Preemptive cultural surrender will be the defining issue of this upcoming election. ~Bill Bennett

First of all, if it were going to be the defining issue of the upcoming election it would need to have a much catchier name than “preemptive cultural surrender.”

The new advocacy of containment may stem from a substantial gap between Russian and U.S. aspirations. U.S. diplomacy seeks to transform what Washington considers “nondemocratic” governments around the world, reordering entire regions in the process. Russia, with its experience with revolution and extremism, cannot subscribe to any such ideologically driven project, especially one that comes from abroad. The Cold War represented a step away from the Westphalian standard of state sovereignty, which placed values beyond the scope of intergovernmental relations. A return to Cold War theories such as containment will only lead to confrontation. ~Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Jim Ogonowski is the most famous special election loser most people have never heard of.  Some are taking his close defeat (in Massachusetts) as proof that anti-incumbency and “change” are the things driving voters this cycle, and that our “closely divided electorate” is actually closely divided again.  Ruffini takes it as proof that “we can finally dispense with the talk of 2008 being another 2006 for Democrats.”  It would help the strength of this claim if most of the people at TownHall had actually thought that 2006 would be a 2006 for the Democrats. 

But it isn’t just the TownHall criers who see this election as potentially significant: Jim Antle and Dave Weigel were talking about this race before the Fightin’ Fifth became a Republican talking point.  Weigel attributes Ogonowski’s loss not only to the extremely adverse conditions of running as a Republican in Massachusetts, but also to Ogonowski’s choice to oppose S-CHIP using anti-immigration rhetoric.  It seems equally likely that Ogonowski performed as well as he did (45%, four points better than Bush ran in the district in ’04) because he tried to recast a highly unpopular position (opposing S-CHIP) in more popular–and populist–language.  However, Weigel does make the right point when he notes, “neither party is brimming with farmer-soldiers whose brothers died on 9/11 and who are ready to work themselves ragged.” 

For Ogonowski’s campaign to serve as a GOP model for next year’s House races, the Republicans would need to recruit candidates as dedicated and appealing as Ogonowski.  Right now, Republican candidate recruitment is going badly, since many local pols who might be interested in making a run for Congress see next year as a disaster and don’t want to be part of it.  A demoralised party base, anemic fundraising and an effectively broke NRCC all mean that you’re not going to have many war veteran Jim Ogonowskis charging into deep blue territory.  It means that you’re going to have virtual no-name rookies trying to recapture territory that your side never should have lost in the first place (TX-22, FL-16, etc.).     

Also, no one seems to be paying attention to this, but the sheer number of votes cast in the special election was much lower than it was even in an uncontested general election last fall.  Turnout at this election was less than half of what it was in ’06, when Meehan was running without opposition.  ’06 had 50,000 fewer total votes than the contested ’04 race, in which the Republican received 88,232 votes, over forty thousand more than Ogonowski received (47,770).  What this means is that Ogonowski, with his service record, notable personal story, generally well-run campaign and work ethic, barely managed to bring out half of the Republican voters of the 5th.  Tsongas, for her part, only motivated about a third of Meehan’s ’06 voters to show up, but this is typical for the two parties in a special election.  In other words, 45% is probably the very best the GOP could have hoped to get in this election, and it achieved that goal.  It will be downhill from here. 

As MA-05 demonstrates quite nicely, Republicans tend to turn out at a greater rate at special, off-year and midterm elections and have done so for a very long time.  Presidential election years tend to have the best turnout for Democratic voters, because their voters tend to turn out at the highest rates when they are mobilised to back the presidential nominee.  That means that next year could conceivably be worse for the Republicans than last year, and the competitiveness in MA-05, to the extent that it has broader significance, vastly exaggerates the GOP’s appeal to the voters.  In any case, next year’s results from Massachusetts are very likely going to be a lot more lopsided than was Ogonowski’s run. 

Following the same logic being applied by Republican boosters to the MA-05 race, the very close IL-06 open race last year between Pete Roskam and Tammy Duckworth (a double amputee Iraq war helicopter pilot) is evidence that even DuPage County could turn Democratic.  Taking such open elections, especially when they are special elections in an off year, as evidence of a national trend seems mistaken, and the fact that it is being taken as a sign of things to come rather reflects the desperation of Republican observers who really need to find something they can use to mobilise their side.  It seems to me that the incumbent party very often wins such open elections in traditionally safe districts by relatively narrow margins.  Roskam won 51-49 in a district that Henry Hyde had routinely won with more than 55% of the vote.  If we grant that Ogonowski was a much better candidate than Duckworth (and everyone will grant this), we should not be terribly surprised that he performed well against Paul Tsongas’ widow, who may have had the advantages of establishment and name recognition, but who evidently did not have a lot more than that as a candidate.

Update: Dig a little deeper, and the GOP boosting of this election makes even less sense.  Apparently, a good number of local progressives resented the party machine foisting Tsongas on the voters and sat the election out.  I’ve already noted the turnout gap between the two sides in this election, and this helps to explain some of it. 

Also, it’s worth noting that the Massachusetts Republican Party is a “shambles” right now.  One of the many knocks on Romney’s tenure is that he did little or no party-building when he was governor.  This represents a striking contrast with the Democrats in Ohio, who were surging after Kerry’s close loss in 2004 and who were in the process of selecting strong candidates for Senate and governor for ’06 when Hackett made his failed challenge to Jean Schmidt.  Like Ogonowski, Hackett was a veteran with no prior political experience.  The Democrats were pinning their hopes as much on the symbolic appeal of a war veteran candidate as the Republicans were pinning theirs on the appeal of a relative of a 9/11 victim.  In the end, the voters who came out for the special election stuck with the incumbent party (and Schmidt narrowly retained her seat in ’06 as well). 

Given what I’ve already said about the differences between the parties with respect to special election turnout, Hackett’s strong showing was evidence of a surging Democratic Party in Ohio while Ogonowski’s result is evidence of Northeastern Republicans in disarray.  If you check the electoral history of Ohio’s 2nd District (which is very easy to do these days, which makes me wonder why it seems that no one has bothered to do this), you can see that the drop-off in support for Schmidt in the special election relative to the level of support for Portman, the House member she was trying to replace, was huge.  Except for the ’04 presidential year, when overall turnout in the district soared, Hackett’s special election result represented one of the best showings for a Democrat in that district in the last decade before ’06.  He outperformed the Democratic candidate for the general in ’02 and was within 10,000 votes of matching the 2000 Democratic candidate’s tally.  Schmidt meanwhile got only 26% of Portman’s 2004 votes, while Hackett held on to 63% of his ’04 counterpart’s votes.  Schmidt’s performance relative to the strength of her predecessor was significantly worse than Tsongas’, and Hackett’s performance was significantly better than Ogonowski’s.  Republicans in Ohio were turning out at a rate so much lower than the norm for Republican voters in special elections that it was quite rightly taken as a sign of the GOPocalypse.

Matt Continetti notes economic and business conservatives’ wariness about Huckabee, but then goes on to add that Huckabee’s foreign policy may actually be insufficient for “national security conservatives.”  As Continetti puts it, these people have “reason to doubt Huckabee’s seriousness in prosecuting the war on terror and carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration.”  Since Huckabee’s feints in the direction of a “humble” foreign policy have never seemed very compelling to me, I confess that it had never occurred to me that he could have exposed himself as weak in the eyes of interventionists.  What terrible things did the man say that have apparently put him in such a bind? 

At the CFR CSIS he said:

This Administration’s bunker mentality has been counter-productive both at home and abroad.  They have done as poor a job of communicating and consulting with other countries as they have with the American people.   

This seems to be a basically true observation.  Huckabee could very easily be making these criticisms as a hawk who thinks that the administration has failed to “name the enemy,” to use a favourite jingo phrase, and has failed to “explain to the people” the stakes and costs of the war.
It’s true, he did say this:

We don’t merely tolerate diversity, we embrace and celebrate it. 

But he is making his drippy remarks in the context of talking about how different we are from “Islamic extremists.”  Huckabee went on to say:

It takes an enormous leap of imagination to understand what these people are about, that they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it.   

This should put him right at home with the people Continetti is talking about.  The man name-checks Sayyid Qutb and talks about the need to understand the thinking of the enemy.  Granted, for some interventionists any call to understanding is painful and alien, but it’s not clear how Huckabee has failed the “seriousness” test as seriousness is defined by these folks.  He even comes back to his favourite theme of linking the jihadis to the culture of death–it’s new fusionism in action!  (In case I need to make it clear, I don’t think this is a good thing.)  Where did Huck go wrong?

Huckabee talks about the failure of European integration of its Muslims while praising the wonders of assimilationism here.  This stuff was supposed to be music to the ears of “national security conservatives.”  But, wait, I think I am seeing a weakness in Huckabee’s otherwise solid jingo wall:

We have to understand that while educated Muslims in Europe may not be materially deprived, many of them feel socially and emotionally deprived by a lack of acceptance. 

Anytime you use the phrase “emotionally deprived,” your favourability with the voters Continetti is talking about is going to go down.  This sort of language veers dangerously towards the idea that policies have some relationship to terrorism and the prevention of terrorism.  It also sounds a little too therapeutic for most people on the right.  Then there was this:

We can’t ‘export’ democracy as if it was Coca Cola or KFC, but we can nurture native moderate forces in all these countries where Al Qaeda seeks to replace modern evil with medieval evil.

Er, who’s the “modern evil”?  That’s a bit of a puzzle, but otherwise Huckabee is on potentially solid ground as far as “carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration” goes.  He expresses some greater skepticism of democratisation, but doesn’t seem to fundamentally disagree with the assumptions of the Bush Doctrine.  Instead of Second Inaugural-style lunacy, Huckabee proposes a milder form of madness:

My goal in the Muslim world is to correctly calibrate a course between maintaining stability and promoting democracy.  It is self-defeating to try to accomplish too much too soon, you just have elections where extremists win, but it’s equally self-defeating to do nothing. 

He accepts the indictment against realism that the pursuit of stability is unacceptable, which is one of the reasons why I continue to find Huckabee unacceptable. 

Huckabee may have gotten himself into some trouble here:

First, we have to destroy the terrorists who already exist, then we have to attack the underlying conditions that breed terror, by helping to improve health and basic quality of life, create schools that offer an alternative to the extremist madrassas that turn impressionable children into killers, create jobs and opportunity and hope, encourage a free press, fair courts, and other institutions that promote democracy. 

“Underlying conditions” sounds an awful lot like “root causes,” which usually receive such mocking from the people Continetti calls “national security conservatives.”  On the whole, however, this doesn’t sound that far removed from what Romney has been saying.  However, he summons up an association he might have wanted to avoid:

As for the underlying dispute between them that’s been going on for almost fourteen hundred years, we don’t have a dog in that fight. 

References to dogs and fights grate on neocon ears, since this is the language used by James Baker about Yugoslavia (and he was right) and usually belongs on the indictment of realism.  But when you look closer, you can see that Huckabee is no realist (far from it!):

Our enemy is Islamic extremism in all its guises. 

Apparently that includes every “extremist” on earth, no matter whom he’s fighting or why.  Of course there’s no conceptual coherence to any of this–he belittles the Saudis for backing “Sunni extremists” while praising our efforts to support…Sunni extremists in western Iraq.  He does nonetheless occasionally say strangely intelligent things:

I’d rather have more people in Langley, so we can deploy fewer in Baghdad.   

Then he says things that must really annoy them over at the Standard:

The difference in America’s mission is that Al Qaeda must be destroyed as a movement, while Iran just has to be contained as a nation.

Obviously Huckabee didn’t get the memo that containment is for losers.  By mentioning containment, despite his perfect willingness to launch attacks on Iran, he has made himself seem less “serious” to the hawks, which is some evidence that he is at least not as irresponsible as they are.  Not to worry, though, he’s still sticking to the main points of the script:

To contain Iran, it is essential to win in Iraq. 

But then he goes and “ruins” it all by talking about robust diplomacy!  He then quickly “saves” himself with a pointless call for divestment from Iran.  But then he really hurts himself with the “national security conservatives” when he says:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

This sounds unusually sensible.  It will probably completely undermine his reputation with the Persophobes who think that there can never been any real negotiations with Iran, but it might just make him seem remotely sane enough to be entrusted with power.  He seems to be leaving the door open to restoring diplomatic relations with Tehran, while also stating his willingness to bomb them.  This is a terribly split-minded view of things, but it might be just the right balance of hawkishness and sanity to win over a good number of voters.  But, before anyone gets too excited, Huckabee really does go off the rails and begins making an extended argument for launching strikes into Pakistan without Islamabad’s approval.  As foolish as I think this is, Huckabee does also manage to say some sensible things about Musharraf that need to be said.  Then he turns around and recites the talking points about the “surge” and “bottom-up reconciliation.” 

There are a lot of things there that ought to satisfy interventionists, a few lines that realists will like, and very little to generate enthusiasm among antiwar conservatives.  Frankly, whatever you think about his policy proposals, his CFR speech is one of the most substantive addresses on foreign policy this year.  Any knock on Huckabee that he is “light” or weak on foreign policy seems plainly wrong to me.

Rod writes:

But I think he [Huckabee]’s going to get the GOP nomination in 2012. What think ye?

I agree with Rod that Huckabee is not going anywhere this time, even if he should somehow win in Iowa, which I have already argued won’t happen.  But what about the next time around?  Assuming that the eventual GOP nominee this time will be defeated next November, and he very likely will be, it’s not unthinkable that Huckabee could win the nomination. 

However, for this to happen at least two things are essential. 1) He must not be the VP nominee this time (a failed Veep nominee never gets his own chance, unless he has actually been, as Mondale was, at least Vice President at some point before).  2) In the event of a Giuliani nomination, he must not endorse the nominee.  Any strong social conservative, pro-life politician who endorses a Giuliani ticket will suffer the curse of Santorum in the next cycle (being abandoned by many of the very pro-life voters whose cause the politician had made a central part of his career).  Any pro-life politician on a Giuliani ticket will be finished. 

Also, Huckabee would need to cultivate a position as an informal opposition leader during the next administration.  However, he would probably have some strong competition in another open GOP race in ’12 against a number of other governors or former governors (perhaps Pawlenty, Riley, the ever-looming Jeb Bush or perhaps even a very strong Charlie Crist).  Either Pawlenty or Riley could undermine Huckabee’s claim to his mix of social conservatism, reformism and populism, and the possibility of having a big-state governor on the ticket would limit the appeal of an Arkansan (who will have been out of office for five years by the time the first votes are cast in ’12).  Were it not for his name, Jeb Bush would easily overshadow all other probable entrants for ’12.  Now a Bush-Huckabee ’12 ticket would not be such a far-fetched idea, awful as it seems to me, but I just don’t see Huckabee’s name in the top position. 

Reihan makes a number of good points here*, and if I had taken the time to write a longer response to Brooks’ latest I would have had to acknowledge that there is certainly something to Brooks’ contention that Huckabee ought to be taken more seriously and should be seen as more of a first-tier candidate.  What I wanted to say in my short post was simply that one of the key reasons that Brooks gives (Huckabee’s acceptability to “all factions”) is pretty questionable.  Brooks says this as a way of distinguishing Huckabee from the leaders of the pack, but Huckabee has as many perceived flaws as, if not actually more such flaws than, some of the leaders.  

That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t also got a number of electoral strengths (his mild Main Street populism, his foreign policy mix of national interest and talk of honour, his Giuliani-esque embrace of border security while being pretty liberal on immigration policy itself).  Then again, some of these strengths can be liabilities in a Republican primary contest and some undermine him with other voters.  His corporation-bashing is good, populist fun, but it hardly helps his already anemic fundraising, and his sympathy for American workers seems to be entirely out of whack with his broader immigration position and his advocacy for a consumption tax.  He talks a good game on a number of things at the moment, but perusing his record gives the groups I mentioned a very different view of the man.   

As I’m sure Reihan knows, the Club for Growth really dislikes Huckabee’s record on taxes.  This would be where Reihan says that this is actually a mark in Huckabee’s favour, because people backed by the Club for Growth have pretty bad electability.  Nonetheless, in the primaries the Club has disproportionately great influence and their “pro-growth” views carry weight with many activists.  Huckabee has also received a “D” grade on economic policy from Cato for his tenure as governor.  Again, Reihan could ask, “How many divisions does the Cato Institute have?”  The number would not be large.  But the reasons why Huckabee might very well be a successful general election candidate are the reasons why he will have trouble gaining traction in the early primaries.  Does he undo some of this damage with his support for the Fair Tax?  Perhaps, but the charge of opportunism hurts as much as “vagueness” and “flexibility” help.  The same goes for his discovery of border security.  On the war, his position is not a liability with most core GOP voters, but it seems to me that antiwar conservatives have to have been put off by his commitment to remain in Iraq in the name of “honour.” 

Update: Ross has more.

Incidentally, aside from his having an agreeable personality and executive experience, what substantially distinguishes Huckabee’s social conservatism plus populist streak from a similar Gary Bauer-type candidacy?  What policies does Huckabee advocate that should make him more appealing than a Bauer?

*I would normally be writing this at the Scene, but so far the new interface has a nasty habit of making my browser crash, so this will have to do for now. 

Evidently, I am a technological moron.

On the subject of Brownback’s endorsement of a rival, I am fairly sure of one thing–it won’t be Huckabee that he will be backing.  The reasons are pretty obvious, but let’s just review them quickly.  First, Huckabee and Brownback were fiercely competing with each other for the same voting bloc and seeking to claim, in effect, the mantle of the Christian “compassionate” conservative.  Both were trying to repackage social conservatism as something I suppose they would call more “humane” or less “angry,” and were both known for taking on unconventional (for conservatives) reform issues.  The extent of their drippiness on immigration was virtually identical, though Huckabee has always been able to make a better rhetorical presentation of the same saccharine talk.  They were always going to be natural competitors if they both entered the race, and it remains to be seen whether Brownback will be willing to ignore that Huckabee is one of the main reasons why his campaign is coming to an end. 

Second, part of their fierce competition was some fairly bitter fighting in Iowa before the straw poll, which included some recriminations from Brownback’s side about alleged anti-Catholic sniping from some Huckabee supporters and some bad feeling about Huckabee’s supposedly insufficiently zealous denunciations of anti-Catholicism.  Huckabee’s campaign manager notably once responded to Brownback’s complaints thus:

It’s time for Sam Brownback to stop whining and start showing some of the Christian character he seems to always find lacking in others.   

Perhaps Brownback will be willing to look past the rivalry with Huckabee, but since it was Huckabee’s second-place finish at Ames that pushed Brownback into the insignificance of third place I doubt it.  Brownback also has to weigh Huckabee’s chances, which right now do not look all that great.  Huckabee’s been slowly gaining ground, especially in Iowa, but Brownback might have more of an impact by endorsing, say, Fred Thompson.  Endorsing another likely also-ran severely reduces any later influence on the national campaign, while backing one of the media-anointed leaders holds out the chance of shaping the final ticket or, much less likely in Brownback’s case, being part of the ticket.  Thompson-Brownback?  When I think about it, it’s not entirely ridiculous.

Returning to Lerner for another response, I will try to explain how flawed the article is.  As an earlier commenter has noted, Lerner has already tried to stack the deck rhetorically by making a comparison between an exterminationist party and ideological movement and an entire nation:

We must do it, Armenian genocide proponents [sic] tell us, because the Armenian tragedy was the original Holocaust: Armenians in World War I were like the Jews in World War II; Turks in 1915 were like the Germans in the 1940s. Thus, the only moral choice is to condemn the Turks, as we condemned the Nazis.

In fact, it was not “the Turks” who filled the role of genocidaires during WWI, but leaders and members of the CUP, Kurdish irregulars and some Ottoman soldiers.  To make blanket statements about “the Turks” is to go down Goldhagen’s road of collective guilt and engage in precisely the kind of reckless identitarian vilification that, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn has argued in another context, leads to the dehumanisation of an entire people and thus makes it easier to wage campaigns of annihilation against them.  Lerner has phrased things in such a way as to endorse Ankara’s portrayal of the efforts to recognise the genocide.  In this view, it is not just a recognition of crimes committed by agents within the Ottoman government and military, but an indictment of the entire Turkish nation.  If that was what we were talking about, I would also have to object to it, but it isn’t.  “The Turks” as a whole were not responsible, just as “the Turks” today are not responsible for what was done in those years, but it was rather specific groups of Turkish nationalists and Kurdish tribesmen who were responsible for what happened.  So, right away, Lerner clouds the issue by inaccurately describing the terms of the debate.

Lerner says:

The only enemies at home [in Germany in WWII] were the Jews, and they were never a real threat. They were scapegoats, not objective enemies, and they were being methodically eliminated, without exception, in all German-controlled territory.

The implication is that all Armenians in eastern Anatolia were an “objective enemy,” because there were some Armenians who raised rebellions or fought with the Russians, which somehow makes the genocidal campaign against the civilian Armenian population of eastern Anatolia less than genocidal.  In Lerner’s world, it’s only genocide if there are literally no members of the targeted population engaged in subversive or rebellious activity.  In framing things this way, Lerner has already conceded the morality of collective punishment of civilian populations in retaliation for the activities of guerrillas.  Presumably, as she sees it, there was also no genocide attempted against the Serbian population under German-Croat occupation, either, because “the Serbs” were an “objective enemy” engaged in resistance.  For Lerner, deliberate exterminationist campaigns are something other than genocide when they take place in a war zone, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of the way most people understand the term.  Organised killing of a particular group of civilians bound by ethnic and religious ties is not genocide for Lerner if it comes as a “punishment” for the rebellion of a minority of the population.  It’s certainly a different kind of view, but it certainly isn’t moral.

She then obscures the issue by describing the Dardanelles campaign thus:

Fighting there was fierce, and continued until January 1916, but, on this front, there were relatively few civilian casualties, and no massacres.

There were relatively few civilian casualties because the front was largely static and confined to the narrow strips of land near Gallipoli.  There were no massacres because the Ottoman forces had their hands quite full with British and ANZAC forces.  There was also no sizeable Armenian population in the immediate vicinity of the Dardanelles, which makes the comparison seem almost pointless.

While Lerner acknowledges that Armenians fought on the Ottoman side, being subject to the general mobilisation conscription, she does not mention that Armenians in Ottoman units were disarmed after the Ottoman defeat at Sarikamis.  They were then executed. 

Of the aftermath of Sarikamis, Akcam writes on p. 143-44:

The defeat at Sarikamis was a turning point in the treatment of the Armenians, especially those in the army and labor batallions, who were no longer mistreated but frequently murdered.  In many regions, propaganda claimed that the Armenians had stabbed the Turks in the back.  Enver Pasha himself attempted to attribute the defeat to Armenian treachery, and referred to Armenians as a “threat.”….the first measure taken after the Sarikamis disaster was the order sent to army units on 25 February 1915, instructing them to disarm all Armenian soldiers….Reports followed, claiming that the annihilation of Armenians serving in the army had begun. 

Akcam writes more on page 144:

German missionary Jakob Kunzler, who worked with the medical personnel at the Urfa missionary hospital, recounts that the Armenians taken into the labor batallions were killed in March 1915, and that, “mostly knives were used, because the ammunition was needed for the foreign enemy.”  Something similar was related by Ambassador Morgenthau:

In almost all cases, the procedure was the same.  Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village.  Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp.  Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes.  In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’ sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.

Other eyewitness accounts by foreigners serving in the area corroborate the fact that the murder of the labor batallions began only after the defeat at Sarikamis.

Sounds an awful lot like scapegoating to me. 

She also has nothing to say about the leading Armenians of Constantinople who were arrested on April 24, 1915 and subsequently executed.  She has nothing to say about these episodes because these would all point to an organised campaign of extermination.  In the end, Lerner cites the presence of Armenians fighting for the Russians (many of whom hailed from Russian Armenia all along, since the country was, as it has often been, divided between different empires) as if their possessing the same ethnicity gave the CUP or anyone else license to slaughter other, entirely unrelated Armenians.   

The only thing that Lerner can credibly claim is that the situations of the Armenians and Jews were very different.  The differences do not prove that there was no genocide, but only shows that genocide can take place under a number of different circumstances. 

Akcam has a passage on page 126 that happens to address the thrust of Lerner’s article directly:

It was not a coincidence that the Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster and was contemporaneous with the empire’s struggle at Gallipoli.  As a rule, the acceleration of the process of a country’s decline and partition helps to strengthen a sense of desperation and “fighting with one’s back to the wall.”  As the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, those who have failed to prevent the collapse become more hostile and aggressive.  When the crisis deepens, they resort to increasingly barbaric means, and come to believe “that only an absolute lack of mercy would allow one to avoid this loss of power and honor.”  A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its situation.

Update: Just to make another thing clear, there were also deportations of Armenians from western Anatolia and Thrace following the deportations from eastern Anatolia.  Those who would like to cast this as an eastern front wartime measure and leave it at that have no way to account for this.

And why on earth should these public bodies lecture historians as to what they should be saying? ~Norman Stone

This is a standard line that I have heard a lot of these past few days.  Never have you encountered so many new passionate defenders of the independence of professional historians as in the last couple of weeks–the concern is truly touching.  Very clearly, Stone has never read the text of the resolution in question, or he would know that it has absolutely nothing to do with lecturing historians. 

The invocation of what we magical historians do bothers me most when someone talks about a matter “best left to historians” as another way of saying, “Let’s please stop talking about this subject publicly and leave it to those ghastly academics to worry about.”  Huckabee has done it before when it comes to debating the merits of the beginnings of the Iraq war (“it’s a question for historians to decide”), and it has now become the favourite refrain of the denialist.  Naturally, the denialist is not interested in proper historical research, nor does he care about interference with that research by “public bodies.”  The denialist complains about “political” interference with research when official bodies recognise the blatantly obvious, but will just as readily denounce as hopelessly biased any research that comes to conclusions that he dislikes.   

No one says that governments are “lecturing” historians when they commemorate the Holocaust or V-E Day or the Armistice or any other major historical event.  Governments commemorate things all the time, lending a certain sanction or authority to this or that reading of history.  As the Turkish government has shown, governments can use this power for distorting and corrupt ends.  That does not mean that we cease all commemorations and public acknowledgements of the past, but that we strive to be scrupulous in how we remember the past.  Certainly governments should not interfere with academics or dictate to them what they ought to say–that is fundamental.  That’s yet another reason to draw attention to the offically sanctioned denialism of the Republic of Turkey.  It is rather amazing to me how so many Westerners became so exercised over the threatened free speech rights of the people at Jyllands-Posten, but have suddenly lost all interest in free speech when it comes to Turkish academics and writers.  Many Westerners were put off by the idea that Muslims should apply the standards of their religion to everyone else and demand that others abide by those standards, but when it comes to abiding by the revisionist propaganda coming from Ankara they are more sanguine.        

It is not the government’s official approval or recognition, to address a concern my colleague James has raised, that adds any truth or significance to the event, and the historical reality would be the same whether or not it was ever officially acknowledged.  The genocide happened, whether or not Ankara and its small army of American and other lackeys will ever accept that reality.  But what we choose to commemorate and acknowledge does reflect on the kind of government one has and the kind of historical memory the citizens of a country have.  Refusal to commemorate and use the proper names for things also reflects on us. 

To cast the current (almost certainly now dead) resolution as a lecture to historians, as Stone does, is especially galling, since the main (indeed technically the only) intended audience of the resolution is the President, who is as much of an historian as I am a jet pilot.  The resolution is entitled: “Calling upon the President to ensure the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian genocide and for other purposes.”

Were the resolution to pass, not one historian would be obliged to do anything.  No historians will have been lectured by a public body.  Most historians of the subject, who already acknowledge the genocide, will be unfazed by the terrible burden of a non-binding resolution.  The only historians who would be troubled are those who have, for whatever reason, chosen to deny the genocidal nature of the events.  In any case, they have not yet been persuaded by evidence or conscience to recognise and speak the truth–a vote by the House of Representatives will not weigh heavily on them, either.

Stone invokes Lewy, whose arguments are pretty effectively undermined here, while ignoring the work that directly contradicts that of Lewy.  The Inside Higher Ed refers to a future Akcam work that will reportedly make the case even more clear.  From the article:

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no evidence, “I laugh at them,” Akçam said, because the documents he has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even more. “There is no scholarly debate on this topic,” he said. 

P.S.  Note to Cohen: the text of the resolution itselfincludes mention of Lemkin’s views on the Armenian genocide.

The Economist covers the resolution in an editorial and discusses Turkish-Armenian relations in an article.  Naturally, I don’t agree with the editorial, but I’ve already said plenty on that subject for now.  The article is a good overview of the state of affairs in Turkey.