Letter: Teach genocide as genocide

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-Ok, most of you heard about the Turkish American Associations filling a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Board of Education for teaching about the Armenian genocide in public schools. They want the "Turkish view" to be heard too... whatever that means! Here is the old thread if you haven't. This article is a response to that:

Teach genocide as genocide

To the editor:

The Nov. 3 edition of theTown Crier contained an article describing a lawsuit that aims to provide an alternative view of the Armenian genocide in the public schools. I am a strong and committed believer in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, I contend that the L-S teacher, Bill Schechter and the student, Ted Griswold, have every right to express their views. However, teaching our children that the mass killing of Armenians was not a genocide is teaching them a false history.



When it come to crimes against humanity, there is only one truth. The Armenian genocide was the first calculated attempt at mass destruction of a people in the 20th century. During WWI, between 1914 and 1918, more than 1,500,000 Armenians were murdered by the Young Turks after overthrow of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Mass graves have been documented, mass executions were witnessed and tens of thousands of Armenians were left to rot in the Euphrates River. The U.S. Ambassador to Turkey at the time was a Jewish man (Sir Henry Morganthau). Sir Henry, in addition to countless others, reported to the United States and the Western World that the Armenian people were being systematically wiped off the face of the earth. Because of the World War and political pressures, Ambassador Morganthau was reassigned from Turkey in 1916.

World Scholars, including Turkish scholars, versed in the areas of history and crimes against humanity concur that the atrocities committed against the Armenians by the Young Turks rises to the level of genocide as outlined by the United Nations. The Armenian genocide is formally recognized by many world nations including France and Switzerland who are making it difficult for Turkey to gain entry into the European Union. Sadly missing from this group is the United States, who, because of political pressure, has not formally recognized the Armenian genocide.

The documentation exists to prove that the genocide occurred and in 1998 a bill was unanimously passed in Massachusetts mandating the education of the Armenian genocide in the public schools.

The Armenians who survived the genocide are now dead or very old. Those with first had accounts of the atrocities are gone. By denying the Armenian genocide you pave the way to deny other acts of genocide as well. As the survivors fade away, look at the list of the 20th century genocides...who will be denied next? The Jewish people were decimated by Nazi Germany because the world forgot the Armenians. In 50 years will our society revisit the history of the Jewish Holocaust as well?

If you do not protest crimes against humanity you may find yourself in a very different world some day. The Germans who watched Jewish neighbors being "relocated" must have asked themselves: "How did we get here? When did the world change? Why is this happening?" The answer lies here. It happened slowly: over time.

I am proud to say that I am an American Armenian. I live in the United States because both sets of my grandparents fled Armenia during the genocide in an effort to save their lives. I support the First Amendment and stand up in protest of crimes against humanity. Do not forget the past. Recognize the crime against the Armenian people for what it was: genocide.

Jennifer Davagian Ensign

http://www2.townonline.com/sudbury/opinion/view.bg?articleid=365120&format=&page=1

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Paybe: The strange case of history

By Richard Payne/ Contrary Indicators
Thursday, November 10, 2005


A suit was filed last month in federal court on behalf of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations (ATAA) against the Massachusetts Department of Education challenging the department's curriculum guidelines as they apply to the historical event known as the Armenian Genocide. The case reported in theBoston Globe and theTown Crier also made national headlines.

The suit is supposedly about the constitutional guarantee of free speech but it raises issues far beyond the scope of the First Amendment. It also casts some doubt on the judgment of the teacher and the student from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School who together with a teacher from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School have entered the suit as co-plaintiffs in the suit.

The ATAA is upset with the DOE for implementing the law passed by the Massachusetts Legislature requiring the DOE to create guidelines within the history curriculum on genocide and human rights. The academic curriculum has thereby been plunged into the realm of international politics. The ATAA wants "other points of view" to be explicitly brought out in the guidelines. Kind of like mandating the teaching of creationism, or as it is now called "intelligent design," as a counter to the theory of evolution.

The Turkish Government's position that while something may have happened in 1915 in the midst of the First World War it falls short of the descriptor "genocide." At one point the DOE had changed that to "slaughter," which from the victims' point of view may have seemed like a distinction without a difference. But the term genocide has its own special aura. One can apparently indulge in slaughter without its reaching the quality of a full-blown genocide, which seems to apply to people who are killed deliberately and for who they are rather than just for the heck of it.

The dissenting views of the assembly and others were initially included in the guidelines but later deleted when the sponsor of the bill that mandated the genocide guidelines, Senator Steven Tolman, filed a written protest with the DOE. In response to the suit Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll has reminded the plaintiffs that they need to take up the issue with the legislature not the DOE. Quite so.

The historical fact of the massacre of Armenian men, women and children in 1915 seems well established. Photographs published on the Internet are reminiscent of the pictures taken by the British Army at Bergen-Belsen in 1945: piles of emaciated bodies, skulls on sticks, public hangings with Turkish soldiers conspicuously in attendance. But history is notoriously subject to interpretation and falsification. The Turkish Government and the ATAA say that the 1915 event, while it occurred, did not constitute a "genocide," whatever that means. These unfortunate people were caught up in a war, all 1.5 million of them. War is hell. Nice people die in wars.

Well, sure. If you are hoping that your country, which may not have always enjoyed the best of records for human rights, will qualify to enter the European Community will be very anxious to downplay such embarrassments. But the preponderance of the historical evidence is that the Armenian Genocide happened and that it was what it appeared to be, an exercise in racial hatred or ethnic cleansing as it is known in the modern vernacular.

But the plaintiffs in the suit feel that all sides need to be heard - the First Amendment right to free speech demands it. Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School history teacher Bill Schechter who is on record as being against curriculum guides of any kind now believes that balance in the guidelines is required. Co-plaintiff Lawrence Aaronson who teaches a constitutional law course at Rindge and Latin High believes that "students need to know multiple perspectives when learning history so they can sort out the truth." But how on earth are they going to do that? Even history scholars have the hardest time "sorting out the truth."

History is a strange discipline. It purports to recount events that typically happened many years ago beyond the experience or memory of anyone presently alive. Narrative history supposedly chronicles the events that happened, when they happened, in an objective manner based on primary sources, primarily documents and contemporaneous records. One can reasonably assume that the people who generated such documents and records would have had no axe to grind and hence the material will be a reliable guide to the facts.



But the primary sources provide no information on historical context or meaning. That is provided by the historian who, working from the primary sources, then becomes a secondary source for his subject. The historian provides context as well as interpretation and analysis of the facts. However, the authenticity and impartiality of what the historian does can scarcely be taken for granted. Other historians working with the same facts may come to different conclusions. Consequently if Schechter, Aronson and their students are interested in the objective truth they had better be prepared to go back to the primary sources. They are not otherwise likely to find the objective truth if that is what they are seeking.

The Turkish Government and those Turkish-Americans of the ATAA have an understandable if not entirely admirable reason for slanting the truth of what happened 90 years ago. But there are others who have much less admirable motives. The Armenian Genocide like the Jewish Holocaust of World War II has its world-wide cadre of deniers who are motivated not by embarrassment or even simple patriotism but by racial hatred. They deny these events ever happened despite the incontrovertible evidence that they did. Moreover, for them it would have been okay if they did. Such people admire the perpetrators of such crimes against humanity.

By involving themselves on the side of the revisionists and deniers Bill Schechter et al. provide succor and encouragement to such people. One might want to think very hard about taking such a position. This is more than a freedom of speech thing. It's about distorting history and telling lies to children. And it's about people who see nothing wrong with fascism and in truth deplore its demise and would like to see it restored. Didn't we fight a world war to put an end to all of that?

Richard Payne is a research laboratory manager and a longtime resident of Sudbury. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Massachusetts and genocide

By Peter Balakianand George H. Stanton | December 4, 2005

THE RECENT lawsuit filed on behalf of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, a student, and two teachers claims that the Massachusetts Board of Education is censoring history and denying freedom of speech. Why? Because educational materials about genocide and human rights, approved by the board, removed reference to a Turkish government website that denies the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. If the board were to endorse websites denying the reality of the Holocaust, Massachusetts citizens would be justifiably outraged.

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Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts The lawsuit is wrong in claiming that extermination of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 is a disputed history. There is a profound difference between disputed history and denialist propaganda.

Scholarly agreement on the Armenian Genocide is overwhelming; and scholars of genocide are unequivocal about the reality and scope of the Armenian Genocide, in which the Ottoman Turkish government exterminated over one million Armenians, eliminating almost all of the Armenians in Turkey. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (the definitive group of scholars on the subject), the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, and the Institute for the Study of Genocide have repeatedly affirmed the historical facts of the Armenian Genocide.

Exasperated with the Turkish government's campaign to falsify the history of the Armenian Genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars unanimously ratified an open letter to the Turkish prime minister last June, noting that Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, used the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide; and that the killing of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. The Armenian Genocide has a crucial place in every book on comparative genocide in the English language.

The Board of Education's decision to drop Turkish websites from a curriculum aimed at teaching about genocide was a corrective to an egregious situation in which a foreign government managed to intervene (with the help of the ATAA) to insert historical falsehoods in a Massachusetts curriculum. It seems clear that the lawsuit, initiated by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, has a blatant political subtext, which is to aid the Turkish government's 90-year campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide. The politics are transparent; the intellectual discourse on the Armenian Genocide is the result of mainstream, international scholarship over many decades, while Turkey's denial is the product of its government and a few scholars who work with it.

Finally, this is not a First Amendment issue. States have the right to shape their own curriculums and educational goals. Freedom and educational ethics are at stake here. The leading scholar on Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt, put it well in a statement she made to Congress in 2000: ''Denial of genocide -- whether that of the Turks against the Armenians, or the Nazis against the Jews -- is not an act of historical reinterpretation . . . The deniers aim at convincing innocent third parties that there is 'another side of the story,' when there is not. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers the right to be treated as the 'other side of a legitimate debate,' when there is no credible 'other side'; nor does it guarantee the deniers space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum."

The issue, Lipstadt demonstrates, is not about free speech, but about endorsing a foreign government's propaganda. The Turkish government and its supporters are free to express their thoughts, but it does not follow that their genocide denial websites are entitled to endorsement in Massachusetts classrooms.

The First Amendment permits us to express anything, but is does not enable a foreign government's falsification of history to be taught in our public schools. When Elie Wiesel wrote to the governor of Massachusetts in 1999 urging the state to drop the Turkish denial website from resources recommended in the genocide curriculum, he said: ''Nothing that is in any way related to genocide must be distorted or diminished. No human rights curriculum sponsored by the state should be teaching the untruths put forth by the perpetrator. Our dignity as human beings is at stake."

Peter Balakian, Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for ''The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response." Gregory H. Stanton is James Farmer Professor of Human Rights at University of Mary Washington and vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/04/massachusetts_and_genocide/