| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"J Young" |
| Date: |
12 Nov 2007 04:20:57 PM |
| Object: |
Distinctions among genocides |
http://dailycamera.com/news/2007/nov/11/distinctions-among-genocides/
Distinctions among genocides
The Providence Journal
Sunday, November 11, 2007
BOSTON - The effort by some in the House to answer the historical dispute
about whether the death of at least 1 million Christian Armenians in the
predominantly Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1915 "rates" as a genocide is
an unfortunate chapter in a deeply unfortunate contemporary phenomenon:
treating mass murders like competitions, and ranking them as if they were
U.S. News & World Report's annual rating of colleges.
In Greek, "holocaust" means "burnt whole." The Holocaust - capitalized -
denotes Hitler's attempt to exterminate European Jewry during World War II.
"Genocide," from Greek (genos, "race") and Latin (cidium, "murder"), means
the attempt to kill an entire race or people. The point can be made (I will
deal with it below) that a million acts of murder do not constitute a
genocide if they are not directed against a race, ethnic group, religious
population or social class.
In sheer numbers of those killed, the greatest mass murder of the 20th
century was Mao Tse-tung's Great Leap Forward, from 1956 to 1959, when an
estimated 30 million rural Chinese died in agricultural collectivization and
from the removal of the able-bodied from villages. Yet today, most
Westerners are willing to philosophically accept Robert Frost's observation
that "the longest peace in China ends in strife." The worst most historians
will say of Mao is that he was a butcher, and some still accept him as one
of the great men of his age. Benignity on the part of intellectuals may
reflect their racism: In part, they excuse Mao because the Great Leap
Forward was just Chinese killing Chinese.
Mass murders that directly compete with the Jewish Holocaust for remembrance
are the Armenian catastrophe of 1915 and the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33
(Ukrainian: holod, "hunger," and mor, "plague").
The best account of 1915 probably remains "The Murder of a Nation," written
on the spot by the American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau Sr.
(father of Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury secretary). In World War I, the
"Central Powers" - of Austria, Germany and Turkey - were opposed by the
"Triple Entente" of Britain, France and Russia. By 1915, Turkish Armenians
were suspected of being pro-Russian, and were accused of committing
atrocities in Turkish villages whose young men had been drafted.
The decision was taken to disarm Armenians and remove them to "safe" areas.
Some Armenians were actually given train tickets. But, as Morgenthau writes,
Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed and put into "labor
battalions," where many perished from cold and hunger. The civilian
population was put on a death march to the Syrian Desert. The atrocities en
route were committed by fanatic Muslim Kurds and Turks, but were planned by
"Young Turk" atheists, who would organize the post-Ottoman government. The
present-day Turkish wish to ascribe all things to the Ottoman regime is
based on false assertions.
Before the war, the Ottoman government had visited similar privations on
Greeks, of whom more than 100,000 were removed from their ancestral homes on
the Mediterranean coast. Morgenthau wrote: "It was probably for the reason
that the civilized world did not protest ... that the Turks decided to apply
the same methods on a larger scale ... to the Armenians, Syrians, Nestorians
and others." Hitler would use the civilized world's lack of protest about
the destruction of the Armenians to ridicule the idea that anyone would care
what he did to the Jews.
The most compelling survivor's account of the Ukrainian Holodomor is Miron
Dolot's 1985 "Execution by Hunger." Under Lenin, the USSR had attacked
kulaks - unacceptably rich peasants - by confiscating all grain, then partly
redistributing it. The policy had the effect of making the rural population
compliant in surrendering its food and complicit in reporting hoarders.
Stalin revived the policy, and when Ukrainians resisted agricultural
collectivization, he withheld the government's meager return-of-rations -
leading to an estimated 7 million deaths from starvation.
Stalin later purged the Ukrainian Communist Party and destroyed most of the
republic's cultural elite. But he did have a purpose beyond killing
Ukrainians: subservience. Kazakhstan, southern Russia and the Volga German
Republic experienced many of the same horrors.
Today, the legitimacy of the Armenian and Ukrainian agonies as genocides is
opposed by defenders of the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust on both
principled and unprincipled grounds. The principled ground is (it is argued)
that however evil the purposes and methods of the Turks and Soviets, they
did not set out to kill Armenians and Ukrainians only because of their
birth. Hitler, by contrast, contrived for Germans to despise and ultimately
murder Jews simply because of who they were, and without any political
purpose other than using innocents to unify Germany in a frenzy of hatred. I
agree with that distinction.
The illegitimate grounds are: As to Armenians, 1) denial of the facts; and,
2) (worse) an unwillingness by some Jewish organizations to offend modern
Turkey, which has a pro-Israeli foreign policy.
As to Ukrainians, the Holodomor was always categorically denied by the
Soviets and by Western apologists, such as Walter Duranty, of The New York
Times, who received an as-yet-unrescinded Pulitzer Prize for his lies. The
Soviets also perpetrated the myth that Ukrainians - not they - were
anti-Semites and had been Nazi collaborators.
There were, of course, collaborators in Ukraine, as in every occupied
country. Prof. Omer Bartov, of Brown University, has researched this in
"Erased, Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine." It is
not a pretty picture. But it is beside the point of 7 million dead.
Ordinarily, I think words are important. But the descendants of the dead
should not be quarreling about semantics. Let us say that Armenians,
Chinese, Jews and Ukrainians were all victims of genocides. Then let us
admit that among genocides there are distinctions.
David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of the Providence Journal's editorial
board.
--
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Distinctions among genocides |
12 Nov 2007 06:47:46 PM |
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How on earth did this lying coward get out of my killfile?
Susan
On 12-Nov-2007, "J Young" <youngopinions@aol.com> wrote:
[flushed]
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| User: "Benjamin Cramer" |
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| Title: Re: Distinctions among genocides |
13 Nov 2007 03:19:17 AM |
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<flaviaR@verizon.net> wrote in message news:Su6_i.1857$RR1.1366@trnddc02...
How on earth did this lying coward get out of my killfile?
What killfile, you stupid, dyslexic, thick Irish *****? You manage to
respond directly to all those you've allegedly placed in a killfile.
Why do you lie so, cohen?
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Distinctions among genocides |
12 Nov 2007 05:11:59 PM |
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On 12 Nov., 23:20, "J Young" <youngopini...@aol.com> wrote:
http://dailycamera.com/news/2007/nov/11/distinctions-among-genocides/
Distinctions among genocides
The Providence Journal
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Why on earth are you posting this, fucking nazi turd?
Already tired of your account?
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