For over 100 years the Armenians have been trying to get the world to hold the Turks responsible for the deaths of thousands of Armenians during and after World War One….
And for that century the Armenians have been trying to get the world to recognize the genocide…….The US in the past has ignored the genocide because Turkey was a valued customer and ally…..
On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others — some 1.5 million — were killed in what historians consider a genocide.
As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”
The man who invented the word “genocide”— Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_armeniangenocide.html
Now that the Turks are on the new “shit list” it is time for the US to step up….
The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recognize the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a genocide, a symbolic but historic vote instantly denounced by Turkey.
The Democratic-controlled House voted 405-11 in favor of a resolution asserting that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire was centered in present-day Turkey.
The vote marked the first time in 35 years that such legislation was considered in the full House, underscoring widespread frustration in Congress with the Turkish government, from both Democrats and President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-turkey-armenia/u-s-house-recognizes-armenian-genocide-backs-turkey-sanctions-idUSKBN1X82LY
This vote does little but to make the Congress appear to actually give a crap about what Turkey is doing in Syria.
A little history in the region and it involves the Kurds (remember them? They are those people that the media is so concerned about)….those same people also participated in the genocide of the Armenians…..
Not widely known in the United States, but very well known in the region, is that among the most enthusiastic participants in the Armenian massacres of 1915 were Kurdish Muslim tribesmen, who largely inhabited the same regions of Anatolia as Armenian Christian peasants. This fact also goes unmentioned in the New York Times piece, but can be found by a casual perusal of Wikipedia, and the associated footnotes.
The Ottoman government of World War I (whose most important leaders, such as Kemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, were actually Albanians by ethnicity) considered Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians as a potential fifth column for the Russians, and made every effort to encourage Muslim attacks on them. The best parallel is with anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia of that same era, which were encouraged by government officials but mostly carried out by local Polish and Ukrainian peasants.
Kurdish Participation in the Armenian Genocide
It is all a game.
Sadly this is NOT the way to carry our foreign policy……it is childish and wimpy.
Turkey is pissed!
Turkey’s President Erdogan declared that he “strongly condemns” the House resolutions, calling them a “slander against our country,” and “the biggest insult toward our nation.” Turkey also summoned the US Ambassador to warn of a breakdown in US-Turkey relations.
This could indeed have long-term ramifications, because with all these US Representatives now having publicly voted to recognize the genocide, it’s going to be really hard for a future US government to unrecognize it to make Turkey happy.
Will greed replace outrage?
I Read, I Wrote, You Know
“Lego Ergo Scribo”