While investigating the material for other postings on this blog recently, I came across a rather attention-grabbing little outlet in the form of the Indecent Left blog. Interestingly, Stuart A, the guy who runs it, discovered the same misrepresentation Oliver Kamm dredged up on Chomsky and Philip Knightley as I did, along with various others which are well worth reading. Available here is one in which he collects various serious falsehoods he has written about previously in a letter to Kamm. While Olly at first seemed happy to give me the benefit of his evasions, in the case of the Indecent Left blog’s queries, he simply declined to respond.
Perhaps the most intriguing comments in this post, however, touch on Kamm’s apparent propensity for selectively deleting posts and comments which contradict and expose him. As Stuart A writes:
Based on Kamm’s record, I had thought he might simply delete the articles. Those who read his output in 2003 might recall what he did when his misquotation of the New York Times was exposed. He silently deleted the posting and never spoke of it again. The traces are extant, as is the article itself in the Wayback Machine [Stuart A’s name for Kamm’s old, archived blog]. He was apparently unable to bear the irony that a piece accusing Chomsky of misrepresenting the New York Times itself misrepresented the New York Times more seriously.
The reason this struck me was just how precisely it seemed to recall another course of events, which slipped by quietly while I was on holiday from blogging. I wrote previously of Oliver Kamm’s inaccurate Amazon review of Manufacturing Consent – a review which now appears to have disappeared into the ether. Whether this was due to Kamm’s deliberate removal I am not in a position to say; given that many of his other reviews remain, however, it seems to be the only plausible explanation. The traces, as in Stuart A’s case, also remain - one of them is an email from Chomsky on the subject. Perhaps it’s worth asking Kamm exactly what has happened to his pearls of wisdom?
NOTE: Apparently the "Wayback Machine" is actually much more than, as I had assumed, Stuart A's affectionate name for Kamm's archived blogs - in fact it is an independent website that allows readers to view pages of various websites as they appeared on a particular date in the past - and thus a particularly useful tool, it would seem, for exposing the careful deletion of embarrassing things. Apologies to Stuart on that count; and in addition, the site itself looks well worth investigating.
