Modern Turks are foolish to be defensive about the massacres of Armenian Christians carried out by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The regime that committed those atrocities doesn’t exist any more, and the Turkish Republic was built on rejecting its ideology. It would make just about as much sense for a modern Southerner to cavil at condemnations of slavery or a modern German at denunciations of the Holocaust.
Almost as foolish are the Armenian-Americans who press zealously for an official declaration that the killings were an act of genocide. Armenia has won the historical battle. Except for Turkish ultra-nationalists, no one defends the Ottomans’ actions. An otiose endorsement by Congress is worse than gilding over gold: The public wisely doubts the acumen of historians turned politicians; those who know little about the events in question will naturally suspect that an assertion about the past must be pretty weak if it needs a Professor Nancy Pelosi to sustain it.
In ordinary times, maybe it would be of no moment for our legislators to irritate one folly and indulge the other, but we don’t live in ordinary times. One needn’t suspect that the Democratic leadership’s enthusiasm for an Armenian Genocide Resolution is prompted by a desire to make mischief in Iraq. That is, however, its predictable effect. And thus it is a folly surpassing those that inspired it.
What’s more, if we must risk alienating one of our country’s most important allies, why not hang it for its own sins rather than for its disowned ancestors’? The persecution of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Turkey is a tragic and undeniable blot on Turkish standing in the community of civilized states. (Vide Otmar Oehring, “Is There Religious Freedom in Turkey?” and United States Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe, “The Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey: A Victim of Systematic Exploitation”.) If Rep. Pelosi and her colleagues aimed their fire thither, the net consequences would still be negative, but at least they would address injustices whose perpetrators are alive and able to alter their conduct. Instead, they hector ghosts.
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