the guardian – Modpress

Det er tåbeligt at lovgive mod Holocaust-benægtelse

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

USA: Otte års tilbagegang

Timothy Garton Ash skriver i The Guardian om Bush-regeringens nemesis:

The irony of the Bush years is that a man who came into office committedto both celebrating and reinforcing sovereign, unbridled national power has presided over the weakening of that power in all three dimensions: military, economic and soft. “I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional committee earlier this month. Many on the ground say that’s an understatement. The massive, culpable distraction of Iraq, Bush’s war of choice, leaves the US – and with it the rest of the west – on the verge of losing the war of necessity. Here, resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are the jihadist enemies who attacked the US on September 11 2001. By misusing military power, Bush has weakened it.

Economically, the Bush presidency ends with a financial meltdown on a scale not seen for 70 years. The proud conservative deregulators (John McCain long among them) now oversee a partial nationalisation of the American economy that would make even a French socialist blush. A government bailout that will total close to a trillion dollars, plus the cumulative cost of the Iraq war, will push the national debt to more than $11 trillion. The flagships of Wall Street either go bust or have to be salvaged, with the help of government or foreign money. Most ordinary Americans feel poorer and less secure.

Som Ash også bemærker, er det ikke kun den rå militære og økonomiske magt, men i allerhøjeste grad også landets moralske styrke og anseelse, der har lidt skade. George Bush kritiserer Putin for at invadere en uafhængig stat (Georgien), og hele verden ler. Amerikanerne taler menneskerettigheder i Kina og Rusland, og folk trækker på skuldrene og tænker på Abu Ghraib og Guantanamo.

Selv en medskyldig og republikaner som Colin Powell mener i dag, at en kommende præsidents vigtigste opgave må være at genoprette USAs anseelse ude i verden. Latinamerika er ved at falde fra, og den eneste rigtigt venligtsindede regering på de kanter er Colombia, der ledes af en notorisk krigsforbryder og bandit. Imperiet består måske stadig, men det har fået alvorlige ridser i lakken.

I stedet står USA nu, efter otte års svækkelse, overfor et valg mellem to kandidater, der repræsenterer mere eller mindre den samme politik, men med vidt forskellige kulturelle og symbolske betydninger. Det er til dels ud fra en formodning om, at det nok ikke kan blive meget værre, at vi i den anledning gerne vil gøre Garton Ashs håb til vores:

“No one has done more to serve the cause of anti-Americanism than GW Bush. It is we who like and admire the US who should, by rights, be burning effigies. But now, at last, we live in hope of a better America.“

Guantanamo – amerikansk tortur med britisk hjælp

Fra dagens Guardian, om en retssag, der skal afklare efterretningstjenesten MI5s mulige indblanding i en sag om bortførelse og tortur af en britisk borger:

Mohamed, a UK resident, was initially held in Pakistan in 2002 and was later secretly rendered to Morocco, where he claimed that he was tortured and had his penis lacerated while further threats were made. He was then flown by the US authorities to Afghanistan, where he claims he was subjected to further ill-treatment and interrogation, at the end of which he said that he would have said anything to avoid further punishment

In September 2004, he was taken to Guantánamo Bay, where he is still held. He claims that all his confessions were a result of the torture. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

Den amerikanske regering ser helst ikke, at den britiske domstol afklarer, hvad der er sket:

‘The US state department today warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause “serious and lasting damage” to security relations between the two countries – the “national security of the UK” would be affected’
Oversættelse: “National security would be affected” = “det er alt for pinligt for os, det her”

Er der noget om tortur-snakken? En af de implicerede efterretningsagenter var i hvert fald bange for at udtale sig under vidneansvar:

Last week, in the initial hearing of the case, the high court found that MI5 had participated in the unlawful interrogation of Mohamed. It emerged that one MI5 officer was so concerned about incriminating himself that he initially declined to answer questions from the judges even in private… It was disclosed that the officer, Witness B, was questioned about alleged war crimes, including torture, under the international criminal court act.

Det tyder som udgangspunkt ikke godt. Vi bemærker, at som altid, når det handler om Guantanamo og de mennesker, der er havnet i dette helvede af en moderne koncentrationslejr, er det en helt usædvanligt ubehagelig historie.

Jeg håber, de skyldige ender med at få deres straf (og det er ikke den efter alt at dømme ganske uskyldige hr. Mohamed, jeg tænker på).

Genoa – syv år efter

The Guardian har en glimrende og noget foruroligende gennemgang af forløbet i forbindelse med politiets amokløb under G8-topmødet i Genoa i 2001:

It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with their sticks… It was at that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and kicked him in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of his rib cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh.

There are several good reasons why we should not forget what happened to Covell, then aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only the beginning. The second is that, seven years later, Covell and his fellow victims are still waiting for justice…

… they dragged Zuhlke into the ground-floor hall, where they had gathered dozens of prisoners from all over the building in a mess of blood and excrement. They threw her on top of two other people. They were not moving, and Zuhlke drowsily asked them if they were alive. They did not reply, and she lay there on her back, unable to move her right arm, unable to stop her left arm and her legs twitching, blood seeping out of her head wounds. A group of police officers walked by, and each one lifted the bandana which concealed his identity, leaned down and spat on her face.

The signs of something uglier here were apparent first in superficial ways. Some officers had traditional fascist songs as ringtones on their mobile phones and talked enthusiastically about Mussolini and Pinochet. Repeatedly, they ordered prisoners to say “Viva il duce.” Sometimes, they used threats to force them to sing fascist songs: “Un, due, tre. Viva Pinochet!”

Fascistisk infiltration af politiet – var det derfor, det gik så galt? Nick Davies antyder i artiklen, at det kan være endnu værre, at laden-stå-til overfor sådanne metoder fra politiets side kan være en bevidst taktik fra politikere, der føler sig under pres – som for eksempel, G8-landenes ledere og de italienske politikere, der var ansvarlige for topmødets afvikling uden pinlige demonstranter til at gøre opmærksom på fattigdom og ulighed i den globaliserede verden:

Fifty-two days after the attack on the Diaz school, 19 men used planes full of passengers as flying bombs and shifted the bedrock of assumptions on which western democracies had based their business. Since then, politicians who would never describe themselves as fascists have allowed the mass tapping of telephones and monitoring of emails, detention without trial, systematic torture, the calibrated drowning of detainees, unlimited house arrest and the targeted killing of suspects, while the procedure of extradition has been replaced by “extraordinary rendition”. This isn’t fascism with jack-booted dictators with foam on their lips. It’s the pragmatism of nicely turned-out politicians. But the result looks very similar. Genoa tells us that when the state feels threatened, the rule of law can be suspended. Anywhere.

Go read.