The genocidal cost of cynicism

See update for April 24, 2021, at end of post.

I don’t doubt that the Ottoman Empire’s killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenia civilians was genocide and will certainly agree if, indeed, Joe Biden declares it so.^[1] What strikes me is 1) Turkey’s longstanding refusal to atone,^[2] and 2) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist embrace of the empire, which along with the Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated in the wake of World War I.^[3]

The history is not entirely one-sided. Though the allies were happy to exploit the massacres for propaganda purposes, they did so cynically, refusing to take serious action to stop them.^[4] This, of course, aligns with my understanding of that war: It had no moral purpose whatsoever; it stands as a blatant example of elites squabbling amongst themselves over which of them will control which bits of territory and the people and resources therein, at great cost to and with little regard for human life.^[5]

As I look at this now, I think also of the Trail of Tears in the U.S. And I wonder how Adolf Hitler and other genocidal maniacs cannot see genocide as perhaps publicly frowned upon but nonetheless as statecraft as usual, indeed, as an assertion of sovereignty as the ‘legitimate’ use of force^[6] in service to national ‘unity.’^[7] Today, we have the Palestinian, Rohingya, and Uyghur crises, surely among others, but we who condemn them have far from pure hands.

Update, April 24, 2021: To his credit, Joe Biden did indeed recognize the Armenian massacres as genocide.^[8]

1. ^[1]Lara Jakes, “Biden Preparing to Declare That Atrocities Against Armenia Were Genocide,” New York Times, April 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/biden-armenia-genocide-turkey.html↩
2. ^[2]Zachary Basu, “Senate passes Armenian genocide bill in move likely to infuriate Turkey,” Axios, December 12, 2019, https://www.axios.com/armenian-genocide-resolution-senate-turkey-1931783f-88e2-41c8-a488-91d9049be529.html; David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Owl, 1989); Lara Jakes, “Biden Preparing to Declare That Atrocities Against Armenia Were Genocide,” New York Times, April 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/biden-armenia-genocide-turkey.html↩
3. ^[3]David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Owl, 1989).↩
4. ^[4]David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Owl, 1989).↩
5. ^[5]David Benfell, “We ‘need to know how it works,’” Not Housebroken, March 19, 2012, https://disunitedstates.org/2012/03/19/we-need-to-know-how-it-works/↩
6. ^[6]Max Weber, “What is Politics?” in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010), 114-116.↩
7. ^[7]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006).↩
8. ^[8]Chris Megerian, “Biden formally recognizes killing of more than 1 million Armenians as genocide,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-04-24/biden-formally-recognizes-armenian-killings-as-genocide↩