Never Offend
Annals of Thought-crime. Orhan Pamuk goes on trial on Friday.
My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”…Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country…If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; there were public burnings of my books.
Most of the ingredients, brought together in one nasty brew. Stupid idea piling on stupid idea until you end up with a great stack of nonsensical absurd hollow pseudoideas. The idea that there is such a thing as Turkish ‘identity,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be ‘denigrated,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be denigrated publically, the idea that doing so is a crime worth three years in prison, the idea that Pamuk should be ‘silenced’ for committing such a crime, the idea that he should be permanently silenced for doing so, the idea that what he did is ‘treachery.’
My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked.
Well, yes. What Turkey did some ninety years ago was done by an entirely different set of people (which is one reason ‘identity’ is such a bad idea: it leaves the impression that in fact it’s the same people, but it isn’t), but the people forbidding discussion of it now are the people who are alive now, and if they think they’re buffing up Turkey’s current ‘identity’ by doing so, they’re delusional. If they think preventing freedom of expression in order to suppress discussion of a part of Turkey’s history is a sensible, useful, productive idea, they’re infatuated.
What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?…Last May, in Korea, when I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo.
They must all have offended someone. Never, never offend anyone – or else.
Speaking of the EU, out of curiosity, what do you think of the David Irving case?
I don’t recall having heard you comment on it since his arrest last month in Austria. As you may recall, he is going on trial in February for “minimizing the crimes of the Third Reich” based on speeches he gave 16 years ago denying the Holocaust. Of course, Irving continued to spread Holocaust denial right up until his foolish jaunt into Austria in November to give a speech to a right wing student group, his hubris in ignoring an outstanding warrant for his arrest leading to his present incarceration. Nonetheless, as odious and anti-Semitic as he is, he is arguably being prosecuted solely for his speech.
I think it’s different. Which is not to say that I have no qualms at all, because I do, but I think the differences are important. For one thing there is the difference between saying a genocide did happen and saying one did not. If genocide-denial is a part of the overall project of making genocide possible – by minimizing it or calling it something else, something legitimate and acceptable, like war casualties or police action or self-defense – then arguably it is dangerous – in the sense of putting people’s lives at risk – in a way that genocide-assertion is not. (Though I suppose one could argue that genocide-assertion is also dangerous to some people, because of the potential for revenge. It’s complicated, isn’t it.) For another thing, given Austria’s relatively recent history, it has a lot of reason to prevent anti-Semitism to get more of a foothold than it already has. Life or death reason, not mere ‘offense’ reason.
So I take the point about Irving to be not at all that he’s odious, but that he’s dangerous. I think that’s a huge distinction, that nearly always gets obscured in these discussions – there’s a tendency to call speech controversial, offensive, radical, etc, when the point is that it could get people killed.
Sorry, but I don’t buy that line of reasoning. There may have been such a rationale for laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in the early postwar period, but the time is long past since there was any real likelihood that Nazi-ism would rise again. All these laws do is allow scum like David Irving to claim the mantle of free speech martyr. Holocaust denial is nothing more than a tool of anti-Semites to justify their Jew-hatred and, in some cases, to incite further hatred of the Jews.
In fact, I would argue that the very same arguments you make to defend Austria’s law could be made in support of the British law against “religious hatred,” which, as I recall, you oppose. After all, isn’t “inciting religious hatred” pretty dangerous too? Isn’t it potentially as dangerous as inciting anti-Semitism through Holocaust denial? Something to think about.
They weren’t prosecuted for reading it out, but for reading it out in such a way as to constitute an illegal public demonstration within a mile of parliament….
Anyway, the pertinent distinction here is between free speech which criticises the beliefs of others, and free speech which constitutes incitement to racial hatred. The inability of the UK govt to grasp this distinction is an ongoing problem, but more intelligent folk ought to be able to see it…
Orac, I’m not trying to sell you that line of reasoning. I simply answered your question. And it’s not really a buyable ‘line’ anyway, it’s a collection of thoughts all tending to express a good deal of uncertainty and ambivalence. You seem to have overlooked the bit about qualms, for instance. And I’m not ‘defending’ Austria’s law. I don’t care about defending Austria’s laws. I’m trying to think about the whole subject, I’m not making an emphatic case. And of course I see the relevance of the religious hatred law – I’d have to be an idiot not to, so I don’t need to be told it’s something to think about.
I’ve said a few times, I’m not against laws against incitement to hatred – I have qualms about them, as I do about Austria’s arrest of Irving, but I tend to think they’re sometimes necessary. It’s the specification of beliefs that I object to.
How do you know that ‘the time is long past since there was any real likelihood that Nazi-ism would rise again’? And in any case the issue isn’t Nazism but anti-Semitism and genocidal furies. Does anyone know that such furies are impossible in contemporary Europe? That seems to me to be an absurd idea, given recent history.