The term “genocide” is back in the news again. The word has emblazoned itself in the public psyche with the white-hot imagery of bodies stacked like firewood and hungry faces with starving eyes staring out from behind barbed wire.

“Genocide” was coined by a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, in an effort to outlaw “acts of barbarism” at the League Council of the League of Nations in Madrid in 1933.

The proposal failed, and it wasn’t until 1944 after the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin’s seminal work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” which laid out an extensive legal analysis of German rule in Nazi-occupied countries, that the word gained ground. Lemkin included his definition of genocide in the work, and it was widely accepted and used extensively in the Nuremburg Trials.

The current controversy around the use of the word genocide stems from a bill being debated in the Congress, House Resolution 398, the “short” title of which is “United States Training on and Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide Resolution.”

The bill’s actual purpose is surprisingly benign, despite the pandemonium that has ensued since the bill moved out of subcommittee. The bill “calls upon the president to provide appropriate training and materials to all foreign service officers . relating to the Armenian genocide and the consequences of failure to enforce the judgments of the Turkish Courts.” The bill also calls on the president to commemorate the Armenian genocide on or about April 24 to “recall the proud history of United States intervention in opposition to the Armenian genocide.”

Despite the purported “proud history” of our “opposition to the Armenian genocide,” newly declassified State Department documents show that as early as the 1970s, the U.S. was working to block recognition of the Armenian genocide by the United Nations.

Regardless of the United States’ previous covert attempts to block recognition of the genocide, the administration has turned the rhetoric dial to 11 in an attempt to prevent Congress from passing H.R. 398. Adding a sense of panic to the rhetoric is Turkey’s ongoing condemnation of the bill, repeatedly saying passage of the bill will result in the “poisoning of ties” between the countries.

It is unclear as to why Congress is being so obstinate in its efforts to pass this bill; one wonders if that obstinacy could be put to better use enacting the “mandate of the people” to redeploy the troops in Iraq that put the Democrats in control.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this debate is that Lemkin used the very slaughter of Armenians as a defining example of what entailed genocide.

However, all of the United States’ moral posturing serves only to highlight our own glaring unacknowledged genocide. Historian David Stannard has said the indigenous peoples of America were victims of a “Euro-American genocidal war.” The number of American Indians that were killed by the Europeans is a contentious number that ranges from 2 million to 100 million, by some accounts. Despite this huge difference in quantity, at its smallest, the number killed is still half a million greater than the recorded Armenian deaths during their 1915 genocide.

The extent and purpose of the United States’ relocation and mistreatment of the American Indians is hotly debated with some scholars arguing the “virgin soil epidemics” idea, where the ignorant Europeans simply spread their diseases unknowingly.

This idea, however, ignores the sheer animosity with which the American Indians were dealt. The Indians were purposefully broken and destroyed out of an all-consuming drive for land.

The accepted definition of genocide includes the idea that it is a “coordinated plan . aimed at the destruction . of national groups.” America’s attempts to suppress American Indian culture and the squalid reservations on which they were placed shows an attempt to repress and destroy the American Indians, rather than allowing them to integrate and assimilate.

This is another case of Americans having the opportunity to practice what they preach. Like the Burma protests, where our commitment to spreading democracy in places where there is no oil was put to the test, we find a similar situation here.

It is easy, too easy in fact, to point fingers at the rest of the world and accuse them of willfully destroying cultures and peoples, but we shirk from looking at our own history. The founding of America is an idealized, romanticized myth that forms the basis for the rabid patriotism currently gripping the nation (ribbon magnet, anyone?).

We must examine our own historical shortcomings with the same zeal that we examine other nations’. Our nation’s past is written in blood, and our own history of exterminating a native people is a charge that deserves to be addressed and acknowledged.

– Quincy Miller is a senior in English from Altoona.