The Brandeis Hoot, NJ
Oct 19 2007

Dial D for Denial
or How I learned to stop worrying about history and love genocide
By Jon Lange

Someone once asked Marcel Ophüls, a director whose films The Sorrow
and the Pity and Hôtel Terminus changed the way a generation of
Europeans thought about fascist collaborationism, what it was like
spending so much of his time interviewing Nazis. `Oh I get along with
Nazis,’ he responded.`We share something in common: an interest in
the past. I share more with them than I do with most people today who
don’t care about the past.’

Last week, President Bush demonstrated that he cares about past. The
House of Representatives is trying to pass a long overdue resolution
recognizing the Armenian Genocide. The massacre and forced
deportation of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire between
1915 and 1917 marked the beginning of a golden age of mass murder
during which technology and ideology came together in perfect
symbiosis and made it possible to do in a few years something that
used to take centuries viz. exterminate an entire ethnic, religious,
or national group.

Bush has come out firmly against the House resolution. In so doing he
took the standard line that Turkish nationalists have been towing for
decades. The argument goes something like this: Sure, a lot of
Armenians died, but 20 million people died during the First World
War, so we really don’t have to call this particular slaughter
genocide. Bush’s denial of the Armenian Genocide is based on simple
political calculations. The US needs Turkish cooperation to ship
military supplies for its own mass murder in Iraq, and the Americans
want to make sure that Turkey doesn’t invade Kurdistan. Denying
genocide is a price Bush has shown that he is all too ready to pay as
long as this denial furthers US imperialism.

If the Armenian Genocide denier’s argument sounds vaguely familiar to
you, you’re not alone. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes a similar tact when
talking about the Nazi Holocaust. Ahmadinejad famously told NBC’s
Brian Williams, `In the second World War, over 60 million people lost
their lives. They were all human beings. Why is it that only a select
group of those who were killed have become so prominent and
important?’

This kind of hypocrisy and opportunism is exactly what I’ve come to
expect from the Bush Administration, but there is some good news. For
the first time in nearly seven years, Bush and I have something in
common. We both care about the past, albeit in different ways. I
agree with Orwell that we can’t obliterate history for political
purposes. For Bush, on the other hand, history is a tool which he can
use to denounce his enemies and which he can ignore when denial
advances his political goals.

Perhaps this resolution will scuttle the long-standing
American-Turkish alliance. If that’s the case, I say let it drown.
Any relationship build on a foundation of lies is doomed to collapse.
Even the most elaborate diplomatic dance will not resurrect dead
Armenians and no alliance is so essential that we should deny a
genocide in order to protect it.

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