Talk given at the Armenians and the Left Symposium on March 31.

First, let me say how delighted I am to be here with you this evening, and to share the podium with professor Henry Theriault and professor Halil Berktay, who has been an important, courageous, progressive voice in Turkey over the past decades.

When my memoir was published 10 years ago, my editor asked me, in a whisper voice, at our first meeting after she bought the book: “How far out on a limb are we?” She was afraid that the subject of the Armenian Genocide was so obscure, the book would go belly-up in a few days. I told her we’d be fine; but truthfully, I had no idea what would happen to a book that dealt with a history that had happened more than 80 years before. I just held my breath.

If you’d told me then that 10 years later—9 decades after the event—the Genocide would again be appearing on the front page of the New York Times and in the media regularly, I’d have said you were crazy. Sadly, it was Hrant Dink’s assassination that wound up on the front page of the Times, but the Armenian Genocide is nonetheless news and at the forefront of contemporary affairs. The rapid advancement of scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, the EU accession process, and the forces of democracy and courageous intellectuals in Turkey are all responsible for this.

It is quite an extraordinary moment for this history; 92 years later, after decades of obscurity, the Armenian Genocide is an important ethical, intellectual and political issue. And yet, as a kind of leaping progress has been made due largely to a scholarly process and a culture of liberal education, for example, here in the States, there has been a violent backlash from forces inside Turkey. This has created a quandary, a conflict, a problem to be solved.

The assassination of Hrant Dink is in some way emblematic of it. An Armenian citizen of Istanbul who was writing and speaking about the Armenian Genocide openly in Turkey. He was taking democratic society seriously. And, for this, he was murdered. He was inhabiting a delicate, civic space in Turkey’s complex world. In his final essay, he told us he felt like a pigeon—at once vulnerable, yet free, he so hoped. But he was gunned down, apparently by the “Deep State,” by forces of repression and violence against free expression and thought, and he was demonized and made a pariah by Turkey’s penal code Article 301.

Dink’s murder resonated with Armenians because it evoked the murder of thousands of intellectuals and cultural leaders in 1915. There was a genocidal taint to it. It reenacted our history. Yet, Dink’s murder also resonated with Turkish culture. It brought more than a hundred thousand people into the streets of Istanbul—Armenians and Turks—to express anger, outrage and solidarity. People in the streets shouting “We are all Hrant Dink, We are all Armenian.” It was something new; Dink’s assassination became one catalyst for the democracy movement in Turkey. It represented hope for change. And change is the key.

A hundred years ago, progressive Armenians were working with the Young Turk movement for change and for a new age of constitutional reform. It didn’t work out, as we well know. A hundred years later, Armenians of the Diaspora and of the Republic—ironically—may still be able to play a role in Turkey’s quest for genuine democracy. We are not citizens of Turkey but we are a long shadow of Turkey’s conscience. (Armenians in the Republic are as well, although they have a unique situation to grapple with.) We are connected to an issue that is a cornerstone to Turkish democracy.

Diasporan Armenians are a complex community: they are American, French, Canadian, Greek and many other nationalities; and most have grown up in cultures and educational systems that value serious mechanisms of critique, and historical and cultural evaluation. This often creates a gap between Diasporan Armenians and Turks, who have been socialized by a different kind of culture. Because the issue of the Armenian past in Turkey embodies the idea of Turkey’s democratic capacity for self-criticism and historical critique, might Armenians of the Diaspora be part of a process that brings about that change? Or are they a hindrance? Can Armenians enter into a productive dialogue with Turkish citizens or Turks in the diaspora?

First, let me note that while there has been a positive opening-up of dialogue between Armenians and Turks in recent years, there are some basic issues that create obstacles for deeper dialogue, and I encounter these issues when I speak with Turkish-Americans who come to protest my lectures and even with some of the Turkish scholars on the Armenian-Turkish listserv to which I belong.

As I note them, I know very well that Armenians need to understand things about Turks and their worldviews and their complex society. And, I in no way mean to suggest that Armenians and Armenian culture is any more fault-free than any other culture in the world. However, in the ongoing dialogue between Turks and Armenians, I feel it is important for Turks to understand the issue of power, and how asymmetrical it was in 1915 and continues to be between our two cultures. Armenians are often astounded when Turks respond to them as if, on the issue of the Genocide, we are on an even playing field.

First, the asymmetry of power is a key element in the act of genocide. In 1915 the perpetrator used its military, its state bureaucracy, and an unequal social structure to enact a plan of extermination against a people who were a defenseless, Christian minority. The Turkish government’s subsequent denial became a further manifestation of such radical asymmetry in which a large, strategically important, nation-state uses all of its political and military means—including blackmail, coercion and cajoling—to get third parties to cooperate with it in delegitimizing the history of the Armenian Genocide. The goal is to absolve Turkey of responsibility for the events of 1915 and to undermine its moral definition. The main power that the Armenians of the Diaspora have is the truth of the ever-growing discourse about the history of 1915. (Yes, there are Diasporan lobbies and money, but this seems rather small potatoes compared to the Turkish state’s massive efforts and its apparatus).

This asymmetry is also a factor in the dialogue about nationalism: Which culture’s nationalism is worse and was more responsible for the problems leading to the Genocide, and which nationalism is now worse in resolving the pursuit of justice following the Genocide. Having come to this entire issue through the discourse of peace studies and human rights (I am not an Armenologist, a Middle East studies area scholar), I have little affinity with nationalist projects or modalities of any kind and from any culture. But it seems clear from having studied this history that, for the most part, dangerous Armenian expressions of nationalism have been reactive to Turkish power and its abuses. Whether Armenians were trying to dig out from under their infidel status as Christians in the Ottoman Empire, or were resisting massacre and deportation when possible during the Genocide, or reacting with anger and political activism in the face of Turkish government campaigns of denial, Armenians often felt and feel trapped in a syndrome of reactive-ness, because of the inherent asymmetry of power between the two cultures. Not to acknowledge this is to de-contextualize history.

The Turkish government continues its abuse of power in its multi-million dollar denial campaign. How would it look if today the German government were going around the world blaming the Jews for what happened to them during World War II, or the Cambodian government were blaming the victims of Pol Pot’s genocide for what happened to them? This abuse of state power for the purpose of inflicting on the third parties around the world a false narrative about the events of 1915 leaves Armenians with a sense of moral revulsion and it adds to their trauma. The Turkish state appears to many as desperate in seeking to suppress the reality of its past, and at costs that are dear to its own future. (I, for one, would like not to spend the rest of my life dealing with the mess of Turkish denial. I would like to be able to play golf, and play golf with Halil Berktay).

Most Armenians—and I must say many, many others in the media, in politics, in intellectual life—are deeply troubled and even shocked by the Turkish state’s present aggressive campaign of denial. In fact, what Turkey is now doing in Washington in its effort to stop a non-binding Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian Genocide evokes Orwellian comedy and absurd theater. But it is not farce. It is tragedy, and tragedy for both cultures in different ways. Congressmen have told me that in their several decades on Capitol Hill they have never seen a foreign country come to our halls of government to intervene on any issue as Turkey is doing now. And for what purpose? For Armenians, to watch this kind of theater is bewildering, enraging, hard to fathom. Since the Armenian Genocide was carried out with impunity, these small acts of moral and historical acknowledgement have symbolic meaning, but symbolic meaning is at least some meaning for a survivor culture that has been robbed of a great deal more.

So this situation of asymmetrical power has resulted in a serious kind of trauma— that often misunderstood concept—that I hope Turkish people will come to accept. Armenians have been deeply traumatized by their history under Turkish rule and now by the denialist extremism of the Turkish state in the long aftermath of 1915. Let me say clearly that I am in no way an apologist for Armenian acts of wanton violence such as the killings of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s. These kinds of distorted manifestations of trauma have no place in conflict resolution and are destructive to all. Nor am I affirming anything like a cult of victimization, for such states are the result of trauma that has become one-dimensional and can find no creative way to move forward and heal. And, Armenians must always be seeking ways to heal and move forward, and not get stuck in the rut of their rage or rigidity.

This traumatic state is the result of being bludgeoned again and again by Turkish power. Armenians have had to work hard to repair themselves and make new worlds after everything was destroyed in 1915—a whole civilization, a homeland and millions of lives. This is not a history that individuals get over easily, and especially when the perpetrator’s legacy continues to blame the victims and falsify the narrative. This creates a morally unacceptable situation that can produce a condition of moral chaos which Armenians are always struggling to stave off by insisting on the truth of history.

One would hope that as we get to know each other, Turks will not retort to Armenians by claiming that Turkish trauma is worse than Armenian trauma. In the particular context of 1915, with an understanding of power, this strikes me as unethical and inappropriate. Just as Germans don’t equate their sufferings during WWII with the sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust. Some space must be afforded with respect. Conversely, Armenians need to listen to Turks talk about their issues, their anxieties, their traumas, their different worldviews.

As I look back at the past decade, I note many changes, and among them, the presence of Turkish friends and colleagues. Where once there was a black hole of abstraction about Turkey for many of us, now there is a more visible and complex world. In the past decade, Turkish intellectuals and others have made great inroads that are now visible to us and have given us a deeper understanding of Turkey as a place of many layers and nuances, a place not simply defined by ultra-nationalism and “Deep State” forces. Armenians need to embrace the new sense of complexity they have given us—of our shared history, of our shared humanity, of the understanding that there is no future in denying the past. Our Turkish friends are vital to our sense of a future and a hope for healing.

It’s important for Armenians to accept that the Armenian Genocide is not only an Armenian issue; the discourse should be de-ethnicized as much as possible. The idea that this is a debate between two cultures is wrong and ahistorical. It is not “Armenians say” and then “Turks say.” Here, there is an important place for the international scholarly community and I would also point to the community of genocide scholars. The first person to use the term genocide to define what happened to the Armenians was Raphael Lemkin (he used it on January 31, 1949, on American TV). In some ways, scholars of genocide can shed light on things that scholars who are part of national discourses or area studies can’t. Rather than defending or rejecting a particular national narrative, scholars of genocide are able to see the anatomy of such events in a comparative context across a global expanse. They are able to show us that the Armenian Genocide is part of a human history that involves many perpetrators and many victims. Turkey is not to be singled out, nor is it alone. Just look at American history and its genocidal acts against Native Americans and African Americans.

It seems as if there has never been a more open moment for bonds to be forged between Turks and Armenians on the issue that haunts both their cultures. Hrant Dink was concerned that pressure on Turkey from the outside world would backfire or endanger the lives of people inside Turkey, and his perspective I respect deeply; he paid the highest price for it. And yet, while his fears were and are a genuine response to the effect of mechanisms of terror and repression inside Turkey, the fact remains, I believe, that the process of education about the history of the Armenian Genocide is an inexorable force, a ground zero of intellectual freedom and discourse. It can’t be stopped, or controlled, by any entity. It is part of knowledge. We cannot allow the accepted history of the Armenian Genocide to be falsified by the blackmail and threats of the Turkish state.

In this new era, Armenians, I hope, will find ways of joining hands with their new Turkish colleagues and friends to work for change in whatever ways—creative ways and pragmatic ways, not rigid, ideological or romantic. Armenians in both the Diaspora and in the Republic must divest themselves of stereotypes and essentialist notions about Turks, and open themselves to the complexity of Turkish society. There are new openings in this landscape and there are new pitfalls and fears. There is anger, frustration and paranoia among Armenians. There are threats of violence from the new wave of Turkish ultranationalists; and there are many people inside Turkey asking for broad, democratic change, so that religious and ethnic minorities can achieve equality, and intellectual freedom and free speech can be realized. Only last week more than a hundred students at Bogazici University in Istanbul staged a protest with the slogan “against the darkness,” and they chanted Hrant Dink’s name and their solidarity with Armenians. These are the forces that Armenians want to join with and work with in pursuit of an open and free society in Turkey.

As it is wrong of Armenians to essentialize or demonize Turks, I think it is also unfair of the Turkish world to demonize the Armenian Diaspora because it seeks to deal with this history and its own traumatic past with passion and a need for truth and resolution. To do this to the Armenian Diaspora is to decontextualize history and the moral reality of 1915, and it essentializes what is a complex and multilayered international community and culture. Armenians of the Diaspora have little choice but to continue their role in the educational process, for it is only through scholarly discourse, school curricula, and educating the media and public that an important history will find its proper place in the world’s history, and perhaps some resolution to the conflict with Turkey can happen.

William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem Easter, 1916: “He too has been changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly;/ A terrible beauty is born.” And in that same poem: “Too long a sacrifice/can make a stone of the heart.” Yeats had thought deeply about what a struggle for justice can embody. For many Armenians, the cause of pursuing justice in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide has been going on for nearly a century; and this can turn the heart into stone. We cannot let our hearts turn to stone. We must find the human in the other, the spaces of camaraderie with our Turkish colleagues and all people who cherish human rights. We must find ways to push democracy forward in Turkey, and openness in our own culture. We must defuse our own tendencies to totalize, generalize, to over-simplify, to use history to impede dialogue. We live in a time of a terrible beauty; the power of the truth of history has been born and it comes with responsibilities.