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Read other letters about this article
What many people fail to understand is that the issue is not just the murder of one and a half million men, women, and children ninety years ago.
It is that the government of Turkey has continued to deny that the Genocide ever happened. They have poured their treasure and influence into confusing and erasing the historical record.
They've endowed academic chairs in Turkish studies at major US universities, with the requirement that those who occupy those chairs must help further their denial of the Genocide.
They have spent millions, hiring former Congressmen from both parties to lobby Congress relentlessly. This is particularly ironic given that the US gives foreign aid to Turkey to the tune of 3 billion dollars per year. We are paying for our own corruption!
They have threatened and bullied the governments of other nations to go along with their campaign of denial. They've threatened the ADL with reprisals against ethnic Jews in Turkey. And the ADL, to their eternal shame, has acquiesced - thereby becoming complicit in the denial of genocide.
The Turkish government has been busily doing all this right up to this very moment. That crime is happening now.
By continuing to cover up the truth of the atrocities that their forebears committed, the current Turkish government has assumed guilt for the continuation of that crime. They didn't have to deny the Genocide; no one made them do it. Some of their own intelligentsia have been trying to speak out about it, and face persecution, prosecution, and assassination as a result.
Incidentally, Gary, one point: you suggested that the Diaspora must let go of their hatred of the Turks. As a member of the Diaspora, I feel no personal hatred for Turks; I've gotten along with the few I've met. If their government would at least admit the truth, I would bear no grudge against modern Turks for the Genocide.
Because, for one thing, I always remember that some supposed Turks living today are surely related to me! The Turks took many Armenian infants and gave them to Turkish families to raise. They grew up as Turks, following Islam, many never knowing that they were in fact giving their love and support to the very people who'd murdered their real families in the name of religious and ethnic hatred.
How is this not an unspeakable crime? And if the United States won't call a genocide by its true name, won't take a stand against those who would bury the truth of history in the same shallow graves as the bodies of their victims, how can our country claim to be a beacon of truth and liberty?
"Now is not the time", the wise men and women of the State Department say. They have always said that. It is never the time. If they and the Turkish government have their way, it will never be the time.
I'm a patriotic American before all. I'm also a second/third-generation member of the Diaspora. The truth is that if you aren't the descendant of denied genocide survivors, you can't really understand what this means to us.
You can't really understand what it's like to know that dozens of your relatives, most of your grandparents' generation, were raped, tortured, and butchered like animals. And that the descendants of those who committed those atrocities are now not only claiming that the whole thing never happened (or even trying to blame it on the victims!), but doing their best to force everyone else to pretend that the whole thing is a fiction, too.
At least Holocaust survivors and their descendants have recognition, and the admission of the German government that an unspeakable crime was committed. We don't even have that.
