Los Angeles Times
Oct 14 2006

Pamuk’s Politicized Prize
The Nobel Committee may honor lefty politics as much as it honors
literature, but it’s France, Turkey and the U.S. that really play
politics with language.
October 14, 2006

‘THERE IS NO SUCH THING," George Orwell once said, "as a genuinely
nonpolitical literature." That probably comes as news to millions of
Danielle Steel fans. Still, if Orwell had only tacked on the word
"award" to his aphorism, that 1946 statement would have been as
eerily prescient as his novel "1984."

Take Thursday’s awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Turkish
writer Orhan Pamuk. Though the secular storyteller has been a rumored
Nobel candidate since his lyrical 2002 novel, "Snow," he is perhaps
best known for being charged in his native country last year for
"denigrating" the Turkish identity. His crime consisted of pointing
out, in an interview with a journalist, that the Ottoman Empire
killed 1.2 million Armenians nine decades ago and that its successor
has killed 30,000 Kurds over the last two.

Although charges against him were eventually dropped,
Pamuk becomes the third consecutive literature laureate with heavy
political baggage. Last year’s winner, British playwright Harold
Pinter, is equally well known for his strident leftist politics. The
2004 honoree, Elfriede Jelinek, is a fierce critic of Austria’s
conservative establishment.

As tempting as it is to poke fun at political moralizing from the
Nobel committee, the ones truly deserving of criticism are the
governments – not just of Turkey but also of France and the United
States – that twist language into politics by criminalizing speech
and denying the truth.

Turkey continues to demonstrate its unreadiness to join the ranks of
mature democracies with its many attacks on free expression, most of
them springing from laws against insulting the state or its
institutions. And the list of jokes that insecure Ankarites can’t
take is long: suggesting that troops be withdrawn from Cyprus;
criticizing Kemal Ataturk, the long-dead father of modern Turkey;
even having a fictional character in a novel speak of the Armenian
genocide. The country is consistently ranked about 100th in the world
by global nonprofit groups that measure press freedom, and the
European Union has insisted on easing these restrictions as a
precondition to Turkey’s membership.

During that process, France has taken the lead in pushing Turkey to
join the 21st century instead of squabbling over the 20th. But as is
too often the case in Europe, the state’s zeal to promote the truth
has manifested itself in a prohibition against the individual’s right
to state falsehoods. On Thursday, as Pamuk was winning his prize, the
French National Assembly passed a bill making it an imprisonable
offense to deny that the Armenian genocide took place. This matches
similar laws across the EU criminalizing Holocaust denial. Both
notions exhibit an unseemly lack of confidence in the free
competition of ideas and leave European governments open to charges
of hypocrisy.

France has a partly questionable motivation – anti-Turkish animus –
for coming down on the side of truth. The U.S., which is motivated by
a desire to please its most important Muslim ally, has come out on
the other side – refusing to call the Armenian genocide by its proper
name. Proving again that nothing corrupts language more than
politics. "Political speech and writing," to quote Orwell again, "are
largely the defense of the indefensible."