There are a lot of things you can say about the wisdom and appropriateness of governmentally declaring that the calculated mass murder of the Armenians by the Turks was a genocide. I reserve just a few comments.
First of all my instinctual inclination is against thinking that unless we Officially Certify a fact of human history it is not really a fact of human history. We are not all under some sort of cosmological order to put Government Stamps on things that happened at risk of their no longer having happened at all.
But this is a vague and general inclination and the Armenian genocide is definitely a particular case. There is no reason why one egregious or unique genocide should not be recognized, officially or unofficially, instead of another; and there is no reason why recognizing one genocide means that every genocide has to be recognized. Still, Official Certification does suggest at a minimum that some genocides have been more important to the American people, and are now more important to their Government, than others. Though this does not necessarily bother me for any particular reason in the abstract, it seems obviously primed to touch off a long round of question-begging. Why the Armenian genocide and not some, or all, others? Or even, why not somewhat less awful but nonetheless clearly reprehensible Turkish acts too? Why don't I, a Greek American on my father's side, get the satisfaction of a similar Hundreds of Years of Oppression Decree?
The answer would have to be that in a representative democracy you can petition your Government in Washington to do things, and that among these things are Laws and Decrees and while hopefully Laws will not be passed simply because a large enough group of people goads their representatives into passing them the same cannot quite be said for Decrees, which are easy to pass and have no legal standing and should, better than any other acts of Officialdom, gratify the urges of the people to convey the weight of their political and moral convictions, particularly when they are clearly attuned to historical fact. The Armenians get their Decree because they persuaded the Government to give it to them. This is merely politics in action.
Nonetheless something still rankles: the implicit notion that one of the important jobs of Government is not in fact to legislate but to 'give a voice' to constituents that are being 'underheard' -- to 'speak' for people whose voice is not yet quite official enough. This is not the only pitch point for an Armenian Genocide Resolution, but it is one that resonates half-consciously along certain thick strings of our political culture. Whereas I find it to be rather disgusting and embarrassing to imagine that the Government is put to proper use as an Endorsement Loudspeaker, a certifier of grievances directed not, as our venerable political theories would have it, at the Government itself but to some third or fourth party. Resolutions on matters like these run the serious risk of becoming Certificates of Pain Feelification given weight and heft by the fairly illegitimate misdirection of the legitimate public power.
I think generally the legislature should do as few official things that are not passing laws as possible. But I am driven also to admit that when a popular hue and cry goes up to admit as a political body that a genocide happened and it was bad, there is something especially grotesque at the other end in stonewalling and evasion on the part of the legislators. The uncomfortable quality of this dilemma, which ends up getting resolved by just passing the damn thing and bracing for the consequences of acknowledging the truth on a calligraphied scroll with an embossed sea, seems to me to militate in favor of people recognizing the wisdom of not getting into the dilemma to begin with.
Note as a matter of postscript that all of this can be thought out plainly and conclusively enough without having to clutter the imagination with what-ifs about how it'll play in Anatolia.
PPS. I do feel compelled now to make special reference to this post of Larison's. Certainly there is a difference, whether or not National Review acknowledges it, between being a genocide denier and wishing we all would have thought better of getting into the official genocide affirmation business for our own sake. In short, as a private citizen I have always worked the fact of the Armenian genocide into casual conversation whenever not inappropriate; as private citizen and public legislator I would have ardently hoped that the Official Resolution of Genocide Fact Affirmation issue would not ever come up, in public debate or for a vote; and as a public legislator I would have voted at once for its immediate passage. This collection of positions, public and private, seems to me consistent, fair, and advisable.
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