Damned if you do

In Turkey, journalist Hirant Dink is to go on trial (again) for "insulting Turkisness" in writing about the 1915-1917 massacres of Armenians.  Previously he received a six-month suspended sentence for his writings.  Now it's likely he will be actually jailed for daring to refer to the massacre as genocide.

In France, in the meantime, they are considering a bill to make it a jailable offense to deny the massacre was genocide.  Dirk is opposed to that as well.

"This is idiocy," the Turkish-Armenian Dink said in remarks to the liberal daily Radikal. "It only shows that those who restrict freedom of expression in Turkey and those who try to restrict it in France are of the same mentality."

That's the soul of Socialism, however.  Free speech might lead to an inconvenient truth or, worse yet, a genuine dialogue. 

Victimhood bestows grievance.  Officially sanctioned Victimhood absolves the recipient of a need for personal responsibility or intellectual integrity serving to elevate the history, tragedy, or occurence to the political sphere so it cannot be debated, or disputed, or even considered.  It also makes for a wonderful continuity of conflict that is at the heart of the Marxist soul searching for eternal conflict, made all the more delicious for political elites to not only create victims but count on resentment from the non-sanctioned classes.   The American version of the European Socialist ideal is the Liberal Blame Plan.