WHO MADE THE U.S. JUDGE AND JURY OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE?
examiner.com
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March 7 2010
The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, brazenly displaying a
combination of meretricious arrogance, political expediency and
historical amnesia, voted to recognize Ottoman Turkey’s 1915 ruthless
massacre of over one million ethnic Armenians as "genocide".
Categorizing these acts as such is certainly justifiable, but it is
also fair to wonder why the U.S. gets to determine this, considering
America is guilty of its own genocidal crimes that have evaded proper
classification.
Resolution based on politics not morality. Although the end result is
just, please do not for a second believe the resolution was based on
anything but political survival and greed. Members of this committee
passed the bill not because they believe in the Armenian cause,
but because they want to get re-elected. And though I do believe the
Armenian lobby is fighting for the truth, there’s no doubt they are
quite a potent and influential lot as pointed out by former U.S.
diplomat Lincoln McCurdy who is now the President of the Turkish
Coalition of America:
In the United States there are nearly one million Armenian Americans,
concentrated in a number of congressional districts, who support a
lobby that spends an estimated $40 million annually on furthering its
agenda, which revolves around recognition of an ‘Armenian Genocide.’"
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is doing everything in his power
to halt the bill in its tracks. But it’s not as if Obama has some
moral clarity the others lack considering in 2008 candidate Obama
said: "as President I will recognize the Armenian genocide.". The
only difference being that Obama is looking at the situation through
a prism of geopolitical realism, and the reality is the U.S. needs
Turkey’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and needs Turkey’s
Incirlik military base for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Race murder by any other name… Back in Turkey, Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the entire process a parody. Erodgan’s
assessment is spot-on, yet Turkey’s knee-jerk defensiveness does
not help their cause, especially when the world now knows the Turks
underreported the actual number of Armenians slaughtered during
deportation by at least half a million. What’s even more impressive
is how the Turkish government was able to keep the real figures
hidden for generations. Putting aside the ulterior motives of U.S.
politicians for a minute – let’s be clear: it was genocide.
At surface it may appear to be a semantics pissing contest, yet the
word "genocide" does carry a more heinous connotation than "slaughter"
or "mass killing", for it signifies that much more flagitious
underlying motives and objectives are at play. Attempting to rid
the earth of an entire ethnicity is more psychologically twisted
than standard warfare. Eliminating a population based on racist
ideology is much worse than simply killing folks based on, say,
imperialistic expansion or the protection of oil interests. About a
year ago Christopher Hitchens wrote an article that could have been
written yesterday about the wordsmithing game with respect to this
slaying of countless Armenians:
Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U.S. ambassador in
Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some
ways more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department,
conveying on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the
provinces of Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter
of the Armenians as "race murder." A vast archive of evidence exists
to support this claim. But every year, the deniers and euphemists
set to work again, and there are usually enough military-industrial
votes to tip the scale in favor of our Turkish client."
American hypocrisy. The only thing more detestable than Turkey’s
persistent and immoral disavowals is America’s self-righteousness. As
said, there is no denying the atrocities certainly qualify as genocide,
but anyone with the faintest appreciation of history should raise a
brow at the American utter lack of self-perspective.
If the U.S. is going to raise such a ruckus and chastise a nation for
crimes committed nearly a century ago, what about American crimes
within the last 60 years? What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The
dropping of two atomic bombs that wiped out a quarter of a million
people may not meet the textbook definition of genocide but it
exemplifies evil nonetheless.
What about the pacification campaign launched by the U.S. on the heels
of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) which claimed the lives
of 1.4 million Filipinos? In November 1901, the Manila correspondent
of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:
The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have
been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children,
prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from
lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was
little better than a dog…."
According to a U.S. General’s report, American troops were responsible
for over 600,000 dead men, women and children on the island of Luzon
alone, of which Gore Vidal wrote:
If this is not a policy of genocide (no dumb letters on the dictionary
meaning of the word), it will do until the real thing comes along."
How can the U.S., as well as Europeans, condemn Turkey when the
North American Indian population had been reduced from an estimated
12 million in 1500 to just over 200,000 in 1900? Professor of ethnic
studies at the University of Colorado Ward Churchill described it as
"vast genocide . . . the most sustained on record." Historian David E.
Stannard wrote that Native Americans had undergone the "worst human
holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents
non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens
of millions of people."
Many will argue that most Native American deaths were caused by
disease, yet there is no question the U.S. government set in motion
policies aimed at eradicating entire tribes. At a minimum, the U.S. is
certainly guilty of cultural genocide. There is hard evidence that
suggests there was a deep-rooted ideological motivation behind
these policies. Euro-Americans saw themselves as the torchbearers
of civilization and saw Native Americans as obstacles who failed to
cultivate the vast wilderness, thus their extinction was inevitable.
The prevailing thought was that natives needed to adjust to
Euro-American society in order to survive, and this philosophy of
assimilation resulted in the destruction of Native American culture.
When assimilation failed, the U.S. passed legislation such as the
Indian Removal Act of 1830 as a solution, which directly led to the
infamous humanitarian disaster referred to by the Cherokee as the
Trail of Tears, a forced death march that killed thousands.
This destruction of Native-American communities and culture was not by
chance nor mandated by fate, but was a direct result of governmental
policies and actions. Not unlike what the Turks did to the Armenians.
There’s nothing wrong with calling the Armenian massacre genocide,
so long as we apply the same standard to our own historical sins.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
