‘GENOCIDE DENIAL LAWS WILL SHUT DOWN DEBATE’
Spiked, UK
Feb 6 2007
She’s one of the best-known warriors against Holocaust denial. Yet
Deborah Lipstadt thinks EU plans to ban ‘genocide denial’ are
a disaster.
‘For European politicians, bringing in a ban on genocide denial is
like apple pie. It’s what I call a freebie. They’re doing it to make
themselves feel good. I mean, who could possibly be against standing up
to nasty genocide deniers? Only when you get to the heart of it, this
"freebie", this populist move, could have a dire impact on academic
debate. Even on truth itself.’
Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, may be one of the best-known
warriors against Holocaust denial. But she has no time for the
proposals currently doing the rounds of the European Union which
suggest making it a crime to deny the Holocaust, other genocides and
crimes against humanity in general.
Last week it was revealed that Germany, current holder of the EU’s
rotating presidency, is proposing a Europe-wide ban on Holocaust
denial and other forms of genocide denial. This would make a crime
of ‘publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising…crimes of
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes [as defined in the
Statute of the International Criminal Court].’ (1) In some European
countries – most notably Germany and Austria, which formed the heart
of the Third Reich – it is already against the law to deny or minimise
the Nazis’ exterminatory campaign against the Jews in the Second World
War. This new legislation might also make it a crime, punishable by
fines or imprisonment, to raise awkward questions about the official
history of conflicts that took place over the past 20 years.
‘This is so over the top’, says Lipstadt, in between sips of decaf
coffee in the plush surroundings of the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly,
London. Her earthy New York accent sounds almost out of place in a
building where even the doorman comes across as posh. ‘The question
of genocide, the history of genocide and what you can say about it,
should not be decided by politicians and judges’, she insists.
Lipstadt certainly can’t be accused of being soft on deniers. Her
book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,
published in 1994, meticulously exposed the lies and the underlying
racist agenda of those who deny the truth of the Nazi Holocaust.
Famously (or infamously) she was subsequently sued by the British
historian David Irving, whom she had named in the book as a Holocaust
denier. In January 2000, the 32-day trial, a showdown between an
American-Jewish historian and a far-right British historian, became a
legal debate about the history of the Nazis, and the nature of truth
itself. Irving lost rather spectacularly. The judge branded him an
anti-Semite, a racist and a Holocaust denier who had ‘deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’. Lipstadt recounts
the experience in History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.
Yet this ridiculer of deniers is no fan of the idea that Holocaust
denial or genocide denial should be outlawed. The current EU proposal
to criminalise denial of contemporary genocides and war crimes is an
affront to serious historical debate, she says.
Consider Srebrenica, the massacre that took place at the end of the
Bosnian civil war in 1995 in which it is estimated that 8,000 Bosnian
Muslims were killed. ‘Some people argue that, given there are only so
many tens of thousands of people in Srebrenica and the Serb soldiers
went after an X number of a specific group, then it is genocide. But
someone else might say it’s a massacre of the X population, not a
genocide – because if you’re going to use that word then you have
to go back to what the Nazis did to the Jews or what was done to the
Armenians [by the Turks in the First World War]’, says Lipstadt.
‘That is an entirely legitimate debate to have about Srebrenica. Are
we now saying that the person who says it’s not a genocide will be
fined and punished?’
Lipstadt is also worried about the way in which debate about
the Armenian experience might be closed down. During the First
World War, as Ottoman Turkish forces fought against the Russians,
some of the Armenian minority in Eastern Anatolia sided with
Russia. Turkey responded by rounding up and killing hundreds of
Armenian community leaders in April 1915, and then forcibly deporting
the two million-strong Armenian community in marches towards Syria and
Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Hundreds of thousands died as a result. At
the end of last year, to the fury of Turkey, France made it a crime
to deny that the Armenian tragedy was a genocide, and now Germany
seems to hope that the rest of Europe will follow suit by accepting
its proposals to outlaw denial of all genocides.
‘This is another body-blow to academic debate’, says Lipstdadt. ‘I
know serious historians who do not deny for a minute what happened
to the Armenians, who do not deny the severity or the barbarity of
what happened to them. But they question, they ask intellectually,
"Was this a genocide, or was it a horrendous massacre?" They don’t
ask that question on ideological grounds; they don’t have a shred of
allegiance to Turkey. They ask it intellectually, because they want
to get to the truth.’
‘I happen to think they’re wrong’, she says. She believes the Armenians
did suffer a genocide. ‘But you can, indeed you must, have a vigorous
academic debate about historical events. And in the course of that
vigorous academic debate you probably would illuminate weaknesses
in both sides of the argument, and hopefully sharpen the arguments
as a result. That is what academic debate is about. This kind of
legislation could put a kabash on that.’
Last year, in its reporting of the French decision to outlaw denial
of the Armenian genocide, the BBC was forced to explain why it
put the word ‘genocide’ in inverted commas. ‘Whether or not the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First
World War amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate’,
it said (2). Yet if the proposed legislation is passed in the EU,
then such things will no longer be a matter for heated debate; they
will become legally-defined truths that you deny or question at your
peril. Maybe even the BBC will find itself in the dock for putting
‘Armenian genocide’ in inverted commas.
It strikes me that as well as stifling open academic debate the
proposed legislation could criminalise political protest. Very often
these days, Western powers justify wars of intervention abroad in
the language of combating genocide. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
described their bombing crusade over Kosovo in 1999 as an effort to
stop Slobodan Milosevic’s ‘genocide’ against the Kosovo Albanians. In
truth, the final number of civilians killed in Kosovo – including
both Kosovo Albanians by Milosevic’s cronies and Serbs in NATO air
strikes – was fewer than 3,000. The Nazis were capable of killing
12,000 a day in Auschwitz alone. As Nazi camp survivor Elie Wiesel
said, taking umbrage at the use of Holocaust-talk to justify the
Kosovo campaign, ‘The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the
last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his
accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all
the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?’ (3) If EU officials,
in their infinite wisdom, decide that a conflict such as Kosovo is
genocide, and therefore the bombers must be sent in, will protesters
who question that line be criminalised under the new legislation?
Lipstadt finds today’s over-use of the genocide and Holocaust
tags, to describe conflicts or political repression, disturbing and
distasteful. She seems still to be reeling from an article she read in
The Times on Saturday, the day before we met. Under the headline ‘We
are vilified like Jews by the Nazis, says Muslim leader’, the paper
reported that Birmingham’s most senior Muslim leader had compared
contemporary political Britain to Nazi Germany.
‘That is ludicrous. It is stupid and ridiculous’, she says. ‘Is
there fear of Muslims today? No doubt. Do some politicians play on
that? Of course. But to compare Muslims in Britain to Jews in Nazi
Germany…that shows an utter lack of historical understanding, not to
mention sensitivity. Here, the police go out of their way to explain to
Muslims what is going on. In Nazi Germany if a Jew spoke to a policeman
he got hit. It was a whole government dedicated to being against you,
to eliminating you. So that is a disgusting kind of analogy. It is
wicked, and cleverly wicked. Sometimes it is done in a calculating
fashion to further your aims by playing that victim card.’
To the ‘befuddlement’ of some of her colleagues, Lipstadt is also
opposed to laws outlawing actual Nazi Holocaust denial. Such laws
already exist in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic,
Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and under Germany’s proposals
these will be extended to the rest of the EU and will also cover
genocide and war crimes denial. She points out that there is a huge
difference between those historians who legitimately debate something
like the Armenian experience, and the charlatans who distort the
truth in order to show that the Holocaust didn’t happen and ‘the
Jews’ are all liars. Where ‘genocide denial’ laws might frustrate
serious academic debate, Holocaust denial laws are only aimed at
punishing weird and malicious pseudo-historians. Yet she is against
the censorship of these charlatans, too.
‘I’m opposed to Holocaust denial laws for three reasons’, she says.
‘First because I believe in free speech. Governments should make
no laws limiting free speech, because it is never good when that
happens. Second, because these laws turn Holocaust deniers into
martyrs. Look what happened to David Irving when he was released from
jail in Austria – he became a media darling, given room to spout his
misinformation. We should ignore them rather than chasing them down.
‘And thirdly, and most importantly, such laws suggest that we don’t
have the history, the documentation, the evidence to make the case
for the Holocaust having happened. They suggest we don’t trust the
truth. But we do have the evidence, and we should keep on developing
it and deepening it, and we should trust it.’
Ironically, given her outspoken opposition to laws against Holocaust
and genocide denial, many point to Lipstadt’s legal victory over David
Irving as evidence for why the courtroom is a good place to resolve
historical issues and punish those who lie about or deny historic
tragedies. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that’, she says. She points
out that her case was not about ruthlessly pursuing Irving in order
to prove the truth about the Holocaust. ‘He came after me! He sued
me! I didn’t want it. I tried to stop it. Our whole legal strategy
was premised on trying to make this guy go away. Only when it was
very close to the case, when I saw the wealth of evidence that showed
how he had lied and distorted the facts, was I glad it had come to
court. Aside from that, I can think of no other instance where history
has benefited from courtroom adjudication.’
‘Politicians should not be doing history’, she says. ‘They have a
hard enough time doing politics right and doing legislation right.
Let them not muck up history, too.’
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Deborah Lipstadt’s book History
on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving is published by Harper
Perennial. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). Visit her website here.
The photographs of Professor Lipstadt were taken by Sasha Frieze who
blogs at Sashinka.
(1) EU plans far-reaching ‘genocide denial’ law, Bruno Waterfield,
Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2007
(2) Q&A: Armenian ‘genocide’, BBC News, 12 October 2006
(3) Quoted in ‘Exploiting genocide’, Brendan O’Neill, Spectator,
21 January 2006
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