Leslie Davis was truly a great diplomat and an incredible human being.
Until Genocides are not widely recognized and stopped. Those who commit them are not punished, they are going to happen again, as they did during 20th century.
Hitler used Armenian Genocide to convince others that atrocities committed by Nazis are going to be forgotten. Hitler's quote: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
It is a shame that US did not officially recognize Armenian Genocide yet, even though most of the civilized world did and most of the US State legislatures did.
Germany was one of the main allies of Ottoman Empire when Armenian Genocide occurred and they only recognized Armenian Genocide of 1915 in 2016. 101 years after it happened.
> It is a shame that US did not officially recognize Armenian Genocide yet, even though most of the civilized world did and most of the US State legislatures did.
The real shame, in my opinion, is that Israel hasn't recognized the genocide yet. And I say this as a survivor of Azeri Pogroms of the 1990 and a descendant of the Armenian Genocide survivor whose entire family was murdered by Young Turks. It's actually disgusting not shameful and I don't care how much they try to blame Geopolitics for this.
On this topic, I highly recommend Samantha Power's book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" which details the United States inability to respond promptly to the many cases of genocide over the past century.
I love how that book blames America for failing to respond to many genocides committed far away from its borders - what other great power has ever done so, unless it was for their benefit?
As a non-American, we are fucking lucky that America not only doesn't extord us for loot (as any other empire would) but actually spends so much energy, lives and money keeping protecting us. I am personally really happy that Putin knows there will be consequences if he rolls west.
One could argue that the Roman Empire endured as long as it did because the pax Romana was preferable to the tribal warfare it displaced, even though the Romans may not have particularly cared about security of any given group within their sphere of influence. I'd argue that as the world shrinks long-term consequences manifest over shorter absolute timescales.
Why are you (and others) so negative about feedback? We can't get better at something unless we realize why we aren't doing it well.
> what other great power has ever done so, unless it was for their benefit?
Right, it's for their benefit. Not just morally, but economically and geo-politically.
Which is why we want to make sure we can stop the problem rather than watching the tragedy unfold as we powerlessly flail against ourselves. (ie, waiting until we label something a genocide before trying to help.)
> As a non-American, we are fucking lucky that America not only doesn't extord us for loot
They're generally happier to gain a stronger position than to be up a few bucks. It's long-term thinking.
> I am personally really happy that Putin knows there will be consequences if he rolls west.
Ditto, but these days I believe less and less than the USA would do anything. Or at least until it's too late.
Great point. Exactly what the book tackles. The US did not often intervene in the past because there was no direct benefit to do so.
Powers argues that this is changing. The international condemnation and uproar from citizens has political consequences for those in power and thus is enough to generate action.
The comment is ambiguous, it's not really clear if it's actually meant to be flippant or not. If you read it literally, the meaning is directly the opposite and still makes sense.
The Azerbaijan president often tweets about 'The fake Armenian genocde' (and before I get a ton of downvotes again, I use the quotation marks because I don't agree with his view')
I don't think reporting him helps. Denying the Armenian genocide is one of his main past times, on twitter and off twitter. He is also the world's expert (and only expert) on the fabled Azerbaijan genocide. I'm not Azerbaijanian or Armenian, I can't imagine devoting so much of my life to hating another ethnic group.
American criterias on how to divide Ottoman Empire cause Armenians to "totally-not-genocidie" local populations to secure Greater-whatever-its-supposed-to-be-Armenia. Retaliation is genocidiasfsdfsf
"And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
What a bloody, violent book. We definitely need to ban it, and all its followers, am I right?
This sort of religious flamewar is a bannable offense on HN. It makes me feel sick to see it here, and would probably have banned you had I seen it at the time.
Surah al-Mai-dah verse 5 states that "lawful in marriage are chaste women form among the believers and chaste women from among those who were given the Scripture before you..."
This, giving Muslim men permission to wed Jewish and Christian women, has been interpreted by Islamic jurists as implying by omission that Muslim women may not wed Jewish or Christian men. It was believed that such husbands would impart their religion to their children, and may pressure their wives to convert away from Islam.
Since Islam has no central governing authority, adherents largely rely upon the religious scholarship of their own imam, or upon those known to them to have a thorough understanding of Islamic religious interpretations. Some such scholars declared interfaith marriage by a Muslim woman to be equivalent to apostasy. The consensus opinion, however is that interfaith marriages are never acceptable outside of Muslim-establishment countries, as without the support of a Muslim community, both parents are required to reinforce the faith in their children.
The punishment for apostasy in the Islamic world ranges from death to no punishment at all. Under Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali schools, female apostates are executed, whereas Hanafi and Shi'a will imprison her indefinitely, until such time as she reverts to Islamic orthodoxy.
As a result, I must agree that it is possible that a woman in an interfaith marriage may be executed for it, with no other reason necessary, under recognized interpretations of Sharia law.
This is, of course, independent of those who may murder women in interfaith marriages under color of religion, outside of the purview of recognized Islamic judges of Sharia law. I believe such "honor killing" murders are in fact based upon the underlying tribal culture and not upon its majority religion. As such, if you're not from Pakistan, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia, no one will recommend that a Muslim woman be murdered for marrying a non-Muslim. However, it is likely that everyone she knows will constantly be telling her to get a divorce or will be shunning her until she does.
> As a result, I must agree that it is possible that a woman in an interfaith marriage may be executed for it, with no other reason necessary, under recognized interpretations of Sharia law.
The thing with Sharia is that it is loose enough to be interpreted in many different ways. As the saying goes in the Muslim community, if you find something you want to do badly enough, you can find a "scholar" willing to give you a fatwa for it. This can range from honour killings to an exemption from the ban on drinking alcohol.
However, as you mentioned yourself, this particular set of opinions is rarely drawn together in practice to come to this conclusion, and when it is, it is often to justify other forces at play - tribal cultures and so-call "honour killings".
Ps. Not sure why you got downvotes for a well-researched and well-presented statement. I gave you an upvote for it.
Surah al-Mai-dah verse 5 states that "lawful in marriage are chaste women form among the believers and chaste women from among those who were given the Scripture before you..."
This, giving Muslim men permission to wed Jewish and Christian women, has been interpreted by Islamic jurists as implying by omission that Muslim women may not wed Jewish or Christian men. It was believed that such husbands would impart their religion to their children, and may pressure their wives to convert away from Islam.
You "looked it up" but you didn't understand a single word. For those interested in the nuances of old religious texts written in dialects that have long since been changed beyond all recognition: a good starting point is http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=5&verse=5 - Note: there is no more consensus in the Muslim population on what this scripture means than there is consensus between the Catholic and Orthodox Church on the liturgy. The only difference is that the latter two have been under centuries of global public pressure to reconciliate.
> Since Islam has no central governing authority, adherents largely rely upon the religious scholarship of their own imam, or upon those known to them to have a thorough understanding of Islamic religious interpretations. Some such scholars declared interfaith marriage by a Muslim woman to be equivalent to apostasy. The consensus opinion, however is that interfaith marriages are never acceptable outside of Muslim-establishment countries, as without the support of a Muslim community, both parents are required to reinforce the faith in their children.
The punishment for apostasy in the Islamic world ranges from death to no punishment at all. Under Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali schools, female apostates are executed, whereas Hanafi and Shi'a will imprison her indefinitely, until such time as she reverts to Islamic orthodoxy.
As a result, I must agree that it is possible that a woman in an interfaith marriage may be executed for it, with no other reason necessary, under recognized interpretations of Sharia law.
This is, of course, independent of those who may murder women in interfaith marriages under color of religion, outside of the purview of recognized Islamic judges of Sharia law. I believe such "honor killing" murders are in fact based upon the underlying tribal culture and not upon its majority religion. As such, if you're not from Pakistan, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia, no one will recommend that a Muslim woman be murdered for marrying a non-Muslim. However, it is likely that everyone she knows will constantly be telling her to get a divorce or will be shunning her until she does.
Replace [Islam] with [American Evangelical Christianity], [Imam] with [Pastor], [Islamic] with [Christian], [interfaith] with [inter-racial], [Muslim] with [white], [Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali] with [KKK], [Hanafi and Shi'a] with [their husbands], [Sharia] with [Jim Crow], and [Pakistan, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia] with [Alabama, Mississippi, or Texas] and you have a pretty accurate (although grammatically intolerable) history of 20th century America.
I believe you are distracting from the issue rather than addressing it directly. What Christians have done in America under the presumed aegis of their faith is orthogonal to what Muslims have done under Islam. It is equally unacceptable from a pure ethical standpoint for adherents of any religion to use their shared beliefs to justify murder.
It is also very common for the apologists for every religion (including Agile software development) to claim that its failures are due to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the tenets.
And it is interesting that you mention Texas. When I was researching the issue, some of the most frequent search results were multiple news reports and editorials on Yaser Said and Ali Irsan. The former is one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives, and the latter will soon go to trial.
The UN estimates 5000 honor killings every year, worldwide. About 25 of them occur within the US. The perpetrator tends to employ a religious argument to justify their actions, and are typically (90%) fathers who claim that their daughters had grown "too westernized"--while living in the United States, no less. You can claim that they are spurious arguments all you like; the ones making them still believe that they are valid. My post tried to explain why that belief might exist. And yes, non-Muslim Americans commit domestic violence at a deplorable rate, too, but they are extremely unlikely to be motivated by concern that a Muslim might be abandoning or undermining Islam. Amish, Scientologist, Fundamentalist LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses--they all punish defection or apostasy in some way. The fact that others do it does not make it more morally acceptable for any of them to do it, and it is still very rare for the prescribed punishment to be execution.
I also said that the distribution of honor killings is more easily explained by tribal culture rather than religion. It has little to do with religion, and everything to do with the psychology of murderers.
In any case, the root of this thread lies in group dynamics--specifically homogenization and xenophobia. Dividing yourself from "the other", whether it be by surrounding yourself in your own bubble or echo chamber, or by excluding them from your society, only increases the likelihood of violence between your tribe and the xeno's. Ignorance leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
When Americans support a presidential ban on Muslim immigration, they are already ignorant and afraid of the xeno, and possibly also angry. As a grandparent post mentioned, this ignorance and fear would be lessened by interfaith marriages. But the vast majority of potential interfaith marriages are forbidden in Islam, according to an overwhelming consensus by Islamic religious scholars. A Muslim man may marry a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish woman, while within an Islamic country. It is deplorable for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man. It is deplorable for any Muslim to marry a Christian or Jew outside of an Islamic country. It is forbidden for a Muslim to marry one who is not either Muslim or "of the book". That is indisputably what Muslims believe, and that belief limits one of the many ways in which people of different religious faiths acquire understanding of and compassion for "the other". One simply can't acquire familiarity via a "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" scenario.
I think the lesson is how easy it is for humans to split into groups and start slaughtering each other, and that we need incredible amounts of education to guard against that.
Disagree. If you as a Muslim live as a Muslim surrounded by Muslims, you're eventually going to otherize the Christians living across the border. If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove.
Fact of the matter is, we're prone to split into groups. If you homogenize, then before long, you'll be a Catholic othering the Protestant, or if you homogenize those even, you'll be a Lutheran othering some other denomination. Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society.
> If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove.
FWIW, don't rely too much on it, at least as far as neighbors go. There are numerous examples to the contrary during Balkan wars, and various ethnic conflicts that happened when the USSR was collapsing. For example, during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which involved numerous ethnic cleanings by both sides, one thing that stood out from the surviving victims' reports was that it was often their neighbors, with whom they were on good terms, that led the marauding parties to their house to ransack it and drive them out or kill them. Similar reports have been heard from Kurds and Yazidi in areas of Iraq and Syria captured by ISIS.
But can we always have enough tolerance ?
If in your country you had a community of people performing human sacrifices on unwilling victims, would you be able to tolerate it ? When something goes against our morality it may be very difficult to accept. The "usual" problem is religious belief, but it is necessarily the only one.
(If you think that the above example is a bit far fetched, consider that it is not much different from what some persons think about other people eating meat).
Obviously a line needs to be drawn, the question is where it is drawn. A good rule of thumb is that if it doesn't hurt anyone else and is between consenting people (adults?), you should be able to tolerate it. But you are right of course, some communities feel as strongly about killing animals for food as they do about killing humans. There are all sorts of edge cases involved in these situations. So I can't give you an ultimate answer to that - scholars have been trying to answer it for ages, and the only way to find out is to keep going with this muddled experiment that is modern civilization. :)
If that country kills people or keeps slaves then surely I'm not being intolerant by fighting and enslaving them, I'm adopting their views. /s
Also, if you're sacrificing someone and I tolerate it, there's no reason I can't listen to the victim and take you out as a favor. Tolerating doesn't mean blindly accepting.
You really need to read more history. a lot more history. Maybe try some scholarly works on a culture you are not familiar with so that you're less inclined to rely on your default assumptions.
I put it to you that many conflicts are not so much the result of inevitable animus between diverse social groups, but the willingness of some people to opportunistically exploit a power vacuum for their own advantage by convincing members of one population to scapegoat another one. Rene girard has written extensively on this topic and argues that it may be a fundamental tendency.
You keep appealing to homogeneity, but show me a homogenous group and I'll find some fault-lines in it. If that proves difficult, I'll just create some. Once I have two groups who believe their interests to be divergent I can set them against each other and exploit the resulting instability for my own ends. It's really easy to play people off against each other if that's your overarching objective.
> You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that.
WWII and Nazi Germany
> However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them.
Yes, that's why you need strong institutions. The US has admirable (though not perfect) institutions that incorporate these concepts. In the examples you're citing, the institutions were fundamentally weak.
As I mentioned earlier, humans will _always_ find reasons to fight. You can get as white and Christian as you want, but soon some types of white Christians will start fighting other types of white Christians. Medieval Europe and its interminable wars was a great example of this.
With enough power and political will, fighting other types leads to genocide. I am truly sorry you live in a difficult place. Your best bets would be to immigrate to a place that does have institutions (US, Germany), or to work hard to build them in your country. You can be the place where change starts. I wish you the best.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europe organized itself quite rationally along the lines you suggest. The old dynastic borders and multi-ethnic states went away and German, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc. nationalities each aligned reasonably closely with their own single state. It did not end peacefully.
While internally-homogenous states may have peaceful domestic politics, their international politics become more troublesome. First because the exact same ethnic hatreds translate perfectly well into wars between nation-states. And second because many cultural groups, when assembled into their own homogeneous state, simply don't have the economic or military resources to defend themselves against aggression from larger neighboring groups.
An excellent history of exactly this dynamic -- how domestic government organization and international strategy interrelate -- is the book "The Shield of Achilles".
If before, then Austria-Hungary was still a thing, and it was a massive multiethnic empire. Ditto Russian Empire in the east, incorporating Poland and Finland and a lot of other stuff.
If you mean after WW1 and before WW2, then we're talking about nation-states that involved large minorities from other states - like Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians in interwar Poland, Germans in Czechoslovakia etc. There were massive Hungarian minorities in areas separated from Hungary and attached to neighboring countries after WW1. Yugoslavia was a new multi-ethnic country created after WW1, with a bunch of internal conflicts brewing. And USSR regained most of the imperial possessions lost after the 1917 revolution.
On the other hand, after WW2, the Allies didn't just redraw borders, but they executed a massive population transfer operation to avoid large ethnic minorities on either side of those borders. These mostly involved expulsion of Germans from various areas of neighboring countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland etc), but not exclusively - in Poland, for example, there was also a big population transfer between the areas that USSR annexed (Western Ukraine and Belarus) and eastern Poland, so that ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians would end up in the USSR, and ethnic Poles would end up in Poland.
So I think it's not incorrect to say that post-WW2, European states became more ethnically homogeneous, at least for a while. Whether it actually had anything to do with the period of peace that followed is another question.
You certainly won't get it if you continuously undermine liberal institutions that promote inclusivity and cooperation. Once society starts attacking those institutions wars tend to become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I like you, but I think you're wildly overestimating your analytical powers here. You are essentially assuming the truth of your conclusion and ignoring the numerous counterexamples. I might just as speciously argue that it is in the nature of human beings to fight and that absent an identifiable external enemy they'll quickly turn on each other. I often feel that way but assuming it as a fact would lead to all sorts of unwanted result, don't you think?
What are you actually trying to say? Why are you trying to be cute about it? Muslims and Christians can't get along ever? If two groups have had violence in the past, they'll always have violence? How is this knowable?
It wouldn't surprise me if this was posted and eagerly upvoted as a historical example of how we supposedly should behave in defiance of unjust authority in the age of President Trump.
But the article in question is principally about a genocide of Armenian Christians perpetrated by Turkish Muslims. Doesn't this episode from not-too-distant history demonstrate, for example, the danger of mass, unchecked Muslim immigration to this and every other Western nation, or that diversity, contrary to what is so often asserted, is not a strength but rather is a weakness, one that contributed to the downfall of the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian empires?
the existence of ethnic cleansing is an argument for ethnic cleansing? past atrocities are reason to turn away refugees of current atrocities? sir or madam, i do believe you've got your brain in backward.
The existence of ethnic cleansing is a compelling argument against diversity being a strength, and past atrocities, especially those afflicting Christians of European descent, serve to demonstrate why Christians of European descent should not allow themselves to be displaced and dispossessed through mass immigration, lest they suffer a fate similar to that of the Armenians.
"The existence of ethnic cleansing is a compelling argument against diversity being a strength"
no, it's a compelling reminder to fight racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and the rest, like the deadly diseases they are. the atrocities of the past are their result.
Holy hay, I've never heard of anyone blame the Armenian genocide on immigration.
The Ottomans suffered military losses in the Balkans, and kept losing territory to the Russians. The Three Pashas massacred the Armenians to try to stay in power.
Leslie Davis was truly a great diplomat and an incredible human being.
Until Genocides are not widely recognized and stopped. Those who commit them are not punished, they are going to happen again, as they did during 20th century. Hitler used Armenian Genocide to convince others that atrocities committed by Nazis are going to be forgotten. Hitler's quote: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
It is a shame that US did not officially recognize Armenian Genocide yet, even though most of the civilized world did and most of the US State legislatures did.
Germany was one of the main allies of Ottoman Empire when Armenian Genocide occurred and they only recognized Armenian Genocide of 1915 in 2016. 101 years after it happened.
Edit: Typos.