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Letters
Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:00 AM

In the wonderland of ruins

Turkey's history is even more rich and complicated than its convoluted present.

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  • Tuesday, July 10, 2007 11:43 AM

    Covering up the past

    JoshuasGrandma, it's true that the Genocide was ordered by the Ottoman Empire. It's also true that there are almost no survivors left, and I doubt that many Turkish perpetrators are alive either.

    But the current Turkish government has continued to deny that the Genocide ever happened. They use all of their diplomatic muscle, along with large amounts of money, to get other countries to go along with their program of denial. They intimidated the United States Congress into killing a bill recognizing the Genocide by threatening to block the US from using bases on their soil. They fund online activists and spend huge sums on public relations. They've funded academic posts in major American colleges and universities specifically with the goal of giving their denial academic credibility, although the historical evidence for the Genocide is overwhelming.

    It's the same approach that American big business and the Republican Party took towards global warming and earlier, the link between cancer and smoking - insist over and over that black is white, and then use the "controversy" as evidence that no one can ever decide what the truth is and the whole issue should just be forgotten. Except that big business is finally realizing that global warming will be a disaster for them, too. The Turkish government continues their program of denial as vigorously as they ever did.

    My grandparents lost a lot of relatives in the Genocide, including many brothers and sisters - more than ten each, I believe (families were large in that time and place). They were young when it happened, and they bore the scars of that horror until the day they died. I have some relatives that I will never know, because the Turks took Armenian babies away from their mothers and gave them to Turkish families to raise, as Turks - they never knew their ancestry, nor that they were being raised by the people who had in many cases killed their families.

    I don't hate Turks. But denial of the Genocide is an atrocity in itself, one that should shock and outrage any civilized person. By continuing to cover up the Genocide, even going so far as to persecute and prosecute those of their own people who refer to it, the Turkish government has earned a full share of the guilt for that crime.

    If the German government denied that the Holocaust had ever occurred, and did their best to confuse or erase all historical record of it, would that be acceptable to you? Because that is exactly what the Turkish government is doing.

    The ruins of Armenian cathedrals can be found in many places in Turkey. Gary's article about the beauty of Turkey's ruins was like reading an article about the lovely camp at suburban Auschwitz that completely failed to mention the people who died there.

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