21 November 2006

Armenian holocaust - a little known episode

I have received the following comment to the post My genocide vs. your genocide on Meryl's place.

And as someone of Armenian descent, I should note the man who protested the massacres the most was Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, an American Jew.
I have looked up Henry Morgenthau, and here is the story for you:
Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946) was United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide. A naturalized American from a German Jewish family, Morgenthau was a successful lawyer active in Democratic Party politics. With the election of President Woodrow Wilson, he was appointed United States Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in 1913.

...

The accumulating evidence also led Morgenthau to cable the Department of State on July 16, 1915, with his own dispatch that "a campaign of race extermination is in progress." Drained by his failure to avert this disaster, Morgenthau returned to the United States in 1916 and for the remainder of the war years he dedicated himself to raising funds for the surviving Armenians. In 1918 he published Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, a memoir of his years in Turkey, in which he stressed the German influence and role in the Ottoman Empire. He titled the chapter on the Armenians, "The Murder of a Nation." He described the deportations and the atrocities as a "cold-blooded, calculating state policy." He avowed at the time: "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this."
Notice the last sentence. Ambassador Morgenthau may have been right at the time, but he couldn't know what was in wait for Jews, for Romanies, for Russians, for Chinese, for Cambodians, for Afghans, for...

And come to think of it, both Ambassador Morgenthau and I are wrong. The enlightened monarch of Belgium, King Leopold II, has shown the way in Congo quite a few years earlier.

And the world consistently didn't give a rat's ass...

Hat tip to Colin for the comment.

Cross-posted on Yourish.com

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