Guilt is certainly not the only reason the United States has chosen not to recognize the Turkish actions of 1915 as genocide. Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, philosopher Siobhan Nash-Marshall, and journalists like John Kifner of the New York Times have provided tremendous insight to other reasons over the years. Lifton explains that several reasons for the unrecognition include successful international pressure from Turkey to neglect remembrance of the Armenian Genocide and successful international pressure from Turkey to deny the Armenian Genocide in United States education: primary, secondary, and higher. Kifner has confirmed that to discuss the Armenian Genocide in Turkey is criminal as it “insults Turkishness.” From press releases of the White House over the past two decades, it is clear that there are other pressures weighing on the stalled political decisiveness today.
Robert Jay Lifton, expert in the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, published The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide in 1986. Although the book predominantly discusses the Nazi Holocaust, it does indeed mention the Armenian Genocide and refers to it as such. Lifton even explains that the inspiration for the Nazi Holocaust had much to do with the knowledge of the Armenian Genocide in Nazi Germany at the time. Four years after its publication, Lifton received a letter in 1990 from the Turkish Ambassador, Nuzhet Kandemir, questioning and shaming his work regarding the Armenian Genocide. Kandemir chastises Lifton, calling him “simply ludicrous” and inadequate to discuss such a hotly debated topic by “contemporary scholars” (Lifton 9). The arguments of Kandemir may be viewed as weak because they attack the character of Lifton more than the actual work of Lifton. Kandemir tries to discredit Lifton as an outdated scholar, while Lifton’s publication was produced only four years before the ambassador’s rebuke.
By 1995, Lifton chose to publish all relevant documents to this scholarly attack on his work. He published the Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide with the help of Roger W. Smith and Eric Markusen. In an effort to prove his honest intentions, he explains that “scholarship is, or should be, a quest for truth” as professional scholarship has higher stakes within any given society (Lifton 16). Lifton explains the intention of scholarship in order to expose the corruption of such scholarship on behalf of the Turkish ambassador and his collaborators. He argues that knowledge is a tool that can be used to serve the powerful. There should not be any shock in observing the blatant denial of the Armenian Genocide. Lifton believes that experts and higher education professionals within the topic have been brainwashed to think that their research and scholarship is not that important because no one is being killed. Recording and preserving the statistics of the event is not enough; the premeditations and intentions of the event must be made clear. Otherwise, the statistics are meaningless – just a byproduct of a “messy war.”
The most prominent collaborator of Ambassador Kandemir was Heath W. Lowry, executive director of the Institute of Turkish Studies from its inception to 1994. The Institute of Turkish Studies was established in Washington, D.C., with a grant of three million dollars from the Republic of Turkey. Further funding of the incorporation was colossal and always anonymous. The director, Lowry, was the scholar who notified the ambassador of Lifton’s 1986 publication. At the time, Lowry was the Atatürk Professor Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University and Boğaziçi University. Lowry’s position at Princeton University and the Institute of Turkish Studies, Inc. located in Washington, D.C. had been endowed with a $1.5 million grant from the Republic of Turkey. One of Lowry’s mentors was Professor Standford Shaw, “who strenuously denied the reality of the genocide, and instead blamed the victims as disloyal, rebellious, and terroristic” (Lifton 5). This can be seen as the inspiration for Lowry’s work.
In 2013, Siobhan Nash-Marshall, professor of Philosophy, published Lives, Damned Lies, and Genocide to support Lifton’s claim that “deliberate denial of genocide is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right.” In order to do so, Nash-Marshall spends the majority of her scholarship analyzing what she calls “The Lifton Envelope.” The “envelope” is all of the relevant documents Lifton received from the Turkish ambassador. The envelope included an official letter addressed to Lifton and signed by Nuzhet Kandemir. The envelope also contained a memorandum. The memorandum was addressed to His Excellency Kandemir from Heath W. Lowry. Lastly, the envelope contained a draft of Kandemir’s official letter. The draft was written by Lowry.
Nash-Marshall finds and exposes the inconsistences and ulterior motives within the work of the ambassador, but more so, Heath W. Lowry. By her analysis of the memorandum, she is able to establish that there had been an “ongoing collaboration between Lowry and the Turkish government” (Nash-Marshall 119). As her scholarship develops, she demonstrates that there are instances of genocide denial that are themselves genocidal acts. Her main approach to this thesis is defining scholarly lying and comparing these definitions to the definitions of genocide. This is where the heart of Lifton’s argument is preserved and argued today amidst all of the political language regarding the Armenian Genocide.
Nash-Marshall explains that in general, intentionally what is false impacts the deepest part of a person. This harms humanity, objectifies the reading audience, delivers false promises, damages the truth, and worst of all, inhibits identity. Compared with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the effects of lying and the characteristics of genocide are nearly identical. Of course, scholarship does not slaughter, but it can condone slaughter. Scholarship does not annihilate, but it can hide truth. Lying may be considered genocidal because its slanderous essence strives for annihilation of truth.
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