But Western intellectuals
nevertheless understand the point very well, and have no trouble applying
elementary moral principles in at least one case:  official enemies, say,
Stalinist Russia.
        Within that society, the value system imposed by authority held that the
responsibility of the intellectual is to serve power interests:  to record
with a show of horror the terrible deeds (real or alleged) of designated
enemies, and to conceal or prettify the crimes of the state and its agents.
Russian intellectuals who filled these responsibilities were praised and
honoured; those who rejected these demands were treated rather differently,
as we know.
        Here, the judgements were reversed.  Russian intellectuals who kept to what
was expected of them were regarded with contempt, dismissed as commissars
and apparatchiks.  Those who rejected these demands, we honoured as
dissidents, people who tried to tell the truth about the things that
mattered-- for them, in their circumstances.  If they failed to condemn
Western crimes, or even denied them, it was a matter of no interest to
decent people, though the commissars were of course outraged.  All of that,
again, is trivially obvious, and aroused no controversy, properly.
....[Here Chomsky inserts more historical examples from Greece, the Bible,
El Salvador, etc.]...
        Let's take a step back.  We have no difficulty distinguishing commissar
from dissident in enemy states, or even in the distant past.  But when we
turn to truths that matter in the moral realm, looking at ourselves,
judgements again reverse, and we fall right back into the near-universal
pattern:  the commissars are honored, the dissidents berated for their
iniquity.  It's again all too easy to demonstrate.
        The principles that we apply with increasing facility as our own
responsibility declines are the merest truisms.  But since they are so
commonly denied, often with great outrage, perhaps I might restate them,
beginning with the case that is uncontroversial.

1.  If Soviet intellectuals told the truth about American crimes, well and
good, but they won no praise from us.  There are plenty of commissars around
to do that, and Soviet citizents had more important things to do.  Soviet
crimes in Poland and Czechoslovakea did not come within shouting distance of
those of the US in Central America, to pick the obvious parallel, but it was
nevertheless the moral duty of the Russian intellectual to focus attention
on the former, even to the exclusion of far worse crimes beyond the reach of
Russian power.

2.  If a Soviet intellectual exaggerated or fabricated American crimes, then
he became an object of contempt.

3.  If a Soviet intellectual ignored American crimes, it was a matter of no
consequence.  Our admiration for dissidents was in no way diminished if they
refused comment on these atrocities.

4.  If Soviet intellectuals denied or minimised American crimes, as many
did, it was also a matter of minor or even null significance.  Their
responsibilities lay at home.

5.  If Soviet intellectuals ignored or justified Soviet crimes, that was
criminal.

        Note that there was no lack of information about Western crimes, at least
if we can believe the government-funded studies carried out by Russian
research centers in the United States, which found, in 1979, that 96 per
cent of the middle elite and 77 per cent of blue-collar workers listened to
foreign radio broadcasts.  Even through the haze of distortion, ample
information was available to react properly to US crimes.  But the failure
to do so was a matter of little consequence-- as all agree, in this case.
        The principles are valid, and apply with little change to our society.  To
spell them out:

1.  If Western intellectuals told the truth bout the crimes of the USSR, Pol
Pot, Saddam Hussein (after he was designated an enemy in August 1990),
that's fine, but has no moral standing.

2.  If they exaggerate or fabricate such crimes, they become objects of
contempt.

3.  If they ignore such crimes, it is a matter of little significance.

4.  If they deny or minimise such crimes, it is also a minor matter.

5.  And if they ignore or justify the crimes in which their own state is
implicated, that is criminal."

Chomsky goes on to make some qualifications, but adds emphatically that
"there should not be the slightest question, point 5 of course being the
most important, by a huge margin."

This appeal to common sense about morality, truth -telling, and
responsibility seems to apply rather well to the case of Ramsey Clark and
the IAC, even taking for granted that all of the accusations below are true.
Which kinds of truth-telling warrant the contemptuous label of "commissar
and apparatchik," and which would qualify as "dissident"?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: The philosophy, work & influences of Noam Chomsky
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Tresy Kilbourne
> Sent: Sunday, August 22, 1999 9:00 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CHOMSKY] Chossudovsky testimony -NATO HAS INSTALLED A
> REIGN OF TERROR IN KOSOVO
>
>
> Michael P offers inter alia the following:
>
> This text was presented to the Independent Commission of Inquiry to
> Investigate U.S./NATO  War Crimes Against The People of Yugoslavia,
> International Action Center, New York, July 31, 1999
>
>
> Translation: a kangaroo court put together by a front group for the
> fruitcakes at Worker's World Party and their useful idiot Ramsey Clark,
> about both of whom, in the interests of a semblance of balance,
> more below:
>
> salon.com > News June 21, 1999
> URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/21/clark
>
> Ramsey Clark, the war criminal's best friend
> The former U.S. attorney general has become the tool of left-wing cultists
> who defend Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Rwandan torturers as
> anti-imperialist heroes.
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Ian Williams
> In the most morbidly literal way, NATO forces are "sniffing out" more mass
> graves than alliance spokesman Jamie Shea ever suspected. Dog-eaten sticks
> of bone poke from putrescent pits on television screens. So it is not
> surprising that on July 31 New York will see the opening of a
> commission of
> inquiry for an international war crimes tribunal. What may
> surprise some is
> that its target is NATO's war crimes.
> Those who know him will be less surprised that the inspiration for this
> circus is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whom one
> long-standing
> colleague described as "a good man gone ga-ga -- at least 25 years ago."
> Many liberals and leftists cut Clark a considerable degree of slack. For a
> start he is almost the only person the American left has had in
> high public
> office since World War II, even if it was a retrospective
> success, since his
> long march leftward only began afterward. His views as the former attorney
> general are listened to with a respect that would be accorded to
> few others
> with such eccentric opinions. As a revered spokesman of the left, he is a
> perfect symbol for its near-impotence in American politics today.
> Everyone who has dealings with Clark uses the word "nice" to describe him.
> But he often sides with people whom no one with a full deck would
> call nice.
> (Clark did not respond to a Salon News interview request.) Many former
> friends, more in sorrow than in anger, trace his present positions to the
> company he keeps: the International Action Center, which proclaims him its
> founder but seems entirely in the thrall of an obscure Trotskyist
> sect, the
> Workers World Party. Whoever writes his scripts, there is little
> doubt what
> Ramsey Clark is against now -- any manifestation of the power of the state
> he once served at the height of the Vietnam War.
> At the end of 1998 Clark attended a human rights conference in Baghdad,
> Iraq, where in his keynote speech he pointed out how "the
> governments of the
> rich nations, primarily the United States, England and France," dominated
> the wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which showed
> "little concern for economic, social and cultural rights." The social and
> cultural rights claimed by his Iraqi hosts include the right to hang
> opponents in public at the airport, or poison thousands of Kurds
> and torture
> and execute any opponent of the regime. And on the legality of Iraq's
> invasion of Kuwait, the silence is deafening.
> When he flew to Belgrade to support Slobodan Milosevic during NATO's
> campaign, there was no word about the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at
> Srebrenica or the million homeless refugees from Kosovo -- and
> even less of
> those olfactorily eloquent mass graves that NATO is now uncovering. But
> then, urging Belgrade to resist NATO, while he was there picking up an
> honorary degree, he told his hosts, "It will be a great struggle, but a
> glorious victory. You can be victorious."
> In Grenada he went to advise Bernard Coard, the murderer of Prime Minister
> Maurice Bishop. Other clients include Radovan Karadzic, the
> indicted Bosnian
> Serbian war criminal whom he defended in a New York civil suit brought by
> Bosnian rape victims, and the Rwandan pastor who is accused of telling
> Tutsis to hide in his church and then summoning Hutus to massacre
> them, and
> then leading killing squads.
> His willingness to accept dubious clients is defended by some attorneys.
> After all, everyone needs a defense. Others say he has crossed a
> moral line
> by defending Karadzic and overlooking events in Kosovo. But looking at his
> legal arguments, one must question the wisdom of his legal
> counsel, not just
> his morals. A prominent international lawyer explains, "He's not
> really very
> well up on international law -- I remember he was asking for help
> in some of
> his early cases."
> In his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,
> for instance, he played to U.S. isolationist sentiment, and -- somewhat
> ironically for a case originating in Texas, the capital of capital
> punishment -- said his client faced execution if extradited. A moment's
> research would have established that the international tribunals set up by
> the United Nations do not have the death penalty, because most countries,
> unlike the United States, regard executions as barbaric. But even then it
> seems odd that someone who regards this country so balefully would seek to
> exempt it from the clear international law expressed by the
> tribunal. With a
> foretaste of his blasé attitude over Kosovo's ethnic cleansing,
> he said that
> it was "unconstitutional" to extradite someone to the "illegal"
> international tribunal. "The international tribunal for Rwanda is an
> extension of colonial power in Africa, which can threaten every African
> leader. The tribunal is foreign power intervention taking sides
> to maintain
> its control over the majority Hutu through Tutsi surrogates."
> Attention to detail is not a major feature of his work. While claiming an
> intimate knowledge of events in the Balkans, only this April he
> addressed a
> letter to Bill Richardson as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., telling him
> that "the U.S. assaults both Slavs and Muslims to stimulate them to attack
> each other and to control both." Of course, if he had been reading
> newspapers other than Workers World, he would have noticed that Richardson
> has been energy secretary for over a year. Indeed, he may have
> noticed that
> Richard Holbrooke, not unconnected to the region, has been stalled in his
> nomination for the post.
> His advice to Belgrade to sue NATO for genocide at the International Court
> of Justice did not, for example, take into account an existing successful
> injunction from 1993 against Yugoslavia to stop committing
> genocide against
> the Bosnians.
> What we are reduced to is the idea that human rights are not something
> inherent in the individual, but contingent on the politics of the
> state that
> abuses such rights. What Ramsey Clark wants from the city of Philadelphia
> for Mumia Abu Jamal (another of his causes) he calls "colonial"
> justice when
> claimed by Tutsis in Rwanda against their erstwhile murderers, or
> a tool of
> imperialism when claimed by Kosovars against their torturers.
> In fact, many of these political anomalies make sense in light of his role
> as the figurehead for the International Action Center, which in
> turn is the
> front for the Workers World Party. Between them they write his letters and
> briefs. Respected by some on the left for their ability to bring
> out people
> for demonstrations, they are reviled by many for bringing the left into
> disrepute.
> The Workers World Party split from the Socialist Workers Party
> many decades
> ago in support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and it has
> remained true to its origins. Oddball Trotskyists morphed to
> Stalinoids, its
> members have since then supported the Chinese government over Tiananmen
> Square -- and of course see the current incumbents in Belgrade and Baghdad
> as staunch anti-imperialists. By appearing on their behalf, the former
> attorney general allows their views a vicarious respectability that they
> could never dream of otherwise. Associates take some small
> comfort from the
> WWP's hold on Clark -- it means that he no longer carries water for the
> equally oddball Lyndon LaRouche, with whom he flirted in the '80s.
> Clark's is a distinguished Southern pedigree. His father was an attorney
> general before him and resigned from the Supreme Court to avoid a conflict
> of interest when his son joined Lyndon Johnson's administration.
> There were
> few signs of his current leftism: On Vietnam, the obsessive litmus test of
> the American left, he failed miserably, supervising the prosecution of Dr.
> Benjamin Spock for conspiracy to encourage draft-dodging. When he ran for
> the Senate in 1976, he was to the right of Bella Abzug, and even
> some of his
> campaign workers say that by splitting the ticket, he let in
> Daniel Patrick
> Moynihan ("Not a big step forward for progressive humanity," one former
> supporter commented laconically.) Ironically, as a candidate he opposed
> Israel negotiating with the PLO. Now, he says Islam "is probably the most
> compelling spiritual and moral force on earth today" and that the U.S. is
> anti-Islamic. However, this benignly spiritual view does not seem to have
> extended to the millions of Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia.
> Since the 1970s, he seems to have had little contact with the
> mainstream of
> American politics except as an occasional TV pundit invited to
> speak on the
> strength of his former attorney generalhood. "My feeling is that he has to
> be a true believer" in the WWP, says a former campaign worker, although
> others assume a more opportunistic relationship.
> It is not surprising that many of Charles Dickens' eccentric
> characters are
> obsessively involved in litigation. It does something to a man -- and
> especially to a former attorney general. If the world is not the way you
> want, it must be sued into the right shape. And if conspiracies of the
> powerful exclude you from existing tribunals, or they return improper
> verdicts, why then you set up your own marsupial court where you can pull
> the verdict ready formed from your pouch. Which is why the outcome of his
> tribunal in New York is already in before the jury has even been
> empanelled,
> that the U.S. and NATO are guilty of unspeakable crimes, and Slobodan
> Milosevic is bathed in the blood of the lamb, not steeped in the gore of
> Kosovo.
> salon.com | June 21, 1999
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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