Genocide or civil war?

adamg — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 16:33:45 +0000

Dan thinks Harvey Silverglate might be on the wrong side of the Armenian-holocaust debate. Silverglate is one of the lawyers seeking to overturn a state Holocaust curriculum that does not allow for the possibility that what Armenians call Turkish genocide might just have been a nasty civil war. In a long post in which he acknowledges he's not sure exactly what to think, Dan says:

... Harvey is right in thinking of this as a free-speech issue, but it's not solely a free-speech issue. It's also an educational issue. For instance, scientifically literate educators refuse to teach intelligent design not because they oppose free speech, but because there's no scientific basis for it.

Along the same lines, refusing to teach Massachusetts schoolchildren that what happened in the Ottoman Empire wasn't genocide may be less a matter of censorship than it is of not teaching bad history. ...