Armenia Genocide Bill

[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
I don’t see how passing a bill that recognizes something that happened around 1900 to a different ethnic group would affect, in 2007, the passage of future aid or weapons bills based on the problems of another ethnic group?

lixy wrote:
It’s symbolic, but it’s gotta be a good thing nonetheless.

The Turks seem to be taking it quite seriously.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7040366.stm[/quote]

Which, unfortunately, plays into the hands of the anti-American factions within the Turkish polity.

[quote]lixy wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
These fuckers have too much time on their hands.

And seeing how they gave away good money to Bush to invade Iraq, I’ll say they have too much money as well.

Rice’s opposition to the bill is a total outrage.[/quote]

And Iran holding a conference denying the Jewish Holocaust was not?

[quote]orion wrote:
According to Simon Wiesental and a committee of Austrian historians he took never part in war crimes and even his membership in the SA probably happened without his knowledge.
[/quote]

The dude was in the SA and did not know it? Explain that. He just put on a uniform and did not know what it was, or who he worked for? I am not following here.

[quote]lixy wrote:
Turkey has been oppressing the Kurds with US weapons for much of the 90’s. Billions of dollars are given in aid to Ankara. [/quote]

Kurds and Armenians are 2 separate issues. The Turks did not have US arms when they killed the Armenians.

The Turks (Muslims) also killed Serbians and Bulgarians without US weapons.

Hitler used the Turkish massacres as inspiration for the Holocaust.

(just thought I’d throw out some stupid non-related points myself. Sorry.)

[quote]Gkhan wrote:
orion wrote:
According to Simon Wiesental and a committee of Austrian historians he took never part in war crimes and even his membership in the SA probably happened without his knowledge.

The dude was in the SA and did not know it? Explain that. He just put on a uniform and did not know what it was, or who he worked for? I am not following here.[/quote]

He was in a riders club.

This club was, like many others, incorporated in the SA´s riders club.

Likewise, many other youth organisations were joined with the Hitlerjugend.

By being in any of these organisations you could technically become a member of a Nazi organisation without even knowing.

This is of course not true for the SS or Waffen SS or other elite Nazi organisations.

What is important in the case of Waldheim is that he very likely never joined a Nazi organisation on his own, in a time where a lot of people did for the slightest of advantages.

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

Not quite…

I said…“if I remember correctly.” My memory failed. Nope,that other paragon of virtue, the UN, re-elected him Secretary General, while rumors of Nazi complicity were hushed up. Austria merely voted for him once, when the queries were fully made public. This is not exactly a proud moment in Austria’s history.
“Participation in…” Being on the general staff does not exculpate him from the action in Yugoslavia. He directly supported it. We have all heard the answers, " No one knew!" and “He was only following orders!”

As for Austrian war criminal trials, it is not the few that were conducted, it is the many that were N OT conducted that is the object of my sad comment!
Yes, I could Google for hits the self-exculpatory websites, and perhaps there is a well-serviced website celebrating the Judenschlagfest as well.
Perhaps Orion will re-read Hitler’s Willing Executioners. An edition is available in German.

I am not Austria-bashing; why would anyone engage in such a pointless activity? I have liked Austria very much; it is one of the very quaint appendicized states of Europe that have exercised selective historical amnesia, out of convenience and political needs.

And Orion knows very well that I, and many others, and US policy, does not sanction the targeting of noncombatant civilians. He embraces it, and even celebrates it (and I do not feel inclined to post the many links which cast him beneath the level of contempt.)

[/quote]

Dr Kurt Waldheim did not “directly support” anything because the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” was part of the SS agenda and he was a Leutnant of the Wehrmacht.

Maybe we were a bit lax prosecuting some war criminals, but since “Bomber Harris” and other Sowjet and American generals of his ilk were not prosecuted either, we probably had more pressing problems.

I had to google “Judenschlagfest”. No such German term exists and even googling it, you get zero hits.

Furthermore Orion never embraced or celebrated the targeting of non combatants and DrSceptix saying so does not make it so.

Last but not least I think DrSceptix would be well advised to do his homework before voicing insinuations or allegations that have no roots in reality.

[quote]Gkhan wrote:
And Iran holding a conference denying the Jewish Holocaust was not?[/quote]

Sure it was. I did denounce it many times.

[quote]Chushin wrote:
orion wrote:
Maybe we were a bit lax prosecuting some war criminals,

I just love these little throw-away sentences of yours. “A bit lax.” “Some war criminals.” That’s good.

Let me try: “Maybe we’ve made a few mistakes with the Iraq war thing.”

Oh, here’s one you can use: “Perhaps my fellow Austrians eliminated a few people who didn’t really do much wrong.”

This is fun! Here’s one (paraphrased) that I recall you using recently: “I rant a bit sometimes at the world’s stupidity.”

And you can’t see that you are blinded by whatever pathology it is that is compelling you to constantly bash the US.

Honestly surprising, for someone who otherwise seems reasonably bright. [/quote]

There are war criminals and war criminals.

People guarding concentration camps are “bad” war criminals.

People in the Waffen SS Räumkommandos were really bad war criminals.

Of course some got away, which is regretable, but our country lay in ruins.

People had other problems, like surviving.

Then, technically, people who carried out f.e. the Kommissarbefehl were also war criminals, but after only 5000 of 300000 returned from Stalingrad maybe noone was in a mood to investigate such incidents.

Generals who incinerated whole German cities were also never tried, so we probably we were not that eager to pursue such crimes on the Austrian side?

The real problem we had were old nazis still in power in universities and hospitals and so on, they were dealt with by the next generation of angry students in the 68 movement.

This is actually a smart move by Pelosi:

  1. She helps secure a voting block for the Dems and preserve a congressional seat. Armenian Americans have been pushing for this resolution for a long time.

  2. She screws Bush and the Republicans over by getting them on the wrong side of the issue on moral grounds. She knows that Bush will have to oppose this because he will put national interests ahead of party interests, Pelosi and the Dems will not.

  3. She helps torpedo US foreign policy with the added bonus of the potential for additional chaos in Iraq. A lot of supplies flow thru Turkey. The Turks also cooperate with Israel. Pelosi can’t outright oppose Israel so this helps her appeal to the Israel haters. The military will find a work around but it will cost more and be more diffcult for men in the field.

  4. She gets to claim that Bush has alienated yet another ally and that the Dems are needed to restore our reputation in the world despite the fact that Bush and the Defense establishment oppose this resolution it will long be forgotten in the MSM come 2008.

  5. She can do all of this while claiming the moral high ground. Pure politics.

Modern Turkey is not the Ottoman empire. Muslim hatred of Christians still exists, and is not likely to ever change, but Turkey is a secular state these days. Muslim agression, to this degree, is not likely to happen anytime soon and this resolution serves no practial purpose that does not involve domestic political infighting.

[quote]hedo wrote:
This is actually a smart move by Pelosi:

  1. She helps secure a voting block for the Dems and preserve a congressional seat. Armenian Americans have been pushing for this resolution for a long time.

  2. She screws Bush and the Republicans over by getting them on the wrong side of the issue on moral grounds. She knows that Bush will have to oppose this because he will put national interests ahead of party interests, Pelosi and the Dems will not.

  3. She helps torpedo US foreign policy with the added bonus of the potential for additional chaos in Iraq. A lot of supplies flow thru Turkey. The Turks also cooperate with Israel. Pelosi can’t outright oppose Israel so this helps her appeal to the Israel haters. The military will find a work around but it will cost more and be more diffcult for men in the field.

  4. She gets to claim that Bush has alienated yet another ally and that the Dems are needed to restore our reputation in the world despite the fact that Bush and the Defense establishment oppose this resolution it will long be forgotten in the MSM come 2008.

  5. She can do all of this while claiming the moral high ground. Pure politics.

Modern Turkey is not the Ottoman empire. Muslim hatred of Christians still exists, and is not likely to ever change, but Turkey is a secular state these days. Muslim agression, to this degree, is not likely to happen anytime soon and this resolution serves no practial purpose that does not involve domestic political infighting.

[/quote]

I’d say your assessment is spot on. The whole thing reeks of the democrat’s desire to screw President Bush no matter what the consequences. It is important to note that this resolution came up in the Clinton years and met with defeat then as well but you won’t hear anyone talking about that. Like I said before, we can’t let things in the past ruin our future. Mistakes will always be made, bad things will always happen. Learn your lessons and pick up and move on! We simply cannot dwell on the past ad nausea.

[quote]orion wrote:

Dr Kurt Waldheim did not “directly support” anything because the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” was part of the SS agenda and he was a Leutnant of the Wehrmacht.

Maybe we were a bit lax prosecuting some war criminals, but since “Bomber Harris” and other Sowjet and American generals of his ilk were not prosecuted either, we probably had more pressing problems.

Last but not least I think DrSceptix would be well advised to do his homework before voicing insinuations or allegations that have no roots in reality.

[/quote]

More selective amnesia? Or is this deliberate deception. The subject of this thread is memory, history adn political convenience.
On Kurt Waldheim, for example:

"Service in Yugoslavia and Greece

By 1943 he was serving in the capacity of an ordnance officer in Army Group E which was headed by General Alexander Löhr[7]. In 1986 Waldheim would say that he served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals enacted against civilians locally or of large-scale massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia, but later conceded that he did know about some of the things that were happening, and had been horrified, but could not see what else he could have done. [8].

In Yugoslavia, as in most of the other territories occupied by Nazi Germany, concentration camps had been established and partisans and resistance fighters were battled against. Allegations have been brought forward that because prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Waldheim’s office in Yugoslavia.[9], and the Jasenovac concentration camp was just a few miles away from his office, Waldheim, who was a liaison officer at that time, would have known about these things. Waldheim replied to these allegations “that he did not know about the murder of civilians there.”[9] No confirmation of these allegations has been brought forward.

Waldheim’s name appears on the Wehrmacht’s “honor list” of those responsible for the militarily successful operation. The short lived Independent State of Croatia awarded Waldheim a silver medal with an oak leaf cluster from the fascist Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic. [10]

[edit] Surrender and post-war investigation

In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command post within Army Group E, where he was serving with General Löhr, who was seeking a special deal with the British."

Do I impute evil to Orion, or studied neglect, or his aceptance of the German language sources, or collective amnesia that is also politically convenient? And mendacity. It is you Orion, who may be more circumspect in your “history,” because I recognize it as a lifetime’s work.

Perhaps Congress, which chooses this moment for theater for some reasons, might have served better the Armenians’ history by proposing continued study and respect of it.

Max Boot makes some good points:

[i]A Problem from Hell
Max Boot - 10.11.2007 - 12:28PM

The Turkish government is furious about a vote in the House International Relations Committee condemning as “genocide” the killing of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915.

The issue is an old and vexing one, and I confess to not being entirely in sympathy with either side. The Turks, for a start, are absurdly worked up about a mere piece of paper condemning actions taken not by the current government of Turkey or by its immediate predecessors but by another entity entirely-the Ottoman Empire, which ceased to exist in 1922 when it was replaced by a new Turkish state headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The massacres of 1915 (which were indeed an attempted genocide-see Samantha Power�??s powerful book, A Problem from Hell) were carried out by the Young Turks. Therefore, the current government in Ankara could very easily say: Yes, there were terrible acts committed by the Ottoman Empire in its waning days and we regret and disavow them. Now we want to work cooperatively with Armenians living in Armenia itself and in the Diaspora, and as a humanitarian gesture make some restitution where appropriate.

That would cost Turkey little and gain it much international support. But it does not seem emotionally possible given how high feelings run in Turkey over this issue. Instead, should this resolution go through, the Erdogan government is again threatening all sorts of dire consequences for the Turkish-American alliance. Since we need Turkish cooperation in all sorts of areas, especially in Iraq, we must tread lightly. My own view is that Congress should avoid passing a symbolic resolution that will do little or nothing to help Armenian victims or their descendants, but that will hurt vital American interests.

That’s not, of course, the way Armenians see it, and they form a powerful lobbying group that donates a lot of money to politicians especially in states like New Jersey, Michigan, and California. (It is no coincidence that legislators from those states are leading the push for the Armenian genocide resolution.)

While I disagree with them on the merits of this legislation, I sympathize with their grievances and respect their right to seek redress in Washington. That�??s the way our political system works. It�??s common, and completely innocuous, for various ethnic groups to get involved in lobbying. It’s only a scandal, it seems, when the lobbyists in question are Jewish. In that case, their activities are denounced in odious anti-Semitic tracts, most of them published by groups like the John Birch Society, the Lyndon Larouchites, and the Ku Klux Klan, but some of which appear bearing the imprimatur of supposedly prestigious institutions like Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
[/i]

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
orion wrote:

Dr Kurt Waldheim did not “directly support” anything because the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” was part of the SS agenda and he was a Leutnant of the Wehrmacht.

Maybe we were a bit lax prosecuting some war criminals, but since “Bomber Harris” and other Sowjet and American generals of his ilk were not prosecuted either, we probably had more pressing problems.

Last but not least I think DrSceptix would be well advised to do his homework before voicing insinuations or allegations that have no roots in reality.

More selective amnesia? Or is this deliberate deception. The subject of this thread is memory, history adn political convenience.
On Kurt Waldheim, for example:

"Service in Yugoslavia and Greece

By 1943 he was serving in the capacity of an ordnance officer in Army Group E which was headed by General Alexander Löhr[7]. In 1986 Waldheim would say that he served only as an interpreter and a clerk and had no knowledge either of reprisals enacted against civilians locally or of large-scale massacres in neighboring provinces of Yugoslavia, but later conceded that he did know about some of the things that were happening, and had been horrified, but could not see what else he could have done. [8].

In Yugoslavia, as in most of the other territories occupied by Nazi Germany, concentration camps had been established and partisans and resistance fighters were battled against. Allegations have been brought forward that because prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred yards of Waldheim’s office in Yugoslavia.[9], and the Jasenovac concentration camp was just a few miles away from his office, Waldheim, who was a liaison officer at that time, would have known about these things. Waldheim replied to these allegations “that he did not know about the murder of civilians there.”[9] No confirmation of these allegations has been brought forward.

Waldheim’s name appears on the Wehrmacht’s “honor list” of those responsible for the militarily successful operation. The short lived Independent State of Croatia awarded Waldheim a silver medal with an oak leaf cluster from the fascist Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic. [10]

[edit] Surrender and post-war investigation

In 1945, Waldheim surrendered to British forces in Carinthia, at which point he said he had fled his command post within Army Group E, where he was serving with General Löhr, who was seeking a special deal with the British."

Do I impute evil to Orion, or studied neglect, or his aceptance of the German language sources, or collective amnesia that is also politically convenient? And mendacity. It is you Orion, who may be more circumspect in your “history,” because I recognize it as a lifetime’s work.

Perhaps Congress, which chooses this moment for theater for some reasons, might have served better the Armenians’ history by proposing continued study and respect of it.
[/quote]

He knew and lied about it and left the worst impression possible.

That is undisputed and a far cry from your earlier allegations.

Plus, in your case I would start with a respect for facts, study and respect for history can wait in your case.

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Max Boot makes some good points:

[/i][/quote]

Insightful post there, BB.

Incidentally, those wishing to learn more about the subject may care to read “A Peace to End All Peace,” by David Fromkin.
The conditions of the Armenian genocide were made all the worse by provocative actions of Russians in eastern Anatolia. This book is also painfully instructive in the folly of government and statehood the Middle East. We are still dealing with the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire.

Why do Turks now take offense at Congress’ deprecation of the Ottomans? Because any nation finds it difficult to discredit the actions of its historical predecessors, however discredited. The Turks take this very personally, whatever the intent of Congress, whose next action may as well be to condemn the Treaty of Westphalia.

The purpose of the resolution most likely had little to do with concern for historic accuracy or redressing some past injustice. This is probably a backwards attempt at ending the war in Iraq. The Turks already raised objections to our use of their land in 2003.

We were able to convince them that the invasion of Iraq would be beneficial to them in some way and the subsequent use of Turkey has figured largely in our operations in Iraq. If we were no longer allowed to use Turkish land and airspace, then the day to day logistics of the war would face a major snafu.

Btw this book is fundamentally flawed, written by a guy who has obviously only a very superficial knowledge of history.

The books 2 main arguments are simply wrong. He completely misses the point how and why genocides happen.

“Judenschlagfest”? What have you been smoking? Is watching South Park your historical education of choice?
And “Hitler’s willing executioners” is a piece of worthless scribble.

[quote]Chushin wrote:
orion wrote:

There are war criminals and war criminals.

People guarding concentration camps are “bad” war criminals.

People in the Waffen SS Räumkommandos were really bad war criminals.

Of course some got away, which is regretable, but our country lay in ruins.

People had other problems, like surviving.

Then, technically, people who carried out f.e. the Kommissarbefehl were also war criminals, but after only 5000 of 300000 returned from Stalingrad maybe noone was in a mood to investigate such incidents.

Generals who incinerated whole German cities were also never tried, so we probably we were not that eager to pursue such crimes on the Austrian side?

The real problem we had were old nazis still in power in universities and hospitals and so on, they were dealt with by the next generation of angry students in the 68 movement.

Yes, yes, I know Orion. Things are never simple and clear-cut, and there is often a seemingly reasonable reason for situations that we find abhorrent.

What I don’t get is why you can apply that to your own country’s case, but are so gung-ho self-righteous about the US.

Just in case you missed it several posts back: I don’t necessarily disagree with much of what you write, but your holier-than-thou attitude I find inordinately arrogant and impossible to move beyond.
[/quote]

This is my problem with a lot of American posters. My posts however do not nonchalantly justify the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

But then you are missing the big picture that I think that the start of WWII was a crime.

According to an American supreme judge commenting on the Nurembrg trials starting a war is the ultimate war crime because all other war crimes necessarily flow from it.

I just happen to agree with him.

This is why I am not really interested if some US officer did this or that and I am appalled that only the lowest ranks were prosecuted for Abu Ghareib.

If Bush or Cheney should face a trial, using the reasoning the US used in Nuremberg that would be interesting though.