Getting at the truth
By Charles Fried

December 13, 2006
The Boston Globe CHARLES FRIED

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, the egregious president of Iran, is hosting a
conference this week on whether the Holocaust really happened. There
are serious questions that someone with Ahmadinejad’s hostile attitude
toward the state of Israel might ask about the Holocaust — did it
justify the settlement of its survivors in Palestine in the first
place and has Israel misused the Holocaust to justify the Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories — but whether the Holocaust
ever happened is not one of them. To even somewhat sensible, mildly
educated people, Ahmadinejad’s conference is like having a conference
about whether the world might be flat after all.

Although Iran surely intends this as an affront to Israel and
Jewish people everywhere — my family and I fled Czechoslovakia
in 1939, leaving my grandparents and many relatives behind to die
in Theresienstad and Auschwitz — the real victims of this minor
latter-day outrage are the Iranian people and rational discourse
everywhere.

What Ahmadinejad’s conference proclaims is that truth has no place
in the world of politics; that if your ends are just, you can say
anything, no matter how far-fetched. Ahmadinejad tells us that his
pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities is for peaceful purposes only:
power generation, medical applications, and not as part of a weapons
program. Why would a rational person put faith in any assurance from
a man so contemptuous of truth or even think there is any point in
negotiating with him?

But Ahmadinejad’s tortured logic seems almost broad-minded compared
with Turkey’s stringent criminal prohibition on any suggestion that
such a thing as its genocide of the Armenian people ever happened.
Many brave Turkish writers and journalists have suffered persecution
in recent times for proclaiming what no reasonable person would deny.
Yet the Armenian genocide is as certain a historic fact as Hitler’s
European Holocaust, for which Ataturk’s may well have served as a model
and feasability study. (A recent brief, horrifying and thoroughly
documented account can be found in Niall Ferguson’s "War of the
World.") Turkey and Iran turn truth into either a crime or charade.

And then there is the converse: What about countries like Canada
and many in Europe that make it an offense to offer propositions
derogatory of races or religions, or to deny the Holocaust, or
proposed legislation in France that would make it a crime to deny the
Armenian genocide. Here, too, the truth and how we come to know it
suffers. States that forbid such palpable lies degrade the currency
of truth as much as those who proclaim a lie as their national policy.

For in the end, the only way to bite the nickel to make sure it’s
genuine is in discussion, debate, assertion, and counter-assertion.
That is the process in which extremists in Iran and Turkey are shown
to be what they are — charlatans and liars. But states that shut down
that process, even to inane propositions like Holocaust or Armenian
genocide denial, debase the currency of truth every bit as much
as their opposites, For in their zeal, they assign to themselves,
to politics, and to official power (with its attendant machinery
of prosecutors, judges, juries, and jailors) an authority that can
reside only in the forum of individual judgment and conviction.

There is such a thing as truth; that is why Holocaust deniers are
fools or liars. But that is exactly why there can be no such thing as
official truth — truth endorsed, policed, and enforced by the power
of the state. Truth is above politics, and judges politics, which
is why politics has no authority to proclaim it. Official truth is a
contradiction in terms. In one respect the Turks seem worse than the
Iranians: They make it a crime to tell the truth, while Ahmadinejad
claims to doubt what only a fool or scoundrel would deny. Because
there is a truth about the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, this
doubt is foolish, but that judgment is not a judgment of politics
but of the free mind that judges politics.

Charles Fried is a professor at Harvard Law School. His most recent
book is "Modern Liberty and The Limits of Government."

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