Criminalize free speech at your peril

Acknowledgements to http://www.andrewbrons.mep.eu/

Illegitimate custodians of cultural and intellectual heritage

Written by Administrator

15th January 2012

Last week, Andrew Brons MEP wrote the following letter to the editors of Britain's national and regional newspapers. Copies were also sent to French and Turkish English language websites.

"So the French political establishment wishes to make it a criminal offence to deny that the killing of up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turks in 1915 was genocide.

"Perhaps the French establishment was simply following the example of the Turks who had threatened to prosecute Orhan Pamuk in 2005, for claiming that the killing was genocide.

"Differences about propositions of fact are one thing; differences over description and classification of events are quite another.

"Professional historians understand that there is never the last word spoken or written on an area of historical study; there is only the latest word. All words of wisdom are doomed to be qualified or superseded by subsequent findings or conclusions. Academics in other subject areas would agree, mutatis mutandis.

"People who hope to set current findings or conclusions in stone, for all time, are at best ignorant of the nature of progression in academic research or, at worst, hostile to it. States that attempt to do the same reveal themselves to be totalitarian, anti-academic and, in an Age of Reason, utterly illegitimate custodians of a national and international cultural and intellectual heritage."