Facts, supposedly, are facts, and words, allegedly, have a meaning that should not be disregarded easily. That includes the word “genocide,” which dictionary.com defines as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”
The biggest and most famous genocide of the 20th century, and perhaps of all time, was the Nazi murder of approximately 6 million Jews during the Hitler period. The only good thing that can be said about it is that Germany has fully acknowledged this mega-crime, apologized and made no excuses for it since the fall of Hitler, publicly memorialized it in a variety of ways and tried to learn and internalize the proper lessons.
But the second biggest 20th century mass slaughter of a minority ethnic group, the murder of an estimated million to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians by Turkey during World War I, in Turkey and territories that Turkey occupied during the war, has never been properly acknowledged by Turkey.
Turkey explicitly rejects the term “genocide” to describe its role in the deaths.
There is perhaps some semantic basis for distinguishing what the Turks did to the Armenians from what the Nazis did to the Jews. And the word “genocide” hadn’t even been invented at the time all those Armenians were killed for the “sin” of being Armenians.
But until Turkey tells the truth about its crime and apologizes, it lacks standing for much sympathy in expressing offense at the use of the word for mass slaughter based on ethnic identity.
Nor, over recent decades, has the G-word been used by the government of the United States to refer to what Turkey did to Armenians, for fear of creating tension with its NATO ally.
Apparently, no U.S. president other than Ronald Reagan had ever used the word “genocide” to refer to the matter.
President Biden, to his credit in my humble opinion, became the second last week, and the first president since 1981 to use the word “genocide” on the day earmarked for observing the Armenian Genocide, keeping a campaign promise he had made.
During those 40 years, presidents chose to coddle the feelings of Turkey, an important NATO ally. Maybe that was understandable in some pragmatic sense, but I prefer to err on the side of truth-telling, and applaud Biden for his statement, which read in part:
“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.
“One and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. … We remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring.”
You’ll note that, presumably out of concern for the feelings of a NATO ally, Biden managed to avoid the actual country-name “Turkey” in his statement, sliding by with “Ottoman-era Armenian genocide.”
But the Ottoman Empire refers to Turkey in its pre-World War I incarnation. Still, Biden’s statement was the strongest acknowledgement in decades. Biden also said:
“Over the decades Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history. We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”
The Turks who committed the genocide are all gone. The Turks who deny it occurred, or dispute whether it should be called “genocide,” or wish it would not be mentioned should be told to come to terms with this significant blot on their national escutcheon (as the Germans have long since done), stop quibbling over the semantics, apologize, and figure out how to make whatever amends might be appropriate for the crime itself and the century-plus of denial.
That, of course, is up to them. So far, they have mostly been doubling down on half-assed denials of their accountability and quibbling over whether the million-plus deaths, and the way they occurred, qualify as a “genocide.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted a reply to Biden’s statement that managed to admit nothing and deny nothing but nonetheless accuse Biden of opportunism:
“Words cannot change or rewrite history. We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice. We entirely reject this statement based solely on populism.”
My mom taught me long ago that you can’t apologize for something without acknowledging you did it or did anything at all.
A more detailed overview of the Turkish genocide against ethnic Armenians living under Turkish rule in this period is here, from the Washington Post.
Turkey should hire some new spokesperson(s) to investigate Biden’s claim. Lindsey Graham comes to mind. In his view, the U.S. has no systemic racism.
The 130 million dollars of campaign expenditures by Jamie Harrison may have been better spent just as a bribe to make Lindsey go away.
Or, Jeffery Epstein’s island retreat is likely for sale for a lot less.
And then there’s the role of Kurdish militia in carrying out the Armenian genocide.
The Ottomans preferred not to have native Turks in their military (Janissaries), favoring foreign mercenaries as being more likely to be loyal to the Ottoman government.
The explanation for not apologizing can be found by carefully analyzing the memorable past apologies of Erdogan, Putin, Jong-un, Bolsonaro, Duterte and Trump.
Authoritarians apologize for nothing.
And for Trumpians, I’ll give you this piece of advice my Mom gave me decades ago:
“You’re known by the friends you keep”
While a putative modern democracy, Turkey appears to be far more of an authoritarian regime, with its military routinely engaging in coups–usually to counter even more reactionary civil government seeking to set up religious-based rule! Obviously Turkey’s current (lifetime) president is an open authoritarian, one that had the ridiculous Trump in thrall with his power. So this is not a society or government that is ever going to have much interest in looking at abuses against minority ethnic groups undertaken a century ago. Admitting that one’s authoritarian forebears engaged in ethnic massacres is just not going to be on the agenda when human rights are a secondary concern.
I’m not really up on this, but what’s the position of the US government on our relentless assaults on the last vestiges of the native tribes in the 19th Century? Was there an official “apology”? (I do remember official apologies to the Japanese-Americans interned during WWII.) But we’ve got our own history of refusing to acknowledge history. I’d go so far as to say the German example is really quite an outlier in this area. Did the Soviets ever “apologize” to the Ukrainians for Stalin’s totally-engineered “famine” of the early 30s, that apparently killed millions? I don’t think that’s ever gonna be on Czar Putin’s agenda, either.
And one has to wonder of the value of an “apology” without parallel efforts to meaningfully redress the wrong, such as the massive appropriation of Armenian property by the Ottomans. No doubt an understanding of that fact also has something to do with the Turks’ selective memory here.
Finally, one should note that these two enormous 20th Century genocides took place during wartime, and indeed the war was used as the cover or excuse for why the massacres (of unarmed civilians!) were somehow “necessary”. Many modern societies seem to think that they (and their soldiery) are entitled to do literally anything in war, despite all the Geneva Conventions, another reason to studiously avoid having anything to do with it. Were the armies of antiquity really any worse?
Good points.
I’m not aware of any Soviet / Russian apology for Stalin’s depredations in Ukraine after coming to power, and the U.S. government has certainly never apologized to the dozens of native tribes whose members were annihilated over the course of the 19th century, and whose land was simply appropriated by the ancestors of most of the people reading this.
The current issue of “The Atlantic” has an interesting cover article posing the idea that our national parks be returned to their original land owners for governance and administration, with, if I understand the article correctly, the National Park Service being absorbed into tribal administration. Instead of private contractors making money from accommodations and recreational facilities at the parks, the money would go to the tribes on whose land the park was located. Not quite reparations, but not so far removed as to be in a different ethical universe, either. One side effect might be better maintenance of park facilities, as Congress has underfunded the NPS for decades.
In any case, as the 20th, and now the 21st centuries have show us, we obviously have our own blind spot(s) when it comes to …um …reluctance to admit our collective role in treating others inhumanely. Nazi Germany was beyond awful, but at least the Germans (most of them) admit it, have done so publicly, and at least made efforts to make amends for past atrocities. Recent treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 notwithstanding, little or nothing along those lines has come from our government regarding the nation’s original inhabitants, and recent Republican-backed voting laws (not to mention other events that have gained national publicity) in multiple states illustrate that we haven’t yet owned up to our own cultural blind spot regarding race.
In this regard, one of my favorite lines comes from the late Roger Ebert, writing in 2004 about a film that featured a character most of us would regard as a pariah: “We are quick to forgive our own trespasses, slower to forgive those of others. The challenge of a moral life is to do nothing that needs forgiveness. In that sense, we’re all out on parole.”
“The current issue of “The Atlantic” has an interesting cover article posing the idea that our national parks be returned to their original land owners for governance and administration . . .”
A chance to put in a little plug for The Experiment, the podcast from the Atlantic. The guest last week was Anton Treuer, discussing the idea of returning the parks to their original owners.
The dates for the Shoah (Holocaust) appear to be ambiguous.
While many historical sites refer to 1941 (the US date for the start of WWII), Kristalnacht and the German invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred in 1938, and some sources date the Shoah to Hitler’s rise in 1933.
It’s not as simple as a wartime justification; antisemitism was already there.
Hi Paul. There’s no doubt that Hitler had a known and publicly declared policy of bellicose antisemitism when he took power in 1933, and that the official and unofficial harassment of German Jews ratcheted ever upward as the decade progressed.
But as far as I am aware, the actual massacres of Jews only began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and these were “smaller scale” compared to what was to come. I’d say the actual genocide began in earnest in June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. It was then that the SS Einsatzgruppen, following in the rear of the German armies, began the systematic round-up and machine-gunning of thousands of Jews. The Nazi “explanation” given to and by German generals was that these obviously poverty-stricken and helpless Jews had somehow engineered the war (of all absurdities), and that they were somehow responsible for the guerrilla resistance that was emerging in the rear areas.
So June 1941 is when I would personally date the start of the Holocaust if we are going to speak of it as a genocide, but September 1939 is equally plausible. In both cases it was the cover of war and militarist nationalist invasions that provided both the opportunity and cover for deadly massacres of unarmed civilians (men, women and children) by uniformed soldiers following official orders. Of course deep seated antisemitism in central Europe existed long before those dates.
Interesting recent books on this subject are “Bloodlands” by T. Snyder and “The German War” by N. Stargardt.
Thanks for your observations.
Your point about the national parks raises the important issue of what exactly is really to be gained by “apologies” for massive historical deprivations of human rights, such as the displacement of the native peoples of North America. (We’ll leave aside Polk’s bogus war of aggression against Mexico in 1849.) The national park revenue issue seems a perfectly plausible approach to at least debate. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that having native peoples administer the parks would likely be far more beneficial for the health and future of the parks than having them dependent upon perpetual maladministration and under-funding by a penny-pinching Congress in post-Reagan DC. Of course, the parks would first have be taken out of the massive backlog of current decades-long neglect.
And as if on cue for this discussion, I read today that famous “conservative” icon, serial prez candidate and (now) TV yapper Rick Santorum just offered the informed opinion that “we built a nation from nothing” in North America when Europeans showed up and began displacing the native occupants. We’ll leave aside that these Europeans also quickly imported African slavery and slave labor into the bargain, which may have also contributed to the “building” of America. Also leave aside that those who actually arrived in the 16th Century were European colonists, certainly not “Americans”, and that it was they that oversaw the building of the European-style infrastructure that (white) “Americans” inherited upon their rebellion from the British crown in 1776.
Of course, Santorum’s (additional) idea that native culture had no effect upon colonial America and “American culture” could only be maintained by someone profoundly ignorant. So as we started this little discussion, many in America also have a hard time acknowledging its history….
“Truth teller” Biden is dismissing the genocide against the Uighur population in China calling it a “different norm.”
It’s wonderful to see with what open minds the nation’s “conservatives” view the new democratically-elected and democratically-legitimate president. Go, Team Conservative!
Where did you find this little nugget?
Various right-wing agitprop sources have taken this comment out of context. If Mr. Gotzman had read the full remarks President Biden made (I know, I know), he would know that the “different norms” remark was part of an explanation that the President of the United States will speak out about human rights.
Thanks. What’s so comical in all this is that Biden has been closely involved with American foreign policy for over 40 years, and probably has the greatest experience in this area of any president in history. His history is one of being all-in with the military industrial complex, hawkish views on communism, and a reliable supporter of almost every self-defeating and illegal war that Repubs and neocons had proposed. He most certainly was not the first choice of demonic progressives, especially in this area.
Yet naturally upon Biden’s election to the presidency, the “conservative” Noise Machine must pretend he is the foreign policy equivalent of Noam Chomsky and 1960s Jane Fonda rolled into one. Disinformation run rampant, but I guess they will believe anything…
Its weird that you say that, because a quick Google search shows that the Biden administration has imposed sanctions for the treatment of the Uighurs.
Do you just make this stuff up?