WE SO often follow the lead of the American and British in everything that it is probably inevitable that the campaign to transform the Holocaust into a historically sacrosanct law will spread here; and given our love of moral posturing, we no doubt can look forward to a real treat on this issue. The Germans already have a meaningless law which makes it a criminal offence to deny that six million Jews died in the Holocaust: does the figure of 5,999,999 suggest that the atrocity was any less atrocious for the one Jew saved?
It does not. No intellectual or moral cause is served by turning history into a moral and legal dogma; all that is served is a reactionary notion about the individual's intellect and the state. That kind of notion underpinned the united theological and criminal legal code which caused Aristotle's beliefs in the movement of the heavenly bodies to be eternal verities, the denial of which was punishable before the courts. The issue is not the rightness of what Aristotle thought, but whether or not his beliefs in the universe should be protected by the rigours of the law, even from the mad, the foolish or the bad.
Historical Record
The known historical record concerning the Holocaust, God knows, is clear enough - there was a concerted attempt to destroy the Jewish population of Europe. To my mind, and without exaggeration or melodrama, no more evil single enterprise has yet been attempted in human history. But the figures for the gassed do not reach the nice and handy six million; the total death toll was more probably four million, many of whom died of hunger and disease rather than gas poisoning.
Nor was the Holocaust the only, or the first, attempt to dispose of unwanted human beings; what distinguished it was its Germanic efficiency and the documentary zeal with which the Third Reich recorded this particular historical triumph for did not little Germans of the future need to be shown what great things grandpa and his generation did to cleanse the world of the Jewish threat?
Before the Holocaust there was the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, largely by Kurds rather than by the ethnic Turks who are now held responsible for the killings. Nobody can know how many Armenians died - less than the figure given by Armenians, more than the figure admitted by Ankara.
It had not the concerted and centralised purpose of what the Nazis were to do 30 years later, and much of it was caused by bizarre and spontaneous jacquerie lynch mobs - but it had some of the characteristics of genocide. It would be absurd to make the denial of the Armenian massacre a criminal offence in law - as it would to deny that the fates of the aboriginal peoples of the US and Australia could, by cumulative experience and final effect, be akin to the Holocaust planned, if not fully achieved, by the Third Reich.
The horrible truth about freedom is that we have to allow the bad the right to speech, even as we allow it to ourselves, provided that that speech does not incite others to harm the health and lives of others. Holocaust denial does no such thing; in fact, in its own funny little way, it is a moral reassurance from neo Nazis that this was something so terrible that it would have been beyond their beloved Adolf to contemplate. If they find the idea of mass murder so repugnant, is that in itself not reassuring? Do we need to protect ourselves with the criminal legal code from the intellectual ramblings of such people?
Attempt at Genocide
And if we do, who else must be silenced that they might not harm some central historical tenets, which should therefore be guarded by the courts? In New York State, it is now the law that children be taught that the Famine was an attempt at genocide of the Irish by the British. If British politicians are seriously going to make it a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust and Tony Blair has come out in favour of it: no doubt he hopes to win the Jewish vote and conciliate the doctrinaire, Left wing dogmatists who have little enough to cheer about from New Labour and Americans are by law decreeing the Famine to have been genocide, what other historical episodes might not be incorporated into the criminal legal code?
We can all play at this game; fatwas and the intellectual intolerance of the imams were once the preserve of others. Now they seem to the plaything of Western politicians too. Might the British not insist it be a criminal offence to deny the historical significance of the Battle of Britain? Might not the Germans introduce a law compelling children to be taught that Dresden was the equivalent of Auschwitz? The Americans have already grabbed our Famine - might we not insist that Irish children are taught by law, to be enforced by the courts of the land, that the American Civil War was a shameful and wickedly imperialist assault by the Washington Government on seceding states?
Different Rules
I happen to believe that: I believe in the right of peoples to depart from political unions with which they are no longer in sympathy. Is that not the story of the Irish within the United Kingdom? Was that not the aspiration of generations of Irish political leaders through generations? So why should different rules be applied to the peoples of Alabama and Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee? Did not the plain men of those states, with not a slave to their name, freely lay down their lives in the cause of the rights of those states?
But that does not mean my beliefs should be a matter for the law. Individuals must make their own mind up about the rights and wrongs of the war between the states; for having made up my mind freely in one direction, might I not, with that same freedom, change my mind in the other direction?
Not according to the new priesthood which the History As Law phenomenon suggests is coming into existence. No room for intellectual error exists within that Inquisition; and when there is no room for error, who dare inquire? The willingness to be wrong in the pursuit of right is the keystone to intellectual freedom. It is a keystone we should keep our eye on.