The banality of evil: Starving children and an orderly line of civilians - soon to be victims - marched off to eternity and mass-murder....
Photo-library of the Armenian Genocide: in yet another display of AMERICAN SHAME, NO LESS than FIVE former SECRETARIES OF STATE of America are trying to WHITEWASH and ELIMINATE, from historical recognition, this systematic mass-murder GENOCIDE.
http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Image:Geno14.JPG
It looks like the "BREAD AND CIRCUS" agenda or ancient, totalitarian Rome - voyeur sadism in name of imperial state profit and power - has infected even the very top tiers of America's foreign policy establishment, as it has already long infected Fox 'news' ("if it bleeds, it leads!") viewers.
White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/09/AR2007100902347.html?hpid=topnews
During the early years of WWI, Turkey's nominally secular leaders "The Young Turks," heirs to power in Turkey as the (Turkey-based) Islamic-Sultanate Ottoman Empire collapsed under pressure from "modern" European nations, organized and executed THE SYSTEMATIC GENOCIDE of up to 1.5 MILLION Armenian men, women and children, marching the unfortunate victims by the thousands into the Syrian desert to die of thirst, rape, torture, or mass executions by Turk police/militia/military or Kurdish mercenary units, First military Armenian men were DRAFTED into the Turkish military over a period of years or decades in typical conscript fashion; then the genocide was unleashed when the regime rounded up and executed Armenian political and cultural leaders in early 1915, swiftly followed by mass-execution of Armenian men in the military, followed by the deportation and genocide of surviving men, women and children to the Syrian Desert.
Armenia, like 'Kurdistan' today, had the unfortunate fortune to be a landlocked peoples astride the crossroads of trade - and conquest - between East (Asia) and West (Europe). Like mountain clans throughout the world, the Armenians were fiercely independent, and fierce fighters. By comparison, Rome, a city founded in a relatively flat river delta, were also fiercely warlike. Historically, those empires that gain control over flatlands adjoining great rivers become greater empires than mountain based confederations, because river valleys produce more grain and agricultural output, and thus can sustain greater populations and larger armies. Starting as recently as the past millenium (i.e. only 1,000 years ago or less), the Turks migrated from Central Asia at the crest of armed conquest, as the Persians, Mongols, Huns, and other tribes migrating West had before them. The Turkish-clan Ottomans converted to Islam in ______, and initially swarmed around and bypassed the Christian Armenians in their mountainous strongholds as the Turks concentrated on destroying and occupying the Greek Byzantine empire; but over the following centuries the Armenians would be subject to the same indignities and humiliations of conquered peoples everywhere, including the occassional massacre stoked by political or religious (Turkish, Kurdish, or other) leaders and agitators. The toll of massacres of Christain Armenians at the hands of Islamic Ottoman Turks built up prior to WWI as the Ottoman Empire shrank and collapsed, its colonial conquests under pressure from resurgent, modern European military power (eg. the French invasion of Egypt under Napoleon, the British control of the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy, the increasing power of the German and Asutrian empires to the north, etc.), and as the new Triumverate of "secular" leaders decided to ally Turkey with Germany and Austria-Hungary (their traditional rivals for empire in Eastern Europe), Turkey was put under the strain of WAR with Russia and England. It was early in this Eastern phase of WWI that Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide - with little notice from a world that was caught up in the do-or-die survival fighting of WWI, anyways.
The two leading causes of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany after WWI were the tremendous sense of loss, helplessness, and bitter rage in Germany for losing the war ( loss of WWI to the Allies), and of the dehumanizing HYPER-INFLATION as the German government printed (literally) tons of Riechsmarks to pay off the WAR REPARATIONS imposed on Germany by the VERSAILLES TREATY. As Hitler gained power in the early 1930s and he directed the rounding up of enemies of the regime - "ENEMIES OF THE STATE" - the nation's polished and educated elite told him that the world would not countenance the destruction of Germany's Jewish sub-culture. To which Hitler is said to have responded" "LOOK AT THE ARMENIANS - NO ONE did anything for them, they are forgotten already."
Indeed, BRITAIN, while at war with Turkey, had no small part in the Armenian Genocide, because Britain was paranoid of Russian ACCESS to the Mediterranean, and PREFERRED THE ELMINATION of Armenians, to their rescue by the (fellow Christian) Czar's army, which could potentially have given Russia a foothold in Asia Minor (present day Turkey), and potentially access to ports adjacent to the Med from which Russia could have projected her Navy into the Med.
Either way, the historical record is clear: Britain and France seriously FAILED at preserving their victorious peace (re rise and Conquest of Europe by Hitler two decades later), the JEWISH 'nation" spreadout through Europe was party to that failure, and all three nations/races (Britain, France, and European Jews) payed the price, and then some, for those failures.
In retrospect, it looks like the REFUSAL of "civilized Europe" to note the ARMENIAN GENOCIDE was the quick and easy way out... with disasterous ramifications later.
And America's former SECRETARIES OF STATE should be ASHAMED for putting REALPOLITIK - amoral Machevellian self-interest - ABOVE honesty, principle, and truthful reporting re the memory of 1.5 MILLION men, women, and defenseless children SLAUGHTERED at the altar of big-nation policy.
THE SOONER AMERICA AKNOWLEDGES THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE, the SOONER we can patch up affairs with Turkey and move on from this dark, dismal truth.
Putting it off JUST DELAYS THE INEVITABLE day of reckoning, and thus contributes to the continuation of POWER POLITICS that CONTRIBUTED TO THE GENOCIDE in the first place.
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White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Page A01
A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.
All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.
Discussion Policy
Pelosi, whose congressional district has a large Armenian population, has brushed aside such concerns and said she supports bringing the resolution, for the first time, to a full vote in the House, where more than half of the members have signed on as co-sponsors. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has passed such a resolution before, is set to vote on it today.
House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide, has been pushed doggedly by a congressman whose Southern California district contains the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the country. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D) won his seat in 2000 after his Republican predecessor was sandbagged when then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reneged on a pledge and pulled the bill from the floor after a last-minute plea from President Bill Clinton.
Schiff, who defeated Rep. James Rogan after Hastert killed the floor vote, said the deaths so long ago still resonate with Armenians. "It is an insight you get when you have lots of Armenian constituents," he said, saying it reminded him of conversations he had while growing up Jewish. "But imagine losing the entire family and having the successor state say it never happened."
Few people deny that massacres killed hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children during and immediately after World War I.
But Turkish officials and some historians say that the deaths resulted from forced relocations and widespread fighting when the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire collapsed, not from a campaign of genocide -- and that hundreds of thousands of Turks also died in the same region during that time.
"This is the greatest accusation of all against humanity," said Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, referring to genocide. "You cannot expect any nation to accept that kind of labeling." He said the reaction in the Turkish parliament would be one of fury, noting that the Turkish military cut contacts with the French military and terminated defense contracts under negotiation after the French National Assembly voted in 2006 to criminalize the denial of Armenian genocide.
Pelosi had long been a co-sponsor of the resolution. The Armenian National Committee, one of the many Armenian organizations that have sought passage of the measure for years, has given her an "A" grade for her stance on Armenian issues.
Now as speaker, Pelosi will face a choice between her role as a national leader and her previous campaign pledges as a member of Congress. U.S.-Turkish relations are already under some strain because Kurdish militant groups have attacked Turkish targets from bases in Iraq, with Ankara suggesting it may launch its own attack. Turkey plans to hold a "neighbors" conference on Iraq pushed by the United States later this month, but a recent poll by the nonpartisan group Terror Free Tomorrow found that 83 percent of Turks would oppose assisting the United States on Iraq if the Armenia resolution passed.
It is a problem that has caused other politicians to flinch. As a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to ensure that "our nation properly recognizes" what he called "a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension." But, angering Armenian groups, Bush refused to use the term in the annual presidential statement on the subject made on April 24, generally considered the beginning of the killings in 1915. President George H.W. Bush and Clinton also refused to refer to genocide in their annual statements, for fear of offending Turkey.
Among other things, the resolution calls on the president to use his annual message to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide."
In the Senate, where one-third of its members are co-sponsoring the resolution, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) supports the measure, as do the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.).
The State Department, which collected the signatures of the former secretaries of state, has lobbied against the resolution, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried and U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson calling lawmakers yesterday to "urge them not to vote for this," according to an interview Fried gave the Anatolia news agency.
The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm DLA Piper and $105,000 a month to the Livingston Group, and it recently added communications specialists Fleishman-Hillard for nearly $114,000 a month, according to records filed with the Justice Department. Turkish lawmakers were on Capitol Hill yesterday, warning that passage would put military cooperation with Turkey at risk.
Meanwhile, leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members, a budget of $3.6 million last year and phone banks that are running on overtime calling members of Congress. The organization has signed up 53 non-Armenian ethnic groups, including a number of Jewish groups, to support the resolution.
Some Jewish groups have found themselves in a bind because Turkey is one of the few Muslim nations to have diplomatic relations with Israel.
