It amuses me greatly that Turkey is so vociferous in its assertion that the "mass killing" of Armenians that the Ottoman Turks perpetrated during World War I was not genocide.
Merely a mass killing.
(Thank goodness that's cleared up!)
While I appreciate the tactic of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and loudly humming "The Stars & Stripes Forever" while someone else points out the truth, this has become just a tad ridiculous. The Turks are quick to point out why it isn't genocide...
A) It wasn't directly orchestrated by the government (unless you look into the matter).
B) Only 300,000 Armenians were killed (or was it over a million? I suppose once you hit six figures, the rest is gravy).
C) The word genocide wasn't coined until the 1940s (best reason yet!).
Turkey wishes so desperately to join the EU and be considered a cosmopolitan European nation yet can't seem to own up to what was done within their own borders 90+ years ago? Let them cool relations with the United States. Let them beat their chests in public and trot out revisionist historians to explain why the systematic elimination of hundreds of thousands of Armenians was simply inter-racial skirmishing during the war. I for one refuse to listen any more. If the prospect of a non-binding resolution terming the event genocide passing a House committee is driving the Turkish government around the bend, then I for one can hardly wait to see what happens when it sails through the full House.
What the Turks need to understand is simple: rational people don't hold the current government responsible for what the Young Turks did during the war - they hold them responsible for refusing to acknowledge the truth. It's hard to consider a state a legitimate voice in the modern world when they refuse to acknowledge their own past faults. It seems to be this would be something akin to the U.S. claiming that they never allowed slavery, but did have an extensive African guest worker program prior to the Civil War. Utterly ludicrous, but that's what we're seeing today.
I wish the Erdogan government would come to realize this and proceed accordingly, but they'll use patriotic fervor and anti-American sentiment to whip up further support for themselves. What this accomplishes outside of a brief wider mandate remains entirely unclear to me. I tire of the notion that there are lists of countries we are allowed to offend and and lists which we are not allowed to offend. I'm rather in favor of speaking the truth, and if that means embarrassing some nation because they refuse to acknowledge their faults, then so be it.
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Matt, I agree with your sentiment that Turkey should not ignore and/or make excuses about wrongs it committed. I also tend to agree that we should not ignore atrocities committed by friends but condemn the atrocities by enemies. However, the House's passing of this condemnation is a transparent attempt to continue to undermine US relations with a Turkey involving Iraq. The Democrats don't have the balls or the votes to pull the troops out, so they will outright attempt to destroy the war effort through a backchannel. I understand people don't want their patriotism questioned, but this blatant;y unpatriotic because it will cause further unrest in an already tense situation.
I understand motivations in this situation. It's pretty sad - and, incidentally, I think there are enough Democrats who realize what the true motivations are here that the actual resolution isn't going to pass.
It's sad that support or opposition to this resolution has nothing to do with the actual matter at hand on either side of the aisle.
On the flip side, the Hawks and the Vikings won last week, so maybe I should just be happy and move on with life.
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