Saturday, October 06, 2007

Is Bush a genocide denier?

The headline of the Deutsche Welle article is "Bush denies Armenian genocide". The action which this article describes as denial is
rejecting a proposal by lawmakers to officially classify the massacre and displacement of Armenians between 1915 and 1918 as genocide.

Does this sound like a fair characterization to you?

4 comments:

Jeff said...

Yes. How is it not?

Joe Mondello said...

I actually said to myself "Jeff is going to say yes to this question." Actually the more I think about it the more I tend to agree that it is a fair characterization.
However, they didn't say anything about whether Bush denies that the massacre and displacement occurred. That is the nature of Turkey's Armenian genocide denial, and I highly doubt that Bush would share that belief. Rather, for political reasons, Bush seems to be rejecting the official classification of what any non-Turkish nationalist knows is a genocide. I'm not sure if it's fair to call that genocide denial. Perhaps genocide misrepresentation would be less misleading?

Jeff said...

We both know exactly what he's doing. Maybe from a geopolitical standpoint it's the right thing to do. We've already pissed Turkey off enough with what we're doing in Iraq.

And as I write this comment I get what you're saying. He's not Ernst Zundel or Fred Leuchter going out to Germany trying to show that no Jew ever died in the 1940s. He's saying a bunch of people died and it wasn't because of who they were and it wasn't intentional. But really, that's genocide. Genocide is the intent to wipe out another ethnic, religious, national, etc, group. Denying a massacre that didn't have genocidal intent would be denying murder. Not denying a massacre with genocidal intent, but denying the genocidal intent would be denying the genocide.

I get what you're saying but I don't think the distinction makes it much better.

Joe Mondello said...

Very difficult to appreciate point well taken. You are right, he is denying genocide.