The recent decision by the House Foreign Affairs committee to condemn Turkey for committing genocide against the Armenian people is a sterling example of US hypocrisy and lack of historical sense.
The genocide is said to have occurred during the First World War in 1915, when the Ottoman Empire forcibly resettled over a million Armenians.
It is not my intention to argue numbers of deaths, or whether or not an act of genocide was carried out, but rather to point out several inconsistencies which I fail to see being voiced by others:
- The resettlement occurred under the Ottoman Empire in 1915. In 1923, Turkey became a republic under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. The country modernized under 'The Father of the Turks', and became a stable, democratic, and secular nation. Modern day Turkey has as much in common with the Ottoman Empire as modern day Russia has with Czarist Russia, modern day Germany has with Nazi Germany, and modern day Japan has with Imperial Japan. To condemn an entire nation for the acts of a Sultanate which fell from power nearly 90 years ago is simply absurd.
- Please note the overarching theme of a lack of political continuity in the above paragraph. The United States has had a continuous political system for over 200 years, yet the genocide committed by the U.S. government against the native peoples of North America was carried out by the same governing body that exists today: a stable, democratic, secular republic. What are the metrics for determining at which point we close the books on historical genocide? 50 years? 100 years? 200 years? 500 years? Who gets to determine said metrics, and on what basis? So, in Turkey, a completely different governing body than the one that carried out the forcible resettlement of Armenians in 1915 is condemned for genocide, while in the United States the same governing body that carried out genocide and the forcible resettlement of millions of Native Americans gets a pass, even as the injustices inflicted upon Native Americans still continue into the present!
- Many people, including historians who should know better, have called the Armenian genocide the first genocide in modern history. This flies in the face of the classic divisions of Western history into four periods: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary. The Modern historical period is widely held to have begun in the 16th century, which therefore would make it clear that the first modern genocide was that which was perpetrated against Native Americans. To label the Armenian genocide as the first modern genocide is a clear-cut case of historical prejudice and hypocrisy. Perhaps the Turkish parliament should vote to condemn the United States for committing a protracted genocide against the tribes and nations of North America...
I am neither Turkish nor Armenian, and I believe that this dispute should be left in their hands. Aside from the absolute farce of a nation which once openly and proudly practiced the maxim of, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" condemning another nation for committing genocide, this decision by the House Foreign Affairs committee will most certainly strain relations with Turkey, a member of NATO, the European Economic Community, and a strategic ally in the Middle East.