“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.”
My dismay at these laws was not only that they set a remarkably bad precedent, limiting freedom of expression beyond all reasonable bounds, but because I found little or no public anger that they had been instituted. The typical response I encountered ran something like, “If those events happened, then saying they didn’t happen is wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a law mandating that we publish the truth.” The problem is, the truth is such a slippery subject, and the only way to get at it is often to sift through falsehoods and prove them wrong with facts and logic.
Ash provides one of the clearest, most concise arguments in favor of freedom of historical expression I’ve seen. With so many versions of the “truth” out there, how can we ever hope to find out which truth is objective? Only, Ash argues, by allowing a full, unfettered public debate:
“How, for example, do you refute the absurd conspiracy theory, which apparently still has some currency in parts of the Arab world, that "the Jews" were behind 9/11? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by refuting it. By mustering all the available evidence, in free and open debate. This is not just the best way to get at the facts; ultimately, it's the best way to combat racism and xenophobia too.”
It’s fitting that for the first full article in this blog, we take freedom of expression for our topic. The RPF, after all, was originally conceived as a forum for open public debate on rights issues, where it was okay to pull down sacred cows, scratch the bottoms of their feet, and see if they really were made of gold. Give Ash’s article a read, and let us know what you think.
