History From the Bench

In April, 1995, I wrote an article, "The Bosnia Calculation," in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. In it, I argued that claims of numbers killed in Bosnia then being tossed around had been grossly exaggerated for propaganda purposes. At the time I was pilloried relentlessly for my trouble. In the past couple years, however, the best published demographic research shows I was not far off the mark — and my sense of it is, if a reasonable extrapolation were made from my estimates (completed in December 1994) through to the end of the fighting (the Dayton Accords in December 1995) I would have been almost exactly on the money. Anyhow, having been proved more-or-less right in the teeth of furious opposition on such a subject, the prospect of Europe now adopting a law that goes a considerable distance towards criminalizing "Holocaust denial" gives me pause. To be honest, I have no idea how many Jews the Nazis killed, or how exactly they killed them (or not), but I doubt that any court is in a legitimate position to rule on these matters. My a priori assumption — and I believe it's the only appropriate working assumption — is that whenever governments turn a particular historical point over to the courts for enforcement of a prevailing consensus, then that consensus must be wrong. The very idea that a court should enforce historical truth smacks of medieval witch trials. Europe has gone uncomfortably far down this path already and it is to be fervently desired that some residue of American notions of free speech may continue to prevail in our sorry nation. (Art by Drooker.)