The Guardian, UK
Oct 19 2006

This is the moment for Europe to dismantle taboos, not erect them

Far from criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide, we should
decriminalise denial of the Holocaust

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday October 19, 2006
The Guardian

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I recently heard the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy 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.

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.

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.

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.