this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
97 points (97.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43956 readers
925 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm sure he would say this. But in this specific case it's more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there's a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that's what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He's a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because "the issue has been resolved". What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I've read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn't whether the researcher was wrong or right. It's just that we can't set the precedent that certain topics are "finished" and can't be modified anymore. Because at that point we're not doing science or research - we're falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn't read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a "genocide denier" and a "CCP tankie"?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing "wrongthink" is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren't good guys and there aren't bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone's a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
Regardless, I appreciate your comment.
I'll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don't take it like I'm trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.
Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.
In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we're still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.
As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.
To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I'd be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.
In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you'd get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.
break
In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.
don't worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I'm glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here
so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You're absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn't mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).
I agree that I'm not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don't think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky's beliefs. I'm a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.
Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky.. there's a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
Here's what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier
I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended
If we give up the principle, we lose everything.