Sunday, March 11, 2007

More on the Armenian genocide and laws against denial

I want to elaborate on my previous post. What if a scholar said: the Turks set out to murder in as brutal a fashion as many Armenians they could lay their hands on in Turkey. What they did was immoral and a crime of major proportions. Furthermore, their failure to acknowledge their terrible wrongdoing and, even more so, their denial of it further compounds their crime.

So far so good.

What then if the scholar went on to say "but I don't think it should be termed a genocide"?

Now we have a problem. Should that person be prosecuted? According to this Swiss court it seems yes. What happens then to academic debate?

This situation reminds me of the debate that once prevailed among scholars of the Holocaust about its uniqueness. More on that later.

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