Why American ambivalence? Why not world ambivalence, or UN ambivalence? Since when does America have to handle everything?
It doesn't. I was not implying that, for I was simply denoting ambivalence of opinion, not ambivalence of action. Furthermore, if you reread the passage you quote, you'll find I feel this way not just about America during the Rwandan crisis, but also "any other instance of genocide that people can't recognize as such despite copious amounts of historical evidence." Out of this sweeping inclusion, I named America specifically because I wanted to emphasize my own country's painful experience of hesitancy--in both opinion and action--in designating an event as genocide.
Personally, I find UN irresoluteness on the issue much more egregious. For all of its talk of human rights, all indicators suggest that the UN has no intention of intervening in current and future instances of genocide, instead sweeping them into the umbrella term "domestic conflicts." I did not mention the UN in my original post, since I was comparing ambivalence of opinions between the peoples of two countries, not between the Turkish government people and the UN organization as a whole.
What exactly is the deal here? We recognize its a genocide. And like nearly every other nation in the world did nothing about it. America is the world's tough guy, but that doesn't mean this crap is on us and us alone. And there's a world of difference between actually committing a genocide and ignoring someone elses. The two things don't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence.
To clarify my original point: at the time of the genocides in Rwanda, the US did not recognize the situation as a genocide, instead writing it off as "ethnic cleansing" in order to avoid the implications that the term "genocide" entails (namely, the need for immediate interventionist action). And as you said, the US succeeded in its policy of ignoring the situation as much as possible. But as I said in the above response, I was
not referring to "ambivalence of action" in my original post; rather, simply "ambivalence of opinion." It is this ambivalence of opinion of the American federal government during the Rwandan genocide that I take issue with (for those of you who do not know, America has a whole has come to recognize Rwanda as a genocide since then).
In this sense, I'm on the same page as EnlightenmentHK. Turkey has the opportunity to change their current ambivalence of opinion on the Armenian genocide, something that would indicate that Turkey is willing to take an honest look at its history.
