by publius
Somebody help me out with this Turkey/Armenian resolution. I feel like I’m missing something. It seems like such a colossally stupid thing to do. Turkey is a key ally, and this is a particularly important time for good relations. I’m not saying that should excuse human rights violations. But it did happen decades ago – it’s not like there’s an urgent pressing need for this (as opposed to say the horrors in Congo). What is more urgent is that Kirkuk may well explode soon, and Turkey/Kurdish tensions are simmering. Why gratuitously piss off Turkey?
I guess I’m most curious about the underlying politics driving this. I can understand the vote in France – I assume it had anti-EU undertones. But here, it seems weird that the whole thing is being driven by high Armenian populations in a couple of congressional districts (yes, Pelosi is one — but is that enough?). Also, I know the Armenians have their own lobby, but are they really this powerful? So powerful that Congress will act even if it jeopardizes stability in northern Iraq.
What am I missing here? I feel like I’m watching Syriana having missed the first half hour.
[UPDATE: David Schraub has more – and takes a different view.]
Not sure I have much to add other than the Armenians hold a march every year in SF commemorating this. Saw it one day and had no idea what it was about until I looked it up.
But yeah, this seems utterly stupid.
This may not be much help, but to clarify the position of one supporter (me):
The Armenian genocide is the event that inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word genocide, and to push the UN to adopt the convention against genocide.
Yet the United States, spreader of freedom, took until the 1980s to ratify the convention (because of the reaction to Reagan’s wreath-laying at Bitburg, where SS members are buried). And the U.S. has never recognized the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians as a genocide.
It’s past time. There’s never a time that won’t piss off Turkey.
This isn’t a great moment, granted, what with the PKK launching attacks against Turkey (and offshoot guerrilla groups launching attacks against Iran) from territory in which our occupying troops seem to feel free to abduct Iranians sitting peacefully in offices but unwilling to patrol the border.
But, as you might be able to tell from the above, I’d rather see U.S. troops at the Turkish-Iraq border and the Armenian genocide called by its rightful name than a shameful, eyes-averted reluctance to act.
“But it did happen decades ago – it’s not like there’s an urgent pressing need for this”
That’s always the way people feel when it’s their people asked to wait just a while longer.
Whatever the minority, it’s always uninteresting to hear a majority “white” person explaining why you really need to just wait a while longer for the “right” moment to be acknowledged.
It’s somehow never this decade. But if you just have patience….
I also gather you don’t have any Armenian friends.
“But yeah, this seems utterly stupid.”
Yeah, it’s just genocide. Give it some more time. It’s only been 90 years. We shouldn’t rush Turkey.
Also, let’s lay off all the arguments about holocaust denial. We could use the support of those people, after all. In another 90 years or so, when it’s a better time, we can take up the discussion again. Why gratuitously piss neo-Nazis off? What do we have against them? Supporting a genocide? But it’s okay to do that, and in fact, it’s a colossally stupid thing to piss off people who do that, I read. What’s the point?
Adding to what Nell said, nations that officially recognize the genocide adds to pressure on the the Turkish gov’t to reform its longstanding official policy of denial. Considering Turkish citizens can still be arrested (or killed) for even mentioning the atrocities of 1915, I’d say the concern is more immediate than you think.
(JFTR, Canada passed a similar resolution in 2006.)
“That’s always the way people feel when it’s their people asked to wait just a while longer.”
s/b “That’s often the way people feel when it’s not their people asked to wait just a while longer.”
I support this. Turkey will get over it.
yeah gary – my whiteness is clearly the problem here. I mean, if my glaring whiteness weren’t forcing my eyes to see a potential meltdown in northern iraq, i would realize just how racially insensitive i’m being.
you do understand that there’s a war in iraq right now, right? i suppose i’m blinded by long record of support for neo-nazis and holocaust deniers. b/c those are clearly relevant points to my question
@Ugh: It’s getting on to a century ago, so your lack of awareness is understandable. But if you want to read up a bit on the Armenian genocide, I recommend Samantha Power’s A Question from Hell. The wiki is not bad, either.
Partly because of the Ottoman/Muslim vs. Christian dynamic, the killings, starvation and forced marches to which the Armenians were subjected was widely publicized in the U.S., through churches. While researching the first election in which women voted in my little home town, I noticed several articles and ads for Armenian relief.
But there was not enough of a response early enough to prevent the death of a million Armenians.
“So powerful that Congress will act even if it jeopardizes stability in northern Iraq.”
Because as we all know, both Congress and the President have never before acted in a way that would destabilize Iraq…
(Please excuse the shoddy grammar/typos above – posting from work under the radar, so to speak.)
“Also, I know the Armenians have their own lobby, but are they really this powerful?”
Of course, it’s not “the Armenians” driving this in the U.S. as much as the entire community of people with connections to the genocide issue. Which includes much of the Jewish community.
That whole “genocide” thing just tends to arouse hackles for some reason. Especially given that this issue has been one everyone has been working on for decades.
I know you don’t mean it that way at all, of course, but it’s impossible not to hear echos, when asked “what’s the urgent pressing need, what’s the rush, why now?” about the vast oppression of a people, of John F. Kennedy’s early responses as President for a long time to the civil rights movement: this is a very bad time, if you’ll just have patience and wait a few more years, give me a chance….
This is the same thing that every oppressed and slaughtered people has heard, decade after decade, often century after century: soon. Wait. I promise. We’ll get to it. Just not now.
It’s never the right time until people make it the right time.
That’s what you have to understand.
Is the power of the Armenian lobby on an Armenia-related issue any more surprising than the power of the Cuban lobby over policy toward Cuba? It’s not like there’s much counterweight on the other side of the argument. The vast majority of the public isn’t even aware of the issue.
Nell – thanks.
“yeah gary – my whiteness is clearly the problem here.”
I have no clue what your skin tone is; I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. In this case, actually, I was hearing how my Armenian friends feel regarded, and I see that I wasn’t remotely clear, or even quite coherent, in that; apologies. I should have more coffee.
@publius: Gary was not attributing holocaust denial or neo-Nazi appeasement to you; he was trying to get you to see how this issue is viewed by Armenians and Armenian-Americans.
You asked what you were missing. That’s certainly one big aspect you’re missing.
the precise question is not so much the substance, but the timing. i don’t buy the whole “we can’t wait any longer.” of course we can — this isn’t segegration in the South or genocide in Darfur. it’s in the past — it’s something we should recognize, maybe even pass a resolution. but not right now. we are going to be relying heavily on Turkey not to make iraq even worse than it is. (This is a huge huge thing there – will cause an uproar)
so the precise is question is – why RIGHT now
“you do understand that there’s a war in iraq right now, right?”
Yes, but it’s always something. If it wasn’t this, maybe you wouldn’t have qualms about the timing, but rest assured Turkey would.
JFK had Berlin and Vietnam and Cuba. If the civil rights movement had shut up and waited, Nixon still would have had Vietnam, and certainly the time still wouldn’t have been right. Maybe we would have had a brief window under Carter, but then the time wasn’t right again under Reagan. Etc.
The time is never, ever, ever, right for offending powerful friends, or one’s self, with evidence of crimes.
nell – fine, but congress isn’t exactly a hotbed of addressing racial discrimination, etc.
something is driving this other than big-hearted concern for armenians, imho
“But if you want to read up a bit on the Armenian genocide, I recommend Samantha Power’s A Question from Hell. The wiki is not bad, either.”
The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian is also a valuable resource.
“yeah gary – my whiteness is clearly the problem here.”
Less your whiteness, and more, with all due respect, your apparent ignorance.
I know, that sounds snide; it really wasn’t intended to be. But you seem to be posting about a subject that you don’t have much familiarity with (my apologies if I am mistaken). Just do some research and then consider whether this is or isn’t the ‘right time’ and why some of us believe resolutions that recognize the genocide are important, even if it gives Turkey the vapors.
gary – apologize for the sharp response. it’s early here too by my standards
matt – same question. even assuming i’m grossly ignorant (which i probably am), i’m too cynical to think that concern for the plight of armenians is driving this on capitol hill.
something else is going on
“It’s not like there’s much counterweight on the other side of the argument.”
Other than the lobbying efforts of the Turkish gov’t, no, there isn’t much counterweight.
Publius, as to the timing: This resolution has been brought forward every session of Congress for a long, long while.
I don’t think this is the first time it’s gotten a majority in the House, either. It’s an old and familiar dynamic: human rights legislation inconveniences realpolitik.
As I said, failing to pass the resolution isn’t the only action we could take to relieve Turkey’s legitimate concerns about the attacks on their border with Iraq/Kurdistan, nor would it be the most effective one.
This issue is inconveniencing some other people, too. Abe Foxman fired the head of the New England ADL chapter a month or so ago for passing a resolution in favor of this legislation. He was trying to make the ADL follow Israel’s official position (which is due to their alliance with Turkey).
But protests forced him to relent. I admit to a fondness for any issue in which Abe Foxman’s right-wing-ness is exposed and given a comeuppance.
The Armenian lobby is quite high profile and vocal. Hell, they’ve made Denny Hastert’s life a living hell ever since he killed the last attempt at passing a resolution.
You want a cynical reason why ‘right now’? Abyssmal Congressional approval ratings coupled with the potential of more bad press.
Serj Tankian of System Of A Down (along with the other members of SOAD, all of whom are Armenian) has afforded this issue with more mainstream exposure than you’d normally expect for events that occurred nearly 100 years ago.
IMO, “Something else” = hard g*ddamn work of many dedicated activists + the pragmatism of pols worried about saving face.
YMMV.
“Abyssmal” s/b “abysmal”.
“something is driving this other than big-hearted concern for armenians, imho”
As I said: the anti-genocide community. Samantha Power has certainly been a very important figure; I’ve mentioned that much of the Jewish community is behind it.
It seems, no offense, fairly clear that you’re not terribly familiar with the anti-genocide community, or you’d be familiar with all these arguments, and who has been doing what, and so on. It’s not a mystery, though.
And, otherwise, yeah, the Turkish government doesn’t swing a ton of weight with Congress, and there isn’t a large Turkish-American vote, so it’s pretty much a typical no-brainer for Congress to feel moved to vote for a popular thing with a strong-willed minority, when the only opposition is from Turkey.
What’s driving it is quite upfront and obvious: the Armenian genocide was the primal genocide of the 20th century. It’s what led Hitler to his famous alleged explanation of how the Jews could all be killed, because ““Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”. It’s a root of the Holocaust. Not everyone is familiar with this, but most Jews are. And everyone who has ever actively campaigned in some way against genocide knows it (whether it’s accurate or not). And thus all these efforts for so many years to get Turkey to recognize it, and in the U.S. case, to finally get Congress to recognize it.
It’s never been the Right Time up until now. Do you have any suggestions as to what might be a good year to put the resolution off until?
What I meant was that Armenian-Americans outnumber Turkish-Americans by 3 to 1 (though I was expecting it to be more), and there are a lot more non-Armenian-American people who take the anti-genocide side than there are non-Turkish-American people who take the denialist side. But matttbastard is correct that I shouldn’t have underestimated the pressure coming from elsewhere.
“It’s a root of the Holocaust. Not everyone is familiar with this, but most Jews are.”
Balakian’s book goes in depth on this. Foxman’s denialist efforts are largely anomalous.
There’s a simple solution here. Have Turkey condemn the US for acts of genocide against certain Native American groups, or for our complicity with genocide in East Timor, or our support for mass murder in (supply your own example). Clinton, as I recall, apologized to the people of Guatemala for our role in the slaughter there. But it wasn’t like he then set up a truth commission to investigate further. High time we did so.
I’m in favor of forcing Turkey to face up to what they did and so I’m fine with this legislation. It does bother me a little to have the American congress in its lordly wisdom passing judgment on others. Motes and beams, ya know. But all that said, sticking it to genocide deniers is a good thing, if funny, coming from congresscritters.
Easy solution to all of this:
Congress passes the resolution; Bush produces a signing statement that declares the genocide never happened.
All is good with the world.
so the precise is question is – why RIGHT now
No. The precise question is, “If not now, when?”
We can’t bring back the Armenian dead. We CAN do something to prevent more death in that sad region. The only consideration we should apply to this issue is simple: will it lead to fewer deaths or more death? I think that the answer is fairly clear: it will ultimately lead to more deaths. Turkey is teetering between a secular, Western outlook and a nationalist, Islamic outlook. They are already planning to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq. This action by Congress will give them a gentle push away from a secular Western outlook and towards a nationalistic outlook.
The past is beyond our reach; the future is what we should be working on.
There is never a right time to piss off a friend, but there are especially bad times. For example, most poeple would consider it imprudent to lecture a friend about his moral failings back when he was in college, just at the same time that you’re asking him for a loan.
While we have 100,000+ troops in Iraq is a bad time to piss Turkey off. Just when we’re de facto creating Kurdistan, which is going to scare the he!! out of Turkey all by itself, is also a bad time. Right now, Turkey needs to know that we are really their friends, that we’re not going to look the other way if the Iraqi Kurds support Kurdish terrorists in Turkey, or actively support a pan-Kurdish nationalist movement. Taking this moment of all times to deny their national myth may lead to war between the Turks and the Kurds, which could kill thousands of people and leave America caught between two allies.
And on the other side, what? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that this resolution can wait another 10 years. There are basically no living survivors of the genocide now anyway, nor of the perpetrators. This is about national pride, on both sides. The Armenians are right and the Turks are wrong, but nobody’s well-being is at stake. Pure moral satisfaction can wait a little longer.
Turkey is teetering between a secular, Western outlook and a nationalist, Islamic outlook. They are already planning to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq. This action by Congress will give them a gentle push away from a secular Western outlook and towards a nationalistic outlook.
Turkish nationalists are secular, and always have been. The Islamists are the ones most in favour of greater integration (eg, via EU membership).
The ones agitating for a more aggressive Kurdish policy (and the ones least in favour of answering the Armenian question) is the military, which is and (since Ataturk) always has been, controlled by secular nationalists.
In fact, Kurds within Turkey largely supported the (moderate Islamist) gov’t, precisely because it has deliberately made inroads with the Kurdish minority.
Again, posting from work. Please excuse all typos 😛
“I think that the answer is fairly clear: it will ultimately lead to more deaths.”
I’m so glad you can give us that result for the next one hundred, two hundred years.
“There are basically no living survivors of the genocide now anyway, nor of the perpetrators.”
Would you actually be willing to volunteer to tell ten people, who happen to be Armenian, or Armenian-American, that you’re sorry their parents and aunts and uncles, along with their whole village and family and heritage, were slaughtered, and that you know they’re senior citizens now, but if they just are willing to wait another decade, they might still be alive to see justice done… maybe?
Would you be willing if one was your spouse’s parent? To explain to them that this is such an old issue, we really don’t care about it anymore?
All I can say is that if people were, in other circumstances, taking this stance about the Shoah, I would strenuously be arguing in opposition.
It’s a moral question.
And no one knows the long term consequences of letting these things slide for the sake of expediency. In the end, that’s an argument precisely justifying the means (keeping quiet about genocide) because of the ends (ostensibly preserving or preventing some theoretical act by Turkey).
Going down this road, presumably if it required killing a fresh Armenian, for the sake of tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, it would be worth it.
But, then, so would killing ten.
Or a hundred.
Or keeping quiet about just a little ongoing genocide.
And, say, aren’t we then suddenly what we criticize China for doing and being as regards Darfur?
I don’t favor granting those guilty of genocide a cover-up for the sake of a theory that says maybe the genocide-deniers will be more favorably inclined to us, so long as we keep giving in to the blackmail, and agree to deny the genocide with them.
And I’m doubtful that this sort of behavior saves lives in the long run of history.
But even if it does, it’s evil.
I’m so glad you can give us that result for the next one hundred, two hundred years.
Your sarcasm is based on the false assumption that such predictions apply to the far future, when in fact any reasonable reader would interpret such predictions to apply to the near future.
“…if they just are willing to wait another decade, they might still be alive to see justice done…”
I think this is what confuses me about the vehemence with which some people support this resolution. In what sense is “OK, the US Congress officially declares that the events leading up to your grandfather’s death a century ago and an ocean away technically meet the definition of genocide” synonymous with “justice has been done”? Does this resolution make restitution to the victims? Punish the perpetrators? Deter future genocides? Those are all honest questions. Particularly since historians more or less unanimously agree that it was, indeed, a genocide, I don’t see what additional benefit comes from having the US officially declare it so.
It may be useful to compare this topic with the controversy within a parallel community about the Employment Non Discrimination Act and the exclusion of transgendered people from categories given protection. In boht cases, what drives the timing is primarily internal – these are things people have been working on for years and decades and generations. And as Gary and others have been saying, I say too: there’s never a right time for demanding justice if the right time is that there be nothing that would be upset or adversely affected by heeding the demand. It’s always going to be something.
By the way, although I think someone said it flippantly up above, I entirely agree that pressuring the US government to acknowledge genocidal intent with regard to some of the Indian nations would be a very good idea. I can think that and also applaud the current pressure on Turkey, in fact.
Gary, I’d like to offer a criticism of the moralistic policy you advocate. I think it is misleading to think of questions like this as matters of morality versus pragmatism. Such arguments misunderstand the nature of morality. If we follow a policy that we believe to be moral yet leads to, in fine, a net increase in the amount of human suffering, then that policy was most certainly not moral. We are responsible for the consequences of our actions. The only measure of the morality of a policy is the amount of human happiness or suffering it creates.
Now, if you wish to argue that condemnation of the Armenian genocide will, all things considered, result in greater human happiness, then we have something to debate. So far you have not advanced that claim.
publius, the answer to “why now?” is “because it wasn’t done already.” If your forebears were eradicated the way it happened to the Armenians, you’d be back year after year too. The history of this resolution — and the determination of its supporters — antedates the fact that a war is on next door.
Turkey will do what it does after weighing its best interests; if this resolution affects those calculations, so will an errant cough or a cross look.
driven by high Armenian populations in a couple of congressional districts (yes, Pelosi is one — but is that enough?)
It’s inaccurate that there are a great number of Armenians in Pelosi’s district. There are many Armenians in *LA*, not so much in SF. Not to say there aren’t any, but it’s not some kind of major population.
“Your sarcasm is based on the false assumption that such predictions apply to the far future, when in fact any reasonable reader would interpret such predictions to apply to the near future.”
Yes, that’s the point. A prediction, however right or wrong, that only takes into account the extremely short term, says that 99.99999…% of the results aren’t even being taken into account.
Advocating social or political or any sort of policy based only on the effects it will have on, say, the next year, or any short term period, while ignoring the results thereafter, would be — as it always is — idiotic.
Let’s also not forget that, while the genocide itself happened almost a century ago, anyone in Turkey who even insinuates that the genocide occurred can face imprisonment for “insulting” the Turkish Republic.
Orhan Pamuk, who recently won the Nobel Prize in literature, faced three years in prison and his trial was only cancelled because he is so well known outside of Turkey that the government was worried about its EU bid. Many other authors are still in jail on the same or similar charges.
I wasn’t being flippant, Bruce, I was being sarcastic. There is something a little absurd or sickening about the American Congress lecturing others about morality, but one good reason I can think of for supporting it is that it annoys an even more loathsome group–Armenian holocaust deniers.
See, that sounds flippant too, but I mean it.
And the reason it’s sickening in its own way (though again, I support it) is that I haven’t noticed many examples of the US government being overly forthcoming about its own complicity (or actual participation in) acts of mass murder in the recent or distant past.
A prediction, however right or wrong, that only takes into account the extremely short term, says that 99.99999…% of the results aren’t even being taken into account.
Gary, your argument leads to the absurd conclusion that we must not make any policy because we can never know its effects in the far future. In the real world, we have to make policy decisions in the absence of certainty. We make our best guess as to the likely effects of a policy and use that best guess to guide our decisions.
If you want to advance the argument that the Congressional resolution will ultimately yield benefit, then please do so. I maintain that the net results of this resolution will be more human suffering.
Sorry for the misreading, Donald, and thank you for kindly setting me straight. (I mean that, too – I realize folks often write such things sarcastically, but I’m not doing that here.)
All sides agree that lots of Armenians were killed. The dispute is about wether it was premedidated and ordered by the Turkish government (= genocide), or just happened because the Armenians were at the wrong place with the wrong sympathies.
Use of the term ‘genocide’ is a political action imho.
Listened to Dan Burton (R-NUT) hold forth on the topic just now; sadly, it’s as if he was reading directly from your post, publius, as well as the reprehensible WaPo editorial, of course.
Yes, there’s a war on. If this resolution were to complicate waging that stupid war, well, halleluia, actually.
I am of several minds about this. On the one hand, I really don’t think this is about whether or not we will “see justice done.” The US House passing a resolution is not “doing justice”. It is just the US House taking a position on something it has no real power to affect, and certainly no power to make more just.
I mean: delay on this is absolutely not like delay in passing civil rights legislation, or something. That was legislation that actually did rectify real injustices, right now. This is a resolution that is purely symbolic, and will bring no actual justice to anyone anywhere.
Moreover, there are both real costs to this (northern Iraq, Turkey’s own efforts to come to terms with these problems, which I do not think would be helped by the US plonking itself down on one side), and other issues on which a stand in favor of justice could provide real benefits. (See Bruce Baugh’s invocation of ENDA, which I think differs from this in part because including transgendered people in ENDA would actually have some effects.) And while there are always some reasons to delay calling something by its right name, that should not prevent us from recognizing that there are some times when there are particularly huge reasons not to do so.
On the other hand, of course it was genocide, and of course it should be called by its right name.
I would feel a bit more urgent about it if the House resolution promised any actual benefits. And if this wasn’t a particularly bad time, I’d say: it’s a no-brainer, of course we should pass it. I expect to be saying just that in a few years, provided we get out of Iraq and northern Iraq settles into whatever destiny it will end up with.
No. The precise question is, “If not now, when?”
And “If I am only for myself, what am I?
“The dispute is about wether it was premedidated and ordered by the Turkish government”
dutchmarbel, there’s a “dispute” about that the way there’s a “dispute” about the Holocaust. There is no serious question whatsoever that the Turkish govt of the day engaged in premeditated slaughter of Armenians — up to and including besieging towns, forced death marches (not “relocations” — death marches to Nowhere, DesertLand), and wholesale executions. Here’s what I’ve put together about the genocide, with links to more.
Kill every Armenian woman, child, and man, without concern for anything. — Talaat Pasha.
It’s worth noting that the West has a lot of leverage over Turkey right now because they’re looking to join the EU. That leverage might not be there in 10 years or 20 or however long it takes you to get your courage up enough to tell the truth even if it pisses off the Turks.
I’m quite confident that lives were lost, on balance, as a consequence of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. So what? Do you, like Donald Rumsfeld, argue that we should have kept them secret so as not to rile up the Arabs?
“Gary, your argument leads to the absurd conclusion that we must not make any policy because we can never know its effects in the far future.”
It may lead you to that absurd conclusion, but I have no idea why anyone else should join you in it.
The point was that we shouldn’t make policy on the basis of only the extremely short-term effects. How you get to the other is your own inane journey.
“I maintain that the net results of this resolution will be more human suffering.”
And you’re back to either making predictions about the extremely short term, and ignoring the rest of the future, or to making predictions you can’t possibly make. Either way, best ignored.
The possibility that, say, taking a firm stand now, might save tens of millions of lives in the future, clearly never occurs to you. I don’t know what to say to that. Except to repeat that making policy purely because of the effects you believe it will have in the extremely short term, with no consideration given to possible longer term effects, is utterly, insanely, idiotic.
But go ahead, recommend it again.
Gary, if you’re going to take an absolutist deontological position, there’s no use arguing, but I reserve doubts that you actually practice that kind of moral absolutism in your life or politics. Appealing to family feeling does not make your argument any stronger, however. Any policy decision that benefits one group at another’s expense hurts someone’s spouse or mother.
Since you ask, yes, I’d be willing to tell Armenians that I think their need for this particular form of moral affirmance is outweighed by the particular life-and-death circumstances. I think some of them might even agree — just as some Jews fought for the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, and some Jews pushed other Jews to normalize Israeli relations with Germany, because some people can see past their own ox being gored. I’m not sure what that has to do with whether I’m right, but since you asked, yes, I could do that.
As for your rather offensive inference that I would favor murdering people for peace (there is no such thing as “a little genocide” so I’m just going to use the actual word we use for killing people unjustly, if you don’t mind), well, no, that doesn’t follow, because murder changes the balance of harms.
If you’re interested, I’m more or less a rules utilitarian, and I don’t think murdering for peace is a good rule. I think that when you start killing people for peace, it is a good sign that your theory of what will make peace is probably flawed.
Eras, you’ve already demonstrated in the impeachment thread and elsewhere on this blog that you have a particular view of how societies should achieve reconciliation after grave injustices have been perpetrated:
by those who’ve suffered shrugging and moving on.
No ‘nichevo’ for me, thanks.
My view is that this imposes a further burden on those who’ve suffered, and encourages further, perhaps even more extreme injustices by the perpetrators. Before an aggrieved group can legitimately be asked to get past the injustice, the perpetrators (and/or the descendants) must acknowledge the wrong and harm they’ve done.
This applies with equal or greater force to the great wrongs that our government has done, simply because we’re citizens in a democracy (however weakened). But it’s a universal principle of reconciliation.
Is there some additional benefit other than recognition that’s conferred by congress passing this resolution?
That’s a good point about the current window of opportunity to lean on the Turks, although I’m not sure how much opportunity it affords the US, which has little to do with the EU.
I don’t think the comparison to Abu Ghraib is any more valid than comparisons to the Civil Rights movement. Exposing Abu Ghraib was desirable, first and foremost, in the expectation that such exposure would prevent further torture of Iraqis by the US government. I don’t think anyone expects that calling the Armenian genocide a genocide is going to prevent Ismail Enver or Talaat Pasha from killing more Armenians.
Are there specific actions that we think Turkey might take in retaliation (esp. in Northern Iraq) or a general concern that this will piss them off?
The conditions making this such a bad time in the hilzoy-publius-WaPo p.o.v. have to do with the U.S. occupation of Iraq at the same time that PKK forces in northern Iraq are attacking Turkey with impunity.
The way to improve those conditions, since hilzoy at least acknowledges that it was a genocide, seems to me to be not to defeat or quash this resolution, but to either
1) get the troops the hell out of Iraq and make it an Iraq-Turkey or Kurdistan-Turkey issue and not a US-Turkey issue or
2) put U.S. troops along the northern border instead of having them bomb Baghdad neighborhoods from the air.
OK, Gary, so how do you propose that we evaluate the effects of the Congressional resolution? What factors should we consider? Can you offer your reasoning as to the magnitude of these effects?
The point was that we shouldn’t make policy on the basis of only the extremely short-term effects.
OK, so how short is “extremely short-term”? One day? One year? Ten years? Are you suggesting that we look centuries into the future. What ARE you suggesting?
We can be fairly confident that this resolution will diminish our ability to restrain Turkey in its relations with the Iraqi Kurds. There is continuing bloodshed between Turks and Kurds in Turkey. That bloodshed will eventually spill over into Iraq. This resolution will therefore contribute (to a small degree) to the human suffering that results.
I am not discounting long term effects. I do not believe that this resolution will have any effect in preventing future genocide. It inflicts no punishment upon Turkey, and so has zero deterrent value. Imagine a future despot contemplating genocide. “Should we kill all the Burutikanuki people?” he asks his adviser. “I don’t know”, the adviser responds, “The US Congress might pass a resolution in a hundred years condemning you.” At which point they both burst out laughing.
So what we have here is a high probability of short-term human suffering and no plausible probability of diminishing human suffering in the future.
Katherine, the Turkish government has just asked the legislature for authorization to mount cross-border operation against the PKK, since neither the Kurdish regional government nor the U.S. are doing anything effective to stop the PKK.
Another action they have threatened to take is to seal the border to trade (which Iran did for about a week to protest the U.S. abduction of an Iranian businessman in northern Iraq recently; Iran relented after the Kurds and other members of the Iraqi government emphasized how strongly they’d protested the U.S. action.)
That does make this week a particularly touchy time for this resolution to hit the floor of the House. But the border issues are fully capable of resolution by this administration. It’s that they’re not willing to stop all the guerrilla activity in the north, because that would end the PEJAK raids into Iran as well.
” It inflicts no punishment upon Turkey, and so has zero deterrent value”
Not to threadjack but this seems directly contrary to view on the need to penalize U.S. gov’t officials for abuses of power, committing felonies, etc.
“OK, Gary, so how do you propose that we evaluate the effects of the Congressional resolution?”
Admit that we don’t know, and therefore lean strongly towards the default of doing what’s right.
I’d also keep in mind that at present, most Turks already despise the U.S. and think the U.S. is hostile to them, so any negative effects of anything are going to be marginal. See here, for instance.
Nell, I think you overstate my position. I do not believe that victims of injustice should always shrug their shoulders and get over it. I am instead a pragmatist: I try to evaluate the overall effect of a policy on human happiness. The truth and justice commissions in South Africa were a brilliant way of resolving a nasty dispute and they were enormously successful in that regard. They were part of an overall deal whereby the white South Africans relinquished power and were in return promised that they would not be prosecuted for past crimes.
What we’re talking about here is something completely different. The genocide took place 90 years ago. There’s nothing we can do to stop that suffering, because it stopped a long time ago. This resolution is political posturing, nothing more. There are real people suffering real injustice right now, people whom we could help, and this resolution positively interferes with our efforts to reduce that suffering. As such, I consider it immoral.
Nell; “Eras, you’ve already demonstrated in the impeachment thread and elsewhere on this blog that you have a particular view of how societies should achieve reconciliation after grave injustices have been perpetrated:
by those who’ve suffered shrugging and moving on.”
From what I’ve read here this is an insulting misrepresentation. Please link to evidence or retract.
Gary, your policy proposal is this:
Admit that we don’t know, and therefore lean strongly towards the default of doing what’s right.
But you assume your conclusion. I argued earlier that this resolution is immoral. You simply assert that it is moral. If you don’t know the effects of a policy, then you don’t know its moral worthiness.
most Turks already despise the U.S. and think the U.S. is hostile to them
So the solution is to make matters worse? Rub some salt in the wound? That is not the path to peace.
As to the effects of this resolution: As has been pointed out more than once by other commenters, Turkey is seeking to join the EU. Its denial of the atrocities committed by the Turkish government against the Armenians is an obstacle to that. (And in their case it isn’t the WaPo, Israeli govt, etc. position that the atrocities happened but should not be officially labeled genocide; they deny the crimes period.)
Having governments around the world name the Armenian genocide creates pressure for them at least to stop persecution of those who acknowledge the crimes committed against the Armenians (by decriminalizing mention of it).
I’m open to tactical arguments about timing, but not putting it off into the ever-receding future. No one who understands the history should be open to arguments of the ‘what’s the big deal?’ form.
“If you don’t know the effects of a policy, then you don’t know its moral worthiness.”
We never know the effects of a policy.
Or do you have precognition?
Nell writes:
Turkey is seeking to join the EU. Its denial of the atrocities committed by the Turkish government against the Armenians is an obstacle to that.
Turkish sentiment for joining the EU is fading. Just two years ago, 68% of Turks favored joining the EU; I don’t have current numbers but there has been a decline, especially after the recent election. Moreover, the adamant opposition of the French and the imposition of new obstacles has disenchanted the Turks. If the West keeps kicking them in the teeth, they might just decide that they’d be better off cozying up t the rest of the Islamic world — which would be a foreign policy disaster for the US.
Gary writes:
We never know the effects of a policy.
Well then, perhaps we should just flip a coin before we vote on anything.
My characterization is based on Eras’ comments here:
And in the impeachment thread (I can’t take the time to link each comment, search on ‘Erasmus’):
and here.
It was probably an overstatement to characterize Eras’ attitude as
‘shrug and move on’, but these passages show clearly that his view of justice as an ingredient in reconciliation is highly conditional.
There is no evidence to support his self-characterization that “in general” he supports the prosecute-according-to-the-facts approach, since in every case under discussion here — the Nixon, Bush, and Turkish cases — he explicitly bases his judgement on an assessment of the short-term outcomes of prosecution or crime-naming, and his assessment in every case is that making the criminals take responsibility for their crimes will hurt the victims.
Gary Farber:
Interestingly, this is (as far as I’m aware) not quite right. Hitler seems to have said this just before the invasion of Poland, and was referring specifically to wiping out Poles. Here’s the wikipedia translation:
Meanwhile, there’s also a lighter side of genocide: my favorite part of this quote is that both Armenian genocide deniers and Holocaust deniers get extremely agitated about it, but for different reasons. Holocaust deniers generally accept the Armenian genocide happened (dirty Muslims killing Christians) but don’t like the idea that Hitler compared his actions to that. On the other hand, Armenian genocide deniers in Turkey accept that the Holocaust happened, but the Armenian genocide never did, so why would Hitler say that?
What’s the status of efforts to stop the routine use of torture in Turkey’s judicial system?
Well, ok, I can use google. Hmm, there has been some improvement.
the imposition of new obstacles has disenchanted the Turks
Quite possibly, but the requirement that they stop criminalizing acknowledgement of the crimes against the Armenians is not a new one.
I’m leaving for a series of meetings and don’t want my disappearance from the thread construed as an unwillingness to face further challenge of my characterization from rilkefan or anyone else.
Will check back in about six hours.
“It was probably an overstatement to characterize Eras’ attitude as ‘shrug and move on'”
Thanks for the links – to my eye there’s not a hint of “probably” there: he could as fairly accuse you of not giving a damn about the possible bad consequences of policies you like.
“don’t want my disappearance from the thread construed as an unwillingness to face further challenge of my characterization from rilkefan or anyone else”
I’ve said what I think and am shutting up, esp. since Erasmussimo doesn’t seem offended.
How thoughtful of you to come up with a counter-slur on Eras’ behalf. I’ll respond to him if he cares to make one, but not to you.
Lost my crappy dialup and commented before refreshing; I wouldn’t have if I’d seen rilkefan’s 4:01.
Now I’m late.
Gee, I didn’t realize that I was so important that my personality deserves such careful analysis, and that such impressive conclusions can be drawn from a few hundred words of text. Me, I’d rather talk about issues such as the wisdom of the Congressional resolution. Can we get back to that?
Katherine – Are there specific actions that we think Turkey might take in retaliation (esp. in Northern Iraq) or a general concern that this will piss them off?
From the AP:
Gates said that 70 percent of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey, as does about one-third of the fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq.
“Access to airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would very much be put at risk if this resolution passes and Turkey reacts as strongly as we believe they will,” Gates said. He also said that 95 percent of new vehicles designed to better protect against mine attacks are being flown through Turkey to get to Iraq.
Bush et al have come out against the genocide recognition. No surprise.
As much as it pains me, I agree with Bush on this one, though not by a strong margin. But since that puts me in league with publius, hilzoy, eras and a few other luminaries I guess that’s ok. I’m a pragmatist, and this one has too much pain for not enough gain.
Once again, a ‘pragmatic’ reason for passing the resolution is to put pressure on the Turkish government to rescind its draconian denialist policy, which does have immediate legal (and sometimes lethal)consequences for those who dare to breach said policy. Or is academic/press freedom now suddenly expendable, too?
Also, this:
“Turkish sentiment for joining the EU is fading. Just two years ago, 68% of Turks favored joining the EU; I don’t have current numbers but there has been a decline, especially after the recent election”
grossly misrepresents the political dynamics at play in Turkey. There is growing public disenchantment with EU membership. However, the strongest nationalistic voices are those of the secularists, not the (moderate) Islamist gov’t, which draws its support from a broad cross-section of the public–not just fundamentalists.
The current moderate Islamist gov’t officially supports EU integration, for pragmatic reasons, as do minority groups such as Kurds and Armenians who have faced repression from nationalist factions. The nationalists are the segment most resistant to integration.
Also, the fact that Turkey is a fellow NATO member (as well as a trading partner) gives the US some diplomatic leverage, IMO.
YMMV.
To answer publius’s original question, this is happening now because there are something like 90,000 Armenians living within Pelosi’s district. This should tell use something about your political structure, ladies and gentleman. President Bush, the Turkish PM, the State Department, the present Secretary of State and eight former Secretaries of State can all line up against something. They can use the nuclear counterargument that it endangers our troops, which is usually enough to mute any further rational deliberation. And yet all that really matters are the demographics of one congressional district.
I am of two minds about this resolution as well.
On the one hand, calling a spade a spade ought to be the prerogative of any legislative body. And being bullied by madman threats (Turkey invades Northern Iraq over this??) is not a good precedent, even between allies.
On the other hand, there’s simply no reason whatsoever to take these risks at this point in time. Also, these kinds of problems are only really solved when the community in question (the Turkish community) decides to grow up and acknowledge its own past. Just think of what US of Aers think when South Americans passed resolutions on our treatment of Native Americans.
So I have to say that if I were sitting on that congressional committee, I would have to vote against it. Which is just unpalatable — to be put in a situation where circumstances compel you to deny what is obviously true, a denial you know will be rightfully painful to plenty of people.
It’s just damned unfortunate that people who oppose the Resolution cannot do so like hilzoy — namely by saying of course it was a genocide but this is not the time or place — but rather tend to take up Turkish euphemisms that put them on the side of genocide deniers.
The resolution is almost certain to pass. More than half the House has co-sponsored. So we will see what Turkey’s threats amount to, whether they were bluffs. Or whether what they were warning about was the kind of spontaneous political violence that has no agent and therefore could not be bluffed.
Ara: “our treatment of Native Americans”
I was wondering about this the other day but forgot to follow up – anybody have a sense to what extent this is a continuing failure?
As always with this kind of issue, things not immediately visible matter a lot. For me, Gary’s stance is so persuasive precisely because “this is a good cause but not the right time and we’ll get to it when it is” has ceased to persuade me on pretty much every front. When things get postponed, in my personal and social experience, they get lost. The flip side of this is that things done badly are often hard to fix, of course – but when there’s a chance to do the right thing, I’m increasingly inclined to let that possibility balance out a multitude of objections. I just disbelieve in that calm future moment when it will be better to do the right thing.
“but when there’s a chance to do the right thing, I’m increasingly inclined to let that possibility balance out a multitude of objections”
Isn’t this benefit analysis in hilzoy‘s terminology? And, well, isn’t such analysis out of favor here?
“but when there’s a chance to do the right thing, I’m increasingly inclined to let that possibility balance out a multitude of objections”
Who knew you were ok with going to war to remove Saddam…? 😉
At SOME point objections overrule, right? We’re just arguing about where that point is.
to be clear, i agree completely (like hilzoy) on the genocide. my point is strictly about timing. (Sorry, i’ve been away at class all afternoon).
“Just think of what US of Aers think when South Americans passed resolutions on our treatment of Native Americans.”
Not notice them? Seems pretty innocuous.
But to be clear, “my stance” isn’t absolutist. I’ve not made any statements here about how I’d vote if I was in Congress this week, or any absolute declarations.
The thing is, I’m not in Congress, and I don’t have to make an absolutely responsible final decision.
But what I’ve been speaking to is my very strong inclinations, and prejudices, and leanings, and if I were in a position to vote, I’d only vote against the resolution if I thought the immediate negative effects were so drastic that I’d think it worth overcoming those.
But since I don’t have to actually vote, I’m happy to make a case in favor of the resolution, and in favor of truth, and answer publius’s question. I’m a lot more comfortable condemning genocide, and genocide-deniers, than I am engaging in real politik suppression of truth, in return for nebulous benefits involving colloboration with covering over genocide, given how cloudy the results of either outcome are.
The Scylla and Charybdis here is pretty clear. On the one hand, there are those who would be quixotic by neglecting all risks and consequences in favor of doing the right thing in principle. On the other hand, there are those who would be cowardly by endlessly deferring taking action in the face of any risk at all.
Man, I wish there were some Armenians and Turks on this blog to see what they think!
*sigh* I forget sometimes how easy and fun it is to disregard all of someone’s past posting history for the sake of gotchas. Never mind.
“*sigh* I forget sometimes how easy and fun it is to disregard all of someone’s past posting history for the sake of gotchas.”
I don’t think anybody above has done this to you. As SH notes, the question is about balancing.
Actually it was less a gotcha and more of an attempt to lighten it. Note to self, attempt failed. Seriously, we aren’t arguing over whether or not you can do it ‘at any price’, we are talking about what price is too high. Right? So for example, do you think that the price outlined by hilzoy and publius is too high? Both of them seem to be positing a pretty short term where the price is too high. So I’d way the length of time of the proposed postponement with the cost. If it was decades, that would be a stronger argument. But “until we aren’t immediately reliant on Turkey for an ongoing hot war in Iraq” might be a short enough time to wait for. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But that is probably where we might want to have the discussion.
cough– weigh not ‘way’ sheesh.
As evidence of the power of the Armenian lobby in California, the California state tax return has a line for”Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments”:
“If you received settlement payments as a person persecuted by the regime that was in control of the Ottoman Turkish Empire from 1915 until 1923 your gross income does not include those excludable settlement payments received on or after January 1, 2005.”
which has something to do with delayed life insurance payments.
On the larger question, I’m with hilzoy. The only benefit would be if a Congressional resolution helped to make the Turks confront and address what was done (as the Germans did after WWII and the Japanese did not). But it will have the opposite effect–and also create other problems as noted in this thread.
(Yes, it will make some Armenian-Americans feel btter, but this doesn’t seem like a serious advantage).
Actually, I hate to be meta, but was that really a gotcha? I’m pretty sure you weren’t pro-Saddam’s regime, and I’m pretty sure you would have thought that a zero cost removal would have been worth it, and I’m pretty sure that you don’t think the actual cost as currently being paid was worth it. So my point is that “doing the right thing” is always about weighing the cost. That is part of figuring out what the right thing is.
Matt, I disagree with your assessment that the secularists are the primary nationalist force in Turkey. My impression is that the secularists are more eager to cut loose from the Islamic past and join the European future, and are more sensitive to Western interests. The Islamists don’t care as much about the West.
I also disagree as to our ability to apply pressure on the Turks. Right now we need them a lot more than they need us. We’re just lucky they haven’t been demanding a higher price for their support.
Maybe Congress is smarter than I would ever give them credit for. They vote for this bill, Turkey chops us off. Logistics goes south, Bush has no choice but to pull the troops out. Mission accomplished!
“*sigh* I forget sometimes how easy and fun it is to disregard all of someone’s past posting history for the sake of gotchas. Never mind.”
I think Sebastian’s attempt at a joke there was relatively innocuous, myself, Bruce.
Sebastian: “But ‘until we aren’t immediately reliant on Turkey for an ongoing hot war in Iraq’ might be a short enough time to wait for.”
If I seriously believed that there were an absolute commitment to passing the resolution next year, or in two years, I’d be a lot more copacetic about letting it fail again this year. But I see no particular reason to count on that. Is there one?
“But I see no particular reason to count on that. Is there one?”
Is there any reason to think it’d be less likely to come up and pass in a few years when the Realpolitik argument won’t have as much force?
“Is there any reason to think it’d be less likely to come up and pass in a few years when the Realpolitik argument won’t have as much force?”
Sure. That folks have been trying to pass this practically as long as I can remember, and not been able to, and one can never count on the future. Is Turkey going to be objecting less next year? Is Iraq going to be all peaceful? When will those events be occurring? We should be counting on those events occurring in the near future? When, exactly?
Incidentally:
Let me also be clear that my opinions about this issue are extremely clouded by emotion.
Imagine we were in an alternate history in which Nazi Germany hadn’t declared war on us, had survived the war, etc., and we were now be asked to keep quiet about a resolution condemning their genocide of the Jews, but we were being asked to keep quiet about it for now, to wait a few more years, for the sake of Germany’s not interfering with our vital interests of whatever.
That’s the parallel I’m stuck on considering, and contemplating, and imagining how I’d be comfortable agreeing to keep silent, for the sake of expediency.
Silly of me, perhaps, but that I am a lot. The “we should be silent about genocide for a while longer, until the time is right,” is just an argument I’m extremely resistant to, even if it has some rational elements.
It’s not something I’m all that rational about, perhaps. I just have trouble being a person who can do that.
[joke]
In all of this, I shocked that no-one has comment on “Pelosi is one” — Armenian I presume. If she were a proper Armenian, her name would be Pelosian!
[/joke]
No one has mentioned the exquisite irony that most of the atrocities committed against the Armenians during their forced death marches were carried out by their escorts of irregular Turkish cavalry, who happened to be Kurds.
The Turkish reasoning behind the genocide of the Armenians, was that they rose up and sided with the Russians during the 1914-15 campaigns in the Caucasus. In the fighting, the Turks lost tens of thousands of soldiers, and were comprehensively defeated by smaller Russian forces.
Thanks for the props!
It was not that Armenians were killed by Turks because they were Armenian that is the issue. It is that the Armenians were Christians, and killed by Arab Muslims that makes it an issue relevant today. Anything to justify the continuation of the 21st century Crusades. Christians in WW I, Jews in WW II, so now it’s the Muslims turn, so say the Christian Zionists.
Bottom line — if Turkey insists on being the kind of country that has hissy-fits when we repeat the evident fact that their ancestors committed genocide a hundred years ago …
… then the problem isn’t the resolution’s sponsors, or America; the problem is Turkey.
A Turkey that won’t come clean at this late date is a Turkey with serious problems that do not bode well for its future. We are not responsible for those problems just because we say “Lincoln was assassinated by Booth, Einstein discovered the theory of general relativity, and the Ottoman Empire did to death hundreds of thousands of Armenians.”
“It is that the Armenians were Christians, and killed by Arab Muslims that makes it an issue relevant today.”
Not really, no. That would be simple, but it just isn’t true. This was an issue in the Sixties, and Seventies, and onwards, and not to mention ever since it happened, during the fall of the Ottoman Empire, having nothing much to do with Muslim/Christian issues, and everything to do with Armenian/Turkish issues.
Trying to squish this issue into the Procrustean bed of the last few years is to pretty much get the whole thing wrong.
Is it just me, or did the captcha suddenly, a few minutes ago, get about fifty times blurrier and hard to read?
“Matt, I disagree with your assessment that the secularists are the primary nationalist force in Turkey.Matt, I disagree with your assessment that the secularists are the primary nationalist force in Turkey. My impression is that the secularists are more eager to cut loose from the Islamic past and join the European future, and are more sensitive to Western interests. The Islamists don’t care as much about the West.”
Really.
I would contend that ‘your impression’ is incorrect. Are you unfamiliar with the MHP or the CHP? If that is the case, allow me to enlighten you with some examples.
openDemocracy:
Nicolas Birch of The Observer provides a more in-depth example how Turkish secular nationalism is traditionally hostile to minority communities and has of late extended that hostility towards the west, specifically Europe:
In fact, as Birch later points out, it was the Islamist AKP that has enacted the very reforms that have made Turkey eligible for EU membership–reforms that have contributed to secular nationalist agitation:
Please also see Turkish columnist Ahmet Altan on the volatile paradox that is modern Turkey (written prior to this past summer’s election, back when talk of a [secular] coup was all the rage); this lengthy New Left Review essay by Cihan Tugal detailing what he labels Turkey’s ‘Islamized Americanization’ is also quite informative.
As I said before, the cultural and political dynamics in Turkey don’t fall under the simplistic binary rubric of ‘Islamists = teh bad guys, secularists teh good guys’ that, for whatever reason, you appear to accept as being conventional wisdom. Not saying that the neoliberal moderate Islamist AKP are on the side of the angels. Most of its reforms and outreach efforts to the EU have been pragmatic efforts to stave off military intervention.
But, by and large, the recent Turkish antipathy with regards to the West is primarily coming from secular nationalists who feel threatened by AKP reforms (eg, even cursory admittance that there may have been something that occurred in 1915; the softening of relations with Kurds in Turkey; neoliberal economic reforms) that are believed, rightly or wrongly, to pose a threat to Turkish unity.
More from the The Boston Globe:
This post-election briefing paper by PINR further explains what I meant re: pragmatic reasons behind the AKP’s support of economic and democratic reforms, and how said policies helped make the party more palatable to liberal sectors of Turkish society, despite AKP’s Islamist pedigree:
Ditto Anderson @ 22:11 EDT.
Gary: Is it just me, or did the captcha suddenly, a few minutes ago, get about fifty times blurrier and hard to read?
Not just you. Gah. My eyes.
Apologies for the formatting error @ 22:24 EDT. JFTR, my comments were responding to Erasmussimo @ 20:31. Dunno how the first quoted sentence got copypasted twice (feel free to place the blame on gremlins–or Underwear Gnomes.)
GF: Push the analogy a little farther. Imagine Germany were controlled today by a mad dictator who was prosecuting people for mentioning the Holocaust. And that madman has threatened that he might invade Alsace Lorraine, if the US Congress passed a nominal resolution acknowledging the reality of the Holocaust. Do we have our Chamberlain moment and pass on the bill, forever to be snickered at by history buffs of the future? Or do we vote and trigger an invasion? On the one hand, it is really hard to stomach being bullied into vileness on something so sensitive. On the, war is war, and compromising to avoid invasion is not so ignoble a thing.
I assume that most people here are willing to have their Chamberlain moment. But nobody wants to have another Chamberlain moment!
I’ve thought about this in the past, and what I’ve realized is: if you take the line that someone’s elected officials are there to perform the duties of the office — then at some point — when forcibly entangled with unreasonable agents (foreign nations) — you really have to compromise on the notion that politicians have obligations to tell the truth, to be decent with respect to particular values, in the way we would ordinarily reckon decency with respect to those values.
I wonder whether there is any wisdom in national parliaments passing historical judgments about other countries other than provoking resentment and tensions between people. What will they do next, pass judgment on modern art or big bang? Can’t they just stick to their main responsibility of enacting legislation to deal with the concrete problems of *today* and *tomorrow*? The question before us is whether the world public is doing anything useful to stop the bloodshed in Iraq, Darfur, Myanmar, or other places of the world *now*. Are they doing anything useful *now* to stop the environmental destruction of the globe that will have serious consequences for tomorrow’s generations?
Someone mentioned the possibility of South Americans passing legislation to recognize what US did to native americans as genocide. How about the not only one but two A-bombs dropped not on the same day but days apart and not by accident or by air force pilots gone crazy but on the orders of the US president on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians with the explicity intent to destroy them (and not as unintended ‘casualties’)?? Has anyone ever looked up the definition of genocide as given by the UN Convention? Here it is for your reference:
“genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Wouldn’t US action in WWII against Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki fulfill four out of five of the criteria described therein? Has the US ever come to terms with its own actions? Not having done that, what kind of moral authority does the US legislature have in passing judgment on events that happened almost a century ago??
Matt, thanks for all the quotes, but they don’t support your point. Yes, there are plenty of nationalists in the secular parties. But there are also plenty of nationalists in the Islamist parties. I agree with you 100% that what’s going on in Turkey right now is very complex. There are multiple parties at work: the military, which is absolutely secularist and is slowly losing power; the old-time nationalists who revere Ataturk’s legacy; the modernizers who want Turkey to become a modern Western society; the knee-jerk Islamists who see Turkey’s future in a return to old values; the urban middle class, which is not sure what to do; the rural folk who are suspicious of the modernizers; and a variety of other groupings. What is changing is the absolute grip that the military had on the Turkish government, and with that change we’re seeing a lot of repressed forces bubbling up to the surface.
Turkey has been undergoing major cultural shifts. Turkish cultural affiliations were so much simpler 20 years ago, when there were clear and obvious enemies and friends. There was no question among the Turkish leadership that Turkey’s future lay with the West. But these days that’s nowhere near as clear. Which brings me to my central point: we are in no position to be kicking the Turks in the teeth. They are uncertain as to their relationship with the West, and we need them more than they need us. This Congressional motion does not exert any diplomatic pressure on Turkey; it just insults them. It will only serve to make them less cooperative at a time when we really need their help to stabilize the Middle East.
Wouldn’t US action in WWII against Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki fulfill four out of five of the criteria described therein?
No.
Schilling: Maybe the fourth criteria is a little questionable? Given that in the aftermath of the bombs, many stillbirths were registered and many more births with severe defects happened, I’d say all but one of the criteria are fulfilled. It’s not that there is controversy about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was genocidal, there is simply no political will or courage on any side to recognize it as such. Why? Because every major power has such skeletons in the closet. They will not go down that route of condemning each other. Turkey seems to be a convenient ‘other’ to project all such latent moral misgivings. It is Moslem, it is not a major player, it is feared and despised by most European countries. So, no problem as far as the West is concerned.
“a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
The residents of city X don’t typically make up such a group. E.g., the Japanese killed more Chinese (upwards of twenty million) than we killed Japanese, but I wouldn’t call that a genocide.
Has it occurred to anyone else that Pelosi needs to act in some way that suggests that she is capable of principled action? There are not a lot of Armenians in her district (the Armeniapedia says “a few thousand” in the San Francisco area) but there is an organized Armenian community. And there are thousands of constituents who presently consider our Congresswoman to have the moral courage of a banana slug. So why not push this?
FWIW, I’m not a believer in waiting for a better time to do the right thing. If you can do it, do it. But I wanted to chime in on the Pelosi angle.
“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,”
It clearly says “in part”. Japan was and is one of world’s most homogeneous societies. I am sure everybody down from the President knew fully well, that the target of the bombs were all “part” of one national, ethnic, racial, and practically one religious (Shinto/Buddhist) group. The residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with thousands of other cities in Japan qualify for the specification in the UN article.
Errassemous: I’ve provided specific examples (which I DO believe support my point; YMMV).
You, in turn, have offered nothing glib dismissals and wordy assertions, without citing anything to bolster your dissent.
I think we’re through.
Arg. “Erasmussimo”.
Bed.
‘It clearly says “in part”. Japan was and is one of world’s most homogeneous societies.’
Ok, then logically killing a single Japanese would amount to genocide. We might agree that e.g. the fire-bombing of Tokyo was a war crime but I (and I think the vast majority of English speakers) would still not consider “genocide” to be an accurate description.
“We might agree that e.g. the fire-bombing of Tokyo was a war crime”
Ask about that to the US government whether they even agree to that description. Or don’t bother, I tell you their answer. They don’t. Nobody has ever been accused and tried for dropping bombs and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, or Dresden. It is a world where justice and history is made and written by the victors. Anyways, why look at historical examples? How about today? Iraq? Almost everybody around the world knows that US bombed the hell out of, invaded, fractured, and turned into complete chaos a nation of 20 million people under false pretenses and without provocation. Hundreds of thousands killed, millions injured, even more displaced. Yet, no talk of war crimes there. Worse, the US electorate (and not just the politicians) said in 2004 “more of the same, please”. So, US has no authority whatsoever when it comes to rectifying injustices.
“Given that in the aftermath of the bombs, many stillbirths were registered and many more births with severe defects happened, I’d say all but one of the criteria are fulfilled. ”
I don’t think the function of radiation in that sense was understood at the time, and I don’t think of genocide as a crime that can be committed without intent.
“So, US has no authority whatsoever when it comes to rectifying injustices.”
Being imperfect oneself is no reason not to try to improve the world.
“Being imperfect oneself is no reason not to try to improve the world.”
Exactly. One should start with ‘home improvement’ before patronizing others to do so. USA has no moral authority to tell any other country to atone for her sins before they do it themselves for their own sins. This goes back to the similar (ever shifting) rationale of invading Iraq: bringing democracy and blah blah. As if democracy is in full bloom in US or any of its other allies around the world such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc. Likewise, US cannot start condemning nations for historical injustices when it refuses to do for its own unjust deeds (some of which are still in progress). That has nothing to do with being perfect or imperfect. If they don’t and won’t own the responsibility of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in A-bomb attacks with the clear intention of obliterating those people, and yet go around asking others to accept responsibility for their misdeeds, it is hypocrisy, pure and simple.
“I don’t think of genocide as a crime that can be committed without intent.”
Me neither. However, I am sure that the US leadership knew fully well the likely consequences of dropping not only one but two A-bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians. Prior research and tests had supplied ample evidence to researchers and policymakers of the true power and destructiveness of those weapons. They were not dropped to simply take out military installations. They were dropped to wipe out entire cities and their people.
Without getting into vexed questions about World War II atrocities, which are invariably inconclusive, what about the current US position? In 2004 the US population voted for a torturer to lead them (and yes, I know there are millions of Americans who are deeply unhappy about this, but the majority of the population were either indifferent to it or actually positive about this). To a non-American*, the moral authority of the US as a whole (not just the current government) is currently low to minimal.
Given this, though I can see the proposal for condemnation of the genocide would be welcomed by Armenians and others concerned about genocide (and is in itself positive), in the current political situation it looks mainly like moral grandstanding by those members of Congress who supported it. Why aren’t they agitating effectively about their own country’s abuses instead?
This moral grandstanding is unappealing at best; if it feeds into the deadly belief in the moral authority of the US to attack other people’s countries, it’s positively harmful.
*My country’s sins include the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, deep involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and the British Empire. I’m not claiming any overall moral superiority here.
One aspect of the argument that has perhaps not been properly discussed is the fact that America is so much bigger and stronger than Turkey, and that being lectured (even in a righteous cause) by someone more powerful than you always elicits a defensive reaction. Americans have trouble understanding the reactions of the Turks, because there is no equivalent power that could talk down to the US from a position of power. Perhaps the irrational prickliness of the Turks could be better understood by imagining the following example: If the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution saying that ‘the US is a nation created by means of the genocide of the Native American population’. This is factually true (although an incomplete view of history), but would lead to a very negative reaction in the US, perhaps even amongst those who in cooler moments would accept the historical facts
I appreciate that this doesn’t make much difference to the rights and wrongs of the case in question, but it might help understand why Turks are reacting as they do.
@Ara: Just to be clear, the Turkish government was and is threatening to mount cross-border operations into northern Iraq/Kurdestan before the resolution became a hot issue, specifically to deal with PKK raids that recently killed a good number of Turkish military and some civilians.
For months and months, they’ve been complaining to and negotiating with the Kurdestan regional government, the Iraqi government, and the U.S., who are all conveniently in a position to try to push off the responsibility to each other. From the Turkish point of view (and mine in this case), there has not been an adequate response from any of the three governments.
The Turks have also been deeply annoyed to find that some of the weapons being used against them are the same ones that the honorable Gen. Petraeus had “kicked off the planes” without bothering to record the serial numbers, and regarding which one of his senior subordinates is under criminal investigation.
Power relations being what they are, we read no press releases or UN denunciations by Turkish military and politicians that the U.S. government is organizing and sponsoring the PKK, but let’s say that there’s a much more convincing chain of evidence for that claim (which I am not making) than there is for the claims that have been thrown around by the U.S. brass about Iran for the last ten months.
So it is emphatically not the case that Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq/Kurdestan over this Armenian genocide resolution; that would be madness. It is true that the progress of the resolution in Congress comes at a moment when the Turkish government and people are even less ready than usual to take in its message, and are more than usually angry and frustrated with the U.S.
But since Bush’s wars (the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the eyes-averted PEJAK and other guerrilla activity against Iran, and the planned U.S. war against Iran) are what’s making naming the Armenian genocide an even more difficult issue than usual, I say let Congress have at it and Bush can veto if, as is highly unlikely, it passes the Senate. Heck, that might even strengthen his hand in reaching some overdue agreements with the Turks and Kurds.
Sebastian: I don’t think of genocide as a crime that can be committed without intent.
Possible to argue that the politicians who made the decision to use a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima had no real notion of what would happen, only that it was a really, really big bomb. (Difficult, but possible.)
Impossible to argue that there was no intent for Nagasaki.
Anon: Given that in the aftermath of the bombs, many stillbirths were registered and many more births with severe defects happened, I’d say all but one of the criteria are fulfilled.
Ah, but “pro-lifers” never concede that it’s a bad thing to kill or damage fetuses when you do so by killing or harming a pregnant woman, especially not in wartime. It’s only bad to “kill unborn babies” when a pregnant woman has an abortion without harm to herself: so long as the pregnant woman dies or is seriously harmed too, it’s just fine to kill a fetus.
Anon’s comment about the reaction to being lectured by the big, unaccountable power is cogent.
It brought to mind an idea that I had a few years ago as an international peace-building measure: a worldwide day of atonement, in which governments officially note, reflect on, and take responsibility for crimes against humanity they have committed or enabled. At the grassroots level, the focus would be on forward-looking, person-to-person reconciliation activities.
If the featured crime changed from year to year, we could go on for quite a long time in this country. The challenge would be for the more pacific governments to keep up the practice nonetheless so that the imperial biggies don’t feel isolated.
“Possible to argue that the politicians who made the decision to use a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima had no real notion of what would happen, only that it was a really, really big bomb. (Difficult, but possible.)
Impossible to argue that there was no intent for Nagasaki.”
Considering that I made was responding ONLY TO THE STILLBIRTHS FROM RADIATION point, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki distinction you are trying to draw doesn’t make sense. If you want to argue that it was genocide feel free, just work with what is actually there.
Considering that I made was responding ONLY TO THE STILLBIRTHS FROM RADIATION point, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki distinction you are trying to draw doesn’t make sense
Fair enough. Both were genocide, then.
I think it is a dumbing down of the word to essentially turn any bombing of civilians into genocide (if you include those, you surely have to include Tokyo and Dresden as genocide). My understanding of the term is closer to an attempt to destroy or displace an entire nation, race or people (used in the sense of a unified ethnic group that isn’t a nation or race). The interest in extending fairly understandable terms into things well beyond them (it happens with ‘rape’ on the left and ‘theft’ on the right) strikes me as counterproductive but your mileage may vary.
Genocide was a term invented to describe something beyond normal warlike behaviour and beyond even run of the mill war crimes. Erasing those distinctions might give you a year or two of shock value, but it seems to me that it is much more likely to destroy the value of labeling something ‘genocide’ than it is to extend the outrage of genocide to other behaviour.
“pro-lifers” never concede that it’s a bad thing to kill or damage a fetus by killing I’d harming a pregnant woman
This is simply wrong, and quite likely dishonestly so, since dollars to donuts you know that “pro-lifers” support expansive fetal homicide and abuse laws, as they consider them back doors or precursors to more restrictive abortion laws.
“Possible to argue that the politicians who made the decision to use a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima had no real notion of what would happen, only that it was a really, really big bomb. (Difficult, but possible.)”
There were no plural “politicians” who made that decision. It was one man, Harry Truman.
And he had a reasonable idea of what it would do, which is, as has been pointed out in this thread, less than happened to Tokyo, or in the general firebombing of Japanese cities, which was overall almost certainly the greatest slaughter in the history of this planet.
Logic suggests Hilzoy has turned off the unreadable captcha! Huzzah! Let a triumph be thrown!
“The challenge would be for the more pacific governments to keep up the practice….”
I’d like to see a list of nominees, just out of curiosity. Presumably a specific time period should be denominated.
“Fair enough. Both were genocide, then.”
That’s novel. Is there some reason the genocide community hasn’t tended to take up this notion, do you think? Perhaps that there was, in fact, no effort to exterminate the Japanese? (Although there was little lack of suggestion of that, to be sure.) (And there would be an equal case that Japan tried to commit genocide on the Chinese people, if so — but, again, it’s “just” that they killed them in the tens of millions.)
“Massive killing” doesn’t equal “genocide.” If it did, we’d be claiming the Germans were trying to commit genocide on Ukrainians, for instance, and on Poles.
But they didn’t try to kill a notional “race” of either. They simply slaughtered them in the millions for lebensraum.
It turns out that these are two different terrible things.
It’s uninteresting to play the game of pretending otherwise.
Genocide is an important concept. It’s not helpful to blur it, or play games with it.
Phil: since dollars to donuts you know that “pro-lifers” support expansive fetal homicide and abuse laws,
They do not, however, in general support expansive domestic violence laws, maternity leave, employment protection, or indeed any legislation that focuses on helping and protecting the pregnant woman, which will inevitably help and protect the fetus she carries.
So again: pro-lifers are indifferent to the welfare of the fetus except as a means of abusing/controling the pregnant woman.
Sebastian: I think it is a dumbing down of the word to essentially turn any bombing of civilians into genocide
I think it is fairly typical of “war crimes are committed only by the losers” to essentially pretend that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no different from “any bombing of civilians”.
Mass bombing of civilians in World War II was not classed as a war crime because the winners did it as much as the losers: it has never been classed as a war crime since, though it has killed people by the million.
And mass bombings are not necessarily the same as genocide, which is what you seemed to claim above.
@Gary: Re possible nominees for ‘more pacific’ states: Notice my carefully weaselly language: more peaceful than the massive-scale atrocity-committers. In many cases, this would simply be due to small numbers.
The beauty of a day of atonement is that every government/people can find something for which to reflect and repent. So the states that seem to me likely to run out of themes after the first few years might, to those more familiar with them, be rich in material.
(Side note: As this device is obviously inspired by the somber holy day of the Jewish faith, but is an all-peoples’, secular proposal, it would be held at a completely different season.)
And, yes, we might want to set an outer time bound. Any suggestions? I was thinking 500 C.E.-ish… ;>
If genocide involves an intent to exterminate a race/ethnicity/religious group/etc. then why do we count Cambodia? (We do count Cambodia, right?)
And yet I do put the killing fields & Rwanda in one category & massive civilian deaths in war in another. Is it that in one case you’re talking about trying to conquer a country or force it’s surrender, & in another you’re killing for the sake of killing, & will continue even if they surrender? But in that case, the fact that there were Kurds rebelling doesn’t make Anfal less of a genocide, right?
Or is it just sheer % of the population killed? The term is a bit fuzzy, though I think it’s still useful.
I think we count Cambodia because it was an attempt (mostly successful) to destroy an entire class of people–the middle class/non-agricultural workers class. They were really portrayed as different people–non-Cambodian in some essential way. So as seen from the inside, it was like trying to destroy a nation of people who were ‘wrongly’ living in Cambodia.
“The term is a bit fuzzy, though I think it’s still useful.”
I do too. I understand what most people are saying when they use the term. But I think it won’t be useful if you just use it to mean “times when lots of civilians died” as Jesurgislac seems to suggest.
When certain types of feminists want to call seduction-style attempts at convincing, leading to sex, leading to next morning regrets, ‘rape’ I think they are trying to draw attention to a problem, but they do more harm to the utility of the term ‘rape’ than they get out of using it.
When certain types of libertarians want to call taxes ‘theft’, they are trying to draw attention to the coercion inherent to government collection, but they do more harm to the term ‘theft’ than they get out of using it.
In both cases they attempt to use terms that come with lots of emotional/moral weight in order to make their arguments for them. The problem with relying on that too much is that when you see a classic rape, classic theft or classic genocide, you have diluted the impact of the term with weaker associations.
speaking of Cambodia, I’m going in January, anyone ever been?
Going for a holiday?
The sort of denialism displayed by Turkey is a sure sign of a sick society – you could see it in parts of German society for a long time and in Austria pretty much as a whole for an even longer time. Yet, none of these countries dared to threaten those who put their fingers in the wound, e.g. Thomas Bernhard or Heinrich Boell, with prison, that would have been unthinkable even in the very authoritarian climate of the postwar era. If Turkey wants to be taken seriously or even get EU membership, it has to come to grips with such issues. I am slightly appalled by all the pussyfooting around here.
*P.S. As for the pragmatic argument: Turkey refused to support the US invasion of Iraq, which caused major strategical problems; that didn’t keep Bush from invading anyway – so, tough.
rilke – yes. Most of our time is accounted for as we’re taking a cruise up the Mekong river from Vietnam, then spending a couple of days in Angkor Wat before flying back to vietnam. I was wondering if a couple was enough or if there was anything else nearby worth taking a look at.
Should be interesting.
Far be it from me to question the healthy anathematizing of a society distant in miles and time but I don’t understand why or how Turkey is seen as synonymous with the Ottoman Empire. At least, in discussing the American predation of native populations in the nineteenth century, the government is the same one that is the subject of criticism. Why is this instance of human creativity worthy of greater abundance in opinion than, say, the acts of the Belgians toward the Congolese?
Turkey recalls US ambassador – just a symbolic gesture as I understand it.
Ugh, that was a Dead Kennedys reference, since von presumably isn’t reading this thread to make it.
damn you pop culture!
rilke: ahem.
(ugh: don’t forget to pack your wife.)
found the lyrics, I hate it when things go over my head (not as much as I hate puns though).
Thomas, I looked at your post and the second paragraph starts with Historians estimate one and a half million people died.. In actual fact estimates go from 200,000 to 1,800,000 people killed. You cannot write an objective account if you pick a side and display the facts that coïncide with it.
This actually was a hot item during our national elections last year. We (=the Netherlands) also have a resolution that it is genocide and several Turkish politicians were removed from eligable places by their parties when they refused to publically state it was a genocide.
The only reason for the amendment I agree with is what Mattbastard brought up: people who claim it was a genocide are locked up in prison and that is wrong. Article 301 is State censorship and I don’t like censorship. But that goes both ways; Swiss convicts people for denying that there was a Turkish genocide againts Armanians, which imho is wrong too.
I read your link, did you read mine?
An description of the historians work:
Everybody agrees that there were many, many Armenians killed and most agree that the pre-Attatürk Turkish government bears responsibility. There should be more honest (as in un-politicized) research, both here and in Turkey. But calling it genocide now only serves a political goal, it has no practical value. The Turks invited the US to do research – that would have been more usefull.
How do you kill several hundred thousand people of the same ethnic group by accident?
The Turkish government’s position on this is ridiculously disingenuous. To the outside world, they argue it should be a matter for historians. But, internally, you risk prosecution for mentioning it.
It seems to beg the question to me to place the documentary evidence of intent before the plainer question of responsibility. The Armenian eyewitness accounts speak of deportations, rounding up people village by village. Why did these deportations take place? Who organized them? If you forcibly relocate a large community of people out of their communities and they die on route during your forced relocation, why isn’t that sufficient for establishing a genocide? People and governments are, after all, responsible for the consequences of their actions, and if the consequence of a forced relocation is mass death — and if that suffering was foreseeable and not the consequence of an improbable sequence of events — then why do we need further documentary debate to establish that a genocide took place? Why on Earth does the smoking gun need to be a memo from Talat? People who argue against the genocide position seem to accept only such a memo as evidence that the event took place. I’ve never understood that.
“genocide was a term invented to describe something beyond normal warlike behaviour and beyond even run of the mill war crimes. Erasing those distinctions might give you a year or two of shock value, but it seems to me that it is much more likely to destroy the value of labeling something ‘genocide’ than it is to extend the outrage of genocide to other behaviour.”
Actually, this is what I find disturbing about the term “genocide”. “Beyond” run of the mill war crimes implies that these are less serious. Yeah, some mass killings in wartime don’t fit the definition of genocide. What follows from this morally? From the way people make these careful distinctions, it sounds as if it’s worse to murder large numbers of people in cold blood if you do it for racial reasons, rather than, for instance, because you want their land. And then you get laws passed against genocide, but not large scale mass killing and you end up with idiotic situations where, for instance people argue whether the Sudanese government is guilty of genocide, or only mass killing.
A common practice in wartime is to slaughter civilians as a way of inducing the enemy to surrender, or better yet, not to fight at all. The Mongols would do this. If a city resisted they’d wipe it out (or so I’ve read–Mongol apologists are free to correct me on this.) If it hadn’t resisted they wouldn’t have wiped it out. Is this any less evil than genocide? It’s what Saddam did with his opponents, it’s what the Guatemalan army did in the 80’s, and it’s probably the kind of situation that is most commonly called “genocide”, but maybe it’s really only mass killing. I suppose one could argue that the distinction matters, but I don’t see it.
On the individual level, it’s the difference between a bank robber who only kills people who cause him difficulty, compared to someone who does it because he hates the victim.
The moral question with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo and other mass killings of civilians is not the question of whether it fits the legal definition of genocide. That would matter in the practical legal sense if Harry Truman or any American President ever faced any real chance of being tried for crimes against humanity. But morally, the question is whether you can justify the deliberate killing of large numbers of innocent people in order to end a war (or impress the Russians or both). We (on average) are more likely to excuse Truman because we think WWII was a just war, whereas presumably we don’t think the Mongols had a good reason for waging their wars. It’s not a way of thinking that we want others to use.
Everyone keeps saying that Turkey is a key ally in the “war on terrorism.” But what has Turkey done for us lately that’s in any way contingent upon the US House respecting the sensitivities of Turkish genocide-deniers?
Sure, Turkey is the conduit for 70% of the military cargo that goes into Iraq. If the US were closer to Turkey, Turkey might change its mind about allowing the US to use Turkish territory to stage an attack on Iran. That’s not going to happen in the near future.
So far, I haven’t heard anyone argue that Turkey is more likely to attack Northern Iraq out of spite for the genocide resolution. In fact, it seems as if frustration over the lack of US support might be stoking resentment towards the resolution, and not the other way around.
It’s hardly news to Turkey that the West, including the US, takes a very dim view of the Armenian genocide.
The official impetus for the genocide resolution was to alter the US President’s yearly address to commemorate the Armenian slaughter. The current president has called the mass murder of the Armenians “genocidal.” As did president Reagan.
It seems far-fetched that a resolution by the US House would be sufficient to provoke the level of outrage that Turkey is projecting.
If a city resisted they’d wipe it out (or so I’ve read–Mongol apologists are free to correct me on this.) If it hadn’t resisted they wouldn’t have wiped it out. Is this any less evil than genocide?
Well, I think it is, because the animating principle is that there is nothing the person could do to live. Genocide implies that the decision is made with total disregard to anything that the victim could do. In that sense, it is more complete and total than what Genghis Khan (though I tend to me more of a Madeline Khan apologist)
I agree that there is a disconnect in the notion of genocide being an ultimate evil, which seems to make efforts that are aimed at totally breaking a small minorities will as an example to others tolerable. But this is the point that I think Adorno gets at in the fact that the Holocaust is an inversion of logic, and the fact that it is inverted permits no escape.
This shouldn’t be taken as some three bank shot defense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Dresden and Tokyo, but when the impulse is a ‘logical’ framework, it doesn’t permit reconsideration, which is what pushes genocide over the edge. Unfortunately, this encourages creating an absence of agency that permits us to deny genocide, which then raises the issue of whether the absence of agency is true or simply a stance.
I’m having some trouble understanding why we’re supposed to worry about this scenario:
“Our symbolic gesture of acknowledging the genocide pisses off Turkey… at a time when they feel like invading Kurdistan. So, just to spite a military superpower… they invade Kurdistan.”
–and not worry at all about this scenario:
“Our symbolic gesture of refusing to acknowledge the genocide (or even to complain about their brutal treatment of others who do) shows Turkey that we’ll continue to support them in actions that the rest of the world condemns… at a time when they feel like invading Kurdistan. So, confident that they are best friends forever with a military superpower… they invade Kurdistan.”
One does not need moral authority to state what is right, just to persuade people of one’s opinion. The US should not remain silent for lack of confidence due to fear of justified and valid criticism. That will come anyway, even if the population never hears it.
If you think the US Senate should acknowledge Hiroshima (when has it not?) then campaign for it. It’s a weak comparison as the people of that City were massacred as a show of force to exert control(1) whilst the Armenians, the Jews and E. Timorese were massacred for the acquisition of their assets.
And like it or not, the popular view is that shows of force to exert control are acceptable, whilst theft of assets by force are not. I doubt you can persuade Congress of something that is neither popular nor supported by moneyed interests, but best of luck.
The US Senate should say what its people think is right. In accordance with this they should condemn the invasion of Iraq. That will not happen outright. There will not be condemnations of the project as a whole for a long time. Anon, why do you think this is? Several answers would be good.
(1) And, perhaps more protestably, as a test of the effect of the weapon on civilians– why not just demonstrate the weapon to enemy leaders in a remote location otherwise? Why hush up the effects of radiation?
LJ–I understand your view, but don’t agree on the difference in evil, or don’t think the difference is very significant. It comes back to the bank robber vs. hate crime murder (or bank robber vs. serial killer). To me, killing someone because they get in the way is just as evil as doing it because they are a member of some group. The bank robber is logical and gives you a way out (don’t move and keep your head down), but he is still willing to kill you for no just reason.
There are mitigating circumstances for Hiroshima, unlike the bank robbery (which is more like the Mongol conquests) but then one gets into the question of whether terrorism is okay in a just cause.
This could also go off on a tangent about hate crimes legislation,about which I have no firm opinion. If passing a hate crimes law will cut down on the frequency of that brand of crime, then I’m for it, but I don’t think one murder is worse than another.
DJ
I see your point, and there may be an overton window phenomenon here to brand something else as the most evil so that it allows the ‘lesser’ evil to pass unnoticed, but the distinction between a cold-blooded logical murder and a crime of passion seems pretty set in our minds (and seems reflected in our laws), and to me, the distinction is similar. In one, the logic of genocide demands that you eliminate branch and root, whereas the logic of oppression is that you ‘merely’ make examples in order to cow the others.
The bank robber example is interesting, because wouldn’t you classify a person who stalked someone with the aim of killing them as being ‘worse’ than the bank robber? To me, I see genocide as being akin to stalking killer, which may be why it generates so much more approbation.
But I am sympathetic to what you say, so I’m not dismissing it out of hand. It may be that our reaction to genocide is a trained cultural one rather than one arising from logical considerations, but if it is and it helps to decrease the frequency of genocide occurring or acting to mitigate it in some way, like your feeling on hate crime legislation, I’m all for it.
Donald: but I don’t think one murder is worse than another.
A murder (or an assault) that is done not only to attack the individual member of a hated group, but to put every member of the hated group in a state of fear, is a double crime. When a gay man is hit in the face with a broken bottle for being overheard talking about his upcoming civil partnership, the assailant is both trying to smash in an individual man’s face, and trying to make sure that no other gay couples dare talk openly about their plans to wed in a straight pub because they will be afraid of being viciously attacked. Why should the second offense go unpunished?
Why did these deportations take place? Who organized them? If you forcibly relocate a large community of people out of their communities and they die on route during your forced relocation, why isn’t that sufficient for establishing a genocide? People and governments are, after all, responsible for the consequences of their actions, and if the consequence of a forced relocation is mass death — and if that suffering was foreseeable and not the consequence of an improbable sequence of events — then why do we need further documentary debate to establish that a genocide took place?
Everybody agrees that many Armenians were killed – mass slaughter or even ethnic cleansing are not disputed. Genocide means that there was INTENT to kill, premediated, instead of death through negligence of as a not unwanted side effect.
Armenia was part of the Ottoman empire for a few centuries, but wanted independence. So there allready was tension (and mass killings) as from the end of the 19th century. People don’t even know for sure how many Armenians lived in Armenia in 1915 because the figures differ greatly and quite a number say that the official Ottoman figures (1000000-1500000) were too low because the central government wanted to downplay their importance and the Armenians assisted because not registring meant that they wouldn’t have to pay taxes.
In WW1 the Russians and the Turks fought on different sides. The Armenians were part of Turkey but sympathized with the Russians (their other neighbours). The Russians had a hugh army of Armenian volonteers fighting against the Turks and it was believed that Armenia assisted the Russians. So the Turkish government decided to remove the threat by relocating the Armenians.
The dispute is about wether there was an official government policy to kill all Armenians or not. The governor of the region was convicted and killed after the war, but was he an individual with a grudge and opportunity or was he following orders? Telegrams of Turkish officials are circulating, but there is doubt about their authenthicity. If you want to use a comparison it is more about wether the death amongst the relocated native Americans was official policy (= genocide) or not.
After WW1 the Turks got Attaturk and Armenia became Russian (in stages, finalized in 1920 by occupation). It gained independency in 1991. Currently it is in heated dispute with Azerbijan. Armenia has currently militarily occupied 16% of Azerbaijan; over 800,000 mostly ethnic Azerbaijanis were driven from the occupied lands and Armenia; about 230,000 ethnic Armenians were driven from their homes in Azerbaijan into Armenia.
Interesting, Jes. That’s a good point, but let me be devil’s advocate (I first add that I think hate crime legislation is important, so I’m still not convinced about these, but want to see what you and others do with them) and give two reservations. The first is that essentially double jeopardy would occur, cause the person is being charged twice for one physical assault. The second is that there is an element of trying someone for what goes on in their head. We do do that in determining if it was passion versus cold blooded killing, but as we go deeper into that, we risk trying someone for thoughts that go on in their head. I believe that there was a case where someone was charged and convicted of child pornography charges because they had drawn images of children in sexual scenes and these scenes were on their hard drive. If I remember the case correctly, the prosecution made no attempt to show that the person has transmitted the scenes or distributed them in anyway. What the guy was convicted on was something that came out of his own head, and this as akin to thought police.
Having said that, I still think hate crimes are important in drawing a bright line. Dave Neiwart in the comments over at Balloon Juice makes the interesting point that he supports hate crimes legislation not because he’s liberal, but because he has a conservative law and order sensibility.
Here’s Rep. Harman explaining why, as a co-sponsor of the Armenian genocide resolution, she asked Lantos to withdraw it and voted against it in committee.
dutchmarbel, do you think that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians? (Put aside the Congressional resolution.)
LJ — “To me, I see genocide as being akin to stalking killer, which may be why it generates so much more approbation.”
Perhaps you mean “opprobrium” here?
liberal japonicus: The first is that essentially double jeopardy would occur, cause the person is being charged twice for one physical assault.
Well, the way in which hate crime legislation works in the UK (I don’t know enough about hate crime legislation in the US to say if it’s invariably the same) is that hate crime is taken into account in the sentencing, not in the conviction. When someone has been convicted of what has been determined to be a hate crime, the judge may then impose a more severe sentence. There are all sorts of aggravating and mitigating factors that a judge can take into account in imposing a sentence: this isn’t “double jeopardy”, it’s the normal way a judiciary behaves in assessing crimes and determining sentences.
but as we go deeper into that, we risk trying someone for thoughts that go on in their head.
This wouldn’t apply to hate crimes in the UK, where a person can only be sentenced for a hate crime if they have been convicted of a crime. In the UK it is not criminal to think bad thoughts, but if you translate those thoughts into behavior such as harassment, assault, or murder, you can be convicted of that: and thoughts alone cannot provide evidence that the person did it as a hate crime (sans court telepaths).
The example of the person who drew children in sexual situations is borderline. Was he drawing from life? If so, then his drawings were evidence that he had participated in criminal activity. A better example (which has also happened) would be if a commercial developer gets a series of photos of naked children playing together. They report the photos to the police; the police investigate: and find (a) that the series of photos was taken by the children’s mother, and are of her children playing in the family garden: or (b) that the series of photos was taken by a male neighbor, whose house overlooks the garden, and who has a string of child molestation non-convictions in his past. If the police bring charges of child pornography against the neighbor when they wouldn’t against the mother, which I think would be the case, they’re clearly doing so because of what they guess the thoughts in the neighbor’s mind to be…. and do you think they’re right to do so?
(In fact, though I’ve heard of parents/family members being queried by the police about photos of naked children, I’ve never heard of this by itself resulting in conviction. But I bet it would be enough to let the police get a search warrant for the neighbor’s computer and his house, to see if they could find any other evidence.)
“If you want to use a comparison it is more about wether the death amongst the relocated native Americans was official policy (= genocide) or not.”
I’d be much more eager to vote for a resolution condemning settlers on the American continent for engaging in genocide than I would be eager to vote for a resolution about Turkey. Are you trying to up my enthusiasm for doing justice, and the right thing?
Because the fact that the Native Americans were met with a lot of genocidal enthusiasm is hardly wrong. It was a horrible crime.
Was that your point? (What else could it be?)
I’d be much more eager to vote for a resolution condemning settlers on the American continent for engaging in genocide than I would be eager to vote for a resolution about Turkey.
I think the better analogy would be that if some random country voted a resolution condemning the genocide of the Native Americans, I might be sort of annoyed (in a nationalistic way) that they decided to pick that scab, but I certainly wouldn’t take to the streets to deny that it ever happened.
In my morning paper today, I saw a picture of members of some “left-wing political party” demonstrating in Turkey against the U.S. resolution. I thought to myself, what sort of left-wingers are these? Don’t they know they’re supposed to blame Turkey first?
“Well, the way in which hate crime legislation works in the UK (I don’t know enough about hate crime legislation in the US to say if it’s invariably the same) is that hate crime is taken into account in the sentencing, not in the conviction.”
Same here. For what it’s worth, this is another issue I stand with you on (sorry).
“The first is that essentially double jeopardy would occur, cause the person is being charged twice for one physical assault.”
This seems to be clear nonsense, lj. Charging someone twice would require two crimes. Multiple charges for the same offense, on the other hand, is normal. What are you talking about?
We may be working off different knowledge sets. I was a municipal court clerk; I also spent years working for law firms in various capacities, including as a legal secretary and paralegal. I’m reasonably familiar with the American justice system.
When you say that “double jeopardy would occur,” which just isn’t true, what are you talking about? You seem to be offering a hypothetical about that which is factual, and offering a falsehood, and I don’t understand why you suggest this is a reasonable thing to think about, given the whole, you know, not true thing.
“The second is that there is an element of trying someone for what goes on in their head. We do do that in determining if it was passion versus cold blooded killing, but as we go deeper into that, we risk trying someone for thoughts that go on in their head.”
Sure, that’s the norm. Mens rea. So what?
For some reason, people start going on about states of mind, using other phrases, whenever judging whether “hate,” i.e., prejudice against popular targets, is relevant, but have no problem with it being everywhere else in our justice system. We always judge people for what’s in their head. If you grab a necklace because you want it, it’s theft; if you accidentally snagged it in your cuff button, it isn’t. When are we planning on not judging people based on what’s in their head? Why is it that this comes up only when it’s a question of what people think about minorities?
Why am I even asking?
I’m not sure if I’ll have time to comment much today. Maybe, maybe not.
Anyway, Jes, I’m not opposed to hate crime legislation or genocide legislation, but am more concerned about what LJ calls the Overton window effect–making other sorts of war crimes seem less important. I haven’t thought or read enough about hate crimes issues to have a firm opinion. Maybe I should stick to the other example– killing witnesses during a robbery (which is logical) vs. what a serial killer does. I don’t want to say that the armed robber’s actions are less evil because he had a logical reason for doing it.
Mass slaughter as a logically thought out procedure to achieve victory doesn’t seem any better to me than a lunatic desire to wipe out some particular group. You might, of course, be able to reason more effectively with a logical killer than one driven by fanaticism, but that doesn’t make his actions less evil (IMO).
Steve,
If say, the Belgium government passed a resolution condemning genocide of Native Americans, are you absolutely certain that in the US there wouldn’t be a) fervent denunciations of all previous Belgian human rights abuses, b) rabid right-wingers calling for the bombing of Belgium, c) diplomatic arm-twisting to get the resolution withdrawn and even possibly d) some anti-Belgian demonstrations? I think the country that invented the ‘freedom fries’ is also rather sensitive to any external criticism.
Meanwhile, what are the chances of Chinese-Americans now getting a condemnation of the ‘Rape of Nanking’ passed? I think that’s an equally serious crime that the country perpetrating is still trying to deny happened decades later.
If say, the Belgium government passed a resolution condemning genocide of Native Americans, are you absolutely certain that in the US there wouldn’t be…
Oh, no, I suspect all those things you mentioned would occur. We’re a sensitive people. Hell, I get my dander up a little when a foreigner criticizes President Bush, and I think he’s the worst.
But I think the response certainly wouldn’t be to deny the genocide! The more measured response would be something like “hey, we feel we’ve dealt with this ourselves, why are you picking on us?”
the response certainly wouldn’t be to deny the genocide!
You bet your boots we would deny it. We would deny it just the way Turkey is: sure, lots of people died, but that was never really official federal policy, at least not long term, or, the population left after European diseases had killed off 80% was not viable anyway, or, there are lots of them left so that proves we weren’t trying to kill them all, and when we killed off entire tribes they weren’t really distinct ethnic/national groups from the ones we didn’t kill off, etc. Haven’t you heard all of these? I sure have.
Most people don’t study history. Actually, I’ll go further than that, most Americans hate and resent history on principle. We want to believe that the past does not bind us. Starting over is our great national myth. We get really upset when called to account for the sins of the past, because we don’t know about them, prefer not to think about them, and take any mention of them as an attack on our self-image. Think of all the Southerners who refuse to hear the obvious fact that the Confederate flag is the symbol of racist oppression.
Of course we would deny it. We deny everything.
Of course we would deny it. We deny everything.
No, we don’t.
Gary,
My points were formulated specifically concerning Jes’ comments on the general notion of hate crimes rather than any specific instantiation of them in a particular country and Jes answered them and asked some interesting follow up questions. Rather than get you involved, I take up the points over at TiO.
oh, and I forgot, farmgirl, you’re right, opprobrium is the word I wanted. Everyone else was worried about the captcha, I’m just trying to keep my 1st language…
dutchmarbel, do you think that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians? (Put aside the Congressional resolution.)
My first link expressed how I felt I thought. I don’t know for sure and am more or less with Guenter Lewy:
PM Erdogan invited the Armanians in 2005 to form a combined research group.
Gary:I’d be much more eager to vote for a resolution condemning settlers on the American continent for engaging in genocide than I would be eager to vote for a resolution about Turkey. Are you trying to up my enthusiasm for doing justice, and the right thing?
I not your eagerness to condemn settlers, but I was referring to the US government. You do realize a lot of forced relocations and death happened after the American revolution? You do realize that taking children and educating them ‘for their own good’ in another religion, language and culture is genocidal?
DJ: I’m with you on this one. I’m beginning to loose track of the conceptual distinctions here. There is ethnic cleansing, but then there is something called genocide that goes beyond ethnic cleansing and mass killing?? This, I assume, is not the Turkish position: I don’t think the Turkish government is fessing up to ethnic cleansing.
By the way, I’m not sure that killing by negligence (when the negligent entity is the state and therefore in a special relationship to its subjects) is much of an improvement. And, as someone asked earlier, how do you kill several hundred thousand people negligently?
To repeat what urks me: so much of the debate focuses around whether or not the Ottomans appropriately documented their crimes. Somehow this has been conceptually finnagled to the point where the eyewitness testimony of thousands of people who said “We were rounded up and people were shot” stands as evidence for nothing whatsoever towards the question of whether there was ethnic cleansing.
Another thing: the debate here is pitched as an insult to Turkishness. Not to the Turkish state, but to Turkishness itself: the cultural identity. If the argument is that there was ethnic cleansing on a vast scale but not organized ethnic cleansing, that might let the Ottoman government off the hook, but how does that let Turkishness off the hook?
I just feel a bait and switch is being tried here where people summon up arguments that don’t really lead to the conclusions they are trying to reach at.
not=note
dutchmarbel: You have to realize that the idea of cooperating with a Turkish group of denialist scholars sounds to Armenians to accepting an invitation from Ahmadinejad to join in on a Holocaust conference. So I don’t feel that that is grounds for criticism, given where the Armenian community is subjectively.
I’ve never been able to see why I can’t concede all of Lewy’s points and yet still think that there was a genocide. The no premeditation therefore no genocide argument doesn’t have any sway on me. This is because the alternative to premeditation is not just that Armenians were “in the wrong place with the wrong sympathies”.
to accepting=like accepting
Daniel Fried, testimony march 2007:
I think getting rid of article 301 in Turkey should be most important at the moment.
Ara: Maybe I’m naive, but I think that I would like Ahmadinejad to join a holocaust conference. Seeing the films shot by the allied forces that liberated the concentration camps. Judging the vast amount of documented abuse. But to stay on track; if they open all Ottoman archives that would be a welcome opportunity, wouldn’t it? Not matter wether you have an ideologically liking for your fellow scholar or not. And saying “denialist scholar” seems to imply that the Armanian scholers would be objective, which in turn would make YOU te naive party 😉
You seem to feel that genocide is another word for mass killings. Your statements about eyewitness reports about whole villages being round up collaborate with that viewpoint. However: nobody disagrees with the fact that whole villages were round up and that many people were intentionally slaugtered. As LJ said: the terminoligy is what matters, since genocide implies moral opprobrium (yes I had to look that up).
You say: “By the way, I’m not sure that killing by negligence (when the negligent entity is the state and therefore in a special relationship to its subjects) is much of an improvement. And, as someone asked earlier, how do you kill several hundred thousand people negligently?”.
Do you remember the discussions about the Lancet study? Do you realize that the number of excess dead has increased to a million at the moment? We are more documented now than we were 90 or 100 years ago, but we still have fierce discussions.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2901136.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3052373.ece
@John: I read your links, but they are more an illustration of the one-sided view people often take to be honest. It cites from sources that are not beyond doubt, and has quotations like:
Which I think is kind of leading and not very factual, don’t you?
wikipedia starts with: “Ottoman Armenian population size within the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1915 is a controversial topic. Most estimates range from 1.5 to 2.5 million” and ends with: “Most Western scholars believe the totality of the Armenian population within the Empire prior to 1915 to be between 1.8 and 2.1 million.”. That makes it hard to march three million…
My problem with this discussion is that it’s like you think nothing bad happend if you are not sure it is a genocide. But nobody denies that horrible things happened and many many people died. The whole difference is the *intent*. Unless you change the meaning of the word genocide to something like “every horrible thing were masses of people of one specific (religious/ethnic/geographic) group were killed”, which is what a lot of folk seem to think of – at least they seem to think that not knowing wether it was a genocide amounts to denying that that happened.
If we look at current discutable situations you see how hard it is to just look at one side of the story and assume they are right. Take Iraq: a million dead through intent or through negligence? Most folk I know assume that it was shear incompetence by this administration, but suppose you had to defend that to people who are convinced that it was intentional? Wouldn’t you have the same discussion with one side showing lot’s of eyewitness reports of all the bad things happening and the other side saying that it would be ridiculous to assume intent and that quite a lot was due to internal Iraqi conflicts, bad circumstances and the fact that a war was going on?
Suppose the Netherlands would have a resolution to recognize the Fallujah Massacre? Asking for apologies of the US government, reparations, prosecution of the folk responsible? Wouldn’t that be seen as a highly political move? Suppose France would do it? The UK? Turkey? Iran?
In Iraq, there’s debate over the scale of the death toll and some debate over the percentages –the Lancet study and the recent ORB poll both suggest far more deaths from air strikes than one would think from the news, and Lancet says 30 percent of the violent deaths were attributed to coalition forces. OTOH, Iraq Body Count, relying on mainstream press accounts, finds a much lower number of deaths caused by the coalition, and the bulk of those in the first two months of the war. In that version of events it’s mostly Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that accounts for the death toll, though some of the factions are or were allied with the US.
If it turns out that the US really has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with its own forces (and the majority of these would probably be civilian), then I’d say that wasn’t accidental. It wouldn’t fit the genocide definition–it would be the sort of killing that occurs in counterinsurgency campaigns when the occupying power doesn’t care about the effects of its firepower. That’d be a major war crime. Personally, I’m indifferent as to whether someone wants to call it “genocide”, because I’m tired of people tacitly assuming that massive crimes against humanity are less serious if they don’t fit the precise definition of “genocide”. My impression is that people bend and flex the definition from case to case anyway. People in the US used to say the Russians were engaged in genocide in Afghanistan. Saddam, famously, committed genocide against the Kurds. The Guatemalan government is said to have committed genocide against the Mayans. Certainly Turkey is more than guilty by those standards.
There’s no doubt that Turkey intended an ethnic cleansing at the very least–mass killing is a natural part of that process. But if the people in Turkey are all upset over being accused of genocide when all their country did 90 years ago was “only” ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, I have to say I don’t give a damn about their hurt feelings. Let them admit to having committed one of the worst crimes of the 20th Century–if they are sincere about this they’d have too much shame to get upset if someone uses the term “genocide” to describe it.
As for condemnations of the US, bring them on. I would applaud if other countries started holding us accountable for our war crimes. I might quibble about the use of the term “genocide”, but I wouldn’t get upset over it if I thought we were guilty of mass killings. The people of Turkey who object are acting like flag-waving American viewers of Fox News. That’s not a compliment.
But if the people in Turkey are all upset over being accused of genocide when all their country did 90 years ago was “only” ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, I have to say I don’t give a damn about their hurt feelings. Let them admit to having committed one of the worst crimes of the 20th Century–if they are sincere about this they’d have too much shame to get upset if someone uses the term “genocide” to describe it.
I agree with most of your post. It’s probabely just that from a practical point of view I’d rather have Turkey change their policy against minorities. I’d like article 301 to be abolished, the Kurds to be free to speak their own language, them admitting to having done bad things in their past, under different government, and being willing to change them.
The South-African committee of truth and reconsiliation was quite an eye opener for me. It made clear that moving on is sometimes more important than justice punishing people. Labels for political gain make me uncomfortable in any case (I really hate being manipulated), but if they might have an adversory effect, what’s the use of labelling?
Slightly late reply to hairshirthedonist (01:42) but: Americans are pretty good at denial, they just don’t bother with the aggressive version used by Turks (i.e. actively denying the obvious) because they pay far less attention to outsiders. Good example: a couple of years ago Ezra Klein (normally as smart and sensitive a blogger as you’ll find anywhere) described a trip to Amsterdam. He then said something along the lines of ‘wonderful place, but very hard to walk the streets without remembering the crimes commited there, and the people who don’t walk there anymore’. I have seen similar comments from other US commentators elsewhere, and I never see any of them adding something about the fact that they live in a land that was stolen and cleansed of its original inhabitants only a few generations ago. Equally, I went to the quite modern Museum of the West under the arch in St Louis, and there was a lot on the brave settlers and explorers, and not much on dead natives – You’d think the land was unooccupied…
There is no question this is a genocide and no question we should recognize it.
All the serious non biased scholars agree on this.
The names mentioned in denial (Gunter Lewy) are known for thier positions. Lewy is a rabid unexceptionalist. he says no genocide occurred except the Holocaust. That is an absurd position to take. He for example has written that no genocide against the Gypsies occurred in World War Two (!).
Lewy — and this is quite chilling — uses the exact method of denial described by Samantha Power! It is as if Lewy is channeling Goebbels and Irving at the same time.
Then there is the statement that Erdogan invited the examination of the archives. This is 100% false and everyone working in the field of genocide studies knows it.
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=68233
Scholars and journalists are arrested for the most innocuous statements on the Armenian genocide. It is hardly an inviting place.
On the question of timing, and why this is happening now, this has almost nothing to do with US politics, it is all about what has been coming out of Ankara for the past few years. If a successor state to Nazi German were to start denying the Holocaust we would have resolutions here.
So, can’t lie. Not a fan of the dems, but not excited about seeing my friends going off to Iraq.
So my (cynic) thought on this is that it could be an attempt to force the Simian Shrubbery to bring the troops home. Slowly knock out the allies to we can’t use them as air bases, etc. There’s no way we can really fight if we haven’t got a close enough base, right? So if we can’t fight, then the war id effectively over.
In my view, Turks get a bad rap, whether you define it as “genocide” or “one-sided mass killing.” Because, while the killing was carried out by Turks, it was instigated by Germany, fresh from, but not satisfied by, their genocide of Namibians, and eager for the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad. Germans, through an intensive propaganda campaign and other support, instigated the Young Turk “Holy War” and then calmly observed it. Partial rap sheet of German principals: Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf, Constantin von Neurath (German charge d’affairs at Constantinople, later Hitler’s first Foreign Minister) and lesser ones like Major Stange. The Turkish principals involved were hung by the Turks*, although some escaped to Germany. Three groups were killed: Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians – all Eastern Orthodox Christians.
I happen to be an American of German descent but Assyrian Orthodox Christian by faith. On the Armenian genocide topic I recommend the objective research by Berkeley historian Margaret Anderson, and that of Dr. Gabriele Yonan.
Regarding Berlin-on-Potomac’s (Washington’s) looming “recognition” of “Turk guilt,” it’s hardly surprising they seek to anger Turks against the US. They have, by their every action, been diligently angering the entire world against the US. They are supporting the PKK as Herr Bush ardently seeks to supplant Turkey’s secular government with a radical theocratic one, as was done in Iran in 1979, and now in Iraq. While the Shah and Saddam were intially installed by the US in the 50’s and 60’s resepectively, they outlived their usefulness, because both were firmly secular, brutally suppressing the jihad in their respective countries. Which didn’t fit with Washington & Bonn’s 21st-century gameplan for worldwide jihad, employed so effectively against the Soviets in the 80’s, and against Yugoslavia in the 90’s, and now employed effectively as the carrot-and-the-stick for the so-called “war on terror.”
dutchmarbel: If you’re going to talk about “sources that are not beyond doubt,” you shouldn’t turn around and cite Wikipedia.
Regarding intent, this section from the first article I cited is eminently clear:
I’d be all in favor of the Netherlands (or France, or the UK, or Turkey, or Iran) recognizing the Fallujah Massacre, asking for apologies, reparations, and prosecution of the people responsible. In fact, I think a reasonable response on Turkey’s part would be to pass a resolution recognizing the genocide of the Native Americans.
I had two comments on this over at BlueMassGroup.com here and here, and I won’t copy them here. From the latter comment, copying a piece from Juan Cole, it appears that Pelosi has a lot of wealthy Armenian Americans in her district, who are pushing for this resolution, regardless of the possible repercussions regarding US troops.
I’m half-Armenian and stay in touch with th eArmenian community, so I know what a sensitive topic the Armenian genocide is with them. All of us grew up with stories from teh survivors – my grandfather and grandmother being two of them.
But the political side of this – especially the timing – is inescapable. If any of you have any doubts how hostile Leftists are to this country, and how pervasive their influence is amongst the Democrats, this should dispel them.
Simply put, Putin is trying to bring the Cold War back using Islamic militants and South American cocaine traffickers, and a number of Democrats are going along with the idea, for what inducements I can only imagine. That’s why Pelosi has been warming up to the Assads of late. It’s also why they seem keen on destroying our relations with Turkey, a NATO ally – Russia has been an enemy of Turkey for centuries, and the hostility they have for the Turks is very deep seated.
Watch events unfold over the next few years, and see if I’m right.
Americans like you who mentioned that it was dumb to pass a resolution condemning Armenian Genocide are very dumb and ignorant. Our schools do not educate anything. 1.5 Millions of people were killed and you are saying it was dumb just because they are a close ally ?
So what happened if someone raped your sister and he was proven innocent just because he is a close friend of a judge ?
Americans like you who mentioned that it was dumb to pass a resolution condemning Armenian Genocide are very dumb and ignorant. Our schools do not educate anything. 1.5 Millions of people were killed and you are saying it was dumb just because they are a close ally ?
So what happened if someone raped your sister and he was proven innocent just because he is a close friend of a judge ?