Political Quotes

“On April 24, we will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. 100 years ago, 1.5 million Armenians, along with the Syrians and Greeks, were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in the first genocide of the 20th century. The sheer scale of genocide thwarts our capacity to comprehend it: 1.5 million Armenians killed, 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1 million Tutsis. The numbers become abstractions sanitized by their enormity. It is only when we consider each of those lives individually that the full horror comes into focus. {time} 1700 The victims of genocide are more than victims--they are human beings. The Armenians massacred from 1915 to 1923 were men, women, and children who were targeted in what was then an unprecedented campaign to wipe out an entire people. It is our duty in the modern day to remember those lost and to bear witness that the campaign to destroy the Armenian people failed. We do so by speaking the truth, and we do so by speaking the names of those 1.5 million and by keeping both the way they lived and the way they died alive in our memory. Earlier this month, I asked my thousands of Armenian constituents and millions of Armenians around the country and the world to submit the names and stories of their family members who were killed 100 years ago. The response was overwhelming.…”