At the premiere of the Intent to Destroy documentary, a former U.S. ambassador called Armenian Genocide denial the worst alternative fact, David Crow writes in the Den of Geek.
An eye-opening documentation about the history of the Armenian Genocide—as well as a companion film to Terry George’s sweeping melodrama on the same subject, The Promise—the Intent to Destroy makes for an efficient and precise record on a grim topic many Westerners have been deprived of learning about for the better part of the last century.
According to the author, the most fascinating aspect of the film is not a recollection of where the bodies were buried (both in reality and on the Portugal set of George’s narrative fiction), but rather how a multi-generational campaign by the Turkish government, and with an increasing complicity by the U.S. one, has attempted to erase this devastating crime against humanity from the history books.
Former US Ambassador John Evans was present at the screening.
“The denial of the Armenian Genocide, I think, is the worst case of alternative facts of the last hundred years,” Evans told a theater full of filmmakers, journalists, and descendants of Armenian survivors. “Governments do tell falsehoods from time to time for reasons they think outweigh the ethical considerations.” And that includes 102 years of denials first by the Ottoman Empire during World War I and then by its Turkish successor.
“It has everything to do with the alliance with Turkey, with all the things we saw in the film about Turkey’s position in the Middle East,” Evans said during the premiere. “We’ve invested great hopes in Turkey over the years, and after the recent referendum, we’re very worried about the direction in which Turkey is going. But it’s significant in 1951, in a written submission to the World Court at The Hague, the United States characterized the Turkish massacres of Armenians as one of the outstanding examples of genocide in human history, along with the first Roman persecutions of the Christians and the Nazi massacres of Jews and Poles in World War II. In 1952, a year later, Turkey joined NATO. Since that time, the United States has not used the word genocide.”
