I posted the following:

“Abe,

“Very “elaborative” piece.

“On a more specific point, I thought you dissected the Wall Street Journal “rant”, “rave” rather surgically.

“I would have loved to translate it for Le Monde but am afraid am not a professional translator, interpreter and might miss the message of your discourse (as in lost in translation – pity!) They would’ve loved it!”

http://redsherring.blogspot.com/2006/03/french-toast.html

and

http://redsherring.blogspot.com/2006/05/blind-spots-or-blinders.html

if you guys are interested in the full articles.

What does Chomsky think about it?

If you look back at the Revolutionary War period, you’ll find that Revolutionary War leaders, people like Thomas Jefferson (who’s regarded as a great libertarian, and with some reason), were saying that people should be punished if they are, in his words, “traitors in thought but not in deed” — meaning they should be punished if they say things that are treacherous, or even if they think things that are treacherous. And during the Revolutionary War, there was vicious repression of dissident opinion.

In fact, the nature of Western systems of indoctrination is typically not understood by dictators, they don’t understand the utility for propaganda purposes of having “critical debate” that incorporates the basic assumptions of the official doctrines, and thereby marginalizes and eliminates authentic and rational critical discussion. Under what’s sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics, or at least, the “responsible critics” make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits — that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored.

I have relevant discourses here (http://redsherring.blogspot.com/2006/03/french-toast.html) and (http://redsherring.blogspot.com/2006/03/french-toast.html):

In the first discourse I posted:

To put it in general terms, freedom of speech or of the press and popular power have parallel offices. The expansion of their domains has the opposite effect of constricting the domain of the powers that be. In a political sense, the press is but one institutionalized aspect of the phenomenon we now call “people power” – I mean those romantic and traditional journalists who still refuse (some by taking partial refuge in the blogosphere) to be withered into just another form of concentrated power, the media power as The Wall Street Journal represents. In revolutionary France, these powers were the clergy, the aristocracy and feudalism itself. Today, these power structures are what former president Fidel V. Ramos calls as the “unholy alliance” and “perverse symbiosis” of the political and economic elites in the Philippines. The Filipino power holders are no different from the power holders of the American variety that The Wall Street Journal is obligated to protect against what conservative intellectual Samuel Huntington regards as the “excess of democracy” (of the French sort).

In the second, this:

If I may take the liberty to restate DJB’s position, when media ministers to private power, it loses its true office – basically that of telling as truthfully and ethically as possible what the emperor is wearing or not wearing. Not blind spots but self-imposed “blinders” have “gagged and compromised” the media in such a way as to render it as “not so free as it pretends to be,” to appropriate once again another no-holds-barred raps from DJB.

Political correctness on the part of individual journalists may actually amount to sheer submissiveness to the private power of the people running the media business who are for the most part into it for the money. In this respect, concentrated media power as anathema to the “free market of ideas” parallels the chimera of oligopolies as dregs of the free market society.

In terms of authenticity, the US model is more in keeping with Voltaire’s summation above. Even if we are appalled at the discourses of the Islamists, Klu Klux Klan or the neo-Nazi’s, from the standpoint of a genuine democracy, it would be better for them to exist out in the open rather than as underground movements. Going back to Dryzek:

“…one cannot abolish prejudice, racism, sectarianism, and rational egoism by forbidding their proponents from public speaking. A model of deliberative democracy that stresses the contestation of discourses in the public sphere allows for challenge of sectarian positions, as it allows for challenge of all kinds of oppressive discourses. Indeed, if there were no such oppressive discourses to challenge, a vital democratic life in the public sphere would be hard to imagine. Deliberative democrats are those who have faith in the powers of deliberation itself to root out bad arguments and sectarianism; to deny their advocates admission into the forum is to reveal a lack of confidence in the efficacy of deliberation. Rather than attach preconditions for entry into deliberation, we should rely as far as possible on mechanisms endogenous to deliberation itself to change views and beliefs in a benign direction – and also, in the language of social choice theory, to restrict domain and so make collective choice more tractable. Discursive democracy is not an exclusive gentleman’s club.“

Re your “criticizing Chomsky, although the latter’s position is more in keeping with the American approach to free speech, which i believe is superior to the French or German model.”

You’re right that chomsky’s position is more in keeping with the American tradition of free speech but I do not believe free speech in the US, is “superior” as such (unless you believe that “almost free for all sort of thing” is a gauge of superiority) to the French or German model.

Indeed if we are to go by the negation law or anti-negativism laws that were passed by the National Assembly making it a criminal offence to deny that the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian genocide existed, you might feel that your right to speak or to negate certain events in history is clearly infringed upon, but it is a tradition in France for critiques, writers, opinion columnists to value what they write; they feel a tremendous responsibility for what they write, hence the French as a rule do not just mouth freedom of speech for the sake of satisfying the ego.

With freedom comes responsiblity as the saying goes. (Btw, libel is not criminal offence in France and there is a limit to damages awarded to a libel victim, eg, 1 E to 3,000 euros most of the time.) The “responsabilité” trait just like “la mission civilisatrice” dogma (although less pronounced today) is almost latent in the French; it is inculcated from the time a child makes his début in a place of learning (I know because my children all attended French schools till they were 13); it wouldn’t be at all wrong to say that for the Frnch freedom of speech is more of an intellectual rather than a muscular exercise.

Modern Germany’s model is a different brand altogether and I ascribe that to a feeling of “collective guilt”, eg WWII German atrocities.

On the other question, from the Chomsky literature that I have read so for, I think Chomsky stands first and foremost against illegitimate forms of authority. He believes that people working at the grassroots level are the real change agents capable of dismantling totalitarian institutions (and he thinks corporations are the most totalitarian of them); hence, if political as well as economic institutions are placed under democratic control, i.e, by the people themselves or their genuine representative, he’ll probably die a very happy man.