Reply #27: Chomsky gives a lengthy response

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

This is an open letter to a few of the people with whom I had discussed the Guardian interview of 31 October, on the basis of the electronic version, which is all that I had seen.  Someone has just sent me a copy of the printed version, and I now understand why friends in England who wrote me were so outraged.

It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it’s worth reviewing what most readers could not know.  The general interest is that the print version reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre.  It’s of general interest for that reason alone.
 
A secondary matter is that it may serve as a word of warning to anyone who is asked by the Guardian for an interview, and happens to fall slightly to the critical end of the approved range of opinion of the editors.  The warning is: if you accept the invitation, be cautious, and make sure to have a tape recorder that is very visibly placed in front of you.  That may inhibit the dedication to deceit, and if not, at least you will have a record.  I should add that in probably thousands of interviews from every corner of the world and every part of the spectrum for decades, that thought has never occurred to me before.  It does now.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9110