Biden labels massacre of Armenians in WWI as "genocide"

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well past the century after the event in The Great War that ended all wars until the next one, President Biden announced that the US officially see the massacre of "a lot" of Armenians was a genocide.

The President noted that this change in policy has been something he has envisioned enacting ever since hearing about it when he served in the House of Representatives during the Great War. The impact of this announcement will likely put a further rift between the US and Turkey for whatever reason, this was over 100 years ago!

Armenians have been lobbying the US to call this act a genocide for a long time and their efforts have finally paid off. With the recognition comes... well, pretty much just a label and a bit bit of Turkish grief. On the other hand, it does provide a larger voice for the victims of the barbarism that inflicted the Armenians. It recognizes it happened and the solemn promise to never let it happen again, except in cases where said location has no viable foreign policy interest of the West, Russia, or China.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Or if God orders it, because, Religious Liberty.

 

[Elixir]

My first radio "job" was in the late 80s in Boulder CO as a volunteer at KGNU, doing the early morning airshift. The station manager at the time was David Barsamian. He spent a lot of time muttering around the station and loudly lamenting the genocide Armenians at the hands of Turks, and trying to call the attention of anyone who would listen to the inhumanity that was visited upon his ancestry.
Frankly, I had never heard about the matter, and couldn't understand what kind of bug got up David's butt that made this so much more important than the plethora of currently unfolding injustices of the day - especially as the manager of a public radio station that was, IMO supposed to be focused on current sociological problems.
But his constant focus on it eventually caused me to look it up and read a little bit, and yeah - it was horrifying. But so many things that happened in the middle east were horrifying, I didn't think there was any chance that the US was ever going to take one step out of its way to recognize that particular genocide since it barely effected any US government interests.
Of course when I heard this from Biden, I thought about David. I hope he has derived some ... satisfaction? .... vindication? ... SOMETHING, after all this time.

 

[Valjean]

Yes, people are tribal. Extending moral consideration to "The Other" is a new and unnatural thing; a nascent artifact of civilization and the need to coöperate rather than compete.

Universal moral consideration is a thin and easily removed veneer, though, and history is replete with examples of people turning on their brothers and committing terrible atrocities.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

A Problem From Hell - America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power

America has since WW2 had a problem confronting the fact of genocide. This book is a list of such failures. This is a sobering read. Well recommended. Well done president Biden!

Wikipedia
In January 2021, President Biden nominated Power to be the head of the United States Agency for International Development

 

[Treedbear]

...
Of course when I heard this from Biden, I thought about David. I hope he has derived some ... satisfaction? .... vindication? ... SOMETHING, after all this time.

Maybe simply closure.

 

[Tigers!]

Then Governor GW Bush mentioned the Armenian genocide back in 2000.
https://anca.org/press-release/george-w-bush-recognizes-armenian-genocide/

Pity it has been such a long time between drinks.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Well past the century after the event in The Great War that ended all wars until the next one, President Biden announced that the US officially see the massacre of "a lot" of Armenians was a genocide.

The President noted that this change in policy has been something he has envisioned enacting ever since hearing about it when he served in the House of Representatives during the Great War. The impact of this announcement will likely put a further rift between the US and Turkey for whatever reason, this was over 100 years ago!

Armenians have been lobbying the US to call this act a genocide for a long time and their efforts have finally paid off. With the recognition comes... well, pretty much just a label and a bit bit of Turkish grief. On the other hand, it does provide a larger voice for the victims of the barbarism that inflicted the Armenians. It recognizes it happened and the solemn promise to never let it happen again, except in cases where said location has no viable foreign policy interest of the West, Russia, or China.

It's interesting that the guy who made the first attempt to acknowledging the genocide was Reagan. And now it's a Democrat who does it.

My personal view, too little too late. Nobody who experienced it, on either side is alive any longer. It would be like Japan acknowledging the great crimes of Sweden's Viking ancestors.

It's one thing if this acknowledgement comes from Turkey. But this... meh.

 

[Treedbear]

...
My personal view, too little too late. Nobody who experienced it, on either side is alive any longer. It would be like Japan acknowledging the great crimes of Sweden's Viking ancestors.

It's one thing if this acknowledgement comes from Turkey. But this... meh.

I look at it as a beginning. Like the fable of stone soup. Lots of reason for skepticism but before you know it people bring out some carrots, potatoes, and onions. Pretty soon they'll be asking "where's the beef?" Or if you prefer Jesus and the story of the loaves and fishes.

 

[Politesse]

A Problem From Hell - America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power

America has since WW2 had a problem confronting the fact of genocide. This book is a list of such failures. This is a sobering read. Well recommended. Well done president Biden!

Wikipedia
In January 2021, President Biden nominated Power to be the head of the United States Agency for International Development

Just since World War II? The only reason that is technically true is because the word genocide only came into existence at that time. We have always denied or deflected responsibilty for mass murder events conducted by ourselves and our allies abroad.

 

[Politesse]

Well past the century after the event in The Great War that ended all wars until the next one, President Biden announced that the US officially see the massacre of "a lot" of Armenians was a genocide.

The President noted that this change in policy has been something he has envisioned enacting ever since hearing about it when he served in the House of Representatives during the Great War. The impact of this announcement will likely put a further rift between the US and Turkey for whatever reason, this was over 100 years ago!

Armenians have been lobbying the US to call this act a genocide for a long time and their efforts have finally paid off. With the recognition comes... well, pretty much just a label and a bit bit of Turkish grief. On the other hand, it does provide a larger voice for the victims of the barbarism that inflicted the Armenians. It recognizes it happened and the solemn promise to never let it happen again, except in cases where said location has no viable foreign policy interest of the West, Russia, or China.

It's interesting that the guy who made the first attempt to acknowledging the genocide was Reagan. And now it's a Democrat who does it.

My personal view, too little too late. Nobody who experienced it, on either side is alive any longer. It would be like Japan acknowledging the great crimes of Sweden's Viking ancestors.

It's one thing if this acknowledgement comes from Turkey. But this... meh.

The children and grandchildren of Armenian refugees who fled to the U.S. are still in a desperate position because of this slaughter, so it is a valid point for a US president to be making, especially as it never was acknowleged up until now. These are our citizens now, but for terrible reasons whose consequences continue to reverberate through the centuries. Just because you have the privilege of pretending that century-old events don't affect you doesn't mean they don't, or that you have a right to tell other people that the event that caused their poverty and exile is a vile anti-Turkish myth as Erdogan would prefer. Do you really think that killing one million people and driving the rest into poverty and flight is an act whose consequences disappear in a few decades? Or that it doesn't matter whether or not the act is represented in state-approved versions of history?

For that matter, if Sweden were, in fact, arguing that the Viking raids never happened or that no one was really affected by them, etc., I would find that bizarre and absolutely would question their motives. Do they? As I recall, a romanticized Viking past was pretty central to the fledgling Nazi movement in Scandinavia back before the wars, and remains a bulwark of European race nationalist movements today. Even if the past has no remaining material consequences at all, it still matters how we frame the past and why.

 

[DrZoidberg]

...
My personal view, too little too late. Nobody who experienced it, on either side is alive any longer. It would be like Japan acknowledging the great crimes of Sweden's Viking ancestors.

It's one thing if this acknowledgement comes from Turkey. But this... meh.

I look at it as a beginning. Like the fable of stone soup. Lots of reason for skepticism but before you know it people bring out some carrots, potatoes, and onions. Pretty soon they'll be asking "where's the beef?" Or if you prefer Jesus and the story of the loaves and fishes.

Turkey still has statues of Atatürk everywhere. Both the fascist movement and the Nazi movement where both based on the Young Turks of Turkey. They are still revered. By cleverly keeping Turkey out of WW2 and by peacefully transitioning to democracy, the Turks have never had any reason to go back and reopen old and by now healed wounds.

There's also the little detail of historical culpability. Preceding the Armenian genocide Enver Pascha lost, what should have been a walkover battle, of a Russian army in Armenian territories. He blamed this on sabotage by Armenians. Which isn't as crazy as it sounds. There were Armenians on both the Russian and Turkish sides, and it was common knowledge that the Armenians were unhappy about this. There had also been a number of revolts against Ottoman rule, which during a war, is seen as aiding the enemy. This is what triggered the genocide.

What followed was Turkey's army collapsing under Russian and Greek encroachment. Yes, Greek. The Brits aided a Greek insurrection. The Greeks took full advantage of the situation and immediately attacked Turkey itself. Emptying cities of ethnic Turks. A genocide. The only thing that stopped the Greek genocide of Turks was the Russian revolution, which allowed the Turks to pull all their troops from the east and push the Greeks out of Anatolia.

After WWI the Ottoman empire was divided up among the winners. The Ottomans weren't even invited to the Versailles conference and the treaty of Lausanne basically just carved it up among the winners.

This triggered a war of independence. Where the ethnic Turks were fighting a war of existence. While not genocide, the Italian and British occupying troops executed anybody they thought fought for Kemal Atatürk. Using similar methods the Brits had used flighting the Boers.

My point with all of this is to show how it was a complicated situation with atrocities on all sides.

The problem with the framing of the Armenian Genocide as it is now, is that it is very one sided, ignoring how Turks were persecuted and how Turkey was treated in this period. Instead Turkey is made out to be some sort of Asian Nazi Germany and Atatürk a Hitler. This genocide is way messier without neat goodies and baddies.

If anything the prime culprit here is Great Britain. This whole mess was engineered by them and the Russian Tsar. They were exploiting ethnic tensions with the Ottoman empire to help it fall apart, so they could scoop up the leftovers.

So I understand if Turkey is less than happy about alone admitting guilt, which I assume is at the core of why they don't want to.

It's interesting how little Great Britain has admitted to atrocities in general. They're guilty as fuck about a lot of things, putting them on par with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Yet they somehow manage to slip out of western outrage. Outside of the West Great Britians great crimes are well known. But in the West we somehow keep ignoring them.

 

[Politesse]

What followed was Turkey's army collapsing under Russian and Greek encroachment. Yes, Greek. The Brits aided a Greek insurrection. The Greeks took full advantage of the situation and immediately attacked Turkey itself. Emptying cities of ethnic Turks. A genocide. The only thing that stopped the Greek genocide of Turks was the Russian revolution, which allowed the Turks to pull all their troops from the east and push the Greeks out of Anatolia.

Talk bout a one-sided retelling! That was after the Turks themselves had been carrying out mass killings of Greeks in Anatolia for several years.

My point with all of this is to show how it was a complicated situation with atrocities on all sides.

All genocides are. Clear moral lines of perfect goodies and baddies are not actually part of the definition of genocide.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The children and grandchildren of Armenian refugees who fled to the U.S. are still in a desperate position because of this slaughter

What? How are they still in a desperate position because of this slaughter?

How doesn't the Soviet Union carry most of the blame for the continued plight of the Armenian people? And not to mention the oligarchs who to this day have the people by their balls and who manipulate politics in order to maintain control.

Lebanon is still full of Armenian refugee families who left during the genocide but were never welcome back. They still aren't. Who's to blame? The correct answer is the current Armenian republic. So Armenians hurting Armenians, because these refugees are the descendants of rich people who want their stuff back. Still. How's that for grey history?

, so it is a valid point for a US president to be making, especially as it never was acknowleged up until now. These are our citizens now, but for terrible reasons whose consequences continue to reverberate through the centuries. Just because you have the privilege of pretending that century-old events don't affect you doesn't mean they don't, or that you have a right to tell other people that the event that caused their poverty and exile is a vile anti-Turkish myth as Erdogan would prefer. Do you really think that killing one million people and driving the rest into poverty and flight is an act whose consequences disappear in a few decades? Or that it doesn't matter whether or not the act is represented in state-approved versions of history?

I didn't say it's not a good thing that Biden did it. What I said, too little too late. This is something which should have been done in 1925. But then of course it would have meant Great Britain would have to face up to their genocides, so they let it slide. And now I'd say the window of opportunity is gone. Acknowledging the genocide is a nice gesture, but won't lead to anything concrete happening. I'm willing to bet that the only tangible outcome of this will be Biden placing a laurel wreath on a monument to the genocide in Armenia.

For that matter, if Sweden were, in fact, arguing that the Viking raids never happened or that no one was really affected by them, etc., I would find that bizarre and absolutely would question their motives. Do they? As I recall, a romanticized Viking past was pretty central to the fledgling Nazi movement in Scandinavia back before the wars, and remains a bulwark of European race nationalist movements today. Even if the past has no remaining material consequences at all, it still matters how we frame the past and why.

I don't think the Nazis romanticised the Viking past. I think they were pretty accurate in the portrayal of them. Apart from the racial purity part. What the Nazis romanticised was war and conflict. Fun fact. Scandinavians today are pretty racially mixed. Why? Because they weren't racists. They'd raid and abduct people from all over Europe and north Africa. They'd keep the hottest girls for themselves. No matter their ethnic backgrounds. They'd sell the rest.

The Nazis portrayal of Vikings was actually more accurate than anybody outside Scandinavia before or since. In the media they're typically portrayed as nothing but a bunch of savages. But they were very civilized, absolutely on par with Ancient Greece or Rome. We had elected kings, that ruled by consent. The TV series Vikings, to put it mildly, is inaccurate.

 

[Treedbear]

...
I didn't say it's not a good thing that Biden did it. What I said, too little too late. This is something which should have been done in 1925. But then of course it would have meant Great Britain would have to face up to their genocides, so they let it slide. And now I'd say the window of opportunity is gone. Acknowledging the genocide is a nice gesture, but won't lead to anything concrete happening. I'm willing to bet that the only tangible outcome of this will be Biden placing a laurel wreath on a monument to the genocide in Armenia.
...

The laying of a wreath is the least significant outcome. I'll take positive incremental change over tangible symbolic change any day. That's how historically important changes happen.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well past the century after the event in The Great War that ended all wars until the next one, President Biden announced that the US officially see the massacre of "a lot" of Armenians was a genocide.

The President noted that this change in policy has been something he has envisioned enacting ever since hearing about it when he served in the House of Representatives during the Great War. The impact of this announcement will likely put a further rift between the US and Turkey for whatever reason, this was over 100 years ago!

Armenians have been lobbying the US to call this act a genocide for a long time and their efforts have finally paid off. With the recognition comes... well, pretty much just a label and a bit bit of Turkish grief. On the other hand, it does provide a larger voice for the victims of the barbarism that inflicted the Armenians. It recognizes it happened and the solemn promise to never let it happen again, except in cases where said location has no viable foreign policy interest of the West, Russia, or China.

It's interesting that the guy who made the first attempt to acknowledging the genocide was Reagan. And now it's a Democrat who does it.

My personal view, too little too late. Nobody who experienced it, on either side is alive any longer. It would be like Japan acknowledging the great crimes of Sweden's Viking ancestors.

It's one thing if this acknowledgement comes from Turkey. But this... meh.

It is too little, but it isn't too late.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What followed was Turkey's army collapsing under Russian and Greek encroachment. Yes, Greek. The Brits aided a Greek insurrection. The Greeks took full advantage of the situation and immediately attacked Turkey itself. Emptying cities of ethnic Turks. A genocide. The only thing that stopped the Greek genocide of Turks was the Russian revolution, which allowed the Turks to pull all their troops from the east and push the Greeks out of Anatolia.

Talk bout a one-sided retelling! That was after the Turks themselves had been carrying out mass killings of Greeks in Anatolia for several years.

My point with all of this is to show how it was a complicated situation with atrocities on all sides.

All genocides are. Clear moral lines of perfect goodies and baddies are not actually part of the definition of genocide.

Except for the Nazis. The Nazis are pretty much the gold standard for baddies. Any empathy for them regarding the Treaty of Versailles was quickly exhausted with their literally evil scheme.

 

[Politesse]

Talk bout a one-sided retelling! That was after the Turks themselves had been carrying out mass killings of Greeks in Anatolia for several years.

All genocides are. Clear moral lines of perfect goodies and baddies are not actually part of the definition of genocide.

Except for the Nazis. The Nazis are pretty much the gold standard for baddies. Any empathy for them regarding the Treaty of Versailles was quickly exhausted with their literally evil scheme.

The funny thing is, Nazis are only unvarnished baddies when you're taking about them as the unquestioned objects of historical narrativism, or as the storybook villains in a TV series.

If you start asking questions like, "so, we should reject the central platform of the Nazi party? ie, extreme xenophobia, creation of an arbitrarily ethnized national culture, propagandist restructuring of primary education, open lust for an image of idealized soldiers and battles as symbols of a powerful central state, angry rejection of Marxism/valorization of ill-paid factory labor, etc" suddenly a bunch of fanboys appear to insist that it's only the literal Nazis in history that are wrong, not their most obvious analogues in other time periods and cultures. Suddenly, when accused of similarity, people magically become capable of seeing the Nazis in shades of grey, people who "had some good points" despite being narratively evil. Like, everyone should be enamored of a purified White imaginary of American culture and weaponize it as paranoid persecution of immigrants from other places, you just can't literally wear a swastika while you're doing it. (And even if you do that, it's your first amendment right, dammit!)

 

[TomC]

The funny thing is, Nazis are only unvarnished baddies when you're taking about them as the unquestioned objects of historical narrativism, or as the storybook villains in a TV series.

Bingo!

With all the revisionism and white washing of U.S. history, it's difficult to find out that Hitler was a hero here, until he wasn't. Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi. Hitler had a framed portrait of Henry Ford in his office.
The USA supported Nazis until the Nazis interfered with business.
Tom

 

[DrZoidberg]

The funny thing is, Nazis are only unvarnished baddies when you're taking about them as the unquestioned objects of historical narrativism, or as the storybook villains in a TV series.

Bingo!

With all the revisionism and white washing of U.S. history, it's difficult to find out that Hitler was a hero here, until he wasn't. Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi. Hitler had a framed portrait of Henry Ford in his office.
The USA supported Nazis until the Nazis interfered with business.
Tom

Here's a fun book to emphasize this. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman published 1915.

Its about a country consisting of only women. It describes what by the author is supposed to be a feminist utopia, the readers should want to live in. It was a utopia for its day. Because by today's standards it would, be a Nazi totalitarian hell.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32/32-h/32-h.htm

We had different ideals back then. All over the world.