Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide

This article examines Turkish efforts to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915–17. Specifically, it exposes an arrangement by which the government of Turkey has channeled funds into a supposedly objective research institute in the United States, which in turn paid the salary of a historian who served that government in its campaign to discredit scholarship on the Armenian genocide. After a short review of the Armenian genocide and a range of Turkish denial efforts, three documents are reproduced in full. They include a letter that Robert Jay Lifton received from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, and two documents that were inadvertently included with the Lifton letter—a memorandum to the Turkish Ambassador and a draft letter to Lifton for the Ambassador's signature. After a critical analysis of each document. we discuss the harmfulness of genocide denial and explore why intellectuals might engage in the denial of known genocides. The article concludes with reflections on the relationship between scholars and truth.