The Amermenian Genocide and Historical Revisionism

[Sethomas]

So, at Chicago one of my good friends was half-Armenian, and with his matrilineal half being Polish he decided he'd be big into his weird wishes-it-were-Greek heritage. Another friend and I would make fun of him by calling him a Turk, especially after he discovered that the Turkish Students Organization on campus existed, as he described, solely to deny the existence of the Armenian holocaust. My guess was that he'd read one article by some moron who happened to be in the Turkish circle-jerk, but years later on facebook I noticed something odd.

Then, I noticed that someone on campus had started a "campaign issue" called "Improve Turkish-American Relations, DON'T Recognize The Armenian 'Genocide'". Curious, I found that there are several groups and campaign issues on the global facebook level dedicated to and against the same thing. Naturally, every such thing had some indication that the administrators and/or members were mostly of Turkish origin.

Now, there is a great deal of argument in historical circles over how many people died of Turkish aggression against the Armenian people. These arguments DO NOT fall along the lines of "was it genocide?", but rather "was it only 500,000 or over a million people that died?" To deny that it actually happened and was worthy of the label "genocide" is just historical revisionism and very much on par with Holocaust denial.

I fail to see how recognizing the fact of the Armenian Genocide can in any way hurt Turkish-American relations. That's like saying that belief in the Jewish Holocaust is anti-German. I've seen a great deal of revisionism happen as of late, especially in regards to slandering religion with exaggerated claims of what the Crusades did and were. Such revisionism happens often when people take a very grey subject and turn it into a binary system of good and evil. That people can even attempt as much with the Armenian Genocide is just disgusting. Case in point, nobody is saying that Turkey should be sanctioned for what it did almost a century ago. What these revisionists are saying is that for some reason that doesn't seem to extend beyond egoism, the grey subject of "what happened to the Armenians in the early 20th Century?" should be answered with "Nothing, really".