Inarguable

Speaking of Krikorian… How many of the movement conservatives objecting to the resolution also support open immigration? They’ve called this pandering to Armenian constitutents (when they’re not calling it a deliberate attempt to sabotage the war) (or denying the genocide altogether) but don’t they know that the magical assimilative power of America means that only a bigot worry that ethnic groups will increasingly lobby their own interests?

I’m usually sympathetic to Krikorian’s pov, but I diagree to some extent here. I think much of the controversy over this resolution is precisely about the appropriate limits to the polite fictions of diplomacy.

Daniel, thanks for discussing this topic. The truth about such matters is important.

Once we have gone down the road of commemorating one genocide to the point of building a museum about it on the Mall in DC, and we have a significant minority concerned with a second one, it’s unseemly to recognize the first and not the second. Perhaps it would have been better not to go down that road, in the first place, given that “man is the wolf of man” and picking at historical scabs can be an endless process, but we did.

Back in the Cold War days, I seem to remember “Captive Nations Week” for the Baltics and others. That, of course, gibed with our foreign policy at the time.

If the Ukrainians and Cambodians want resolutions, so be it.

I’m not sure which of the various Armenia-related posts this best belongs under, so I might as well put it here:

According to the Wikipedia map linked to below, the legislatures of forty U.S. states have voted to recognize the genocide, as have nine of Turkey’s fellow NATO members (I think - are Slovakia and Lithuania NATO members yet? If not, then seven). A New York Times article a week or two ago mentioned that Reagan referred to it in a speech as a genocide, although no other President has ever done so. Would Turkey really go any more beserk over this resolution than over these past actions, or this all a bluff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ArmenianGenocideRecognition.png

Yes, both Slovakia and Lithuania are NATO members now. Although, I think I see ten NATO members on that map: Canada, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece.

The view that this is all a devious, Machiavellian plot by Pelosi (that notorious super-genius who doesn’t even seem to understand the basic macro-economic concept of supply and demand) to starve the troops to death seems to be the opinion of about 95%+ of the posters at Redstate and about 80%+ at Free Republic. What struck me about that response was not its sheer callousness but rather its utter counter-intuitiveness, and how it simply couldn’t be an amazing coincidence that they all came to this rather odd conclusion independently. I wonder who put that line out there, and why.

In their “defense,” about half of the lefty bloggers who’ve written about the resolution seem to be completely unconcerned about the substance of resolution and instead have focused almost exclusively on the “hypocrisy” of a nation with a history of slavery, etc. condemning someone else’s atrocities. I might have some sympathy for this argument if they would have brought up this objection to the construction of dozens of Holocaust museums over the last twenty five years, to the anti-apartheid campaign, or when they themselves want Washington to condemn Israel. The other half of the left blogosphere is just giddy about a potential campaign issue to use against the GOP in 2008.

I’m along the lines of Grumpy Old Man here, once we have recognized one genocide (did the U.S. government ever formally declare the Jews in Europe, or the Rwandans or anyone else genocide? ) it puts us and our government in the position of serving as arbiters on whether one set of mass killings or the other is a genocide, even if the evidence is obvious. I’d rather we not, but short of making yet another declaration along the lines of “The United States will no longer declare genocides” we seem to be in for a long road of this. The process will likely be endless, the Ukrainians, the Cambodians, various Native American groups, the Darfuris, one group of Iraqis against Saddam, another group of Iraqis against us, Serbians, Bosnians and so on. I suppose it ties up various ethnic lobbies in the U.S. for a while, but it would energize them too.

D’oh! I carefully counted the European NATO members but forgot all about our neighbo[u]rs to the north.

I tend to agree with the analyses of Grumpy Old Man and Herman. Who made the U.S. Congress the judge of this sort of thing? But once the idea has been raised, I suppose Congress is obliged to support it rather than seem to be condoning a despicable lie.

As if on cue, Paul Craig Roberts, perhaps looking for an editorship at Counterpunch:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/071015_iraq.htm
has the U.S. on the hook for Iraqi genocide.