Armenians in my family tree

When the Democrats decided an apology from the Turks for the slaughter of Armenians nearly a century ago was the way to defeat our troops in Iraq, I began to check the family tree. There wasn't much mixing until the 1920s and 1930s when the Scots-Irish Protestants and German-Swiss Anabaptists started finding each other, but we're quite a stew now. Native Americans, Alaskan First Peoples, Mexican Americans, African Americans. And sure enough, with the click of a mouse I see the west coast Kerkorians descended from the Pennsylvania Danner/George group as did I. However, I got bogged down with the Woos and the Lams, the Chinese "cousins" who are also in the Danner/George branch of the family (I have over 3500 names in my Family Tree Maker database).

What the Turks did to the Armenians was awful. Millions died or fled their homeland, leaving behind families, culture, churches and businesses. However, a much higher percentage of Irish died at the hands of the British through famine and immigration, going into exile in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Because Ireland is a tiny island, the Irish lost half its population to bad government and agricultural policies--far more than Africa did to the slave trade a century before the great famine.

So where do you start when demanding reparations and resolutions about old wrongs? The people who perpetrated them or suffered at their hands are gone. Should the American blacks go after the Arabs and African tribal chiefs because they initiated the slave trade needing an outlet for war booty? Can the Irish go after the British who were just going after the descendants of the Celts and Vikings who had earlier invaded and enslaved Ireland? Their descendants, those who survived those difficult times, have a better life in their new lands than the descendants of those who stayed behind.

Also, it is unthinkable that a powerful American ethnic lobby group, whether La Raza or descendants of WWII internment camps or descendants of the plantation slaves would ever stop with an apology, no matter how heartfelt, soothing and useless. The bar would be raised demanding more reparations for loss of culture, personal humiliation of great-grandpa and God only knows what other indignities difficult to quantify.

Today's opinion page in the WSJ pretty well summed it up:

If Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos want to take down U.S. policy in Iraq to tag George Bush with failure, they should have the courage to walk through the front door to do it."

For another view, see Silvio Canto Jr's blog