Lad det være sagt med det samme og på forhånd: Holocaust-benægterne har ikke en sag. Holocaust er én af det 20. århundredes bedst og grundigst dokumenterede begivenheder, og for at benægte det skal man enten være meget uvidende, have store ideologiske skyklapper på eller have et ganske bestemt ideologisk sigte. Men når det er sagt, er det stadig en ret tåbelig idé at ville lovgive om, hvilke historiske teorier eller påstande, der kan fremsættes.
Lad os hellere tage debatten for åben pande og med udgangspunkt i empiriske fakta, som i tilfældet med Holocaust ikke er svært tilgængelige.
Timothy Garton Ash påpeger absurditeten i en kommentar i dagens Guardian:
More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.
This week a group of historians and writers, of whom I am one, has pushed back against this dangerous nonsense. In what is being called the “Appel de Blois”, published in Le Monde last weekend, we maintain that in a free country “it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions”. And we argue against the accumulation of so-called “memory laws”. First signatories include historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Le Goff and Heinrich August Winkler. It’s no accident that this appeal originated in France, which has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with memory laws and prosecutions. It began uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg tribunal, was made punishable by law in France – as it is in several other European countries. In 1995, the historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law.
A further law, passed in 2001, says the French Republic recognises slavery as a crime against humanity, and this must be given its “consequential place” in teaching and research. A group representing some overseas French citizens subsequently brought a case against the author of a study of the African slave trade, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, on the charge of “denial of a crime against humanity”. Meanwhile, yet another law was passed, from a very different point of view, prescribing that school curricula should recognise the “positive role” played by the French presence overseas, “especially in North Africa”.
Mine fremhævelser. I forlængelse af et argument oprindelig fremført af den borgerlige, liberale tænker John Stuart Mill i hans uomgængelige On Liberty: Hvis det ikke er tilladt at argumentere imod sandheden, mister den sin værdi og bliver et arbitrært diktat.
Hvis det ikke er tilladt at forsøge at finde alternative forklaringer på bestemte historiske begivenheder, mister disse begivenheder i sidste ende deres sandhed. Og de empiriske data om Holocaust klarer sig, skulle jeg hilse og sige, særdeles godt mod Holocaust-benægternes usandsynlige og søgte konspirationsteorier. Men hvis nogen mener at kunne argumentere for noget andet, skal vi da have lov til at høre argumenterne, før vi eventuelt skyder dem ned.
Som eksemplet med Bernard Lewis (som jeg ellers ikke er nogen stor fan af) viser, kan det meget hurtigt ende med at blive en ubehagelig glidebane.
Som Garton Ash spørger:
This kind of nonsense is all the more dangerous when it comes wearing the mask of virtue. A perfect example is the recent attempt to enforce limits to the interpretation of history across the whole EU in the name of “combating racism and xenophobia”. A proposed “framework decision” of the justice and home affairs council of the EU, initiated by the German justice minister Brigitte Zypries, suggests that in all EU member states “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” should be “punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between one and three years imprisonment”.
Who will decide what historical events count as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, and what constitutes “grossly trivialising” them?
Ytrings- og forskningsfriheden må i hvert fald og altid omfatte friheden til at rejse historiske spørgsmål og forsøge at belyse dem empirisk, uanset hvor “politisk korrekt” resultatet må være eller ej. Om ikke andet, fordi denne politiske korrekthed er en vejrhane, der skifter med det politiske klima – men mest af alt, fordi indstiftelsen af en officiel historisk sandhed, der ikke må modsiges, ganske enkelt reducerer den historiske forskning til pjat og tidsspilde.
Og hermed mister de begivenheder, hvis betydning disse velmente men tåbelige love forsøger at beskytte, netop dette: Deres betydning.
Link: The freedom of historical debate is under attack by the memory police