The Anniston Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers presents his thoughts about the Armenian Genocide and other unacknowledged genocides and atrocities worldwide, speculating that Turkey’s admission of its guilt could one day cause the country the lightness of relief. The article reads with slight reductions:

When I was a little boy, grace at our dinner table given by Mother or Dad would include the phrase … “and remember the starving Armenians.”

Armenian suffering was so remote to a child who didn’t know who or where those unfortunate people were that I could tuck into the stacks of golden fried chicken and mountains of mashed potatoes without a tinge of guilt.

The enormity of the horror suffered by the Armenian people can be measured by the fact that the authors of international law could not imagine a crime so great that a word had to be invented to describe it — genocide.

April 24 was the centennial of the beginning of the Armenian Diaspora. As events from World War II and beyond showed how inventive man could be in inflicting mass suffering on the species, we forgot about the Armenians.

The commemorations, however, trigger thoughts on the guilt of nations, how they deal with sin so monstrous that the hurt mind recoils from admitting it.

Turkey still declines to admit that it is guilty of genocide, the systematic destruction of a people. Our own first reaction to My Lai was denial. “The massacre of innocent Vietnamese women and children couldn’t have been done by U.S. troops. We’re not like that.”

As the trial of Lt. William Calley revealed, we are human, too, capable of committing atrocities against people who are not “like us” when nobody is looking, caught up in the swirl of wartime emotions.

On the scales of moral justice, our society has still not come to terms with My Lai. Two days after a Court Martial sentenced Calley to life in prison, President Nixon commuted his sentence to house arrest and he was later paroled by Nixon’s Secretary of the Army, Howard “Bo” Callaway.

Calley now has a jewelry business in Columbus, Ga.

Atrocities against people not “like us” are not uncommon; Apartheid, Srebrenica and Rwanda come to mind. But there are only two cases so inhumane as to achieve the rank of genocide, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

Japanese committed atrocities during World War II, none more horrifying than the mass slaughter in Nanking. But Japanese prime ministers have apologized for sadistic acts, even sending personal letters and compensation to “comfort women,” Korean women forced into prostitution.

Japan seems relatively at peace with itself, but not so Germany when I visited in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In terms of national pride, it seemed a stillborn society; there were no flags, no songs, no past.

Shame is an appropriate reaction to acknowledging the Holocaust. When Chancellor Willy Brandt fell on his knees at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, it was a moving act, but no society can live on a diet of shame. It is a meager diet but one that a nationalist demagogue can feed upon. It is good to see that, while admitting its dark past, German self-confidence is now secure.

Since the first proven genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks, it is worth a brief description of the horrors. Scholars, diplomats, journalists, photographs and testimony of survivors all testify to the facts.

A column of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders was led on a forced march out of present-day Istanbul into the Syrian dessert, there to die of starvation. In other parts of Turkey, Armenians were herded into churches and barns, which were then set on fire.

Such a heavy burden of guilt must lie painfully on the conscience of the Turks for them to continue their failure to admit to the crime of genocide. Germany and Japan bore the injury to national self-respect by admitting their guilt but found relief in doing so.

South Africa, too, found redemption through the process of a Peace and Reconciliation Commission, individuals testifying to their crimes without facing criminal charges.

Turkey may one day enjoy the lightness of relief by the simple act of admission.