Finally, the United States has erased its moral sin of failing to recognize the Armenian Genocide. It took President Joe Biden to finally rise to the occasion of standing up to Turkish tyrant Recep Tayyip Erdogan and declare that America’s soul is not for sale.
Over the past decade the United States has often held up Turkey as the model of a moderate, democratic ally in the Muslim world, serving as a bridge between America and illiberal autocracies in the Middle East. President Barack Obama used to publicly showcase a warm working relationship with President Erdogan even as he dismantled Turkish democracy and media freedoms.
Today, that idealism has been washed away by Erdogan’s authoritarian rule, persecution of his political opponents, support of terrorism, and antisemitism.
Of course, it’s not uncommon for our nation to hold its nose when dealing with thuggish autocrats in the face of pressing global crises. But in denying the Armenian Genocide America was selling its moral soul to hold on to a man whose increasing tyranny is antithetical to all American values.
In recent history, Turkey has pulled every lever of influence at its disposal to prevent formal acknowledgment by the United States that Ottoman Turkey slaughtered 1.5 million Christian-minority Armenians under the cover of a world war and its aftermath. America’s concession to this morally bankrupt stipulation for good relations set a gut-wrenching precedent of turning a blind eye to genocide.
Consider the words of Adolf Hitler to Nazi officers in August 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland: “Go, kill without mercy... who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum but, rather, incubates amid the silence of bystanders. As Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The Armenian Genocide was Hitler’s proof-of-concept for his belief that the world has a short memory and would be largely indifferent to unspeakable horrors.
Once examined thoroughly, the connections between the Nazis and the Young Turks are troubling. Hitler’s confidants learned from Turkey’s genocidal playbook. As Hitler strategized his rise to power in the early 1920s, his lead political adviser was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a young German consular office in Erzurum during World War I, a region of Ottoman Turkey densely populated with Armenians.
Scheubner-Richter saw the galvanizing, nationalistic effect of blaming a well-educated, affluent religious minority for a nation’s woes. He witnessed the strategy of rounding up dissident intellectuals and political leaders first and the use of starvation as a means for mass slaughter.
Although Scheubner-Richter died literally marching arm in arm with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, he was so influential to Hitler’s thinking that the latter dedicated the first part of Mein Kampf to him and later singled him out as the only “irreplaceable loss” of the Putsch.
It wasn’t only Nazi elites that took notes from Turkey. Turkey’s ethnic cleansing in World War I was well known and admired by Nazi ideologues. In 1923, journalist Hans Trobst wrote in the Nazi newspaper Heimatland, “These bloodsuckers and parasites, Greeks and Armenians, had been eradicated by the Turks.” This chilling praise of genocide foretold atrocities to come.
Turkey’s approach to its own genocide has been the precise opposite of Germany’s efforts at atonement and reconciliation. In recent years, Turkey charged scholars and journalists with crimes for “insulting Turkishness” by speaking of genocide. In a chilling and terrifying example of blaming the victim, high school textbooks in Turkey today refer to the “Armenian matter” (the word “genocide” is never used) and describe it as being the result of provocation by Armenians.
Insinuations of genocide are said to be a lie used in an attempt to harm and break up Turkey.
The “Armenian matter” isn’t the only area where Erdogan has displayed detachment from reality. He aggressively contests the claim that atrocities in Darfur were genocide, yet he libeled Israel as being guilty of an attempted “genocide” during its air campaign against Hamas in 2014 and called Zionism a “crime against humanity” in 2013. In July of last year he disgraced himself further with the stomach-turning charge that Israel’s “barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
This wretched antisemitic fervor continued with Turkey welcoming the relocation of Hamas’s so-called West Bank and Jerusalem headquarters to Istanbul in 2015, even while the genocidal Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews wherever they may be found. And rather than demonstrating even a hint of sympathy after the bloody Paris terrorist attacks took the lives of four Jews guilty only of buying bread for the Sabbath, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu equated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the terrorists who carried out the attacks.
UNTIL THIS past Saturday, when Biden – who also courageously labeled Erdogan an autocrat – reversed course and recognized the Armenian Genocide, the United States was refusing to challenge a country that not only denies its own guilt in genocide but aids and abets organizations committed to the repetition of this most horrific of all human sins.
In standing up for truth and justice, Biden has deeply shamed his predecessor Obama, who had campaigned extensively in the Armenian-American community with his promises to recognize the genocide, which he ultimately refused to do. The Obama White House demonstrated its own faulty moral compass by both ignoring the intensifying antisemitism of its NATO “ally” and by refusing to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.
While Obama supported formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a senator and made promises to Armenian-Americans to recognize the genocide while seeking their votes in 2008, he failed to live up to this promise over the eight years of his presidency; and while Donald Trump – Israel’s great friend – did not promise to recognize the genocide, his White House could and should have done so. It was embarrassing to think that America seemed to cower at the thought of an autocrat’s displeasure.
I cannot begin to imagine the pain of the Armenian community of having to suffer – especially in 2016 at the centenary of the Armenian genocide – the final indignity: that after the murder of 1.5 million innocent victims, the world refused to acknowledge their deaths; that after being robbed of their lives, the victims were robbed of their memory.
When we dishonor the lives of the Armenians killed, we embolden those who would commit unspeakable evil, much in the way Hitler was emboldened by the world’s indifference to this dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.
Obama could have used the 100th anniversary of the genocide in 2015 as an opportunity to finally place the United States on the right side of history and morality and make it clear to Turkey that its choices have consequences. Sadly, he chose to do precisely the opposite. After intense lobbying by the Armenian-American community, to whom he made a campaign promise in 2008 that “as president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” the White House announced three days before the centenary that the president would break his promise for the sixth year running.
Now, to his eternal credit, Biden has righted the wrong of the president under whom he served – and, indeed, of all his predecessors since the Second World War, when the term “genocide” was established after the Holocaust – and removed the stain of denial from the United States.
President Biden, the world is watching and history has taken notice. You have answered the cry of 1.5 million Armenians souls from the grave. And in showing that America is listening, you have signaled to every tyrant on the globe that there will always be accountability for mass killings, and America will never turn a blind eye to atrocities.