100 Years Ago

The Armenian Genocide began.

To this day, the Turks deny that it ever happened. Their explanation for killing 1,500,000 people is eerily similar to a rationale offered by Donald Rumsfeld: "Stuff happens [during a war]."

The Armenian Genocide may have inspired the Germans twenty years later: Since nobody tried to stop the Turks from murdering the Armenians, the Third Reich might have concluded that they could kill millions of people with impunity.

The sad thing is that mass killings have been repeated almost every decade or so. The Indonesians murdered about a million of their own citizens, primarily ethnic Chinese. The Pol Pot regime murdered two million of its fellow Cambodians. The Hutu in Rwanda murdered a million or so people. Compared to all of them, the Serbs were pikers.