As Voltaire put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.
Lying big is a way to gain fanatics to a cause, whether it’s done serendipitously or by cold, calculated design.
We’re all discussing Omar voting present, even going so far as to say she voted against it, and was the only Democrat to do so.
Omar voted Present. So did Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas (D) and Paul Gosar of Arizona ®. Johnson gave no reason for her vote, and Gosar claimed it was simply a partisan attack on Trump.
Actually voting against HR 265? Eleven Republicans, only one of which [Tom Cole of Oklahoma ®] offering his reasoning: it was solely an attempt to hurt US-Turkey relations.
But hey, let’s focus on a tortured portrayal of Omar’s words instead.
More on her opinion:
“My issue was not with the substance of this resolution. Of course we should acknowledge the Genocide. My issue was with the timing and context. I think we should demand accountability for human rights abuses consistently, not simply when it suits our political goals.”
Much of the European-American interaction involved enslavement or disease more than planned racial elimination. Exceptions AFAIK, clearly genocide, include US and Canadian policies against indigenes. Removal. Starvation and privation. Medical and legal neglect. Kidnapping children. Yes, deliberate physical and cultural destruction - like how China now handles domestic Muslims. Will Congress condemn Chinese genocide, or various Australian, Belgian, Russian, Guatemalan, et al genocides? Did I miss those votes?
What about the current genocides in Yemen and Myanmar? Funny how this happened after this so-called deal with Turkey concerning the Kurds.
It’s a bad sign when we don’t have additional words besides racism or bigotry which sounds racist in itself. How certain kinds of racism is worse than others, so start an entire term, even if it isn’t accurate.
Well, 90% of the indigenes were dead before there *was *a US or Canada, and altho there were some small exceptions, at no time was the elimination of the natives “planned” or “systemic”. Us white folks just kinda bumble our way thru getting rid of most of the rest, and of course the Indians didnt really help their cause with massacres and atrocities. (Something about the European mindset is that atrocities rarely scare us into give up, we just get angry and seek revenge).
and once we call everything a “genocide” it loses it’s strong meaning.
Would you consider the death of 20% to 40% of a nation during government mandated forced expulsion be “planned” or “systematic” - because that’s what happened to the Cherokee, and the Creek, and the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw, over the course of a few years.
Considering how badly it was mismanaged, to the extent that there was an even an attempt to manage it, “systematic” and “planned” hardly seem fitting descriptors. But at any rate it comes down to whether you consider ethnic cleansing via forced population transfer( which it was )to be synonymous with genocide. They’re generally considered closely related phenomena, but usually defined as distinct from each other.
Now on the other hand the Pequot War of 1637 was pretty unambiguously genocidal. The colonists genuinely wanted to exterminate the Pequot as a people and more or less succeeded.
Where I’m concerned, the general gist of it is that, while it can’t really be argued that there was a centrally planned Big Picture genocide going on ; there were dozens upon dozens of individual, contained, slow-encroachment genocidal acts and plans by dozens of genocidal actors who never got punished or even shamed for it by their contemporaries. And I’m not just talking about heinous stuff like the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek or poxy blankets ; I’m also talking about kidnapping children to forcibly “civilize” and “educate” them into not being damned dirty Indians no more.
When you don’t condemn nor punish massacring this or that tribe, nor “relocating” this or that tribe, nor any actions deliberately meant to de facto remove this or that tribe from existence and keep doing it for 200+ years… honey you’re doing a Big Picture genocidal, you’re just not all teutonic efficiency about it :).
Did anyone else hear that needle skip right there ?
Well, there was nothing about the Cherokee trail of tears that was Planned to kill off natives- it was combination of bad management, stupidity, racism, and the corruption of the Van Buren administration (Jackson , altho he started the voluntary removal, had nothing to do with the forced removal, since he wasnt even president then).
wiki "Scott discouraged mistreatment of the Native Americans, ordering his troops to “show every possible kindness to the Cherokee and to arrest any soldier who inflicted a wanton injury or insult on any Cherokee man, woman, or child.”
And perhaps 4000 died (mostly due to dysentery- very common, tens of thousands of Civil was soldiers succumbed) of a total of nearly 2000), very nasty indeed, but altho the move was “planned” there was nothing at all “planned” or “systematic” about the deaths along the way. No doubt some of the "conductors’ were racist that hated the natives but by and large the deaths were caused by POOR planning, gross corruption, and stupidity. Unless you can find the smoking gun signed by Van Buren or Scott saying “Hey make sure that we wipe out 20% or more of those redskins along the way, fewer to feed” it wasnt a genocide. It was stupidity and greed.
If you want to say there was many shameful acts committed upon the natives, that while heinous, were neither planned or systemic- thus not really a genocide, sure. And that’s the point. Sure over 200 years, slowly, the white man won, and thus screwed the Indian pretty badly. But there was nothing planned and systemic about it.
Why? let’s not pretend that the natives didn’t commit many heinous acts upon the whites, they certainly did. I mean just because they lost and we love the little guy and the loser, we can’t just brush those off either.
Planned ? No. Systemic ? Yes. Again, when the public discourse is almost unilaterally biased against a group ; and brutalities committed against the group are never punished nor officially condemned, you’re perforce going to see a lot of brutalities.
Sure, but it’s not like they started it. E.g. Cortez kicked off the massacre ball, and nobody can claim he had any historical beef or real reason to… “Both sides do it” is nonsense when one side is (for the most part) doing it in response and kind, sometimes even encouraged to - for example, while the practice of scalping the dead existed in some parts of the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans, the latter did a hell of a lot to spread and encourage it in spaces where it hadn’t existed before.
The phrase “500 treaties or more” is almost a cliché among Native American advocates at this point, to refer to the 530some treaties the US government signed with various tribes and groups throughout its history - and then broke or unilaterally amended because Fuck Em That’s Why. Whereas treaties broken by Natives are, to my best knowledge, in the single digits.
You can’t try and pass that shit as a moral equivalence.
I specified disease. The first Euro explorers spread germs in both directions that felled much of Europe and nearly obliterated coastal America. Euro settlers found empty sites where earlier sailors saw thriving populations. It’s hard to enslave the dead.
Do the US “negro removal” projects during my lifetime qualify as ethnic cleansing? Do alt.right voices calling for expulsion of Blacks, Jews, Latinos, et al qualify as genocide advocates? Is mass-murder of social dissidents more acceptable?
On the #'s killed, the Nazis kept very meticulous records, and the evidence all points to something close to 6 million. So, if someone says “3 or 4”, I think that is a form of soft denial.
On the 2nd point, just pointing out that other groups were targeted is not denial. The deniers go another step and try and put these other groups on par with the Jews. It’s well-documented and well-known by all historians that the Jews were considered the top enemy by the Nazis and their #1 target. They were willing to annihilate and/or enslave other groups, but nothing was on par with the Jews. However, just pointing out that other groups were killed (gays, communists, gypsies, jehovah’s witness) is not a form of denial.
There are people who profess great indignation about Jews promoting Holocaust remembrance for supposedly failing to give sufficient attention to other groups whose members were murdered by the Nazis.
Curiously, these people (generally) don’t lambaste organizers of Black History Month for accentuating black suffering under slavery but not highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout history - or attack Armenians for concentrating on their own genocide.
Naturally, any group historically targeted for enslavement and/or elimination will focus on its own sufferings. However, claims of ignoring other ethnic/political/religious groups seem to be focused most virulently on Jews.
This generally comes off as a “soft” :dubious: form of anti-Semitism.
Eh I’ve run into the “but what about…” types wrt slavery. You think of a flavor of stupid, it’s out there. Probably has a Facebook group (I recommend not looking unless you want a shower ASAP.)
Context is important. The Hill article on her vote explains it:
That seems to be the basis for the suggestion of denial: that she’s using the language the Turkish government uses to sow doubt about the genocide.
By trying to suggest that her vote was based on a lack of academic consensus, when there is in fact a general academic consensus, that appears to be a form of denial on her part, especially when she uses the language used by the Turkish government.
Interestingly, after her “present” vote became a matter of debate, she issued a further statement, which appears to recant from the comment about a need for academic consensus:
