Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

April 24, 2026 was Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

This year marks the one hundredth and eleventh anniversary of the Genocide perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenians.

Founder of the Marshall Institute, Prof. Siobhan Nash-Marshall, believed that the Armenian people and their ancient Apostolic faith could save the West. In our troubled times, the Armenians continue to make present to the world Christ's life, teachings, sufferings, and death. Prof. Nash-Marshall worked (seemingly without ceasing) not only for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide – still denied by Turkey to this day – but to bring together the Armenian spirit with that of America and Europe. She recognized two cultures in desperate need of one another: the dying West meets the persecuted first Christian nation. She hoped, and labored, to see a Western revitalization through partnership with the Armenian people.

Prof. Nash-Marshall's efforts grew naturally out of the non-profit organization she co-founded – the Christians In Need Foundation – and spanned from sending College undergraduates to teach English in Artsakh, to founding an Armenian-Italian Hamalir in Stepanakert. 

Another front on which she fought was through publication. In 2018, she published The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide. The central thesis of the book: the Armenian Genocide was not an event begun in 1915 and ended in or around 1917. Rather, Turkey's continued denial of the Genocide, as well as its active efforts to silence or destroy any evidence of the existence of the Armenian people in the lands of modern-day Turkey, constituted not a separate event, but an integral part of the same Genocide.

Her argument was simple. Human acts are not identified by their material constitution or place in time, but by their end goals. Writing a letter is a material act, but the act’s true nature and moral worth is established by its purpose, the why at the cause of the activity. To write a letter to a friend is an act of charity. Writing a letter to conceal a Genocide is not also an act of charity, even if the act is materially the same as writing a letter to a friend. Genocide has the intentional goal of eradicating a distinctive group of people. Writing a letter to conceal a Genocide can conform to and be directed by the same goal. Such a letter can participate in a purpose alive and active: the Genocide of the Armenian people. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, such a letter exists.

The letter in question, sent in 1990 by Turkish Ambassador Nüzhet Kandemir to Professor Robert Jay Lifton,[1] was not, as it appeared, a simple act of diplomatic correspondence. The letter was a response to Lifton’s recent publication of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. In that book, Lifton compared the Armenian Genocide to the horrors of the Holocaust. The letter itself from Ambassador Kandemir may have appeared, on the surface, to be an act of honest scholastic dialogue, contending with some of Lifton’s sources. However, the letter arrived, as Prof. Nash-Marshall recounts in The Sins of the Fathers,with materials not intended for Lifton’s eyes: a private memorandum authored by Professor Heath Lowry[2] of Princeton University, and a draft of the very letter Kandemir would send, likewise written by Lowry at the Ambassador’s request. These accompanying documents make plain what the official letter concealed. The Turkish state had hired an American academic to craft a response designed to challenge Lifton’s comparison of the Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust, not through the pursuit of truth and objective fact, but through their strategic obscuring.

The significance of this lies not merely in the collaboration itself between the Turkish state and an American academic, but in what it reveals about intention. The memorandum and draft showed that the denial was neither incidental nor born of ignorance. It was a deliberate, calculated, and informed act. Those involved understood the historical reality they sought to undermine[3] yet proceeded to construct a narrative meant to discredit scholarship, confuse moral judgement, and forestall recognition.

Such a letter is not morally neutral. It is not inquisitive. It does not pursue truth. Its purpose is not exhausted by the act of writing, nor by the exchange of ideas it purports to represent. It aims at something further: the destabilization of the Armenian people’s historical reality, the erosion of the memory of their suffering and identity, and the prevention of their international acknowledgement. In this way, the letter participates in the same end as the Genocide itself. What was once pursued through deportation and death is here pursued through denial and distortion, the same carried forward by different means.

Evidence that Prof. Nash-Marshall was correct in her analysis goes beyond the letter from the Ambassador. The other day, a friend of mine from Artsakh messaged me. I taught English with her in Stepanakert, many summers ago. (I was one of several American students sent by Prof. Nash-Marshall to live and work in Artsakh.) Following the year-long siege upon Artsakh, my friend has since been displaced from her ancestral lands. The news she shared with me now was horrifying, but not surprising: in time for this year's memorial of the Genocide, the Azeris of occupied Artsakh have destroyed the churches of Stepanakert, their capital city.

I did not want to believe it – although, I knew it could very well be true. Then my friend showed me the pictures, and I saw the Cultural Center next to where the little church should be. That little church where I went to Sunday mass in the summer, so many years ago. Where I marveled at the piety of the Armenian men and women; watched old men kneel for hours on the stone floor before their Lord; heard the choir sing in Old Armenian; received the bread dipped in wine upon my tongue. And in that spot now, a parking lot.

This is not a new war upon the Armenian people. These are acts of persecution committed within a context, with a purpose.

Anniversaries usually commemorate events past and gone. This is not true for the Armenian Genocide.

Against the Armenians, on the one hand, are their persecutors. Yet on the other, there is a more startling betrayal: the silent West. I asked one of my students for his opinion on this article. This is what he conveyed to me:

“As a young American, I came to the Armenian Genocide not through any formal course of study, nor through the ordinary channels by which we are taught to remember the great crimes of history, but almost by accident. It was not something impressed upon me in school, not something marked on calendars or revisited in classrooms year after year. Unlike the Holocaust, which stands as a fixed point in our collective moral education, the Armenian Genocide seems to exist on the margins, spoken of rarely, and with a kind of hesitation, as though it had not yet been fully admitted into the canon of acknowledged human suffering.

This absence is not insignificant. What is not taught is, in a real sense, not remembered. And what is not remembered is made vulnerable in doubt, to distortion, and eventually to erasure. I do not recall being asked to grapple with the moral weight of 1915 in the way I was asked to confront other atrocities. There were no extended units, no primary documents placed before me, nor sustained effort to ensure that this history took root in my understanding of the world. The result is that one can grow up within a system of education that rightly condemns certain evils with clarity and force, while remaining almost entirely silent about others no less grave.

To encounter the Armenian Genocide later, then, is to experience a kind of disorientation. One is forced to ask not only how such an event could have occurred, but how it could have been so thoroughly neglected in the education of those who pride themselves on remembering. That absence, once recognized, does not feel neutral. It feels like a silence that has been allowed to persist, and in that persistence, it begins to resemble the very denial that Prof. Nash-Marshall identifies. For if the destruction of a people is followed by the failure to teach their destruction, what remains of them in the minds of those who come after?”

My Artsakhtsi friends and I have witnessed this same silence unfold on the international, political stage. We remember the Azeri war in 2020, the siege of Artsakh from 2022-2023, and then the final Azeri attack in September 2023. We recall the fleeting remarks of the leading politicians at the time, if they made any mention of Artsakh or Armenia at all. Yet when the Azeri’s launched that last, deadly attack that began on September 19, 2023, when Artsakh was already weakened by a year-long blockade, the Western geopolitical leaders did not act. This Azeri attack violated peace agreements settled only two years previous. When the fighting ended two days later, the Azeri’s finally lifted their blockade of the Lachin Corridor, allowing tens of thousands of Artsakhtsi to flee to Armenia. The goal of the Azeri’s siege and attack were never clearer than at this moment in history. Yet, where is the West’s response?

Even now, I think back on that summer I spent teaching English in Artskah with my friend. I remember too fondly the peaches we shared just before class on a hot, summer afternoon. How sweet were those peaches, and how wholesome the company. We talked and looked out the open window by the desk, taking in the glorious mountains of Artsakh. My friend, I know her heart is heavy with grief – will she ever see those mountains again? I have only a small taste of her pain. Yet my friend is proud to tell me how her faith sustains her. Her strength humbles me – it is an Armenian strength with deep roots and rich history. It is a concrete response to my confused, secular, modern world. She is a true friend.

What can we do to help our true friends, the Armenians? This is a question that cannot be answered with words alone. Prof. Nash-Marshall understood this. She also understood that in order to help the Armenians, we must first understand their concrete history and current challenges. This is why she introduced English courses: so that the Armenian people could communicate with the rest of the world.

Our efforts to support the Armenian people must likewise be concrete, not merely spoken, and the time to work is NOW.

Stephanie Havens

Written with contributions by:

Connor Pellicciotti, Manhattanville University Undergraduate

[1] Robert Jay Lifton was an author, lecturer of psychiatry at Columbia, and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of John Jay College.

[2] Professor Heath Lowry is the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University.

[3] Prof. Siobhan Nash-Marshall goes into detail regarding some of the evidence to this claim in her book and in a separate article she authored titled, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Genocide.”