U.S. Cannot Afford to Admit Turkish Genocide against Armenians: We Killed 50+ Million Native Americans with Nary a Word of Remorse

Who Has the Power to Describe What is and is not Genocide?

 Armenians mark the one hundredth anniversary of the genocide that killed 1.5 million of their people, and that  Turkey denies having perpetrated.  The term "Armenian genocide" is not in our nation's diplomatic glossary, in the same way that "climate change" has been excised from the state of Florida's policy statements.  Nevertheless, I've just had a sobering epiphany.  Now I can finally begin to see why China, Iran and everyone else wants to claw their way to superpower stardom.  Any misbehavior, act of genocide, mass murder, phony justification for invading other countries, even devoluton into a police state targeting black males for extermination, can just be swept under the rug. In academia, we call that the " politics of knowledge".  Knowledge is packaged, framed, manipulated in ways that narrate the story that those in power wish to tell.    Any and all atrocities committed by those in positions of privilege can be erased from the pages of history.

Of course Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians.  But President Obama seems to have enough political sense  to refrain from uttering an acknowledgement of it.  And this is as it should be.  Why should we be pressuring perpetrators to admit genocide, when the U.S. removed far more indigenous peoples from existence than the Turks did to the Armenians.

American historians use such terms as "population decline" to describe the fact that the indigenous population of the Americas went from a conservatively estimated 57.3 million in 1492 to half a million today.  Some historians even insist that death by the deliberate contamination of native peoples with measles and smallpox, to which they had no immunity should not be categorized as genocide.  Other historians opine that since we don't have full documentary and archaeological evidence of those times, "who knows" (throwing up their hands in fake exasperation) as to what became of all those people?  According to Wikipedia:

Scholars who have argued prominently that this population decline can be considered genocidal include historian David Stannard and anthropological demographer Russell Thornton,as well as scholar activists such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Russell Means and Ward Churchill. Stannard compares the events of colonization that led to the population decline in the Americas with the definition of genocide in the 1948 UN convention, and writes that "In light of the U.N. language—even putting aside some of its looser constructions—it is impossible to know what transpired in the Americas during the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not conclude that it was genocide".Thornton does not consider the onslaught of disease to be genocide, and only describes as genocide the direct impact of warfare, violence and massacres, many of which had the effect of wiping out entire ethnic groups. Holocaust scholar and political scientist Guenter Lewy rejects the label of genocide and views the depopulation of the Americas as "not a crime but a tragedy".

Historians like Thornton and Lewy belong to what I call the waste-water-treatment branch of American history.  They were the same type of scholars, who ignored every last bit of empirical evidence to sanitize Thomas Jefferson's biography.  It was only with the addition of DNA evidence, that scholars acknowledged that the African-American slave, Sally Hemings, had been Thomas Jefferson's mistress, with whom she bore six children.

So why hasn't the United Nations gone after the U.S. for committing genocide?  It is because it is the largest donor and pays the bills for the organization's elaborate New York headquarters.  What does genocide even mean if only the powerless have to admit to it?