Mourning Humanity

"The presence of the Turks here shows their shame is all over them, otherwise they wouldn't be here. What brainless idiot let them assemble here? I'm deeply disturbed by the presence of antagonists like this on Parliament Hill."
(former) Toronto-area Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis

"Many historians dispute Armenian claims. No court has ever ruled that this was indeed a case of genocide ... Millions perished in [the dying days of the Ottoman Empire], not just Armenians, but many others; Turks, Kurds, Muslims. Is it consistent with Canadian values ... to single out only one ethnic group's loss?"
Canadian academic of Turkish ethnicity

The social media is marking the 99th Anniversary of 'Armenian Genocide', also known as the Armenian Holocaust. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Canada is one among 21 nations which officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. At obvious risk of offending Turkey, which steadfastly refuses to admit that they were responsible for any such episode in history. Yet the Turks marched Armenians in their hundreds of thousands to certain death in a death march where men, women and children who just happened to be Armenians succumbed to disease, starvation and death.

Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney declared that the Canadian Museum of Human Rights located in Winnipeg is prepared to feature a permanent exhibit focusing on the 1914 slaughter that the Armenians mourn as Medz Yeghern. So, most certainly, Canada does indeed, along with other nations, more dedicated to commemorating the dead than to avoidance of offending Turkey with their recognition of history, single out not only one, but many ethnic groups' losses.

The strange thing about these official recognitions of the horrors of genocidal atrocities committed by one adversarial group against another is that when the recognition is given an official stamp of recognition, one could be forgiven for assuming that there will be universal compassion and outrage over man's inhumanity to man, but such is not necessarily the case.

Dachau

For while, for example, the Holocaust which represented an institutionalized, well-planned and coldly executed annihilation of Europe's Jews as a singular act of evil, its recognition as such makes other groups who have suffered similar, but yet not quite too similar atrocities bristle with indignation. As though recognizing the horrors of mass extermination through the lens of a particular event in world history minimizes the others that have also taken place.

Some Ukrainian Canadians have lodged complaints of the prominence of the Jewish Holocaust over other genocides. The Ukrainian Holdomor under the Soviet famine of the early 1930s led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainian families through a deliberate enforced strategy of starvation imposed on Ukrainian peasants, on the part of the Soviet hierarchy.

There is the syndrome of 'my suffering was greater than yours'. Pol Pot's extermination of 25% of the population of Cambodia in a political/ideological/social re-engineering of society reminiscent of the millions of Russian intellectuals, professionals, academics who defied Stalin's Soviet authority under Communist rule, reflected the Cambodian genocide. Then there is Rwanda, where in the space of months one ethnic tribe massacred another.

Skulls and bones of victims killed during the Rwandan genocide, laid out in the Nyamata Church in Nyamata, Rwanda. (AFP PHOTO / PHIL MOOREPHIL MOORE/AFP/Getty Images)

The same relentless, hostile-to-humanity ideology rules North Korea which under the Kim dynasty has been slowly re-engineering their society from cradle to grave in a worship of a cult-like figure portraying himself as all-powerfully vindictive, but entitled through his quasi-godlike qualities as the 'father-benefactor' of 'his' people, most of whom struggle with the condition the Kim reign imposes on the country, of gulags and mass starvation.

Each one of these atrocities counting enormously beyond mere human understanding of the abysmal failure of the human animal to reach its collective potential as other than tribal, clannish genocidaires.