In making the historic decision to consider the succession of massacres that led to the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 in the rubble of the Ottoman Empire as genocide, US President Joe Biden signaled a change alliance policy in the Middle East.
Biden’s predecessors never crossed the line of recognition for fear of alienating Turkey. The NATO member country, where 70% of American planes passed during the Iraq war, has built its modern identity around genocide denial.
Undermined by a serious economic crisis and accused of participating in the spread of radical Islam in Europe, the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lost its aura. In Biden’s geopolitics, Ankara will only be a secondary partner, without the right to diplomatic and military privileges.
The event also marks the return of the United States to civilization.
One of the flags of the populist era ruled by Donald Trump is vandalism against sacred monuments of history. It is no accident that the trivialization of analogies with the Holocaust was one of the favorite rhetorical devices of Bolonarists during the pandemic.
The Holocaust Museum has been forced to reinvent itself into a fact-checking agency to expose the absurdities uttered by public authorities such as the Special Secretary for Culture, Mário Frias. The fact that we are debating the recognition of a genocide from the 20th century to the 21st century shows how the historiography of great crimes against humanity is still a fragile and incomplete construction.
Germany is in the midst of negotiations for a reparation agreement with Namibia for the Herero genocide between 1904-1908, which will set a world precedent, and France begins a painful process of clarifying its role in another genocide, that of Rwanda. .
The recently published Duclert commission report, convened by Emmanuel Macron in a decision of great democratic clarity, reveals the ethical, military and political shipwreck of France and highlights, among other sordid elements, the obsession of President François Mitterrand (1916-1996) for the neo colonial influence of Paris in Africa and the direct involvement of diplomats in the formation and arming of the extremist Hutu government responsible for the massacres.
The theme of one of this year’s most exciting Oscars, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, The Bosnian Genocide, demonstrated before two international tribunals, continues to be relativized by figures such as the famous writer Peter Handke and the iconic intellectual Noam Chomsky. Denial is suicide of the soul that knows no ideological boundaries.
Finally, it should be noted that Biden’s decision is a milestone for the Armenian community in Brazil.
This has the tragic characteristic of having been forged by the events of 1915: it was after the genocide that the great wave of migration from Armenia to Brazil occurred.
Its recognition for the largest democracy in the world ends a chapter in a struggle closely linked to the history of thousands of Brazilian families.
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