Shame on the ADL

Call it like it is.

I agree on admitting that what happened then was what it was; marching an entire population out of lands where their families have lived for generations and putting significant numbers in front of firing squads for the asinine belief that not being Turkish somehow makes them a security risk sounds pretty much like genocide to me.

At the same time though, I think its hypocritical for us to use it as a reason to keep Turkey at arms length in regards to global or regional unity. Particularly for U.S. citizens, who are descended from the perpetrators of the largest genocide in human history, its rather disingenuous to tar them with a brush we never even had to face; not that the Europeans aren't just as guilty of such outrages throughout the world as we are, something they love to forget.

Should we push the Turkish government to admit what was done? Yes. Should we leave them out in the cold because of it? No. Given time, Turkish political society will calm down from its current levels of nationalist fervor and paranoia (it hasn't exactly been truly democratic for that long, after all) and, when a full part of the international community, make what restitution as they can and their conscience dictates, as we did. I doubt that's a very popular stand on the issue, but its an honest one.

At the same time though, I think its hypocritical for us to use it as a reason to keep Turkey at arms length in regards to global or regional unity. Particularly for U.S. citizens, who are descended from the perpetrators of the largest genocide in human history, its rather disingenuous to tar them with a brush we never even had to face; not that the Europeans aren't just as guilty of such outrages throughout the world as we are, something they love to forget.

Even employing your laughably broad and variegated definition of genocide, conflicts between Native Americans and whites in what is now the United States hardly constituted 'the largest genocide in human history.' Learn some history.

Or perhaps you're referring to slavery? Was slavery committed with an intent to destroy Africans and are Africans and European nations equally collectively guilty for their roles in the slave trade? You are aware, also, that the Caribbean and South America were the destinations of the large majority of slaves? The United States had nothing on Brazil when it came to extent and brutality in the slave trade, but I guess since they are a nation of "brown people," they simply don't count in your estimation.

At the same time though, I think its hypocritical for us to use it as a reason to keep Turkey at arms length in regards to global or regional unity.

To my knowledge no one has proposed keeping Turkey at arms length for this reason. Am I missing something?

(Although I might well argue that Turkey should be facing some sort of repercussions from the international community for their ongoing treatment of Kurds...)

Particularly for U.S. citizens, who are descended from the perpetrators of the largest genocide in human history, its rather disingenuous to tar them with a brush we never even had to face; not that the Europeans aren't just as guilty of such outrages throughout the world as we are, something they love to forget.

I am not aware that our government is running around with a huge lobbying effort around the world to stop any acknowledgement of what happened to the Native Americans. MORE TO THE point one can clearly read from the ADL statements on this for YEARS (and has been commented on in Haaretz) there is a thinly covered threat against the Jews of Turkey if we don't carry this water and help them with denial.

The historic fact of the Genocide against the Armenians is not the "controversy". The Turkish governments harrasment and denial, and their perversion of the ADL is the important issue at hand.

Learn some history from before 1600. How many Native Americans do you think died from Measles or small pox? How many from the flu? How many from starvation, exposure, drunkeness, and just plain suicide? Those killed with guns are only part of the story and as for the Armenians; at least they still have a society, the Native American were annihilated in every way a people can be; what we call their culture now is little more than the desperately cobbled together traditions of the few tribes that didn't completely vanish. You kid yourself by refuse to admit this is genocide. Hundreds of millions died from the first lading at Jamestown to 1900s; Hundreds of millions, the vast majority before we even pushed beyond the Mississippi. Was it purposeful government policy? No; but they're just as dead and their future, culture, beliefs, hopes and dreams were erased just as surely as if it had been.

As to the U.S. not having a concerted campaign to lessen the brutality of it, haven't you ever seen a western? You do realize that the most popular reading material of the 1800's were adventure stories from the American West, lauding the heroism of killing the red devil, don't you? No, we don't have a government pr machine to deny it, but then again we don't need to have one do we? It was never an issue because there was never any spokesman for the other side to question what we did, and if there had been, who was there to listen? Were the Queen and Parliament going to do anything other than shed a few tears and maybe write an angry letter? Was France or Spain going to take up arms for the rights of the Americans, or even so much as consider breaking off diplomatic ties? Of course not, and its even less likely that they'd be willing to do so now. Turkey denies it, and spends money on denying it, because they see these claims not as an attempt to gain some restitution, but as an attempt to isolate them politically, and the fact that this is exactly the impact they've had in France, and through France, in the EU, only feeds that notion.

Coin:

Yeah, what they're doing to the Kurds is equal nonsense, and through the AKP, the Kurds are making the militarist pay for it. With time, this recent democratization will hopefully make Turkey a place where stuff like that can't happen to anyone.

Itzaak:

More to the point? The point is genocide, what it means to take responsibility for it and what we do in response to it. That's a broad subject, one not restricted to Turkey. My POINT, to use your wonderfully edifying literary device, is that we all have skeletons in our national closets that we don't like to face; that harassing the Turks and isolating them over the issue of Armenian, which is what the not-so thinly veiled object of much of the Armenian lobby is, is only going to make them dig their heels in even further on the issue. Give them some time. Our President didn't even apologize for Slavery or the fate of those who lived in this land before us until the 1990s, and so many seems to expect the Turks to bad-mouth their George Washington's and Thomas Jefferson's less than 70 years since the founding of their nation.

I'm not saying people should shut up about it and I'm not siding with the ADL in this instance either; what I'm saying is that the Turks have to get to the point where they can deal with this issue on their own, and a hostile international community, constantly badgering them about an issue that every Turkish child is raised to believe is either a dirty lie or no different than what every other country has done, especially when its one they identify with (because the Turks sure as heck don't see themselves as middle easterners) is only going to delay that by making it an issue of national pride.

That should be less than 100 years not 70; for some reason I was thinking of the 50's instead of the 20s for Turkey's founding. The main point though is that Ataturk hasnt been dead all that long, and in their eyes, he's still as much a god among men as G.W. was to Union Citizens in the 1800's.

I was thinking that hundreds of millions claim was too high, and it is which is why relying on memory is seldom a good idea. The current numbers are a pop ~50 million at 1600 with a death rate of 80% so; about 45 million.

wait, 40 million

The best estimates are approximately three million Indians living in what is now the United States and Canada. (Yes, some estimates are as high as 11 million, but most demographers agree these estimates are too high. Nobody claims 40 million in the U.S. and Canada. Get a clue.) A good portion of those died off not from diseases spread from English settlers but from the first great epidemic spread by Hernando de Soto's explorers in the Southeast - something the ancestors of modern Americans, not being Spanish, have absolutely no relation too. Again, with Indian populations being much higher in Mesoamerica and South America than in North America, you need to look further south for greater examples of what you label "genocide."

Which raises the question: since when did involuntary disease transmission equal genocide? If that's your definition, then the Black Death is one of the greatest genocides in human history. The Chinese would be the perpetrators of genocide upon Europeans and others (with approximately 75 million killed worldwide by the plague, including 20 million Europeans). Oh, wait! According to the rules of pee-cee, it's only genocide when white people unwittingly spread diseases to brown people! Sorry, I forgot that caveat.