She issued a statement on her vote (David Brennan, Ilhan Omar Refuses to Back Turkey Armenian Genocide Vote ... Newsweek 10/30/2019):
Omar said that while she believes that accountability for human rights abuses is "paramount," she also believes that "accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as a cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics."This tweet by Michael Brooks retweeting a criticism by TYT reporter Ken Klippenstein is an example of criticism of her from the left:
If Congress truly wishes to acknowledge historic crimes against humanity, Omar added, it should look closer to home.
She argued that such a step "must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and the Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of people in this country." For this reason, Omar said she voted "present" on the bill. [my emphasis]
Trash vote and trash statement. She’s really good and there are geopolitical reasons behind the vote. She should hear from everyone how absolutely awful this is https://t.co/aUo5eXQOdT— Michael Brooks (@_michaelbrooks) October 30, 2019
I agree that it was a bad vote.
It‘s also a cautionary note about overly-promiscuous usage of ”genocide,“ which the Armenian case certainly was.
The UN Genocide Convention excludes ”cultural genocide“ as well as the targeting of political groups from its definition of genocide. Text here from the UN website of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
That doesn‘t mean we can‘t argue for a broader definition. The attorney Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) who is credited with inventing the term genocide (in the 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) did employ a wider definition himself. This short video from the US Holocaust Museum remembers Lemkin, Eyewitness Testimony: Raphael Lemkin:
But the wider the definition, the more examples people have to accuse countries of hypocrisy when they single out a genocide for condemnation. Jeffrey Ostler, an actual scholar of genocide, discusses at some length the challenges in applying the concept to one of the examples Congresswoman Omar used in his book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).
Comparing genocides to one another unfortunately can lead to some frivolous political rhetoric along the lines of my-genocide-is-worse-than-your-genocide. It can be a real rhetorical minefield.
I spent some time in the 1990s trying to learn about the Nazi Holocaust and to understand how it is treated in various historical narratives. That included learning about some of the polemical arguments made by people who want to minimize the seriousness of the Holocaust in some way.
One example of that produced a public discussion in Germany in the 1980s that became known as the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute). This was an argument among scholars that was conducted in the popular press. (Matthias von Hellfeld, Vor 25 Jahren: Der Historikerstreit Deutsche Welle 20.07.2011) It was kicked it off by a 1986 editorial column by Ernst Nolte, a German historian who (at least until then!) was a respected one. Nolte's earlier work on fascism, particularly his 1963 book published in English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism; Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, is still regarded as an important work.
But in 1986, Nolte made the bizarre argument that I will summarize this way: because the Soviet Union had set up concentration camps, this inspired Hitler's idea of exterminating the Jews. So Stalin was responsible for the Holocaust. Other historians and the well-known Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas criticized Nolte's piece, though there were prominent historians who were at least partly supportive of Nolte.
Nolte and his partisans didn't put it that crassly. But his argument served to shift part of the blame and responsibility for the Holocaust away from Hitler and Germany. "Did the [Soviet] 'Gulag Archipelago' not exist prior to Auschwitz?" asked Nolte, who referred to the Holocaust as an "Asiatic" act, i.e., not genuinely German or European. In other words, he used the comparison as a deflection from the historical seriousness of the Holocaust. He also wrote, "Auschwitz does not result primarily from traditional anti-Semitism and was not at its core a mere 'genocide', but rather the reaction to the extermination processes of the Russian Revolution born of fear," i.e. German fear of the Russians. In other words, the Holocaust wasn't really a "genocide", and the Commies were to blame anyway.
The Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 also plays a role in Holocaust denier polemics. The argument is, look at how savagely the Allies bombed and killed Germans in Dresden and that shows what murderous intentions they had against all Germans, so the Holocaust was a response to those evil intentions. The decision against the far-right historian David Irving in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat (2000) has an excellent discussion of Irving's own revisionist and inaccurate historical accounts of the bombing of Dresden. And it describes how this can be used in a narrative that tries to minimize the Holocaust:
Irving has also made broader claims which tend to minimise the Holocaust. For example he has claimed that the Jews in the East were shot by individual gangsters and criminals and that there was no direction or policy in place for mass extermination to be carried out. I do, however, accept that Irving expressed himself in more measured language on this topic than in the case of the gas chambers. But he has also minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Having grossly underestimated the number who lost their lives in the camps, Irving is prone to claim that a greater number than that were killed in Allied bombing raids on Dresden and elsewhere. He has, moreover, repeatedly claimed that the British Psychological War Executive ingeniously invented the lie that the Nazis were killing Jews in gas chambers in order to use it as propaganda. (p. 176) [my emphasis]So comparing genocides can be tricky.
And this is a big reason why I currently tend toward a more conservative definition of what constitutes genocide and try to orient my view around the international law version enshrined in the Genocide Convention.
Particularly as historical awareness of the Holocaust in the US and Europe has grown over recent decades, the term "genocide" has understandably taken on an implication of the worst of all possible crimes. So there is a temptation to apply it as a superlative to more and more situations. So people talk about a genocidal war in Vietnam, a genocidal war in Yemen, the slave trade as genocide, settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere as genocide. But the Genocide Convention established genocide as a distinct type of crime, not as something that applies to all wars or all famines or all discrimination.
And there are reasons for that. Criminal law discriminates between different degrees of illegal killing. In the US, manslaughter is distinguished from second degree murder and both are distinguished from first degree murder. There is also a category of murder "with special circumstances," i.e., killing involving unusual cruelty. These don't mean that society considers any of these kinds of killings okay. It does mean that it does make distinctions based among other things on motive and intentions.
In terms of popular polemics involving genocide, it's important to keep in mind that the more broadly a particular term is applied, the greater the risk that its meaning will become blurred, or that it will lose some of its intellectually and emotionally evocative power. To put it in a more exaggerated way, if every kind of collective violence is genocide, genocide becomes just another word for collective violence.
I've always remembered the line used by Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew in dismissing contemporary criticisms from antiwar activists that the Vietnam War was immoral. He brushed it off by saying, "All wars are immoral." Which meant in practice, no wars are immoral. On its face, it was a radical pacifist position, though no sentient being took Agnew or Nixon to be radical pacifists. Actually, Agnew's position was also directly sneering at over a millennium of Christian religious traditions on the Just War, as well as similar traditions in other religions. And, however imperfectly the religious doctrines or international law have functioned in limiting violence, it is illegal in international law to invade another country that is not threatening the invader. The defendants in the Nuremberg Trials were accused and convicted of waging "aggressive war," the legal term used there for an illegal invasion. A secular version of the Just War doctrine, in other words.
Telford Taylor, the chief American chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970):
The lack of a satisfactory definition of "aggressive war" ... should not be taken as a sufficient argument against its use as a description of unlawful international conduct. In fact, as the discussion and application of the standard since it came into common parlance reveals, it is not significantly different from the tests for the lawful use of defensive force in our domestic criminal law. As we have already seen, the parallelism is of long standing. There is remarkable similarity between the criteria stated by Suarez and Grotius for distinguishing the just from the unjust war, and the provision of the New York Penal Law specifying. the circumstances under which force may rightfully be used: to defend one's sell, one's property or to assist other persons engaged in defending themselves or their property. [my emphasis]Agnew, in other words, watered down the concept of a war being immoral to the point of rendering it meaningless. Political speech can have that effect on the meaning of words and phrases. Actual experts on the subject, like Taylor in that case, have a more substantive take.
And here's where Ilhan Omar's position calls attention to some important considerations, though I do wish she had voted for the resolution. If we actually consider the fate of native populations in the Western Hemisphere after European colonization as genocide, people have a substantive point in arguing that the US - and every Latin American country, for that matter - are acting hypocritically in criticizing other countries for genocide if they haven't condemned their own genocides against native peoples.
I'm going to put on my Reluctant Realist hat for a couple of minutes here and say that foreign policy, unfortunately, runs to a large degree on hypocrisy. If the US waits to condemn wrongs and injustices abroad until it has formally condemned and made just restitution for every domestic wrong, it will never condemn any foreign wrong whatsoever. And that would not be a good outcome, either.
Yes, of course, these condemnations have political considerations involved with them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do them. It does mean, though, that it's legitimate for Members of Congress to criticize the political considerations being applied in individual cases.
I just happen to disagree with Ilhan Omar's vote on this one.
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