Why You Condemn

A story from this week you might have seen pop up on your news feed is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, slaughter, and systematic killing of one and a half million Armenian Christians.  Two things I want to point out about this story.  First is the number.  One and a half million people were targeted solely because they were Armenian, accused of working against Turkish interests.  This ethnic/religious cleansing is one of the worst historical injustices, ever.

The second is the word I intentionally used to describe the carnage, genocide.  This was genocide, without a doubt, but for some reason Turkey, the United States, and other countries refuse to label these deaths correctly.

There is no vindictive pride in my voice when I bring up an injustice, like what happened to the Armenia Christians, and call it a genocide.  It's what it was.  The history of the world is full of cases where governments and people have attempted to eliminate other groups of people, whether their false validation was due to the religion they practiced, the geographical region they came from, a false superiority ingratiated, or the color of their skin.  The United States government was truly horrible to the Native American population which resided here centuries before sails came from Europe.  What we did to them was genocide.  I'm not trying to shame my ancestors by pointing that out.  They shamed themselves.  What I am trying to do is acknowledge the horror, putting it in context, a scream to all, in an attempt to make sure we never revisit an abomination like it again.  If all voices do the same, we'll go along way to ensure it never does.

In his justification for his atrocious actions, Adolf Hitler, in 1939, specifically pointed to the slaughter of the Armenian Christians and said:  "who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?"  He used the world's silence on that slaughter to defend his own crimes against humanity.  No, the Turks did not cause the Holocaust and World War II, but the world's neglect to condemn the genocide from 100 years ago was used as corroboration to authorize the Nazi's actions.

The failure to stop the genocide of nearly 6 millions Jews is the world's darkest legacy, a legacy which should hang heavy on all of our hearts.  That was genocide, as was what happened to the Armenians.  End of story.

We should never candy coat history, regardless of whether it's among the world's worst failures or smaller in scale.  We should always label history truthfully and accurately.  It's why what we did after 9/11 needs to be labeled torture.  It's why the war in Iraq should be labeled unjustified.  It's why the use of drones in combat zones should be labeled unsupervised and extremely reckless.  It's why the collection of data on all Americans the last 12 years should be labeled repulsive.  And it's why we must label the deterioration of the rights of workers in this country as repugnant.  If we don't, how long before someone else uses the actions of others to justify their actions?

Take my pleas as my voice to be added to the choir, an attempt to ensure we don't repeat bad history.