"Genocide," or "Crimes Against Humanity:" Does It Matter? With Us, It Sure Does

So the Turks are not happy with us now, but we knew that was going to happen. On the other hand, three days out, they haven't said a thing.

President Biden came out and said that what Turkey did to the Armenians during World War I, and beyond (until about 1923, in fact), constituted "genocide." As if we didn't know.

We do know that imprisonment, execution, and starvation resulted in the deaths of about 600,000 to 1.4 million Armenians. We know that that wasn't a happenstance of geography, either. They were targeted. 

So do we call these acts "genocide," or "crimes against humanity?" And does it matter?

It apparently matters to the Turks. They blanch from "genocide." According to Phillipe Sands, law professor from the University of London, as interviewed on Fareed Zakaria's show "GPS," Sunday, the Turks don't want to use that word because it had not been invented when they committed it. Apparently--and I didn't know this--the word "genocide" was first used when discussing the Nazi mass murder of the Jews. That's a very narrow and mindless argument.

It would also leave the United States off the hook. Our genocide of the American Indian began in the 17th Century and continued into the 20th. It ended, too, before World War II, if only because we didn't have that many Natives to eliminate any longer, kind of like the bison, the staple animal for many of them.

With this thought train, William Sherman, Union Army general of note for razing Atlanta and marching to the sea, can also be excused for postulating: The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

Which separates two particular American tragedies from each other: Slavery and reservations. One meant that we needed to keep enough of some people of color alive so they could do dirty work that white people thought (and some still think) isn't lofty enough for them to do; the other pushed them away from their natural living areas without caring at all whether they lived or died, the latter of which they did in enormous numbers.

So slavery, as such, is a crime against humanity: It robs people of their civil rights, manipulates their existence, and keeps them from the freedom which all human beings deserve. They live because they serve someone else's purpose, not their own.

But what American whites did to American Natives was genocide. It was the intentional ending of human life because, simply put, they were in the way. They were cleverly referred to as "nations," and retain that status, but they are nations in the way that Liechtenstein can stand up to France. Which is to say, barely noticeably.

No American President has ever referred to what was done to Natives in that way. Someone should.

Of course, that might also open the doors to what African-Americans have started a conversation about within recent years: compensation. Compensation for being owned is one thing: Compensation for having your land and the lives of your ancestors taken is quite another.

Not only that, but it took until 1924 for Natives to be declared citizens. This post-dated the 14th Amendment for them by more than fifty years. After all, the 14th Amendment says that anyone born on American soil is a citizen, period. That's supposed to be that. But it sure wasn't.

It's nice, and accurate, for Joe Biden to clear the air about Turkish genocide of Armenians. It's a much longer reach to do it about our own people. But we should.

We intentionally gave them smallpox. We destroyed their bison. We made treaties that turned into big lies. And we raided their settlements, murdering men, women and children. Then we pushed them onto useless lands, pretending they could make a decent living.

Some of them fought back for a while. But they knew it would be futile. 

We took their children and tried to 'assimilate' them, turning them into white people, pretending again that it would do them all kinds of good. Totalitarian countries have another word for it: Re-education. It's what the Khmer Rouge did with Cambodians after they, in another act of genocide, butchered millions there, too.

Funny, but Biden's declaration (actually, he blended it into a sentence, which hardly makes it a declaration) did not set off incredible outcries in Turkey or elsewhere. They haven't made a peep. Does the above list of hypocrises have anything to do with it? Have they, along with the bungling of our last president, reduced our claim to world leadership and descended us into irrelevance? Does our declaration matter as little as that of, say, Thailand?

Either way, it would be a much bigger deal if we cleaned our own house and declared ourselves to be implicit in our own genocide. There's plenty of talk about what we've done and are still doing to blacks now, and Asian-Americans are catching a vicious whirlwind, too. As usual, the Natives stand in the corner, waiting for someone to recognize them beyond tokenism.

Let's do that right now. A declaration of genocide might raise some respect that the rest of the world has reduced. An admission of our own bruises and wounds might set off a new surge of scholarship in which our schoolchildren might learn anew that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution set bars for behavior that have still not been hurdled. That sobering thought might give more of us pause and take the steam out of the anger that many of us still have.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark