It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the ‘international community’ had learned nothing since the Holocaust.
When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it’s again not people who are intrinsically evil.
I did not support the U.S. decision to intervene with military force in Libya. The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent. Policies other than military intervention were never given a full chance.
I went to Rwanda with my wife who had been going for the past three summers. She is an art therapist who works with survivors of the genocide. I decided to become a volunteer also, and to teach filmmaking. But thinking about how to approach a class, it made sense to start making a movie there, with the kids.
This was a tragic event in human history, but by paying tribute to the Armenian community we ensure the lessons of the Armenian genocide are properly understood and acknowledged.
It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage between one man and one woman. We don’t want genocide. We don’t want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage.
The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.
But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it’s happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing – In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.
So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations.
There aren’t just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It’s our evolutionary history.
You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it’s really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
It makes it difficult to decide which to go see, since no film about say, some tragic genocide in Africa is going to get a bad review even if it’s poorly made.
I think that the memory of Armenia’s genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.
In the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the violence there at the moment, the very fact that a hideous regime – responsible for genocide, for the use of chemical and biological weapons, aggression against two neighbors – has been removed in itself is a positive development.
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It’s bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.
‘Never again’ is the rallying cry for all who believe that mankind must speak out against genocide.
Some argue that recognition of the genocide has become even more problematic now, when the world is at war with terrorism and the United States cannot afford to offend the sensibility of our Turkish ally.
In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.
Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.
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