Overview:
A teacher fellow with the Genocide Education Project studied the Armenian Genocide firsthand—walking the museum with scholars, attending lectures, and reflecting on how the lessons of hatred, denial, and democratic erosion must urgently inform how we teach history in the United States.
This summer, I was invited to study at the Genocide Museum in Yerevan, Armenia as a teacher fellow with the Genocide Education Project. I walked the museum with Regina Galustyan, the museum’s biographer and researcher. I sat in on lectures from professors like Dr. Dikran Kaligian and visited cultural sites and monasteries. I watched Armenian scholars clean ancient manuscripts, including one donated by a member family from our team. I learned about a genocide culminating in approximately 1.5 million people killed in an eighteen-month period in and around 1915. Despite the historical truth of it all, some in our world are still denying this well-documented genocide ever took place.
It was brutal to hear stories and see the evidence of the atrocities firsthand. There were more than several of our team of teachers in tears at various points. Even so, that wasn’t the hardest part for me. The hardest part for me was being a teacher in the United States and making connections that I knew many US educators are also concerned about. Sometime during our debrief another teacher brought up the exact feeling I had when she told us:
“I can’t stop thinking about all of the things I see here, issues that we haven’t seemed to have learned in the US or ones we seem to be going away from. Some of it is the precursors to the genocide, but some of it isn’t. I can’t stop thinking about how many of these things that I see evidence of from our own history and in some cases back home now, or that I don’t see evidence of to prevent the hatred that led to this.”
I had to agree, and we all, the eighteen teachers in our fellowship, discussed not just the lack of these understandings back home, but also the backlash some of us receive for just teaching history.
I wish those folks had been here, this week, to see and learn what I did.
USAID and AUA
During a visit to the American University of Armenia, or AUA, we spoke with professors and learned about genocide history. But the most powerful portion was to hear from their students, and their unanimous hope for us to bring the knowledge of how hatred builds over time back to our students at home. This in and of itself was powerful, but as I walked out of the university front office, I noticed something that stopped me cold. There was a sign on the wall I hadn’t noticed when I came in, so I asked one of our guides about it. He explained that AUA was founded with a grant from US AID.
“Previously,” he told us, “this building was a Soviet era building. US AID transformed it into an institution dedicated to democratic ideals, those based on America’s ideals. Later, several grants have built and supported our genocide education program. Many of our graduates have become prominent members and actors in our democratic elections.”
By the time I got back to the hotel I had learned two more things, one from the news back home and one from our guide, Rima. The first thing I learned was that the US House of Representatives had just approved DOGE’s cuts eliminating funding for NPR and gutting US AID (among many other things). The second was the number of positive contributions made as a result ofUS AID’s investment and the democratic institutions we were literally driving by in the heart of the city. It wasn’t lost on me that currently Russia was attacking Ukraine to our north, nor that Iran was just a few hundred kilometers to our south. US AID, I knew then, was a peaceful and cheap barrier to the autocratic ideals surrounding this small democratic nation. The loss of US AID here would have massive repercussions in the years ahead, changes that would be far more costly to Americans than what US AID ever spent in Armenia.
A Genocide, an Epiphany, and a Barrier
Being our primary objective, our GenEd fellowship spent the bulk of our time learning about the Armenian genocide, perpetrated against them by the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP, in Turkey. To this day, the Turkish government denies this genocide occurred, and even neighboring nations like Turkey and Ajerbeijan actively teach that it did not happen. In a 2010 interview with 60 minutes, the Turkish Ambassador to the United States said that there was no genocide and that “bad things happened on both sides.”
For those who know their history, the lack of acknowledgement in the early 20th century led to Adolf Hitler’s famous quote: “Who after all today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Here, among the halls of artifacts, accounts and historical records, adjacent to the flame that burns continually as a reminder to anyone who visits, we learned and compared the ten stages of genocide to those of other genocides we, as history teachers, knew well.
But in nearly every talk, it became obvious to one or more of us that we were seeing signs of these stages within our society at present. In stage 1, societies “classify” other groups. In Rwanda, the Tutsis were called cockroaches, in Germany the Jews were called “rats” and “vermin”, and in Armenia, even some Turkish doctors referred to Armenians as “microbes” which needed to be cleansed from society. One teacher compared this to the comments made by President Trump, calling those with different ideologies “enemies of the state” or claiming, without evidence, that Haitian migrants were eating “cats and dogs”. Another pointed out that President Trump has threatened to deport those who stand against him, like Elon Musk or Rosie O’Donnell.
As we discussed, we realized that many of these public comments and actions were not details which showed the first stage of genocide. This was symbology, and discrimination, the second and third stage. Some brought up those firefighters and airline control operators targeted after disasters beyond their control because they were “DEI hires.” Some brought up ICE targeting folks in Southern California simply based on their physical appearance.
For me, the concern wasn’t, nor is it now, whether or not the US will devolve into genocide against it’s own people. Despite “Alligator Alcatraz” and deep state conspiracies, I believe the American people are too kind a nation to fall into the atrocities I’ve seen here.
But that is actually what bothers me the most from this trip to Yerevan, Armenia. The Armenian Genocide didn’t happen in 1915 because a group of kind people suddenly became a group of evil ones. It took decades of hatred, of othering, and it took many legal rights to be taken away from Armenian citizens.
And it also took lies. Lots and lots of lies.
And as a teacher, I know very well, that the best way to counter a lie, whether it’s about whether or not US AID funds transgender mice or a genocide did or did not occur, is with facts.
As a lead researcher and author with the museum told us, “My job is not to prove to someone denying the truth. My job is to bring more facts into the light.”
And that is my job too.
I therefore encourage all US educators to continue teaching those facts. I encourage educational leaders to keep supporting the teaching of those facts. And I encourage all of us to start referring to facts, regardless of how the facts make us feel. The world, and the great people in it, are watching us, now. Somewhere in the future, our time will be their history.
What will they learn from what we do?
For more information on how to teach genocide, Armenian or other atrocities, a dedicated portion of which will be found in any state history standards, please visit genocideeducation.org.
