French author explains rationale behind Genocide bill

PanARMENIAN.Net - French writer and academic Bernard-Henri Lévy explained the rationale behind the recent bill passed in the French Parliament criminalizing the denial of the Armenian Genocide in a January 4 article in Huffington Post.

“The law whose purpose is to penalize negationist revisionism, voted before Christmas by the French parliament, does not propose to write history in the place of historians. And this for the simple reason that this history has been told and written, well written, for a long time,” Lévy writes in the Huffington Post. “This we have always known: that, beginning in 1915, the Armenians were the victims of a methodic attempt at annihilation.”

“It’s time to stop mixing everything up and drowning the Armenian tragedy in the ritualized blahblahblah assailing the ‘memorial laws.’ For this law is not a memorial law. It is not one of those dangerous power plays capable of laying the path for dozens if not hundreds of absurd or blackguardly rules, codifying what one has the right to say about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the meaning of colonization, slavery, the Civil War, the misdemeanor of blasphemy and heaven knows what else. It is a law concerning a genocide - which is not the same. It is a law sanctioning those who, in denying it, intensify and perpetuate the genocidal act – which is something else entirely. There are not, thank God, hundreds of genocides, or even dozens. There are three. Four, if we add the Cambodians to the Armenians, the Jews, and the Rwandans. And to place these three or four genocides on the same level as all the rest, to make their penalization the antechamber of a political correctness that authorizes a stream of useless or perverse laws on the disputed aspects of our national memory, to say, “Watch it! You’re opening a Pandora’s box from which everything and anything can pop out !” is another imbecility, exacerbated by another infamy and sealed with a dishonesty that is, really, grotesque,” the author writes.

“Let us confront this specious line of argument with the wisdom of national representation. And may the senators complete the process by refusing to be intimidated by this little band of historians,” he concludes.