On Being a Moral Midget
I spend my time studying the Caucasus. It’s what I do in my free time. It’s what I’ll be doing for the better part of the next decade as a graduate student.
So, while it’s no secret that I’m not a fan of our current President, I respected Barack Obama’s repeated promises to recognize the Armenian Genocide for what it was: the systematic murder of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Unfortunately, as with so many other cases, the candidate of “Hope” and “Change” has once again revealed himself to be little more than a cynical opportunist who’s more than content to blow smoke up the electorate’s ass and otherwise continue with the policies of the past, in this case choosing to kowtow to Turkish “sensibilities” rather than live up to promises he’s made in the past.
Christopher Hitchens writes:
President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide. Then-Sen. Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department’s cowardice and roundly stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 “is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” On the campaign trail last year, he amplified this position, saying that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”
[…]
It is now being hinted that if either President Obama or the Congress goes ahead with the endorsement of the genocide resolution, Turkey will prove uncooperative on a range of issues, including the normalization of the frontier between Turkey and Armenia and the transit of oil and gas pipelines across the Caucasus. When the question is phrased in this thuggish way, it can be slyly suggested that Armenia’s own best interests are served by joining in the agreement to muddy and distort its own history. Yet how could any state, or any people, agree to abolish their pride and dignity in this way? And the question is not only for Armenians, who are economically hard-pressed by the Turkish closure of the common border. It is for the Turks, whose bravest cultural spokesmen and writers take genuine risks to break the taboo on discussion of the Armenian question. And it is also for Americans, who, having elected a supposedly brave new president, are being told that he—and our Congress too—must agree to collude in a gigantic historical lie.
