By Cameron McCaffrey
The Armenian Genocide was a tragic death campaign carried out by the Turks from the mid-1910s to the early 1920s which led to the eradication of over half of all of the Armenians on the planet at the time—to be precise, the years 1915 and 1916.
This event also influenced future generations and played a significant role in a little-known fact: that Adolf Hitler was influenced by this event to carry out his infamous Holocaust murder spree which led to the decimation of millions, including seventy-five percent of all of the Jews that lived in Europe at the time. Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Nazi Germany (1933-45), is on record for having said: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Approximately 1.5 million Armenians perished during the Armenian Genocide, and about 500,000 others were evicted from their ancestral homeland.
In this current day and age, the government of Turkey regularly expresses denial of the Armenian Genocide ever having transpired, claiming that Armenian individuals merely experienced removal out of the warzone that resided in the East.
The primary issue and concern at play here is politics, with some justifying American failure to acknowledge the event by saying that with wars taking place in that part of the world, America could not afford to insult the strongest regional NATO ally. Congress has consistently refused to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, despite the fact that legislation to do so has been introduced over and over as far back as the 98th Congress (1982-1984) and as recently as the 111th Congress (2009-2010).
Today, genocide is also still being attempted in places like Somalia, yet receives little attention. For anyone reading this, make no mistake…silence IS complicity, and turning a blind eye does not absolve one from responsibility. History is doomed to continuously repeat itself until the world takes decisive and enduring action.
On March 19th of this year, Senators Robert Menendez and Mark Kirk officially introduced a new Armenian Genocide Resolution (S. Res 399), with Senator Menendez stating that “it is time for the United States to join the nineteen nations including Belgium, Canada, France, Italy and the European Union that have formally recognized the actions carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 as genocide.” Senator Kirk was quoted as saying that “the Armenian Genocide is well-documented and formally recognized by 11 NATO allies and the European Union. This resolution accurately characterizes the events of 1915-1923 as genocide, honors the memory of the victims, and strengthens America’s moral leadership on human rights and the prevention of mass atrocities around the world.”
Perhaps this time the U.S. will finally do what it should have done so many years ago.