At the Shoah Foundation last week, Stephen Spielberg presented President Obama with an award for the President’s "efforts in fighting genocide around the world". Apparently the award did not include recognition of the first genocide of the 20th Century, since, after having become President of the United States, Barach Obama has never acknowledged the genocide of the Armenians perpetrated by the Turks. Could Hitler have been correct when he mouthed the now infamous words, "Who, after all, remembers the Armenians?"
See New York Times, National, Friday, May 9, 2014, Page A17
In the 9-11 ceremony a few ayes ago, the pres never mentioned the word 'terrorist', 'jihadist', or anything that could link that day to its origin. So, why should one be surprised at the omission of yet another horror committed by people of the same faith as the perpetrators of 9-11? The bigger the government, the greater the power accrued, the greater the willingness to mask the truth for political expediency. Power corrupts. The greater the power, the greater the corruption. The founding fathers understood this, acutely, which is why they fashioned a limited government. Well, it is no longer limited, and we are inheriting the wind, a wind from the desert, a howling wilderness that blinds us and deafens us to the truth. Our leaders and our teachers and too many of the voters have become a choir of Pontus Pilate, and sing the refrain, 'what is truth'?
ReplyDeleteThat quote by Hitler was purportedly made to his generals ordered to murder the Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Genocide seems to have characterized the twentieth century. The massacre of the Jews in Europe during ww2, was the third, not the second of that century. The second was the forced starvation by Stalin of the kulaks, upwards of 10million, because they resisted the agricultural collectivization of Ukraine, the most fertile and greatest farmland in the world outside of North America. Mass murder is a universal trait of fascism, whether the international version, such as communism, progressivism, socialism, or the nationalistic one, such as the German nazis, or the Italian fascists during ww2. Since the conclusion of that war, there have been man, many more. A partial list would include mao's in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties, purportedly in the scores of millions, the murdering of 2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian communists, 'ethnic cleansing' in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, the near extinction of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, as well as several other tribal acts of genocide committed by dominant tribes against lesser tribes in Africa. Yes, indeed, who does remember the Armenian today? His was only the first, in a century that witnessed at least eight genocides. There is so much to remember, and to forget.
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