Endorsing Denial of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi: Open Letters to Professor Noam Chomsky

By Roland Moerland
Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, Netherlands
February 3, 2011

Dear Professor Chomsky,

In 1967 you published a special supplement to The New York Review of Books in which you critically addressed the responsibility of intellectuals. Intellectuals, you wrote, have a deep responsibility “to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, […], through which the events of current history are presented to us.”

Although your article was written and published more than forty years ago, the argument is highly relevant, because abuses of power still lead to vast human suffering. I believe that much of what you have written after 1967 up to your recent publications reflects these ideas and principles.

I was therefore shocked and disappointed to find out that you, as a highly distinguished intellectual, should write the foreword to the book The Politics of Genocide, which in chapter 4 includes one of the most flagrant cases of denial of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi that I have ever seen. I find it extremely hard to understand why you would endorse such a gross denial of human suffering. [...]

[Read the full text of the open letters.]