Oliver Kamm, franchement

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification." The context, which he omits, is a 1968 report in the New York Times of a protest against an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where children could "enter a helicopter for simulating firing of a machine gun at targets" in Vietnam, with a light flashing when a hit was scored on a hut. This was a year after the warning by the highly respected military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction… [as]… the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size."

Apart from misquoting and omitting the crucial context, Kamm also fails to tell us how one should react to this performance, aside from his own standard tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes and his dedicated efforts, failing with impressive consistency, to find something to criticise in the efforts to terminate state crimes for which he and I share responsibility, particularly as in a free society, we cannot plead fear as an excuse for silent complicity.

We are All Complicit, Noam Chomsky, Janvier 2005