After the 1915 Genocide of our people by the Ottoman Turks, most of the Western Allies 
including our own United States, started low-keying Turkey’s crime and started 
cultivating economic relations with them.


Before W.W.II, our Western Allies were no doubt aware of Nazi Germany’s massive 
military build-up, but they looked the other way.   They probably felt that a more 
powerful Germany would be the most economic buffer against the spread of Communism 
through its increasingly powerful fountainhead--the USSR.  Their optimism was 
short-lived because they finally realized that Adolph Hitler, Germany’s all powerful Nazi 
leader, wanted all the marbles.


Then came the inevitable W.W.II.  Nazi Germany became our enemy and Stalin’s 
Communist USSR, our ally.  During the war, Adolph Hitler had said, "Who remembers 
the Armenians?"    And while he was in power, his Nazi stalwarts went on to murder 
6,000,000 Jews.  As for the people of  Germany, if any of them knew of the Holocaust, 
they did absolutely nothing to prevent it -- perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of 
indifference, and perhaps more so out of cultivated hate.  As we soon found out, Hitler 
and his cohorts were masters at using the hate card.  And as I’ve stated in a prior 
commentary, "Hate is the aphrodisiac for ignorance."  Why heck, they even had their 
Nazism spreading to our USA.  And there are still small groups in America brandishing 
Swastikas.


After W.W.II, Nazi Germany wasn’t on the map any more.  In its wake, however, we had 
developed a more formidable adversary in Stalin and his evil empire -- an evil empire that 
Russia’s monarchy had cultivated because of their insensitivity to the needs of their 
impoverished people.  It took a cold war of forty plus years and near national bankruptcy 
to finally bring the Iron Curtain down. 


Today, with some of the world in place again, we find the use of the same kind of 
short-sighted diplomacy that, more than once, got our world behind a rock and a hard 
place during the last century.  For starters, our government has been supporting both 
military and financially, a nation that almost massacred our Armenian people into 
extinction in 1915.  And, likewise, today with the whole world watching, they’re doing it 
to the Kurds.


Though being allied with Turkey may have been justified in recent years because of the 
cold war, our present-day relationship is based more on material gain (as in the aftermath 
of W.W.I), than it is on human survival.  Why haven’t our world leaders learned from 
their past mistakes?  Is erratic, short-sighted diplomacy a game designed only for the high 
rollers of our world?  If not, then when will the killing, dying, and suffering of people be 
factored in?


For years, our State Department never generated doubt over the validity of the Armenian 
Genocide of our people in 1915.  Yet, with the formation of the NATO Alliance, and 
more so in President Reagan’s administration, our State Department started referring to it 
as "alleged."    


For the last five years or more, Azerbajian and Turkey, one nation composed of 
11,000,000 people and the other of 60,000,000 people, have been blockading Armenia, a 
nation of 3,000,000 people, because Karabagh had claimed independence from 
Azerbajian.  


And to compound the situation even further, huge deposits of oil were discovered in 
Azerbajian, bringing the world’ gigantic oil cartels into the picture.  And since that time, 
driven by the all-powerful influence of material gain, the powers to be have been trying to 
label Armenia and Karabagh as the aggressors.


The Government of Germany recently proclaimed, much to Turkey’s dissatisfaction, that 
the 1915 Genocide is a valid part of history.  Yet, we hear that a German manufacturer is 
getting ready to sell Turkey 1,000 state-of-the-art tanks.


The French Senate was also ready to confirm the 1915 Genocide as part of their history, 
but Turkey threatened to cancel on a 145,000,000 dollar contract on their Eryx missiles.  
The French confirmation of the 1915 genocide is now on the back burner.


Israel, a nation that lost 6,000,000 people in the Holocaust, is also reported to be trying to 
ally itself with Turkey, a nation that has committed genocides on Armenians, Greeks, 
Arabs, and Kurds, as well as Jews.


Russia, on the other hand, who is trying to build a democracy after the collapse of their 
USSR while trying to stem the tide of Turkish influenced hostile satellites on its borders 
and who is currently fighting in Chechnya against Chechnyan and foreign insurgents, has 
indirectly threatened that it will use nuclear weapons if it has to in order to resolve the 
conflict.


I don’t know, but from where I’m sitting, it looks as though our worldly back room 
diplomats are once again starting to play "dead man out" again.   I would hope not, but 
the last thing I would like to see in the not too distant future, would be a world at war 
again and the people on either side dying for Azerbajian oil or for the geopolitical 
positioning of a nation like Turkey, a nation with one of the most abominable human 
rights records in history.


Joseph Vosbikian