In today’s Toronto Globe and Mail, I noted a rather disturbing story about the withdrawal of textbooks dealing with three instances of genocide- the Nazi Holocaust and European Jews, Rwanda’s one million dead in the early nineties, and the Armenian genocide during the First World War.

Textbook censorship is a loathsome practice, no matter who carries it out. In the United States, it usually seems to be the Christian Right- that is, when they’re not making spurious claims to ‘equal time’ through inserting anti-evolution religious propaganda (”intelligent design”) into school science programmes.

Fortunately, it wasn’t anti-Semites protesting that neofascists were ‘unfairly’ pilloried. It was Canada’s Turkish immigrant community, who have consistently denied that the events of the First World War and loss of Armenian lives should be viewed as genocide. Unfortunately, the local school board in question knuckled under to their demands.

Wrong. If an historical event has adequate corroboration or verification through detailed empirical and/or archival evidence, then one can be reasonably confident that it took place. If there are matters of interpretation involved, one must ask which is the more rigorous when one is analysing the past.

Genocide is genocide. It is not as if late Ottoman Empire Turkey is being singled out for especial condemnation in this context- Rwanda and Nazi Germany are similarly culpable for what happened in their own national contexts.

And like Holocaust denial of any sort, which is utterly despicable, irredeemably anti-Semitic and depraved, genocide denial is fit only for condemnation.

As Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”  In the case of genocide and ethnic or any other form of ’social cleansing,’ we have had quite enough, as the mute skulls and skeletons of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and other crimes against humanity bear witness.

When we ignore any of them, our moral compass is compromised.

Recommended:

Unnati Gandhi “Genocide Book Pulled From High School Reading List” Globe and Mail: 16.05.08:

http://www.globeandmail.com