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  • Curbing Free Speech Works Against Truth

    CURBING FREE SPEECH WORKS AGAINST TRUTH
    BY: BRENDAN O'NEILL

    Weekend Australian
    January 28, 2012 Saturday
    1 - All-round Country Edition

    The French will pay a very high price for their new law on the
    Armenian genocide

    AS of this week, it is against the law in France to say: "I don't
    think the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians."

    Under a new act, passed by the French Senate on Monday, anyone who
    denies or "minimises" the genocide suffered by the Armenians at the
    hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915 could be jailed for one year or
    fined E45,000 ($55,500).

    A government minister says the act is part of a drive to "repress
    racist and xenophobic statements". That is, the French government is
    mainly concerned with preserving the safety and self-esteem of its
    population of 600,000 ethnic Armenians.

    A senator in France's upper house who voted for the act says it is
    also about establishing the truth in the face of "continuing denial
    of a tragic historical event". Who could be opposed to the desire of
    the French state to protect its Armenian population from hurt feelings
    and its commitment to the project of affirming the truth about history?

    Well, I am. I'm against this massively illiberal law, which is a
    disgrace to 21st-century Europe and particularly to that birthplace
    of modern liberty, France. Whatever the backers of the act might tell
    us, the truth is their speech-curbing piece of legislation will do
    nothing to establish historical truth or improve cultural attitudes
    towards Armenian people.

    As it happens, I believe that what the Turks did to the Armenians
    during and after World War I was a genocide. From 1915 to the early
    1920s, between one million and 1.5 million Armenians were either
    massacred or marched to their deaths by Ottoman Turkish forces. In
    some parts of the empire, entire Armenian populations were destroyed.

    However, there's still great scope for debate about the nature and
    the naming of these tragic events. For example, many people mistakenly
    see the Armenian genocide as a neat precursor to the Jewish Holocaust
    of World War II. They tend to read history backwards, projecting the
    terminology of the Holocaust on to the events of 1915, so that we
    end up being presented with two samey events from a pretty warped
    century in human affairs.

    Some even refer to the "Armenian Holocaust" of the 1910s.

    But there are great differences between the Armenian genocide and
    the Jewish Holocaust, not only in terms of scale but also in terms
    of intent.

    It unquestionably involved the brutal wiping out of huge numbers
    of an ethnic group, but it lacked the design of the Nazi plan to
    liquidate every Jew on Earth. It was a brutal assault on a people,
    a genocide, but was it part of a carefully worked-out program of
    industrial extermination?

    Historians must be free to raise questions such as that without the
    threat of being hauled before the courts for "minimising" Armenian
    suffering.

    As the Socialist Party senator Jean-Pierre Sueur said, as he voted
    against the act, "it isn't the business of the law, and especially
    criminal law, to intervene in the field of history and to rule in
    terms of historical truth".

    Indeed. Such clumsy and censorious state intervention into matters of
    historical interest do not help to clarify issues, far less get at the
    truth; rather they make things more cloudy, discouraging researchers
    from openly speaking their minds for fear of having their collars
    felt by the cops.

    John Stuart Mill, that great English defender of freedom of speech,
    argued more than 150 years ago that truth can be established only
    through testy debate in the public arena.

    In his fiery 1859 pamphlet On Liberty, he said: "Complete liberty of
    contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which
    justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action." In short,
    it is only by submitting your ideas or beliefs to the rigours of public
    discussion and ridicule that you can be sure they are correct, true,
    right. If you erect a moral or legal force-field around your theory,
    denying anyone the chance to pick it apart, then it isn't "the truth";
    it's a prejudice, a received wisdom, which you cleave to more out of
    habit than conviction.

    The French government hasn't established the truth of the Armenian
    genocide; it has turned the Armenian genocide into a state religion
    that you question at your peril.

    As to the claim that this law will help improve cultural relations, the
    opposite seems to be the case. It has provoked huge tensions between
    France and Turkey (which denies it committed a genocide against
    Armenians) and it has angered Turkish people living in France.
    There have been hot-headed protests against the law, mainly by
    young French-Turks who feel their people are being singled out for
    a censorious slap on the wrists by the French state.

    The end result of this legal instrument to control what people can
    think and say is that some communities feel relieved (the Armenians)
    but others feel aggrieved (the Turks). By turning a historic event
    into a contemporary flash-point issue, France is stoking up tensions,
    not combating xenophobia. The whole debacle demonstrates the extent
    to which genocide has been politicised in recent years.

    The motivation of Nicolas Sarkozy and his party in pushing the
    Armenia genocide law is really to garner support at home, not just
    among Armenians but also among native French people concerned about
    Turkey's demand for more influence in Europe, and also to look tough
    abroad, to appear uncompromising in relation to increasingly powerful
    Eastern states.

    Such cynical politicisation of a historical event has come with a
    very high price: the denigration of free thought, the straitjacketing
    of academic debate, and the intensification of West-East tensions in
    this supposedly modern Europe.

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