News and Editorials

Facing Facts: Armenian Genocide and Turkey

October 19, 2007

Every time we decline to recognize a genocide we lay the groundwork for the next one. Hitler’s infamous quote about nobody remembering the Armenian genocide stands as a shocking reminder of where denial leads.

There is NO good reason to deny – and thereby permit – genocide, EVER!

By the international definition, what the Turkish Ottoman Empire did to the Armenians during WWI was genocide. Period. Time to face that fact.

Let’s also be realistic: Virtually nobody alive in Turkey today had anything to do with it, nor did the current Turkish government. Today’s Germans are uncomfortable when they acknowledge the sins of their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, but they are NOT responsible for it. We don’t hold them responsible for it, either; but we do insist that they acknowledge that it happened, and thereby caution anyone against the same mistake.

The sensitivity of Turkey to this very old charge is understandable. Yet it should not prevent us from recognizing both the older Ottoman sins and the modern Turkish distance from them.

We’re not completely in the clear in this nation either. When people often say, “It can’t happen here”, they’re dead wrong! Over the dead bodies of the deliberate, systematic, prolonged, and government sanctioned elimination of Native Americans as close as 120 years ago.  Please don’t tell our African-American citizens that we didn’t walk down that path too far with them until uncomfortably recently; and despite the fact that we hate to acknowledge it, the Japanese-American internment was another pretty dangerous racially motivated step in that direction.

We teach in our “Extremes of Hate: Holocaust Studies & Critical Thinking” program about the “Six Simple Steps from Discrimination to Extermination.” It’s all too easy and the path is well worn.

Santayana’s quote about those who fail to learn from the past being doomed to repeat it may seem hackneyed. That is, until you remember who said this:

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
– Adolf Hitler persuading his associates that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the world.

Bart A. Charlow, President
Silicon Valley Conference for Community and Justice