Category: Ergun Kırlıkovalı

(update)

Armenian-American group accused of lobbying violations

McClatchy Newspapers as published on MiamiHerald.com, SacramentoBee.com, AnchorageDailyNews.com

18 Feb 2009 // Michael Doyle // Fresno Bee – WASHINGTON – A high-profile ethics organization on Wednesday asked federal agencies to investigate the Armenian National Committee of America for alleged campaign finance and lobbying violations. [1]

In a seven-page complaint, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asserts the Armenian-American group failed to register either as a domestic lobbying group or as a foreign agent despite its political work and its close ties to an Armenian political party.

The Armenian National Committee of America is one of the country’s most prominent ethnic organizations, and has worked closely with San Joaquin Valley lawmakers on Armenian genocide commemorative resolutions.

“We’re not saying they should be out of business,” said Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who heads the private Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “We’re saying there are laws, and they should be following them.”

Sloan attached 161 pages of exhibits in support of the allegations. [2]

Armenian National Committee of America officials denounced the charges as unfounded.

“We’ve taken a preliminary look at [the] allegations, and they are without merit and full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations,” ANCA Communications Director Elizabeth Chouldjian said.

Chouldjian declined to undertake a point-by-point rebuttal of the complaint, but she said “the real story is why this is being brought up now.” She noted the complaint was filed about two months before the annual April 24 Armenian genocide commemoration; she did not elaborate on a potential motive for the complaint’s timing.

The Armenian National Committee of America describes itself on its web site as “the largest and most influential Armenian American grassroots political organization.” It is active in regions with large Armenian-American populations, including New Jersey, Florida and California.

Currently, Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, and other ANCA allies are rallying renewed support for an Armenian genocide resolution that collapsed last Congress. Under presidents of both parties, the Pentagon and State Department have opposed the resolution as an insult to Turkey, which denies that mass deaths between 1915 and 1923 amounted to a genocide.

“Circumstantial evidence indicates that ANCA and its current or former executive directors … have lobbied Congress and the executive branch heavily with regard to perennial congressional Armenian genocide resolutions,” the complaint states.

The complaint cites interviews and press releases, in which ANCA leaders tout their efforts to sway Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., among others.

The Armenian National Committee of America has not registered as a lobbyist with either the House or Senate. Failure to register can be a felony offense, though Sloan said potential problems are often resolved simply by registering after the fact.

The Armenian Assembly of America, the nation’s other prominent Armenian-American organization, is registered and reported spending $182,000 on lobbying last year.

“These are the rules, and everybody has to follow them,” Sloan said.

The complaint asks the Internal Revenue Service to review potential tax violations and the Justice Department to open a criminal probe. The complaint also asks the House and Senate to open “companion inquiries” into the lobbying allegations.

Citing press accounts, a U.S. embassy study and the research of Heather Gregg, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, the complaint contends ANCA is “an arm” of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The latter is a political party that is part of Armenia’s ruling coalition.

Agents of foreign political parties are required to register with the Justice Department. ANCA can endorse political candidates, as a group organized under section 501 (c)(4) of the federal tax code. The affiliated ANCA-Western Region, based in Glendale, cannot because it is a 501 (c)(3) organization. The complaint alleges the Western Region office nonetheless participated in the national organization’s candidate endorsements, in part by sharing a Web site.

Sloan said the complaint arose from a tip received late last year.

Sloan’s non-profit, six-year-old ethics group claims no partisan affiliation and has previously filed ethics complaints about both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Its past targets have ranged from former Tracy area GOP congressman Richard Pombo to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

A WORD FROM CREW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MELANIE SLOAN
“ Since 2003, CREW has closely monitored government ethics, bringing egregious conduct to light and holding public officials accountable for their misconduct. On our website you’ll find exhaustively investigated reports on corruption prepared by our research staff, high-impact lawsuits filed by our legal team, as well as the latest national ethics news. Thank you for your support. “
Melanie Sloan, Executive Director
WALLS ARE GETTING CLOSER AROUND THE ARMENIAN FALSIFIERS
For decades, the Armenians lobbies lied, cheated, falsified, deceived, begged, screamed, demanded, and destroyed, without shame, remorse, or consequences. I don’t know about the first two, but it seems, the last item is finally being taken care of.
I want to know, for instance, if, when, and how much financial help these Armenian front organizations provided to some vile politicians known for their passionate support of bogus Armenian genocide and how those monies helped shape American policy toward Armenian and Turkey. That would be a gross violation of US laws that say non-profit NGOs cannot engage in politics in a manner to influence policy or support candidates .
Armenians falsifiers arrogantly and shamelessly made the bed; now they should lie in it!
***
[1] Letter of complaint written by CREW about the Armenian non-profit ANCA to the Attorney General, IRS, the Secretary of the U.S. Senate, and the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, all located in Washington DC (7 pages.)

[2] Armenian associations, organizations, groups, and churches and their lobby activities are exposed here (161 pages.)

By: Ergun KIRLIKOVALI

If you judge one’s credibility by the sheer press coverage s/he gets, then you would think Bernard-Henri Lévy is credible, but is he?

After all, Armenian allegations of genocide get lots of press coverage for 90+ years and yet we know better than to take them at face value, don’t we?

Bernard-Henri Lévy is an ardent supporter of the bogus Armenian genocide, so it would be a good idea to take a closer look at this man’s work.  Frankly, I don’t know who is using who.  Is Bernard-Henri Lévy using the Armenian genocide industry to get a wider market for his ethocidal works or are Armenian lobbyists using him to get more credibility for their bogus genocide claims?  Perhaps, both.

Whatever the case is, one thing seems clear enough:  Bernard-Henri Lévy’s credibility in France is on decline, thanks to several books written by journalists or scholars who know him well.   See, for example, this summary of the revelations about Mr. Lévy’s forgeries  here:

<a href=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1480855/Frances-fashionable-philosopher-under-fire.html

> FRANCE’S FASHIONABLE PHILOSOPHER UNDER FIRE </a> written by Henry Samuel, Paris, for the Telegraph newspaper, England, published on  10 January 2005.

I quote:

“… France’s love affair with its highest-profile living philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, appears to be at an end after the publication of a number of books attacking his writings and methodology.

The latest critique, by the investigative journalist Philippe Cohen, brands Lévy intellectually “incoherent”. His book, BHL – a biography, published this week, coldly sets out to unmask the philosopher.

It attacks France’s most media-friendly intellectual on all fronts, dissecting not just his work but the man himself.

It reproaches him for impoverishing French intellectual debate by over-simplifying any complex issue for mass consumption and demonising the opposite point of view.

It even suggests that the ideas set out in his work French Ideology accelerated the rise of France’s hard-Right National Front.

But perhaps most damaging of all to his credentials, the book contends that Lévy has a loose relationship with the truth.

In 2002, President Jacques Chirac sent the philosopher on a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan. Lévy inaugurated a plaque commemorating Ahmad Massoud, the former commander of the Northern Alliance. The plaque was signed “from your friends of 20 years, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Gilles Hertzog [his colleague]”. Mr Cohen claims that Lévy met Massoud only once, and that briefly, in 1998.

Fabulously rich, intelligent and camera-friendly, the fashionable philosopher is never happier than when causing controversy. With his trademark floppy hair and open-neck white shirt, Lévy has been the darling of television chat shows for the past three decades.

The son of a timber tycoon, he owns a grand apartment on the Left Bank. And with his third wife, the actress and singer Arielle Dombasle, he owns a palace in Marrakech.

But over the past months, seven books have been released questioning his intellectual credentials.

One, by Richard Labevière, a journalist with French radio, and Bruno Jeanmart, a philosopher at Grenoble University, is entitled The Absence of Thought in Bernard-Henri Lévy.

In yesterday’s weekly L’Express magazine, the first to publish extracts of Cohen’s work, Lévy denied playing into the hands of the National Front and brushed off suggestions that he had sapped French intellectual debate and skirted the allegation that he was sometimes economical with the truth.

“I have a war-like conception of seeking the truth,” he said. “History is very cunning, why shouldn’t men be too?”

***

To throw more light upon the relationship between history and law, I am quoting Rene Remond’s  30 January 2009 dated treatment of the issue:

***

HISTORY AND THE LAW

By René Rémond

The relationship between history and politics has for some time been tempestuous and troubled. This is not a new development: in politics we choose the long view when referencing past events, whether it be to disassociate ourselves from them or to seek arguments and reinforcement from them. Our willingness to be shaped by history is inevitably somewhat ambivalent, as history is both the mortar cementing the people.s unity and the seed of discord engendering its divergences and dissent. This is why the authorities . . cannot distance themselves from the recording of history or its transmission, and why they must consider themselves somewhat responsible for it. We are therefore not surprised that politicians are sometimes tempted to intervene in the fabrication and the instrumentalisation of history. Totalitarian regimes often openly rewrite history to their advantage, maintaining strict control over those who are tasked with the verification of historical truths. In fact nothing is more banal than the instrumentalisation and the agencing of the past. Qualifying it is sometimes controversial, and the historical significance of various events has ignited bitter ideological debates and political face-offs.

For some time now in France there has been a major debate about the role of the legislator in defining history, which normally would neither interest nor be within the purview of the normal civilian, except that new information with multiple implications has recently been brought to our attention. It involves the philosophically significant problem of searching for the truth in history, as well as the role of the State, the responsibilities of the legislators and the historians. It is about the role of the Law and the availability of access to an objective cognizance of the past, the very idea and application of democracy.

In listing all these challenges, are we not exaggerating slightly the scope of the affair? It will be up to the reader to decide, but in any case the question has not only been omnipresent in recent newspaper headlines, it has stirred the entire country and in particular elicited statements of position from both the President of France and his Prime Minister. The larger political parties have been obliged to examine its questions, a lawsuit was filed at the Conseil Constitutionnel (the Constitutional Council, the highest constitutional authority in France) and a judgment delivered in that case. Most importantly, the incident reveals the existence of a mechanism which could threaten the objectivity of the historical process and allow history to be manipulated for political reasons.

THE PÉTRÉ-GRENOUILLEAU CASE

Let us examine the elements of this case. On Saturday, June 10, 2005, the jury awarding the French Senate’s History Prize, which is given to distinguish a book which both satisfies strictly scientific criteria and also contributes significantly to the education of the French people – announced its choice after extensive deliberations: a book dealing with the African slave trade, published in the prestigious Gallimard series . Bibliothèque des histoires. (Library of History), by Olivier Pétré- Grenouilleau.  At the time the Prize was awarded, the Journal du Dimanche published an interview with the author in which he underlined the global nature of his research, expressing his interest in the phenomenon in its totality, i.e. not just in the .Atlantic. portion of the slave trade linked to the triangle of commerce originating in Western Europe. When asked about the qualification he would give to this historical fact, he said he considered the slave trade a crime against humanity but would not go so far as to call it genocide, since for him that would imply a systematic will to exterminate those of a different ethnicity. Moreover, the traders, whose motivations were mostly mercantile, certainly did not want their .merchandise,. their slaves, to die out and cease to provide revenue on their .investments.. This response, which seemed entirely reasonable, did not go down well with everyone, in particular those who are still haunted by memories of the slave trade tragedy.

A collective of people from the Antilles, Guyana and La Réunion, citing legislation which authorised groups to bring class action suits against those denying these specific crimes, sued the author of the book. A ranking, historian whose work was recognised and supported by his peers, and who had done nothing to contravene the historian’s responsibility or that of a simple civilian of France . was thus dragged into court by plaintiffs who had no particular competence in his area of expertise, exposing him to possible criminal sanctions. Other historians suddenly realised the danger threatening research involving so called controversial subjects, and the genesis of the mechanism of public opinion being allowed to compromise the independence and the dissemination of their results. The complexity of this situation triggered a series of legislative initiatives, and an awareness of the consequences of this new mindset.

INTERNATIONAL JURISDICTION AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MEMORY

One of the causes of this entirely unexpected problem was the fact that the world will no longer let those who commit collective crimes go unpunished. The obvious precedent would be the Nuremberg trials, which we had hoped would be a one-time event, linked solely to the second World War and to the exceptionally heinous crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. Nuremberg left us a strong historical heritage, including concepts and definitions which have unfortunately again become current. International jurisdictions have been established to try war crimes committed in the enforced destruction of the Yugoslavian Federation and during the bloody massacres in Rwanda. The resulting initiative, whose far-reaching consequences constituted a caesura (a pause or break) in the history of the world, was the decision reached by the signatories of the Rome Treaty of 1999, which has been ratified by more than one hundred sovereign states, establishing a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) with the authority over war crimes committed in both international and internal armed conflicts, reflecting the reality of contemporary armed conflict and crimes against humanity.

The establishment of these new jurisdictions implied that political acts would now have to be justified by our sense of morality, our collective conscience, positing the development of human responsibility on a planetary scale. And there was another .break. which affected our relationship to the past: the introduction of the Convention on the imprescriptibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the dissolving of the statute of limitations on certain crimes, and directly contradicting the universal practice of not allowing the prosecution or even the mentioning of specific crimes. Our century decided to abolish this linking of time and memory for a specific category of crimes. To forget would be forbidden, a sin, and to remember would be both an ethical and legal duty. We created this duty.

Remembering is not only desirable in the search for knowledge, it is now more than ever a moral imperative, and it is not being able to remember which becomes unacceptable. The responsibility is selective and it applies only to these crimes. It is justified by the respect we owe to the victims, and it is right that they survive in our memories. It is also in another sense a reparation, in that memory asks for forgiveness for that which could neither be prevented nor stopped. By recognising its faults, a people attains a certain stature. This attitude in our civil and political society is spiritually echoed by recent developments in the Catholic Church dealing with repentance. The final consideration affecting the responsibility of memory would be the enormity of the crimes, and the scope and nature of the actions committed.  In reminding us of them we are solemnly warned that these crimes could happen again and equally, that they must never happen again.

THE INTRODUCTION OF LAWS ON MEMORY

These dignified and laudable considerations have profoundly altered our relationship to the past, reflecting history.s changing position in society. They justify the intervention of politics into the equation. Now that remembering has become a civic responsibility, how can the legislator accept anything publically contradicting opinions that Justice or our collective conscience has previously adjudicated? This would evince a lack of respect for the victims and for their suffering, in effect condemning them a second time. This would allow doubt to enter the minds of those who did not or could not decide for themselves, contradicting the principles of civil education. Doesn.t political responsibility mean to take measures, to legislate?

These, then, are the origins of the .memorial. laws dealing with the establishment of truth in history. They were strongest against the so-called revisionists, those who flatly deny the criminal activities of the Third Reich, using the defense of historical method to constitute their case. Of course, the Holocaust, the Shoah, is a historical fact, and there are seemingly only two explanations for the negationist position and the minds that have invented it: deliberate, contrarian bad faith (why?), or that idiosyncrasy beloved of the epistemologists, the total disruption of the critical functions of the mind, called Zoilism or hypercriticism. In 1990 the former Communist Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot submitted a bill making the denial of crimes against humanity a crime, punishable with sanctions, and it was generally well-received, the perception being that a crime of this magnitude demanded an exceptional response. Who would oppose this bill, wouldn.t that mean joining the negationists or supporting Jean-Marie Le Pen, who famously called the Holocaust a mere .detail of history.? A few historians whose vision extended beyond the sentiment showed concerns about the consequences of this bill: the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1), and Madeleine Rebérioux (2). Neither of them showed any sympathy for the negationists, and they asked judicious questions about the loi Gayssot. Unfortunately they were proved correct . the Law was meant to apply to one particular period of time, but instead has engendered a further series of memorial laws which are neither justified nor legitimate.

RAISING THE STAKES

After being lobbied by several Armenian associations, supported by senators and deputies representing large Armenian constituencies, in 2001 the Parliament adopted a law, which is unequalled and unique. It consists of one sentence:  “France publicly recognizes the Armenian genocide of 1915.”  Period.   Added was, “as of today, this is in effect, a law of the Republic.”  And what did it mean?  It meant that anyone who professed to have doubts about an ethnocide  (3)  or massacre whose existence is unquestioned would be in violation of the law and open to prosecution.

Before that law went into effect, the eminent scholar Bernard Lewis (4) was sanctioned by a French court after an Armenian association sued him using the loi Gayssot (the Gayssot law) about denying crimes against humanity. Suddenly that law was being used to refer to the Armenian genocide. But there was a difference: the loi Gayssot technically referred to French men or women who were World War II victims or collaborators; it was not unusual that the representatives of France pass a law about them. However, in the Armenian massacre, the victims were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, not of France. And contextually, could we not in theory also prosecute the Spanish conquerors for the massacre of the American Indians? In addition, the period of time referenced by the loi Gayssot was 1945; the Armenian massacre took place in 1915. And the legislature was also being asked to decide something the specialists could not agree on: no one denies that the Turks left hundreds of thousands of Armenian men and women to die, in appalling conditions, but was it the execution of a decision which expressly ordered the extermination of each and every Armenian?

This is the dilemma facing historical researchers. If we qualify an event, a crime, as genocide, we effectively banalise that concept as it applies to the Holocaust, diluting it, rendering it less specific and unique. In fact, the existence of the second .memorial. law set up a sort of competition between victims, as what the laws had in common was their citing of the persecutions suffered by the victims, risking that the memories of specific groups or.communities,. be used as substitutions for collective memory.

The third of this family of .memorial. laws is known as the .Madame Taubira. law, bearing the name of the Senator from Guyana. It was adopted on May 21, 2001, and fortunately does not cite historical facts not involving France, since it condemns the slavery treaties and the slave trade in the colonies. But it does go back farther, the slave trade having been excoriated for over two hundred years and slavery itself having been abolished in 1848. Those who suffered have been dead for years and their surviving descendants are separated five or six generations from them. The law nonetheless gives them the right to defend the slaves. memory, to honor their descendants, and to prosecute anyone who dares to deny or minimize the fact of their existence. This was the reason for the Pétré-Grenouilleau case. So how far are we willing to go back in time? Back as far as the Crusades, or the Albigensian Crusade (5)? Perhaps the Reformists (the Protestants) should ask for reparations for the persecutions they suffered because of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Juxtaposing these particular memories would no doubt undermine the national memory and set the various traditions of thought against each other. Why legislate only on crimes? The loi Taubira implicitly targeted the whole colonial system, depicting it in negative terms. It is true that under the Ancien 3 As opposed to genocide, which has international implications, ethnocide or ethnic genocide, is the province of ethnologists, who have not yet determined an exact meaning for the word.

Régime and over several centuries it was accompanied by slavery and the slave trade, but it was that same system which, beginning in the 19th century, ordered the French colonies to cut off the slave trade and to abolish slavery. Crossing the line judiciously drawn by the Constitution of the Fifth Republic between the legislative and executive branches of the government, which limits the former in defining the general principles of education, the loi Taubira decreed that .school curricula and programmes dealing with history or the humanities must situate the slave trade and slavery in their rightful places in history.. Beyond the fact that we don.t know exactly what is their rightful place . how many class hours, how many pages in the books should be devoted to them? . we need to ask how we can presume to legislate something which requires specific professional and scientific knowledge . is to open the door leading to confusion about roles and responsibilities.

CONFISCATING HISTORY

The loi Taubira shot colonialism down, the following loi rehabilitated it. The first law gave teachers quantitative instructions and obligations; the second told them how to .appreciate. them: .School curricula should recognise in particular the positive effects of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa, and should also honor the courage and sacrifice of soldiers from these countries in the French Army.. That step, once taken, cannot be untaken if a legislator dictates his interpretation of history to the teacher, substituting himself for the real historian. If this law goes further than the one preceding it, the two laws are interdependent: the second law would not have been proposed if the first had not expressly targeted colonialism. It is perfect dualism: the two laws evoke, if disassociated, the two faces of this historical fact. They also call for consistent, concerted judgment. Asking for the repeal of the first loi Taubira would mean a political choice dictated by ideology; exonerating colonisation of its crimes, while asking for the repeal of the second law would give the impression that colonisation had had only negative effects on the countries involved. And to lobby for both laws to be repealed simultaneously would mean conclusions would be drawn and decisions would be made from a purely scientific position on the independence of history, which is technically supposed to illustrate the complexity of social reality and its innate ambivalence.

The genealogy of these .memorial. laws, which as far as we know may continue to proliferate, has created an unexpected and worrisome situation for both research and education, and . I affirm this without hesitation . for civil rights and democratic process. Will the fear of legal action steer us away from delicate subjects? What researcher would take on a subject which potentially could expose him to a lawsuit? What research director would be willing to hire young investigators in sensitive or dangerous cases, as Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau did? Entire pages of history will remain blank, unless someone fills those blanks with State-proclaimed .truths.. The intrusion of politics into the definition of programmes and the establishment of historical truths would mean the outright confiscation of history by those in power, and a terrible loss to ordinary men and women.

A group of historians, worried by this turn of events, took the initiative of addressing the major politicians directly, intending not only to plead for the rights of the historians to do their work freely, without pressure from the State, but also in the name of each French man and woman to know and understand history. Contrary to popular opinion, the historians did not claim to have a monopoly on the truth, merely the professional qualifications to speak about it, since by delegation they work for US. They do not .own. History, inasmuch as judges do not .own. the law, nor do doctors .own. our health. They answer to us. This is why some of them responded without question when they were asked to testify in the great trials dealing with the Occupation, with the single condition that they be asked only to verify facts, not to judge nor take part in the confusion between legal truth and historical truth. They were asked for their perspectives on the facts in evidence, sometimes also for explanations. They were not prohibited from juridically or morally qualifying these same facts, i.e. .is this genocide or not?. Does the historian overstep his bounds when he allows himself to morally disapprove of an act or a crime?

THE ROLE OF THE POLITICIANS

The politicians also want to have their say. They certainly have the right to publicly express their feelings in these situations, they may speak in our behalf — but they must follow two rules: unless they have personally investigated a case as any historian might, and developed their positions or convictions based upon purely historical considerations, their positions as representatives of the nation do not give them the right to decree what is true and what is not, nor to adjudicate conflicts of interpretation.

This may seem obvious, but it is probably not a bad idea to set it down in black and white: in the debate on the .memorial. laws, we heard legislators abusing their positions, ignoring the fact that they only hold office because they are elected by the people, in fact conferring on themselves the rights to, the jurisdiction over historical truth, which confuses political legitimacy with that acquired through the scientific process. No senator, minister or deputy would dare to make pronouncements about the forces of nature, about hydraulics or the secrets of the genome. It is because of this definition of roles that there are now established institutions whose job it is to clarify the scope of the legislators. actions and those of the authorities. Why should it be any different for history?

By opposing the principle of the .memorial. laws, the historians are reminding us to respect this separation of roles, reaffirming that history, our collective memory, belongs to us all. The list of the .memorial. laws shows us what the factors were in passing them, essentially electoral and political (not in itself a bad thing). They were clearly more influenced by emotion than by reason, they were without scientific foundation, confusing memory and history. They all begin in the same way, through lobbying by religious or ethnic constituencies, in the hope that their memories will be given consideration on the national stage, using history as both hostage and intermediary. The historians are taking a stand against this instrumentalisation which chips our collective memory into fragments.

The second condition which the politicians need to accept when they are planning to speak about history concerns form: experience and the current controversy have shown us that they should not speak when their intent is to submit a law. Of course, politicians have every right to speak about history but not as part of the process that is specifically theirs: their votes. And by passing a law they are not .taking a position,. not the way the intellectuals did when they signed those long petitions. The law sets the rules, the standard, the limits. When it is amended with a clause allowing lobbyists to file lawsuits, it sets in motion an incredibly efficient and innately destructive mechanism. It was to neutralise this process that the historians advocated the abolition of the .memorial. laws, although they had certain qualms about extending the rule to the loi Gayssot because of its uniqueness. Of course it was also this same law which began the whole disastrous sequence of events.

In any case, something needed to be done.

The answer was a grand gesture worthy of all the hoopla. Both the French President and his Prime Minister proclaimed that the legislator does not have the power to dictate history. And the Constitutional Council downgraded the subparagraph of the last law which had intervened in the definition of school programmes while effectively disregarding constitutional law. The collective which had sued Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau withdrew its complaint, with interesting grounds: its process neither embodied public opinion nor included petitions from intellectuals. Was this a sign of the price we must pay for independent research, the establishment of a history which will be neither weapon nor pawn in the controversies which continue to divide us? History needs to belong to all of us.*

– René Rémond*

* P.S. Of course we have just learned that the Socialist minority in the Assemblée Nationale was planning to submit a law saying that those who deny the Armenian genocide may be prosecuted and sentenced to five years in prison. Which then would align it with the Holocaust and give it the same weight as the loi Gayssot. Politicians are apparently incorrigible; emotion has again triumphed over reason.

Translated by Sara Sugihara

René Rémond* (1918-2007) was professor emeritus of contemporary history at Paris Institute of Political Studies, chairman of Nanterre university (1971-1976), of the Institute of Current History (1979-1990), of the National Association for Political Sciences (1981-2007), and of Liberté pour l’histoire (2005-2007). He was also member of the French Academy, and an administrator of the French public TV (1965-1972; 1982-1989). Among his numerous books: Histoire des États-Unis (“History of the United States”, 1959); Les Droites en France (“The Rigt wing in France”, 1964; new edition, 1982); Le Siècle dernier (“The Last Century”, 2003); and Quand l’État se mêle d’histoire (“When the States meddles with History”, 2006).

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Études, June 2006

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Notes:

(1)   The eminent French historian who documented the systematic use of torture by the French during the Algerian war for independence in the 1950s and early 60s.

(2)   The French Marxist historian and former president of the Human Rights League.

(3)  Ethnic genocide, currently the prvonce of ethnologists with still unclear definition

(4)  The Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

(5)  Albigensian or Cathar Crusade of 1181.

(Note: My thanks to https://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2009/01/2729-armenian-tuggery-intimidation-in.html site for bringing this information to my knowledge. I am covering this issue as a gesture of support to Jack Lang, the courageous French politician who saw through the Armenian falsifications and bogus genocide claims and dared to change his position on the genocide claims. I believe his example will provide a most educational paradigm of how truth eventually wins over propaganda.)

Below, please find Jack Lang’s speech , 11 October 2008, Blois, France, which instantly attracted the poison arrows of a stunned Armenian lobby. Strident articles, nasty letters, and vitriolic internet posts poured from major Armenian lobbyists (and their ethocidal friends), quickly labeling this brave man a revisionist and a denialist, as well as calling him many choice names (some of which are not repeatable here but others like the following are: inconsistent, self-indulgent, felon, Judas, heinous negationist (?), scandalous, cynical, coward, shamed and dishonored France, insulted the values of humanism, etc., etc.)

It is interesting to note that Jack Lang had signed the preface to the book “the news of the genocide of Armenians” published by the CDCA in October 1999; one more reason not to trust the information presented in Armenian books.

Armenians questioned Lang’s alleged cynicism in his support of France’s Gayssot law which criminalizes denial of Jewish and Gypsy genocides. Armenian fail to understand the difference: the Jewish Holocaust is a fact supported by a court verdict (Nuremberg); Armenian genocide is an allegation, not supported by any court verdict and a much contested and discredited allegation at that. All Armenians have are a bunch of hearsay, forgeries, exaggerations, embellishments, and distortions, none of which help explain the Armenian propaganda, agitation, raids, terror, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and the civil war all of this translated into causing half a million Muslim dead, mostly Turkish, in that order, between 1890 and 1921.

TERESET (temporary resettlement of 1915) is one frame in the 1890-1921 film. TERESET was a home security measure that was caused by the Armenian rebellions and treason during a time of war. None of this has anything to do with extermination of a people nor can it be explained by the term genocide. Genocide claims are political, not factual. Human suffering was universal and caused by all sides; selecting favorite victims out of this lot and ignoring the suffering of the rest is cruel, unethical, and inhuman.

Historians are best equipped to deal with the complexities of controversial history and they must be allowed full access to archives to do their jobs properly. Turkey opened her archives two decades ago and more than 80,000 scholars have used them since. The Republic of Armenia (Yerevan) , various Armenian churches (Istanbul, Etchimiadzin, Jerusalem, Mekhitarists, and more) and Armenian political associations (ARF, ANA, etc. in Boston, Glendale, etc.) and institutions (Zorian, Gomidas, etc.) need to open their archives and provide full access to scholars. Turkey propsed in 2005 establishment of a historians commission to study the matter but Armenian declined. The solution must be seen through more research, dialog, review, and debate; not less. Memory laws destroy freedom of speech on these issues and replace history scholarship with political partisanship.

Therefore, I salute jack Lang for his visionary and courageous stand in the matter of Turkish-Armenian conflict during WWI and for supporting more liberty, not less, for history.

SPEECH BY MR JACK LANG, 11 OCTOBER 2008, BLOIS, FRANCE

“I turn a word about who we meet, I do not at all exhausted in a few words, and I am surrounded at the moment of eminent specialists who have worked, and then in the room Similarly there are great historians intervene. Some words in bulk, I am not prepared to talk, a few words to say in bulk at the heart of this discussion is freedom, freedom of thought, freedom to seek, freedom to discover, freedom to ask questions. Freedom … and it is both a conviction and a temperament. I believe that in all matters relating to intelligence, art, creation, freedom must be the principle, sometimes even absolute, and we cannot make exceptions or conditions may, in certain circumstances perfectly defined, freedom of thought, including forgiveness may be politically incorrect, including think evil. If we do not recognize the right to think, think evil, then the point is freedom.

I will not think badly of course, everyone has their beliefs, values, but at the same time it should, except within certain limits, and unfortunately to propose a topic or question you are going to discuss, what we believe that by reasoning or by intuition or emotion or because we are citizens of that time, the law on the Holocaust and the denial of the Holocaust must be respected as such? Why, how? And why are we reserved, if not hostile to other acts of proclamation and especially to other criminal laws related to historical facts?

I take a concrete example to move forward, so I do not answer the question that I ask, it will be in the debates. To move forward a little in my question, I take the example of Armenia. It is that myself, so I have to say the truth as it should, I passed the first resolution of the National Assembly on the recognition, in quotes, can we say, because it is also necessary that historians do their work, the Armenian genocide. I voted because I thought it was an act of moral and repair history, and given the absolute refusal of the Turkish government to accept any discussion, any debate on this subject, it seemed to me the French National Assembly could perform this act. I do not know if I react the same way today, but in any case I have voted. And at the time, I was chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, so I am doubly guilty, if I may say, MP and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. However, I am prepared with force against the second law on Armenia, already at that time I committed a crime, vis a vis the instructions of my own group, I refused to vote as a text monstrous.

It allows the prosecution against historians, against persons, against citizens, against journalists, who would undertake to discuss, reflect on the magnitude, the reality on the forms of killing (there were massacres ) of Armenians committed by the Turkish armed. Yes, he must speak clearly, those who voted it did not at all a kind of moral commiseration, not at all a kind of attachment to a story. They did so simply by electoral concerns, thinking and raise the voice of the Armenian community of France, who deserves our respect. But at the same time, the duty of a senior politician, a member of Parliament, a minister, is to carry out its mandate with courage and conviction, and to resist any pressure whatsoever. And the consequence of this vote absurd, unacceptable to the National Assembly, was in Turkey itself, I participated as a guest professor of the Bilgi University in Istanbul, we were able to convene a committee of Historians mixed Turkish and Armenian, was a first, which had agreed to meet, discuss, think to compare their views, discuss their assessments. And this vote was such that it echoes blocked temporarily, this work is essential to understand, to know the historical reality in the region.

***

SUPPORT JACK LANG AGAINST ARMENIAN INTIMIDATION AND THREATS

Please send your message of encouragement in English to Jack Lang via email at:

jlang@assemblee-nationale.fr

and/or

jacklang62@wanadoo.fr

or by Fax to: + 03 21 30 91 22

Your support is not only for a politician who is intimidated and terrorized by Armenians, but also, perhaps even more so, for an idea: “liberty for history”…

***

(Note By KIRLIKOVALI: Today, I yield my column to my good friend Yüksel Oktay, a tireless seeker of the truth, a meticulous researcher, and a great writer, who will introduce the Turkish version of a unique book, “GENOCIDE OF TRUTH’’.)

PART 1: “SOYKIRIM TACiRLERi VE GERÇEKLER –
Türk aleytari ve tarafsiz yabanci belgelerle diaspora yalanlarinin içyüzü.
Yazan: ŞükrüServer Aya

Reported by Yüksel Oktay
Istanbul Ticaret Odasi, 19 Ocak 2009, Monday

The program was on the presentation of a book in Turkish and the language of the program and the speakers were also in Turkish. This commentary on the book and the presentation is in English for the benefit of readers in America and other countries.

The primary purpose of Sukru Aya in publishing his book in English was to inform the foreigners (students, media members, businessmen, legislators, the public, etc.) on a subject which has been told to the world through fabrications, distortions and out right lies. An example of this was a poster displayed at the university’s reception area was a manipulated photograph of Mustafa Kemal.

Tomorrow Senator Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States and judging from his campaign speeches, he will state that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians, which is a lie as shown in Sukru Aya’s book.

The program started around 11:00 AM in the Conference Room of the Istanbul Commerce University where there were over 80 participants, including the Honorary Chairman of Koc Holding Rahmi Koc, Miss Europe of 1952, Gunseli Basar, Sami Kohen from Milliyet, Tufan Gunes from Huriyet, Ruhat mengi from Vatan and other media members and many dignitaries. There were also three Tarsus American High School graduates, Nabi Eren and Yucel. There were very few students and most of the participants were over the age of 50, an observation also noted by Commerce University Rector Ates Vuran during his opening remarks.

OPENING SPEECHES

The first speaker was Lawyer Elif Derbeder representing the brave publisher of the book, Derin Yayinlari. She said that her company strives to publish books in different subjects.

The second speaker was Lawyer Kegam Karabetyan who also wrote the Preface to the book. He made a passionate speech, first stating that he is an Armenian Turk originally from Kastamonu and now lives in Istanbul, practicing law and getting involved in community projects. Referring to the sad events in the (last quarter of the) 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Karabetyan stated that some Armenians were used by the Western powers for their own purposes, specifically the Russians, the French and the British, and that he was here to tell the truth. He said that he met Sukru Aya at a conference where the former head of the Turkish Historical Society Yusuf Halacoglu was a speaker. He ended his remarks with Ataturk’s famous saying, ‘’Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene.’’ (Happy is the one who calls himself a Turk. Note: not who “is” a Turk. One’s considering oneself a Turk is a state of heart and mind, not blood or territory.)

Next, the rector of Commerce University, Ates Vuran, stated that he read the book himself and also had it reviewed by the Turkish Historical Society. Finding the book to be very useful, he had the university sponsor the first printing of 3,000 and distributed to University libraries and media members.

The next speaker listed on the program was Bulent Akarcali who has been instrumental in convincing Sukru Aya to publish the book. Unfortunately, Akarcali was not in attendance, probably working on his strategy to win the race for the Mayor of Cankaya as a canditate from AKP. In his place, Prof. Dr. Orhan Cekic made an excellent presentation, including a summary of the decision of the European Council of Justice (Avrupa Adalet Divani) on the lawsuit brought against the EU by an Armenian organisation in France on the Armenian issue, denying the Armenians’ demand that Turkey admit genocide as a condition for EU membership, asking the Armenians to produce a Court verdict saying that it was genocide, which of course does not exist. Prof. Cekic also mentioned that terrible things are taking place such as the murder of many Turkish diplomats since 1973 (like Bahadir Demir in California on Jan 27, 1973) and one Turkish-Armenian, Hrant Dink, in Istanbul on Jan 19, 2007.

SUKRU AYA’S PRESENTATION

Sukru Aya also made a passionate speech, first stating that participants from Cyprus, Bursa, Adapazari and other cities had come for the program. He presented backround information on the publication of the English version of his book, which he said had not received the proper attention from the media or the public, stating that since April 14, 2008, only 4 review of his book has been published. Sukru Aya made reference to the Armenian revolts starting with the Zeytoon uprising in 1859, followed by many others including the revolt in Maras in 1895.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Before the question and answer session, a short documentary was shown on the atrocities committed by Armenian rebels and the events that led to the re-location in 915. Afterwards, Ruhat Mengi from Vatan took to the podium and objected to Sukru Aya’s statement that the media has not shown enough involvement in the Armenian issue, giving her own struggle as an example, even having to defend her writings in court, especially in a case started by Halil Berktay. She referred to the efforts of Yusuf Halacoglu, wondering why he was dismissed as the head of the Turkish Historical Society who has invited Armenian historians for meetings but was ignored. Then Ruhat Mengi made reference to the ‘’Apology campaign’’, stating that those who started it had close connections with the Armenian diaspora.

After Ruhat Mengi finished her comments, I looked around to see if anyone from AGOS newspaper was in the room, the largest circulating Armenian weekly in Istanbul. Quite by coincidence, today was the 2nd anniversary of the murder of Hrant Dink, the founder and the publisher of the Armenian newspaper. There were commemoration services at his grave and other places and almost all newspapers covered the story, including Birgun, with a full front page photograph of Hrant Dink and the funeral procession in the entire back page, which I had also participated in. In an open letter to Turkish readers published in AGOS (9 Jan 2009), Jean Kehayan wrote that those who were signing the apology statement were ‘’Turkey’s Pride.’’

It will be interesting to see if Birgun and other newspapers will cover this very meaningful and important book presentation. I am sure Ruhat Mengi and others who came to the presentation will. I wonder if the Turkish Daily News (now known as the Hurriyet Daily News) will write about this as they had covered a conference at Bilgi University last year where Sarafian was the star attraction and was given a copy of ‘’Genocide of Truth’’ by Sukru Aya but never mentioned it in any of his endless papers.

The first question was by Rahmi Koc. ‘’What do you think Barack Obama will do on the Armenian issue?’’ I missed the answer but yesterday, ANCA sent a letter to Senator Obama which should answer Rahmi Koc’s question. I am afraid Senator Obama will support the Armenian Genocide Resolution after he is sworn in as the 44th President of the USA and when he signs the statement on April 24th, 2009. Thus, Armenians will have been allowed to taint the Turkey-America relations.

I could not stay until the end of the program due to other commitments but took the box of börek and baklava with me which I enjoyed while driving to Esenyurt. Thank you Sukru Bey and his assistant Serpil Hanim for their contributions.

***

PART II:

Review of the book “GENOCIDE OF TRUTH’’ Written by Sukru Aya
Review By: Yüksel OKTAY, PE, Istanbul, Turkey, July 16, 2008

Genocide of Truth is an excellent book with a collection of detailed information from a wide variety of sources which includes many books, articles, newspaper opinions and commentaries from many foreign publications written by westerners over the past 100 years (Over 2,000, according to the author). It is almost like an encyclopedia, presented under 30 chapters, with an Introduction by Prof. Talat S. Halman and a Foreword & Bibliography by the author. Each chapter can be read as a standalone treasury of information on various subjects related to this important issue which has been presented to the world as a one sided and prejudiced tragedy with many fabrications, as shown by many authorities.

In the Part I of my review, I covered chapters which I am most familiar with which are also the most controversial. These were Chapters 1 through 5 and Chapter 16, Propaganda fabrications (May 11, 2008). The book begins with Chapter 1, “Historical Background”, and ends with Chapter 30, “Status Quo and Conclusive Remarks. There is a long list of Bibliography and a Selected Index and over 400 notes at the end of each chapter which shed further light on the subjects presented. It is a valuable source for anyone interested in solving this number one foreign policy issue of Turkey .
Part II of my review will cover some of the remaining chapters and summarize for the benefit of those who may not have the time to read the entire book what conclusions one might expect to reach.

Chapter 6, Divinity for Bigotry and Anarchy, provides statements by many famous figures, including Napolean Bonaparte, Warren G. Harding, Sigmund Freud, Tomas Paine, Mohandas Gandi, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, one of the most respected President of the United States (1809 – 1865), claimed to have the Melunchan ancestary. This is what Abraham Lincoln has stated on divinity:

“My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of scriptures have become clearer and stronger with the advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them. Page 89.”

Among the many quotations, The New York Times report on Oct. 28, 1915, The Light That Might Go Out in Turkey, includes the following staement from Admiral Bristol, the US Ambassador to the Ottoman State: “Troubled that killings by Armenians and Greeks did not get into the American press, the admiral wondered in his diary, ‘Why aren’t the atrocities committed by the Christian nation more heinous than those committed by Moslem races’, if Christianity is better than Islam.”

Chapter 7, Distorting Realism Brings Antagonism, offers the readers a variety of excerpts and incidents relating to the Superpowers as defenders of Christianity and Humane values. At the request of Protestant missionaries, England and the U.S. intervene in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire . In fact, Artin Dadyan Pasha, Ottoman Under-Secretary of State Foreign Affairs actually works for the Armenian case and not for the Sultan as referenced in Erich Feigel’s book “A Myth of Terror.” What is also worse is that the Major Powers were directly and indirectly encouraging enmity between the Armenian sects, referenced in another book, “The Great War and the Great Tragedy of Anatolia” by Salahi Sonyel. The author in a Flier Sheet issued after the publication of the book states that this chapter as well as Chapters 14 though 17 show that the claims outlined in the 2007 House Resolution 106 are fabrications.

Chapter 8, “Di-fused AUTONOMY! (Goal or Pretext?) begins with a statement that the Ottomans were friendly with Dashnaks, something overlooked by most historians and writers, especially the Armenian authors. In fact, the book states that the Dashnak Congress in 1914 was hosted in Erzurum where the Ottomans offered the Dashnaks and Hunchaks autonomy, although the book makes reference to independence as well (which may need to be corrected.). The chapter also makes reference to the aims of British on carving up the Ottoman Empire and the US President Woodrow Wilson’s desire for its complete disappearance, something shared by the US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau.

Chapter 9, Atrocities, Van, etc., makes references to the Armenian atrocities and revolutionary acts that go back to 1880s. For a very comprehensive study of the Van rebellions, the author refers the reader to Prof. Justin McCarty’s book, “The Armenian Revolt in Van,” while citing from close to 100 other references.
Chapter 10, Battlefields (Sarikamish – Gallipoli – Suez ) emphasizes the fact that the Ottoman armies were fighting on many different fronts, something also overlooked and seldom mentioned by some historians and writers. In his book, Inside Constantinople, Epstein, a member of the US Embassy in Istanbul at the time, states that the attcak at Gallipoli was the main reason for the re-location of Armenians.

Some of the conclusions that the reader can easily reach on the Armenian Issue after reading this book include:

1. Armenians and Turks lived together for almost a thousand years until the western powers began to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire and used Armenians for their own purposes.

2. Towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Armenians began revolts and uprisings against the Ottoman government and started massacring Turks with the aim of creating a state of their own on lands where they were not the majority.

3. Armenians betrayed their own government and their fellow-Ottoman citizens, the Moslems, by joining the invading Russian forces and with their aid, captured Van, establishing the Armenian Republic of Van , killing over 30,000 Moslem inhabitants. After the relocation and their return, some Armenians joined French forces in fights against the Ottomans in the Cilician region.

4. During the uprisings, Russia , England , France and Italy provided arms and support to the Armenian guerillas and terrorists and the missionaries from these countries and the United States
And much more.

Sukru Aya has not stopped writing about the Armenian issue with the publication of his book. He has summarized new findings that were revealed after the publication of his book, especially a Report submitted to the US Congress by the Near East Relief Fund (now Near East Foundation with headquarters in NYC with an Armenian director) back in 1922. I will cover these and further review of additional chapters in Part III of my review.

This is a book that should be read by everyone who would like to see this issue resolved and Armenians and Turks everywhere can talk to each other, just like we did with Ara Sarafian when he freely discussed the Armenian issue in Istanbul, who was also presented a copy of the book by Sukru Aya personally.

***

PART III:

Review of the book “GENOCIDE OF TRUTH’’ Written by Sukru Aya (cont’d)
Review By: Yüksel OKTAY, PE, Istanbul, Turkey, July 30, 2008

Armenian genocide is a controversial issue and also a fabrication by many Armenians and their supporters who benefit from it according to those who have studied the events of the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century with an open mind and without prejudice. Through the efforts of selfish Armenians, the issue has been carried to the legislative organs of 19 countries and 41 States in America, passing Resolutions declaring April 24 as the genocide day. Articles, books, commentaries which support the Armenian claims number in the hundreds of thousands, mostly based on a few books written by Ambassadors and Missionaries as war propaganda and the survivors of the relocation and immigrants to foreign countries. Very few books have been written by Turks and their supporters that show the Armenian genocide is a myth, as best described in a book by Austrian historian, Erich Feigel, “A Myth of Terror” and other books listed below (1).

On April 14, a new book was introduced to the media and the public which responds to the allegations of the supporters of the Armenian genocide. The 700 page book, “GENOCIDE OF TRUTH’’ , is the result of over 4 years of extensive research and study by an ordinary Turkish citizen aged 78, who happens to believe that the allegations are an injustice and insult to Turkey and Turks everywhere.

The book is a compilation of information from a multitude of foreign sources, grouped under 30 headings, in order to shed light to certain arguments and thesis. It begins with an Introduction and Chapter 1, “Historical Background”, and ends with Chapter 30, “Status Quo and Conclusive Remarks. There is a long list of Bibliography and a Selected Index and over 400 notes at the end of each chapter which shed further light on the subjects presented. It is a valuable source for anyone interested in solving this number one foreign policy issue of Turkey .

It is not easy to read the massive work in a few days or weeks, which is unique in its presentation with frequent quotations from interesting people that shed light to the subject matter. As the author states in the Introduction, the purpose of the book is “neither to acquit the Ottoman Administration from the responsibilities of a generally badly managed deportation or relocation process, nor to degrade the Armenian people as a race or nationality.”

The first four chapters give the background on the Turkish – Armenian relations and the groundwork established by the Armenians to create a state on eastern part of Turkey where they were never the majority through revolts and uprisings which resulted in the massacre of Muslims and Turks.

The subject covered in Chapter 5, Marvelous Missionaries, is very important, since the American High Schools founded by Protestant missionaries are where I was educated before heading to the United States to attend university. Therefore I would like to present the review of the book in several parts, beginning with this chapter. There has been many commentaries and articles over the years on the role of the missionaries in the creation of the Armenian issue, which is very sensitive and their involvements is not known by the public widely. As a frequent contributor to the study of this issue, I received the following comment from one of my former American teachers:

“We agree that all of us – including Christian missionaries to the Ottoman Empire and Turkey – need to acknowledge that wrongs were done to all sides during the early 20th century. We need to ask forgiveness of each other. Then we need to find ways to be friends. None of these is an easy step; the hurts are real, even if some of the cause may be dubious. For us, the greatest reason for friendship and healing is that the alternative is grossly destructive. “

The chapter begins with information on the founding of Missionary Societies in London with the mission of instructing Christians of the Arab East as to what being Christian meant, evidently prompting Edgar Allan Poe to state, “The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.” (P. 57) The first missionary societies in the USA were founded in 1810 which led to the arrival of missionaries in Izmir in 1819 and the opening of a mission in Bursa in 1834. The book tells the story of their expansion in the Ottoman lands and opening of missionary schools in Harput in 1876 as “ Armenian College ” , later renamed as “ Euphrates College .” The Tarsus American High School was established in 1888 and Talas American High School in 1889.

A book by Dr. Uygur Kocabasoglu, “ America in Anatolia – the Missionary Schools in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire , Based on Documents,” is a good source of information on the activities of the missionary schools. Another book by a former teacher at American High School Frank Andrews Stone, “Academies for Anatolia”, presents a study of the Rationale, Program and Impact of the Educational Institutions Sponsored by the American Board in Turkey: 1830 – 2005. However, neither one of these books are referenced or included in the Bibliography.
Chapter 16, “Propaganda Fabrications,” is also very important as it presents information on the role of several early publications which are being used over and over again by authors, academicians and students to deceive the unsuspecting readers around the world.

The chapter begins with an analysis of the book supposedly written by the US Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau (1913 – 1915) and based on his diaries, published in the US in 1918. The author tells the story behind this book by referring to a study of Prof. Heath Lowry who has shown that the book did not reflect the true events of the time. Ambassador Morgenthau’s book, also available in Turkish translation, was ghost written for him by Burton Hendrick with input from his Armenian secretary and Armenian translator, with the purpose of bringing the US into war against the Ottoman Empire . The sections below are directly from ”The Murder of a Nation”, a chapter from the book ”Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story”, published as a separate book by the Armenian Benevolent Association, full of slanders against the Ottoman Turks and many fabricated and distorted facts:

1. p. 51. ”Perhaps the one event in history that most resembles the Armenian deportations was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. According to Prescott 160,000 were uprooted from their homes and scattered broadcast over Africa and Europe .
The Ambassador conveniently omits the fact that it was the Ottoman Turks who saved the Spanish Jews and sent ships to bring them to the Ottoman lands and settled them in Istanbul , Selanik, Bursa and other cities.

The Ambassador continues on the same page :

“ Yet all these previous persecutions seem almost trivial when we compare them with the Armenian sufferings, in which at least 600,000 people were destroyed and perhaps as many as 1,000,000.”

As mentioned in many references, the Ambassador Morgenthau never ventured out from the environs of Istanbul and did not witness anything, as many others like Samantha Power falsely claim in her book. And yet, the HR 106 voted by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee mentions that 2,000,000 Armenians were deported and 1,500,000 Armenian were killed, among many other distorted facts.

2. p. 6. ”They (Turks) were lacking in what we may call the fundamentals of a civilized community. They had no alphabet and no art of writing; no books, no poets, no art, no architecture; they built no cities and established no lasting states.”

3. p. 50. ”The only reason for relating such dreadful things as this is that, without the details, the English-speaking public cannot understand precisely what this nation is which we call Turkey.”
Sukru Aya writes in his book that Morgenthau’s claims were refuted by George A. Schreiner, a distinguished foreign correspondent who served in Turkey at the time and who knew the Ambassador and wrote to him about his concerns on how the truth was twisted to favor the Armenians.

A book on the relations between the Netherlands and Turkey published in 2007 makes reference to the Dutch Reporter George Nypels who has stated in 1922 that “Ambassador Morgenthau’s widely read book was now judged to be ill-founded.” The book, the Netherlands and Turkey: Four hundred years of political, economical, social and cultural relations – selected essays” also states that the writings of the former US Ambassador were refuted by Ahmed Rustem Bey, a former Ottoman Ambassador to Washington . These are not mentioned in “Genocide of Truth” which could be issued as an addendum, including the addition of Morhentau’s books “The Murder of a Nation”, “Secrets of the Bospohorous” and “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” to the Bibliography.

Over the years many articles have been written by Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his grandson, Henry Morgenthau III, which in a way carry on the mission of their father and grandfather, but the “Genocide of Truth” makes no references to any of these, especially commentaries published in Boston Globe by Henry Morgenthau III. There is also no reference to Samantha Power’s book “ A Problem from Hell – America and the Age of Genocide “, which has the opening chapter devoted to the Ambassador’s work with his photograph and can be found in every library in the US.

This is a valuable book that will show the readers the other side of the story and every concerned Turk and Turkish American who would like to see an end to the tall tale of Armenian genocide should read it in order to bring out the truth about the Armenian issue and set the record straight.
End of Part I.

***

APPEL DE BLOIS  (THE BLOIS APPEAL)

(Columnist’s note:  Those who read this column regularly know that I always supported the view that  history cannot be legislated.  I believe that the historical controversies can be resolved only by mustering all the available evidence, allowing peers to honestly review and scrutinize it, and permitting free and open debates to take place, without the intimidation by partisan fanatic groups of citizens and/or politicians.   Armenians for years tried very hard to stifle debate by pressuring  politicians into legislating the Turkish-Armenian conflict into law as genocide, totally ignoring Armenian complicity, Armenian war crimes, Armenian hate crimes and the resulting Turkish victims.   They have almost succeeded it in France.  I am saying “almost”, because French scholars, historians and other intellectuals, fed up with nagging Armenian demands destroying history scholarship, finally rose up against such travesty  and with the appeal below, they turned the tables on vocal groups (mostly Armenians) dictating certain historiographies on the unsuspecting public.  “Memory laws” in Europe are signs of double standards and disrespect for freedom of expression. I hope that the same mistake will not be repeated in the United States.  Otherwise, you will have zealots, armed with only one side of the story allowed by legislation, attacking and demonizing scholars and citizens with differing views as “genocide deniers”, not unlike those KKK lynch mobs.  I am delighted to note the following developments in France regarding the de-legalization of the alleged Armenian genocide.  I signed “The Blois Appeal” immediately and congratulate here the French intellectuals who showed the civil courage to also sign it.  Let’s read the “Appel De Blois” : )

***

( Note by the authors of the “Blois Appeal”;  Pierre NORA, Chairman, LIBERTÉ POUR L’HISTOIRE:  If you wish to approve the “Appel de Blois”, send an e-mail to contact@lph-asso.fr;  give your first and last names; and write “read and approved”. Everyone is entitled to give his/her signature.  Academics should add their university and others their residency.

Since 2005 Liberté pour l’Histoire has fought against the initiatives of legislative authorities to criminalize the past, thus putting more and more obstacles in the way of historical research.   In April 2007, a framework decision of the European Council of Ministers has given an international dimension to a problem that had until then been exclusively French.  In the name of the indisputable and necessary suppression of racism and anti-Semitism, this decision established throughout the European Union new crimes that threaten to place on historians prohibitions that are incompatible with their profession. In the context of the Historical Encounters of Blois in 2008 dedicated to “The Europeans”, Liberté pour l’Histoire invites the approval of the following resolution .)

***

Concerned about the retrospective moralization of history and intellectual censure, we call for the mobilization of European historians and for the wisdom of politicians.

History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories.  In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.

We call on historians to marshal their forces within each of their countries and to create structures similar to our own, and, for the time being, to individually sign the present appeal, to put a stop to this movement toward laws aimed at controlling history memory.

We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.

In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.

Pierre NORA, chairman of Liberté pour l’Histoire

First signatories :

AABELVIK Hanne-Guro, Oslo (SE) · ABAJO VEGA Noemi, Barcelone (ES) · ABBATTISTA Guido, Trieste (IT) · ABBÈS Anne (FR) · ABBOTT Steve (GB) · ABEL Burkhard, Osthofen (DE) · ACCORNERO Cristina, Turin (IT) · AGBAZAHOU Christel, Blagnac (FR) · AGRIANTONI Christine, Volos (GR) · AGULHON Maurice, Villeneuve-les-Avignon (FR) · AKGÜRBÜZ Cemal Engin, L’Horme (FR) · ALARY Éric, La Croix-en-Touraine (FR) · ALBERTI Elisabetta, Massagno (CH) · ALDEBERT Jacques, Vanves (FR) · ALDERMAN Geoffrey, Buckingham (GB) · ALEXANDRE Françoise, Paris (FR) · ALLAIN Jean-Claude, Paris (FR) · ALLAIRE Jean-Marie, Rennes (FR) · ALLCOCK Matthew (GB) · ALLEN Andrew, San Francisco (US) · ALLIES Paul, Montpellier (FR) · ALPTEKIN K. Ekim, Ankara (TR) · ALVAREZ DO BARRIO Manuel, Alicante (ES) · ÁLVAREZ JIMÉNEZ David, Madrid (ES) · AMIEL Pierrette, Pantin (FR) · AMORETTI Francesco, Salerne (IT) · ANDERSON Gordon, Glasgow (GB) · ANDREAU Jean, Paris (FR) · ANDREUX Jean-Émile, Jérusalem (IL) · ANGRÉMY Jean-Pierre, Paris (FR) · ANGUSTURES Anne, Paris (FR) · APPETECCHIA Ilaria, Rome (IT) · ARMAROLI Andrea, Modène (IT) · ARNAUD Patrice, Paris (FR) · ARREDONDO Jaime, Houston (US) · ASSERETO Giovanni, Gênes (IT) · ASSMANN Aleida, Constance (DE) · ASSMANN Jan, Heidelberg (DE) · ATAUZ Devrim, Houston (US) · AUDOUSSET Sophie, Paris (FR) · AURELL Martin, Poitiers (FR) · AYA Ukru, Istanbul (TR) · AYGEN Zeyno, Rockville (US) · AZÉMA Jean-Pierre, Paris (FR) · BABÈS Leïla, Lille (FR) · BACCON Suzanne, Vendôme (FR) · BACKERRA Manfred, Hambourg (DE) · BADINTER Élisabeth, Paris (FR) · BÄHRE Klaas, Hanovre (DE) · BAIADA Luca, Rome (IT) · BARACCA Pierre, Lille (FR) · BARBERON Martine et Michel, Tours (FR) · BARBIER Elsa, Chatou (FR) · 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B. L., Cambridge (GB) · MAZEL Florian, Rennes (FR) · MAZOYER Camille, Sante Fe de Bogota (CO) · MAZZINI Elena, Pise (IT) · MCCAIG Donald, Williamsville (US) · MCINTYRE Andrew (GB) · MCKAY Bob, Séoul (KR) · MÉDARD Madeleine, Autun (FR) · MEDRI Guido, Bologne (IT) · MELANDRI Pierre, Paris (FR) · MENESES CASTAÑEDA Zenobia, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (ES) · MERIGGI Maria Grazia, Bergame (IT) · MERSI Stefano, Genève (CH) · MESSICK Melissa, Cadix (ES) · MESSNER Claudius, Lecce (IT) · MIAS Claude, Paris (FR) · MICCOLI Luisa et Giovanni, Trieste (IT) · MICHAUX Madeleine, Nevers (FR) · MIDDELL Matthias, Leipzig (DE) · MIGONI Riccardo, Capoterra (IT) · MIKULSKI Krzysztof, Torun (PL) · MILDT (de) Dick, Amsterdam (NL · MILLER Scott C., Boulder (US) · MILLIGAN Don, Manchester (GB) · MILLOT Jean-Paul, Nevers (FR) · MILZA Pierre, Paris (FR) · MINK Georges, Nanterre (FR) · MINNITI Fortunato, Rome (IT) · MIRANDA Cándido, Ponte Vedra (ES) · MISTRAL Madeleine, Grand-Saconnex (CH) · MITTEAU Anne (FR) · MODZELEWSKI Karol, Varsovie (PL) · MOISL Hermann, Newcastle (GB) · MOMBELLI Mirella, Rome (IT) · MONIOT Henri, Paris (FR) · MONNERAT Sandrine, Berne (CH) · MONTCHALIN (de) Véronique, Chartres (FR) · MOORE Edwin, Glasgow (GB) · MORAT Daniel, Berlin (DE) · MOREAU Mickaël, Bonneville (FR) · MORENO CHÁVEZ José Alberto, Mexico City (MX) · MORO Francesco, Cuneo (IT) · MOSTARDINI Andrea, Rome (IT) · MOTIKA Raoul, Hambourg (DE) · MOUGIN Françoise, Paris (FR) · MOUHOT Jean-Francois, Birmingham (GB) · MOUT Nicolette, Leyde (NL) · MUHAJIR Umair Ahmed (GB) · MÜLLER Klaus-Jürgen, Hambourg (DE) · MUNS Maarten, Diemen (DE) · MURDOCH Iain, Warwickshire (GB) · MURGESCU Mirela Luminiţa, Bucarest (RO) · MURRAY Peter, Maynooth (IE) · MUSALLAM Adnan, Bethléem (Cis-JO) · NANICHE Claudette, Igny (FR) · NASRA Mostefa, Échirolles (FR) · NAVEH Eyal, Tel Aviv (IL) · NEANDER Joachim, Cracovie (PL) · NERSESSIAN Vrej, Londres (GB) · NEVEU Valérie, Angers (FR) · NICHOLLS A. J., Oxford (GB) · NIEUWOUDT Egbert, Stellenbosch (ZA) · NIHAT Ali, Oxford (GB) · NIJHUIS Ton, Amsterdam (NL) · NIKEL Séverine, Paris (FR) · NILSSON Sara Ellis, Göteborg (SE) · NORA Pierre, Paris (FR) · NOTARI Matteo, Neggio (CH) · NOYON Joël, Mâcon (FR) · OLIVA Vincenzo, Rome (IT) · OLOFSSON Magnus, Lund (SE) · ORAN Baskin, Ankara (TR) · ORAN-MARTZ Sirma, Villeurbanne (FR) · ORY Pascal, Chartres (FR) · OUSTLANT Jean-luc, Plaisir (FR) · OVREVIK Bjorn Oystein, Horten (NO) · OWENS Dr. (GB) · OZOUF Mona, Paris (FR) · ÖZTÜRK Erkan Can, Levallois-Perret (FR) · PAGANO Emanuele (FR) · PAILLETTE Céline, Paris (FR) · PAINTING Brian, Reading (GB) · PALM Lennart Andersson, Göteborg (SE) · PARCOLLET Dominique, Paris (FR) · PARKS Michael, Los Angeles (US) · PARRAD Sylvie, Essômes-sur-Marne (FR) · PARVÉRIE Marc, Saint-Augustin (FR) · PASCHEN Joachim, Hambourg (DE) · PAUL Jean-Louis, Dinan (FR) · PÉAN Pierre, Bouffémont (FR) · PEARCE Martin (GB) · PECHA-SOULEZ Michel, Chanzeaux (FR) · PEIRANI Nicolas (IT) · PELAT Mathieu, La Réunion (FR) · PÉRARD Alain, Draveil (FR) · PÉREZ Joseph, Bordeaux (FR) · PERIN-DUREAU Michel-Philippe, Châteauneuf-sur-Isère (FR) · PERRIER Éléonore, Grenoble (FR) · PERRIN Pascale, Bruxelles (BE) · PERROT Jean-Claude, Paris (FR) · PERVILLÉ Guy, Toulouse (FR) · PETOT Françoise, Antony (FR) · PÉTRÉ-GRENOUILLEAU Olivier, Paris (FR) · PETROVIC Vladimir, Skopje (MK) · PEUSCH Marc, Wasserbillig (LU) · PEZZI Teresitta, Ravenne (IT) · PEZZINO Paolo, Pise (IT) · PFEIL Ulrich, Paris (FR) · PFUETZNER Andreas, Salzburg (AT) · PHAM Karine, La Corogne (ES) · PICARD Christophe, Paris (FR) · PIKETTY Guillaume, Bourg-la-Reine (FR) · PISA Michele, Hamilton (CA) · POLLMANN Judith, Leyde (NL) · POMIAN Krzysztof, Paris (FR) · PONDARD Aude, Paris (FR) · PORTEVIN Jacques, Levallois-Perret (FR) · POTEKHIN Dmytro (FR) · POUILLON François, Paris (FR) · PRAT André (FR) · PRAUSER Steffen, Birmingham (GB) · PREVEDEL Michael, Centennial (US) · PRODI Paolo, Bologne (IT) · PROST Antoine, Paris (FR) · PUENTE RUBIO Dimas, Guadalajara (ES) · PUISEUX Hélène, Paris (FR) · PUISSANT Jean, Bruxelles (BE) · PULT Anna Maria, Pise (IT) · PURSEIGLE Pierre, Birmingham (GB) · QUENTIN Bernadette, Évreux (FR) · QUINSAT Françoise, Lille (FR) · QUINTANA-PAZ Miguel Angel (ES) · RACHET Sylvie, Paris (FR) · RAPOPORT Michel, Paris (FR) · RAYTCHEVA Lilia, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (FR) · READ Piers Paul, Londres (GB) · REDIGOLO Stefano, Venise (IT) · REGOURD François, Massy (FR) · REID David (FR) · REISINGER Craig M. (GB) · REMY Sylvie, Paris (FR) · RENDERS Hans, Amsterdam (NL) · RENE-BAZIN Paule, Meudon (FR) · RENONCIAT Annie, Paris (FR) · REPOUSSI Maria, Thessalonique (GR) · REVEL Jacques, Paris (FR) · RICHARD Gilles, Tours (FR) · RINDONE Elio, Rome (IT) · RIVARD Robert Leon, Amherst (US) · ROBIN Jacques (FR) · RODOLPHE François, Jouy-en-Josas (FR) · RODRIGO Javier, Saragosse (ES) · ROGER Liliane, Loudéac (FR) · ROMAN Alain, Saint-Malo (FR) · ROMANO Sergio, Milan (IT) · RONCUZZI Giovanni, Ravenne (IT) · ROSE Jonathan, Madison (US) · ROSSELLÓ Alex Homar, Barcelone (ES) · ROSSI Paolo, Florence (IT) · ROUAULT Rémi, Caen (FR) · ROUDINESCO Élisabeth, Paris (FR) · ROUGIER Hélène, Lyon (FR) · ROUSSEAU Paul, Paris (FR) · ROUSSELIN Paul, Caen (FR) · ROUSSO Henry, Paris (FR) · ROUVEURE Adine, Lyon (FR) · ROUX Jean-Pierre, Grenoble (FR) · RUIZ-MANJÓN Octavio, Madrid (ES) · RUMBLE Greville, Nutley (GB) · RUMIN Fanch, Saint-Nazaire (FR) · SABINE Mark, Nottingham (GB) · SABY Pierre, Lyon (FR) · SAGER Alain, Nogent-sur-Oise (FR) · SAGNER Pavel (CZ) · SAINT-ROBERT (de) Philippe, Paris (FR) · SALACHAS Jasmine, Paris (FR) · SALAMITO Jean-Marie, Paris (FR) · SALOMONI Antonella, Bologne (IT) · SALVATORI Olivier, Paris (FR) · SALVUCCI Richard, San Antonio (US) · SANTAMARIA Yves, Grenoble (FR) · SANTIN Nathalie, Caen (FR) · SANTOMAURO Michael (GB) · SÁPI Géza, Francfort-sur-l’Oder (DE) · SARAGAT Maria Pia, Rimini (IT) · SARRAZIN Franck, Paris (FR) · SARTRE Maurice, Chambray-lès-Tours (FR) · SAURÍ MERCADER Francisco Manuel (ES) · SAUTEREAU Manuelle, Le Havre (FR) · SAYAG Yves, Montalcino (IT) · SCHEBEN Thomas, Francfort-sur-le-Main (DE) · SCHILLER Ben, East Anglia (GB) · SCHILLING Robert, Montpellier (FR) · SCHMIDT Dieter, Berlin (DE) · SCHOETTLER Peter, Paris (FR) · SCHWARCK Christian, Oxon (GB) · SCHWARTZ Annie, Bailly (FR) · SÉCAIL Claire, Paris (GB) · SELLIER Geneviève, Paris (FR) · SELVA Anne, Salon-de-Provence (FR) · SENARD-BLOCH Catherine, Gif-sur-Yvette (FR) · SÉRANDOUR Arnaud, Paris (FR) · SERRIER Thomas, Francfort-sur-l’Oder (DE) · SHELDON Richard, Bristol (GB) · SHEPPARD Gordon J., Londres (GB) · SINEUX Pierre, Caen (FR) · SLOSS Colin (GB) · SMITH Richard (GB) · SOCRATE Francesca, Rome (IT) · SORENSEN Oystein, Oslo (NO) · SOTINEL Claire, Paris (FR) · SOUBBOTNIK Michael A., Paris (FR) · SOULEZ-LARIVIERE Daniel, Paris (FR) · SOURICE François-Xavier, Franqueville-Saint-Pierre (FR) · SOUYRI Pierre-François, Genève (CH) · SPAGNOLO Carlo, Bari (IT) · SPRENGER Scott, Provo (US) · STALLMAN Richard M., Cambridge (US) · STANO Vito, Bari (IT) · STEINBERG Thomas Immanuel, Hambourg (DE) · STENHOLM Markku, Kotka (FI) · STILES Dean, Douvres (GB) · STOLS Eddy, Herent (BE) · STOLZ Peter, Berlin (DE) · STONE Roger (FR) · STORA Frank, Paris (FR) · STOUDER Paul, Grosrouvre (FR) · STOUFFS Nadia et Jacques (CH) · STRAZZA Michele (IT) · STROUMSA Guy G., Jérusalem (IL) · SUMPTION Jonathan, Londres (GB) · SUSSEL Philippe, Paris (FR) · TAMAS Gergely, Budapest (HU) · TEGÜN Bülent, Istanbul (TR) · TEULINGS Jasper, Amsterdam (NL) · TEYSSÈDRE-JULLIAN Emily, Le Monastère (FR) · THESEN Rainer, Nuremberg (DE) · THEVENET Anne-Marie, Niort (FR) · THOMAS David, Londres (GB) · THOMPSON Peter, Wahroonga (AU) · THONGNAM Somchai, Bangkok (TH) · TIBERTO Franca, Lugano (CH) · TILLMAN Christian, Leamington Spa (GB) · TINTORÉ Natalia, Paris (FR) · TISON Hubert, Paris (FR) · TORRI Michelguglielmo, Turin (IT) · TOUREAUX Guy, Sarzeau (FR) · TOURNÈS Ludovic, Cachan (FR) · TOURON Émilie, Labastide-Cézéracq (FR) · TOUZALIN Marie-Hélène, Paris (FR) · TRAVERSO Enzo, Paris (FR) · TROISI SPAGNOLI Giovanna, Paris (FR) · TRYZNA Nicolas, Thiais (FR) · TÜRKOĞLU Didem, Istanbul (TR) · TURREL Denise, Paris (FR) · TUTIAUX-GUILLON Nicole, Arras (FR) · VAAGLAND Odd (NO) · VABRE Sylvie, Toulouse (FR) · VAÏSSE Maurice, Paris (FR) · VALAT Bruno, Albi (FR) · VALGE Jaak, Viljandi (EE) · VALLEJO Luisa, Madrid (ES) · VALLS MONTÉS Rafael, Valence (ES) · VAN BOXTEL Carla, Rotterdam (NL) · VAN DER LEEUW-ROORD Joke, La Haye (NL) · VAN TORHOUDT Éric, Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives (FR) · VANKOVSKA Biljana, Skopje (MK) · VATTA Antonio, Gênes (IT) · VEINSTEIN Gilles, Paris (FR) · VELDE Henk te, Leyde (NL) · VELLUT Jean-Luc, Louvain-la-Neuve (BE) · VERCLYTTE Thomas, Nîmes (FR) · VERDES-LEROUX Jeannine, Paris (FR) · VERGE-FRANCESCHI Michel, Tours (FR) · VERGEZ-CHAIGNON Bénédicte, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (FR) · VERGNON Gilles, Valence (FR) · VERLEY Patrick, Genève (CH) · VERSINI Alain, Paris (FR) · VEYNE Paul, Bédoin (FR) · VIAL Éric, Paris (FR) · VICENTINI Claudio, Naples (IT) · VIENNOT Anne-Catherine, Le Havre (FR) · VIGNAUX Michèle, Paris (FR) · VILLAPADIERNA Ramiro, Berlin (DE) · VILLE Sébastien, Budapest (HU) · VINATIER Jean, Paris (FR) · VINCENT Catherine, Paris (FR) · VIOLLET Christian, Orléans (FR) · VIRET Jérôme, Caen (FR) · VODISEK David, Volmerange (FR) · VOGT Michael, Elbingen (DE) · VOIRON Philippe, Châtenay-Malabry (FR) · VOLPATO Sébastien, Nogentel (FR) · VUILLEMIN Alain, Vincennes (FR) · WALKER Roger, Paris (FR) · WALKER Syd, Kuranda (AU) · WALLACE Edward (US) · WALRAND Gilles Marie, Jouars-Pontchartrain (FR) · WALSHE Robert, Aix-en-Provence (FR) · WASSEF Pierre, Paris (FR) · WEBER Jacques, Nantes (FR) · WESSELING Henri, La Haye (NL) · WESTSTEIJN Arthur, Florence (IT) · WHEATCROFT Andrew, Moffat (GB) · WIDMANN Andreas, Hanovre (DE) · WIESENAECKER Philipp, Niedernhausen (DE) · WIEVIORKA Annette, Paris (FR) · WILLEMARCK Frederik, Londres (GB) · WILLEMART Philippe, Sao Paulo (BR) · WINKLER Heinrich August, Berlin (DE) · WINOCK Michel, Paris (FR) · WINTERHALTER Cecilia, Rome (IT) · WIRZINGER Heidrun, Neustadt (DE) · WOOLF Linda (GB) · WRIGHT Nicholas, Norfolk (GB) · YOUNG Alistair, Fife (GB) · YOUNG Emily, Londres (GB) · YUEN John, Hong Kong (CN) · YVOREL Jean-Jacques, Juvisy-sur-Orge (FR) · ZANNI ROSIELLO Isabella (IT) · ZARCONE Thierry, Paris (FR) · ZARROW Peter, Taipei (TW) · ZATON Monique, Cornebarrieu (FR) · ZELIS Guy, Louvain-la-Neuve (BE) · ZELLER Pierre-Marc, Prissé (FR) · ZEN Stefano, Naples (IT) · ZIVOJNOVIC Sanja (NL) · ZOELLNER Reinhard, Berlin (DE) · ZUNZ Olivier, Charlottesville (US).

***

THE CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES OF HISTORIANS

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Conférence Pronconcée à l’Université de Melbourne , 29 April 2008

( Jean-Noël Jeanneney is a French historian and politician associated with LIBERTÉ POUR L’HISTOIRE,  23-25 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 75001 Paris, France.  Here are some excerpts from his address at the University of Melbourne  🙂

“… (T)he subject I want to explore with you, which is the responsibility of historians as they exercise their intellectual and professional activity, charged by the collectivity to which they belong to organise shared memory, to cast light on the common past, and to reflect on the traces it has left. In doing so, they may choose to cut themselves carefully off from contemporary politics, and moreover, while we can identify moments where historians intervene directly in domestic or international political life, we can also find moments of withdrawal or mistrust. This happened for instance in the 1920s in Europe, which saw academic historians withdrawing from the political struggles as a reaction against the orgy of nationalism, even though … most of them had been participants in it during the Great War.

It remains the case that historians, however prudently they set themselves up to appear, can never completely escape the problem of their civic responsibility, because their entire intellectual activity is affected by it. They cannot ever get away from the possibility that their work will have major political consequences, by virtue of the fact that they are working on the past, and that the presence of that past … always weighs heavily … in the debates and sensitivities that weave the life of a democracy.

Consequently, their responsibility is a great one – unless they choose to limit themselves to the superficial satisfaction of anecdotal history. I see the management of this responsibility as requiring three lines of approach. Firstly, historians must contribute to the truth about humankind – what it has been, and hence what it is. Secondly, there is the need to clarify ideas, in the service of those who engage in action. And finally they must serve the identity of the nation to which they belong. This third role, as we shall see, is the most ambiguous.

The truth about humankind? Now that, assuredly, is rather daunting… Obviously the society of historians cannot claim any monopoly in bringing the truth to light, based on some professional know-how. That would be ridiculous. But it seems to me that there would be cause for guilt if historians did not, in such circumstances, contribute to the separation of truth and falsehood.

…

Personally, I consider that historians would be failing in their duty if they refused this task of bringing the truth to light when the public interest especially demands it. Clearly, it is also the responsibility of the justice system to draw out truth: does this mean there is competition when a judgment has a historical dimension? I think it’s probably possible to draw a line distinguishing the respective duties: if there is a crime or misdemeanor concerning the norms and laws of the national community, the historian can help define the responsibility of those implicated; but only the judges can reach conclusions in respect to possible punishment.

This notion of historical ‘expertise’ is difficult to handle. But it becomes clear if we consider that it can and must help the moral, civic and legal judgment process to better understand and, potentially, to reach better conclusions. It can do this firstly by scrutinising the freedom of action of the protagonists, so that the diversity of possibilities they have faced can be reconstructed moment by moment. I think the very heart of our mission is in fact this constant effort, against the temptations of anachronism, to reconstruct what, at each successive moment, has been the freedom of those involved.

…

The second mission of historians in a democracy, as I see it, is to help clarify the thought of those engaged in political action. As a stimulus, we can return to the severity of Paul Valéry, who in the text I quoted earlier, affirmed that the work of historians made nations ‘bitter, arrogant and vain.’

…

At the risk of appearing paradoxical, I would claim that the task of historians is precisely to warn political agents against the fascination of repetition, by reminding them that nothing ever begins again in the same way, and that what follows is always new. ..

Prudence and irony are needed to deal with the use that politicians can make of the large reservoir of situations and diverse positions that the past offers: we know how readily they can isolate a given fragment of an event that could easily be refuted by another, if only they should care to mention it.

It is certainly not up to the historian to be the obliging furnisher of this arsenal of arguments that bring comfort and dynamism to politicians. But conversely, historians have to know that the history they write can and must play an essential role in enlightening these same political actors in the exercise of their power. ..

In all democracies, we can see that the politicians who most clearly leave their mark are those with historical ballast, and that those who are not are almost always, like boats without keels, condemned to float on the surface of events without really influencing them.

This responsibility of historians obviously has to be extended beyond leaders to the entire body of citizens, citizens who are educated to history through books, the press, the audio-visual media, and first of all through school.

History as civic education… Certainly it is not a question of dropping some kind of revealed truth on our compatriots from on high. Rather, our task is to help sharpen their perception, by teaching the diversity of choices, the chains of events, the rhythms of duration in time.

In the midst of the avalanche of information that modern media technology has intensified for all of us, the most effective citizens of tomorrow, the wisest, will be those who have learned – thanks first and foremost to history (what a responsibility!) – how better to classify, order and organise the complexity of the world which will be fashioned by their choices, their behaviour and their votes.

They will learn that collective life does not operate in straight lines and that it is constructed according to complex rhythms – some slow and profound, some developing over the middle term, others again rapid and superficial; they will learn that it is all these rhythms together that, at any given moment, delineate the field of each person’s individual freedom within the life of the collectivity. This can readily be applied, in any nation, to all sorts of questions that thrown up by current events: for instance, among others, the sacrifices that each individual must make for the national defence, or the policy of solidarity towards the most needy, or the relations between society and religions, or the role of justice and the nature of punishment, or the tax system, and – in a more enduring way – the balance between the State and the market.

I have one last area to consider, which is perhaps the most important, namely the links between our profession and the question of national identity. ..

In the first decades of the Third Republic in France, all of historiography was influenced by a kind of secular pope, a ‘national school-master’ called Emest Lavisse. For a long time, Lavisse dominated the teaching of future citizens, through his hefty university-level History of France, right down to the primary school textbooks that, under his name, were distributed by the millions. This teaching was based entirely on the tenet that historical judgment had the right to sort the events of the past in a simple and peremptory fashion: the good was what favored national unity; the bad was what got in its way or threatened it.

A tension with universal values results from this attitude, because of the risk that history is putting itself in the service not of patriotism but of patriotism’s degraded caricature, nationalism. I already mentioned this tension, from another angle, in relation to the Dreyfus Affair. In relation to the First World War, in our countries given over to the barbarous folly of a European civil war – and I’m not forgetting the price paid by Australia –, we could put together a very sad anthology of the excesses of historians carried away by their patriotism. It applied to both camps, and sometimes involved the most unreasonable attitudes, to the point of dishonouring the intelligence of the authors.

I have read that you knew something of this phenomenon here at the same period, and that without going to those extremes, your great Ernest Scott, celebrated in this university, put his academic reputation at risk in his service to the Australian cause. In the other direction, we need to salute the efforts of those historians on both sides of the Rhine, who in the 1920s and 1950s, sought to bring convergence to the French and German textbooks, thanks to a dialogue undertaken in a spirit not of forgetting but of peace.

From another angle, a nation is also the history of its conflicts and in some cases of its collective crimes – in other words of the way memory is worked over by history. I only know about your ‘history wars’ from the outside, and you won’t be surprised if I use the example of the historians of Germany and their grappling with the issue of the collective responsibility of the entire people in the flowering and perpetuation of nazism and its criminal barbarities. But I’ll also point to a situation that is closer to yours, namely the controversies in the United States and Canada that for several decades now have sprung up around the intervention of historians in the legal confrontations over the rights claimed by the descendants of the Indians who signed particular treaties with their conquerors. In their eyes, these treaties confer special rights that fall outside the common regulations – hunting and fishing rights, for example.

In North America things are further complicated, in civic and moral terms, because many of our colleagues have accepted to be paid by one side or the other to defend their respective thesis. I remember rejecting, a few years ago, an offer made by lawyers for cigarette manufacturers in anticipation of future trials. They were asking me to certify, from documents that they would give me, that in the 1950s smokers were already perfectly aware of the risks they were running, and that consequently, no responsibility could be imputed to the firms concerned. You can see how slippery the ground is, from the point of view both of the ethics of the profession and of the public interest.

Along this line, and more broadly, it is illuminating to consider those special moments that constitute commemorations – when a nation crystalises chronological chance to reflect on itself, and, in the best of cases, to cast light on the deep forces that have slowly created a state of ‘wanting-to-live-together’.

I hope you’ll forgive me for taking a French example once again. I was charged by President Mitterrand, in 1989, to organise the commemoration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was a privileged occasion for reflecting on the situation of historians, on their role, and their responsibility in such circumstances.

At the time, I felt that a comparison with the two earlier commemorations, in 1889 and 1939, would be instructive. In 1889, Alphonse Aulard (the Revolution historian I mentioned earlier), stated explicitly:  ‘I wanted at once to teach and practice the French Revolution by serving knowledge and serving the Republic.’ The whole question was to know if at certain moments, given the dramas and passions of the past, there wouldn’t be a contradiction between those two goals. In truth, during that first Centenary, the historians’ action was characterised by sufficient fervour for them not to feel any contradiction or discomfort. The University was on the radical left, with a neo-Kantian orientation, and honoring the memory of the Revolution was a way of honoring the Republic, which was seen as the balanced, peaceful and ultimately successful incarnation of the generous ideals of 1789.

In 1939, at the time of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, instead of agreement and fervour, what dominated was rather awkwardness and discord, because of the weaknesses of the European democracies, which were beginning to doubt themselves in the face of the totalitarian ideologies. The attempt was made to mobilise historians to celebrate the so-called ‘translatlantic revolutions’ and to emphasise the links between the United States and France at the end of the 18th century (in an effort to attract the sympathy and support of Roosevelt’s America). But this provoked a lot of reticence, not because of sympathy for fascism (though there were some exceptions), but because the (history) profession did not feel carried by a sufficiently strong wave of collective determination to set aside their academic scruples and to descend into the arena.

As for the 1989 Bicentenary, I was too involved in it to have the necessary critical distance. But it seems to me that, helped by the precedents, we managed to achieve a good balance between historical research and the civic implications of the event. The Mission I headed imposed a careful and strict separation between the scientific historiographical work – which the State kept its nose out of, even though it provided subsidies – and, on the other hand, the explicitly political task of crystalising deep hopes for the benefit of a certain idea of the French nation as a unique and universal entity in the real world.

What I have been able to read, at the time and since, about the way Australia organised the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation, suggests to me that, notwithstanding the specificities of our two countries, you must have confronted problems somewhat similar to ours – especially in the light of your memorial debates about the relations between colonists and the indigenous populations.

The issue goes beyond commemorations. In France, there have recently been sharp reactions to a law voted by the right-wing majority in the context of a much-needed and belated renewal of the historiography of French colonisation. This law imposed on the teachers in our junior and senior high schools the obligation to teach ¬ and I quote – the ‘positive aspects’ of colonisation. Quite a number of us responded that it was certainly not through a law that historians could be forced to have a balanced approach and that this text, therefore, was nothing more than a party-political injunction. I must say that when I saw that your former Prime Minister, Mr Howard, had sought in 1999 to introduce into the preamble of your constitution the statement that ‘Australians are free to be proud of their country and heritage’, I had a reaction bordering on the incredulous.

In France, a great controversy has developed around what we call ‘memorial laws’ – laws that seek to shape the national memory. Whether they are passed by the Right or the Left, they claim to tell the truth about historical facts in the name and interest of the French nation. One of them has recognised the Armenian genocide, another has defined as a crime against humanity slavery and black slave trading (the western practice, rather than the Arab practice). The critique of the historians has moreover reached back as far as a 1990 law, the so-called Gayssot law which punished negationism, the negation of the gas chambers under the Nazis. Against these ‘memorial’ laws, we created an association called ‘Liberty for History’, under the presidency of the great René Rémond, who was my master. After his death, Pierre Nora became president. Neither of these men can be accused of being carried away by excessive emotion.

Our conviction is that it is not the place of lawmakers to regulate the work of history in this way. You should not see this as self-protection by the profession. One does not need a university label to write good history. Negationism is ignominious. But if it has faded, it is because of the work of courageous colleagues, not because of laws, and moreover, before that law, we had plenty of legal means of punishing antisemitism. For us, it is absolutely unacceptable from a civic point of view, that successive and possibly contradictory parliamentary majorities should make determinations of threat sort about the interpretation of the past, relying on some transient and chance notion of the national interest. It is not only an offence to that intellectual freedom that the Republic must guarantee. It is also a peril to the dignity of a democracy in relation to its past. Patriotism, in truth, while a precious value, should take up its abode elsewhere.

By way of conclusion, I would like to give the final word to another great historian, Gabriel Monod, who founded the Revue historique in 1876. Monod was a strict Protestant, and as such was more than most preoccupied with the ethical and civic foundations of his discipline. In an article on the progress of the science of history since the 16th century, he set about formulating a synthesis of the different duties I have outlined :

“Without proposing any goal, any purpose other than the benefit to truth, history, in a mysterious and sure way, works towards the greatness of the nation and at the same time towards the progress of humanity.”

No doubt, like him and like me, a century and a half later, you can feel how difficult the conciliation of these two objectives will always be. But in the end, it is perhaps that challenging task that gives our profession its savour, its scope, and, in the best of cases, when we succeed in fulfilling it, its virtue.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your kind attention.

***

THE FREEDOM OF HISTORICAL DEBATE IS UNDER ATTACK BY THE MEMORY POLICE

Timothy Garton Ash, contact@lph-asso.fr <br>

Guardian, October 16 2008

Well-intentioned laws that prescribe how we remember terrible events are foolish, unworkable and counter-productive.

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. 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 Aug u st 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”.

Fortunately, at this point a wave of indignation gave birth to a movement called Liberty for History (lph-asso.fr), led by the French historian Pierre Nora, which i s also behind=3D2 0the Appel de Blois. The case against Pétré-Grenouilleau was dropped, and the “positive role” clause nullified. But it remains incredible that such a proposal ever made it to the statute book in one of the world’s great democracies and homelands of historical scholarship.

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?

International humanitarian law indicates some criteria, but exactly what events qualify is a matter of often heated dispute. The only cast-iron way to ensure EU-wide uniformity of treatment would be for the EU to agree a list – call it the Zypries List – of qualifying horrors. You can imagine the horse-trading behind closed doors in Brussels . (Polish official to French counterpart: “OK, we’ll give you the Armenian genocide if you give us the Ukrainian famine.”) Pure Gogol.

Since some countries with a strong free-speech tradition, including Britain, objected to Zypries’ original draft, the proposed agreement now also says: “Member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting.” So in practice, individual countries will continue to do things their own way.

Despite its manifold flaws, this framework decision was approved by the European Parliament in November 2007, but it has not been brought back to the justice and home affairs council for final approval. I emailed the relevant representative of the current French presidency of the EU to ask why, and just received this cryptic but encouraging reply: “The FD ‘Racism and xenophobia’ is not ready for adoption, as it is suspended to some outstanding parliamentary reservations.” Merci, madame liberté: that will do till the end of this year. Then let the Czech presidency of the EU, which covers the first half of next year, strike it down for good – with a dose of the Good Soldier Svejk’s common sense about history.

Let me be clear. I believe it is very important that nations, states, peoples and other groups (not to mention individuals) should face up, solemnly and publicly, to the bad things d one by them or in their name. The West German leader Willy Brandt falling silently to his knees in Warsaw before a monument to the victims and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto is, for me, one of the noblest images of postwar European history. For people to face up to these things, they have to know about them in the first place. So these subjects must be taught in schools as well as publicly commemorated. But before they are taught, they must be researched. The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted, and various possible interpretations tested against it.

It’s this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom – subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander, designed to protect living persons but not governments, states or national pride (as in the notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code). The historian’s equivalent of a natural scientist’s experiment is to test the evidence against all possible hypotheses, however extreme, and then submit what seems to him or her the most convincing interpretation for criticism by professional colleagues and for public debate. This is how we get as near as one ever can to truth about the past.

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 the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by=3D2 0refuting 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. So join us, please, to see off the nanny state and its memory police.

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STATEMENTS OF LIBERTÉ POUR L’HISTOIRE,

Pierre Nora, President <br>

January, 12, 2009

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I do not want the end of January, 2009, to pass without communicating to you an assessment of our activities in the past year. On the whole it is positive.

As you have possibly learned from articles in the press, the mobilization of Liberté pour l’Histoire, today across Europe (cf. Le Monde November 28, 2008) and our Appel de Blois (October 11, 2008), have allowed us to score the following decisive points:

1. The Parliamentary Mission of Information on Memorial Questions which had listened to numerous historians and jurists, among them our vice president, Françoise Chandernagor, and myself, decided that the National Assembly should cease enacting laws that designated as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” (modern terms) events that took place in the past. The Mission, presided over by the President of the National Assembly himself, unanimously (thirty deputies representing all of the parties) reaffirmed that it was not the role of Parliament to write history. From now on, when members of Parliament wish to express their regrets or their compassion concerning an historical event it is recommended that they do so by “resolutions” which do not have the constraining power of law and that cannot result in judicial action. (See the Rapport of the Mission « Rassembler la Nation autour d’une mémoire partagée » www.assemblee-nationale.fr.)

2. The government has decided against sending to the Senate the second proposal of the law concerning the “Armenian Genocide” voted at the end of 2006 by the National Assembly. In light of the arguments presented by our association and the conclusions of the Parliamentary Mission, the government no longer seeks to apply to the law on the “Armenian Genocide” of 1915 the penal sanctions envisioned by the “loi Gayssot” of 1990 concerning the nazi’s crimes. The law of 2001 on Armenia is retained, but it does not forbid debate.

3. Before the menace of a European framework-decision concerning the “fight against certain forms of racism by means of penal law,” Liberté pour l’Histoire, on the occasion of the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire de Blois, October 10-11, launched an appeal published by Le Monde and echoed by the major European newspapers. As of today, we have received more than 1,100 signatures representing the collectivity of historians. We have published the list in the form of a full-page advertisement in Le Monde on November 28. On the same day this framework-decision was signed in Brussels. However, France has opted for a minimalist approach suggested by Liberté pour L’Histoire: the new crime, very general, established by this framework-decision (crime of “banalization” and of “complicity in banalization” of all war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocides”) only concerns those crimes previously qualified as such by an international tribunal. This allows, in practice:

a) To reserve the application of this new charge to contemporary crimes, the only ones susceptible, in fact, to being adjudicated either by an ad hoc international tribunal or by the new International Criminal Court.

b) To avoid retroactive and automatic penalization of all “historical laws” already adopted by our Parliament.

Certainly it would have been even more preferable, both for scholars of the contemporary period and for future historians, to avoid any further criminalization of opinions or in the canonization of any judgement, but this framework-decision, proposed by the French government since 2001, had already been adopted by the Counsel of Ministers of the European Union and voted by the Parliament of Strasbourg when we became aware of it. At least, by prompting them to make the issues more precise, we have avoided the worst case scenario, that a historian, for example, could be brought before a court for having “minimized” and “contextualized” the massacre of the Angevins in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282…

4. Concerning the intervention of Parliament in educational programs, a public exchange of letters took place between Xavier Darcos, Minister of National Education, and myself (see the letter on the Web site of Liberté pour l’Histoire.) The report of the Accoyer Parliamentary Mission clearly confirmed the decision that had been taken by the Constitutional Council on January 31, 2006, removing article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005 concerning the recognition by educational programs of the positive role of the French Presence in the Outre-mer. “It must be clear for all,” the Accoyer report affirmed, “that the Parliament must not exceed the realm of law by prescribing the content of history syllabi.”

Not withstanding these successes we must remain vigilant:

— First, because we must carefully follow the elaboration of future texts (the European framework-decision must be “transposed” by our Parliament within two years) as well as the evolution of the jurisprudence of courts.

— Next, because nothing prevents our Parliament, which has for the moment returned to its senses, to come back at any time to its earlier errors.

— Finally, because, in light of the recent reform of the Constitution, the Constitutional Council might have to pronounce, in the months to come, on the memorial laws that have already been enacted.

Liberté pour l’Histoire must, more than ever, remain an active interlocutor with the public authorities. In this spirit a meeting has already been set for January with Claude Guéant, (General Secretary of the Elysée), Henri Guaino (Special Counselor for the President of the Republic) and Jean-Louis Debré (President of the Constitutional Counsel).

We urge you thus to join, to rejoin, and to encourage others to join.

For our international friends who belong to the European Union

France established that, for the framework-decision adopted November 28, 2008 concerning the “fight against certain forms of racism and xenophobia” the option deadline offered to title 1 paragraph 4 remains, contrary to the project of the initial text, open for two years.

This certainly means that the 27 countries of the European Union that are signatories to the framework-decision are already obligated to have in their laws the equivalent to our “loi Gayssot” of 1990 concerning nazi’s crimes (or of the similar German law), and even a bit more: penal sanctions extended to three years in prison for all attempts at “banalization” or “complicity in banalization” of war crimes and crimes against humanity adjudicated up to 1945 by the Nuremberg Tribunal (article one, paragraph one, line d).

On the other hand, it remains possible, thanks to the option, to limit, for all other collective crimes committed in the course of history, penal sanctions incurred by possible commentators to only those “war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocides” recognized as such by an international criminal court (in other words, “contemporary crimes”).

It is necessary and sufficient that a government requires to exercise the option envisioned by article 1, paragraph 4, of the framework-decision, an option that the French government, alerted by Liberté pour l’Histoire, has exercised at our request and that, as of the present, is the only government to have so acted.

Since this option remains open to all states until November, 2010, it would be good if you would encourage your government (Minister of Foreign or European affairs and Parliament) to exercise this option with the Brussels authorities. The option is exercised in the form of a declaration, the text of which is as follows: “[this country] declares, in conformity with article 1, paragraph 4, that it will not make punishable the negation or gross banalization of the crimes addressed in paragraph 1, points c) and d) unless these crimes have been established by a definitive decision issued by a national court and an international court.”

It is true that the “residual” penalization which remains, even after the exercise of the option, may trouble future historians, who will not be allowed to criticize either judgments of various international ad hoc tribunals created during the past fifty years or those of the International Criminal Court that has recently been established. Any reconsideration of the facts that these courts have considered as proven could result in the criminal sanctions envisioned by the European text. However, contemporary historians will not be hindered in the pursuit of their research and in the expression of their opinions on the more distant past (the Crusades, for example): this is the lesser evil.

The future will require great vigilance because if the framework-decision which has just been adopted only concerns the “banalization” of collective crimes committed for reasons of racism, xenophobia, or religion (when these latter are focused on an ethnic minority), certain states of the European Union have again requested similar legislation condemning the “banalization” of collective crimes committed for political reasons by totalitarian regimes; in particular this is aimed at crimes of communist regimes in certain countries of the Union (especially the Baltic states). The Council of European Ministers has already invited the Commission to hold public hearings on these crimes and to examine, within two years, the possibility of the adoption of a second framework-decision.

In the intermediate term one cannot thus exclude:

— On the one hand, an extension of the European law to crimes committed for religious reasons without any “ethnic” connotation (the European wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the Irish problems could be included).

— On the other hand, an extension to political crimes committed in the past (without statute of limitations) by a totalitarian regime.

If one is not careful, what margin of discussion and evaluation will remain to the historian who will soon be accused, concerning any crime that our contemporary society condemns, of “relativism,” “contextualization,” “comparativism,” or “complicity in banalization”?

In the name of the Association Liberté pour l’Histoire, I send you my best wishes for the new year.

Pierre Nora, President of Liberté pour l’Histoire, January 12, 2009.