REWRITING THE PAST
Agnes Poirier

The Guardian, UK
Oct 18 2006

Despite what the French left wants us to think, we cannot legislate
on how we should remember history.

Last Thursday, the French national assembly passed a bill that, if
approved by the French senate, would make the denial of the Armenian
genocide between 1915 and 1917 a criminal offence. Even if the senate
knows better and finally rejects this bill, the question remains:
how on earth have we even got to the point where such a bill could
be proposed, let alone adopted by a majority of MPs?

If this sad affair shows anything, it is the disrespect in which
the French prime minister is held by his own majority (Dominique de
Villepin is so badly considered within his own ranks that rightwing
MPs prefer to play a silly and dangerous game: passing a bill which
will make Villepin look even more of a fool to the French and the
world, and present Nicolas Sarkozy as the only adept runner to the
presidential elections). Secondly, the whole affair has proved how
inept and remote from the nation’s real concerns the French left is.

Not that it is news but it simply gets worse – and we naively thought
we had reached the bottom.

The international community reacted promptly to the news, condemning
the stupidity of the act and warning against its potential disastrous
effects. It would be fair to add that many international publications
also chose to mislead their readers by implying that the bill was,
in effect, passed as law. Some commentators shouted so loudly that
one couldn’t help but be perplexed by such venom.

The French socialist MPs who drafted the bill showed once more how
detached they are from the people they are supposed to represent.

They demonstrated once more their debilitating grasp of reality and
history. Is it the vote of the 450,000 French citizens of Armenian
origin they are after? The more problematic aspect of it all is not
the moral lesson the French MPs seem to be giving to Ankara – no,
that’s just childish; the real tragedy lies in what it says about
the way some of us now think. Instead of addressing issues, which
concern the whole nation (education, reforms, pensions, immigration,
security, globalisation), the French left prefers catering for groups
of clients, embracing cultural relativism. Truth and historical facts
now apparently change according to who speaks and from where.

When communities within a country start asking for laws to be amended
so that they include "their truths", it is the whole nation that
suffers. Many today want to be seen as victims of colonialism, of
past injustices, of forgetfulness, of past disrespect. In fact, they
are victims by proxy, indulging in the suffering of their ancestors.

This is not to say that the Armenian genocide didn’t take place;
we all know it did. But we simply cannot legislate on how we should
remember history, and France should certainly not be doing it on a
Turkish issue.

History is being rewritten; as journalist Eric Conan points out,
"by focusing too much on the shadows of history, the shadows have
blackened and obtruded the whole picture. Crimes alone are kept in
the frame while acts of heroism exit the scene. Let’s concentrate on
Vichy and forget the Nazi occupation. Let’s consider colonisation as
the essence of the republic. And so forth."

This unworthy trend in France is clearly here to divert our attention
from the real issues and the real debate. It offers a sickening
show played by some of the elite who find a narcissistic pleasure in
charging previous generations and asking to be whipped in public for
crimes they didn’t commit. They will tell you that the riots last
November were the heritage of colonisation, when they are actually
the direct result of 25 years of dire education and urban planning
policies, which have led to the rioters living in ghettoes of poverty.

They will tell you that the problem with Turkey is that they don’t
recognise the Armenian genocide at the precise moment when, in Turkey,
a national debate is opening up on the subject. What is the French
left trying to divert us from? Its own inanity? What an undignified
and pitiful spectacle.