HyeOctane

Taking Grassroots Activism to the Next Level

Archive for May, 2007

Denying Armenian genocide an atrocity in itself

May 14th, 2007 by

By David RossieSome
Things Never Change Department:

“UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations dismantled an exhibition on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.” — The New York Times.

Members of the Flat Earth Society take heart. Your cause is not lost.

Global warming deniers stand firm. Dick Cheney’s oil company pals may yet pay off enough needy science professors to lie for them.

If the Turks, despite the mountains of evidence, including eye-witness testimony, can get away for 92 years with pretending that the slaughter of more than a million Armenians didn’t happen, then there’s hope for any group or government determined to keep reality at arm’s length.

It boggles the mind that after all these years, all the books, all the eye-witness accounts and, yes, the trials when some of the perpetrators were called to account and admitted their roles in the atrocities, although most of them escaped punishment, that we are still being confronted by an official cover-up of that monstrous deed, and the governments of the world, not to mention most of the newspapers that cover them, are willing to put up with it.

In some European countries, you can go to prison for denying the Nazi’s Holocaust that took the lives of 6 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and assorted others.
The Cheney/Bush Gang’s foreign policy operatives won’t talk to the Iranians in large part because their prime minister is a Holocaust denier. [Read More]

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‘Never again’ for Armenians too

May 1st, 2007 by

Los Angeles Times

This year, Congress established April 15 as Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorating the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Just nine days later, on April 24, Armenians throughout the world observed the commemoration of their great tragedy: the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks that began in 1915.In many ways, it was the 20th century’s first genocide that helped set the stage for its largest, including Rwanda and now Darfur. Adolf Hitler reportedly said, on the eve of his invasion of Poland in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

For the last 60 years, the Jewish community has labored to avoid granting Hitler, in the words of philosopher Emil Fackenheim, “a posthumous victory.” Jews have taken as their motto “never again,” and most tend to understand that this charge refers to all of humanity, not only to fellow Jews. One of the last surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Simha “Kazik” Rotem, once said that the central lesson of the Holocaust to him was that the Jewish people should stand vigilant against genocidal acts directed at any people. [Real More]

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