Politicking and the Medz Yeghern

Despite my earlier support for Ilhan Omar, my congresswoman has deeply disappointed me, and many other Minnesotans, over her ‘present’ vote on the Congressional bill to recognise the Medz Yeghern as a genocide. Representative Omar’s reasoning as given, defending her ‘present’ vote, is almost a pastiche of woke-idpol reasoning and whataboutism. I have little else to say about this vote other than what I already have. Congresswoman Omar’s willing acquiescence in Turkish lies is absurd, it is craven, and it is pointless. We do not need an ‘ally’ like Turkey that cannot face the truth about its own history.

But try telling that to the president, who has been putting what pressure he can on the Senate to block the Senate from passing a resolution by unanimous consent recognising the Medz Yeghern as a genocide. The unprincipled opportunism of the president is the exact mirror image of the unprincipled opportunism of our congresswoman, sad to say, even though they are on opposite sides of the political divide.

Now, I have no love for Ted Cruz, who is a spineless sellout willing to throw Christians in the Middle East straight under the bus. And I have no love for Bob Menendez either, a cynical and corrupt Clintonian war-hawk who has been not only wrong but heinously so on nearly every single foreign policy issue of the last fifteen years.

But stopped clocks can be right twice a day, and both of them happen to be in the right on this issue. What happened to the Armenians in 1915 and 1916 is considered by a consensus of historians as a genocide, and a formal recognition of that genocide is long overdue. I’m glad that the American government is finally getting around to it at last, even if – and here Omar perhaps did speak a grain of truth – it took a moment of gæopolitical gamesmanship to bring it about.

Speaking on a personal note, I have nothing but warm feelings and gratitude for the Armenian-Americans I knew in Rhode Island. One of them was my twelfth-grade history teacher, and also a committed labour organiser. They are not only upstanding members of the community but also steadfast friends and comrades. The Armenian diaspora has had to fight an uphill battle in many Western countries against a ‘strategic partnership’ between Turkey and its allies. However, they have achieved something remarkable in bringing about recognition of what happened to them, and in that cause have built a remarkable sense of solidarity. The passage of the bill recognising the Armenian Genocide is encouraging; the fact that it has been accompanied by the usual cynical politicking much less so.