Via Massie, I see that Fallows wrote:
The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn’t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what’s right. But it’s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey’s current government and people 90 years late.
Er, so it’s willfully self-indulgent to stand up for what’s right? What do you call it when you permit those in the wrong to prevail? Virtuous self-sacrifice? As the last couple of weeks has made quite clear, it isn’t just “many Turks” who deny the genocide, but a small army of water-carrying American apologists as well. Is it “self-indulgent” to try to defeat willing collaborators in genocide denial?
There is something deeper wrong with Fallows’ response. He is not alone in making this kind of argument, so this isn’t aimed just at him. There is the idea that unless you simultaneously condemn every act of genocide or anything that might reasonably be defined as genocide in the history of the world, you really shouldn’t say anything about one particular genocide. This is a very strange view to take. Rather than strengthening the case against recognition and drawing attention to the particular genocide, it simply reminds us of how many such exterminationist campaigns most people never give a second thought. It reminds us how lopsided and arbitrary our commemoration of past genocides has been up till now, and underscores how poor and limited our historical memory is. There is something particularly strange about those who actually know about these other slaughters and wish to cite them as reasons for not acknowledging this or that genocide. They might cry, “What about the Ukrainians?” But should it ever come time to commemorate the Holodomor, they will turn around and cry, after having belittled the Armenian genocide resolution and the history that it represents, “What about the Armenians?”
The odd thing is that this push to recognise and acknowledge an historical event requires very little of a nation. Americans are not being called on to intervene in someone else’s conflict, nor are we being asked to take sides in complex, little-understood struggles on the other side of the world. The only costs that we might incur derive from the threats of a putative ally. Americans are being asked to acknowledge, through their representatives, the basic and obvious truth about a terrible, state-organised act of terror and violence against innocent people, and in response their representatives are being intimidated with invocations of the importance of this so-called ally in the “war on terror.” The absurdity of it is plain for all to see.
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October 19th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Roach
Of course, I doubt Fallows would say it’s not wrong to lecture Germany, Poland, and their neighbors on what their ancestors did 60 years ago.
That said, it is a bad idea to get the US Congress in the contentious historical debate subject. Do we really wan them dispensing favor and abuse on every country on earth and its historical record. And it is also a bad idea to get them into this when we have troops on the field dependent on Turkey. I think the practical consequences are simply too real for our troops in the field. There is no reason to do this to allys when we’re at war. If we could call Stalin “Uncle Joe,” surely we can shut our traps about the Armenians, at least at the congressional level and at least for now.
The “it’s the right thing to do” argument sounds like the kind of idealist clap-trap we usually hear from George Bush and Nancy Pelosi when they’re talking about Rwanda and Darfur and other third world hell holes. The US government shouldn’t generally be in the historical judgment business, in my opinion, and that includes Germany, Rwanda, Israel, China etc.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Daniel Larison
It seems to me that it is the Turks who are threatening concrete measures against us in wartime. Surely, it is their (frankly irrational)behaviour that deserves the overwhelming bulk of criticism, rather than the symbolic resolution calling on the President to acknowledge something obvious. Allies shouldn’t be in the business of threatening to cut off supply lines in wartime, but that is what Turkey is talking about doing.
It also seems to me that the timing is never going to be considered good enough to make this statement. Seven years ago, Ankara threw the same fit, even though it did not have as much leverage as it does now. In another seven years, it will be the same story–important strategic ally must not be alienated, etc. I have been generally very sympathetic to Turkey’s real concerns about security, the PKK and the war. We should work with Turkey on those real security issues, and should have heeded their warnings about the war. That is what proper realism based on tangible interests dictates. It does not require us to participate in a denialist lie for the sake of keeping up appearances.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Roach
Be that as it may, we need them, they know it, and it behooves us to play nice. I also as a general matter don’t like the idea of the US or any other government getting into the historical judgment business. It seems an exercise in vanity. The real hypocricy is not this resolution–which is a dumb idea in my view–but that we take opinions on everything from Poles putting crosses up at Auschwitz to the Sudeten Germans, but somehow we ignore the Armenians for the same reasons we should probably not make too big of a stink about the internal affairs of many other nations, including the Burmas and Israels of the world.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Zarathustra
“Seven years ago, Ankara threw the same fit, even though it did not have as much leverage as it does now. In another seven years, it will be the same story–important strategic ally must not be alienated, etc.”
Along these lines, Senate Minority Leader McConnell let the cat of out the bag today and explicitly stated that Congress should never pass this resolution at any time, thus confirming that the GOP company line of the past two weeks, that this resolution will “starve our troops,” was little more than the cheap drivel that we always knew it was.
In any case, a 12-15% longer trip from the East Coast to Iraq, while not an insignificant trifle that can be lightly dismissed outright, won’t lead to a single soldier going without his rations. (Somehow we manage to provision the AFB at Diego Garcia) That an overwhelming majority of the GOP activist base seemingly bought into this fetid nonsense wholeheartedly says something depressing about the modern state of the conservative movement in particular, and modern politics in general.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Roach
To say that the rations will still make it there through Iraq ignores that we have a lot of troops near Mosul and Anbar and the north for whom the long supply line through southern Iraq is a major hassle and a dangerous troops. To avoid that trip is very valuable and to just pretend it’s not a problem is stupid.