John Evans Calls Armenian Genocide Denial ‘Worst Alternative Fact’ of Century

At the premiere of the Intent to Destroy documentary, a former U.S. ambassador calls Armenian Genocide denial the worst alternative fact.

NEW YORK—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 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,â€