Time & Perspective Quote by Jerry Costello

Calling the Armenian genocide a "tragic event" is doing careful political work: it sounds morally clear while staying just soft enough to avoid the diplomatic landmines that have long surrounded formal recognition. Costello’s phrasing carries the recognizable stamp of parliamentary language, where condemnation is often calibrated for coalition management, international relationships, and domestic constituencies. The line is less a history lesson than a positioning statement.

The key move is the pivot from past to present: "by paying tribute... we ensure the lessons... are properly understood and acknowledged". Tribute becomes a mechanism of public pedagogy, a way to turn commemoration into civic instruction. That matters because genocide denial and euphemism thrive when atrocities are treated as distant tragedies rather than named crimes with identifiable agents and consequences. Costello doesn’t litigate responsibility here; he emphasizes the collective duty to remember. The subtext is that acknowledgment is not automatic - it’s contested, vulnerable to political pressure, and therefore requires ritual reinforcement.

There’s also a domestic message embedded in "paying tribute to the Armenian community". It frames remembrance as solidarity with citizens and diaspora, not only as a foreign-policy statement about Ottoman history. That’s a common strategy for politicians: anchor a contentious international issue in local multicultural belonging and civic respect.

"Properly understood and acknowledged" signals anxiety about miseducation and revisionism. It’s an argument for memory as infrastructure: if the public record is kept intact, future atrocity has fewer places to hide.