This article appeared this morning in NYT, and it had a resonance to it in the light of other issues that suggested it was worth a diary.
Literally, the article describes an act of the formerly Soviet Georgian legislature declaring that the Circassian debacle of the 1860s in its final stages was an act of Genocide by the Russians.
In the present case, it is apparently a part of the continuing not-military war between that Georgia and current Russia, as a part of which a description of attempts to organize Northern Caucasus area Circassians is also mentioned, a part of that area being where, conveniently, the Sochi Olympics are being held.
Ironies abound in this situation including the peculiarity that one of the Circassian Groups was named as one of the groups which was waging a form of war against this same Georgia at roughly the same time as the Russian Ossetian situation, because Georgia claims now some of the same area, Abkhazia, that the Tsars drove their ancestors from 150 years ago, and because Georgia is home to a lot of Armenians by reason of the Ottoman Armenian massacres, but has not made the same effort at declaring that matter one of genocide.
It has current relevance because according to the background article attached for the reference of all those whose knoweldge of matters Circassian is highly limited here together with a YouTube site about Circassians here., the matter was tied to the concurrent American view and treatment of Native Americans and Mexicans at the same time, and a similar reference in the comments to various Israeli newspaper articles of the "If they want this of us, are they going to give the southwest back to the Mexicans and the rest to the Indians from whom they took their country." Another version of this is the one which is symptomatic of the issue, a poster here who in any debate over justification will eventually say that what Israel is doing is justified because it is only just restoration and undoing of what the Romans did to the Jewish people in the First Century. This is not intended to be an IP diary but one which considers a somewhat broader question.
Politics can be like that, but for me this raises a question, namely how far back does one have to go or need to go before a situation is history rather than one for which land adjustments are now demanded or reparations or reclamations of that land from which one's ancestors were driven, etc., a whole package of issues, some of which are specifically mentioned in the NTY article. And how and when such events should be given political spin, as the Georgians have done for an issue not even exactly theirs, like Canada discussing what happened to the Aztecs.
History is full of people A doing things to people B, frequently when people A are doing it because people C have just chased them out of their homeland and are hot on their heels. Think of the waves in pre Twelfth Century times which flowed west across Eurasia with someone in front of them and someone else behind them. The Celts originated in the area of what is now Hungary and moved west rather briskly and into France, Germany, the British Isles and Spain, not their home ground and the Britons whom they found there were not amused, only to be followed by groups from the Low Countries entering Britian, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who were once they had settled, followed by Vikings, followed by Normans, who were Vikings who stopped somewhere else first. The Visigoths marched all over Europe, through Spain and into North Africa. Muslims and Ottomans went as far north as Vienna and into Spain and back out again. Huns went west. Romans went everywhere, as did the Greeks and the Persians and the Assyrians and so forth before them. The Mongols went East and West both, and the Manchus followed the Mongols into China. Mughals went into India. All of the messes these made in making these moves are still present at greater or lesser levels, even if the doers are long gone. In more modern times, colonial powers of all kinds went to all sorts of places to establish their control over those areas, including the British, the Russians, and the Americans, not having great respect for who was there and any rights or virtues of such folk when they did.
One of the factors of such involuntary populations shifts is, of course, that those driven out and not simply slain for resisting end up somewhere else, as the Circassians have, being found according to the background material provided in places like Jordan, where they are now Jordanians of Circassian descent, and in the good old US of A. The Ottoman Empire was willing to take Circassians expelled by the Tsars, those not moved to other areas where they still can be found in various parts of the old soviet union after being moved there by the selfsame Tsars, although many died on the way to the Ottoman Empire. What would become the USA voluntarily took some, as well as Irish and Scots forced out of Britain, and many jurisdictions took refugees of the First and Second World Wars. Others did not have such limited acceptance and suffered in involuntary relocations if they survived them at all
In modern times, such conduct has not had the same inevitability and irreversiblity, and beginning in the early Twentieth Century, steps were taken to change the consequences of such movements, and their effects on those who were in place when the baddies first hove over the hill nearby and looked upon their lands with covetousness.
After the Second World War, what was done to the Jews by the various people not limited to Germans who perpetrated Shoah, was and has without a great deal of dispute, all things considered, and as to the property of individuals, been made reversible, as descendants find causes of action in courts and other remedies created by which they could retrieve the property they could prove was that of their looted and often murdered near ancestors, and penalties assessed against some for genocide, the attempt to exterminate groups, or ethnic cleansing, its very slightly less offensive cousin, the attempt to eliminate or exterminate such people in a given place, although they could flee to another and live there if they chose to. Southern Africa is still trying to undo or at least unscramble the mess that the creation of apartheid colonial regimes created there, at a time when the Bantus were moving south, and tribes already there didn't like that either. So is Central and South America, dealing with its own Native Americans and their rights and cultures. And things like the Potato Famine and the Highland Clearances. And international treaties have been written and unevenly adopted by most nations concerning wars and civilian populations and the like, which work (or don't work well) but prospectively.
We here who like current politics now have a number of these situations on our plate, where the principal wrong alleged was done sixty years ago or a hundred years ago or a hundred and fifty, or two hundred, and what should be done about them by the current generation.
In the Georgian case, that state is inviting the rest of the world to acknowledge the Circassian dispersal as a genocide which creates in their official mind the possiblilty of repatriation and reclamation rights for land, reparations for the lives of those killed and property taken, and the like, and a boycott of the Sochi Olympics run by the successor to the country who committed the dispersal by force of arms in the 1860's, but there are survivors of that in Northwest Georgia who want their own independence and not life as a province of Georgia, the party invoking the alleged genocide. The Armenian people are looking for a declaration of genocide for what occurred at the point in Turkey and some other places when the Ottoman empire was in collapse and modern Turkey was in process of being born. There are a series of such events which involve Palestine with which I will assume readers have some familiarity at least. But behind each of them there are other similar events in time, whole series of them, for which remedy is not sought. What this diary is asking is for people to think through why or why not these situations are thought appropriately capable of modern remediation and on what bases.
And some peoples, the Kurds being a prominent group, are still fighting it. As are Tibetans, who once were a huge empire but not anymore, but do not necessarily want all to become Chinese or to have the Chinese take over their territory. Ditto for the Basques. Palestinians. People who don't want the modern remedies as an alternative to the lands they still occupy in whole or in part. So there are examples before us in our time where peoples decline, usually but not always with firearms, to be displaced or blotted out. They are not history, but next week might be different.
But the questions I have are two, for the assembled who will not simply answer they flunked history.
1. How far back and under what circumstances should modern governance and politics go in reversing what has already historically occurred, and seek to undo what then occurred or find a remedy for it.
When does history become history, a fixed if usually unpleasant matter rather than a work in progress on which modern political minds should act to reverse elements of what happened rather than simply remembering them as tradition, usually with anger, and trying to work through them.
An example of working through is what Ireland is doing with Ulster, which includes the Protestant descendants of persons trasferred from Britain to Ireland in Cromwell's time to stabilize English control of northern Ireland without the need of an army in place, a pattern with precedent in Edward I's transfer of Flemings, refugees from the floods there of 1105, to Southern Wales to hold English forts against Welshmen. The Flemish dispute has finally died out of the memory of all but historians, leaving a few place names and architectural features as its only traces, but the Ulster one is still being worked on with all of both sides still in place, combat only recently and partially, mostly, abated and nobody being deported. That is what I mean by remembering but not acting. How far back is too far back to do more than making political adjustments with all of the descendants still in place, or out of place? And why?
2. What if anything should be the limits of using history for modern political purposes as is my view of what Georgia is doing, declaring a genocide involving a separate people in order to continue a struggle against its own particular enemy in a different battle, while ignoring the Armenian situation which has supplied no small number of their own residents.
Who should have the opportunity to raise and pursue these questions? And how should they be resolved. The Circassian declaration from formerly soviet Georgia raises the situation in a way that may make these questions slightly easier to look at than IP for a lot of reasons, and that is why I am starting there. But what Georgia has for its own political benefit and the discomfit of Russia chosen to do is also something the US Congress and other governments are being invited to do with respect to the Armenian Massacre, although the relief sought based on the declaration being requested is not yet a general public issue in no small part because of the general inability of Americans to identify where Circassia or Armenia even was or is.
I am not in this also raising the slave trades, to try to keep it simpler.
So I ask. When and why does history in the view of Kossacks become just history, something that currently living people should not be asked to undo. And should there be rules or limits on who can ask for such relief, and what are those limits. And for those proposed to be acted upon, what are the rights of the persons presently in those places.
Have at it. It's a subject we need to think through.