The Land under the Mountain

"The Bush administration and top American generals have been vocal in warning that passage of the resolution could cause great harm to the American war effort in Iraq and have put significant pressure on Republicans to abandon their support for the measure."

It seems to me that Bush et al. have a difficult job--they are arguing that the timing of this resolution is wrong. That implies that the substance of the resolution itself is at least not absurd. I don't understand why the fact that Turkey is our ally in the "war on terror" prevents us from asserting particular historical facts. Do we ignore the shortcomings of nations that are our "friends"? It seems to me that we ought to attend even more to the failings of countries with which we are allied.

Additionally, contra Representative Murtha

(“This happened a long time ago and I don’t know whether it was a massacre or a genocide, that is beside the point,” said Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is urging Ms. Pelosi to keep the resolution from the floor. “The point is, we have to deal with today’s world.”),

I believe that when politics is restrained to a conversation regarding the future and ignoring the past, then one cannot see the present correctly, nor make correct decisions regarding the future. In Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt writes about this problem:

"Authority, resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone, gave the world the permanence and durability which human bings need ... . Its loss is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world, which indeed since then has begun to shift, to change and tranform itself with ever-increasing rapidity from one shape into another ... . But the loss of worldly permanence and reliability--which politically is identical with the loss of authority--does not entail, at least not necessarily, the loss of the human capacity for bulding, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live for those who come after us."

The question is, then, whether our President and legislators understand Turkey to be a nation that recently killed many of its own and neighboring people and denies it still. I'm not sure that our close relationship with them reflects that fact.

Really, recognizing the Armenian genocide is not simply a non-binding, meaningless Congressional resolution; there is the possibility, at least, that this could be the start of more significant reparations to the Armenian people.