Ноябрь 1992 года: Джон Пилджер напомнил Ному Чомскому о его защите неонациста

In November 1992, on the BBC’s The Late Show, John Pilger reminded Noam Chomsky that he’d once defended a heckler with neo-fascist views at a talk in south London. Did that commitment to free expression really stretch that far? Chomsky didn’t hesitate. If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, he said, we don’t believe in it at all. The line has been on posters and coffee mugs ever since, usually stripped of any context at all. Twelve years earlier, Chomsky had already tested it against something far worse than a heckler. The test case nobody puts on a mug Robert Faurisson was a French literature lecturer who denied the Holocaust happened. In 1980, Chomsky signed a petition asking that he be kept safe, given access to public archives, and allowed to exercise his legal rights. He then wrote a short statement confined strictly to the civil liberties question; it was printed as a preface to Faurisson’s own legal defence. France lost its mind. What he was actually defending Chomsky laid out his reasoning the following year in “His Right to Say It,” written for The Nation. He admitted he had barely read Faurisson’s work and had little interest in it. His argument was narrow: free expression is not reserved for views you happen to approve of, and it matters most in exactly the cases where the views are almost universally condemned. He even reached for the “I detest what you write” line, credited to a Voltaire letter of 1770 that quote researchers have never actually found. It traces only to a 1963 reference book, not to Voltaire. Chomsky made a sharper point too. He’d also defended the right of people he considered genuine war criminals to keep teaching, and of scientists who claimed black people were genetically inferior, and nobody complained. The outrage, he noticed, was selective. The objection that still has teeth Is there a right to lie? Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the classicist who took Faurisson’s claims apart piece by piece in “A Paper Eichmann,” called the petition scandalous. It described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” as though a forger had merely been interrupted mid-research. Nobody, Vidal-Naquet wrote, should grant a forger that right in the name of truth. Even so, he landed somewhere uncomfortable for both camps. Silencing Faurisson by law, he concluded, would turn historical truth into legal truth, a weapon with obvious uses elsewhere. So he chose to live with Faurisson, without ever dignifying him as a historian. Skokie, and the bill for it April 1977. A neo-Nazi outfit of a few dozen men applied to march in Skokie, Illinois, a village close to half Jewish and home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The ACLU took the case, and its lead lawyer, David Goldberger, was himself Jewish. He has written about the phone call in which his general counsel ordered him to take the case, so that anyone coming after Goldberger would have to come after the counsel too. Thousands of members resigned, by some estimates as many as 50,000. Goldberger got a threatening call at home and moved his family out of the house for the weekend of the march. Men with baseball bats turned up in the office reception. Then came the part usually left out of the retelling. Holocaust survivors came up to him after talks to say he had been right, because they did not want their enemies pushed underground where they could no longer be seen. Eight years earlier, American law had already drawn its line. In Brandenburg v. Ohio the Supreme Court threw out a Klansman’s conviction: advocacy can only be punished where it aims at inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. The email I didn’t sign Years ago, in the office job I retired out of, a colleague replied-all to the floor with a joke about another colleague’s accent, the kind everyone clocks as racist in four seconds flat. By lunchtime a petition demanding his dismissal was circulating, and someone slid it onto my desk expecting a signature. I didn’t sign it. Two years earlier I’d said something clumsy in a meeting, been quoted afterwards by someone who hadn’t been in the room, and spent the next fortnight introduced to strangers as “the one who said that.” Nobody asked what I’d meant. I kept my job but never fully got my reputation back. I wasn’t about to hand someone else the same rough justice because his offence was easier to agree on. So I watched instead of signing. He kept his job. But everyone on the floor had read the email themselves, in his own words, and for four years nobody sat with him at lunch, a harsher verdict than any petition would have reached. Thirty-four per cent That’s roughly one in three American college students who won’t rule out violence as a way to shut down a campus speaker, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which surveyed 68,510 students across 257 colleges. Seven in ten said much the same about shouting someone off a stage. And for the first time in the six years FIRE has been asking, most students said no to every one of six speakers they were shown, three leaning right, three leaning left. One survey is one survey, and FIRE isn’t a neutral referee; it exists to defend free speech. But it’s been asking the same questions for six years running, and the answers keep drifting the same direction. There’s a catch to defending speech for people you can’t stand that nobody mentions upfront. It only gets tested by people you’d cross the street to avoid, so most of us don’t know what we actually believe until the bill arrives. Chomsky’s critics were right that he picked a grotesque hill to stand on. He was right too: the hardest cases are exactly where a principle gets tested, not the easy ones. Refuse to make that call yourself and the decision doesn’t disappear. It just moves to whoever’s left holding it: a university committee, a platform’s moderation team, a mob with a hashtag. Somebody still decides who’s beyond the pale. The only real choice is whether that somebody is you.