In 1939, during the siege of Poland, Adolph Hitler gave a speech expressing his right to exterminate the Polish. He justified mass murder thusly: “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Grievously, we are nearly reaching the 100th anniversary of the genocide against the Armenians, and this still remains the case. The international community fails to recognize this event as, in fact, a “genocide.” Although this genocide occurred during the First World War—meaning that it predates the actual word “genocide”—the term very much applies to this case. In fact, it inspired Raphael Lemkin to invent the word “genocide” in the first place.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The distinction between genocide and other atrocities is that genocide is always perpetrated with the “intent to destroy.”

According to the Armenian National Institute, the genocide was perpetrated by the Turkish government during World War I (between 1915 and 1918) against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire—the largest Christian minority in the Anatolian portion of the empire. In addition to the mass killings, victims were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture and starvation in an attempt to further the genocide and ethnic cleansing. Many would fall victim in rather ordinary ways from hunger, thirst and disease. 

Two weeks ago, Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, took the case of the Armenian genocide to the European Court of Human Rights, defending the honor of some 1.5 million slaughtered by Turkish officials a century ago. This case is long overdue. 

Clooney is joining a movement that was established nearly a century ago. Before the genocide even occurred, the international community took notice of the mass atrocities committed against the Armenians, and, surprisingly, successful activist movements arose in the United States. This is recounted in Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.

In fact, beginning in the 1890s, the response to the “Hamidian Massacres”—and, later, genocide—marked the first international human rights movement in American history, according to Balakian, helping to establish our place as a global power, accompanying European powers. And on Nov. 26, 1894, individuals gathered in the historic FaneuiI Hall to solidify this movement and began addressing the grievous atrocities being committed in the Ottoman Empire by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. News of the massacres splayed across the pages of papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe—just to name a few.  In 1915, the New York Times published some 145 articles on the massacres in that year alone. Influential figures like John D. Rockefeller helped to establish the National Armenian Relief Committee to raise significant amounts of money for relief and later encouraged Clara Barton to take her Red Cross relief team internationally for the first time to further their cause.

Yet, oddly enough, we now seem to have forgotten about the genocide against the Armenians. The Sultan’s attempt to solve “the Armenian question” falls deafly on our ears. Perhaps Hitler was right in his assumption that the world had forgotten about the Armenian genocide. In fact, according to the Armenian National Institute, only twenty-one countries—or 11 percent of countries in the world today—officially recognize the genocide. 

However, Turkish officials still to this day deny the existence of the genocide, expressing that whenever Armenian scholars write about the genocide, it is the “Armenian point of view.” At the same time, the Association of Genocide Scholars and the community of Holocaust scholars assert that this intentional extermination of the Armenians is a genocide—one which claimed the lives of nearly two-thirds of that population. Elie Wiesel writes that the Armenian genocide is a “double killing” because it kills the memory of the event. 

However, denial of a genocide is more than an altered historical view. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a noteworthy scholar of genocide denial at Emory University, takes it a step further, stating that denial is in fact “the final stage of genocide,” as it “strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.” We must do better.

Not addressing and recognizing a genocide nearly a century after the fact is setting a frightening precedent. Although the United States does not categorically deny that the genocide occurred, this doesn’t give us a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card. As a global power, we must ensure that our government holds others in the international community accountable for their human rights atrocities. Otherwise, we are forgetting the precedent we set all those years ago when we gathered in Faneuil Hall to protest an unjust act. We are forgetting the precedent that ensured the world that we would soon be great.