Denial of crimes witnessed

By Aussiegirl

Here's the very powerful last paragraph from this article: Each generation gets tested by the evil of its time and, in learning nothing from the past, fashions its denial of crimes witnessed.

TorontoSun.com - Salim Mansur - Denial of crimes witnessed

April 22, 2006

Denial of crimes witnessed
By SALIM MANSUR

In the spring of 1915 with Europe at war, the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportation and killing of the Armenian population within their territory.

Between April 1915 and the end of the war in November 1918, the organized destruction of a people identified by ethnicity and religion was conducted by a government that ruled an empire in the name of Islam.

The nationalist Turks who succeeded the defeated power-holders in Istanbul continued the massacres of Armenians in eastern Anatolia and into the Caucasus. Some 1.5 million Armenians perished during this period between 1915 and 1923.

This destruction of the Armenian people was the first genocide of the 20th century, a prelude to what would come later under Hitler's Third Reich as the "final solution" for the Jews.

It took nearly 90 years for the Canadian parliament -- by a vote of 153 (yeas) to 68 (nays) on April 21, 2004 -- to pass a resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide and condemning it as a crime against humanity.

Neither the passage of time required for such an acknowledgment nor the number of parliamentarians voting on record against it came as a surprise, since the mass murderers of our age well understand that the human capacity to deny evil is far greater than our inclination to oppose it.

A mere 24 countries around the world have acknowledged the facts of the Armenian genocide, and with the exception of Lebanon -- possessing a sizable Christian population -- there is a wall of silence on this subject from the Muslim-majority member states of the United Nations. [....]

That the world is a cynical place is not news, however, nor is the fact that human nature is flawed.

Even as I write this column, the systematic depredation of the wretchedly poor in Darfur remains unabated -- while the United Nations and its grandees, led by Kofi Annan, quibble over the meaning of "genocide."

Historians and philosophers struggle to find lessons from the tales of human wickedness, and teach future generations to do better. [....]

The lesson of history is that, to paraphrase Santayana, there is no lesson.

Each generation gets tested by the evil of its time and, in learning nothing from the past, fashions its denial of crimes witnessed.