Why does the Turkish government deny the Armenian Genocide?

[BrainGlutton]

Historians all over the world generally agree that, between 1914 and 1917, over a million Armenians in what is now Turkey were killed in a government campaign of what we now would call genocide or “ethnic cleansing.” Yet the Turkish government officially denies it, and in Turkey you can be criminally prosecuted for talking about the Armenian Genocide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide#Position_of_the_Turkish_government Why? After all, everyone directly involved is dead by now, so where’s the harm in talking about it? Are they afraid that the Republic of Armenia will make irredentist claims on territory in northeastern Turkey (which was, I understand, majority-Armenian before the genocide), or what?

[GIGObuster]

Cecil’s take on this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050520.html

Turkey’s adamant refusal to acknowledge the massacres is part of it, but equally important is the West’s agreement to forget.

…

When a 1908 revolt by the Young Turks, secular modernizers with a support base in the Turkish army, forced the Ottoman sultan to cede power to a constitutional government, the Armenians thought they might get a break, but the new nationalist leaders proved no more tolerant than the old religious ones. A massacre of 15,000 to 25,000 Armenians in 1909 set the table for the main event during World War I. Blaming the supposedly disloyal Christian minority for an early defeat by the Russians, the Turkish government starting in 1915 rounded up Armenians throughout the country, murdered vast numbers outright and deported the rest, with many dying on forced marches or in refugee camps. The brutal work was carried out by an elaborate bureaucracy that some historians consider a model for the extermination program of the Nazis. Add in a couple of additional massacres in the early 1920s and the Armenian death toll for 1915-1922 totals a million to a million and a half.

For a time after the war it seemed that the surviving Armenians would get a homeland protected by an American mandate, but resurgent U.S. isolationism doomed the effort. (Russian Armenia wound up as a Maryland-sized republic in the Soviet Union; it’s now the site of present-day Armenia.) Attempts to try the Ottoman officials responsible for atrocities came to little. In the 1923 Lausanne treaty, the Western powers abandoned the Armenians in return for commercial guarantees from Turkey, where the no-longer-so-young Turks under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had consolidated their power. Though Congress never ratified the treaty, the U.S. made its peace with the Kemal government and Turkey has been a reliable ally in a volatile part of the world ever since. For that reason the U.S. has remained largely silent in the face of Turkish insistence that the Armenian genocide is a myth, was the Armenians’ fault, etc. (One difficulty in researching this topic now is that much of what’s written about it is the work of Armenian or Turkish partisans and so of uncertain reliability. For this column I’ve relied on The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response by Peter Balakian, a persuasive 2003 account by an Armenian-American university professor.) One understands the political realities; still, it’s creepy that a million deaths could be expunged from human memory so thoroughly that 90 years later barely anyone would know.

–CECIL ADAMS

[E-Sabbath]

Oh no. He talked about the Genocide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

Anyone else remember this guy?

Briefly, there is a impulse in any culture to deny that which one wishes did not exist. I consider denial of the Holocaust to be similar in nature. It is not merely arabic countries that have this, however. The Soviet Union was famous for revising history. On the other hand… well.

Basically? People are effed up and think ignoring something will make it go away.

[BrainGlutton]

@E-Sabbath

Basically? People are effed up and think ignoring something will make it go away.

Ignore a genocide and it will go away, in a manner of speaking . . .

[Jackmannii]

The ongoing denial seems to be a case of nationalism run amuck, ignorance and continued ethnic hatred.

Supposedly Turkish recognition of the Armenian genocide is a prerequisite for Turkey’s admission into the EU.
We’ll see.

[BrainGlutton]

According to the CIA World Factbook, “traditional demands regarding former Armenian lands in Turkey have subsided” in Armenia. http://www.faqs.org/docs/factbook/fields/2070.html And according to the Wikipedia, there are only 45,000 ethnic Armenians in Turkey today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenians#Geographic_distribution So I doubt the government is afraid of irredentism, at any rate.

[rowe]

It would be nice to finally get official recognition from Turkey of the tragedy. My wife’s great-grandmother died on a forced march during the genocide. I admit I knew absolutely nothing about it until I was married as I don’t think any of my history courses ever covered it.