The Guardian: Decriminalize Holocaust Denial!

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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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.