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An Op-Ed By Professor Charles Fried: Getting At The Truth

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  • An Op-Ed By Professor Charles Fried: Getting At The Truth

    AN OP-ED BY PROFESSOR CHARLES FRIED: GETTING AT THE TRUTH

    Harvard Law Bulletin, MA
    Dec 13 2006

    The following op-ed, Getting at the truth, was published in The Boston
    Globe on December 13, 2006.

    Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the egregious president of Iran, is hosting a
    conference this week on whether the Holocaust really happened. There
    are serious questions that someone with Ahmadinejad's hostile attitude
    toward the state of Israel might ask about the Holocaust -- did it
    justify the settlement of its survivors in Palestine in the first
    place and has Israel misused the Holocaust to justify the Israeli
    settlements in the occupied territories -- but whether the Holocaust
    ever happened is not one of them. To even somewhat sensible, mildly
    educated people, Ahmadinejad's conference is like having a conference
    about whether the world might be flat after all.

    Although Iran surely intends this as an affront to Israel and
    Jewish people everywhere -- my family and I fled Czechoslovakia
    in 1939, leaving my grandparents and many relatives behind to die
    in Theresienstad and Auschwitz -- the real victims of this minor
    latter-day outrage are the Iranian people and rational discourse
    everywhere.

    What Ahmadinejad's conference proclaims is that truth has no place
    in the world of politics; that if your ends are just, you can say
    anything, no matter how far-fetched. Ahmadinejad tells us that his
    pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities is for peaceful purposes only:
    power generation, medical applications, and not as part of a weapons
    program. Why would a rational person put faith in any assurance from
    a man so contemptuous of truth or even think there is any point in
    negotiating with him?

    But Ahmadinejad's tortured logic seems almost broad-minded compared
    with Turkey's stringent criminal prohibition on any suggestion that
    such a thing as its genocide of the Armenian people ever happened.

    Many brave Turkish writers and journalists have suffered persecution
    in recent times for proclaiming what no reasonable person would deny.

    Yet the Armenian genocide is as certain a historic fact as Hitler's
    European Holocaust, for which Ataturk's may well have served as a model
    and feasability study. (A recent brief, horrifying and thoroughly
    documented account can be found in Niall Ferguson's "War of the
    World.") Turkey and Iran turn truth into either a crime or charade.

    And then there is the converse: What about countries like Canada
    and many in Europe that make it an offense to offer propositions
    derogatory of races or religions, or to deny the Holocaust, or
    proposed legislation in France that would make it a crime to deny the
    Armenian genocide. Here, too, the truth and how we come to know it
    suffers. States that forbid such palpable lies degrade the currency
    of truth as much as those who proclaim a lie as their national policy.

    For in the end, the only way to bite the nickel to make sure it's
    genuine is in discussion, debate, assertion, and counter-assertion.

    That is the process in which extremists in Iran and Turkey are shown
    to be what they are -- charlatans and liars. But states that shut down
    that process, even to inane propositions like Holocaust or Armenian
    genocide denial, debase the currency of truth every bit as much
    as their opposites, For in their zeal, they assign to themselves,
    to politics, and to official power (with its attendant machinery
    of prosecutors, judges, juries, and jailors) an authority that can
    reside only in the forum of individual judgment and conviction.

    There is such a thing as truth; that is why Holocaust deniers are
    fools or liars. But that is exactly why there can be no such thing as
    official truth -- truth endorsed, policed, and enforced by the power
    of the state. Truth is above politics, and judges politics, which
    is why politics has no authority to proclaim it. Official truth is a
    contradiction in terms. In one respect the Turks seem worse than the
    Iranians: They make it a crime to tell the truth, while Ahmadinejad
    claims to doubt what only a fool or scoundrel would deny. Because
    there is a truth about the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, this
    doubt is foolish, but that judgment is not a judgment of politics
    but of the free mind that judges politics.
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