CENSORING IDEAS
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
Boston Globe, MA
Oct 18 2006
DID THE Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915?
Careful — in some places you can be arrested if you give the wrong
answer to that question. Under Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code,
for example, those who promote "recognition of the Armenian genocide"
are subject to prosecution, while Article 301 makes the denigration of
"Turkishness" a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. The
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk , winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for
L iterature , is among those who have been charged under Article
301. His offense was to tell a Swiss interviewer that "30,000 Kurds
and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but
me dares to talk about it."
Yet if acknowledging the Armenian genocide is a crime in Turkey,
gainsaying it could soon be a crime in France. Last week the French
National Assembly voted to approve a bill under which anyone denying
the 1915 genocide could be sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and
a 45,000-euro ($56,000) fine. That matches the penalty under French
law for denying the Nazi Holocaust .
The French legislation is meant to uphold the truth — the Armenian
genocide, like the Holocaust, is a fact of history — while the point
of the Turkish law is to debase it. Both, however, are intolerable
assaults on liberty. Beliefs should not be criminalized, no matter
how repugnant or absurd. As I wrote when David Irving was convicted
of Holocaust denial in Austria earlier this year, free societies do
not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting
historical lies.
We Americans should know this better than anyone. The right to speak
one’s mind is supposed to be a core article of our civic faith. Yet
the would-be censors are busy here, too.
THE ‘SHUT UP’ FACTOR: How serious a problem is censorship today? Are
would-be censors smothering debate?
At Columbia University two weeks ago, a forum on immigration was to
feature a speech by Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen, a group that
monitors the US-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. But moments
after Gilchrist began speaking, protesters led by members of the
International Socialist Organization stormed the stage, overturning
tables, unfurling banners, and yelling insults. After 15 minutes of
pandemonium, campus police shut down the program .
In Seattle, two teachers are suing the affluent Lakeside prep school
for illegal racial discrimination and the creation of a hostile
work environment. "Among the plaintiffs’ complaints," reports the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "was Lakeside’s invitation to conservative
commentator Dinesh D’Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture
series." But D’Souza, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and
a veteran of the Reagan White House, never gave the lecture: Faculty
members opposed to his views howled when he was invited, and the
school’s headmaster, bowing to the censors, rescinded the invitation.
Asked about the campaign against him, D’Souza had said: "I am coming
to speak on one day. If they think what I am saying is so awful, they
have the rest of the year to refute it." But that isn’t enough for
the enemies of free speech. They insist not only that speakers with
politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering
them a platform be punished as well.
Then there is "Grist," an environmental webzine whose staff writer
David Roberts recently proposed that global warming skeptics be put
on trial like Nazi war criminals.
"When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming . . . we
should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of
climate Nuremberg," Roberts wrote. Negative publicity led him to
recant, but he is far from the only one invoking the Holocaust as a
way to silence global warming heretics.
Environmental writer Mark Lynas, for example, puts dissent on
climate change "in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial —
except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have
time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have
to answer for their crimes." This totalitarian view is taking root
everywhere, making skepticism on climate change taboo and subjecting
anyone reckless enough to question the global-warming dogma to mockery
and demonization. Former vice president Al Gore lumps "global warming
deniers," some of whom are eminent scientists, with the "15 percent of
the population (who) believe the moon landing was actually staged in a
movie lot in Arizona" and those who "still believe the earth is flat."
The silencers are at work in the marketplace of ideas, using hook
or crook to smother opinions they dislike. The lust to censor is as
powerful as ever. If only liberty’s defenders were equally vigilant.
Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is [email protected].
e/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/10/18/censo ring_ideas/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
