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On the Armenian Genocide: The Response of a Handful of Historians

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  • On the Armenian Genocide: The Response of a Handful of Historians

    Huffington Post
    Jan 3 2012


    On the Armenian Genocide: The Response of a Handful of Historians

    Bernard-Henri Lévy.French philosopher; Writer

    Are these people really incapable of comprehending? Or are they just
    pretending not to understand?

    The law whose purpose is to penalize negationist revisionism, voted
    before Christmas by the French parliament, does not propose to write
    history in the place of historians. And this for the simple reason
    that this history has been told and written, well written, for a long
    time. This we have always known: that, beginning in 1915, the
    Armenians were the victims of a methodic attempt at annihilation. A
    wealth of literature has been devoted to the subject, based in
    particular upon the confessions offered by the Turkish criminals
    themselves, starting with Hoca Ilyas Sami, almost immediately after
    the fact. From Yehuda Bauer to Raul Hilberg, from researchers at Yad
    Vashem to Yves Ternon and others, no serious historian casts doubt
    upon this reality or denies it. In other words, this law has nothing
    to do with the will to establish a truth of state. No representative
    of the French National Assembly who voted for it saw himself as a
    substitute for historians or their work. Together, they only intended
    to recall this simple right, that of each of us not to be publicly
    attacked -- and its corollary, the right to demand reparations for
    this particularly outrageous offense which is the insult to the memory
    of the dead. It is a question of law, not one of history.

    Presenting this law as one that denies liberty, one likely to hamper
    the work of historians is another strange argument that makes one
    wonder. It is the negationist revisionists who, up until now, have
    hampered the work of historians. It is their mad ideas, their
    hare-brained concepts, their twisting of facts, their terrifying and
    breathtaking lies that shake the earth upon which, in principle, a
    science should be built. And in punishing them, making their task more
    complicated, alerting the public that it is dealing not with scholars
    but with those who would enflame minds, that the law protects and
    shelters history. Is there one historian who has been prevented from
    working on the Shoah by the Gayssot law punishing denial of the
    Holocaust? Is there one author who, in good conscience, can claim that
    it has limited his freedom to do research and to raise questions? And
    isn't it clear that the only ones this law has seriously hindered are
    the Faurissons, the Irvings, and the other Le Pens? Well, the same
    applies to the genocide of the Armenians. This law, when the Senate
    will have ratified it, will be a stroke of fortune for historians, who
    can finally work in peace. Unless... Yes, unless those who oppose the
    law express this other, cloudier reservation: that it would be a bit
    premature to come to a conclusion, precisely and for nearly a century,
    of "genocide".

    Some still say, isn't there some other way than the law to intimidate
    the "assassins on paper"? And hasn't the truth in itself, in its
    starkness and its rigour, the means to defend itself and to triumph
    over those who would deny it? It is a vast debate, one which has been
    discussed, in parenthesis, since the origins of philosophy. And to
    which one adds, in the case at hand, a specific parameter stating
    that, when in doubt, it is prudent to make sure one is backed up by
    the law. This parameter is the negationist revisionism of the Turkish
    State. And this specificity is that the negationists there are not
    just a vague bunch of cranks, but people who are supported by
    resources, diplomacy, the capacity for blackmail and retaliation of a
    powerful State. Imagine the situation of the survivors of the Shoah
    had the German State been a negationist State after the war. Imagine
    the immensity of their additional distress and anger had they been
    confronted, not with a sect of loonies, but with an unrepentant
    Germany that brought pressure upon their partners by threatening them
    with angry retaliation should they call the extermination of the Jews
    at Auschwitz genocide. It is, mutatis mutandis, the situation of the
    Armenians. And that is also why they have the right to a law.

    And finally, I would add that it's time to stop mixing everything up
    and drowning the Armenian tragedy in the ritualized blahblahblah
    assailing the "memorial laws". For this law is not a memorial law. It
    is not one of those dangerous power plays capable of laying the path
    for dozens if not hundreds of absurd or blackguardly rules, codifying
    what one has the right to say about the Saint Bartholomew's Day
    massacre, the meaning of colonization, slavery, the Civil War, the
    misdemeanor of blasphemy and heaven knows what else. It is a law
    concerning a genocide -- which is not the same. It is a law
    sanctioning those who, in denying it, intensify and perpetuate the
    genocidal act -- which is something else entirely. There are not,
    thank God, hundreds of genocides, or even dozens. There are three.
    Four, if we add the Cambodians to the Armenians, the Jews, and the
    Rwandans. And to place these three or four genocides on the same level
    as all the rest, to make their penalization the antechamber of a
    political correctness that authorizes a stream of useless or perverse
    laws on the disputed aspects of our national memory, to say, "Watch
    it! You're opening a Pandora's box from which everything and anything
    can pop out !" is another imbecility, exacerbated by another infamy
    and sealed with a dishonesty that is, really, grotesque.

    Let us confront this specious line of argument with the wisdom of
    national representation. And may the senators complete the process by
    refusing to be intimidated by this little band of historians.



    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/on-the-armenian-genocide-_b_1181758.html?ref=yahoo&ir=Yahoo




    From: A. Papazian
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