FlaglerLive
Mustafa Kamal Aataturk, the man who modernized and secularized Turkey, led the Turkish revolution after World War I, was born on this day in 1881. He may be considered a great man by Turks. But his legacy is marred by an atrocity: instead of stopping it, he played a significant role in furthering the genocide of Armenians–an inspiration to Hitler’s genocide of Jews–and their forced conversions to Islam. Turkey to this day denies the Armenian holocaust, which began with massacres in the 1890s.
The United States denied the Armenian genocide–as unconscionable an act as denying the Shoah–until President Joe Biden finally did in a statement on April 24, 2021: “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms. Of those who survived, most were forced to find new homes and new lives around the world, including in the United States.” Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver at 9:05 a.m. on Nov. 10, 1938 (his friend and closest aide, Salih Bozuk, tried to kill himself with a gun. He only wounded himself). The New York Times reported his death on its front page. Armenians were never mentioned.