Denying the genocides of the past enables those who carry out the genocides of today – Mondoweiss

Two Junes ago, I spent my birthday at the house that my grandmother—medzmair, in Armenian—lived in as a young girl in Istanbul. The old ivory building, just a block off one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, looks so renovated that I doubt she would recognize it today. She left the city in the early days of the Turkish Republic, a few years after her father was killed in the Armenian Genocide.

I stood in front of her old house unbothered by anyone on the street. I thought I could…