Deny the Armenian Genocide?

At stake in this lawsuit is not only the right of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to have their children learn about the Armenian Genocide and other massive abuses of human rights like the Middle Passage or the Great Hunger in a way consistent with established evidence, but whether or not their children’s classrooms can remain free from purposeful historical fabrication, crack-pot theories and the influence of foreign governments.

This case itself is predicated on one of these theories: the Armenian Genocide did not happen and therefore websites, primarily those created by the Turkish government, supporting that position should be included in the commonwealth’s human rights’ curriculum. But it is also based on a misunderstanding of how history and historians work and ignores the reality that only the Turkish government and a tiny handful of specialists, continues to hold that there was no genocide.

Thus, not only is this lawsuit an abuse of our legal system that mocks the value of open academic exchange and informed debate, it is an abuse of history.

Conversely, the Armenian Genocide is a fact of history.

During World War I, the government of the Ottoman Empire — which was allied with Germany and is the predecessor of the Republic of Turkey — used its military and irregular troops to mount a campaign of ethnic cleansing and deportation that resulted directly in the death of a large portion of the empire’s Armenian civilian population, many of whom were killed outright during initial round-ups or who later starved to death on the banks of the Euphrates River. Most were civilians living in Central Anatolia, far from any combat zone and were primarily unarmed farmers, shopkeepers, doctors or state employees and otherwise loyal citizens of the empire.

The historical consensus that it was a genocide, in the common understanding of the term, is based on a preponderance of evidence from various sources — including telegrams, eye witness testimony and documents introduced at a series of post-war war crime trials, and first-hand reports by European and American diplomats and missionaries. This evidence proves not just what happened, but establishes intent and culpability on the part of the Ottoman government. And it is important to recall the precedent set by the post-WWII trials at Nuremburg, which holds that responsibility for committing genocide rests not just on those who pulled the trigger or the lever, but also on those officials who created conditions of starvation or lawlessness in which mass death and extra-judicial killing took place.

Where mainstream historians differ are on issues of causes and effects, the specific numbers of deaths and the long-term impact of the genocide on Armenian survivor communities spread throughout the world, including a very large community in Massachusetts, as well as on political culture in Turkey. The fact that historians may debate particular elements of the genocide is not the same thing as a lack of consensus.

To ask our social studies and history teachers to give “equal time” to denial is akin to making them spend valuable moments in the classroom having students study those who would want us to believe that plantation slavery in the Old South wasn’t so bad, Japanese Americans in California were a serious security threat and had to be interned in camps, and that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Historians shouldn't have to teach these things in the same way that biologists shouldn't have to teach “intelligent design,” or that geographers shouldn't have to teach that the Earth is flat.

The irony is that in Turkey today, Turkish historians and intellectuals who publicly dissent from their own government’s denial of the Armenian Genocide are being arrested and tried on charges of “insulting Turkey.” This includes Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most prominent author, as well as lesser known journalists and academics.

There is another way.