Who Remembers the Armenians?

Forward Forum

The Forward (Published Weekly in New York)
April 29, 2005

By Christine Thomassian and Shabtai Gold

Adolf Hitler was confident that the world would remain indifferent to
the plight of the Jewish people he was planning to exterminate. After
all, he reportedly told Nazi commanders before the outbreak of World
War II, who remembers the Armenians?

The answer to Hitler’s rhetorical question remained much the same as
the 90th anniversary of the Turkish genocide of an estimated 1.5
million Armenians was commemorated last weekend.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and the world’s central
address for commemorating the horrors of genocide, recently opened a
new wing to its museum, with much international fanfare. There is not
a single mention in the new museum of the Armenian genocide, which
paved the ideological way for the Jewish genocide perpetrated by the
Nazis.

For its part, the Turkish government – much like today’s Holocaust
deniers – continues to disclaim its involvement in the genocide and
the very occurrence of such a horror, expending large sums of money in
this campaign. Some in Turkey admit that a few “individuals” committed
massacres against the Armenians, but they are quick to assert that
these acts were provoked by the Armenians themselves in order to
receive aid and sympathy.

Not satisfied with this accusation, this week the Turkish State
Archives announced that more than a half million Turks were killed by
Armenians. True, many Armenians collaborated with the Russians as
irregular fighters against Turkey in World War I, and they may have
killed as many as 75,000 Turks. But given the anti-Armenian pogroms
initiated by Turkey during the 1890s that set the stage for the
full-scale genocide in 1915, Armenians’ partaking in the fighting is
easily understood – no one should be expected to go like sheep to the
slaughter.

Sadly, the Turkish government is not alone in its campaign. Indeed, it
is receiving support from some very odd sources, including a number of
prominent Jewish organizations in Washington and the Jewish state
itself. Noble Peace laureate Shimon Peres, while serving as Israeli
foreign minister in 2001, called the Armenian genocide nothing more
than a “tragedy,” saying “nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred.”

Much energy, effort and money is justifiably spent on attempting to
ensure that the world will never forget the Holocaust. Wouldn’t it
meet our standards of morality to include all such horrors?

What about the Assyrian Christians murdered along with Armenians by
Turkey? What about the Roma, homosexuals and other “undesirables”
massacred by the Nazis? And what of the more recent killing fields in
Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur?

Shouldn’t “never again” be applied to all men, women and children who
are starved, beaten, obligated to undergo torturous medical
experiments, marched through forests or deserts, forced to dig their
own mass graves or herded into gas chambers? Is “never again” an
admonition over which the Jewish people can maintain a monopoly?

Shouldn’t the American Jewish community be doing more to help gain
recognition for the Armenian genocide, 90 years after the fact? After
all, the first American human rights movement to focus on issues
overseas was founded to stop the travesties being committed against
Armenians. And it was Henry Morgenthau, America’s Jewish ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire, who led the campaign to alert the world to the
horrors being perpetrated by Turkey.

Denial is, without a doubt, the final stage of genocide. It murders
the memory of the horrors, and of the dead. We must always guard
against denial becoming accepted as legitimate discourse, let alone as
fact. Will we allow Turkey to successfully continue its campaign of
denial?

If we do, we will be condemning our children to repeat these horrors
and to have these horrors repeated unto them, as American philosopher
George Santayana famously warned a century ago. But if we act now, if
we insure that our children and our children’s children are properly
educated about the Armenian genocide, then just maybe we can prevent
“never again” from becoming an empty saying.

Christine Thomassian and Shabtai Gold are university students who lost
members of their family in, respectively, the Armenian genocide and
the Holocaust.