Darfur, Armenia, Bosnia, Wounded Knee

Genocide - Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of the CPPCG defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Understandably we want to keep focused on the past so we can police the present. Darfur cries out for humanity but yet we stand still. How can that be when we can be so noble to invade a county and topple its leader to rid that country of his tyranny but yet we stand in collective silence at an ongoing tragedy?

It's pathetic.

So, in a vane attempt at trying to climb and claim some resemblance of our once moral high ground we want to label an atrocity and bring it back to the present. Can we really do this without first looking into the mirror at our past and the atrocities we have commited?

I think not.

I think we can all agree to the definition above but what purpose does it serve to point a finger at anyone else before we point it to ourselves? I don't get it. From our earliest actions as a newly liberated country we systematically choked our native peoples until they were a shadow of their former selves. We made treaties with them only to break them later. We moved them from their ancestral lands, to areas that were to be unsustainable to themselves and the generations that would follow.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the attempt of some members of congress that want to label what happened to the Turkish Armenians over 100 years ago as genocide. It may or may not meed the international definitions. What I do disagree with is that no mention of our past misdeeds was made.

We need to clean our moral closet first.