A Problem From Hell: Why America should prevent every single possible genocide from Rwanda to Romania, from Uganda to Uzbekistan, everywhere everytime

[Sunni Man]

the constitution is not a suicide pact, sir

Nor is it a carte blanche document to be the world's policeman.

 

[basquebromance]

U.S. officials spin themselves (as well as the American public) about the nature of the violence in question and the likely impact of an American intervention. They render the bloodshed two-sided and inevitable, not genocidal. They insist that any proposed U.S. response will be futile. Indeed, it may even do more harm than good, bringing perverse consequences to the victims and jeopardizing other precious American moral or strategic interests. They brand as "emotional" those U.S. officials who urge intervention and who make moral arguments in a system that speaks principally in the cold language of interests. They avoid use of the word "genocide." Thus, they can in good conscience favor stopping genocide in the abstract, while simultaneously opposing American involvement in the moment.

 

[basquebromance]

In 1915 Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople, responded to Turkey’s deportation and slaughter of its Armenian minority by urging Washington to condemn Turkey and pressure its wartime ally Germany. Morgenthau also defied diplomatic convention by personally protesting the atrocities, denouncing the regime, and raising money for humanitarian relief. He was joined by former President Theodore Roosevelt, who went a step further, calling on the administration of Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I and forcibly stop the slaughter. But the United States clung to its neutrality and insisted that Turkey’s internal affairs were not its business. An estimated 1 million Armenians were murdered or died of disease and starvation during the genocide.

 

[basquebromance]

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and international lawyer, warned about Hitler’s designs in the 1930s but was scoffed at. After finding refuge in the United States in 1941, he failed to win support for any measure to protect imperiled Jews. The Allies resisted denouncing Hitler’s atrocities, granting refuge to Europe’s Jewry, and bombing the railroad tracks to the Nazi concentration camps. Undaunted, Lemkin invented the word "genocide" and secured the passage of the first-ever United Nations human rights treaty, which was devoted to banning the new crime. Sadly, he lived to see the genocide convention rebuffed by the U.S. Senate. William Proxmire, the quixotic U.S. senator from Wisconsin, picked up where Lemkin left off and delivered 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor urging ratification of the UN treaty. After nineteen years of daily soliloquies, Proxmire did manage to get the Senate to accept the genocide convention, but the U.S. ratification was so laden with caveats that it carried next to no force.

Senator Proxmire on the Genocide Treaty

content.wisconsinhistory.org

 

[Sunni Man]

Historically the main problem with the U.S. trying to solve other countries internal problems.
Is we usually don't have a good grasp on which side of the conflict are the good guys and the bad guys.
So we usually end up making worse the situations we were trying to solve.

 

[easyt65]

we, even we here, hold the power, and bear the responsability.

DEMOCRATS use to say the US can NOT e the world's policeman. Ow they want to send troops into everywhere from Yemen to Somali.

Biden and Drmocrats have devastated the economy while adding trillions to tbe debt. Americans are struggling to survive.

You want to clean up crime and murder abroad when, thanks to Drmocrats, we are veing invaded by literally millions of thieves, sexual predators,violent gang members, tapists,pedophiles, murderers, human / drug / child / sex traffickers, and terrorists....

....our streets and cities are no longer safe from machette/knife-wielding attackers, looters, rapists, people shoving commuters onto train tracks, etc...

Crime and violence is out of control here at home!

'We have the power and resonsibility'?!

We / our leaders don't have the power, don't feel a responsibility, and don't have the WILL to do it here at home.

Not to mention, again, we are BEYOND 'BROKE'.

We would have to pay off more than $31 TRILLION DOLLARS in debt just to be 'BROKE'.

 

[basquebromance]

A handful of U.S. diplomats and journalists in Cambodia warned of the depravity of a sinister band of Communist rebels known as the Khmer Rouge. They were derided by the American left for falling for anti-Communist propaganda, and they failed to influence a U.S. policy that could not contemplate engagement of any kind in Southeast Asia after Vietnam. Pol Pot’s four-year reign left some 2 million Cambodians dead, but the massacres elicited barely a whimper from Washington, which maintained diplomatic recognition of the genocidal regime even after it had been overthrown.

 

[basquebromance]

is anyone counting the combined death toll of the PREVENTABLE events i've summarized so far? i'm just getting started!

 

[basquebromance]

Peter Galbraith, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drafted punishing legislation for his boss, Senator Claiborne Pell, that would have cut off U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Saddam Hussein in retaliation for his 1987-1988 attempt to wipe out Iraq’s rural Kurds. The sanctions package was defeated by a determined White House, State Department, and U.S. farm lobby, which were eager to maintain friendly ties and sell rice and wheat to Iraq. And so Hussein’s regime received generous American financial support while it gassed and executed around 100,000 Kurds.

 

[basquebromance]

Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian major general who commanded UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994, appealed for permission to disarm militias and to prevent the extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsi three months before the genocide began. Denied this by his political masters at the United Nations, he watched corpses pile up around him as Washington led a successful effort to remove most of the peacekeepers under his command and then aggressively worked to block authorization of UN reinforcements. The United States refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, the issue never became a priority for senior U.S. officials. 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days.

 

[basquebromance]

A few diplomats at the State Department and several lawmakers on Capitol Hill relentlessly tried to convince an intransigent bureaucracy to bomb Serb ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. These men watched the sanitization of cables, the repackaging of the conflict as "intractable" and "ancient," and the maintenance of an arms embargo against Bosnia’s outgunned Muslims. Several foreign service officers who quit the department in disgust then watched, from a no less frustrating perch outside the U.S. government, the fall of the Srebrenica safe area and the largest massacre in Europe in fifty years. Between 1992 and 1995, while the nightly news broadcast the Serb onslaught, 200,000 Bosnians were killed. Only when U.S. military intervention came to feel unavoidable and Bob Dole had persuaded congress to lift the arms embargo did U.S. policy change. By bringing the war in Bosnia home, Dole helped spur President Clinton to begin NATO bombing. By then, however, Bosnia’s genocide had been largely completed, and a multiethnic state had been destroyed.

 

[basquebromance]

Historically the main problem with the U.S. trying to solve other countries internal problems.
Is we usually don't have a good grasp on which side of the conflict are the good guys and the bad guys.
So we usually end up making worse the situations we were trying to solve.

the United States’ decisions to act or not to act have had a greater impact on the victims’ fortunes than those of any other major power. Since World War II, the United States has had a tremendous capacity to curb genocide. It could have used its vast resources to do so without undermining U.S. security.

 

[basquebromance]

"we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide." - Jimmy Carter, 1979...nobody except ME listened!

Five years later, President Ronald Reagan, too, declared. "Like you, I say in a forthright voice, ‘Never again!’" President George HW Bush Sr. joined the chorus in 1991. Speaking "as a World War II veteran, as an American, and now as president of the United States," Bush said his visit to Srebrenica had left him with "the determination, not just to remember, but also to act." Before becoming president, candidate Clinton chided Bush over Bosnia. "If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything," Clinton said, "it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide." Once in office, at the opening of the Holocaust Museum, Clinton faulted America’s inaction during World War II. "Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done," he said. "We must not permit that to happen again." But the forward-looking, consoling refrain of "never again," a testament to America’s can-do spirit, never grappled with the fact that the country had done nothing, practically or politically, to prepare itself to respond to genocide. The commitment proved hollow in the face of actual slaughter.

 

[basquebromance]

I used to refer to U.S. policy toward Bosnia as a "failure." I have changed my mind. It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.

 

[basquebromance]

a little more than 100 years ago, on March 15, 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha, one the main instigators of the Armenian Genocide. The assassination was a part of Operation Nemesis, revenge plan for the Armenian Genocide, and organized by the ARF. Tehlirian lost 85 family members in the genocide.

Talaat presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of 1 million Armenians

“I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer”.

the dude has his own statue in Armenia

From Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial transcript

 

[basquebromance]

On March 14, 1921, on a damp day in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, a twenty-four-year-old Armenian crept up behind a man in a heavy gray overcoat swinging his cane. The Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, placed a revolver at the back of the man's head and pulled the trigger, shouting, "This is to avenge the death of my family!" The burly target crumpled. If you had heard the shot and spotted the rage distorting the face of the young offender, you might have suspected that you were witnessing a murder to avenge a very different kind of crime. But back then you would not have known to call the crime in question "genocide." The word did not yet exist.

Tehlirian, the Armenian assassin, was quickly tackled. As pedestrians beat him with their fists and house keys, he shouted in broken German, "I foreigner, he foreigner, this not hurt Germany.... It's nothing to do with you." It was national justice carried out in an international setting. Tehlirian had just murdered Talaat Pasha, the former Turkish interior minister who had set out to rid Turkey of its Armenian "problem." In 1915 Talaat had presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly 1 million Armenians.

The outside world had known that the Armenians were at grave risk well before Talaat and the Young Turk leadership ordered their deportation. When Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany against Britain, France, and Russia, Talaat made it clear that the empire would target its Christian subjects. In January 1915, in remarks reported by the New York Times, Talaat said that there was no room for Christians in Turkey and that their supporters should advise them to clear out. By late March Turkey had begun disarming Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army. On April 25, 1915, the day the Allies invaded Turkey, Talaat ordered the roundup and execution of some 250 leading Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. In each of Turkey's six eastern provinces, local Armenian notables met roughly the same fate. Armenian men in rural areas were initially enlisted as pack animals to transport Turkish supplies to the front, but soon even this was deemed too dignified an existence for the traitorous Christians. Churches were desecrated. Armenian schools were closed, and those teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. All over Anatolia the authorities posted deportation orders requiring the Armenians to relocate to camps prepared in the deserts of Syria. In fact, the Turkish authorities knew that no facilities had been prepared, and more than half of the deported Armenians died on the way. "By continuing the deportation of the orphans to their destinations during the intense cold," Talaat wrote, "we are ensuring their eternal rest."

"Official proclamations," like this one from June 1915, cropped up around town:

Our Armenian fellow countrymen, ... because ... they have ... attempted to destroy the peace and security of the Ottoman state, ... have to be sent away to places which have been prepared in the interior

The Young Turks—Talaat; Enver Pasha, the minister of war; and Djemal Pasha, the minister of public works—justified the wholesale deportation of the Armenians by claiming that it was necessary to suppress Armenian revolts. When Russia had declared war on Turkey the previous year, it had invited Armenians living within Turkey to rise up against Ottoman rule, which a small minority did. Although two prominent Ottoman Armenians led a pair of czarist volunteer corps to fight Turkey, most expressed loyalty to Constantinople. But this did not stop the Turkish leadership from using the pretext of an Armenian "revolutionary uprising" and the cover of war to eradicate the Armenian presence in Turkey. Very few of those killed were plotting anything other than survival. The atrocities were carried out against women, children, and unarmed men. They were not incidental "by-products" of war but in fact resulted from carefully crafted decisions made by Turkey's leaders.

 

[basquebromance]

In June 1915 Erzindjan, the hometown of Talaat's eventual assassin, was emptied. Soghomon Tehlirian, then nineteen, marched in a column of some 20,000 people, with his mother and siblings—two sisters of fifteen and sixteen, another of twenty-six who carried a two-and-a-half-year-old child, and two brothers of twenty-two and twenty-six. The journey was harrowing. The gendarmes said to be protecting the convoy first dragged Tehlirian's sisters off behind the bushes to rape them. Next he watched a man split his twenty-two-year-old brother's head open with an ax. Finally, the soldiers shot his mother and struck Tehlirian unconscious with a blow to the head. He was left for dead and awoke hours later in a field of corpses. He spotted the mangled body of a sister and the shattered skull of his brother. His other relatives had disappeared. He guessed he was the sole survivor of the caravan.

 

[basquebromance]

The "international community," such as it was, did little to contest the Turkish horrors, which began nine months into World War I. Germany was aligned with the brutal regime and thus was best positioned to influence it. Instead, German officials generally covered up Talaat's campaign, ridiculing the Allied accounts of the terror as "pure inventions" and "gross exaggerations." The Germans echoed the Turks' claims that any harsh policies were a measured response to Armenian treason during wartime. The German chancellor met in person with German Christian missionaries who presented eyewitness testimony about the slaughter. But he rejected their appeals. Berlin would not offend its Turkish ally.

 

[basquebromance]

The United States, determined to maintain its neutrality in the war, refused to join the Allied declaration. President Woodrow Wilson chose not to pressure either the Turks or their German backers. It was better not to draw attention to the atrocities, lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement. Because the Turks had not violated the rights of Americans, Wilson did not formally protest.

 

[basquebromance]

Henry Morgenthau Sr., a German-born Jew who had come to the United States as a ten-year-old boy and had been appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by President Wilson in 1913, agitated for U.S. diplomatic intervention. In January and February 1915, Morgenthau had begun receiving graphic but fragmentary intelligence from his ten American consuls posted throughout the Ottoman Empire. At first he did not recognize that the atrocities against the Armenians were of a different nature than the wartime violence. He was taken in by Talaat's assurances that uncontrolled elements had simply embarked upon "mob violence" that would soon be contained. In April, when the massacres began in earnest, the Turkish authorities severed Morgenthau's communication with his consuls and censored their letters. Morgenthau was reluctant to file reports back to Washington based on rumors, and the Turks were making it impossible for him to fact-check.

Although he was initially incredulous, by July 1915 the ambassador had come around. He had received too many visits from desperate Armenians and trusted missionary sources to remain skeptical. They had sat in his office with tears streaming down their faces, regaling him with terrifying tales. When he compared this testimony to the strikingly similar horrors relayed in the rerouted consular cables, Morgenthau came to an astonishing conclusion. What he called "race murder" was under way. On July 10, 1915, he cabled Washington with a description of the Turkish campaign:

Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.