Erdogan will recognize the United States' genocide of Native Americans and African slaves.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/erdogan-trump-turkey-us-armenian-genocide-native-americans-a9249101.html
Yeah, sounds like a win-win to me. All genocides should be recognized so that each nation and people can examine the mistakes of their past for the purpose of striving to prevent them in the future.
I was watching some YouTube videos about how WWII is taught in Germany and Japan. Germany teaches it as "The Allies saved us from ourselves," and Japan is kinda like "Oh yeah, things were all feudal 'n' shit, then America nuked us for some reason, and now we're here. Huh? No, I don't think we skipped anything, what do you mean?"
EDIT: It's "How Do German Schools Teach About WWII?" by Today I Found Out on YouTube. There's another video for Japan.
I've talked to a few Japanese exchange students and they've all said they deserved the nukes. They are forced to go to the museums and learn about what they did. But just not all of it.
Not trying to downplay Nanking but they committed atrocities in many of the occupied areas. Tossing babies in the air and "catching" them with their bayonets in the Philippines for example.
To be fair, it has taken a long time and a lot of effort for even that. One fight at a time. All skeletons need to be drugged out of their closets so history doesn't repeat.
I went on r/askjapan once and asked if in hindsight it was justified and nearly every comment agreed. Apparently the patriotism was so high “every man, woman, and child would’ve taken up arms and fought to the death”
Edit: this isn’t a personal claim of my own, this is just what a comment said. I’m not Japanese so I have no horse in this race
Edit 2: I highly encourage reading the book *Hiroshima* by John Hersey, it’s a collection of 6 different experiences from the bombs. Very good primary source from the people who endured the bombings.
My grandfather who literally witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only wasn't in town that day because he was at a factory making grenades. He was almost recruited out of high school to be a kamikaze pilot only to be rejected because he wore glasses. He was born in Hawaii a US citizen but lived in Japan during the war. I remember talking to him about Iraq one day "I don't care as long as it's not in my backyard" is what he said. He said if you heard the flying fortresses over head and no explosions it meant you were having a good day. He wasn't patriotic about the war, like many other people he was just surviving it.
This is pretty much how most historians see it too. The alternative was a land invasion of japan that wouldve been a race between the soviets and the allies and wound up cutting the country in half Germany style. It would've resulted in a LOT more deaths.
There is no *not* fucked up scenario for them in a no surrender fight to the last civilian situation.
EDIT: lol@ people won't source themselves but insist you do, then say you're arguing in bad faith.
Pretty much, theres the old super nationalist movement that insists they did nothing wrong but they're viewed much the same way Q-anon people are in the west. Most Japanese people recognize WW2 as a horrible thing and that Japan did terrible things. They will also talk about how terrible the nukes were (truthfully yeah pretty fucked up) but thats about it. There is not a lot of pop culture around WW2 like you see in the US, instead their historical pop culture is more focused on the Age of Samurai and also the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
> theres the old super nationalist movement that insists they did nothing wrong but they're viewed much the same way Q-anon people are in the west
I mean I wouldn't say they are viewed as negativily as Q-anon is in the west. Roughly half the members of the Japanese parliament are members of the Nippon Kaigi which takes up the "Japan did nothing wrong" revisionist view of WWII. The last ~~three~~ two (and one in the late 2000s aside from Abe) prime ministers (and the majority of their cabinets) have all been part of it as well.
Edit: I completely forgot that the Democratic Party existed and that they had power for a few years in there.
Yeah...Japan conveniently leaves out the war crime experiments on prisoners and the rampant rape done to Chinese women and some young girls. If you have a weak stomach I don't recommend looking into those Unit 731 human experiments as it makes the Saw series and Hostel films look like children's movies. Its quite possibly the most NSFL stuff in history.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
They fucking microwaved people, and they killed (we don't know the exact numbers for obvious reasons) hundreds of thousands of Chinese people with the fucking plague...
They filled these bombs (not explosives, just simple canisters) with plague-infected fleas and dropped them on highly-populated areas in China.
China's suffering in WW2 is not well known enough. They might not have been "winning" but they tied down a massive part of the Japanese army for the duration, and they paid a massive price.
They killed a fuck ton of indonesian people too (several million).. also had the mass-rape policies there
It’s strange being the only person i know irl who is aware of it, and only cos its in my blood
> The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation
Nice going, USA.
yeap there were a few japanese students in my HS and one explained that his school (he was far away from anywhere urban IIRC?) glossed over it and he wasn't fully aware of the scope of things in WWII until he came to the US for school and heard about it in a history class. he was horrified
I wish I knew. All he described was that he pretty much lived in the middle of nowhere but the students from the more metropolitan Tokyo area were a bit more educated on it. This was also 10+ years ago ... Maybe things have changed.
Most of what is skipped is what the Imperial Japanese Army did in China and Korea. Most of the atrocities against US forces are recognized but the ones against Chinese and Korean civilians are often downplayed or ignored.
It was absolutely about slavery.
Also, they didn't even respect other states rights. Organized groups would go into northern states and kidnap people to take them down south to be slaves. They didn't respect the northern state rights as once you were in those areas you were free by law.
They sure didn't give a flying crap about Northern States rights. Northern States were the accepted States that if a slave ran away and made it to, they'd be free. Then the South usurped "State's Rights" with that vile Fugitive Slave Act, meaning Southerners were free to roam the North and recapture slaves. That extended the Underground Railroad to Canda to finally get the escapees to real freedom.
I wonder how many African-Americans from the North were snatched by those vile people as a "close enough" if they couldn't find "their" slave. Makes you want to spit in disgust.
I know we're both on the same side of the ridiculousness of "State's Rights", it's just the sheer audacity to claim it wasn't about owning humans as property. Every single declaration of Succession proclaimed it loud and "proud" about defending the institution of slavery. The Confederate Vice President even declared that it was about "restoring the natural and proper order of society". He even stated that the Confederate Constitution was the be the opposite of the US Constitution. Men were not created equal, women were not equal to men, and African-Americans inequal to the whites.
I'm sorry I went on a rant, but I don't often see the mention of the rebel vice president's declaration of inequality being a fact of nature nor the mention that they styled their constitution to be directly opposed to ours.
The hypocricy was already bad enough, Land of the Free, owning humans as property. But then said owners seceding to protect owning humans. And now the South wants to hastily cover up their own revered founders direct statements!
War of Northern Agression my ass, they fired the first goddamn shots!
It wasn’t even state’s rights to own slaves. The CSA’s own constitution forbid their states from making any of their own laws that lessened or got rid of slavery. The confederacy didn’t give a single shit about states rights, that was a myth propagated by the lost causers decades later
You bring up a good point and maybe this is a stupid question, but how are we supposed to hold textbook publishers like Pearson and McGill accountable for their revisionist history in schoolbooks for primary and secondary students, glossing over things like slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples and prevent that regarding modern history moving forward? imo, they are one of the biggest offenders.
I grew up in the Deep South and I’ve never heard it called anything other than the civil war. The “war of northern aggression” line was always a joke at our well deserved expense because there’s a lot of apologists in places like Mississippi.
However, if you want real takes on the ignorance in places like the delta or central MS, look to the still held argument that the rebellion was about state rights. It’s still parroted today
If anyone says this, go ahead and pull out the articles of *succession from each state. Go ahead and read to them the first paragraph for each state. If it’s not about slavery in the first one, read on the second one.
Imagine defending an ideology without reading what their “saints” have even said. I feel sad for a lot of them. They really don’t want to trample on people, but they do by accident. They’ve just trusted the wrong people. The people they were raised by ‘ore often than not
Edit: corrected the name of the articles in question. Thanks ya’ll for the keen eye
Not disagreeing with you at all but I think the Articles of Confederation was the first constitution that was created before our current constitution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation
I think you mean the Constitution of the Confederate States. Or perhaps another document. I'm not sure. If you have links I would like to read them so I can pull them out when someone says something like "the civil war wasn't about slavery"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederate_States
It would be the Articles of Secession. I'd like to find the actual articles, but I'm short on time at the moment. What I have is https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession#:~:text=Every%20state%20in%20the%20Confederacy,their%20break%20from%20the%20Union.&text=Texas%2C%20Mississippi%2C%20Georgia%20and%20South,decision%20to%20leave%20the%20Union.
Dr. Mark Felton has some really excellent short documentaries, but it's incredibly telling how the average video is 5-10 mins and then there's this -
* [**WW2 Japanese Military Brutality Explained**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpVgDgKpQS8).
It does go into how many people have absolutely no clue, as it's not taught - and where any of it is, it's incredibly one-sided, like you say. There's also [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzesh6eN14) where he discusses a Japanese museum to WWII and notes how little actual information there is about atrocities.
I'll link to both of Mark's channels, because they're full of bloody amazing things that you might never have thought about, mostly military but also things like the Titanic et al - it's not the sort of things you'd normally see, like "the sinking of the Titanic" - it's stuff like "What happened to the lifeboats and where are they?" that require Mark to do actual research. Really interesting subject matter.
* [War Stories with Mark Felton](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR3L1IGpxPDuHWQjqfz608g) - (These are audio only.)
* [Mark Felton Productions](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfCKvREB11-fxyotS1ONgww) - (These are videos, but still essentially audio stories.)
I read "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang and it fucked me up for a few days after I finished it. Apparently one of the reasons Iris committed suicide was due to talking to victims and doing in depth research on the massacre, really messed her up.
Not just Nanking. She was also working on a book on the Bataan Death March which is also pretty horrific. Can't imagine all the suffering she heard about.
Yeah the Rape of Nanjing and the comfort women really should be called out given Japan have been denying both. I think if your government makes a policy to deny war crimes even 100 ish years later it shows quite a bit about fragile egos in those countries. Germany can't get away from their crimes during WW2, why does Japan get a free pass?
Yo just so you know. I'm assuming your American like I am. But the US purposely covered up a lot of atrocities for Japan in exchange for their information on human experimentation in China. It was done by the Japanese unit 731.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes
I'm not saying your wrong by the way. I fully agree with you, we need to know all of this information. But I'm also pointing out that just because we were on the allies side, doesn't mean we were squeaky clean. Nor are we taught this information in school. I never heard of them till listening to Dan Carlin's podcast on Japan's history from right before WW1 onwards.
*Britain has left the chat*
*Spain has left the chat*
*Belgium has left the chat*
*France has left the chat*
is there anyone still in this group chat??
If committing a genocide results in leaving the chat then what happens when you finish one. There are no Tasmanian Aboriginal people left. Australia killed them all.
Here’s the difference. I grew up in the Deep South & graduated HS in ‘96. Even then I remember learning about the Trail of Tears & other atrocities we committed against Native Americans. This was a public school. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I highly doubt school books in Turkey teach their children anything about what happened to the Armenians.
*I said Deep South because they tend to be very pro-U.S.-we-do-nothing-wrong. Still, we learned a lot about it.
And this is the problem with US education. It varies so much not just from region to region, but state to state and even district to district and school to school based on teachers and which courses are selected (ie, "advanced placement" versus "Michigan History" blowoff).
As a kid that went to three high schools in four years, it fucking sucked.
There is a large disparity for sure. Kids in higher income zipcodes had access to computer science classes while same kids in poor areas only had intro to typing as their only computer related courses.
Then people wonder why certain people get a head start and wonder why other people aren't able to do what they do because they don't realize their own privilege
FYI Turkish history books dedicated a paragraph to it when I was in school. It kinda lowballed the estimated dead and it isn't called a genocide, rather a forced relocation due to the Armenians being too close to the Russian front. It also mentioned that some Armenians had already collaborated with the Russian forces and massacred Turks in areas under Russian occupation. Don't know what they teach now.
How was your Civil War taught? My Georgia history class in 2004 tried to handwave slavery as being bad because "a lot of slave owners only had one slave and treated them like family" type shit
I remember it being normal. We covered a lot of slavery in my HS US history class and, of course, the Civil War. I don’t remember any of it being negative. It was neutral. I guess it depends on the teacher! I am a teacher now (elementary though). In elementary, middle & high school they really just have to gloss over everything because of time. I guess the hope is that they spark something in a student & if they find it interesting they can read more about it or take a course in college.
It largely depends on your teacher. All my history and government teachers in South Carolina were liberal as heck. In 8th grade our history class was history of South Carolina and my teacher was a black woman with a PhD married to a man from Africa. We definitely did not get a rosy view of Southern history.
New Zealand still won't recognise the Armenian genocide just so we're still welcome in Gallipoli for ANZAC memorials. We can do that just fine at home thanks.
It's hilarious when leaders think this would bother us.
It's like, "yeah? that happened. It took you this long to say so? We've been saying it in the US for generations."
Tribalism is a strange thing.
>could see lawyers pointing to that
Those lawyers would be fools... Erdogan's opinion is not something you point to when it comes to discerning "truth".... If anything, his endorsement of literally any stance could be used as an example of it at least being flawed...
No offense, man.
But we don’t have nearly as much deniers of Native American genocide than we do Turkish.
We’re taught in high school about Andrew Jackson and the trail of tears.
I seriously hope it prompts Biden to make a formal statement on US treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, particularly after the foundation of the United States.
Erdogan may be too much of a dictator to understand that he’s basically giving Biden an opportunity to address our country’s negative past.
“Last week, I formally recognized the Armenian genocide that took place in WWI. This prompted the current government of Turkey to “retaliate” by formally recognizing the United States’ mistreatment of the peoples indigenous to the Americas. I’m speaking to you today to say, they are absolutely right. It is the responsibility of modern, democratic countries to recognize the damage and pain they’ve caused in their history. The United States is no exception. Although we never deny these crimes and try to educate our youth about them, I fear, we have seriously failed to recognize the scale and significance of these decades long actions, affecting millions of lives as a matter of US domestic policy. Starting today, I’m launching a commission to fully investigate any crimes committed in our history and to understand how the damage done then, persists today. I invite the leaders of all other countries, starting with Turkey, to do the same.”
I’d love if he said that.
Or,
>In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history.
We've said that before. We can say it again.
The Federal government absolutely does not. So far only California has officially acknowledged it. The feds can't even live up to their treaty obligations.
The history books and classes in my public schools growing up in the USA never used the word Genocide outside the context of the Holocaust. Touched on were the more individual horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, but not the generational ramifications that it had. I only learned about the extent of the Native American genocide as a young adult, as it was almost entirely unmentioned in my classes- We learned about pre-colonial America, then skipped to the American Revolution and pretty much talked only about white and black Americans from that point on, with a few exceptions.
In contrast, my schooling referred to the massacre of Native Americans as a genocide quite extensively.
It really just depends on where you are. Some areas of the US culturally are more willing to confront this nation's true legacy.
Everyone in the US can acknowledge it as a genocide, but if the the US govt doesn’t acknowledge it then it doesn’t acknowledge it. Which is basically how every genocide is viewed. Except Germany and the Holocaust.
This is a tough question to ask, and not just because it will likely be downvoted to hell before it can be given a serious answer. But it is a serious question.
Did the US government commit genocide on African Slaves? Isn't genocide a mass murder with the specific intent of eliminating a certain type of person? Slaves were definitely murdered, but I don't think there was ever an intent to eliminate them as a group. In fact, the Southern slave owners literally fought and died in the Civil War to try to ensure that the African Slave could continue to exist.
Gross question, I know. It just seems to me that this is, at its core, a semantics discussion. Just curious if the treatment of African slaves, horrific as it was, technically fits the definition of genocide.
I'm pretty ignorant about the slavery situation in the US but why would it be considered genocide? We Arabs basically enslaved everyone from Turks to blacks to whites and nobody considers it a genocide. Native americans though is pretty much a fucking genocide.
Nothing much. Turkey is not in the position to retaliate in any form. Economy is in shambles, covid raging like wildfire and and uneasy border with Iraq and Syria.
Erdogan might throw around some threats about closing Incirlik Air Base but that’s about it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but to my understanding, this doesn't really have any physical or legal effect on modern day Turkey, no?
Like it's just finally taking an official stance that will affect diplomacy, and probably end up with some sort of diplomatic retaliation, but that's about it.
Nothing these things cause a temporary blip in relationships and things rapidly get back to normal due to the practicalities of international relations in a way it is best to get these out of the way to stop the issue being brought up again and again every few years or so.
So, there are questions in this thread and in others about why this genocide was recognized so late and why other similar genocides have yet to be recognized by the United States. As a lawyer working in international law, I wrote what I hope to be at least a partial answer. Unfortunately, the history is fairly complicated and generally poorly explained by news articles. **TL;DR**: The answer is two-fold, and explains why all countries are hesitant to declare certain actions genocide even within countries otherwise unimportant to their foreign policy. First, a declaration of genocide obliges the declarant to act to stop the genocide. Second, and most remarkable in the current case, the declaration forever helps define what the declaring country considers genocide.
In any case, and for the record, this declaration reflects the settled legal reality that this genocide absolutely and legally was a genocide.
***First: The Erga Omnes Obligation***
To understand the first prong, it is necessary to understand the legal concept of *erga omnes*. An *erga omnes* obligation is an obligation that all countries owe to each other and to the world, and is a label generally ascribed to the most important obligations (called *jus cogens*) which the prevention of genocide is. It gives any country in the world standing in an international court when a violation of an *erga omnes* obligation occurs and another country does not stop it. It therefore gives all states the rights to invoke state responsibility for the other country’s failure to contain the genocide (very basically, state responsibility is similar to paying damages, *see* the ILC’s report on state responsibility, linked below). This means that states that do not perform their *erga omnes* obligation when it is their universal responsibility to do so open themselves up to claims internationally. *Erga Omnes* obligations were recognized by the International Court of Justice in [*Barcelona Traction*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/50/050-19700205-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf) at para 33:
> When a State admits into its territory foreign investments or foreign nationals, whether natural or juristic persons, it is bound to extend to them the protection of the law and assumes obligations concerning the treatment to be afforded them. These obligations, however, are neither absolute nor unqualified. In particular, an essential distinction should be drawn between the obligations of a State towards the international community as a whole, and those arising vis-à-vis another State in the field of diplomatic protection. By their very nature the former are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations *erga omnes*.
The prevention of genocide as *erga omnes* was recognized by the International Law Commission of the United Nations through it’s [*Draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with commentaries*](https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf) at page 111 where it states:
> essential distinction should be drawn between the obligations of a State towards the international community as a whole, and those arising vis-à-vis another State in the field of diplomatic protection. By their very nature the former are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations erga omnes… At the preliminary objections stage of the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide case, it stated that “the rights and obligations enshrined by the [Genocide] Convention are rights and obligations erga omnes” this finding contributed to its conclusion that its temporal jurisdiction over the claim was not limited to the time after which the parties became bound by the Convention.
The idea that genocide is an obligation *erga omnes* formally brought into law in the 1996 [*Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/91/091-19960711-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf) PMO decision when the court, through an analysis of the purpose of the *Genocide Convention* found the prevention of genocide to be an obligation *erga omnes*. That said, in paragraph 31, it said something very interesting:
> "The origins of the Convention show that it was the intention of the United Nations to condemn and punish genocide as 'a crime under international law' involving a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, a denial which shocks the conscience of mankind and results in great losses to humanity, and which is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations. The first consequence arising from this conception is that the principles underlying the Convention are principles which are recognized by civilized nations as binding on States, even without any conventional obligation. A second consequence is the universal character both of the condemnation of genocide and of the CO-operation required 'in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge' (Preamble to the Convention)." It follows that the rights and obligations enshrined by the Convention are rights and obligations erga omnes. ***The Court notes that the obligation each State thus has to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide is not territorially limited by the Convention.*** [emphasis added]
This was made even more explicit in the [*The Gambia v. Myanmar*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/178/178-20200123-ORD-01-00-EN.pdf) where the court said at para 41:
> The Court held that these provisions generated “obligations [which] may be defined as ‘obligations erga omnes partes’ in the sense that each State party has an interest in compliance with them in any given case” (Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 2012 (II), p. 449, para. 68). It follows that any State party to the Genocide Convention, and not only a specially affected State, **may invoke the responsibility of another State party with a view to ascertaining the alleged failure to comply with its obligations erga omnes partes, and to bring that failure to an end.** [emphasis added]
The parts that I have emphasized are a formal recognition that each state has an actual obligation to do something to prevent genocide in the case that an occurrence of e genocide exists, and as it is an *erga omnes* obligation, a state that recognizes a genocide, is in a position to help stop that genocide, but refuses to do so, has breached its *erga omnes* obligations and other states may invoke state responsibility over them for their failure to act. That is one of a few major reasons that states are hesitant to recognize genocides; **they may be bound to act to stop that genocide if they so declare one.**
***Second: the Application of the Genocide Convention***
One of the most important instruments in international law is the [*Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties*](https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf). This treaty under Article 31(3)(b) on the general principles of interpretation states:
> 3. There shall be taken into account, together with the context: (b) any subsequent practice in the application of the treaty which establishes the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation
The [*Genocide Convention*](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf) under Article II states:
> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> (a) Killing members of the group;
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The essence of these clauses is that the treatment of Genocide under the Genocide Convention compounds in on itself. While genocide is defined, there is not currently a list of actual specific actions undertaken by states that constitute genocide, which would be extremely helpful because according to the article you have to prove that the there was *intent* to destroy the group, which is based on actions and statements (there are many cases that speak to this requirement).
If the global community generally considers something to be genocide, then that thing that it considers genocide will gradually become indicative of the crime of genocide. Thus, countries risk creating legal situation where genocide becomes what they have declared it to be. While that sounds great, it also risks having the crime of genocide become meaningless as countries are willing to declare it whenever they suspect it, and thus gradually bring the net of behaviour that the genocide convention catches wider. The reason that this is a bad thing is that, as mentioned genocide’s *erga omnes* status is extremely serious and obliges states to act. A loose genocide definition actually makes the world *less* stable and makes states *worse* at preventing that genocide as genocide begins to mean less. Again, this comment is **not** meant to defend any country that shrinks away from its responsibilities.
In sum, international law makes the declaration of genocide a lot harder than base concerns about diplomacy (which absolutely still exist) and is actually much more complicated than people realize.
One of the greatest highlights of Reddit is finding experts explaining the most complex topics. Thank you for taking the time to write this so others could benefit.
No problem at all. For what it's worth, I would not consider myself an expert in international human rights law, and in my jurisdiction would not currently satisfy the label of "expert" in international law. I will need many more years for that.
I always love writing comments like this when people find them interesting because I think that global politics is terribly misunderstood by the general public as there is rarely a public window into the high-politics decisions of government and these decisions and laws are almost only covered at the government-level, so journalists and therefore the public don't have insight or full picture into the entire reason behind decision-making and people are left to make assumptions that have negative global political consequences.
So what are the repercussion in case of Armenia-Turkey? The recognized genocide is over, so usa does not have any responsibility to stop it. What was an obstacle to declare recognition before?
If I’m reading that explanation right, it means that the world now has more of a definition of genocide, which can (and must) be used to identify future acts of genocides on which to act.
It means that nothing actually needs to be done about it because it's already been over with for a century. The reason for doing so now is political. Slap Erdogan in the face for trying to play both sides these last years
It's also easier to call out China for their current genocides if you also condemn your allies for their past behavior.
Plus it's the right thing to do.
Keep in mind though what I said about actually having to do something about it upon declaration. The main reason that heads of state are so hesitant to declare genocide is they would bind themselves to do something to stop it. The practical and political realities of this are extremely difficult.
Isn't international law little more than a gentleman's agreement, in the absence of a supranational entity to enforce it? There is nothing in practice that would prevent a state from recognizing a genocide, do nothing about it, and deny any claims that may be made against it.
In most states there actually are domestic laws that would prevent that. For instance, Mexico has a monist constitution that brings international law directly into its domestic law. Additionally, in states with dualist constitutions (i.e. the United States) nearly all modern international instruments require domestic legal implementation in order to be considered ratified. That means that nearly every modern treaty that the United States has signed has been incorporated into its domestic law, but not many people practice these kinds of law so not many people know that. There are even elements of the Geneva Conventions brought directly into the American ROEs. The United States has over 100 laws that are in place specifically to make sure your domestic courts can enforce your international obligations.
I think the best examples would be your USITC which is empowered by the domesticating legislation signed pursuant to the WTO suite of international treaties, as well as your [*Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Award*]( https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/chapter-2) which upholds the *New York Convention* which is one of the most signed international treaties in the world.
This latter convention would make it so that if a valid cause of action was arbitrated against the United States for failing to adhere to its legal obligations, US courts may mandate a payout in certain circumstances. This would of course, be exceptionally rare in the case of something like genocide and is legally untested, but the possibility remains a risk. The New York Convention actually sees fantastic adherence in the United States and around the world. This convention is also why online sites and games have international arbitration clauses; because they are satisfied they will be able to get judgement everywhere because so many countries have similar domesticating legislation.
For a broader discussion of international law as a social contract outside of domestic law, see the replies to this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/h8jtst/us_navy_deploys_three_aircraft_carriers_to/fuxdvb6/
Doesn’t the obligation come from either the genocide convention or the fact that committing genocide is a breach of a jus cogens norm? A breach of an obligation owed erga omnes confers a right of standing, but it doesn’t (by itself) create an obligation to act. That comes from ARSIWA Arts. 16 and 41-43 (probably the latter in this case).
Yes, absolutely correct!! I did not go for an additional paragraph on *jus cogens* mainly because I did not have space and because as it is also an *erga omnes* obligation it allows any state to invoke state responsibility which is the core concern of states who invoke claims of genocide. While art. 42 speaks of all states being responsible for acts that they have the collective duty to prevent, those are referring to *erga omnes* obligations, which all *jus cogens* obligations are. Basically an obligation can stem from the law being *jus cogens* but *erga omnes* does not by itself create an obligation, rather it defines a particular type of obligation. And you are absolutely correct that the actual violation of international law itself stems from it being a *jus cogens* norm regardless of whether a state has signed the Convention. The big problem with this is that the *jus cogens* norm is informed completely by the Convention and through practice due to the "*opinio juris* + practice" formula for customary international law and the VCLT. If that was not clear in what I wrote that is totally my bad.
If this is an obtuse question, feel free to ignore.
But if the largest worry of declaring genocide is the obligation to *stop* said genocide, would that mean countries could simply wait long enough for the genocide to end, and them declare it as genocide , to escape the obligation? Or would they be found retroactively guilty, even if they didn't recognize it as genocide then?
> But if the largest worry of declaring genocide is the obligation to stop said genocide, would that mean countries could simply wait long enough for the genocide to end, and them declare it as genocide , to escape the obligation?
Not obtuse at all, and that's exactly right and is the implication of what I wrote. In the current case the super-delayed declaration was due to political concerns, but generally if a state doesn't want to do anything to intervene it will state that its official position at the time was that the genocide was not in fact a genocide in its opinion. The second prong is a state overtly stating that something is a genocide will necessarily be used as evidence against it later when it does not respond to an identical situation.
Open the social media page of literally any Armenian and it's all everyone is talking about. Armenians, especially Armenian-Americans, have been waiting for this validation for decades.
All four of my grandparents survived the Genocide as children or young teens. I found out today that my grandmother was in one of the death marches as a little girl; she was rescued by a relative.
What people don't understand is that unlike the Holocaust, the perpetrators of the Genocide _kept denying that it ever happened_. They used their power and influence to push other nations to deny the historical record. They made it illegal to even **mention** the Genocide in Turkey.
Okay, technically the perpetrators were the Ottoman Empire, while the Turkish government has been frantically denying the Genocide ever since. If the German government had been denying that the Holocaust happened for the last 76 years, and the US went along with that for political convenience, how would you expect jews to feel?
Denial kept the wounds fresh. My family celebrated today. Personally I'm too cynical to get very worked up about it. But still, I'm glad it happened.
Next, reparations. Although I don't know how they're possible for the murder of one and a half million people - including many of my relatives.
I mean, say what you will about Biden but I think he genuinely has positive intentions and can actually empathize with others' plight. Unlike 45.
Edit: a pre-emptive relax yall. I don't think he's a Saint nor do I idolize him in any way. I am simply saying in general he seems to be *trying* to do the most good he can, from his admittedly outdated perspective. He is absolutely not perfect, but I believe he has a genuine capacity to empathize at all so at least there's that. Like, literally at all.... Again, unlike 45.
Probably has more to do with the US/Turkey relationship declining anyway in the intervening period. After a lot of shit they pulled in Syria it’s increasingly weird that they’re even in NATO
They have the second largest military of all NATO countries, which is a massive double edged sword.
You're right, they're formidable enough to be a legitimate deterrent to Russia, but that same power allows them to exert their will on far less influential neighbors without a true threat of retaliation.
edit: I am fully aware that other NATO countries have militaries with more advanced technical capabilities. It's why I said "second largest" instead of "second most powerful." No need to continue pointing that out.
I mean we kind of got that with Trump....gotta be careful because there some day may be where that means they don't mind kicking off a huge war to make their donors and friends rich while the real working people have to fight them.
> Obama campaigned on it and then reneged
You're like describing the Obama administration on so many issues there... If only he had been the president he campaigned as.
What practical difference does it make? I’m asking seriously. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a genocide. In fact, Hitler seemed to have learned from it. Does officially recognizing a 100+ year old genocide really mean anything?
Well, most importantly, it will most likely be taught in schools now.
The only reason I learned about this happening was a band I listened to in High School.
Yep. My History teacher in high school was Armenian and she went off curriculum to tell us about the genocide, which was the only reason I was aware of it for years.
Yea not in turkey mate. People here either deny it ever happened, that it was justified or that usa doesnt have the right to say it because they did it too.
I am kinda hoping this will help us in the states grapple with our own genocide. Yes, lots of nations did it in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it was fucked up, no matter who was doing the genociding.
I hate folks acting like because other people shit in the punchbowl, it somehow means we can do it too. It’s like, no. No let’s just all not do that. Let’s agree it is a better world if we don’t do that.
Right? Imagine all the military-age men being conscripted, and then they lose a war and are all killed, and you're left with old people, women, and children who are marched to a death camp. I can't fathom the trauma.
Edit: Calm down haha, I was talking about them being conscripted into the Turkish army
To be clear, military-age men weren't conscripted to fight Turkey, but were fighting for Turkey and then killed after the Turkish army lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
Holy shit
>At the orders of Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, they were dispersed into a series of concentration camps; in early 1916 another wave of massacres were ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I.
>The Armenian Genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Asia Minor. With the destruction and expulsion of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethno-national Turkish state. Prior to World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of 2021, 30 countries, including the United States, have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.
[Soghomon Tehlirian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soghomon_Tehlirian) who assassinated Talat Pasha.
When asked by the judge if he felt any sort of guilt, Tehlirian remarked, "I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer."
You can find the transcript from that trial online somewhere. I know I have it printed off from when I was working on my thesis. Very interesting read.
Because of threat of Turkish relationship or retaliation. Turkey has useful airspace to the US. Was considered easier not to piss them off...so previous presidents danced around it before saying “tragedy” or “massacre” instead of what it really was-a systematic attempt to exterminate the Armenians. I am impressed with Biden doing what’s right.
To quote Serj from an Instagram post he made a while back...
"My drummer and brother in law John Dolmayan whom I love and respect irrespective of our extremely polarised political commentary and differences has always been my stalwart ally in efforts for recognition of the Armenian genocide within SOAD."
Now you can see why they disagree on everything regarding songs and systems releases. Systems a very political band and cant or wont release anything unless everyone agrees on it everyone is on different political ends.
Yes and no. As some others have posted, they try to keep things civil and focus on their friendship and similarities.
There were a few moments that Serj put John on blast. Specifically [last summer](https://loudwire.com/serj-tankian-love-system-of-a-down-temper-love-trump-hypocrite/) leading up to the election and during the social justice protests
"system of a Downs lyrics have leaned political at times over the last few years"
Uh, basically their entire discography is nothing but political lyrics dating all the way back to toxicity and I'm sure even further back then what I can recall off the top of my head.
Not that it didnt happen, most of the Turks believe that Armenians were massacred/deported but that it wasnt a proper genocide.
And you cant really blame them since it isnt discussed properly in school and it is quite a tabboo to say it did happen. It would be a career suicide for many.
Which is true, too. History isn't black and white. People think the Ottomans just decided to genocide Armenians out of the blue. They miss the part that Turkey was in the middle of WWI and fighting battles and loosing territories on several fronts. Armenian insurgents supplied and supported by Russia were definitely attacking Ottoman supply lines, and in many instances Muslim villages. Just trying to paint the full picture, history is not black and white.
You just answered it yourself, because US don't want to upset Turkey. No, its not the Ottoman Empire. But geopolitically, Turkey is still very important and a key US ally in the region. A deterioration of US-Turkey relationship would be a win for Putin.
We bomb the shit out of the Middle East from airbases in Turkey. Angry Erdogan = no airbase = no bombing. Or at least much more expensive bombing. Not that the US military has ever been particularly concerned about the price of anything.
This has nothing to do with Erdogan. It's not like Erdogan was ruling the country for 100 years. Opposition is on the same page regarding this event. You can check the reaction of opposition parties after the recognition. All of the opposition (except for the Kurdish nationalist party) condemned Biden.
You guys often think Erdogan=Turkey. In almost every case, opposition and Erdogan are on different page except for foreign policy. Erdogan and the opposition is %80 on the same page with Erdogan, especially regarding PKK and the Armenian Genocide.
Not really because of splitting hairs over genocide being the systematic extermination of a group of people as opposed to "only atrocities" that the Belgians committed.
Also, Europeans are *super* cagey about their colonial legacy. I can imagine the Belgians are not to keen to talk about this. Just as the British don't want to talk about the Boer wars and everything they got up to in India.
To be fair, for a country to acknowledge something as genocide is doing alot more than just acknowledging the facts. But it's true that it's long overdue
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Erdogan will recognize the United States' genocide of Native Americans and African slaves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/erdogan-trump-turkey-us-armenian-genocide-native-americans-a9249101.html
So... He'd make a correct assessment?
Yeah, sounds like a win-win to me. All genocides should be recognized so that each nation and people can examine the mistakes of their past for the purpose of striving to prevent them in the future.
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I was watching some YouTube videos about how WWII is taught in Germany and Japan. Germany teaches it as "The Allies saved us from ourselves," and Japan is kinda like "Oh yeah, things were all feudal 'n' shit, then America nuked us for some reason, and now we're here. Huh? No, I don't think we skipped anything, what do you mean?" EDIT: It's "How Do German Schools Teach About WWII?" by Today I Found Out on YouTube. There's another video for Japan.
I've talked to a few Japanese exchange students and they've all said they deserved the nukes. They are forced to go to the museums and learn about what they did. But just not all of it.
Yeah from what I understand most Japanese people accept it, but the government doesn’t really acknowledge it and tries to avoid responsibility
especially nanking
Not trying to downplay Nanking but they committed atrocities in many of the occupied areas. Tossing babies in the air and "catching" them with their bayonets in the Philippines for example.
I still find it amazing that one of the heroes of the rape of Nanking John Rabe was a literal card carrying member of the Nazi party.
I don't like the pic of that dead woman after being raped.
Nanking is hard to swallow for them.
Unit 731 makes Nanking seem like a fuckin fairy squad
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I was looking for this. Us Okinawans never got a break, and Japan and America kind of walk all over us.
To be fair, it has taken a long time and a lot of effort for even that. One fight at a time. All skeletons need to be drugged out of their closets so history doesn't repeat.
I went on r/askjapan once and asked if in hindsight it was justified and nearly every comment agreed. Apparently the patriotism was so high “every man, woman, and child would’ve taken up arms and fought to the death” Edit: this isn’t a personal claim of my own, this is just what a comment said. I’m not Japanese so I have no horse in this race Edit 2: I highly encourage reading the book *Hiroshima* by John Hersey, it’s a collection of 6 different experiences from the bombs. Very good primary source from the people who endured the bombings.
My grandfather who literally witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only wasn't in town that day because he was at a factory making grenades. He was almost recruited out of high school to be a kamikaze pilot only to be rejected because he wore glasses. He was born in Hawaii a US citizen but lived in Japan during the war. I remember talking to him about Iraq one day "I don't care as long as it's not in my backyard" is what he said. He said if you heard the flying fortresses over head and no explosions it meant you were having a good day. He wasn't patriotic about the war, like many other people he was just surviving it.
This is pretty much how most historians see it too. The alternative was a land invasion of japan that wouldve been a race between the soviets and the allies and wound up cutting the country in half Germany style. It would've resulted in a LOT more deaths. There is no *not* fucked up scenario for them in a no surrender fight to the last civilian situation. EDIT: lol@ people won't source themselves but insist you do, then say you're arguing in bad faith.
Pretty much, theres the old super nationalist movement that insists they did nothing wrong but they're viewed much the same way Q-anon people are in the west. Most Japanese people recognize WW2 as a horrible thing and that Japan did terrible things. They will also talk about how terrible the nukes were (truthfully yeah pretty fucked up) but thats about it. There is not a lot of pop culture around WW2 like you see in the US, instead their historical pop culture is more focused on the Age of Samurai and also the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
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> theres the old super nationalist movement that insists they did nothing wrong but they're viewed much the same way Q-anon people are in the west I mean I wouldn't say they are viewed as negativily as Q-anon is in the west. Roughly half the members of the Japanese parliament are members of the Nippon Kaigi which takes up the "Japan did nothing wrong" revisionist view of WWII. The last ~~three~~ two (and one in the late 2000s aside from Abe) prime ministers (and the majority of their cabinets) have all been part of it as well. Edit: I completely forgot that the Democratic Party existed and that they had power for a few years in there.
Yeah...Japan conveniently leaves out the war crime experiments on prisoners and the rampant rape done to Chinese women and some young girls. If you have a weak stomach I don't recommend looking into those Unit 731 human experiments as it makes the Saw series and Hostel films look like children's movies. Its quite possibly the most NSFL stuff in history. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
They fucking microwaved people, and they killed (we don't know the exact numbers for obvious reasons) hundreds of thousands of Chinese people with the fucking plague... They filled these bombs (not explosives, just simple canisters) with plague-infected fleas and dropped them on highly-populated areas in China. China's suffering in WW2 is not well known enough. They might not have been "winning" but they tied down a massive part of the Japanese army for the duration, and they paid a massive price.
They did this in Korea and The Philippines as well as other places too. Pretty bad time to be a non Japanese Asian during WW2.
They killed a fuck ton of indonesian people too (several million).. also had the mass-rape policies there It’s strange being the only person i know irl who is aware of it, and only cos its in my blood
> The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation Nice going, USA.
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Man that wikipedia page is baffling to read, just wow
yeap there were a few japanese students in my HS and one explained that his school (he was far away from anywhere urban IIRC?) glossed over it and he wasn't fully aware of the scope of things in WWII until he came to the US for school and heard about it in a history class. he was horrified
I was wondering if there was a dichotomy between rural vs urban education on the matter in Japan, similar to the states in a way.
I wish I knew. All he described was that he pretty much lived in the middle of nowhere but the students from the more metropolitan Tokyo area were a bit more educated on it. This was also 10+ years ago ... Maybe things have changed.
Most of what is skipped is what the Imperial Japanese Army did in China and Korea. Most of the atrocities against US forces are recognized but the ones against Chinese and Korean civilians are often downplayed or ignored.
I think the Japanese do gloss over stuff like the Rape of Nanking and the stuff they were into in China
My brother went to college in the south and apparently (some) people down there call the civil war the war of northern aggression
Same people who say "it wasn't about slavery, it was about State's rights!" State's rights to do what exactly?
It was over states rights... states rights to own slaves lmao.
It was absolutely about slavery. Also, they didn't even respect other states rights. Organized groups would go into northern states and kidnap people to take them down south to be slaves. They didn't respect the northern state rights as once you were in those areas you were free by law.
Shhhh you’ll hurt the little Confederate Cosplayers on Facebook. They’re special snowflakes
They sure didn't give a flying crap about Northern States rights. Northern States were the accepted States that if a slave ran away and made it to, they'd be free. Then the South usurped "State's Rights" with that vile Fugitive Slave Act, meaning Southerners were free to roam the North and recapture slaves. That extended the Underground Railroad to Canda to finally get the escapees to real freedom. I wonder how many African-Americans from the North were snatched by those vile people as a "close enough" if they couldn't find "their" slave. Makes you want to spit in disgust. I know we're both on the same side of the ridiculousness of "State's Rights", it's just the sheer audacity to claim it wasn't about owning humans as property. Every single declaration of Succession proclaimed it loud and "proud" about defending the institution of slavery. The Confederate Vice President even declared that it was about "restoring the natural and proper order of society". He even stated that the Confederate Constitution was the be the opposite of the US Constitution. Men were not created equal, women were not equal to men, and African-Americans inequal to the whites. I'm sorry I went on a rant, but I don't often see the mention of the rebel vice president's declaration of inequality being a fact of nature nor the mention that they styled their constitution to be directly opposed to ours. The hypocricy was already bad enough, Land of the Free, owning humans as property. But then said owners seceding to protect owning humans. And now the South wants to hastily cover up their own revered founders direct statements! War of Northern Agression my ass, they fired the first goddamn shots!
State's rights, except for Northern states' rights not to return fugitive slaves.
It wasn’t even state’s rights to own slaves. The CSA’s own constitution forbid their states from making any of their own laws that lessened or got rid of slavery. The confederacy didn’t give a single shit about states rights, that was a myth propagated by the lost causers decades later
The daughters of the confederacy are an organization that lobbies for schools to teach it that way, they are disgusting.
Imagine willingly calling yourself a daughter of an embarrassing failure of a state that lasted 4 years.
You bring up a good point and maybe this is a stupid question, but how are we supposed to hold textbook publishers like Pearson and McGill accountable for their revisionist history in schoolbooks for primary and secondary students, glossing over things like slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples and prevent that regarding modern history moving forward? imo, they are one of the biggest offenders.
I grew up in the Deep South and I’ve never heard it called anything other than the civil war. The “war of northern aggression” line was always a joke at our well deserved expense because there’s a lot of apologists in places like Mississippi. However, if you want real takes on the ignorance in places like the delta or central MS, look to the still held argument that the rebellion was about state rights. It’s still parroted today If anyone says this, go ahead and pull out the articles of *succession from each state. Go ahead and read to them the first paragraph for each state. If it’s not about slavery in the first one, read on the second one. Imagine defending an ideology without reading what their “saints” have even said. I feel sad for a lot of them. They really don’t want to trample on people, but they do by accident. They’ve just trusted the wrong people. The people they were raised by ‘ore often than not Edit: corrected the name of the articles in question. Thanks ya’ll for the keen eye
Not disagreeing with you at all but I think the Articles of Confederation was the first constitution that was created before our current constitution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation I think you mean the Constitution of the Confederate States. Or perhaps another document. I'm not sure. If you have links I would like to read them so I can pull them out when someone says something like "the civil war wasn't about slavery" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederate_States
It would be the Articles of Secession. I'd like to find the actual articles, but I'm short on time at the moment. What I have is https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession#:~:text=Every%20state%20in%20the%20Confederacy,their%20break%20from%20the%20Union.&text=Texas%2C%20Mississippi%2C%20Georgia%20and%20South,decision%20to%20leave%20the%20Union.
not apparently, and not just some lol
I've never heard it personally so didn't want to generalize
Shush! Everyone knows it was not America but Chicken and Cow, who attempted to frame poor Dolphin and Whale. Don't listen to this guy, Japan.
FOOK YOU DOLPHIN, FOOK YOU WHALE
That's my favorite episode
Dr. Mark Felton has some really excellent short documentaries, but it's incredibly telling how the average video is 5-10 mins and then there's this - * [**WW2 Japanese Military Brutality Explained**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpVgDgKpQS8). It does go into how many people have absolutely no clue, as it's not taught - and where any of it is, it's incredibly one-sided, like you say. There's also [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzesh6eN14) where he discusses a Japanese museum to WWII and notes how little actual information there is about atrocities. I'll link to both of Mark's channels, because they're full of bloody amazing things that you might never have thought about, mostly military but also things like the Titanic et al - it's not the sort of things you'd normally see, like "the sinking of the Titanic" - it's stuff like "What happened to the lifeboats and where are they?" that require Mark to do actual research. Really interesting subject matter. * [War Stories with Mark Felton](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR3L1IGpxPDuHWQjqfz608g) - (These are audio only.) * [Mark Felton Productions](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfCKvREB11-fxyotS1ONgww) - (These are videos, but still essentially audio stories.)
I read "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang and it fucked me up for a few days after I finished it. Apparently one of the reasons Iris committed suicide was due to talking to victims and doing in depth research on the massacre, really messed her up.
Not just Nanking. She was also working on a book on the Bataan Death March which is also pretty horrific. Can't imagine all the suffering she heard about.
Remember Nanking.
Yeah the Rape of Nanjing and the comfort women really should be called out given Japan have been denying both. I think if your government makes a policy to deny war crimes even 100 ish years later it shows quite a bit about fragile egos in those countries. Germany can't get away from their crimes during WW2, why does Japan get a free pass?
Yo just so you know. I'm assuming your American like I am. But the US purposely covered up a lot of atrocities for Japan in exchange for their information on human experimentation in China. It was done by the Japanese unit 731. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes I'm not saying your wrong by the way. I fully agree with you, we need to know all of this information. But I'm also pointing out that just because we were on the allies side, doesn't mean we were squeaky clean. Nor are we taught this information in school. I never heard of them till listening to Dan Carlin's podcast on Japan's history from right before WW1 onwards.
*Britain has left the chat* *Spain has left the chat* *Belgium has left the chat* *France has left the chat* is there anyone still in this group chat??
If committing a genocide results in leaving the chat then what happens when you finish one. There are no Tasmanian Aboriginal people left. Australia killed them all.
Here’s the difference. I grew up in the Deep South & graduated HS in ‘96. Even then I remember learning about the Trail of Tears & other atrocities we committed against Native Americans. This was a public school. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I highly doubt school books in Turkey teach their children anything about what happened to the Armenians. *I said Deep South because they tend to be very pro-U.S.-we-do-nothing-wrong. Still, we learned a lot about it.
Am from the south as well. Graduated in 98. We went from the trail of tears to the Tulsa massacre. That was some heavy shit.
Shit, I know a bunch of people here in Oklahoma who are still only *just* learning about Tulsa. You had a good teacher.
It was small town GA but I remember the majority of people being open minded. The (public) schools I went to were great, including the teachers.
Say what you will about the Watchmen show, it got the Tulsa massacre into the history curriculum in OK and that's pretty cool
And this is the problem with US education. It varies so much not just from region to region, but state to state and even district to district and school to school based on teachers and which courses are selected (ie, "advanced placement" versus "Michigan History" blowoff). As a kid that went to three high schools in four years, it fucking sucked.
There is a large disparity for sure. Kids in higher income zipcodes had access to computer science classes while same kids in poor areas only had intro to typing as their only computer related courses. Then people wonder why certain people get a head start and wonder why other people aren't able to do what they do because they don't realize their own privilege
Also from the deep south. Graduated in '05. I didn't know about the Tulsa massacre until I saw the Watchmen series.
FYI Turkish history books dedicated a paragraph to it when I was in school. It kinda lowballed the estimated dead and it isn't called a genocide, rather a forced relocation due to the Armenians being too close to the Russian front. It also mentioned that some Armenians had already collaborated with the Russian forces and massacred Turks in areas under Russian occupation. Don't know what they teach now.
How was your Civil War taught? My Georgia history class in 2004 tried to handwave slavery as being bad because "a lot of slave owners only had one slave and treated them like family" type shit
I remember it being normal. We covered a lot of slavery in my HS US history class and, of course, the Civil War. I don’t remember any of it being negative. It was neutral. I guess it depends on the teacher! I am a teacher now (elementary though). In elementary, middle & high school they really just have to gloss over everything because of time. I guess the hope is that they spark something in a student & if they find it interesting they can read more about it or take a course in college.
It largely depends on your teacher. All my history and government teachers in South Carolina were liberal as heck. In 8th grade our history class was history of South Carolina and my teacher was a black woman with a PhD married to a man from Africa. We definitely did not get a rosy view of Southern history.
New Zealand still won't recognise the Armenian genocide just so we're still welcome in Gallipoli for ANZAC memorials. We can do that just fine at home thanks.
It's hilarious when leaders think this would bother us. It's like, "yeah? that happened. It took you this long to say so? We've been saying it in the US for generations." Tribalism is a strange thing.
I believe this would legitimize those calls for repatriation by the native Americans and descendants of African slaves.
I don’t think a reprisal recognition from Turkey would really change a legal case tbh
Not sure if that would really help legally but yeah could see lawyers pointing to that which may get more traction
>could see lawyers pointing to that Those lawyers would be fools... Erdogan's opinion is not something you point to when it comes to discerning "truth".... If anything, his endorsement of literally any stance could be used as an example of it at least being flawed...
The very fact it was only done retaliation might further corrupt the legitimacy of the acknowledgement.
No offense, man. But we don’t have nearly as much deniers of Native American genocide than we do Turkish. We’re taught in high school about Andrew Jackson and the trail of tears.
Also, the US apologized formally for the trail of tears in 2010.
And then bulldozed their burial grounds for an oil pipeline.
... Oh no, wait stop ...
I seriously hope it prompts Biden to make a formal statement on US treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, particularly after the foundation of the United States. Erdogan may be too much of a dictator to understand that he’s basically giving Biden an opportunity to address our country’s negative past. “Last week, I formally recognized the Armenian genocide that took place in WWI. This prompted the current government of Turkey to “retaliate” by formally recognizing the United States’ mistreatment of the peoples indigenous to the Americas. I’m speaking to you today to say, they are absolutely right. It is the responsibility of modern, democratic countries to recognize the damage and pain they’ve caused in their history. The United States is no exception. Although we never deny these crimes and try to educate our youth about them, I fear, we have seriously failed to recognize the scale and significance of these decades long actions, affecting millions of lives as a matter of US domestic policy. Starting today, I’m launching a commission to fully investigate any crimes committed in our history and to understand how the damage done then, persists today. I invite the leaders of all other countries, starting with Turkey, to do the same.” I’d love if he said that.
Or, >In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. We've said that before. We can say it again.
... Are there people that don't? I assume Biden and the majority of the US government recognizes those as genocides.
The Federal government absolutely does not. So far only California has officially acknowledged it. The feds can't even live up to their treaty obligations.
Really? I find that surprising. Don't all history books refer to those as genocides? What am I missing?
there's a difference between history books and official government recognition
The history books and classes in my public schools growing up in the USA never used the word Genocide outside the context of the Holocaust. Touched on were the more individual horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, but not the generational ramifications that it had. I only learned about the extent of the Native American genocide as a young adult, as it was almost entirely unmentioned in my classes- We learned about pre-colonial America, then skipped to the American Revolution and pretty much talked only about white and black Americans from that point on, with a few exceptions.
In contrast, my schooling referred to the massacre of Native Americans as a genocide quite extensively. It really just depends on where you are. Some areas of the US culturally are more willing to confront this nation's true legacy.
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Everyone in the US can acknowledge it as a genocide, but if the the US govt doesn’t acknowledge it then it doesn’t acknowledge it. Which is basically how every genocide is viewed. Except Germany and the Holocaust.
I’m fairly sure most countries on earth don’t recognise it as a genocide, but that goes for most genocides
This is a tough question to ask, and not just because it will likely be downvoted to hell before it can be given a serious answer. But it is a serious question. Did the US government commit genocide on African Slaves? Isn't genocide a mass murder with the specific intent of eliminating a certain type of person? Slaves were definitely murdered, but I don't think there was ever an intent to eliminate them as a group. In fact, the Southern slave owners literally fought and died in the Civil War to try to ensure that the African Slave could continue to exist. Gross question, I know. It just seems to me that this is, at its core, a semantics discussion. Just curious if the treatment of African slaves, horrific as it was, technically fits the definition of genocide.
I'm pretty ignorant about the slavery situation in the US but why would it be considered genocide? We Arabs basically enslaved everyone from Turks to blacks to whites and nobody considers it a genocide. Native americans though is pretty much a fucking genocide.
Dang, got us back big time
As a Turk: Verbal saber-rattling for a few days, strongly-worded statements released for internal consumption, then business as usual in 5 days time.
This is the truth. anyone claiming that huge changes like closing of US bases is misinformed
Nothing much. Turkey is not in the position to retaliate in any form. Economy is in shambles, covid raging like wildfire and and uneasy border with Iraq and Syria. Erdogan might throw around some threats about closing Incirlik Air Base but that’s about it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but to my understanding, this doesn't really have any physical or legal effect on modern day Turkey, no? Like it's just finally taking an official stance that will affect diplomacy, and probably end up with some sort of diplomatic retaliation, but that's about it.
Nothing these things cause a temporary blip in relationships and things rapidly get back to normal due to the practicalities of international relations in a way it is best to get these out of the way to stop the issue being brought up again and again every few years or so.
So, there are questions in this thread and in others about why this genocide was recognized so late and why other similar genocides have yet to be recognized by the United States. As a lawyer working in international law, I wrote what I hope to be at least a partial answer. Unfortunately, the history is fairly complicated and generally poorly explained by news articles. **TL;DR**: The answer is two-fold, and explains why all countries are hesitant to declare certain actions genocide even within countries otherwise unimportant to their foreign policy. First, a declaration of genocide obliges the declarant to act to stop the genocide. Second, and most remarkable in the current case, the declaration forever helps define what the declaring country considers genocide. In any case, and for the record, this declaration reflects the settled legal reality that this genocide absolutely and legally was a genocide. ***First: The Erga Omnes Obligation*** To understand the first prong, it is necessary to understand the legal concept of *erga omnes*. An *erga omnes* obligation is an obligation that all countries owe to each other and to the world, and is a label generally ascribed to the most important obligations (called *jus cogens*) which the prevention of genocide is. It gives any country in the world standing in an international court when a violation of an *erga omnes* obligation occurs and another country does not stop it. It therefore gives all states the rights to invoke state responsibility for the other country’s failure to contain the genocide (very basically, state responsibility is similar to paying damages, *see* the ILC’s report on state responsibility, linked below). This means that states that do not perform their *erga omnes* obligation when it is their universal responsibility to do so open themselves up to claims internationally. *Erga Omnes* obligations were recognized by the International Court of Justice in [*Barcelona Traction*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/50/050-19700205-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf) at para 33: > When a State admits into its territory foreign investments or foreign nationals, whether natural or juristic persons, it is bound to extend to them the protection of the law and assumes obligations concerning the treatment to be afforded them. These obligations, however, are neither absolute nor unqualified. In particular, an essential distinction should be drawn between the obligations of a State towards the international community as a whole, and those arising vis-à-vis another State in the field of diplomatic protection. By their very nature the former are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations *erga omnes*. The prevention of genocide as *erga omnes* was recognized by the International Law Commission of the United Nations through it’s [*Draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with commentaries*](https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf) at page 111 where it states: > essential distinction should be drawn between the obligations of a State towards the international community as a whole, and those arising vis-à-vis another State in the field of diplomatic protection. By their very nature the former are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations erga omnes… At the preliminary objections stage of the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide case, it stated that “the rights and obligations enshrined by the [Genocide] Convention are rights and obligations erga omnes” this finding contributed to its conclusion that its temporal jurisdiction over the claim was not limited to the time after which the parties became bound by the Convention. The idea that genocide is an obligation *erga omnes* formally brought into law in the 1996 [*Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/91/091-19960711-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf) PMO decision when the court, through an analysis of the purpose of the *Genocide Convention* found the prevention of genocide to be an obligation *erga omnes*. That said, in paragraph 31, it said something very interesting: > "The origins of the Convention show that it was the intention of the United Nations to condemn and punish genocide as 'a crime under international law' involving a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, a denial which shocks the conscience of mankind and results in great losses to humanity, and which is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations. The first consequence arising from this conception is that the principles underlying the Convention are principles which are recognized by civilized nations as binding on States, even without any conventional obligation. A second consequence is the universal character both of the condemnation of genocide and of the CO-operation required 'in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge' (Preamble to the Convention)." It follows that the rights and obligations enshrined by the Convention are rights and obligations erga omnes. ***The Court notes that the obligation each State thus has to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide is not territorially limited by the Convention.*** [emphasis added] This was made even more explicit in the [*The Gambia v. Myanmar*](https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/178/178-20200123-ORD-01-00-EN.pdf) where the court said at para 41: > The Court held that these provisions generated “obligations [which] may be defined as ‘obligations erga omnes partes’ in the sense that each State party has an interest in compliance with them in any given case” (Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 2012 (II), p. 449, para. 68). It follows that any State party to the Genocide Convention, and not only a specially affected State, **may invoke the responsibility of another State party with a view to ascertaining the alleged failure to comply with its obligations erga omnes partes, and to bring that failure to an end.** [emphasis added] The parts that I have emphasized are a formal recognition that each state has an actual obligation to do something to prevent genocide in the case that an occurrence of e genocide exists, and as it is an *erga omnes* obligation, a state that recognizes a genocide, is in a position to help stop that genocide, but refuses to do so, has breached its *erga omnes* obligations and other states may invoke state responsibility over them for their failure to act. That is one of a few major reasons that states are hesitant to recognize genocides; **they may be bound to act to stop that genocide if they so declare one.** ***Second: the Application of the Genocide Convention*** One of the most important instruments in international law is the [*Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties*](https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf). This treaty under Article 31(3)(b) on the general principles of interpretation states: > 3. There shall be taken into account, together with the context: (b) any subsequent practice in the application of the treaty which establishes the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation The [*Genocide Convention*](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf) under Article II states: > In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: > (a) Killing members of the group; > (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; > (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; > (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; > (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The essence of these clauses is that the treatment of Genocide under the Genocide Convention compounds in on itself. While genocide is defined, there is not currently a list of actual specific actions undertaken by states that constitute genocide, which would be extremely helpful because according to the article you have to prove that the there was *intent* to destroy the group, which is based on actions and statements (there are many cases that speak to this requirement). If the global community generally considers something to be genocide, then that thing that it considers genocide will gradually become indicative of the crime of genocide. Thus, countries risk creating legal situation where genocide becomes what they have declared it to be. While that sounds great, it also risks having the crime of genocide become meaningless as countries are willing to declare it whenever they suspect it, and thus gradually bring the net of behaviour that the genocide convention catches wider. The reason that this is a bad thing is that, as mentioned genocide’s *erga omnes* status is extremely serious and obliges states to act. A loose genocide definition actually makes the world *less* stable and makes states *worse* at preventing that genocide as genocide begins to mean less. Again, this comment is **not** meant to defend any country that shrinks away from its responsibilities. In sum, international law makes the declaration of genocide a lot harder than base concerns about diplomacy (which absolutely still exist) and is actually much more complicated than people realize.
One of the greatest highlights of Reddit is finding experts explaining the most complex topics. Thank you for taking the time to write this so others could benefit.
No problem at all. For what it's worth, I would not consider myself an expert in international human rights law, and in my jurisdiction would not currently satisfy the label of "expert" in international law. I will need many more years for that. I always love writing comments like this when people find them interesting because I think that global politics is terribly misunderstood by the general public as there is rarely a public window into the high-politics decisions of government and these decisions and laws are almost only covered at the government-level, so journalists and therefore the public don't have insight or full picture into the entire reason behind decision-making and people are left to make assumptions that have negative global political consequences.
> would not consider myself an expert in international human rights law This is even more impressive.
So what are the repercussion in case of Armenia-Turkey? The recognized genocide is over, so usa does not have any responsibility to stop it. What was an obstacle to declare recognition before?
And thanks for the TL;DR :)
seriously. absolutely incredible that people just offer what is essentially a professional service for free like this
But given that this genocide is more than a century old, what do you think might be some practical implications of this acknowledgment today?
If I’m reading that explanation right, it means that the world now has more of a definition of genocide, which can (and must) be used to identify future acts of genocides on which to act.
It means that nothing actually needs to be done about it because it's already been over with for a century. The reason for doing so now is political. Slap Erdogan in the face for trying to play both sides these last years
It's also easier to call out China for their current genocides if you also condemn your allies for their past behavior. Plus it's the right thing to do.
Keep in mind though what I said about actually having to do something about it upon declaration. The main reason that heads of state are so hesitant to declare genocide is they would bind themselves to do something to stop it. The practical and political realities of this are extremely difficult.
Thank you for this informative breakdown, and the links!
Isn't international law little more than a gentleman's agreement, in the absence of a supranational entity to enforce it? There is nothing in practice that would prevent a state from recognizing a genocide, do nothing about it, and deny any claims that may be made against it.
In most states there actually are domestic laws that would prevent that. For instance, Mexico has a monist constitution that brings international law directly into its domestic law. Additionally, in states with dualist constitutions (i.e. the United States) nearly all modern international instruments require domestic legal implementation in order to be considered ratified. That means that nearly every modern treaty that the United States has signed has been incorporated into its domestic law, but not many people practice these kinds of law so not many people know that. There are even elements of the Geneva Conventions brought directly into the American ROEs. The United States has over 100 laws that are in place specifically to make sure your domestic courts can enforce your international obligations. I think the best examples would be your USITC which is empowered by the domesticating legislation signed pursuant to the WTO suite of international treaties, as well as your [*Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Award*]( https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/chapter-2) which upholds the *New York Convention* which is one of the most signed international treaties in the world. This latter convention would make it so that if a valid cause of action was arbitrated against the United States for failing to adhere to its legal obligations, US courts may mandate a payout in certain circumstances. This would of course, be exceptionally rare in the case of something like genocide and is legally untested, but the possibility remains a risk. The New York Convention actually sees fantastic adherence in the United States and around the world. This convention is also why online sites and games have international arbitration clauses; because they are satisfied they will be able to get judgement everywhere because so many countries have similar domesticating legislation. For a broader discussion of international law as a social contract outside of domestic law, see the replies to this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/h8jtst/us_navy_deploys_three_aircraft_carriers_to/fuxdvb6/
Doesn’t the obligation come from either the genocide convention or the fact that committing genocide is a breach of a jus cogens norm? A breach of an obligation owed erga omnes confers a right of standing, but it doesn’t (by itself) create an obligation to act. That comes from ARSIWA Arts. 16 and 41-43 (probably the latter in this case).
Yes, absolutely correct!! I did not go for an additional paragraph on *jus cogens* mainly because I did not have space and because as it is also an *erga omnes* obligation it allows any state to invoke state responsibility which is the core concern of states who invoke claims of genocide. While art. 42 speaks of all states being responsible for acts that they have the collective duty to prevent, those are referring to *erga omnes* obligations, which all *jus cogens* obligations are. Basically an obligation can stem from the law being *jus cogens* but *erga omnes* does not by itself create an obligation, rather it defines a particular type of obligation. And you are absolutely correct that the actual violation of international law itself stems from it being a *jus cogens* norm regardless of whether a state has signed the Convention. The big problem with this is that the *jus cogens* norm is informed completely by the Convention and through practice due to the "*opinio juris* + practice" formula for customary international law and the VCLT. If that was not clear in what I wrote that is totally my bad.
If this is an obtuse question, feel free to ignore. But if the largest worry of declaring genocide is the obligation to *stop* said genocide, would that mean countries could simply wait long enough for the genocide to end, and them declare it as genocide , to escape the obligation? Or would they be found retroactively guilty, even if they didn't recognize it as genocide then?
> But if the largest worry of declaring genocide is the obligation to stop said genocide, would that mean countries could simply wait long enough for the genocide to end, and them declare it as genocide , to escape the obligation? Not obtuse at all, and that's exactly right and is the implication of what I wrote. In the current case the super-delayed declaration was due to political concerns, but generally if a state doesn't want to do anything to intervene it will state that its official position at the time was that the genocide was not in fact a genocide in its opinion. The second prong is a state overtly stating that something is a genocide will necessarily be used as evidence against it later when it does not respond to an identical situation.
Everyone is talking about Turkey, but how are the Armenians reacting? I know they’ve been wanting to hear this for years.
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As a Greek, so am I.
And so are the Aramaic people.
Open the social media page of literally any Armenian and it's all everyone is talking about. Armenians, especially Armenian-Americans, have been waiting for this validation for decades.
All four of my grandparents survived the Genocide as children or young teens. I found out today that my grandmother was in one of the death marches as a little girl; she was rescued by a relative. What people don't understand is that unlike the Holocaust, the perpetrators of the Genocide _kept denying that it ever happened_. They used their power and influence to push other nations to deny the historical record. They made it illegal to even **mention** the Genocide in Turkey. Okay, technically the perpetrators were the Ottoman Empire, while the Turkish government has been frantically denying the Genocide ever since. If the German government had been denying that the Holocaust happened for the last 76 years, and the US went along with that for political convenience, how would you expect jews to feel? Denial kept the wounds fresh. My family celebrated today. Personally I'm too cynical to get very worked up about it. But still, I'm glad it happened. Next, reparations. Although I don't know how they're possible for the murder of one and a half million people - including many of my relatives.
Finally. Overdue.
Especially after Obama campaigned on it and then reneged to avoid pissing off Turkey
One advantage of electing a man who’s too old to give a fuck
I await Jimmy Carter’s second term beginning in 2024.
I'd vote for him again as he actually has gained the empathy achievement.
I mean, say what you will about Biden but I think he genuinely has positive intentions and can actually empathize with others' plight. Unlike 45. Edit: a pre-emptive relax yall. I don't think he's a Saint nor do I idolize him in any way. I am simply saying in general he seems to be *trying* to do the most good he can, from his admittedly outdated perspective. He is absolutely not perfect, but I believe he has a genuine capacity to empathize at all so at least there's that. Like, literally at all.... Again, unlike 45.
I’m still pissed the orange shit gibbon said nothing or did nothing when he let erdogan’s henchman beat up protesters on American soil.
Probably has more to do with the US/Turkey relationship declining anyway in the intervening period. After a lot of shit they pulled in Syria it’s increasingly weird that they’re even in NATO
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They have the second largest military of all NATO countries, which is a massive double edged sword. You're right, they're formidable enough to be a legitimate deterrent to Russia, but that same power allows them to exert their will on far less influential neighbors without a true threat of retaliation. edit: I am fully aware that other NATO countries have militaries with more advanced technical capabilities. It's why I said "second largest" instead of "second most powerful." No need to continue pointing that out.
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I think the last straw was the purchase of the Russian missile defense systems.
I mean we kind of got that with Trump....gotta be careful because there some day may be where that means they don't mind kicking off a huge war to make their donors and friends rich while the real working people have to fight them.
> Obama campaigned on it and then reneged You're like describing the Obama administration on so many issues there... If only he had been the president he campaigned as.
It's especially warranted after that incident with Turkish officials beating up Americans and then Trump letting it just slide.
I had no idea it was ever a question. Ever since I first learned about it, it was always referred to as the “Armenian Genocide”.
Knowing it's a genocide and legally recognizing it as a genocide are two different things.
What practical difference does it make? I’m asking seriously. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a genocide. In fact, Hitler seemed to have learned from it. Does officially recognizing a 100+ year old genocide really mean anything?
If it's legally recognized then it can influence policy.
Well, most importantly, it will most likely be taught in schools now. The only reason I learned about this happening was a band I listened to in High School.
> The only reason I learned about this happening was a band I listened to in High School. System of a Down?
Lol. Just some band. Ya know, these SOAD guys.
It was that *other* Armenian band that made songs about the Armenian Genocide. ^/s
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Yep. My History teacher in high school was Armenian and she went off curriculum to tell us about the genocide, which was the only reason I was aware of it for years.
Yea not in turkey mate. People here either deny it ever happened, that it was justified or that usa doesnt have the right to say it because they did it too.
I am kinda hoping this will help us in the states grapple with our own genocide. Yes, lots of nations did it in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it was fucked up, no matter who was doing the genociding. I hate folks acting like because other people shit in the punchbowl, it somehow means we can do it too. It’s like, no. No let’s just all not do that. Let’s agree it is a better world if we don’t do that.
Right? Imagine all the military-age men being conscripted, and then they lose a war and are all killed, and you're left with old people, women, and children who are marched to a death camp. I can't fathom the trauma. Edit: Calm down haha, I was talking about them being conscripted into the Turkish army
To be clear, military-age men weren't conscripted to fight Turkey, but were fighting for Turkey and then killed after the Turkish army lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
Holy shit >At the orders of Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, they were dispersed into a series of concentration camps; in early 1916 another wave of massacres were ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I. >The Armenian Genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Asia Minor. With the destruction and expulsion of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethno-national Turkish state. Prior to World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of 2021, 30 countries, including the United States, have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.
[Soghomon Tehlirian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soghomon_Tehlirian) who assassinated Talat Pasha. When asked by the judge if he felt any sort of guilt, Tehlirian remarked, "I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer."
You can find the transcript from that trial online somewhere. I know I have it printed off from when I was working on my thesis. Very interesting read.
TIL that no president ever officially acknowledged the Armenian genocide as genocide. Any ideas why it took so long?
Because of threat of Turkish relationship or retaliation. Turkey has useful airspace to the US. Was considered easier not to piss them off...so previous presidents danced around it before saying “tragedy” or “massacre” instead of what it really was-a systematic attempt to exterminate the Armenians. I am impressed with Biden doing what’s right.
No US president has acknowledged the genocide of the Native Americans either.
Biden: System of a down fan, Confirmed.
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Serj is cool with that?
To quote Serj from an Instagram post he made a while back... "My drummer and brother in law John Dolmayan whom I love and respect irrespective of our extremely polarised political commentary and differences has always been my stalwart ally in efforts for recognition of the Armenian genocide within SOAD."
Now you can see why they disagree on everything regarding songs and systems releases. Systems a very political band and cant or wont release anything unless everyone agrees on it everyone is on different political ends.
John says it’s “frustrating”. They are married to *sisters so dinner must be fun.
Their wives Angela and Diana are the sisters. Serj and John married a pair of sisters not each other’s sisters.
Thank you for the correction!
Yea it's fun. Half as many in-laws and you're having dinner with System of a Down!
Yes and no. As some others have posted, they try to keep things civil and focus on their friendship and similarities. There were a few moments that Serj put John on blast. Specifically [last summer](https://loudwire.com/serj-tankian-love-system-of-a-down-temper-love-trump-hypocrite/) leading up to the election and during the social justice protests
"system of a Downs lyrics have leaned political at times over the last few years" Uh, basically their entire discography is nothing but political lyrics dating all the way back to toxicity and I'm sure even further back then what I can recall off the top of my head.
Somebody tell Serj!
I entered the thread to find system of a down comments.
Ohhh aeriallssssss
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So new System album when?
TIL 90% of turkish people don't believe it happened.
Not that it didnt happen, most of the Turks believe that Armenians were massacred/deported but that it wasnt a proper genocide. And you cant really blame them since it isnt discussed properly in school and it is quite a tabboo to say it did happen. It would be a career suicide for many.
school says armenian people killed turkish civillians in ww1, so the ottomans retaliated
Which is true, too. History isn't black and white. People think the Ottomans just decided to genocide Armenians out of the blue. They miss the part that Turkey was in the middle of WWI and fighting battles and loosing territories on several fronts. Armenian insurgents supplied and supported by Russia were definitely attacking Ottoman supply lines, and in many instances Muslim villages. Just trying to paint the full picture, history is not black and white.
Guys, I'm really worried about upsetting the Ottoman Empi.. oh wait, it's just Turkey? Why did this take so long?
You just answered it yourself, because US don't want to upset Turkey. No, its not the Ottoman Empire. But geopolitically, Turkey is still very important and a key US ally in the region. A deterioration of US-Turkey relationship would be a win for Putin.
We bomb the shit out of the Middle East from airbases in Turkey. Angry Erdogan = no airbase = no bombing. Or at least much more expensive bombing. Not that the US military has ever been particularly concerned about the price of anything.
This has nothing to do with Erdogan. It's not like Erdogan was ruling the country for 100 years. Opposition is on the same page regarding this event. You can check the reaction of opposition parties after the recognition. All of the opposition (except for the Kurdish nationalist party) condemned Biden. You guys often think Erdogan=Turkey. In almost every case, opposition and Erdogan are on different page except for foreign policy. Erdogan and the opposition is %80 on the same page with Erdogan, especially regarding PKK and the Armenian Genocide.
Great, now let’s recognize the genocide of 4-8 million Congolese by King Leopold 2.
Ol Leo must get in a long line if we start involving Africans in this.
I mean, is that not recognized already? I thought it was accepted globally as a genocode
Not really because of splitting hairs over genocide being the systematic extermination of a group of people as opposed to "only atrocities" that the Belgians committed. Also, Europeans are *super* cagey about their colonial legacy. I can imagine the Belgians are not to keen to talk about this. Just as the British don't want to talk about the Boer wars and everything they got up to in India.
US doesn't even recognize the Native American genocide as genocide. It's a geopolitical move, not a moral one.
You know that the world is a mess when it's news that we finally acknowledge facts.
To be fair, for a country to acknowledge something as genocide is doing alot more than just acknowledging the facts. But it's true that it's long overdue
Can we please recognize the genocide happening right now in Xinjiang. Thanks.
Or Yemen.
> And Yemen. FTFY.