This news from Bloomberg:
President Joe Biden commemorated the 106th anniversary of the mass killing of Armenians by twice calling it a “genocide” — a word no U.S. leader since Ronald Reagan has used to describe the event for fear of alienating NATO ally Turkey.
Turkey, in response, summoned U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield to Ankara, and said it rejected Biden’s characterization of the events of 1915.
But of course Turkey did.
The Washington Post offers a brief summary of what happened during World War I, including this detail (plus grisly photos in a tweet I will not repost here):
At this point in the war, the United States was still neutral. Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and witnessed many of the atrocities. In a July 16, 1915, cable, he told the State Department: “It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress.”
He pleaded with Ottoman officials to stop it, and with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. (He didn’t.) Eventually, Morgenthau fundraised for Armenian refugees and published a book recounting the horrors he had witnessed.
How to characterize what happened has been contentious ever since, for Turkey if not for historians. Atrocities took place, yes, but those happens in a civil war, Turkey insists. There was no coordinated campaign to destroy the Armenian people.
What happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is in no way comparable, but the denialism follows a similar pattern.
Democrat Moe Davis lost the race last fall for the congressional seat in NC-11 to Republican Madison Cawthorn. The seat was left open when Rep. Mark Meadows left to work for the Trump White House.
Davis tweeted this morning in response to a local letter to the editor denying the assault on the Capitol even happened.
Damned clever, those establishment lefties. There was no insurrection on Jan. 6, just a 1st Amendment rally by patriots egged on by profiles in courage like media-hungry Cawthorn.
What happened to Armenians in 1915 was not genocide. The Civil War was not about preserving slavery. The Confederate battle flag is about heritage.
And Kool-Aid is good for you.