Dear Mr. Palmer,
I very much appreciated your coverage of the discussion surrounding the proposed “Boston Peace and Heritage Park” proposed by the Turkish American Culture Society of New England in order to subterfuge the Armenian Genocide Memorial. On a local scale, it is remarkably similar to Turkey’s threats of closing its airbases to American aircraft flying over Iraqi “no-fly” zones in 2000 when Congress proposed an Armenian Genocide Resolution.
Clinton killed the bill, of course.
While I do appreciate your and the Globe’s coverage, I do question one of the sentences you used in your article, which reads:
“The Turkish American Cultural Society’s letter now could draw the site into the middle of the 92-year-old controversy.”
To me, the 1915 Armenian Genocide is not a 92-year-old controversy. It’s a 92-year-old fact. The word “controversy” implies that there is something to argue about, or something subjective, regarding the genocide.
The Turkish genocidal campaign which resulted in the massacre of 1-1.5 million Armenians in 1915 is a well-documented historical truth—and historians see a direct link between it and the German engineering of the Holocaust, as Turkey was Germany’s WWI ally and a number of future high-ranking Nazis served in Turkey at the time, including Franz von Papen (Chief of Staff of the 4th Turkish Army later to become Hitler’s vice chancellor in 1933), Lieutenant General Hans von Seeckt (Ottoman General Staff in 1917 later to be a chief architect of the Wehermacht in the 1920s), and most importantly, Rudolf Hoess, who joined the German forces in Turkey as a teenager.
Hitler himself refers to the Armenian genocide in speeches, when in August 1939 he asked this question of his generals (in relation to Poles): “Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?”
I understand that the Turkish government may consider the Armenian genocide a controversy, in much the same way Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considers the Holocaust a controversy.
As Americans, I hope we never question the truth of what really happened.
Thank you again for your coverage of this issue. I look forward to future coverage.
Sincerely,
Mike Hodgson
