The Nine Sages have spoken

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/europe/france-armenia-genocide/index.html

The French Constitutional Court has rejected the bill that would recognise the Armenian genocide. The question is which factor exactly made the judges make a U-turn on the issue. Was it the striving for the ultimate Truth or was it the diplomatic pressure from Turkey and the desire to not destroy the last remnants of decent relations between France and Turkey? Either way, the decision is very questionable and comes in a very disturbing fashion. Because it reveals a certain amount of bias on part of the Court. And that sounds bad for a court that is supposed to uphold the Constitution.

The bill which was earlier adopted by the French parliament provided for sanctioning any acts of Armenian genocide denial, similarly to the existing laws about Holocaust denial in Germany. This provided a convenient reason for the Constitutional Court to shoot it down, basing their decision on concerns about the freedom of speech. Of course nothing and nobody should stand above the law, especially when we are speaking of the highest law and the highest court in the land. But still, the respect for the legal order should not make people blind for some disturbing facts about this court decision.

I am talking about the enormous pressure from a number of Turkish envoys who even resorted to outright threats eventually, in the days before the Court's decision. I am talking about the nationalist protests at the doors of the Senate. And I am talking about that letter which carried the signature of the CEO of one of the most influential French corporations, who was even selected a co-chairman of the "scientific committee" of the most influential Turkish lobby in France, the Bosphorus Institute. Henri de Castries, the boss of the insurance company AXA wrote that letter in which he was urging the French MPs to reject the bill, stating the diplomatic and trade relations between France and Turkey as the primary reason to play nice.

And let's have a closer look at the judges and ask the question what undermines the faith in their impartiality and wisdom. One of the so-called "Nine Sages" is Hubert Haenel, member of the Bosphorus Institute. That was never a secret. Well, he was excluded from the vote for this very reason. But what we shouldn't miss to mention is that before that he tried to influence his colleagues with a letter where he was warning of the potentially damaging consequences for the "economic relations between France and Turkey". Similarly to Haenel, the judge Jacqueline de Guillenschmidt wasn't allowed to vote either, because of her widely known pro-Turkish positions. One might begin to think that the Court was cleaning the way to an anti-Turkish vote, but no. The list of pro-Turkish judges does not end there. Michel Charasse, another openly anti-Armenian-genocide judge was on the vote panel, and her colleague Jean-Louis Debre wasn't any less unbiased.

We are not talking about putting the entire superior Court institution in question. But we shouldn't forget that this presumably highest legal institution in France has not always displayed itself to be so high as we are supposed to believe. The judges are claiming that the verdict is aiming to protect the freedom of speech and nothing more. But this pretense sounds a little weak because they themselves betrayed their own true intentions by publicly throwing qualifications about the genocide, such as "extermination" and other such substitute terms, immediately after the court decision was announced. A court that discredits itself in such a way could not have the pretense of the protector of the ultimate Truth.

And, all said and done, a court consisting of judges who may know everything about the Constitution, is not automatically a panel of expert historians at the same time. They may shoot down a bill like this, whether out of pure intentions like protecting the freedom of speech, or more Realpolitik kind of considerations like the "economic relations" between their country and a strong emerging economy... But they will never erase the authenticity of an enormous atrocity like the Armenian genocide, no matter how hard they try to blur it with vague PC terms.

Comments

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

One could also ask why Sarkozy pushed this bill through right now, and why so hard. I'd guess it's because he's trying to gain some support among undecided voters by playing tough with Turkey (an old exercise in Europe) while appeasing the traditionally strong Aremanian diaspora in France and posing as the protector of historical justice. Or something.

[lai-choi-san.livejournal.com]

Pretty this. And instead of gaining support, this caused an outcry among French people. Law must not interfere with the writing of History. Also, as if denying the Armenian genocide were a big threat here...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Does France have laws against Holocaust Denial? If it doesn't penalize a genocide committed in European territory that it directly helped contribute to, it has no business raising the hoary ghost of WWI to penalize that. But of course it's no surprise that rules applying to one set of Europeans are never expected to fully apply to another.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This is not, additionally, to minimize 1915, just to point out an obvious hole in the argument that a country should sanction one set of free speech and neglect the one that butchered 6 million Jews in Europe, in a genocide committed by the wealthiest country in Europe. If France does have these restrictions, then I would have not really any problem with it whatsoever.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism. Source (http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/385c2add1632f4a8c12565a9004dc311/4c47b59ea48f7343802566f200352fea?OpenDocument).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In that case never mind, my point was invalidated.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

1. On the one hand, this is just plain stupid, because no one, not even the Turks who bother actually looking beyond the propaganda, seriously denies that what took place in Great War-era Armenia constituted "genocide." No, it's pure nationalistic politics and brand-control perpetuated by a Turkey that likes to think of itself as part of Europe and not the Middle East (because Europeans never commit war crimes, I guess) and doesn't want its name tarnished by past atrocities.

2. "The bill which was earlier adopted by the French parliament provided for sanctioning any acts of Armenian genocide denial, similarly to the existing laws about Holocaust denial in Germany."

*bangs head on desk*

Alright, I'm sorry. I can sort of understand German sensitivity to Holocaust issues, but like with "hate speech" laws, what the heck good does criminalizing Holocaust/genocide denial actually do?

There are a whole slew of nonsensical, repugnant, utterly stupid, and hateful things that people say, which are not criminalized. People say they've been abducted by aliens. People say they've seen Elvis working at a gas station in Alabama. People say that all religious belief is a mental illness and religion should be outlawed. People talk about vast worldwide conspiracies by the Illuminati/New World Order. People express beliefs that the 9/11 attacks on America were inside jobs done by the CIA. People root for the Dallas Cowboys, People say that non-white people are physically inferior and little better than animals.

Should we criminalize these kinds of speech as well? Am I really the only person who sees a slippery-slope situation here? Where does it end?

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

My opinion is that there is a middle ground between recognising a historic act of atrocity and outright criminalising its denial. Historical sensitivities are one thing, freedom of speech is another, and turning one's back to a huge episode in history for the sake of political correctness is a third.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Well, since this bill was apparently going to criminalize its denial, one could begin to see where its weak spot was and why it was easily shot down by the constitutional court.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Good point, and the question what would France gain from recognizing the Armenian genocide would be sensible. I think you are on to something with your above comment.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty messed up situation, no doubt.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

But what of the problem in treating atrocities as historical events deserving of study? 1915 is made out to be more like the Holocaust when it was more Stalin in 1942: a few people work with an enemy that as per the Treaty of Sevres and its precursor in the Sykes-Picot Treaty was intending the wholesale destruction of the warmaking Great Power, so the Great Power deports them into barren, inhospitable territory to die and streamline its front. Is this a justification? In no means whatsoever. But is it the reality? Yes.

Unfortunately Turkey simply refuses to admit anything, while the Armenians still to claim territory amounting to a third of Turkey. This combination means the actual events and the 1 million people who died in the desert of Syria get two injustices: misremembered and serving as the political pawns of future generations.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

I'm all for officially recognizing the historical fact of the atrocities. In fact, I think that's a generally good policy. You can't prevent or correct the mistakes of the past without first acknowledging that they happened. I just take exception to criminalizing the speech.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that the claim that it was a proto-Holocaust is not related to the historical facts. The Ottomans very much knew if they lost, the Empire would be dismembered (and they lost and it was in fact dismembered, it took Turkey fighting three simultaneous wars to prevent it being partitioned in at least five ways) and so reacted very drastically to an uprising by Dashnak terrorists, to the point that the ultimate result was a precursor of 1942: tyranny faces revolts by people with no reason to love it, tyranny deports them to die in one of its most barren and hostile places.

Of course bringing *this* up requires people to know something about the Eastern Front of WWII, and there are damned few Westerners who do.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Very true.

"Proto-Holocaust" is a bit too much. "Genocide" fits the bill, though, I'd say.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. And noting the Armenian uprisings at the same time no more invalidates claim to this being a genocide than any other occasion where genocide targets fight back. People do not tamely wind up being railroaded off to die in baking heat, they do fight back. The main reason I differentiate the Holocaust from other genocides is the bureaucratic element. No other modern genocide, however well-planned, went into the kind of bureaucracies of murder Hitler's monsters did.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Yes.

It's what is most frightening about it, for me. Genocide and horrific atrocities have been committed throughout history. The Romans did it. The Muslims did it. The Crusaders were very good at it, and so were the early European colonizers. We Americans certainly did our part as well.

But never before did a modern, industrialized, "civilized" country harness its national industry to facilitate the bureaucratic, mechanized elimination of an entire people. If someone had written about such a thing in 1930, it would have been dismissed as the craziest hack sci-fi that could never happen.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Precisely this. The most interesting fact about the first German genocide, the one in what's now Namibia, is that the German governor in that region was Heinrich Goering, father of the WWI Ace, architect of the Four-Year Plan, and flamboyant drug-addicted kleptocrat Hermann Goering. One wonders just what Heinrich learned from his father in all that given how willingly he aided the modernized, bureaucratic European version. *shakes head* And the most nasty element of the Holocaust is how few were the people in Europe that objected to. And only two countries actively stopped it in their territory, those being Bulgaria and Denmark.

To me perhaps both the most awesome thing and the most frightening thing at the same time in this context is the Rosenstrasse Protest: the SS goes to round up Jewish husbands of Christian women, those women protest in the kind of civil disobedience used by Gandhi and MLK, and the regime backed down and returned their husbands .

The most frightening thing about that is it's the only time this ever happened. But it was the most successful of all protests in Germany. Makes you wonder.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Woah! I never heard of that!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://voiceseducation.org/content/womens-rosenstra%C3%9Fe-protest-nazi-berlin (http://voiceseducation.org/content/womens-rosenstra%C3%9Fe-protest-nazi-berlin)

It defies some mythology about the Nazis (namely that they would have simply shot up civil disobedience) but also raises some more troubling questions of its own. It is simultaneously the greatest WWII-era triumph of non-violence in the place one would least suspect it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I find this quote in particular the most meaningful one in descriptions of the Protest:

A Gestapo man who no doubt would have heartlessly done his part to deport the Jews imprisoned in the Rosenstraße was so impressed by the people on the streets that, holding up his hands in a victory clasp of solidarity with a Jew about to be released, he pronounced proudly: "You will be released, your relatives protested for you. That is German loyalty."

^Yeah, that's what non-violence got people in Nazi Germany. The regime really could have backed down if more people had done this.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. You cannot learn from past mistakes without first acknowledging them, and you cannot heal old wounds without identifying them. As a South African I know painfully well what this means.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) And because when Armenia was using it to make territorial claims at Turkish expense, it was at that time the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Turks understandably weren't interested in *anything* that would give the USSR territorial gain at their expense, and it mushroomed from there into something that on both sides overshadows the reality of the events. It was WWI's version of the Deportation of the Chechens and Volga Germans in WWII: punish everybody for the murderous acts of a few, with the justification being superior force.

Unfortunately for Turkey its denial policy gets into silliness and ridiculousness, while the Armenians claim it was a Holocaust in embryo. Unfortunately for *that* claim given that the Holocaust was bureaucratic mass murder, an Ottoman state that had the capability to construct an SS would have had a one-day Battle of Gallipoli, not a year-long mutual butchery. This is why the *real* Holocaust matters as it really does have certain traits that qualify it as deserving uniqueness. And of course Armenian nationalists used it to claim about a full third of Turkey that *they* could only support with a *real* targeted extermination of all non-Armenians in the region..............but that was just targeting Turks so like Sevres itself nobody gives a damn outside Turkey, while Turks understandably don't like talking about losing a war.