THE GENOCIDE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
By Danny Kampf
Daily Colonial, DC
Oct 17 2007
Once, when faced with internecine skepticism over whether the West
would idle supine while Germany systematically murdered its Jews, Adolf
Hitler remarked: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of
the Armenians?" How telling those words are. More than six decades
have since come to pass and only now is their vile tale of inaction
beginning to be contradicted. Ex post facto just may have to retire.
It has been nearly a century since the Armenian Genocide. Mustering
God’s speed, putting the pedal to the metal and cruising away at
the blinding rate of bureaucratic inertia, the House Foreign Affairs
Committee passed a bill last Wednesday that called the genocide by
its proper name. Naturally, the Turks were outraged. Too soon? The
resolution was immediately denounced by Turkish politicians – as it
was praised by Armenian ones – and Turkey immediately withdrew its
ambassador to the United States for "consultations."
The bill’s momentum belongs to the Democrats and some Republicans,
but alas, not a veto-proof majority of them. And indeed, in what could
only make sense in the bizarro world of the Bush Administration, the
decider has decided on vetoing the bill should it pass Congress. For
someone who has based his legitimacy on the archetypical Wilsonian
concepts of spreading democracy and human rights as opposed to
pragmatic realism, denying genocide might strike you as a little
strange. I suppose seven years of groundless idealism is enough to
push anyone into the realist’s corner.
Bush doesn’t want to use the term "genocide" because it would anger
the Turks, a crucial ally in both his Global War on Terror and the
War in Iraq. Approximately 70 percent of our air cargo gets into Iraq
by way of Turkey. Food, water, and 1/3 of our fuel is trucked in from
there too. Turkey also has about 100,000 soldiers on the border with
Iraq that, if they ever decided to cross into the Kurdish North,
could create further nightmares towards any prospect of stability
there. The country also serves as an excellent base to outflank Anbar
province. There’s no doubt that Turkey has a lot of strategic value
to the United States. The question is, is that worth denying genocide?
Perhaps it would help us to frame this through a different lens. Say
everything in today’s world is exactly the same, except the roles of
Turkey and Iran have been switched and we don’t officially recognize
the holocaust rather than the Armenian Genocide. Would we really
defend holding off on calling the holocaust genocide so that Iran’s
bigots could help us out in Iraq?
Turkey is a country where insulting "Turkishness" is a crime, Mein
Kampf is a bestseller, and people like Hrant Dink, who bravely fought
for both Turkish and Armenian rights, are murdered by fascists in the
street. And we’re not going to take a stand? Canada, France, Russia,
Italy… even Uraguay have acknowledged the genocide and we can’t?
The Armenian Genocide saw the deaths of up to 1.5 million people
(from a community of 2 million). There were concentration camps,
forced deportations. People died in transit, their bodies lying
where they fell. Executions took place with poison, rifles, sabers –
whatever was at hand. Mass rape. Mass graves. In the words of Enver
Pasha: "The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and
the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall
destroy the latter through starvation." Churchill himself referred
to the genocide of the Armenians long before Hitler’s rise as a
"holocaust." If that’s not genocide, then I don’t know what is.
How can Bush denounce a man like Ahmadinejad for not acknowledging
the holocaust when he can’t seem to acknowledge one himself?
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