Well, I was actually planning to limit this blog to my own experiences, but since I lead a rather uneventful life, it was getting very hard to come up with an interesting post 2 or 3 times a week. So I decided to broaden my scope dramatically, and just write about anything I feel like writing about.

For today, I thought I’d write something about the bill that France approved last week which makes it a crime to deny Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915. Apart from the question whether this is really any business of the French government at all, and whatever the hidden motives of the French may be, this bill represents a serious violation of freedom of speech and thought. Furthermore, this law will not be able to alter the opinions of other people. The only thing this law will achieve is to oppress those opinions, and to generate more anger and hatred among the Turks toward the French.

This is not to say I sympathize entirely with the Turks. I can certainly understand their outrage, but it seems somewhat hypocritical in light of Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Writer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, for instance, was faced with charges under the article for stating in the Tages Anzeiger that “Thirty thousands Kurds and a million Armenians were murdered. Hardly anyone dares mention it, so I do. And that’s why I’m hated (source: Amnesty International).” Also, Turkish comments that the French should look at their own history of violence may be a good point, but is totally irrelevant to the discussion. A country which denies its own history of violence, is not a valid excuse for another country to do so as well.

I have to admit I’m not too familiar with the relevant history to form a definitive opinion. However, the Turkish attitude toward the Armenian killings reminds me of the Japanese denial of the atrocities committed in Nanking during the second World War. Iris Chang, in her excellent book “The Rape of Nanking” states that “Japan not only carries the legal burden but the moral obligation to acknowledge the evil it perpetrated in Nanking, (…) and to educate future generations of Japanese citizens about the true facts of the massacre, (…) which is crucial for Japan if it expects to deserve respect from the international community – and to achieve closure on a dark chapter that stained its history.” If there is even an inkling of truth in the allegation that the Armenian killings amounted to genocide, then the same applies for Turkey as well.