In her most recent book, The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power dedicates significant time to the Armenian Genocide. She advocated for its recognition before joining the Obama administration, then failed to do so while serving as a special assistant to the president on the National Security Council and then as ambassador to the United Nations.
As part of her ongoing apology tour, Power has argued that she tried to strike the right balance between idealism and realism. In the end, she concluded that the politics of genocide was too complicated.
Power’s book came out at the same time Congress passed landmark nonbinding resolutions last year that formally affirmed recognition and defined American policy on the Armenian Genocide as the systematic mass extermination of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923.
As a first-generation Armenian-American and grandson to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, this historic decision was something I had been waiting for my entire life. I wanted to know that the stories about how my grandfather, Haroutiun Toufayan, hid in a haystack for more than 40 days from Turkish soldiers while his father and brother were taken away (never to be seen or heard from again) had not been told in vain.
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