Armenian Weekly April 2012 Magazine

Theriault
don’t cause cancer, the earth’s climate is not
getting warmer due to human pollution, and
dinosaurs are a myth or lived only after the
earth was created 6,000 years ago.
While the tremendous material
resources—a benefit of the massive wealth
expropriation of the genocide itself—that
Turkey and its allies in the political and corporate
realms are able to pour into denial
mean that the effort can be extended indefinitely
on multiple fronts, including public
relations/lobbying and academic, given the
growing fracture over denial in Turkey itself
coupled with the increasing boldness of
states such as France in their refusal to give
in to political and economic blackmail, legal
cases have become the rearguard venue of
choice for deniers. The irony, of course, is
not lost on those who notice that the Turkish
government and its allies continue to parrot
the nonsensical insistence that the Armenian
Genocide should not be a political or moral
issue but should be left entirely to historians
at precisely the same historical moment as
some proponents of denialist positions take
the issue right out of academia and place it
squarely in the legal system with lawsuits
meant to promote the teaching of discredited
denialist material on websites and to
prevent denialist editorializing and “scholarship”
from being accurately labeled as such.
It is not the effectiveness of this new dimension
of the campaign against truth and healing
that should give us pause, as its only
success came as the result of the legal and
political ineptitude and moral cowardice of
the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
instead of taking the heat and consequences
itself of its amateurish public statements
about Guenter Lewy, simply heaped on the
victim group of genocide yet more calumny
by retreating completely from its challenge
to denial and even promoting and praising
Lewy in order to save itself from a lawsuit.
When push comes to shove, the line of least
resistance is always to sacrifice or harm the
victims again. What should draw our attention
is the attempt to enforce relativism on
the issue, to require that the “second side of
the story” be legalistically stapled to the true
one side of the story so that the latter can
never be uttered without its parasitic other
clinging to and sucking the life out of it.
This new legalism has a crucial parallel,
which has as yet not been commented upon
by even the most sophisticated
discussants of the Armenian
Genocide. Ten years ago those very few of us
present in the public discourse on the
Armenian Genocide who insisted that reparations,
and not denial, is the central issue,
were met with public dismissal and academic
rejection, where our work was taken
up at all and not simply ignored. We have
continued to make our arguments, and one
by one academics, religious leaders, and
Armenians, as well as many outside the
Armenian community, including U.S. legislators,
have shifted their views or come to
appreciate the importance of reparations
where they had not considered it before. But,
if one thing should be learned from Etienne
Balibar, 3 it is that steps forward, particularly
in regard to oppression, quite often lead to
new veiled forms of the same basic oppressive
forces rather than a meaningful supersession
of oppression. And so it is with the
new attention on reparations, which has
replicated among those—even in the
Armenian community—who recognize the
Armenian Genocide (including some who
do not use the term but recognize an unlabeled
“that which inflicted great harm on
the Armenians”) an emerging structural
dichotomy that mirrors the tension
between truth and denial itself. The problem
is not a function of falsification versus
truth, as denial has never been about truth
and falsity, but about power and the prevention
of rectification of the impacts of
and ethical accounting for the genocide.
Those who believe that establishment of
the truth is the telos of human rights advocacy
for Armenian Genocide victims misunderstand
entirely what is at stake in any
case of genocide, perhaps because they confuse
the putative goal of academic research
(production of “truth”) with the complex
political and ethical terrain in which this
research is rightly situated. Denial can be
abandoned at precisely the point at which
some new means of resistance to rectification
can be engaged more effectively, relative
to the current successes or failings of
denial. Even if it were true that denial as a
state-driven political campaign would cease
with the end to the possibility of any material
or symbolic reparations (and as the
opening paragraph suggests, it might not
be), that does not mean that the end of
denial can only come in this
way. The tension at the core of
denial can morph into another
debate or struggle, which will be all the
more effective because so much focus has
been placed on ending denial as the key to
resolving the Armenian Genocide.
The commitment to denial described in
the introductory paragraph suggests deep
psycho-social roots that go beyond expediency.
The triumph of the Turkish state has
been to structure Turkish national identity
itself in two key ways. First, it has forced that
group identity to be central to individual
personal identity—explaining the former’s
more bizarre and dramatically ironic manifestations,
such as the voting of Kemal
Ataturk as the greatest in just about every
category of a turn-of-the-century Time
Magazine poll—and, second, it has made
that identity frail and rigid. This is interesting
in itself: The Turkish elites have driven
the development of a national identity that
is (intentionally?) insecure while making
individual wellbeing dependent on national
self-esteem, in order to bind individuals to
the state seen as the only capable defense of
that national identity. Denial is one method
used to preserve that psycho-social complex
in the face of political advocacy toward rectification
of the damage (in its more primitive
stage, a simple quest by the victim group
to gain widespread acceptance of the truth),
but it is merely a method, not the foundational
problem, in the way that biological
race theories are one form of racism but not
essential to racism, with a generic racism
existing at a deeper level and fueling a variation
of forms. New forms of racism emerge,
though we can modify Balibar to hold that
the old forms do not simply disappear, but
that over time more and more kinds of
racism aggregate and become options that
impose a comprehensive and even hermetically
sealed context in which no matter what
resistance and facts are met, there is always
another way for racism to function that is
not susceptible to that resistance—or the
particular ethical commitments of this or
that individual. While we can see a temporal
progression of forms, this is not a linear but
an additive history, a packrat historical trajectory
in which no oppressive method that
has had success in the past is ever really
abandoned.
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| THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY | April 2012