WHERE’S VOLTAIRE WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
Denis MacShane

The Guardian, UK
Oct 12 2006

Legislating to make denying the Armenians suffered genocide at the
hands of the Turks illegal deserves the scorn of France’s greatest
exponent of French speech.

Where is Voltaire when you need him? The decision of the French
politicians in the national assembly in Paris to legislate on the
writing of the history of the Armenian massacres of 1915-1916 deserves
the wit, the scorn, the satire and the derision of France’s greatest
exponent of free speech. I cannot believe that the nation of Voltaire,
Hugo, Zola and Sartre has decided to try and control what is written
about history.

But alas, Voltaire is dead and his spirit is slowly being extinguished
as freedom of speech is being replaced by freedom from being insulted
or hurt. The Turkish politicians who also want to dictate how the
Armenian massacres are reported must be opening champagne that they
now have fellow politicians who think they can control history.

Let us be clear. What happened to a million or more Armenians in the
dying days of the Ottoman empire as seismic changes took place in the
political landscape of the region was an atrocious crime. It joins the
other atrocious crimes of the 20th century from Stalin’s extermination
of the Ukrainian Kulaks, Mao’s murder through calculated starvation
of millions of Chinese in the 1950s, or, whisper it quietly in France,
the killing of scores of thousands of people in Madagascar or Algeria
by French soldiers. And more and more can be added.

Was it genocide? The word has become devalued as almost every event in
which innocent people are killed now seems automatically to get the tag
"genocide". Milosevic’s brutalities in the Balkans, the Palestinians
killed by Israelis, the horrific ethnic-tribal-religious wars in
Africa all get given the description "genocide" as if by using this
awesome term the deaths of the innocent are elevated.

What neither the Armenian tragedy nor any of the other mass
killings constitute is the equivalent of the Shoah – the 4-year long,
industrially organised, professionally executed transportation of Jews
from many countries in Europe to face a scientific, hi-tech, engineered
process of extermination. To deny the Holocaust is a deliberate ploy
by today’s Jew-haters to begin the process of returning Europe to a
past that begins with anti-semitic jokes and ends in gas chambers.

It little matters whether the disaster that befell the Armenians is
called genocide or not. It is not for states or parliament to award
descriptions to what happened in the past. That is for historians
and for a sense of deep cultural understanding.

The Turks are as foolish as the French in pretending that politicians
of today can define the events of yesterday. Last year I was attacked
by ultra-nationalists in Turkey when I attended the trial of Orhan
Pamuk, the new Nobel Laureate, who said that the Armenian massacres
should be discussed openly. Turkish law allows private and public
prosecutions against writers and journalists who want to examine
Turkey’s past without any limits on what can or might be said.

Now the French parliament have passed their own version of this
kind of legislation. I appear regularly on French radio and TV. If
I now say I do not believe that the deaths in 1915 merit the term
"genocide", will a gendarme arrive to arrest me? When the British
writer and Labour MP, Michael Foot, was in Paris in 1958 he wrote an
article criticising the behaviour of the then president, Rene Coty.

He was expelled from France for the crime of being rude about a
French president.

Five decades later France is now declaring that any European citizen
who decides to state that "genocide" is not the right term to use for
the Armenian massacres will face punishment under French law. How
has Europe come to behave like its own worst enemy? The Muslim
intellectual, Tariq Ramadam, first came to fame in his native Geneva
when he tried to stop the staging of a play by Voltaire in 1992, the
bicentenary of Voltaire’s death. Like the fatwa on Salman Rushdie this
was the beginning of the long assault against intellectual and artistic
freedom that Europe has had to defend itself against in recent years.

It is not a tragedy that the French parliament has now joined the
enemies of freedom with this attempt to control history. It is a farce,
which need to be laughed away with scorn. At a time when Europe should
defend freedom of expression it is hard to believe that European
politicians should be seeking to make thought a crime. We live in
strange times.