If you don't know much about the Armenian genocide, there's a reason for that.

Suppression of this atrocity has been going on for more than a hundred years.

People throw around the word allegedly to give themselves cover for accusations

that may be problematic or legally actionable.

That it's most trivial, you'll see the word used in newspaper stories about celebrity scandals.

Other times you'll see it wielded in a geopolitical arena.

There it is far more destructive.

It all started with the Ottoman government arresting Armenian

intellectuals and community leaders. The Turks deported and

eventually murdered one and a half million Armenians through forced labor, starvation, and death marches.

This was after being robbed and raped, so pretty much the blackout bingo of atrocities,

allegedly.

Anyway, the reason you may not know about this moment in history allegedly. was a genocide, insisting that the deaths were not deliberate or systematically

orchestrated, just a consequence of mass relocation or deportation. And look, it

was the run-up to World War I, so you can't just have a bunch of Russian sympathizers in your midst, right?

But while the attempt at Armenian extermination was unsuccessful, there's a different kind of erasure

going on today, and that's the denial that these crimes against humanity existed in the first place.

As the Armenian diaspora grows in communities around the world, the survivors and their descendants aren't even given the dignity

of that recognition.

It's one thing to try and end the existence of another culture.

To deny having done so on the basis of a semantic argument is just insulting.

It's not like it's ignored everywhere.

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