“it’s a barrage of violence, sickness and shame
you struggle for your living and you’re paying with pain
i read of the poor, and the women and the victims to blame
of the collapse of the country, again and again”
What happened is a historical fact, and it shouldn’t be difficult to get presidents and prime ministers to say, “Today we remember the Armenian Genocide.” But it’s almost impossible, especially in the U.S. — because Turkey has made Armenian Genocide denial part of its national identity, and we’re dependent on Turkey’s support for our broader mideast policies.
During Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, he explicitly promised that “as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.” Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and now Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., recorded a video urging Armenian Americans to support him because he would acknowledge the genocide: “I know [Obama] very well and he’s a person of incredible integrity. … He’s a true friend of the Armenian people, an acknowledger of the history … he’s a person who can actually be trusted.”
Obama’s commitment was quietly removed from his website sometime after December 2010, and this Armenian Remembrance Day, he broke his promise for the seventh* year in a row. [*Eighth, as of 2016]
And Obama’s gone far beyond acts of omission. When the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution recognizing the genocide, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, said, “The Obama administration strongly opposes [this] and will work very hard to make sure it does not go to the House floor.” She and Obama were — with Nancy Pelosi’s assistance — successful.
Likewise, Israel has long relied on an alliance with Turkey, and has always refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. In 2001, the director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem stated that Shimon Peres had “entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”
This is not hyperbole. In fact, American and Israeli denial of the Armenian Genocide often uses exactly the same language as Iranian denial of the Holocaust.
In 2006, then-Iranian president Ahmadinejad said what was needed was a “fact-finding commission” to straighten out what had actually happened to all the Jews and Roma during World War II. In 2007, Condoleezza Rice advocated “historical commissions” to determine where those Armenians had disappeared to in World War I.
When confronted directly about what he personally believed happened, Ahmadinejad declared, “I’m not a historian.” What did Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, say when asked what he believed happened to Armenians? “I’m not a historian.”
So yes, Iranian Holocaust denial is deeply vile. But on Armenian Remembrance Day most of all, we should see that our own genocide denial is as well. Recognizing this would help prevent some of our more embarrassing outbursts of hypocrisy. One of the reasons Hillary Clinton worked so hard to prevent Congress from recognizing the Armenian Genocide is because we needed Turkey’s help to impose sanctions on Iran … a country she knows is awful because they engage in Holocaust denial: “When heads of state and religious leaders deny the Holocaust from their bully pulpits, we cannot let their lies go unanswered.”
But there’s something more subtle that we should also understand today:
We can see clearly that our own denial of the Armenian Genocide is purely instrumental. That is, Obama and the rest of them don’t act as they do because they loathe Armenians and devote their every waking moment to plans to exterminate them. Rather, they’re motivated by straightforward, grubby power politics.
Similarly, this is a plausible explanation for the behavior of much of the Iranian faction that’s given to Holocaust denial: they’re not all obsessive anti-Semites who hope to call the Holocaust back for an encore, they simply find it politically convenient to deny it happened.And if their straightforward, grubby power calculations change, their behavior will change as well — just as there are loud rumblings in Israel about recognizing the Armenian Genocide now that their alliance with Turkey is on the rocks.
In 1919, Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, said this about the Armenian Genocide: “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.”Twenty years later, his son, Henry Jr., was Treasury secretary. My other grandfather, my father’s father, was working at the Treasury when he received this letter from his cousin Lilly, from Germany:
“Aunt Helen wrote me you have a fine place in the treasury department,” she carefully lettered, on pages my family has saved for 76 years. “Have you or any of your friends, any acquaintances in England? The only possibility to emigrate there is to have a job as a house-maid. I have much to do but I am very happy with my work and think it the best to get over this terrible time. You all cannot imagine how desperate the Jews are. I remain, your cousin, Lilly.”
You can take whatever meaning you want from this. The meaning I take is that all of history and all our lives mean nothing to the people who run the world; they see them simply as chips to use in their endless scramble to get to the top and stay there for as many delicious seconds as possible. I’ll never be on Obama’s side, or Ahmadinejad’s side, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s side, or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s side. Instead, most days, but today in particular, I think about how best to be on the side of Lilly and my grandparents’ Armenian maid.
What would you say are the "basic tenets" of liberalism?? Like whenever ppl talk about it I'm just like uh idk what ideas it espouses
Essentially, liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Besides liberals time and time again showing they are not for workers or oppressed people and are in fact a political trend of capitalism-imperialism, its important to know its basic tenants and assumptions so one can recognize liberalism and criticize it or struggle against it. I’m going to paraphrase a section of Anrudha Ghandy’s book, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement (the original section focuses on liberalism in the feminist movement, here ive tried to paraphrase it to apply to liberalism in general):
1. [Liberalism] focuses on individual rights rather than (and even at the expense of) collective rights
2. It is ahistorical. It rejects class struggle and as such has no comprehensive understanding of workers’ and other oppressed peoples’ roles in history and society, or an analysis to explain the reasons behind their subjugation and exploitation.
3. It is mechanical in its support for formal equality, equality-in-words, without a concrete understanding of the roots of inequality, or without an understanding of the different sections of the population and their specific problems. As a result it expresses the demands of upper and middle classes, without much thought to oppressed nations or the working classes.
4. It is reformist. It focuses on changes in the law, welfare programs, education without a larger revolutionary program and does not question the underlying economic and political roots of oppression and exploitation
5. It views the state as a neutral tool to be used instead of an instrument of the ruling, capitalist class which benefits from the exploitation of workers and neo-colonies.
6. Because of its focus on changing laws and it’s general unprincipled pacifism it is unable of mobilizing workers and the oppressed to a greater stage of political struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
To add to this, liberalism’s reformist and gradualist attitudes towards progress not only run counter to a dialectical understanding of quantity into quality, where the opposites of a contradiction push forward change in both “steps” and “leaps”, but also ignores class struggle by promoting unprincipled peace and cooperation beween competing classes in capitalist society. This “live-and-let-live” attitude results in placing personal interests above the interests of the masses, and leads to opportunism in political work. It promotes superficial peace instead of working to resolve contradictions through struggle, criticism and self-criticism, and (principled) unity.
Its individualism is not one of any socialist conception, even. Rather, this individualism is to show that the individual is threatened by the community. It says that the individual has to be protected from the community (either through an increase in government action and programs or through smaller government). As a result it promotes a lot of capitalistic ideas about the role of the individual- that the individual exists only to care for itself, that success and failure is simply a matter of how hard one works (the market being seen as a neutral tool to determine marginal productivity), and that the individual as a political unit exists before and outside of society and the community.
This all goes to show that liberalism is an ideology not of the oppressed and workers, but of bourgeois intellectuals, those who, because they are not oppressed or exploited, can afford to “see both sides” and “find a middle ground” instead of taking a firm stance on a question of a struggle for power, justice, and equality. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, of the ruling and middle classes, and it will never be able to liberate the working class.
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