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October 1,
2001
Memo to Hitchens
By Noam Chomsky
I have been asked to respond to recent
articles in The Nation
by Christopher Hitchens, and after refusing several times,
will do so, though only partially, and reluctantly. The reason
for the reluctance is that Hitchens cannot mean what he is saying.
For that reason alone--there are others that should be obvious--this
is no proper context for addressing serious issues relating
to the September 11 atrocities.
That Hitchens cannot mean what
he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to
the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing
such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime,
and cannot intend what his words imply. This single atrocity
destroyed half the pharmaceutical supplies of a poor African
country and the facilities for replenishing them, with an enormous
human toll. Hitchens is outraged that I compared this atrocity
to what I called "the wickedness and awesome cruelty"
of the terrorist attacks of September 11 (quoting Robert Fisk),
adding that the actual toll in the Sudan case can only be surmised,
because the United States blocked any UN inquiry and few were
interested enough to pursue the matter. That the toll is dreadful
is hardly in doubt.
Hitchens is apparently referring
to a response I wrote to several journalists on September 15,
composite because inquiries were coming too fast for individual
response. This was apparently posted several times on the web,
as were other much more detailed subsequent responses. In the
brief message Hitchens may have seen, I did not elaborate, assuming--correctly,
judging by subsequent interchanges with many respondents--that
it was unnecessary: The recipients would understand why the
comparison is quite appropriate. I also took for granted that
they would understand a virtual truism: When we estimate the
human toll of a crime, we count not only those who were literally
murdered on the spot but those who died as a result, the course
we adopt reflexively, and properly, when we consider the crimes
of official enemies--Stalin, Hitler and Mao, to mention the
most extreme cases. If we are even pretending to be serious,
we apply the same standards to ourselves: In the case of Sudan,
we count the number who died as a direct consequence of the
crime, not just those killed by cruise missiles. Again, a truism.
Since there is one person who
does not appear to understand, I will add a few quotes from
the mainstream press, to clarify.
A year after the attack, "without
the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced,
Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly,
to rise.... Thus, tens of thousands of people--many of them
children--have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis,
and other treatable diseases.... [The factory] provided affordable
medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary
medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical
products.... Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import
adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious
gap left by the plant's destruction.... the action taken by
Washington on Aug. 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people
of Sudan of needed medicine. Millions must wonder how the International
Court of Justice in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary"
(Jonathan Belke, Boston Globe, August 22, 1999).
"The loss of this factory
is a tragedy for the rural communities who need these medicines"
(Tom Carnaffin, technical manager with "intimate knowledge"
of the destroyed plant, Ed Vulliamy et al., London Observer,
August 23, 1998).
The plant "provided 50
percent of Sudan's medicines, and its destruction has left the
country with no supplies of choloroquine, the standard treatment
for malaria," but months later, the British Labour government
refused requests "to resupply chloroquine in emergency
relief until such time as the Sudanese can rebuild their pharmaceutical
production" (Patrick Wintour, Observer, December 20, 1998).
And much more.
Proportional to population,
this is as if the bin Laden network, in a single attack on the
United States, caused "hundreds of thousands of people--many
of them children--to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases,"
though the analogy is unfair because a rich country, not under
sanctions and denied aid, can easily replenish its stocks and
respond appropriately to such an atrocity--which, I presume,
would not have passed so lightly. To regard the comparison to
September 11 as outrageous is to express extraordinary racist
contempt for African victims of a shocking crime, which, to
make it worse, is one for which we are responsible: as taxpayers,
for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge
and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible
facts to be sunk so deep in the memory hole that some, at least,
seem unaware of them.
This only scratches the surface.
The United States bombing "appears to have shattered the
slowly evolving move towards compromise between Sudan's warring
sides" and terminated promising steps toward a peace agreement
to end the civil war that had left 1.5 million dead since 1981,
which might have also led to "peace in Uganda and the entire
Nile Basin." The attack apparently "shattered...the
expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of Sudan's
Islamist government" toward a "pragmatic engagement
with the outside world," along with efforts to address
Sudan's domestic crises," to end support for terrorism,
and to reduce the influence of radical Islamists (Mark Huband,
Financial Times, September 8, 1998).
Insofar as these consequences
ensued, we may compare the crime in Sudan to the assassination
of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter,
still continuing; or the overthrow of the democratic government
of Guatemala in 1954, which led to forty years of hideous atrocities;
and all too many others like it.
One can scarcely try to estimate
the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the
probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims. The
complete toll is attributable to the single act of terror--at
least, if we have the honesty to adopt the standards we properly
apply to official enemies.
Evidently, Hitchens cannot
mean what he said about this topic. We can therefore disregard
it.
To take another example, Hitchens
writes that I referred to the "the whole business [of the
1999 Kosovo war] as a bullying persecution of--the Serbs!"
As he knows, this is sheer fabrication. The reasons for the
war that I suggested were quoted from the highest-level official
US justifications for it, including National Security Adviser
Sandy Berger and the final summary presented to Congress by
Secretary of Defense William Cohen. We can therefore also disregard
what Hitchens has to say about this topic.
As a final illustration, consider
Hitchens's fury over the "masochistic e-mail...circulating
from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter," who joined
such radical rags as the Wall Street Journal in what he calls
"rationalizing" terror--that is, considering the grievances
expressed by people of the Middle East region, rich to poor,
secular to Islamist, the course that would be followed by anyone
who hopes to reduce the likelihood of further atrocities rather
than simply to escalate the cycle of violence, in the familiar
dynamics, leading to even greater catastrophes here and elsewhere.
This is an outrage, Hitchens explains, because "I know already"
about these concerns--a comment that makes sense on precisely
one assumption: that the communications were addressed solely
to Hitchens. Without further comment, we can disregard his fulminations
on these topics.
In one charge, Hitchens is
correct. He writes that "the crime [in Sudan] was directly
and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid
impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys
and Husseinis of the time)." It's true that I have sedulously
avoided this speculation, and will continue to do so until some
meaningful evidence is provided; and have also sedulously avoided
the entire obsession with Clinton's sex life.
From the rest, it may be possible
to disentangle some intended line of argument, but I'm not going
to make the effort, and fail to see why others should. Since
Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously,
there is no reason for anyone else to do so. The fair and sensible
reaction is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to
await the return of the author to the important work that he
has often done in the past.
In the background are issues
worth addressing. But in some serious context, not this one.
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