Violence in Human History

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker's brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence. Pinker does not deny that individual human beings are capable of the most appalling acts of savagery. But the test of our propensity for violence is how the rest of us respond. Once it would have been basic human instinct to react to violence on this scale with more violence. But where were the reprisals, the mob rampages, the demands for the torture and killing of the perpetrator? Instead, the Norwegian people responded with remarkable compassion and restraint: love-bombing instead of real bombing. What happened in Norway this summer showed just how peace-loving we have become.

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. As Pinker shows, it is both a long story and a relatively recent one. The first thing that had to happen was the move from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence (where your chances of meeting a violent end could be as high as 50:50) to settled communities. The trouble was that early governments showed themselves at least as capable of cruelty as anyone else: most of the truly horrific instruments of torture Pinker describes were designed and employed by servants of the state. As the 17th-century philosopher John Locke remarked of the escape from the state of nature to so-called civilisation: why run away from polecats only to be devoured by lions?

So the next thing that had to happen was the state had to be properly civilised. This took place over the course of what we have come to call the enlightenment, thanks in part to philosophers such as Locke. In both private and public life – covering everything from table manners to bills of rights – the means were found to restrain our worst instincts. Slowly, painfully, but ultimately successfully torture was outlawed, slavery was abolished, democracy became established and people discovered that they could rely on the state to protect them.

Yet the enlightenment has acquired something of a bad name. Why? The answer is simply put: the 20th century, surely the most appallingly violent of them all, scarred by total war, genocide and other mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale. All those table manners and bills of rights didn't prevent the Holocaust, did they? At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend. The two world wars were essentially freak events, driven by contingency and in some cases lunacy: a bit like the killings on Utøya magnified a millionfold. They do not reflect the default condition of mankind. The evidence for this is the third part of Pinker's case: look at what has happened since 1945, as the world has become immeasurably more peaceful on almost every count. Of course, there have been horrors (Mao, Pol Pot) but no one can doubt that the arrow has been pointing away from the violence of the first half of the 20th century, not back towards more of it.

Pinker calls the post-1945 period "the long peace". But the real surprise is what he calls "the short peace", which corresponds to the 20 years since the end of the cold war. I am one of those who like to believe that the idea of 1989 as some fundamental turning point in human history is absurd: the world is just as dangerous as it has always been. But Pinker shows that for most people in most ways it has become much less dangerous. There have not just been fewer wars, but in the wars there have been many fewer people have died. Terrorism is down, not up. All sorts of disadvantaged groups – women, children, ethnic minorities, even animals – are much less likely to be victims of violence across many parts of the world, and the trend is spreading. Part of the reason we fail to notice this picture is that it is so pervasive: we are more aware of violence simply because we have become so unused to it.

At the outset Pinker calls the story he has to tell "maybe the most important thing that has ever happened in human history". That depends. If you told a medieval peasant that all the horsemen of the apocalypse that blighted his (and even more so her) life would be vanquished by the 21st century – famine and disease as well as war and violence – it might be the first two that seemed the real miracles (as well as being responsible for saving many more lives). Some peasants (though here perhaps more the hims than the hers) might also feel a little ambivalent about the decline of violence. Human aggression, unlike famine and disease, is not just some capricious act of God. It is part of who we are. Giving it up might leave even a victimised peasant feeling a little diminished.

Pinker accepts we have not abolished violence in the way that we have abolished smallpox. In the final section of the book he moves from history to evolutionary psychology to show that human beings are always torn between their inner demons and their better angels. What decides us between them is not virtue or vice but strategic calculation. We resort to violence when violence seems the better bet. We resist it when it seems riskier than the alternative. That's why violence can be self-reinforcing – as in the tit-for-tat world of the hunter-gatherers – but it's also why peace can be self-reinforcing – as in the love-bomb world we inhabit now. Pinker is adamant that we should not be complacent about the decline of violence: the inner demons are still there. But neither should we be fatalistic: as things stand, our better angels are a truer reflection of who we are.

What might change that? As I was reading this book I was repeatedly reminded of two novels. One is Lord of the Flies, an earlier generation's definitive allegory of the violence lurking in us all. Pinker's book makes Golding's vision look dated: there is no state of nature bubbling away beneath the surface of civilised man, notwithstanding all the hysterical nonsense that has been uttered about the recent riots (which were, for riots, remarkably unviolent). The other novel is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this generation's definitive allegory of how it could all go wrong. McCarthy pictures a world in which some random future spasm (perhaps an environmental catastrophe) leaves us all unhinged and lets the inner demons loose. Does our gradual move away from violence towards civility leave us better or worse equipped to deal with the next great calamity when it comes? No one can know, and Pinker does not pretend to provide an answer. But in the meantime, everyone should read this astonishing book.

Maps Of The Day

Newstralia?

A POINT OF VIEW

New Zealand is talking about whether to become part of Australia. It would be a sad step for a country which has used its independence to set an example for the rest of the world, says Simon Schama.

On a recent Sunday morning in New Zealand I'm waiting to do a turn on breakfast TV with a tough, veteran presenter, Paul Holmes, whose sharp tailoring at an hour when most of us are still in pyjamas seems, all by itself, a reproach to dozy thinking.

I'm in a studio in Wellington; he's in Auckland. We are connected by a satellite feed, but there is something about Paul that reminds me of a Latin teacher who had an uncanny knack for spotting where my mind was wandering. The rest of the class would be plodding through Parthia with Caesar's legions, but Schama? He was off somewhere on a Pacific lagoon backing up Elvis as grass skirts swayed to a tropic breeze.

"Boy at the back WAKE UP!" the Master Conjugator would roar and you can bet I did. So, this Sunday, even though my fellow writers at the Wellington festival have been making friends with the Pinot Noir until all hours, I sit up straight in the studio and pay attention as Paul and his politician guests tackle a painful question for the half-hour before my interview.

That subject turns out to be the suicide of New Zealand. No not suicide in New Zealand but a proposal to cash in the country's independence and become instead, the seventh state of the Australian commonwealth. An opinion poll has suggested that no less than one in four New Zealanders are in favour of this startling departure, and fully a half of the polled want to begin serious debate about it.

What - in the name of Edmund Hillary, the haka and all things Kiri te Kanawa - are they talking about? Don't they know that Poms live for the moments - and they happen all too infrequently - when the Aussies get shafted by the Men in Black?

Isn't it bad enough they have the sunshine, the terminally cute wombat, and Nicole Kidman? Must they get the kiwi and the juiciest spring lamb in the world too?

The reasons habitually given for this overture are, surprise, surprise economic and not without a steely logic. Over the past two decades, per capita incomes in the two countries on opposite sides of the Tasman Sea have been diverging with New Zealand on the short end of the trend.

Young brains have been draining to Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. As the British and Irish descendants depart for Oz, the great trans-Pacific Asian migration moves in.

New Zealand is one of the least racially defensive places on the face of the Earth, but even in high-minded circles there's anxiety about a shift in cultural identity. Which seems to me to be even less of a reason to cash in that identity in for the Mephistophelian allure of the mineral-rich economy of Australia.

I must have registered shock for when Paul asks me to chip in, the words "birthright" and "mess of pottage" escape my lips.

Some days later in Sydney, though, I can see the point of kiwis who are thinking the unthinkable. Is there any more gorgeous city on the face of the Earth? No, there isn't.

Paris? Oh please: food and fashion are so over. New York? Uninspired modern art and punitive traffic on the West Side Highway. London. OK the great world city. But unlike London, the economic outlook in Sydney is as sunny as the weather.

Future of megastates

Unemployment stands at 5%. Property prices are going up. As are glittering high rise office towers, designed by the usual premier league of celebrity architects. The creamily clad Opera House sits enthroned on its pedestal in the harbour, as the muscle-toned and the tanned jog by the water.

“ Something deeper and sadder is lurking here: the embarrassment of smallness ”

And for a moment you say to yourself, well, all right, who wouldn't want to be along for that kind of thrilling Aussie ride into the Pacific-Asian future?

But then you snap out of it. Because you realise that the economic rationale for making New Zealand more Australian is just that - a rationalisation. Something deeper and sadder is lurking here: the embarrassment of smallness.

I take a straw poll in the studio in Wellington and it's only the producer who says yes she'd vote for a union tomorrow because the country might stake more of a claim in the coming world. By which she means the world of the economic megastates whose population is counted in the hundreds of millions rather than New Zealand's 4.3.

Better to be a tickbird on the hide of the pachyderm than trampled ignominiously beneath its thundering feet is it?

Wretched cookie cutters

To my appeal to leave New Zealand just as it is, my hosts are too polite to retort "that's rich coming from you" and remind me that in 1973 we ran off to the EU; responding to sleeve tugging from the orphaned antipodes with a brush-off telegram: "Thanks a ton for Gallipoli and all the butter, but this is just the way it is. Sorry about the surplus to requirement sheep. Have a nice life."

“ I'm all for micro-anachronism. Long live Andorra! Hail to thee O Liechtenstein! May Sikkim never perish from the face of the earth! ”

But even acknowledging the hypocrisy, I still don't want to see New Zealanders selling short the rich history of their peculiar place in the world. I'm not an enthusiast for one-size-fits-all versions of national community: interchangeable airports, cookie-cutter multiplexes, die-stamp shopping malls.

I'm all for micro-anachronism. Long live Andorra! Hail to thee O Liechtenstein! May Sikkim never perish from the face of the Earth.

I own up to a smidgin of nostalgia here. For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, it's a weird and not unpleasant experience to travel thousands of miles to the opposite ends of the Earth and, in New Zealand's smaller towns, arrive where you began your life amidst drizzle-sprayed bowling greens, rose gardens, and shops selling Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts.

But that's the knitted tea-cosy cliche about the country. The strength of its history could not be less purl and plain.

Wherever you look, the New Zealand story has been heroic, volcanic, singular. Its island masses, torn from Gondwanaland, stayed so remote that for millions of years they knew no mammalian life. Insects, reptiles and birds shared the lush ecology and without any predators, many birds evolved flightlessly.

Zoological miracle

In an ambitious ecological restoration project, set around an old 19th Century Wellington reservoir, it's possible to get a glimpse of that miracle of zoological idiosyncrasy. Deep in the shade of tree ferns, a lizard-like tuatara, identical to its ancestors 200 million years ago, snoozes, its skin papery, eyelids wrinkled like some retired professor taking a nap.

Higher up a tui bird goes through its sweetly comical repertoire of impersonations, sounding first like the winding of an old clock, then Susan Boyle in top form.

But the exceptional New Zealand history that needs to be preserved is human. Whatever its ethnic and social battles, New Zealand has often led the way. In 1893 it was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and it was the first to offer old-age pensions to the poor.

But it's the story of Maori and pakeha, the settlers of European origin, that - for all the pain, betrayals and suffering - still deserve to be known and celebrated as offering a different model of cultural encounter than anywhere else in the world.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi which, in usual imperial style, seized sovereignty from the Maori and laid it at the feet of Queen Victoria did so on condition that their property rights and political and cultural integrity were respected. Needless to say in the generations that followed, this pact was respected more in the breach than the observance, but New Zealand history did follow its own extraordinary course.

In their first wars against violations of Waitangi the Maori effectively won the battle with the pakeha. Decimated by imported diseases for which they had no immunity, the Maori were expected, at the turn of the 20th Century to be on their way to extinction or extreme marginalisation like native Americans or Australian aborigines. Nothing of the sort has happened.

Today they constitute - by one count - almost 20% of the population and astonishingly a special tribunal created in the 1970s has been ruling on land claims dating back to the post-Waitangi years. Maori and the descendants of intermarriages that go back deep into the 19th Century, are to be found in every leading walk of life in the country.

Of course there have been serious problems of unequal social opportunity, of street gangs. But if there is anywhere in the post-colonial world where two cultural worlds truly live an engaged life alongside each other, it's in New Zealand.

Such stories don't come along very often. Cherish them. Chant them. Dance them.

Upane upane, kaupane, whiti te ra! Up the ladder, up the ladder, the Sun Shines.

Timeline: Slovakia

A chronology of key events

1993 January - Independence after Czechoslovakia splits. Parliament elects Michal Kovac of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (MDS) president. Vladimir Meciar, also of the MDS, is prime minister in coalition government.

Bratislava: Site was originally inhabited by Celts, Romans

Bratislava population: 429,000

Capital of Hungary 1526-1784

Part of Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918

1994 March - New coalition led by Jozef Moravcik of Democratic Union of Slovakia formed following no-confidence vote in Meciar government.

1994 December - Meciar heads another coalition following new elections.

1995 March - Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Hungary signed, guaranteeing the existing border and ethnic minority rights.

1995 November - New law restricting official use of any language other than Slovak gives rise to international condemnation.

1998 March - Constitutional stalemate as President Kovac ends term and parliament fails to agree on a successor. Prime Minister Meciar assumes presidential powers, prompting protest demonstrations and EU condemnation. He takes the opportunity to dismiss nearly half the country's ambassadors and overturn several Kovac decisions.

1998 June - Decision to start up first reactor at Mochovce nuclear plant not far from Austrian border angers Vienna.

European integration

April 2000: Meciar charged with corruption

1998 September/October - Meciar loses premiership following elections. Mikulas Dzurinda, heads new coalition, pledges to strengthen democracy and put Slovakia back on the road to European integration.

1999 January - Parliament ends nearly a year of constitutional crisis by passing a new law allowing for president to be directly elected by the people.

1999 May - Pro-Western candidate Rudolf Schuster wins country's first direct presidential elections.

1999 July - Parliament approves law to improve the status of minority languages.

2001 February - Parliament approves far reaching changes to the country's constitution, a key step towards gaining membership of the EU and Nato. The new constitution decentralises power in Slovakia, increases the authority of the state audit office, strengthens the independence of the judiciary and gives greater recognition to minority rights.

1999: Schuster's win ends uncertainty

2002 January - Eight new regional parliaments created under amended constitution, one of the key requirements for EU entry.

2002 September - Mikulas Dzurinda wins second term as premier in a centre-right coalition government.

2002 December - EU summit in Copenhagen formally invites Slovakia to join in 2004.

2003 May - Slovaks vote in referendum in favour of EU membership. Turnout is just over the required 50 per cent.

2004 February - Police and troops brought in to end rioting by Romany population protesting against cuts in benefits in parts of eastern Slovakia.

2004 March - Slovakia admitted to Nato.

2004 April - Ivan Gasparovic elected president, defeating former Prime Minister Meciar in second round of voting.

EU membership

2004 May - Slovakia is one of 10 new states to join the EU.

2005 May - Parliament ratifies EU constitution.

2005 November - Slovakia joins European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a significant step on the way to membership of the eurozone.

2006 January - Slovak military plane crashes in Hungary, killing 42 people.

2006 April - Floods as Danube bursts banks.

Court intervenes to end strike by doctors and nurses over pay and sell-offs in the healthcare sector.

2006 June-July - Left-wing opposition leader Robert Fico becomes prime minister in a coalition government with Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and a right-wing party.

2006 October - Robert Fico announces withdrawal of Slovakia's troops in Iraq by the end of 2007.

2007 November - Scandal involving land deals leads to firing of Farm Minister Miroslav Jurena and plunges the three-party ruling coalition into crisis.

Police seize enriched uranium that could be used for a ''dirty bomb'' and arrest two Hungarians and a Ukrainian.

2007 December - Slovakia withdraws its last troops from Iraq.

Euro

2008 July - EU gives formal approval for Slovakia to adopt the euro in January 2009.

2009 January - Slovakia adopts the euro.

2009 April - Ivan Gasparovic becomes first Slovak president to win re-election, defeating centre-right challenger Iveta Radicova in the second round of voting.

2009 July - Slovak parliament passes new language law allowing fines to be imposed for using a minority language in government buildings; Hungarian parliament issues a declaration condemning the law as discriminating against Slovakia's Hungarian minority.

from BBC

Avatar - A Good Western

Ephemerids: 3rd of Dec

Joseph Conrad was born 152 years ago, today.

Robert Louis Stevenson died 115 years ago, today.

My Life

I just bought today a bio about

called My Life and it´s the English translation of the original "Fidel Castro: Biografia a dos voces" by

Leyla Zana, a Kurd

The history of the Kurdish people is one of blood, constant warfare, and manipulation. The Kurds are the most numerous remaining group of people who do not have a nation to call their own. Their homeland has been ruthlessly divided between countries that continue to deny their very existence. All together, an estimated twenty-three million Kurds are scattered among a remote and mostly mountainous region in the Middle East that spans the frontiers of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Ever since the early days of the Ottoman Empire in the 1600s, the Kurds were given few rights and were not acknowledged as a separate group. With more than a quarter of the Kurdish population residing in Turkey, Kurds comprise one fifth of the Turkish population. Up until the first World War, the Kurds were a pastoral people who by tradition herded animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats. They migrated from one area to another depending on the season, and lived simple lives that revolved around the animals they herded.

In modern days, the Kurds speak languages related to the Farsi language of the Persians. The languages they speak vary in different regions; some major dialects are Kurmanji, Zaza, and Sorani. Sometimes a Kurd from one area cannot understand the language of a Kurd from a different area, a fact which other countries use to dispute the Kurds' capability of forming a free nation. Most Kurds belong to the Sunni sect of the Muslim religion, while others belong to the Alevite sect. The Kurds have their own traditions and culture. Despite their many attempts to gain independence, a united Kurdish nation has never actually existed.

Origin of the Kurds

Looking back into history, the mystery of Kurdish origin is quite disconcerting. The Kurdish people themselves have often pondered the question of where they came from, and why they are in their present situation. The unceasing rebellions of various Kurdish groups for an independent Kurdistan, or “Land of the Kurds,” have often made the Kurds contemplate their own identity. Some consider themselves the descendants of Noah, who after the great flood supposedly landed on Mount Ararat, where Turkey, Armenia, and Iran meet, while others think of themselves as the offspring of the Medes. However, modern researchers have found that the Kurds are actually related to the Gutii, or Karducoi, a fierce band of warriors who dwelled in the mountains overlooking Assyria more than 2000 years ago. As a tribal group, the Kurds were frequently forced to submit to the will of the central ruling government in their region, ranging from the Persians to the Macedonians to the Arabs. After the influx of Turkish tribes into Asia Minor in 11th century B.C., the Kurds again found themselves faced with a group of rulers who would shape their future.

Rebellions

"Ataturk let people speak their own language, then after the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, everything changed. From then on, the Kurds couldn't talk about their identity. President Demirel still hasn't given us Kurdish education or television or cultural rights. What kind of admission of our existence is that? War achieves nothing. The Kurdish people have rebelled 28 times but each time they didn’t achieve anything. But the PKK are our people, our children. They don’t come from outer space. If Turkey gives us more rights, maybe the violence will stop. These rights won’t be for the PKK, but for the Kurdish people. If the Turkish Government introduces some rights for the Kurds, this problem can be solved through politics, not in the mountains. I would like to live with Turkish people on equal terms. If we Kurds had this, I don’t know what I would say about an independent state.”

The Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 at the end of World War I, and several nations were formed from former Ottoman lands, one of which should have been a nation called Kurdistan. Two years later, the Treaty of Sèvres was created by the European Allies, promising the Kurds an autonomous nation. However, Mustafa Kemal, Turkey’s first president, refused this proposition. Kemal, often referred to as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks,” emphasized the need for national unity. In July of 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne came into effect; it failed to mention the approximately 20 million Kurds whose homelands were split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The treaty did state that “all citizens of Turkey should be equal before the law ‘without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race, or religion.” Despite this promising start, Atatürk carried out a ruthless crusade to forcably assimilate the Kurdish minority into the general population, forbidding Kurdish media, education, and culture.

Partia Karkaran-e Kurdistan

The Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or Partia Karkaran-e Kurdistan, was founded on November 7th, 1978, by Abdullah Öcalan and twelve of his fellow students. Öcalan is often called the ‘apo’, meaning uncle. His humble Kurdish beginnings did not limit this man's ambition. He was educated at Ankara University, and after he was arrested for handing out pro-Kurdish leaflets in 1971, he came out of jail calling himself a "professional revolutionary." He strongly believed in the Marxist-Leninist doctrines and eventually became a Maoist, advocating an uprising of the common people, or in this case, the Kurds. The PKK's enthusiastic young founders viewed themselves as progressive representatives of the Kurdish minority, with the sole intention of establishing a 'democratic and united Kurdistan.'

Unfortunately, frustrated by their initial attempts to realize their bright ideals, the newly disbanded PKK turned to terrorism. In their zeal, these PKK participants first targeted the landlords and leaders of tribes ‘representing the chauvinist class.’ After much bloody combat and controversy, the Turkish government and army started to take seriously the threats from this insurgent group of separatists. Soon after, a ban on speaking Kurdish was initiated, adding to the already existing bans on Kurdish radio programs, Kurdish newspapers, as well as teaching in Kurdish. Starting in the early 1980s, PKK guerrillas began to raid and spread fear among the border towns of Turkey. The PKK leader Öcalan directed his war against Turkey from Syria and Lebanon, countries happy to use the PKK to agitate their Turkish neighbors. According to Jonathan Rugman and Roger Hutchings, the authors of Atatürk's Children, "Turkey is unfortunate in being surrounded by countries which, largely because of the colonial Ottoman past, dislike Turks and want to keep Turkey's regional power in check."

In the early 1990s, the PKK changed its tactics, attacking urban areas rather than rural communities. With more than 1500 armed guerillas, the PKK in northern Iraq struck Baghdad, after the defeat of President Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, but this effort to gain control proved futile. Abdullah Öcalan was arrested in Kenya by Turkish government officials in 1999; he then declared a 'peace initiative' in order to increase the odds of his release, renaming the PKK the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). Öcalan claimed that this new organization was focused on promoting Kurdish rights through acts of nonviolence.

The conflict between Turks and Kurds still exists as a major problem in the unity of Turkey. In 2002, Turkey was refused entrance into the European Union largely on account of past human rights records, and EU officials demanded the unconditional release of the Kurdish MPs arrested in 1994, including Leyla Zana. In early 2004, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met American president George Bush in Washington D.C., to discuss Turkey's potential admission into the European Union.

The Memory Police

The freedom of historical debate is under attack by the memory police

Well-intentioned laws that prescribe how we remember terrible events are foolish, unworkable and counter-productive

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.

This week a group of historians and writers, of whom I am one, has pushed back against this dangerous nonsense. In what is being called the "Appel de Blois", published in Le Monde last weekend, we maintain that in a free country "it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions". And we argue against the accumulation of so-called "memory laws". First signatories include historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Le Goff and Heinrich August Winkler. It's no accident that this appeal originated in France, which has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with memory laws and prosecutions. It began uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg tribunal, was made punishable by law in France - as it is in several other European countries. In 1995, the historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law.

A further law, passed in 2001, says the French Republic recognises slavery as a crime against humanity, and this must be given its "consequential place" in teaching and research. A group representing some overseas French citizens subsequently brought a case against the author of a study of the African slave trade, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, on the charge of "denial of a crime against humanity". Meanwhile, yet another law was passed, from a very different point of view, prescribing that school curricula should recognise the "positive role" played by the French presence overseas, "especially in North Africa".

Fortunately, at this point a wave of indignation gave birth to a movement called Liberty for History (lph-asso.fr), led by the French historian Pierre Nora, which is also behind the Appel de Blois. The case against Pétré-Grenouilleau was dropped, and the "positive role" clause nullified. But it remains incredible that such a proposal ever made it to the statute book in one of the world's great democracies and homelands of historical scholarship.

This kind of nonsense is all the more dangerous when it comes wearing the mask of virtue. A perfect example is the recent attempt to enforce limits to the interpretation of history across the whole EU in the name of "combating racism and xenophobia". A proposed "framework decision" of the justice and home affairs council of the EU, initiated by the German justice minister Brigitte Zypries, suggests that in all EU member states "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" should be "punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between one and three years imprisonment".

Who will decide what historical events count as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, and what constitutes "grossly trivialising" them?

International humanitarian law indicates some criteria, but exactly what events qualify is a matter of often heated dispute. The only cast-iron way to ensure EU-wide uniformity of treatment would be for the EU to agree a list - call it the Zypries List - of qualifying horrors. You can imagine the horse-trading behind closed doors in Brussels. (Polish official to French counterpart: "OK, we'll give you the Armenian genocide if you give us the Ukrainian famine.") Pure Gogol.

Since some countries with a strong free-speech tradition, including Britain, objected to Zypries' original draft, the proposed agreement now also says: "Member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting." So in practice, individual countries will continue to do things their own way.

Despite its manifold flaws, this framework decision was approved by the European Parliament in November 2007, but it has not been brought back to the justice and home affairs council for final approval. I emailed the relevant representative of the current French presidency of the EU to ask why, and just received this cryptic but encouraging reply: "The FD 'Racism and xenophobia' is not ready for adoption, as it is suspended to some outstanding parliamentary reservations." Merci, madame liberté: that will do till the end of this year. Then let the Czech presidency of the EU, which covers the first half of next year, strike it down for good - with a dose of the Good Soldier Svejk's common sense about history.

Let me be clear. I believe it is very important that nations, states, peoples and other groups (not to mention individuals) should face up, solemnly and publicly, to the bad things done by them or in their name. The West German leader Willy Brandt falling silently to his knees in Warsaw before a monument to the victims and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto is, for me, one of the noblest images of postwar European history. For people to face up to these things, they have to know about them in the first place. So these subjects must be taught in schools as well as publicly commemorated. But before they are taught, they must be researched. The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted, and various possible interpretations tested against it.

It's this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom - subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander, designed to protect living persons but not governments, states or national pride (as in the notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code). The historian's equivalent of a natural scientist's experiment is to test the evidence against all possible hypotheses, however extreme, and then submit what seems to him or her the most convincing interpretation for criticism by professional colleagues and for public debate. This is how we get as near as one ever can to truth about the past.

How, for example, do you refute the absurd conspiracy theory, which apparently still has some currency in parts of the Arab world, that "the Jews" were behind the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by refuting it. By mustering all the available evidence, in free and open debate. This is not just the best way to get at the facts; ultimately, it's the best way to combat racism and xenophobia too. So join us, please, to see off the nanny state and its memory police.

by T. G. Ash