Japan has never really made amends for the atrocities it committed during World War II.
Turkey has never really made amends for the atrocities it committed during and after World War I.
Germany has recognized the genocide it committed under Hitler.
The United States confronted it's own crime against humanity, the enslavement of millions of mothers, fathers and children because of their race. It also confronted its ethnic cleansing of thousands of men, women and children because of their Japanese ancestry on the West Coast following Pearl Harbor.
The way a nation, if it wishes to be great, makes amends for its past inhumane deeds is to acknowledge that it committed them, first. What it does about this later is open for discussion. Germany, in addition to paying money to survivors, has instituted classes and tours of the death camps for school-children, and it reminds them that it is not good to use certain word-forms such as calling people "dirty" because of their ethnicity. It leads down a road to devaluing people as human beings when the need is to treat all humans as people worthy of complete respect and dignity. Hitler did the opposite of that. Modern Germany does not tolerate any more of this.
Japan has expressed a certain amount of official regret over its bad conduct, but never enough to cause anyone to believe that it sincerely acknowledges its war guilt. We know this because it remains a hot topic in Japan. When a mayor or a legislator have taken the nation to task over this, they have been assassinated. Japanese schoolbooks ignore, gloss over, or whitewash the nations atrocities in China, the Philippines, and in the other nations of its "Co-prosperity Sphere," or empire leading up to the war.
Turkey's self image is such that it cannot admit that it wiped out a large number of Armenians for being Armenian. It denies responsibility and quibbles over words. The issue comes up repeatedly because the victims insist that their victimhood be recognized by the successor state to the Ottoman Empire charged with the actual murders by starvation, gun and sword.
American legislators with many Armenian-American voters in their district, such as parts of Los Angeles, have introduced legislation seeking to establish as this nation's official view that Turkey is guilty of genocide in 1918.
This is not helpful to our interests because Turkey has been a friend and ally for decades. Turkey joined the U.S. in fighting the communist North Korean dictatorship when it invaded South Korea, not part of the Communist bloc and now a democratically administered independent nation, one of the few in Asia.
Turkey has allowed us the use of its bases to monitor and overfly the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The famous U-2 flights over Russia were launched from Turkey.
We needed Turkey's cooperation during the Persian Gulf War and now during the war in Iraq. There are a lot of Kurds in both Turkey and Iraq. We walk a fine line in maintaining Turkey's cooperation while protecting it from Kurdish aspirations for a homeland for Kurds, much as the Palestinians want a homeland, and we did, too.
So it gets complicated.
It is a pity that nations are unable to recognize their own history, the story of their bad deeds as well as their good. Whenever I condemn Nazi Germany, which was an automatic for me, having got my start during the war, now I think that I shouldn't be too smug for having been born on the right side, a matter of luck. My attitudes might have been different had I been born elsewhere.
The other day an album of photos turned up, of officers at one of the death camps having a fine old time during their off hours. Hannah Arendt, in her book on the Eichmann trial, Nazi Germany, and war crimes referred to what she called "the banality of evil." This refers to the idea that the monstrous genocide of six million Jews, Gypsies, sick people, and politically incorrect people didn't just happen all of a sudden, but was an industrial process in which a lot of people went to work every day and pushed paper in the direction of the death of all these people. If you didn't push enough paper in that direction today, you still had tomorrow and meanwhile you collected your government or railroad or check from the corporation that made the ovens, the poison gas, and kept track of all of the paperwork, IBM, as I recall. How mundane is that? How banal?
What this means is that it was not just Hitler, Goebbels, Speer, and Eichmann who are to blame, but all of Germany down to the engineer of the trains and the brakemen and the administrators and clerks in the offices all over Germany and the rest of Europe who turned over their Jews to the police who fell under the control of the Nazis. Say you're a cop in Paris, used to directing traffic, and suddenly you're told to round up the neighbors who are Jewish. They'll be put on a train, never to be seen again. What do you do? You're supporting a wife and two kids on a policeman's salary? My guess is the same as what happened. You round up Jews, unless you are an exceptional person who refuses to cooperate. You'd be laughed at by your colleagues and friends before you, too, were fired and rounded up yourself, harming your little ones. So you round up Jews.
This is how I think it works.
France has had difficulty coming to terms with its own anti-Semitism, beginning with the Dreyfuss Affair around 1895,, and it's rounding up of Jews all over France during the war.
I wish it were not so impossible for a nation to admit its wrongdoing, but it is, clearly, at least for some nations. We don't like to admit our mistreatment of the Native Americans encountered by the white settlers. But we certainly know that we did them wrong, even if we're not about to give back the land. We put magic names on the process, such as "Manifest Destiny," which means that God has told us that it's okay to kill you and steal your land and not pay for it because he loves us because we're white and civilized and Christian and Western European extending from a civilization that we trace back to Rome and Greece and you don't because you are barbarian, savages, and live in tents and hunt animals. So it's okay for us to treat you like dirt.
You can read about the Armenian genocide bill below in an article from the Washington Post.
White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007;
Page A01
A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.
All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.
  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has long supported the resolution. (Getty Images) TOOLBOXDiscussion Policy
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E-mail This Pelosi, whose congressional district has a large Armenian population, has brushed aside such concerns and said she supports bringing the resolution, for the first time, to a full vote in the House, where more than half of the members have signed on as co-sponsors. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has passed such a resolution before, is set to vote on it today.
House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide, has been pushed doggedly by a congressman whose Southern California district contains the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the country. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D) won his seat in 2000 after his Republican predecessor was sandbagged when then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reneged on a pledge and pulled the bill from the floor after a last-minute plea from President Bill Clinton.
Schiff, who defeated Rep. James Rogan after Hastert killed the floor vote, said the deaths so long ago still resonate with Armenians. "It is an insight you get when you have lots of Armenian constituents," he said, saying it reminded him of conversations he had while growing up Jewish. "But imagine losing the entire family and having the successor state say it never happened."
Few people deny that massacres killed hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children during and immediately after World War I.
But Turkish officials and some historians say that the deaths resulted from forced relocations and widespread fighting when the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire collapsed, not from a campaign of genocide -- and that hundreds of thousands of Turks also died in the same region during that time.
"This is the greatest accusation of all against humanity," said Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, referring to genocide. "You cannot expect any nation to accept that kind of labeling." He said the reaction in the Turkish parliament would be one of fury, noting that the Turkish military cut contacts with the French military and terminated defense contracts under negotiation after the French National Assembly voted in 2006 to criminalize the denial of Armenian genocide.
Pelosi had long been a co-sponsor of the resolution. The Armenian National Committee, one of the many Armenian organizations that have sought passage of the measure for years, has given her an "A" grade for her stance on Armenian issues.
Now as speaker, Pelosi will face a choice between her role as a national leader and her previous campaign pledges as a member of Congress. U.S.-Turkish relations are already under some strain because Kurdish militant groups have attacked Turkish targets from bases in Iraq, with Ankara suggesting it may launch its own attack. Turkey plans to hold a "neighbors" conference on Iraq pushed by the United States later this month, but a recent poll by the nonpartisan group Terror Free Tomorrow found that 83 percent of Turks would oppose assisting the United States on Iraq if the Armenia resolution passed.
It is a problem that has caused other politicians to flinch. As a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to ensure that "our nation properly recognizes" what he called "a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension." But, angering Armenian groups, Bush refused to use the term in the annual presidential statement on the subject made on April 24, generally considered the beginning of the killings in 1915. President George H.W. Bush and Clinton also refused to refer to genocide in their annual statements, for fear of offending Turkey.
Among other things, the resolution calls on the president to use his annual message to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide."
In the Senate, where one-third of its members are co-sponsoring the resolution, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) supports the measure, as do the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.).
The State Department, which collected the signatures of the former secretaries of state, has lobbied against the resolution, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried and U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson calling lawmakers yesterday to "urge them not to vote for this," according to an interview Fried gave the Anatolia news agency.
The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm DLA Piper and $105,000 a month to the Livingston Group, and it recently added communications specialists Fleishman-Hillard for nearly $114,000 a month, according to records filed with the Justice Department. Turkish lawmakers were on Capitol Hill yesterday, warning that passage would put military cooperation with Turkey at risk.
Meanwhile, leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members, a budget of $3.6 million last year and phone banks that are running on overtime calling members of Congress. The organization has signed up 53 non-Armenian ethnic groups, including a number of Jewish groups, to support the resolution.
Some Jewish groups have found themselves in a bind because Turkey is one of the few Muslim nations to have diplomatic relations with Israel.