That would be a good band name.
So congress has condemned Turkey for the Armenian genocide of WW I. Turkey claims it was just rock n' roll.
I don't have a problem with calling it genocide, by why did congress feel like now was the time to do it?
I love sick days.
(er...a guest was peeping this thread and I just happened to be watching the dreadful (so far) Atom Egoyan firm,
Ararat...which seems to have little to do with the Armenian Genocide)
Why now after close to a century? Why when the U.S. has not declared the Rwandan Genocide a Genocide and its politics are not 92 year old and anachronistic? Pressure from the Armenian Lobby (I do not know of a Tutsi Lobby). There is also a movement to (European, Armenian, etc.) prevent Turkey from joining the European Union. Many Armenians, quite understandably, do not want to see Turkey prosper when they have not even acknowledged what occurred in 1915 (the mass annihilation of between one and two million Armenians, though some claim even more). There was no doubt more pressure exerted at this time because it looked like the Turkish Army was about to go head to head with the Kurds in Northern Iraq.
U.S. Congress know about as much about what really happened as I do, which isn't a whole hell of a lot. The political aims of the Armenian Lobby are clear enough, but I half-wondered if the Democratically-controlled congress pushed this through for its own reasons, to disrupt Bush's allies and his "little war".
It was a genocide (complete with heads on stakes - I have several books from the Armenian Embassy here in Montreal - almost all of them have to do with the genocide), but the reasons for this push were largely political in nature.
Author
