Ts’eghaspanut’yun
By a one-vote margin, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Armenian genocide resolution, but if what happened last year is any indication it will either not be brought to a vote or it will be voted down. We already know this, because this is what happens every year. This annual ritual includes the usual protestations and threats from Ankara. These always have their desired effect, because every Speaker yields to the President, and every administration yields to the Pentagon, which reliably implores every administration every year to scrap the resolution. Depending on the state of Israeli-Turkish relations, the resolution has relatively more or fewer backers. Given Erdogan’s treatment of Israel in the last year, there might be a few more than usual.
There is one good reason why the House should not pass the resolution, and at least a dozen bad ones. Max Boot rehearses some of these. The good reason is that the resolution would antagonize Turkey at a time when there might yet be a breakthrough in Turkish-Armenian relations. That would be a good outcome for both countries and for the region. It would honor the vision of Hrant Dink, who worked intently to improve relations between Turks and Armenians in Turkey and between the two republics. Dink argued that Diasporan Armenians should devote all their energy and time to building up the Hayastan that exists and cease dwelling on the genocide, as real and terrible as it was. Incredibly, it was the complete misunderstanding of his statements on this point that inspired his Turkish nationalist killer to murder him. The Republic of Armenia could use the economic and diplomatic links with Turkey, and this might work to lessen the tensions in the southern Caucasus that linger from the Karabakh war. If Turkish-Armenian rapprochement continues, the House should not pass the resolution.
Otherwise, the resolution ought to be passed. After all, it is actually not the business of Turkey whether our House of Representatives passes symbolic non-binding resolutions on any topic. One can argue that the House should never pass symbolic resolutions, but no one ever makes this argument except when it comes to defeating this resolution. Virtually no one who is not working for Ankara or pro-Turkish lobbying groups claims that the genocide did not happen or that it was not a state-organized genocide, so there is no good historical argument against recognition. We do not usually accommodate genocide deniers, and it continues to escape me why we should indulge them in this instance. It’s true that the resolution will do nothing for the victims, but then the resolution is really for the descendants of the survivors who support its passage. They wish to commemorate the attempted destruction of their people and their ancestors’ expulsion from their ancestral lands, and I cannot think of one other group of people in this country we would try to prevent from doing this. It is true that the resolution does not provide any justice for the victims, but then it also does nothing to harm or burden the modern Turkish state. Ankara’s constant opposition is not only shameful but also utterly irrational.
The alliance argument doesn’t hold up very well, either. After all, Turkey makes its own foreign policy and often does so in ways that are quite irritating to Washington. That is Turkey’s prerogative, and generally I have no problem with that, but it does undermine the claim that the U.S. must not displease solidly reliable Ankara with a symbolic, toothless resolution. Ankara annoys Washington and Washington infuriates Ankara on far more substantive issues. Somehow, the alliance survives the real rifts that these disagreements create, because the interests of both states dictate that the alliance is more valuable than the points of contention between our governments. It would survive recognition of the genocide, and once the recognition was done it need never disturb U.S.-Turkish relations again.
Boot mentions needing Turkish aid on Iran sanctions, when it is already virtually certain that Turkey has no intention of supporting a new round of sanctions. If the resolution is scrapped tomorrow, Turkey’s vote on the Security Council will still go against Washington’s proposal because Turkish interests diverge from Washington’s on this question. Since a new round of sanctions is misguided and probably futile, this isn’t so bad, but we need to understand that scrapping the resolution will not yield any substantive gains on policy elsewhere because Turkish cooperation on sanctioning Iran, for example, will not be forthcoming anyway.
Daniel’s almost spot on here.
The context for this recurrent kerfuffle is that Congress has not merely commemorated the murder of the Jews of Europe, but elevated it to near-creedal status, with its own temple on the Mall. This elevation is a tribute to the political influence of one ethnic/religious minority. Unfortunately, the memory is routinely abused, among other things, to strengthen an alliance with Israel beyond all reasonable connection to our national interest. If pre-1967 Israel has a narrow waist it is not merely a military liability but an “Auschwitz border,” anything but the most servile obedience to neocon belligerence makes it 1938 all over again, etcetera etcetera and so forth.
Having embraced this ritual, to fail to commemorate the crimes against another, somewhat less influential minority seems unfair, nay, offensive, especially when the exploiters of the genocide of the Jews support or oppose the commemoration of the genocide of the Armenians in the parochial interest of Israel. “Denialism” is only sometimes heretical.
If we have perforce gone down the road of commemorating the victims of mass murders, let us at least be somewhat consistent and accurate about it. Let the Armenian-Americans have their resolution.
As Daniel says, the Turks will get over it.
Someday, no doubt, Congress will pass a resolution commemorating the Nakba, but holding one’s breath until it does so would not be prudent.
I have nothing new to say since the last time we debated this. I do wonder why Larison uncharacteristically chooses sentiment over interest.
No U.S. interests are being sacrificed. No U.S. interests are at stake. This is what I keep trying to make clear: the resolution will not have an effect on Turkish or U.S. interests. These are not arguments for defeating the resolution. The main argument against the resolution is that it could harm Armenian interests.
Sentiment actually has very little to do with it. I object to the Turkish government dictating what our Congress can and cannot pass, especially when it is something that does not refer to the current Turkish state. I definitely object to a state that claims to be an ally acting in such a fashion.
Daniel Larison, thank you for your principle. I have noticed this principle in your past writings too.
Twice the full U.S. House of Representatives has voted (Res. 148 in 1975 and Res. 248 in 1984) to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as a “genocide.” Turkey did nothing. It could not and cannot.
These facts are all on a very fine, well-documented, DC-based website, http://www.Armenian-Genocide.org. Also check out http://www.NoPlaceforDenial.com. Check out the latter’s News Archive and Q and A.
Pres. Reagan officially recognized the Genocide (as “genocide”) in a proclamation in 1981. The EU Parliament has formally done so three times, and the Council of Europe Parliament has also done so.
Turkey has done nothing to retaliate.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has also recognized the Armenian Genocide several times. In a 1949 TV interview, the famed jurist who actually coined the word “genocide” (Raphael Lemkin) said that he first became interested in the subject because of the Armenian genocide. Though he was Jewish, it was not the Holocaust that first got him interested. He’s the one that wrote the UN genocide treaty of 1948.
It disturbs me to see Americans who normally would not stand for threats from foreign countries shake in their boots when the Turks bluster and whine. Do these Americans have no shame, no self-esteem? Hey guys, a reminder: the US is the superpower, not Turkey. Stop shaking. You’re embarrassing everyone.
I am not trying to make this into a religious issue but: what a shame to see some big-name Christian Americans (or those who claim to be Christian) turn a blind eye to the fact that Turkey exterminated nearly all of its indigenous Christians (Turks are NOT indigenous to that territory) from 1915 to 1923. And the few remaining ones are under severe pressure in Turkey.
Daniel, by the way, there really is no Armenian – Turkish “rapproachement.” People have been misled by the mainstream media on this matter just as those media do not even know about previous successful Armenian Genocide resolutions.
You see, the US wants to bury the Genocide issue and open a direct route (Azerbaijan – Armenia – Turkey) for additional US-sponsored gas and oil pipelines since the Georgian-Russian war of 2008 cast doubt on Georgia as a future pipeline route.
I’ve offered to submit an article to TAC on these issues and have often given TAC a lot of this information, but it has made it clear to me that it is not interested and would rather side with neo-cons in these matters. Such is life. Too bad so many of its readers are getting their (mis) information on these issues from the mainstream media and, ahem, National Review, which has become …
No U.S. interests are at stake.
It can never be to our interest to gratuitously offend any foreign government. Doubtless the impact will be negligible in many individual cases, be we can’t be certain of that in any particular case. Or are you claiming infallibility?
By your own account ‘the Pentagon’ is concerned. I see no reason to prefer your opinion to theirs.
The risk may be small, but the upside is absolute zero.
Sentiment actually has very little to do with it. I object to the Turkish government dictating what our Congress can and cannot pass . . .
That’s not sentiment?
Governments try to influence each other all the time. It’s called ‘diplomacy’.
I don’t see the Turks trying to ‘dictate’. They are merely asking a small favor, one that apparently matters to them and costs us nothing.
Dr. Larison, do you mean to suggest that your interest in this matter is purely resentment of the Turks, and has nothing to do with the actual issue? That doesn’t seem consistent with much of what you have written on the subject.
“One can argue that the House should never pass symbolic resolutions, but no one ever makes this argument except when it comes to defeating this resolution.”
I believe Ron Paul makes this argument every time these symbolic resolutions come up, as he did this time — Ron Paul showcases his foreign policy philosophy during Armenian Genocide markup.
Paul’s argument is about symbolic resolutions on internal affairs of other countries, not about all symbolic resolutions.
Here are some alleged Paul votes for symbolic resolutions on domestic issues.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/p000583/votes/
Well, I shouldn’t have said “no one.” I should say that virtually no one makes this argument. I respect Rep. Paul’s view on this, but as he acknowledges in his own statement the people who are most strenuously working to defeat the resolution are the people who would otherwise be demanding American intervention throughout the world. Indeed, most of the geopolitical and alliance arguments against the resolution take for granted that the resolution would get in the way of forging a broader anti-Iranian coalition.
I understand why he would prefer not to have Congress discuss these matters, but the political reality is that it is by and large the worst interventionists who want to see the resolution defeated. As I said, there is a good argument against the resolution focused on facilitating Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, but we should not kid ourselves that effectively aiding denialists in this instance is going to teach anyone the right lessons about neutrality and non-intervention. Quite the contrary, I would think.
Norman Stone has an op-ed today in which he rehearses the same, old bad arguments against genocide recognition. He writes, “However, every Turk knows that, during the First World War, horrible things happened, and for Congress to single out the Armenians is regarded in Turkey simply as an insult.” It’s true that lots of horrible things happened during WWI. Many of them happened inside the Ottoman Empire under the authority of the government or as a result of government decisions. If he prefers, we could also talk about the fate of the Assyrians and the Pontic Greeks, among others, but presumably we’re not supposed to talk about those things, either. Let’s just think what the reaction would be if someone said the same things about WWII and Germany and entitled the op-ed “bad things happen when a Reich falls apart.”
Regarding Ankara’s lobbying, of course they are dictating to Congress. In the past they have held out the threat of cutting off supply routes into Iraq if the resolution were passed. My guess is that these threats have been empty ones, but Ankara has been willing to make quite significant threats to force Congress to toe its line. The resolution really has nothing to do with the Turkish republic, so what favor are we doing them by not acknowledging the crimes of the triumvirate?
In the past they have held out the threat of cutting off supply routes into Iraq . . .
As I’ve pointed out before, that would be no more than withholding a favor of their own, which they have every right to do.
The resolution really has nothing to do with the Turkish republic . . .
I don’t care why the Turks care. It is enough for me that they do. I’m sure they are better judges of their interests than I.
Dr. Larison, I’m less interested in debating this than in understanding why you feel as you do. You’ve ignored my latest questions in that regard.
. . . the people who are most strenuously working to defeat the resolution are the people who would otherwise be demanding American intervention throughout the world.
If that’s supposed to be an argument for passing the resolution, it’s a classic ad hominem fallacy. It parallels the argument that conservatives should support Sarah Palin because most of her critics are liberals.
If the argument is that anti-interventionists should support measures that alienate our allies in the hope of constraining our own government, then it has some force. But I fear such a strategy would be ‘too clever by half’.
It has nothing to do with “feelings.” I am more sympathetic to the Armenians generally, so I take an interest in this debate, but how I “feel” is irrelevant. If Turkish interference in our politics isn’t a good enough reason to oppose Ankara’s efforts I’ll try to give you some others.
No branch of our government is obliged to assist another state in historical revisionism and genocide denial. That is what Ankara wants our government to do. I doubt that we would accommodate most other governments that tried to do this. If Turkey thinks we owe them this favor, that’s too bad. If Turkey wants to withhold military cooperation over what should be a non-issue, that is their mistake. Once again, this has nothing to do with actual Turkish interests. Actual Turkish state interests would not be harmed in the least. It is a matter of nationalist denial of historical reality. Ankara is free to do this, but it cannot expect its allies to cooperate in its unreasonable revision of the past.
Turkey criminalizes speech and actions that acknowledge the genocide and anything else that might be considered insulting to Turkishness. Turkey would like to be taken seriously as a Westernized country and an emerging market, but it infringes on freedom of speech and expression among their own writers and scholars and goes so far as to prosecute them over this. Generally, this is not our business. Ankara makes their censorship and revisionism our business by its interference in our domestic politics.
If Japanese nationalists insist on engaging in massive revisionism about Japan’s wartime past, for example, that may be unfortunate but it is not our problem. Japan may have made some noises about the 2006 House resolution on “comfort women,” but as far as I can recall there were not many arguments against the resolution that cited the possible damage to the Japanese alliance. The resolution passed, and nothing changed in U.S.-Japan relations. That’s because non-binding symbolic resolutions of this kind have no effect on relations between mature, modern democracies. Indeed, whatever problems the alliance with Japan has today have nothing to do with that resolution.
There is also the problem of the obvious double standard applied to WWII-era genocide and almost everything else.
Once again, I don’t think the resolution should be passed. My point in drawing attention to the foreign policy views of those who are working hardest to defeat the resolution is to make clear that Ron Paul’s neutralist reasons for opposing the resolution are not shared by most resolution opponents. Far from it. They hate the idea of U.S. neutrality, and they would like us to be deeply involved in the affairs of other nations. That doesn’t mean we should pass the resolution to spite them. That would be silly. It means that we should understand that their pose of non-interference in this instance has nothing to do with their broader view of the U.S. role in the world.
There is also the problem of the obvious double standard applied to WWII-era genocide and almost everything else.
On this point I am most definitely of the opposite opinion. The Shoah cult is bad enough. We don’t need more of them.
Well, I don’t know. This massacre of Armenians falls into a gray zone between massacres taken as incidents of pre-Modern barbarism without political relevance today beyond the cultural narratives of the historical participants, versus those mass killings that count as catastrophic moral failures of societies with Modern reference frames and responsibilities.
This issue and vote come at a time when American interests in the region (the Caucasus, Turkey, Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria) are complicated and resistance or pushback against these interests is perhaps maximal. It comes inconveniently after substantial State Department investment over the past year in obtaining a negotiated settlement of the Karabakh problem.
If Turkey wants to withhold military cooperation over what should be a non-issue, that is their mistake.
It’s not obvious to me how the Turks would have lost by staying aloof from our war of aggression. Btw their support for that enterprise was not required by the NATO agreement, and was prohibited by the Charter of the United Nations.
I have a few objections to this type of stuff. The first is that this is a matter of history, not political posturing. If we start voting on what is true historically, next do we start voting on the value of pi?
I also disagree with with characterization that “virtually no one . . . claims that the genocide did not happen.” A number of reputable scholars have levelled serious criticisms of characterizing it this way. And, despite your assertion, they are not employed by the Turks. Indeed, the main refutations of their theories seem to lean more on the ad hominem than the historical.
The “no one” statement also seems to be a subtle introduction of a meme I often see advanced: that the majority of historians believe it was a genocide. This implies that there was a survey of historians, but I can’t seem to find any record of this survey.
Personally, being of Scottish descent, I don’t really have a horse in this race. But, perhaps due to a Scottish hard-headedness, I like to see things proven. My forays into the historical records and in debating Armenians have left me, um, “disappointed” with the evidence they present. Many of them still believe in the Naim Bey telegrams, for example.
The conclusion I derive from this is that there is tremendous pressure (cultural and familial) for Armenians to accept the genocide narrative and thus affirm themselves as part of the group. (My theory is buttressed by the apparent tendency for most Armenians in Armenia to care less about the genocide than those outside Armenia.)
I am also struck by the ommisions and framing of events by the genocidists. In their narrative, April 1915 was a peaceful time in the world. There was no war and Gallipoli is not in their vocabularies.
In Eastern Anatolia a group of unarmed women and children, anticipating the catastrophe, rose up and overtook the strategic gateway city of Van, miraculously holding out against entire Turkish divisions until a Russian army happened by to relieve them.
My inability to accept this story may be due to my cynical ideas on Russian expansionist intentions, but that still doesn’t explain the photos of all those nice weapons the hands of the mustachiod women “defending” Van against the Turks.
Perhaps these logical deficiencies are due to me arguing against other armchair historians and real genocide historians have better, more valid, arguments. Of course, by your reasoning, I’d have to only listen to those that are “not working for [Yerevan] or pro-[Armenian] lobbying groups.” But then I may not have a lot to chose from.
I apologize for my long windedness, but I just thought of two other points.
One is that this resolution might have unconsidered ramifications to Armenian-Turkish relations. There does exist a group in Armenian politics that is calling for the “return” of the Eastern Turkish provinces to Armenia. So perhaps the resolution should also reaffirm the existing territorial boundaries. And, perhaps, include a denunciation of the assassinations and terrorism propagated by similar Armenian groups.
The second point is that Armenia really needs to open the border with Turkey. Currently their only land access goes through either Iran or Georgia, neither of which is a trouble-free country. Armenia would benefit considerably with an open border to Turkey. I was in Armenia two years ago, and it is apparent that economically and culturally they would become much more dynamic with direct access to Turkish business and products. Might improve the roads, too.
Armenia is a beautiful country. Aside from the lack of tourist infrastructure (hotels, transit, and – did I mention good roads?) it is a great travel destination. Forested hills, thousand year-old monastaries, and really nice people. Good wine too, I understand.
More people should visit.