Telos Press, NY
Oct 14 2006
Free Speech Fades Away:
France and the New Repression
by Russell Berman ·
The action of the French National Assembly, to criminalize any
statements that deny that the mass killings of Armenians during and
after the First World War constituted genocide, raises many problems,
but foremost among them is the threat to free speech.
To be sure, this bill is not yet law, and it may never become law.
While the vote was lopsided in favor (106 to 19), most of the
577-member chamber did not vote at all. Nor is it likely that the
proposal will proceed successfully through the upper house or be
adopted by the Chirac government, which has criticized it. When all
is said and done, this may have only been an electoral ploy by the
Left (which supported the bill): it is a way to jump on the popular
bandwagon against the expansion of the EU to include Turkey, without
fishing in the racist waters of the far right or adopting theological
arguments about a Christian Europe. It’s ideologically easier to
irritate the Turks through a symbolic gesture about Armenia, in the
hope that an irritated Turkey will then turn away from Europe.
Or perhaps the French socialists were just angling for the Armenian
vote (a large community in France).
Nonetheless the matter needs to be taken on face-value as well.
Whatever the ulterior motives, the important chamber of a major
parliamentary democracy has now declared certain speech acts,
historical claims, to be so inimical to the values of society that
they would warrant incarceration and a significant monetary fine.
This was not a matter of the National Assembly declaring its own
esteemed understanding of early twentieth-century history in a
hypothetical statement that might have condemned the genocide. Nor
does this involve a judgment on statements of whether or not the
killings took place (as in standard Holocaust denial). Rather, the
newly defined crime would involve the articulation of doubts as to
whether such killing “rose” to the level of genocide. While – to make
my position clear – this author accepts the historiographical consensus
that the catastrophe that befell the Armenians was indeed genocide,
the logic of freezing such debate through a criminalization of
expressions of alternative opinion seems dangerous indeed. Dangerous
because it will necessarily poison the atmosphere around this
question between Turks and Armenians; dangerous because it sets a
precedent of providing legislative sanction to matters of
historiographical judgment; but also, and most importantly dangerous
because the august stage of the National Assembly of the French
Republic has now become the most prominent venue to date on which the
value of free speech has come under such systematic attack.
Given the tendency in European jurisprudence toward universal
jurisdiction – the capacity of Spanish courts to sit in judgment on
Latin American matters or for a suit against former Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon to be brought in Belgium – we can imagine the
long shadow of such a French law stretching all the way to Istanbul.
If, for example, a journalist in Turkey were to question the genocide
hypothesis and then later travel to France, the French police might
subsequently be obligated to arrest him: for speech crimes
“committed” on another continent. The tragic absurdity of this attack
on free speech became sublimely clear through a breathtaking accident
of fate: on the very same day, Thursday, October 12, that the
National Assembly decided to prohibit certain statements about the
treatment of Armenians by Turkey, it was announced that the 2006
Nobel Prize for Literature would be awarded to Orhan Pamuk, the
Turkish author who has had to face prosecution in his homeland
for – statements about the treatment of Armenians by Turkey.
Of course the statements at stake are diametrically opposed: the
French hope to criminalize doubt about the status of the killing as
genocide, while Pamuk was accused of making statements which,
acknowledging the killings, cast aspersion on Turkey. If there is a
spirit in history, could it have been any clearer in its
demonstration of the equally reprehensible character of restrictions
on free speech, whether from the Left (Paris) or the Right (Turkey)?
If the French Republic can engage in this sort of thoughtless
repression, it loses any moral high ground in the other debates of
the age. There is no longer any basis on which to condemn the claims,
for example, that the Mohammed cartoons should have been censored.
The leaders of European liberty turn out to have a capacity for
repression akin if not identical to the crowds who attacked Danish
embassies in retaliation for the publication of the cartoons or the
Somali killers who displayed their brave manhood by shooting a nun in
the back because of the statements of Benedict XVI.
The geography of liberty is shifting. For all the profound
differences between the European West and the Islamic world, it is no
longer a matter of simply mapping freedom and repression onto the
opposite poles. There is a repression a foot in the heart of the West
that wears away at the superficial evaluation of a binary clash of
civilizations. In that clash, the West is now sliding toward an
imitation of the enemy it imagines. Indeed the same logic plays out
across the Atlantic: as Europe steps away from free speech, it
reproduces the measures of repression that it loves to discover and
denounce in American policies. The real story of the day is precisely
this spread of repression and the erosion of liberty in all regions,
as Jean-Claude Paye suggests in his work that has appeared in Telos
and in his forthcoming Telos Press book, The Global War on Liberty.
The decision of the National Assembly to police discussions about the
history of the First World War and the proper terminology in the
characterization of the violence against the Armenians betrays a
wider rhetorical crime. As Norman Naimark shows in Telos 136, the
term genocide was a contested and then restricted neologism. The
Soviet Union, in particular, was eager to limit its usage and to
exclude mass killings associated with social class. The term was
damaged at its moment of inception; facing any real genocide,
governments run away from the characterization. Hence the obsessively
careful parsing of the term in the debates around Darfur. Designating
mass killing as “genocide” might obligate world opinion to take some
action, so it is therefore avoided – it is precisely also therefore
easy for the National Assembly to take a heroic stance on a genocidal
war long since concluded, ninety years too late, while the world
twiddles its thumbs in the face of the real genocide in Darfur. Dare
one imagine that the National Assembly might have alternatively
considered criminalizing genocide-denial in Africa and then request
that the Interior Minister Sarkozy arrest the Sudanese government?
Not to mention the systematic killings carried out by governments in
Iran and North Korea. No National Assembly votes on these topics, odd
as it may sound. The political class picks its fights, while it is
engaged in a routinized bureaucratic politics, solely semiotic,
without action or responsibility. Yet this lack of sincerity or
ardor, this pale skin of apathy, chills the political culture, and
liberty flickers. Not brave enough to attack the genocides and mass
killings of our own day, the National Assembly cowers in historicism
and sacrifices free speech without a second thought. It is a farce
that has become tragic.
As free speech becomes illegal, free speakers have to live like
criminals. This brings us again to the case of Robert Redeker, an
author, philosopher and teacher, discussed here previously and widely
elsewhere: after publishing an article critical of aspects of Islam,
he received numerous death threats, his address was posted on
jihadist websites, and he is now in hiding, under police protection.
While the notables of the French Republic condemned his persecution,
in fact the defense they offered was at best lukewarm, and often came
close to an apology for his would-be killers.. A compelling
commentary appeared on an adamantly secularist and atheistic French
website, parts of which are worth translating here:
In the face of this Islamic fascism, the least one can say is that
observed support [for Redeker] is far from what might have been
expected. The National Minister of Education, Gilles de Robien,
committed the infamy of declaring that while he can affirm his
“solidarity” with the teacher, “a functionary must behave prudently
and moderation in all circumstances.” (Le Figaro, September 29,
2006).
In other words, the teacher as a “functionary” has no claim on a
space outside the job where he might think or act as a citizen.
The political class has led the defenders of liberty to expect such
treason since the affair around the Mohammed caricatures. Jacques
Chirac, Dominique de Villepin and Francois Bayrou certainly declared
their unwavering attachment to the liberty of expression, while also
limiting it by a need to respect religious beliefs. It gets worse:
after the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini which condemned
Salman Rushdie to death, Jacques Chirac declared his contempt for
Rushdie and broadcast his understanding for the Muslim masses who
felt that their faith had been insulted (L’Humanité, March 21, 1995);
while he certainly condemned the calls for Rushdie’s murder, he also
condemned “all those who use blasphemy for commercial purposes”
(France 5). In the same vein, when [the Bangladeshi poet] Taslima
Nasrin faced death threats in her country, certain opinion-makers in
the French press minimized the events (see Taslima Nasreen, une femme
contre las fanatismes, Sylvie Leprince et Benoit Mély, Bibiliothèque
de Travail, 1995). No! Religions are not necessarily respectable when
they participate in a set of authoritarian prescriptions such as
so-called sacred texts. Respect for the right to believe does not
imply respect for the object of such beliefs.
The last is a point at the heart of a free society: respect for your
right to speak does not obligate me to respect the content of your
statements. I may believe firmly that your statements are
reprehensible, without feeling the need that the police arrest you
for speech acts, no matter how valueless they seem. Mutatis mutandis
for religion.
The argument continues with an analysis of a French Left willing to
sacrifice any liberal values in order to participate in a
stereotypical anti-imperialist solidarity. The issue here then is not
Islamic extremists themselves, but the useful idiots who populate
western politics and culture and who consistently refuse to stand up
for liberty.
After Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh,
the Danish cartoonists and many others, Robert Redeker is a new
victim of Islamic fascism, a religious imperialism which the regular
anti-fascists refuse to recognize as such. For some short-sighted
anti-racists, it is easier to shout “No pasaran!” while brandishing a
placard against [Jean-Marie LePen’s] National Front than to reject
with the same force the identical tyranny of the Qu’ran, currently
being spread on all continents by murder, accusations of blasphemy
and the imposition of the veil. In the same rush into an open grave,
the Greens, the [anti-racist movement] MRAP and [the young Communist
league] JCR demonstrated side by side with veiled Muslims against the
prohibition of the veil in school; meanwhile part of the left, blind
for decades to the crimes of Stalinism, persists in its denials in
the face of Islam. Thus MRAP commented with regard to Redeker that
“provocation leads to the inacceptable” (Libération, September 30,
2006), a line that is, as usual, similar to that of Muslim leaders.
There is a critique of the political leadership, and there is a
critique of the Left, and they are not the same, although both end up
failing to defend liberty in order to pursue a policy of appeasement.
The conservatives around Chirac find Muslim opposition to Rushdie an
opportune cover to regress to their own congenital suspicion of free
artistic expression, while the Left – which one might have hoped would
have been the carrier of a liberal spirit – has been deeply, perhaps
irreversibly broken by its decades of obsequiousness to Stalinism.
There is a kind of political corruption, which can never be cured.
When the Left votes to restrict freedom of speech, because it is
politically useful in the debates around EU expansion, it is simply
reverting to a behavior pattern learned well in the course of its
miserable twentieth century.
What is interesting about this juxtaposition of the two cases – the
criminalization of genocide denial and the betrayal of Redeker – is
that their ostensible political tendencies are quite distinct. The
former might be seen as anti-Turkish, and perhaps implicitly
anti-Islamic; the latter, the refusal to come to Redeker’s defense,
is in tendency at least pro-Islamic (or at least anti-anti-Islamic).
The issue therefore is precisely not the particular tendency but a
creeping erosion of a commitment to liberty across the full range of
the spectrum. This renunciation of freedom has taken the form of a
growing self-censorship throughout the West, and (as Amir Taheri
calls it) a “preemptive obedience” to what is imagined to be Islamic
sensibility. Parts of the West are eager to cave in to Muslim
demands – even if there are no such demands. Islam becomes a pretext
for Western repression.
The Islamic extremism that repeatedly resorts to violence in response
to insults, real and imagined, is undoubtedly a grievous problem. It
is linked to a complex interaction between Islam and the West in this
age of globalization. Yet, this Islamic dynamic is compounded by
another: the lack of will in the West to defend its own freedoms,
values and culture. A predisposition to collapse in the face of
jihadist extremism has resulted from a relativist multiculturalism
that insists on respecting all cultures except our own. Yet it is in
fact even worse: there is a Western retreat from freedom even in the
absence of Muslim objections. This was the case of the banned Mozart
opera in Berlin, and in the removal of the works of art by the
surrealist Hans Bellmer from a gallery in London.
Beyond a doubt, there is certainly a real and dangerous enemy of the
West, ready to hijack planes and explode trains; but there is another
enemy, a logic of fear and repression, which uses Islam as a pretext
to develop a new culture of control. This is the retreat of the West:
unless it becomes willing to defend its freedoms at home, it will
surely not fight for them against an external enemy in the East
because: liberty is indivisible.
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