On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, James Heartfield wrote:
> What are thoughts here on the Armenian genocide resolution?
A few to add to those already posted:
1) The reason it seems to have happened now is Nancy Pelosi. The largest American-Armenian community is on California, and there are a lots in her district. She's supported this resolution for 20 years, and she pledged to the ANCA that if she became speaker she'd bring it to the floor -- and that's why the committee voted it in. She made it. Now it can die on the floor (and it looks like it will) but she has to look like she went down fighting. The timing would always be bad during her term. But she couldn't put it off forever.
2) One angle that is always interestingly left out of this the Kurds. People always say the Turks massacred the Armenians. But a lot a people doing the massacrering were Kurds. This was something held over their heads for years. It came up at the end of Gulf War I, when Kouchner was organizing refugee aid for the Kurds fleeing Saddam's crack down (aid that would eventually evolve into the Northern no-fly zone). Lots of people in Europe felt toward the Kurds the way they were soon to feel about the Serbs, indifferent to their sufferings because they were demonized as genocidal maniacs and therefore deserved them. But since then it's kind of vanished to be replaced by the opposite idea of Kurds as innocent victims.
In part this is because of the underlying alliances. The Armenians and Kurds now both have cordial relations because they side against the Turks, so the Armenians don't bring up the genocide stuff. It's very similar to the way that Israel and Turkey are on good terms, and Israel show its goodwill by helping to tamp down the genocide charges against Turkey.
3) One last irony in the whole thing was pointed out by Juan Cole in the post Andy F cited: as far as governments are concerned, the massacre wasn't committed by the Turkish government, it was committed by the Ottoman empire. The present government is the result of the overthrow of the Ottoman empire by Kemal Attaturk. The Kemalists condemned the Ottomans for lots of things -- their desire to disassociate themselves from their predecessor government is why the capital is in Ankara rather than Istanbul. So you'd think theoretically it wouldn't be any harder for the Turks to condemn the Ottomans for the massacre than it was for the Germans to condemn the Nazis.
But in reality, that latter would probably never have happened if they hadn't been occupied and made to, and then made to over and over by the needs of European cooperation -- leading to other European countries eventually being forced to do the same decades later.
WWII, of which the holocaust is the most horrible expression, is arguably the negative foundational experience of the EU: it was conscientiously founded to change Europe so that it never against collapsed into war. But I think it's also the exception that proves the rule. No country ever seriously condemns their own country's crimes unless (a) they are being forced to by an occupier and/or (b) the condemnation is an affirmation of a substantial new political unity. (Much of the condemnation of Nazi "totalitarianism" during the cold war was an affirmation Germany's place in the Atlanic Pact.)
By seriously I guess I mean institutionalizing that condemnation with regular ritual avowals and official monuments -- making that condemnation a foundation of a new political identity. And frankly, off the top of my head, I have a hard time coming up with a single example of that happening except with Europe and the Holocaust. (America's condemnations of it are the easy kind, from the outside.) I mean, lots of countries pass minor resolutions apologizing about lots of things; lord knows we do here in the US. But is there anything really comparable to Europe's institutionalized shame about the holocaust? Which even to their own eyes, never quite goes far enough? Their condemnation of colonialism, like our condemnation of slavery, never seems to be in quite the same league, even though there are lots of books, movies and even museums on the subject.
Somehow the holocaust has become a touchstone of European/American collective moral identity in a way no other crime has. It's something we feel wholly good about affirming our condemnation of in a way that we feel about nothing else. And that, I think, is ultimately where the pressure on the Turks to recognize the massacre of the Armenians as a genocide comes from. For Amenian-Americans, campaigning for this has become an organizing element of their collective identity just like the holocaust has for American Jews. And for Europeans, who have been shaming each other into mutual confessions of holocuast crimes for decades now, this seems like a perfectly just demand to make of the Turks who want to prove they're Europeans -- and of course, a great way to prove they're not, and therefore the perfect excuse for excluding them on non-religious grounds.
Michael