Eternal Damnation of the Spotless Mind

On the dangers of forgetting

The New Republic
Wednesday, January 07, 2009

By Bernard-Henri Levy

I write this in remembrance of the renowned Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink, murdered two years ago, on Jan. 19, 2007, for his comments
on the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces during
WWI … in horror that the police officers guarding the 17-year-old
murder suspect, Ogun Samast, saw fit to take a video in which he proudly
held the Turkish flag as they recorded their brief association with him
for posterity … in solidarity with the brave group of 200 Turkish
writers and intellectuals who recently signed an online petition
apologizing for the massacre, risking their freedom to keep pressure on
the Turkish government.

Outrages like Dink’s murder will continue. They will continue as long as
Turkey, fearing the loss of prestige and alarmed by the possibility that
it will be obliged to pay reparations to survivors and their
descendants, continues to deny that the Armenian genocide took place.
This struggle will continue as long as there are no laws in place
penalizing genocide denial — and these laws are needed not only in
Turkey, but around the world.

Critics may say, "It is not for the law to write history." That is
absurd. History has been written a hundred times over. The facts have
been established, and new laws will protect them from being altered.

In 1929, the British statesman and author Winston Churchill wrote that
the Armenians were victims of genocide, an organized enterprise of
systematic annihilation. The Turks themselves have admitted it. In 1918,
in the aftermath of WWI, Mustafa Kemal — soon to be granted the
honorific "Ataturk" — recognized the massacres perpetrated by the Young
Turk government.

The laws already in place in many countries regarding Holocaust denial
do not touch historians — for them the question of whether the
slaughter of the Jews was or was not genocide is no longer at issue.
What is at stake is preventing the erasure of such crimes from our
society’s memory.

Take France’s Gayssot law, which criminalized the denial of crimes
against humanity, and which as yet has been applied only to denial of
the Jewish Holocaust. This is a law that reins in the fringe and
extremist politicians who engage in lightly cloaked anti-Semitism and
who may be tempted to advocate Holocaust denial. This is a law that
prevents masquerades like that of historian David Irving’s trial in
London in 2000.

Irving brought a libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, author of "Denying
the Holocaust," who had labeled him a spokesman for Holocaust deniers.
Though the judge ruled in notably strong language that Irving was indeed
a Holocaust denier, in the absence of laws penalizing this offense,
Irving walked free. Meanwhile, the tabloid journalists and talking heads
muddied the issues and ultimately drew more attention to Irving’s work,
which may well have been his intention all along.

Critics will say, "Where will the law stop?" since technically we could
also extend this law to include the denial of the crimes that took place
during the colonial era, the publication of the Danish cartoons of the
Prophet Muhammad, even the sin of blasphemy. Must we forbid the
expression of opinions that do not mirror our own? This is a trap, for
two reasons.

First, the law would be focused specifically on genocide, a large-scale
criminal enterprise in which, as Hannah Arendt said, someone gets to
decide who has the right and who does not to inhabit this earth. Second,
the deniers don’t just have conflicting or nonconformist opinions. They
categorically deny that this horrific crime took place at all.

The logic and pattern of the crime of genocide was clarified and refined
over the 20th century, with the massacre of Armenians as a seminal
event. Hitler was impressed, nay, inspired by the scope of the Armenian
genocide. In August 1939, days before he invaded Poland, he said to his
generals, "Who still talks nowadays about the extermination of the
Armenians?"

It was a genocidal test firing. It was the basis for the Allies’ use of
the phrase "crimes against humanity" in their May 24, 1915 statement
regarding the massacre of Armenians "with the connivance and help of the
Ottoman authorities." It was a reference for the Polish jurist Raphael
Lemkin — who coined the term "genocide" and is responsible for
developing our understanding of this crime — when he was incorporating
the definition of "genocide" into the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

I have spent some time perusing the Armenian genocide deniers’
literature, which is remarkably similar to the literature on the
destruction of the Jews. The same arguments minimizing the number of
deaths ("sure, there were some, but not as many as they say") and the
same reversing of roles — just as Holocaust deniers render the Jews
responsible for the war and their own martyrdom, their Turkish
counterparts claim the Armenians betrayed the Ottomans by allying with
the Russians, thus sealing their own fate.

Some may ask, "Can’t the truth defend itself?" No, I am afraid not.
Consider that in 1942, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, ordered the
formation of Sonderkommando 1005, whose mission it was to dig up the
dead, to burn their bodies and dispose of the ashes. In one of his
memoirs of the camps, Primo Levi recalled that the SS militiamen enjoyed
admonishing their prisoners that when the war was over, there would not
be a single Jew left to testify and if by chance one did survive, they
would do whatever was necessary to make sure his testimony would not be
believed.

A similar logic drives those who proclaim to Armenians, "No, your
brothers and sisters are not dead. Your parents, grandparents and
great-great-grandparents are not dead, as you’re so foolishly claiming."
Such statements betray the absolute, insane hatred they harbor, against
which factual evidence and debate are useless and the truth is impotent.

Laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are expressions of the fact that
genocide, a perfect crime, leaves no traces. In fact, the obliteration
of those traces is genocide’s final phase. Holocaust deniers are not
merely expressing an opinion; they are perpetrating a crime.

Bernard-Henri Levy’s new book, "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The
New Barbarism", was published in September by Random House. This article
was translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.