During Holocaust Remembrance Week, Donald Trump Denies a Genocide
Former President Joe Biden ended decades of silence on the Armenian genocide. Trump seems to be bringing the taboo back.
During the presidencies of George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, the United States refused to call the killings of as many as 1.2 million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 a genocide. They’d acknowledge the deaths but refuse to use the word genocide.
That’s not because the fundamental facts are in dispute. While historians differ on the exact number of people killed, hundreds of thousands of Armenian civilians were massacred by their then-Ottoman rulers.
The killings helped inspire Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” to promote an international consensus about the need to protect groups of people from extermination.
So why is it that America went decades refusing to utter the g-word? Turkey continues to deny responsibility for the fate of the murdered Armenians; the country is an important strategic ally of the United States and a member of NATO, and the American government made the calculation that denying a genocide is no problem if acknowledging it risks upsetting an ally.
Former President Joe Biden changed that calculation when he decided to term those killings genocidal in 2021. The fallout from Turkey was relatively limited, and many observers felt that the United States had put genocide denial behind us.
But today the White House’s message for Armenian Remembrance Day once again removed the word genocide from its text:
Stephan Pechdimaldji, an Armenian American who lives in California and works in public relations, told me over email about how betrayed he was by the White House statement:
While I'm not surprised, this is a significant setback in my opinion. He basically used the same language that Obama used for 8 years. What's more alarming, is that this might be a harbinger for his policies towards Azerbaijan. He said that he was going to hold Azerbaijan accountable for ethnically cleansing 120K Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh during the campaign and criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to stop Azerbaijan. All bets are off that he's going to follow through on that promise. It's a sad day indeed.
Ironically, today is also the start of the National Days of Remembrance of Victims in the Holocaust.
“Never Again,” tweeted Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “On National Days of Remembrance of Victims in the Holocaust, Jeanette and I commemorate the six million Jews and millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. We must fight antisemitism worldwide and safeguard Jewish communities so Never Again means just that.”
The administration is essentially telling us that we should remember the Nazi-led genocide while forgetting another one — out of nothing but pure deference to an allied foreign government.
And we should never forget that the two genocides share a historical link.
In 1939, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler explained why he had decided to attack Poland. He saw himself as someone who would be vindicated by history, much like other conquerors were.
“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter -- with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state,” he explained. “It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.”
Ultimately, he felt no guilt about the prospect of killing millions of people because, after, the world had so quickly forgotten what happened between 1915 and 1917:
I have issued the command -- and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad -- that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
So I'm going to take the scenic route here, but stick with me. While there is likely more going on than this, one of the things to recognize is that we're being marched to war (whether we get there or not, I don't know, but we are being "herded" there). I don't know really how old you are or how old your readership is, but to those of us who were old enough to remember the lead-up to the Iraq war, so much is familiar here with this sort of tightening of the narrative.
Because so many of us in our middle age remember the Iraq war and how it was sold and how badly its all ended (that and Afghanistan), to sell the Iran war as a neutralizing a threat to the US is just not going to work. We've been there and done that and we don't believe it. Even so many on the right don't believe it.
So you have to sell it as a threat to Israel, and you have to convince Americans that it is worth running up our debt higher, ruining our fragile economy, and potentially getting our children killed to neutralize this threat because Israel is just that precious.
Norm Finkelstein was on Jimmy Dore the other day, and they were talking about how more than half the US population (according to a Pew poll) has an *unfavorable* view of Israel. The reason, Finkelstein said, is that Israel has been normalized. It's no longer the country of the people who suffered in the Holocaust that deserves to be given special leeway in how it treats the Palestinians and its neighbors. It is a country judged as any other country. That's not to say we're ready to intervene and bomb it for bombing the Palestinians, but most people are not ready to go to war to save it because of the way it has acted.
Part of this change in attitude is that we are a long way out from the Holocaust and a lot of Jewish people are anti-Israel themselves, which gives non-Jewish people the "permission" to act on their humanity. But to try to combat that, those who are sympathetic (or one might even say sycophantic) to Israel are desperately trying to re-center the Holocaust in the American consciousness. That's why you have the blow up in certain circles over the Douglas Murray/Dave Smith "debate." That's why you have Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan and Sean Hannity suggesting that people like Dave Smith (and Candace Owens) are political psychopaths. That's why this huge group tries to twist Darryl Cooper's work. They can't stand that someone might de-centralize the Holocaust, especially of the Jewish population, from the study of World War II. That's why you hardly ever have anyone remember that the Jews were hardly alone in being targeted by the Nazis. And that is why you absolutely cannot remind people that genocide is quite a common practice throughout history, and virtually any group can find themselves victims and any group can find themselves perpetrators. So the Armenian genocide gets disappeared. Poof, gone.
This is a long way to saying this isn't personal to the Armenians. It's all a propaganda game, which is actually worse in the long run, because it's coldly calculating.
You are overreacting. That's actually a pretty strong statement. It clearly blames the Ottoman Empire for exiling and marching 1.5 million Armenians to their deaths. All that's missing is the g-word.
But the g-word has been so profligately over-used in recent years that it has been bled dry of meaning, like "racism." You have trans people claiming "genocide" daily because the State won't compel the public to use these folks' preferred pronouns, which is delusional and silly.
I get it: For you anything Trump does is wrong, period, no exceptions. The man could cure cancer and you'd complain. While this might endear you to your fellow TDS sufferers, it diminishes your credibility with others not so inclined, who might otherwise be persuaded by your arguments.