Antoon de Baets

Laws Governing the Historian’s Free Expression

This chapter offers a survey of laws that interfere with the free expression of historians in order to protect public interests. Four types are identified: memory laws, blasphemy laws, hate speech laws and genocide denial laws. For each type, a definition is given and overlap with other types indicated, important debates are summarized and consequences for the practice of history identified. In order to have a standard to evaluate these law types, the survey is preceded by a presentation of the international freedom of expression framework. Laws have an impact on the entire historiographical operation in determining the amount of information available, orienting epistemology and methodology, and encouraging reflection about the ethics of responsible historians. Just laws are essential for history’s survival.

Archivists Killed for Political Reasons

This essay, Archivists Killed for Political Reasons, offers an overview of archivists who were killed for political reasons through the ages. After determining the criteria for inclusion, sixteen such political murders of archivists are briefly discussed. These cases were distributed over six regimes in seven countries. The following clusters can be distinguished: archivists who perished during Stalin’s Great Purge, those who died in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland, those killed under Communist regimes after Stalin (USSR, Romania, Afghanistan), and those murdered in the South (Algeria, Iraq). Although the set of sixteen cases is too small to identify proper patterns, an attempt is made to point to some striking similarities. In seven cases, the motives for the killings were mainly political; in another seven, religion played a major role, either because the killers did not tolerate religion or did not accept a secularist perspective. In two cases, ethnic-religious identity was the main motive. More than once, motives were mixed. Four out of the sixteen archivists were killed for reasons partly related to their archival work: David Riazanov (USSR), Karoly Borbath (Romania), and Zelig Kalmanovitch and Emanuel Ringelblum (Nazi-occupied Poland). Riazanov was accused of “wrecking activities on the historical front,” a stigma that never left him. Borbath’s care for the archives of his political-religious community was intolerable in Ceausescu’s atheist state. Kalmanovitch and Ringelblum saw the collection of archives about life in the ghetto as a political and even existential duty. Killing the record keepers did not always prevent their legacy from spreading. This essay is a tribute to that legacy.

Uma teoria do abuso da História

This essay is an attempt to sketch a coherent theory on the abuse and irresponsible use of history. Such a general theory, which enables historians to identify, prove, explain and evaluate abuses of history, does not yet exist. The essay opens with a discussion of the demarcation problem, that is the problem of how to distinguish irresponsible and abusive history on the one hand from nonscientific, incompetent, meaningless, harmful, and dangerous history on the other. It then proceeds to define the abuse of history as its use with intent to deceive and the broader concept of the irresponsible use of history as either its deceptive or negligent use. Finally, the various ramifications of the theory are developed, from a typology of abuses and irresponsible uses, over questions of evidence, explanation and evaluation to measures of prevention.

The Network of Concerned Historians: A decade of campaigning

A decade ago, the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) was established. Its purpose was and still is to provide a bridge between international human-rights organisations campaigning for censored or persecuted historians and others concerned with the past on the one hand and the global community of historians on the other. The essay gives an overview of these campaigns and of the Annual Reports that NCH has produced. NCH’s work amply demonstrates that the persecution of historians is no thing of the remote past or distant countries only. Solidarity with our persecuted colleagues is needed as urgently as ever. As Orwell said: “Imagination will not breed in captivity”.