    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 Lévy 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.