THE RIGHT TO DENY GENOCIDE
By Timothy Garton Ash
Los Angeles Times, CA
Oct 19 2006
Passing laws that criminalize denying past atrocities is no way to
address historical grievances.
WHAT A magnificent blow for truth, justice and humanity the French
National Assembly has struck. Last week, it voted for a bill that
would make it a crime to deny that the Turks committed genocide
against the Armenians during World War I. Bravo! Chapeau bas! Vive
la France! But let this only be a beginning in a brave new chapter
of European history.
Let Britain’s Parliament now make it a crime to deny that it was
Russians who murdered Polish officers at Katyn in 1940. Let the
Turkish parliament make it a crime to deny that France used torture
against insurgents in Algeria. Let the German parliament pass a bill
making it a crime to deny the existence of the Soviet gulag. Let the
Irish parliament criminalize denial of the horrors of the Spanish
Inquisition. Let the Spanish parliament mandate a minimum of 10 years
imprisonment for anyone who claims that the Serbs did not attempt
genocide against Albanians in Kosovo.
ADVERTISEMENT And the European Parliament should pass into European
law a bill making it obligatory to describe as genocide the American
colonists’ treatment of American Indians. The only pity is that we,
in the European Union, can’t impose the death sentence for these
heinous thought crimes. But perhaps, with time, we may change that too.
Oh brave new Europe! It is entirely beyond me how anyone in their
right mind – apart, of course, from a French Armenian lobbyist –
can regard this proposed bill, which will almost certainly be voted
down in the upper house of the French parliament, as a progressive
and enlightened step.
What right has France to prescribe by law the correct historical
terminology to characterize what another nation did to a third nation
90 years ago? If the French parliament passed a law making it a crime
to deny the complicity of Vichy France in the deportation to the death
camps of French Jews, I would still argue that this was a mistake,
but I could respect the self-critical moral impulse behind it. This
bill, by contrast, has no more moral or historical justification than
any of the other suggestions I have just made.
In an article last Friday, the Guardian averred that "supporters
of the law are doubtless motivated by a sincere desire to redress
a 90-year-old injustice." I wish I could be so confident. Currying
favor with French Armenian voters and putting another obstacle in
the way of Turkey joining the EU might be suggested as other motives.
It will be obvious to every intelligent reader that my argument
has nothing to do with questioning the suffering of the Armenians
who were massacred, expelled or felt impelled to flee in fear of
their lives during and after World War I. Their fate at the hands
of the Turks was terrible and has been too little recalled in the
mainstream of European memory. Reputable historians and writers have
made a strong case that those events deserve the label of genocide,
as it has been defined since 1945. In fact, this year’s winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature, Orhan Pamuk, and other Turkish writers have
been prosecuted under the Turkish penal code for daring to suggest
exactly that. That is significantly worse than the intended effects
of the new French bill. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
No one can legislate historical truth. Insofar as historical truth
can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical
research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts,
testing and disputing each other’s claims without fear of prosecution
or persecution.
In the tense ideological politics of our time, this proposed bill is
a step in exactly the wrong direction. How can we credibly criticize
Turkey, Egypt or other states for curbing free speech, through the
legislated protection of historical, national or religious shibboleths,
if we are doing ever more of it ourselves?
Far from creating new, legally enforced taboos about history, national
identity and religion, those European nations that have them should
repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust
denial. Otherwise, a charge of double standards is impossible to
refute.
I recently heard the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy going
through some impressive intellectual contortions to explain why he
opposed any laws restricting criticism of religion but supported
those on Holocaust denial. It was one thing, he argued, to question
a religious belief, quite another to deny a historical fact. But this
won’t wash. Historical facts are established precisely by their being
disputed and tested against the evidence. Without that process of
contention – up to and including the revisionist extreme of outright
denial – we would never discover which facts are truly hard.
Such consistency requires painful decisions. For example, I have
nothing but abhorrence for some of David Irving’s recorded views about
Nazi Germany’s attempted extermination of the Jews, but I am quite
certain that he should not be sitting in an Austrian jail as a result
of them. You may riposte that the falsehood of some of his claims was
established by a trial in a British court. Yes, but that was not the
British state prosecuting him for Holocaust denial. It was Irving suing
another historian who suggested that he was a Holocaust denier. He was
trying to curb free and fair historical debate; the court defended it.
Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be
poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and
others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for
dismantling them. We must practice what we preach.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is professor of European studies at Oxford
University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.