Biden, Recognition and the Armenian Genocide Details
ALL GENOCIDE’S COUNT Attributing names to the brutal acts humans are capable of inflicting upon each other is never without problems.
There are gradations of terror, hierarchies of atrocity and cruelty. In these, the pedants reign. Disputes splutter and rage over whether a “massacre” can best be described as a crime against humanity or a counter-measure waged with heavy sorrow against a threatening enemy. Scratch the surface of such arguments, and the truth is bleakly common: apologists for murder will be found.
With the Armenian Genocide, terms acutely matter. The treatment of the Armenians by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire was running out of oxygen led to deportations from eastern Anatolia in May 1915 that eventually caused some 1.5 million deaths. (The Turkish estimate is closer to 300,000.) Suspicions abounded that the Christian Armenians were plotting with Imperial Russia and seek
A photo from the National Archives of Norway depicts the Armenian leader Papasyan seeing what s left after the horrendous murders near Deir-ez-Zor in 1915-1916. (Image: Bodil Katharine Biørn - National Archives of Norway/Wikipedia)
Just one week prior to his 1939 invasion of Poland and the mass slaughter that followed, Adolf Hitler asked rhetorically, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Such a depraved sentiment indicates why it is so significant that President Joe Biden, this past Saturday, became the first US President to formally classify the persecution committed against the Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey from 1915-1923 as “genocide”.
Tuesday, 27 April 2021, 3:41 pm
Attributing names to the brutal acts humans are capable
of inflicting upon each other is never without problems.
There are gradations of terror, hierarchies of atrocity and
cruelty. In these, the pedants reign. Disputes splutter and
rage over whether a “massacre” can best be described as
a crime against humanity or a counter-measure waged with
heavy sorrow against a threatening enemy. Scratch the
surface of such arguments, and the truth is bleakly common:
apologists for murder will be found.
With the Armenian
Genocide, terms acutely matter. The treatment of the
Armenians by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire was running out