Bernard-Henri Lévy writes here in defence of laws prohibiting genocide-denial. But it's more an appeal for having these laws than it is a persuasive argument for them. Lévy:
Critics may say, "It is not for the law to write history." That is absurd. History has been written a hundred times over. The facts have been established, and new laws will protect them from being altered.
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The laws already in place in many countries regarding Holocaust denial do not touch historians - for them the question of whether the slaughter of the Jews was or was not genocide is no longer at issue. What is at stake is preventing the erasure of such crimes from our society's memory.
This is a piece of sophistry. Yes, serious historians know that the Holocaust occurred and will not therefore want to investigate the possibility that it didn't. But if they did want to, laws against Holocaust denial would restrict their freedom of research and debate. A person in a locked prison cell is unfree to leave it even if he or she has no desire to do so. The facts 'have been established', Lévy says, and so they have. But the best means of establishing them remain unrestricted freedom of opinion, expression, research (with the usual qualifiers about incitement and defamation). Lévy's response to this:
... which he follows up with references to Heinrich Himmler and Primo Levi, in order to remind us that there are those who will try to eradicate the truth about any genocide. There are indeed. But Lévy needs an argument to show that the path of such people to power is more effectively blocked by legal prohibitions - which they can point to as evidence of 'fear of the truth' - than it is by open counter-argument and freedom of speech and research. He does not provide one.Some may ask, "Can't the truth defend itself?" No, I am afraid not...