Holocaust Denial in The White House
The Turks say the Armenians died in a ‘civil war’, and Bush goes along with their lies
How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb - for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence - but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.
The “story so far” is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging - real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War - to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.
But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers - including our own British Government, and now even the US - to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a “civil war”, that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians.
And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.
Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was “sad and sorrowful” in view of the “strong links” Turkey maintained with its Nato partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then “our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot”.
Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror.” I loved the last bit about the “global war on terror”. Nobody - save for the Jews of Europe - has suffered “terror” more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more than the integrity of history - that Nato might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany - beggars belief.
Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusional US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would “harm the war effort in Iraq”. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial.
Former Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12m from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik airbase through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey.
In the real world, this is called blackmail - which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was even more pusillanimous - although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, “believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…”.
How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very “roads and so on” down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana - a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia - and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge airbase that Mr Bush is so frightened of losing.
Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place - as the Turks claim - the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive - in Sussex if anyone cares to see her - an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same “roads and so on” that so concern the gutless Mr Gates.
But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he’s still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they’re “interested in preventing World War Three”, Bush has warned us. What piffle. Bush can’t even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One.
Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world - he who would protect us against “world terror” - would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
President Unitard explained his personal indifference to the historical record of his own maladministration by observing that it didn’t matter to him because he’d be dead by then anyway.
I suppose there is a fuzzy-logic corollary to this profound view: the dead have no History. So why shouldn’t we all just let bygones be bygones? (Except for the Reich of Zion, and Amerikans still looking to settle scores in the Global War on Terror.)
And then there’s the typical tragicomic slapstick from the hapless Democrats, who were mysteriously roused from their torpor and remembered that there used to be such a thing as “social justice”; reaching over the corpse of a thousand wounds to social justice in present-day Amerika, they proposed a symbolic denunciation of the Armenian Holocaust to show that the Democratic Party still possessed the remants of a soul. But when the Republic criminal bosses snarled, and there was mixed reaction from the hoi polloi, the Dems reverted to saying “Never mind!” a la Emily Litella.
Profiles in courage all around!
David Irving doesn’t belong in jail for his lies, but George W. Bush does.
They don’t get any better than Robert Fisk. His knowledge and integrity is horribly absent in our mainstream media. He shows the fraudulence of American politics and its consequences around the world.
Hoa binh
What about the present Iraqi Holocaust? Between Bush Sr, who gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait, and his vile offspring George, over 2 million Iraqis have been unnecessarily killed. The hypocrisy of the U.S. government is revealed (again) when the leaders arrogantly say “We don’t do body counts” in regard to Iraq. In other words, these human beings whom they slaughter don’t count. According to them, the Native-Americans don’t count and didn’t suffer a Holocaust, either. (Only Jews count, e.g. the Jewish Holocaust.)
Yes, it’s true the Iraqis are Muslims and the supposed perpetrators of 9/11 were Muslims, but the Iraqis had no ties to the attack. Actually, as ruthless and vicious as the neocon leaders of the U.S. are, it’s not hard to believe 9/11 was an inside job.
Words in a language are used to serve ends. Ends justify means, if you have the bully pulpit to make it seem so. Tyrants and demagogues have alweays been with us. Double standards and hypocrisy live on and on and on.
But the Truth has a way of catching up to the liars, and once people realize they’ve been snookered, they become very deaf to the oily voices of deception. Only trouble is, by then, the people are so pissed off that violence becomes endemic.
As a fellow human being, I am still waiting for a real transformation that does not require revenge and bloodshed. Hope I have a great number of lifetimes left in my karmic bank to be around when it finally happens at a large enough scale to make a big difference.
I have sympathy with the Jews for wanting to keep the word “Holocaust” because Hitler did try to exterminate all of them and they had nowhere to go, no one would take them, including us. There are people trying to say it never happened.
I also believe the Israelis are acting like Nazis toward the Palestinians.
There are many acts of genocide in history, some of them by the US. And we may not be setting fire to piles of Iraqi babies, but we are showing a cruel and racist indifference to the value of Iraqi lives.
The capacity for atrocity mankind is capable of is appalling. It makes animals look civilized.
See this blog and book (free pdf download) for a different take on why the Armenian Holocaust is being suppressed, etc. Must say that this is news to me.
http://www.jewishracism.com/JewishGenocide.htm
THE JEWISH GENOCIDE OF ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS
He’s done a lot of writing on this subject. btw the author, Christopher Jon Bjerknes, is a Jew.
As a pre-schooler in the late Twenties I was
told to clean my dinner plate “Think of the starving Armenians”. Thus ten years after that holocaust it was common usage in America
to consider it an abomination. And today the Coward of Crawford spinelessly fears to say it.
Holocaust denial begins at home. How did Americans forget the worst genocide in the last 500 years in the World, the American Genocide. Over one hundred million American Indians were purposfully killed through the conscious imposition of disease and organized death. The quiet genocide of American Indians continues to this day. Where are the shrill voices of those who protest genocide in America. They are absent. Why? It is genocide denial ! It may be wise to face the denial in America before exporting your outrage. I know, you are now denying it’s existence. It’s not hard to find if want to find it. Why has the U.S. Government failed to pay American Indian’s the money due them from the Interior Department lease of Indian lands to the tune of one hundred billion dollars? ( See www.indiantrust.com ) Why are the nuclear waste dumps on Indian land against their will? Why are Indian sacred places being desecrated by business interests? Why have all the treaties been broken by the United States to this very day? Why? The continuing policies of genocide is why ! The systematic elimination of Indigenous Peoples is why? Native People die from these policies. Where are your voices now? Just asking?
Doom n Gloom Well said, and might I add still another reason why no one speaks the unspeakable in our own collective past.
To acknowledge this unspeakable horror, is to face what it was that was being systematically and grotequely eliminated.And so it continues…. Reverence for Mother Earth, coupled with appreciation for Great Spirit’s important contribution to her abundance, and the good of all.
Not to romanticize and gloss over their own human evolution, Native peoples everywhere had a much better sense of who they were and of their place in the Cosmos.
Destroying that consciousness was the begining of the end. It was a suicidal impulse on the part of the perpetrators. This is a very young and ignorant experiment, compared to the aeons of inherent wisdom accumulated and preserved in the indigenous civilizations.
We have been arrogant and stubborn about waking up to the nightmare of our own creation. But Mother Earth will not let us slumber much longer, nor will she be brought down by those who would commit matricide. She’s been around for billions and billions of years while we are barely a blink of the eye.
To our Armenian Brothers and Sisters you are not forgotten by the American people…you have our support.
Starofthesea:
“But Mother Earth will not let us slumber much longer, nor will she be brought down by those who would commit matricide. She’s been around for billions and billions of years while we are barely a blink of the eye.”
(You’re sure saying some interesting things, Starry friend!)
I like household mouses. And rats. They are cute, intelligent creatures. Bush is neither.
UN–commondreams— Blessings to you and yours! While I understand the need to vent—so much rage and frustration—I also know that rage is just one stage of the process, and once we get beyond it, perhaps the vision will take hold. Keep on keepin on, my friend. We are who we’ve been waiting for. AllThatIs is taking no chances this time with just a handful of visionaries. Earth is populated with countless legions of us and we will prevail. The Light Grid is strong and we are supported by so many others who have come before and will come after. We are not alone.
“As a pre-schooler in the late Twenties I was
told to clean my dinner plate “Think of the starving Armenians”. Thus ten years after that holocaust it was common usage in America to consider it an abomination.”
The adults in MY family were still saying that when I was a young child in the 40’s. It must have made an indelible impression, to became a household phrase for 40 years!
What a shame that oral tradition has been replaced by Sponge Bob &; his friends!
I visited the Capital Children’s Museum, back in the late 80’s, and was asked if I wanted to do a tile for the holoaust wall they were building. I was reading the Trail of Tears at the time about the forceable removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. I asked when they were going to build a memorial wall to the holocaust against the Native Americans………
Instead, they closed it down in 2004 &a are re moving it to a different location, across the Potomac, and the Director has been picked up on child porn charges. Such is the nature of “progress” in our upside down world!
Well, I have an entirely different take on this whole thing. Although it is obvious that there was genocide way back in 1915, is it really nessisary to just “out of the blue” make an issue of it right now? I mean, we got all these troops and their very expensive stuff in Iraq, we all want them out, and it would be really handy to be able to leave through Turkey. And wouldn’t it be better for the entire world if Pelosi would take this thing “off the table” for a while and replace it with something more pressing, like, oh say, impeaching Bush & Cheney? Let’s take care of the actual ongoing genocide our presense in Iraq is causing, THEN worry about addressing the past.
Sorry if the Armenian genocide is an inconvenient truth for the neocons and the Bush administration grandiose scheme for redrawing the map of the Middle East but its high time its recognized and the Armenians have been making their case for years so no its not out of the blue Daveg.
So far as I can tell, nobody has picked up on the blatant hypocrisy of Ameircan academic, political, and diplomatic leaders getting all exorcised over the Iranian President’s denial of the Jewish Holocaust while doing exactly the same thing concerning Armenians (and more importantly Native Americans).
The old saying about people in glass houses restraining themselves from throwing stones seems to be apt. We all live in glass houses.
Maybe we could trade Bush for Amidinijad and some players to be named later.
There were actually two Armenian genocides: the first, in 1994-6, killed 200,000 and the second, in 1915, killed approximately a million. Both, carried out by Turks and Kurds, were commonly accompanied by rape and pillage. This was a holocaust in both magnitude and intent. However, the US’s hypocrisy becomes evident when the same Congress that is waging an unlawful war with casualties of similar magnitude condemns it. If the Swedes or Swiss had done so it would have credibility, but not the US.
The perception in the Muslim world that we are ready to condemn a long-ago slaughter of Christians by Muslims while carrying out the slaughter of innocent Muslims in their hundreds of thousands won’t win hearts and minds.
The only way the US can regain any credibility, and hence the moral standing to pass this resolution, is to disengage from Iraq, indict, try and punish those who order and carry out torture and other human rights crimes, and recognize that our manipulative, greedy, cynical and hypocritical conduct for decades in the Middle East has set the stage for today’s crisis.
It’s a shame that, as his diatribe suggests, Mr. Fisk, who I usually support 100% has jumped on the bandwagon to present the claim of genocide by the Armenians as if it were a historical fact. Many well-known historians dispute that claim. Turks for more than two decades have offered to open all the archives to any historian to investigate the claim. They have asked the Armenians to do the same but Armenians have refused to do so. Other than, perhaps the ultra-nationalists in Turkey, nobody on the Turkish side is saying that the Armenians did not suffer or lost lives . But claiming that 1.5 million Armenians got killed in a country that had a total of 13.5 million people and ignoring the number of Turks who got slaughtered by the Armenians have no historical base. It was a war. Many atrocities were committed, and many lives, including Armenians and Turks were lost.
Here is a short narrative of locally what happened during that time in the Trabzon province in NE Turkey where a 20 year friend of mine was born and spent first 20 years of his life. These are first hand stories from his grandmother who was born in 1903.
When the Russians invaded Turkey (Ottoman Empire) along the northeastern (Black Sea) seashore in 1912, they armed the minorities who were of Greek and Armenian in origin. Russian invasion triggered mass migration to the west. Almost all Turkish men were in the army fighting the invading forces in all parts of the country. Tens of thousands of women, elderly and children started fleeing the region. However, his grandmother said, after weeks of walking, they could not escape from the Russians who moved their invading forces via ships quickly and invaded all major centers in the Eastern Black Sea region. With the onset of the migration of Turkish population, ethnic minorities especially Armenians started ethnically cleansing the townships. They invaded, pillaged and ransacked the households vacated by the Turks. They killed thousands of innocent people who either refused to leave or were too old, sick, or young to leave. They raped thousands of women and girls. They stole all the valuables, burned down the houses. There are horror stories about what they have done. Volumes of books with documents and pictures have been written on the subject. Two brothers and two cousins of his grandmother ranging from 10 to 14 years of age were killed by the Armenians. Reportedly worse atrocities were committed by the Armenians in the Eastern (Erzurum and Van area) and South Eastern Turkey where there was a sizable Armenian population.
The claims by Armenians and to a degree the counter claims by the Turks in the media do not get into the details of the history on this topic. It is being portrayed as an incident or series of incidents happened in WW1. If you visit any of the Armenian websites that propagate lies about what happened, they start the clock in 1915 (April 24, 1915 to be precise). There is a history to that contaminated history. They deny any collaboration with the invading forces, notably with the Russians, the French and the British. However, there are many many official historical records made public by these nations that show their collaboration and some of the details of the atrocities they committed (there are also many documents provided by these nations showing that Turks committed atrocities near the end of the war).
As the full-fledged war of WW1 raged thru the years 1914-1918, many more atrocities were committed by the Armenians. After the end of WW1 and beginning of the War of Independence by the Turks, things changed. The invading forces were slowly pushed out of the country. Armenians became vulnerable. Many of them left the country. Many who could not or did not suffered in the hands of the Turks. Several nationalist generals (Pashas they were called) on the Turkish side were involved in forcing the Armenians out of their villages, towns as a retaliation to what they did in the past. So it was another episode of ethnic cleansing, this time being performed by the Turks. In one of these cases, depicted as the “death march” in south-eastern Turkey, no doubt, many Armenians perished.
Nobody should try to excuse anything done by the Turks. Yes, they were fighting to defend their homeland. But it does not mean that everything they did was “halal.” What I am saying is that it is not fair to take the story from one side and accept it as if it is the truth, and the only truth. There are always two if not more sides to a story.
The policy of the current Turkish government is (as stated by the Prime Minister R. Tayyib Erdogan on the Charlie Rose’s show a couple of weeks ago) is that “let’s open all the archives, make all the documents available to a committee of interested historians the both sides agree on. Let them research the topic. We will accept their findings. Was it a genocide? Were there war crimes committed? Who did what and when? Let them document it all.” This offer has not found a positive response from the Armenian side.
I know this is getting long but, with respect to researching what happened to the Armenians in Turkey during that time, Turkey offered to sponsor two professors at UCLA in the 1980s, no strings attached. The offer was a multi-million dolar grant (I don’t remember the exact figure). The Armenian lobby in the US rallied up and pulled every string to make sure that the University turned down that offer! What are they afraid of? Let the truth come out! It eventually will!
P.S.
Before the U.S. interferes with events in past times in another hemisphere, we should pay attention to events occurring NOW!
If we are going to worry about so-called ‘holocausts’, we need to own up to not only the American Indian decimation during the late 1800s but also to the hundreds of thousands of Filipino Muslims(or Moros) slaughtered after we took control of the Philippine Islands from Spain.
While I agree with the writer’s points in this article, and believe that his message is important, there is one clarification that is critical to note. All discussions about genocide and mass killings, in fact what ‘history’ tells us of such events, always omit the most significant “terror” genocidal or ‘event’ of all. The author says;
“Nobody - save for the Jews of Europe - has suffered “terror” more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915″
That is, if we forget the Africans. It has been estimated that between 125 and 150 MILLION Africans died as a result of the slave trade. And which people were involved in perpetrating that ‘holocaust’?
Just some perspective to balance things a bit.
Mr Fisk asserts that Turkish claims of Turkish Muslim deaths in the First World War, of Armenian collaboration with the invading Russians and of Armenians dying in the civil war are “lies”.
Surely he cannot be serious. The fact is that these are historically proven facts.
Huge number of Turks died in the First World War, up to 2.5 million depending on whose account you choose to believe. The close relationship between Armenian ultranationalists and the Russian invaders is equally a historical fact. And the fact is that all this happened in the context of a civil war in which innocent people from all sides died.
Robert Fisk is a great historian and a brilliant author but I think on this issue there is a certain level of disconnect between the whole truth and his version of reality. Certainly nobody in their right mind would deny that the Armenians have suffered tremendously in their tortured history but to dismiss the Turkish side of the story as being “lies” especially given the magnitude of Turkish suffering in the First World War is probably every bit as the unconscionable as the “Holocaust denial” he vociferously flays.
note; sorry for my mangled sentence in the post i just made.
should read; always omit the most significant “terror” or genocidal ‘event’ of all.
The slaughter of the Armenians by the Young Turks was yet another instance of many in a long line of humans’ inhumanity to humans. However, why do we need a Congressional Resolution about it? This is not to say that we, as individuals, should ignore the reality of history, but rather that we don’t need the congresspeople we elected to take care of our (the US’s) business sticking their noses in the business of a sovereign nation.
I have read Balakian and Ambassador Morgenthau on the massacre of Armenians. I believe it occurred, although what we’re having now is a debate about race and genotype (are Armenians a separate race? Are Jews? Are Native Americans?). I just don’t think that the dunderheads in Washington should be wasting what little brain capacity they have on this when we’ve got crumbling infrastructure, a tanking economy, major cities in decline (NO, Detroit, St. Louis), and too many troops stationed in too many places around the globe.
While I love Fisk’s writing, this issue is more white noise.
Whether any holocaust has taken place or not it has nothing to do with the US declaring or denying it. Who the hell is the US but another country among the nearly 200. When will other countries stand up to the US and demand that it stop poking its dirty nose in affairs that belong to the entire world.
The decision as to whether any holocaust has taken place against the native Americans, the black, the Jews, or the Armenians is to be decided by the vote in the UN General Assembly and not by any single country that can spin any genocide to its own interests. Based on the behavior of this rogue nation, any declaration by it should be discarded as rubbish and irrelevant.
Even though Nancy Polosi claims that there has never been a good time for the Armenian Genocide Resolution, the best time was when the British put all the Ottoman Cabinet in jail in Malta after WWI with the charge of Massacres of Armenians and other Ottoman government wrong doings in 1919.
Robert Fisk states that Turkey “blackmailed” US by saying that “access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes.” Call it blackmail or a diplomatic maneuver this is what governments do.
Turkey made it certain that if this resolution passes the war effort in Iraq will be adversely affected. Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos also know well that this is the case. The fact that they have been pushing for this foreseeable outcome makes one wonder whether there is a hidden agenda besides some local politics. Turkey has been an ally of the US for sixty years. The current US actions are effectively pushing Turkey to form different alliances in the region. There has been a visible warm up in the relations between Turkey and Iran and Syria while the possibility of an armed conflict between the US and Iran is on the rise. Robert Fisk is an expert in the Middle Eastern politics and one would expect that he would be writing and illuminating us right now on the potential outcomes of what would happen if the US-Turkey relations suffers a complete collapse and if the current problems we are having in Iraq also extends to Iran and Syria. And whether he thinks if Turkey is deliberately pushed away and if that is the case who would benefit. Instead we see that he is pressuring Pelosi and Lantos to go forward towards a total mess. The word he chose “blackmail” has the echoes of “bring it on!” in it.
“There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true.”
Are there any independent sources for all of this?
If one is to go by the conduct, coverage and reportage of the current Afghanistan & Iraq wars, conflicts in the Middle East, Somalia, Sudan, Algeria by the Western governments - USA and Britain and their mainstream media - then surely one has to take the sources quoted by Mr. Fiske with a grain of salt.
Colonial powers at that time were after the Ottomans and to expect that their reports and claims should be trusted is really asking for too much. Is’nt the “British Foreign Office” the same office that promised Arabs independence while concluding the well known “Sykes-Picot” double cross agreement.
Why don’t they accept the offer of the Turkish government mentioned above in a comment to hold an open investigation?
Please give us a break!!!
The dictionary contains several definitions of holocaust, among them;
“any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.”
It requires no organization or government to “decide” whether this has taken place and thereby grant “holocaust” status.
templer;
You point out several examples of holocausts in history. I think the posts by lillulu and jld_overseas are not critical of or are “pick”ing on Jews. lillulu was referring to the wrong stance of the government in THEIR saying “only Jews count”. I believe jld_overseas is saying simply that there were, in fact, other holocausts, as you noted as well, but that it seems somehow that everyone only thinks of the Nazi holocaust when that word is used and he can’t “understand how that happened” - meaning holocaust should refer to all peoples who have suffered similarly, like the ones you mention in your post.
Now, if I may be so bold as to tread into dangerous waters…I think that one of the reasons for this ‘holocaust’ discussion including who it refers to in history, as well as your thinking that they were “pick”ing on you, is because of what many people see as the often unfair or shall I say unbalanced nature of any such discussion when the discussion involves Jewish people themselves, due to their sensitivity on the very subject. Your post, while you are obviously balanced in your history and do not claim Jewish rights to the term holocaust, react incorrectly to the posters by claiming that they want to “pick on” Jews. For example; it is difficult to have any discussion about the Palestinian / Israeli situation and say the Palestinians have suffered or that Israeli’s have done anything incorrectly without risking being called anti-semitic. That is simply the same thing as Bush saying you are on his side or you are a “traitor”. It is not balanced. I am well aware that there are many Israeli and American Jews who are harsh critics of the Israeli government and support certain Palestinian positions, however that does not change the fact that enough Jewish people are overly quick to call someone anti-semitic who questions anything about the subjects of the Holocaust, Israel/Palestine, Jewish people being instrumental in the slave trade, etc.
In other words, just don’t be so sensitive. No group of people have any exclusive rights to suffering, or the resultant sympathy (something I am sure you agree with, from your post). But no one wants to always be walking on thin ice when they talk about things or to be put on the defensive simply because they broach a sensitive subject.
It occurs to me that many who broach keyboard and pen to castigate others have difficulty in writing, -their hands being slippery with blood from past transgressions; ie: no nation has completely clean hands, if the truth be told?
All of us have done and said things which are reprehensible, imprudent and disrespectful of our fellow beings. As with the NA Indian saying: “When you point the finger of blame, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”
Thanks for the historical erudition in this thread folks. This CommonDreams site sometimes resembles an on-line Radical Progressive’s University (-now there’s a thought!) To starofthesea: feel free to swap a few notes? deepart2000 (at) hot mail (period) com, should get through.
As to Hayastan (as once was) or Armenia as it is now, maybe Bush’s interest was aroused when the president, with his reading age of a three-year old, misread it as ‘America’ and thus got terribly confused?
One of the on-going curses visited upon this once great nation of Armenia seems to be it’s positioning between two large continents, and thus subject to many invasions from various hostile neighbors.
That was aeons ago, and maybe excusable for those times, when we as a race were ‘less civilised’ and ‘didn’t know any better’…
The pity of it all is that in THIS age, [this hi-tech, space-age, 21st Century] there still exists among us throwback degenerates who haven’t yet developed into becoming *caring and enlightened* in their relationships with fellow Earthlings, so daily exhibit predatory, anachronistic Troglodyte characteristics more befitting cave-dwellers than those ensconced in contemporary mansions…
Such ‘resurgent atavism’ is very apparent in America today, wherein we see the curious juxtapositioning of highly educated, progressive, compassionate and forward-looking people, ~ sitting uneasily in class next to ‘primitives’ who, -whilst clad in the finest modern garb and riding SUVs in place of swinging from branch-to-branch in the tree canopies, nonetheless act with rampant, aggressive hostility towards those of the same species.
History’s long-view will see the more urbane amongst us eventually assisting the ’slow learners’ (-such as those in the Gray House, the big corporations, and the Pentagon, et al) to catch up and evolve, …but oh! ~ what an uphill struggle it is in the meantime!
_______________________
Ps. Sometime ago many wondered what the suspicious ‘bump’ was on George WWIII Bush’s back, -visible beneath his jacket.
Was it a secret radio link, supplying puppet-master Cheney’s answers to questions?
The following link explains it all; - view a photo of the atavistic Chimp’s vestigial tail !
http://www.jbjs.org.uk/cgi/reprint/62-B/4/508.pdf
Shame on all human beings, on all human groups, whether defined by race, religion or culture. We are in all a very related species, so ready to see a difference between Us and Them and so ready to turn to do evil against Them. Every human being alive today is descended from or closely related to groups of humans who at some time have killed masses of human beings belonging to other groups. There are no innocents. Everyone is capable of taking part in a group mass murderer. All it takes is group identification of the Other, and a plausible reason and power to acquire their possessions. We do not normally know our capability for evil, but it is programmed in our genes, and harsh circumstances will ignite the programs. Hardened people will do terrible things. When we learn the history of terrible actions of others, we are really learning what we would rather not know about ourselves.
Bush never met a lie he didn’t like.
Ive always Championed the 1965 CIA Holocaust in Indonesia.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5410
Apparently AlexLawyer entered an erroneousd date for the first Armenian slaughter: “1994-6″ should be 1894-, or the last decades of the 19th century. My Armenian forbearers left Turkish Armenia shortly after that time because of the murderous attacks on them by the Turks who had weapons and means of transportation not available to the Armenian villagers, who could not defend themselves or easily escape. Thus when “curmudgeon99″ asserts that the Armenians slaughtered Turks in a war that occurred in 1915 and thereafter, he slithers past the beginning of the holocaust and focuses on the consequences of the hate engendered by the Turks in their earlier attempts to eliminate the Armenians from Turkey. In other words, Russia (whatever their political/military motives)came to the aid of the defenceless Armenians by providing weapons and logistical support, which the Armenians gratefully used against the genocidal intentions of the Turks. But the poor Armenians, lacking the superior organizational and governmental funding of their attackers lost their land, their cities, their villages, and their people to the Turks. Why, then, did Bush support the Turks instead of the Armenian Resolution? Because Bush is like those Turks who murdered so many, just as he is guilty of murdering so many in the wars he is conducting now.
Dung Beetle
More of a reason why this president and his administration has failed the American people again and again and again. A true embarrassment as the “Leader of the Free-World.” Truly despicable!