Despite hopes that he would break with political precedent, Donald Trump failed to call the Armenian Genocide by name in today's commemoration of the atrocity.
As the descendent of Armenian immigrants, I’m beyond disappointed. When government and media fail to label genocide with the “g-word,” it minimizes the calculating nature of the act. Sadly, there has been a trend in this direction.
On April 24, 1915, Ottoman Turks rounded up and deported the Armenian intellectual and political elite of Constantinople. This event has been widely recognized as the beginning of a brutal campaign to eliminate Christian minorities from the region, resulting in the first genocide of the 20th century. Although my great-grandparents were blessed to escape the bloodshed through a midnight getaway, 1.5 million of their countrymen -- as well as Assyrian and Greek Christians -- were intentionally exterminated.
The Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge its culpability for these crimes. Adding insult to injury, the American government still refuses to hold Turkey to task, for fear of alienating a valuable Middle Eastern ally.
Trump’s recent reticence is not surprising. In fact, it follows an eight-year precedent set by his predecessor. Although Barack Obama talked about the genocide on the campaign trail, he repeatedly broke his promise to officially recognize it once he took office – even on the centennial anniversary.
The media, on the other hand, has historically called the genocide what it is. As former New York Times senior foreign correspondent John Kifner wrote, The Times “covered the issue extensively — 145 articles in 1915 alone by one count — with headlines like ‘Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres.’” Kifner further noted the use of terms like “systematic,” “authorized, and “organized by the government.”
Yet now, the roles are reversed. As Middle Eastern Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities currently face extermination at the hands of ISIS, the networks have rarely used the g-word, even as former Secretary of State John Kerry called the atrocities “genocide.”
A film dealing with the Armenian Genocide, The Promise, in theaters now, reveals the necessity of a press devoted to truth and exposure of evil. As Christian Bale’s character Chris—an AP journalist—notes: “Without reporters, the Armenian people would disappear and no one would know it.”
Although an intrepid press helped to inform America of the plight of the Armenians, the horrors of World War I soon eclipsed the 20th century’s first genocide.
By the time Hitler rose to the power in the 1930s, people had already begun to forget. Before the Polish Blitzkrieg, the Führer wrote: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Then (and now) many people were alarmingly ignorant of the Armenian Genocide. And the diminution of genocide begets more genocide.
Turkey’s state-wide denial of the Armenian Genocide helped to pave the way for the other atrocities that would later unfold – the Jewish Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide and the extermination of the Tutsis in Rwanda.
Now, if the media refuse to call the systemic extermination of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria a “genocide,” Arab Christians and Yazidis may well disappear, and no one will know it.
