David Crow
The viewing of Joe Berlinger’s Intent to Destroy
will likely be a revelatory experience for moviegoers as it winds its
way through the festival circuit in the coming months. An eye-opening
documentation about the history of the Armenian Genocide—as well as a
companion film to Terry George’s sweeping melodrama on the same subject,
The Promise—it makes for an efficient and
precise record on a grim topic many Westerners have been deprived of
learning about for the better part of the last century.
Yet the most fascinating aspect of the film is not a recollection of
where the bodies were buried (both in reality and on the Portugal set of
George’s narrative fiction), but rather how a multi-generational
campaign by the Turkish government, and with an increasing complicity by
the U.S. one, has attempted to erase this devastating crime against
humanity from the history books.
One man with direct knowledge of such details was on hand when Intent to Destroy
premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival Tuesday [April 25, 2017] night. John Marshall
Evans was a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service when he was
appointed by President George W. Bush to be United States Ambassador to
Armenia in 2004. And as the film shows, the beginning of the end for his
short tenure in that position started after he broke with at least 25 years of American foreign policy
and called the Armenian slaughters for what they were: a genocide. Now,
11 years and several administrations after his departure from the State
Department in 2006, Evans was ready to make an ironic correlation
between this twist of language and a new term created by the current
counselor to a U.S. president.
“The denial of the Armenian Genocide, I think, is the worst case of
alternative facts of the last hundred years,” Evans told a theater full
of filmmakers, journalists, and descendants of Armenian survivors.
“Governments do tell falsehoods from time to time for reasons they think
outweigh the ethical considerations.” And that includes 102 years of
denials first by the Ottoman Empire during World War I and then by its
Turkish successor.
As the Oscar nominated documentarian Berlinger shows in his film, the
Republic of Turkey has denied that the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians
between 1915 and 1923 either occurred, or would technically qualify as a
genocide after that term was created in 1948. This is likely further
muddied since the Treaty of Sèvres, signed between the Allied Powers and
the Ottoman Empire in 1920, required part of what is modern day
northeastern Turkey be annexed into an independent Armenian state.
Nevertheless,
a century later, the Turkish government not only fails to acknowledge
that its predecessor committed genocide, but it actively fuels
propaganda to discredit research on the travesty—not to mention
pressures the U.S. government (which frequently uses the Turkish
Incirlik Air Base as a vital strategic point for all military incursions
in the Middle East) to ignore this history. The irony is not lost on
the folks present for the Intent to Destroy
Q&A, as the United States was one of the greatest humanitarian
supporters of Armenian refugees and survivors during the early 20th
century.
“It has everything to do with the alliance with Turkey, with all the
things we saw in the film about Turkey’s position in the Middle East,”
Evans said during the premiere. “We’ve invested great hopes in Turkey
over the years, and after the recent referendum, we’re very worried
about the direction in which Turkey is going. But it’s significant in
1951, in a written submission to the World Court at The Hague, the
United States characterized the Turkish massacres of Armenians as one of
the outstanding examples of genocide in human history, along with the
first Roman persecutions of the Christians and the Nazi massacres of
Jews and Poles in World War II. In 1952, a year later, Turkey joined
NATO. Since that time, the United States has not used the word
genocide.”
And as Evans alluded to, this geopolitical argument over the facts
has taken on new wrinkles in the purported “post-truth” world that was
ushered in by major elections in Western states in 2016. For instance,
even in the advent of The Promise—a film that is intended as much to educate as entertain—a primarily Turkish financed alternative called The Ottoman Lieutenant was
released in February. That film depicted its own grandiose love story
during the First World War, albeit in a Turkish landscape where the
Armenians were belligerent dissidents, and not rounded up victims of
mass murder.
For producer Eric Esrailian, who through Survival Pictures spearheaded both the simultaneous productions of The Promise and Intent to Destroy,
the release of these films is the beginning of what appears to be a
lifelong political and media campaign against such “alternative facts.”
“The truth is already out there now,” Esrailian said at the Intent to Destroy
premiere. “And what we have to do is call attention to the kind of
insidious influence of the denialists [in] the Turkish government, the
people who are complicit in the denial and, I think, accomplices with
respect to people who have blood on their hands, not only in the
Armenian Genocide but allowing the influence of foreign governments in
what happens. Particularly with art, culture. Joe and I have dealt with
this, Terry and I dealt with this with The Promise.
People want to control what you see, people want to control what you
watch, you don’t even know about it; it’s so disgusting, the depths of
it all, but it will come out.”
Indeed, the fact that The Promise and Intent to Destroy
are just beginning to enter the film world conversation is the kickoff
of an effort to mainstream information that Hollywood studios have been
strong-armed and pressured to ignore since a failed attempt to make an
Armenian Genocide film in the 1930s. Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate, also noted this cultural transition during the Intent to Destroy Q&A.
Says Balakian, “There’s been a seismic change in the way the media
has covered the Armenian Genocide in the last decade. And you can see
right now that the Turkish state’s counter-film, The Ottoman Lieutenant, is being trashed by the mainstream media as a tawdry piece of propaganda and it’s really helping The Promise.”
Perhaps it is, but it will be Intent to Destroy
that may do the most in helping American audiences fully understand
what has been a century of “fake news” about one of the worst atrocities
in modern history.
Says Evans, “There is no court that is going to give anything like justice, which is why this film and The Promise matters. [The] only court that matters is the court of public opinion.”
"Den of Geek" (www.denofgeek.com), April 26, 2017
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