After all
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler asked rhetorically in 1939. A surprising number of people, it turns out, considering it happened in 1915-1916, during a larger and more terrible holocaust. I have to admire the way the Armenian people have kept the story alive, subsumed as they were into the USSR for so long and subject to its propagandistic needs and whims. All they want is an acknowledgment from the Republic of Turkey, successor state to the real perpetrators the Ottoman Empire. All they get is grief.
On Saturday an Armenian organization in Glendale, California, held a meeting to thank government officials for their efforts to formally recognize the genocide. They invited their Congressman, Adam Schiff, who is kind of busy these days but made the long trip home to attend. This caused a troop of Trumpanzees to disrupt the event with shouting and shoving, including the now customary death threats against the Congressman.
Somehow both houses of Congress passed a resolution condemning the genocide, and it landed on the desk of the Stable Genius. It will not be signed because that would hurt the feelings of Trump's third-favorite dictator Recep Erdogan. Erdogan says he will order ask the Turkish parliament to retaliate by recognizing the destruction of this country's Native population. This was enough to alarm Trump, although he hates Native Americans (they won't tell him how they operate all those casinos without a single bankruptcy) and also POCAHONTAS! He pulled American forces out of the way and let Turkey invade Syria and attack the Kurds with the support of his favorite dictator Putin -- what more does this guy want? Because Trump is fully prepared to give it to him. All he asks in return is a mega-hotel or two, maybe a golf course. And some flattery (see Netanyahu, Benjamin).
If Erdogan doesn't make America blush by recalling Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, he has plenty more history to choose from. If slavery is too big a subject -- and there were and are slaves in many other places -- he might narrow it to the destruction of the Greenwood section of Tulsa in 1921. No one knows exactly how many black citizens were murdered, but that may be clarified now that two mass graves have been tentatively identified. Who after all speaks today of Tulsa? More people than spoke of it twenty years later, when Japanese-Americans were being marched off to concentration camps. Have we learned not to do this? Ask the caged refugees at the Mexican border and the prisoners of unofficial war who will likely die in Guantanamo.
None of which changes the inconvenient truth that over a million Armenians were driven into the desert to die of starvation and thirst. Their memory deserves better than to be kicked around like a deflated football whenever creatures like Ted Cruz want to look more humanoid.
(By the way, if I take his point -- nobody cares how much blood you spill if you achieve your goal -- then Hitler was wrong. The Ottomans lost the war and their empire. Turkey, if you're listening, many countries are trying hard to own their history and to make amends, often at great political cost. Our historians are grateful for your help, no matter how spitefully offered.)
On Saturday an Armenian organization in Glendale, California, held a meeting to thank government officials for their efforts to formally recognize the genocide. They invited their Congressman, Adam Schiff, who is kind of busy these days but made the long trip home to attend. This caused a troop of Trumpanzees to disrupt the event with shouting and shoving, including the now customary death threats against the Congressman.
Somehow both houses of Congress passed a resolution condemning the genocide, and it landed on the desk of the Stable Genius. It will not be signed because that would hurt the feelings of Trump's third-favorite dictator Recep Erdogan. Erdogan says he will
If Erdogan doesn't make America blush by recalling Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, he has plenty more history to choose from. If slavery is too big a subject -- and there were and are slaves in many other places -- he might narrow it to the destruction of the Greenwood section of Tulsa in 1921. No one knows exactly how many black citizens were murdered, but that may be clarified now that two mass graves have been tentatively identified. Who after all speaks today of Tulsa? More people than spoke of it twenty years later, when Japanese-Americans were being marched off to concentration camps. Have we learned not to do this? Ask the caged refugees at the Mexican border and the prisoners of unofficial war who will likely die in Guantanamo.
None of which changes the inconvenient truth that over a million Armenians were driven into the desert to die of starvation and thirst. Their memory deserves better than to be kicked around like a deflated football whenever creatures like Ted Cruz want to look more humanoid.
(By the way, if I take his point -- nobody cares how much blood you spill if you achieve your goal -- then Hitler was wrong. The Ottomans lost the war and their empire. Turkey, if you're listening, many countries are trying hard to own their history and to make amends, often at great political cost. Our historians are grateful for your help, no matter how spitefully offered.)
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 5:05 PM
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