I suspect most on the left, if asked for "ultimate evils", would opt for, say, genocide, war or murder.
"The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, struck your own Armenian people," he said, quoting a declaration signed in 2001 by Pope John Paul II and Kerekin II, leader of the Armenian church.
He said the pontiff's decision to refer to the mass killing of Armenians along with crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism gave the Vatican's "highest sanction" to genocide recognition.
And the UK government has used every manner of evasion – including trying out the preposterous argument that because the term genocide was adopted by the UN in 1948, it couldn't be applied retrospectively.
There is no doubt what happened was genocide.
Instead, he calls it Meds Yeghern (Armenian for "the great crime") and asserts that his opinion has not changed, although you must Google his 2008 campaign speech to discover his opinion that it was genocide.
Ministers were also advised to avoid attendance at any commemoration of the Armenian genocide, and to avoid any mention of it at Holocaust Day memorials.
However, in recent years, the FCO has briefed ministers to call the events a "tragedy" but to deny genocide because "the evidence is not sufficiently unequivocal" – an oxymoronic term (something is either unequivocal or it is not).
The FCO certainly knew that this "genocide equivocation" was dodgy: one internal memo obtained under the Freedom of Information Act admits that "HMG is open to criticism in terms of the ethical dimension.
The real test of this government's willingness to accept historical truth will be whether it sends a senior minister – or any minister at all – to the genocide commemoration in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, on 24 April.
The list of internationally approved war crimes indictments drawn up by the commission cover important modern categories of crimes, including aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, modes of liability – including that of mid-level perpetrators - and international procedures, as well as the development of international criminal justice as a whole.
