Today’s Armenian genocide tributes mark the 100th year since the WWI atrocity was committed by the now-defunct Ottoman Empire … and 100 years of denial and debate as well.
Was the mass murder in 1915 of nearly half of Armenia’s citizens actually genocide, in the strictest interpretation of the word? Or was it *just* another bloody massacre committed in the so called fog of war?
Turkey, of course, has much at stake in obfuscating the subject, and, of course, in distancing itself from the sins of its former leaders. So, perpetually downplaying the Ottomans’ brutal pogrom against Armenia citizens not only effectively serves to ward off possible costly retribution, it's a good PR campaign, too.
Besides, at least as far as the Turks are willing to see it, the rather generic term “massacre” sounds a heck of a lot more benign than, say, “genocide “or “ethnic cleansing.” Despite that the former implies random multiple killings, and the latter the deliberate targeting of populations by class, race, sex, politics or religion.
But many historians and social progressives patently disagree with Turkey’s glossed-over assessment of the Armenian decimation, and they don’t think it’s a question of quibbling over body counts or semantics, either.
They believe that how the international community views the systematic slaying of an entire people, and the plundering of their material and cultural wealth, is no trivial matter at all -- it’s key to understanding the difference between waging a war and committing a war crime, after all.
And even Germany, one of the greatest offenders in modern history, has finally joined the growing ranks of those now labeling the Armenian’s holocaust by Turks in 1915 as an outright act of genocide.
Indeed, only countries like the United States, self-conscious about its own extermination of Native Americans in the 1800s, and the methodical enslavement and murder of African Americans for centuries, as well as the mass detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, continues to dance around the issue.
A stance which sadly suggests that genocide -- as we all have come to know it under any given name -- will likely continue to plague the planet for generations to come.
