Press & Sun-Bulletin, NY
May 13 2007
Commentary
Denying Armenian genocide an atrocity in itself
David Rossie
Commentary
Some Things Never Change Department:
"UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations dismantled an exhibition on the
Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening after the
Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in
Turkey at the time of World War I." — The New York Times.
Members of the Flat Earth Society take heart. Your cause is not lost.
Global warming deniers stand firm. Dick Cheney’s oil company pals may
yet pay off enough needy science professors to lie for them.
If the Turks, despite the mountains of evidence, including
eye-witness testimony, can get away for 92 years with pretending that
the slaughter of more than a million Armenians didn’t happen, then
there’s hope for any group or government determined to keep reality
at arm’s length.
It boggles the mind that after all these years, all the books, all
the eye-witness accounts and, yes, the trials when some of the
perpetrators were called to account and admitted their roles in the
atrocities, although most of them escaped punishment, that we are
still being confronted by an official cover-up of that monstrous
deed, and the governments of the world, not to mention most of the
newspapers that cover them, are willing to put up with it.
In some European countries, you can go to prison for denying the
Nazi’s Holocaust that took the lives of 6 million Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals and assorted others.
The Cheney/Bush Gang’s foreign policy operatives won’t talk to the
Iranians in large part because their prime minister is a Holocaust
denier.
But they, as have generations of their predecessors, suck up to the
Turks and go along with their ghastly lies. And now the UN rolls over
for them as well.
And why not?
In 1939, after his armies had laid waste to Poland and his then
friends the Soviets had carted thousands of them off never to be seen
again, Hitler said in reference to the Poles: "Who, after all, is
today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?"
Well, plenty of his countrymen had spoken of that destruction,
because as German officers posted to Turkey after the start of the
WWII, they had witnessed it.
What brought the Turks down upon the Armenians? Apparently the fact
that they were Christians was reason enough. But there were other
reasons as well. There were allegations, false as it turned out, that
the Armenians were spying for the English and French, despite the
fact that thousands of Armenians were serving in the Ottoman Army.
Service in the German Army in the same war didn’t spare that
country’s Jews 20 years later.
It’s probably worth noting, too, that the Turks were enthusiastically
aided in slaughtering Armenians by the Kurds.
In his definitive account of the Armenian genocide contained in his
book, "The Great War for Civilization," Robert Fisk gives the lie to
the Turks’ fiction, as have others before him. Fisk calls what
happened an upper case Holocaust as , he notes, did Winston Churchill
before him.
The German novelist Franz Werfel described a brief but doomed
instance of Armenian resistance in his book, "The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh." And, Fisk notes, in a chilling preview of what was to come, a
Nazi newspaper in 1939, attacked "America’s Armenian Jews for
promoting in the USA the sale of Werfel’s book."
The Armenian genocide was an atrocity. Going along with the people
who keep insisting that it didn’t happen, even at this late date, is
another atrocity.
Rossie is former associate editor of the Press & Sun-Bulletin; his
column appears on Sunday.
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