Against State-Backed Truths

Last Thursday, the French parliament exacerbated existing tensions between European states and Turkey, which is in talks to join the European Union. In an overwhelming 109-19 vote, the lower chamber of the French National Assembly unwisely passed a bill to criminalize the denial of the 1915 genocide of Armenians on Turkish soil. The French Senate and President have the chance to bury the bill, and we hope they take it.

Unsurprisingly, the Turkish government reacted swiftly against this bill, as have Turkish emigrants all over Europe. Some Turkish parliament members proposed a law criminalizing the denial of the French colonial genocide of Algerians (historians prefer to deem it colonial warfare). In France this weekend, vandals defaced one of the many existing monuments to the massacred Armenians.

These actions must be understood in a larger context. Under the proposed French bill, Armenian genocide deniers would face fines and prison terms equivalent to those mandated by anti-Holocaust-denying laws in some central European nations. Although the motivations for these laws may have been understandable in the post-war era, governments should not impose their version of the truth over their citizens.

The French bill is well intentioned; its goal is to force Turkey to confront the atrocities committed by the ruling Committee for Union and Progress during World War I. But we cannot help but be skeptical of any state trying to impose its version of history and truth. States should simply avoid this business. Thus, our opposition extends beyond the French bill to the laws like those in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Switzerland which criminalize Holocaust denial.

France’s passage of this bill would be an ironic parallel to the circumstances in Turkey, which tried Orhan Pamuk, this year’s Nobel laureate for literature, for speaking about the Armenian genocide—which violates Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. In defending free speech, even the expatriate Pamuk spoke against the French bill. A free market of ideas, not laws imposed by the state, should establish what is true.