While the world
continued to look on—like an impotent rich man who cannot afford Viagra—as a
genocide was taking place in Syria (i.e., the systemic killing of a group—in this
case, of pro-democracy demonstrators), France’s state senate approved a bill on
January 23, 2012 criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides,
which according to the state includes the Nazi Holocaust and the Turkish
killing of Armenians beginning in 1915. In the twenty-first century, fining
people and putting them in prison for not wanting to remember things so
horrible evinces the same kind of nationalist thinking that had led the
twentieth to be the bloodiest century. In contradistinction to that decadent
century, turning a new leaf following the Arab spring in the twenty-first is a
far better strategy.
The full essay is at "Free Speech Compromised in the E.U."
