Alex Massie Alex Massie

Any port in a storm: or more odd reasons for forgetting the Armenians again.

Amidst suggestions that Nancy Pelosi will in fact put the Armenian Genocide resolution in her pocket, it’s been quite something to see so many self-styled liberals shake their heads and mutter that, you know, while we feel for the poor Armenians – and please, don’t for a moment doubt the seriousness of our compassion – that feeling does extend to doing anything other than cave to Turkey’ desire to muddy historical waters that are plenty clear enough (and have been for 90 years) to most reasonable observers. Still, it must be reassuring to be told, We’d like to help, we really would, but it’s just too difficult.

For some reason the Washington Post has run a number of pieces taking this brave stand. Something should be done for the Armenians but nothing should be done that might mean anything, even on a symbolic level.

Daniel Larison knows much more about Ottoman history than I do and he dismantles Richard Cohen’s rather rotten column in his usual, exemplary style.

One thing I’d add, however, is that it is remarkably rich for Cohen to say that the slaughter of the Armenians, while terrible, falls short of genocide even as he notes that the term was coined by Raphael Lemkin who, Cohen says, “clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews”. What happened to the Armenians was not, therefore, genocide it was just “plenty bad”.

But of course Lemkin himself deliberately cited the suffering of the Armenians when he first wrote about genocide. He didn’t seem to share Mr Cohen’s belief that there is only one kind of genocide.

Then there’s Fred Hiatt, the WaPo’s editorial page editor  who thinks the resolution should be spiked because, well, modern Armenia isn’t properly democratic.

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