For decades America avoided recognising the Armenian genocide to protect relations with Turkey
and history is perilous. David Rieff, the author of “In Praise of Forgetting”, argues that the commemoration of past wrongs can become a moral cudgel, cynically weaponised over and over again for political ends. That is certainly how Turkey’s government sees it when foreigners refer to the deaths of over a million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman forces in 1915 as genocide. On October 29th America’s House of Representatives voted to do just that.
Starting in the early 2000s, a series of seminars in America and Europe brought together diaspora Armenians and Turkish Armenian intellectuals. The former tended to focus entirely on the past and on the genocide. The latter preferred to discuss the present, and the challenges facing Turkey and its minorities.
Remembrance may be fraught with risks; but the dangers of forgetting are higher. Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian, once wrote that the genocide has become his country’s “collective secret”. Schoolbooks in Turkey continue to teach that the death marches were a necessary and proportionate response to attacks on Turkish villages by Armenian rebels.
Turkey’s rejection of the genocide label is only part of the problem. A bigger worry is its refusal to accept any responsibility for what happened. For successive governments, condemnation of the events of 1915, whether as genocide, a war crime or ethnic cleansing, has been out of the question. The past has been sanitised. “There have been no massacres and no slaughters in our history,” Mr Erdogan said a few years ago.
The notion that the Turkish state can do no wrong has also left a mark on the present. No major Turkish news outlet can report on the dozens of civilians killed during the country’s Syrian offensive. Turks who openly oppose the invasion risk prosecution. This is largely because Mr Erdogan seeks to stifle most forms of dissent, but also because the legacy of 1915 has made some topics especially taboo. The Turkish state and army are beyond reproach; suggestions to the contrary border on treason.
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