- This is the moment for Europe to dismantle taboos, not
erect them
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- Far from criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide,
we should decriminalise denial of the Holocaust
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- 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 the first world war. Bravo! Chapeau bas! Vive la France!
But let this be only a beginning in a brave new chapter of European history.
Let the British 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.
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- Let the German parliament pass a bill making it a crime
to deny the existence of the Soviet gulag. Let the Irish parliament criminalise
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. And the
European parliament should immediately pass into European law a bill making
it obligatory to describe as genocide the American colonists' treatment
of Native Americans. 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.
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- 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 draft bill, which in any case will almost certainly be
voted down in the upper house of the French parliament, as a progressive
and enlightened step. What right has the parliament of France to prescribe
by law the correct historical terminology to characterise 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.
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- This bill, by contrast, has no more moral or historical
justification than any of the other suggestions I have just made. Yes,
there are some half a million French citizens of Armenian origin - including
Charles Aznavour, who was once Varinag Aznavourian - and they have been
pressing for it. There are at least that number of British citizens of
Polish origin, so there would be precisely the same justification for a
British bill on Katyn. Step forward Mr Denis MacShane, a British MP of
Polish origin, to propose it - in a spirit of satire, of course. Or how
about British MPs of Pakistani and Indian origin proposing rival bills
on the history of Kashmir?
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- In a leading 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 that I could be so confident.
Currying favour with French-Armenian voters and putting another obstacle
in the way of Turkey joining the European Union might be suggested as other
motives; but speculation about motives is a mug's game.
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- 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 the first world war. 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, Orhan Pamuk - this year's winner of the Nobel prize
for literature - and other Turkish writers have been prosecuted under the
notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code for daring to suggest exactly
that. That is significantly worse than the intended effects of the French
bill. But two wrongs don't make a right.
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- No one can legislate historical truth. In so far 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.
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- In the tense ideological politics of our time, this proposed
bill is a step in exactly the wrong direction. How can we credibly criticise
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? This weekend in Venice I once again heard
a distinguished Muslim scholar rail against our double standards. We ask
them to accept insults to Muslim taboos, he said, but would the Jews accept
that someone should be free to deny the Holocaust?
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- Far from creating new legally enforced taboos about history,
national identity and religion, we should be dismantling those that still
remain on our statute books. Those European countries that have them should
repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust denial.
Otherwise the charge of double standards is impossible to refute. What's
sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander.
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- I recently heard the French philosopher Bernard-Henri
Lévy 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.
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- 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 prison as a result
of them. You may riposte that the falsehood of some of his claims was actually
established by a trial in a British court. Yes, but that was not the British
state prosecuting him for Holocaust denial. It was Irving himself going
to court to sue another historian who suggested he was a Holocaust denier.
He was trying to curb free and fair historical debate; the British court
defended it.
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- Today, if we want to defend free speech in our own countries
and to encourage it in places where it is currently denied, we should be
calling for David Irving to be released from his Austrian prison. The Austrian
law on Holocaust denial is far more historically understandable and morally
respectable than the proposed French one - at least the Austrians are facing
up to their own difficult past, rather than pointing the finger at somebody
else's - but in the larger European interest we should encourage the Austrians
to repeal it.
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- 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.
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