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Article Excerpt
ON OCTOBER 19, 2000, in an extraordinary and highly criticized move, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert suspended consideration of House Resolution 596 literally minutes before it was scheduled for deliberation on the House floor. House Resolution (hereafter H.R.) 596 would have declared that Ottoman Turkey had committed genocide against the Armenian people between 1915 and 1923, resulting in millions of Armenian deaths. But in withdrawing the resolution from the docket in the face of a House set to pass the measure, Hastert appeared to bow to the pressures exerted upon him from the Clinton White House and from the Turkish government.
From proposal to scheduling, H.R. 596 was no different than any other resolution that the House considered in 2000. The resolution had over 140 co-sponsors. It was marked-up and amended a number of times in committee to accommodate a number of Representatives' concerns. It passed out of committee with a sizable vote in favor of consideration and was scheduled for discussion on the House floor following normal House procedures. In the days leading up to its discussion, various reports indicated that the resolution would likely pass a vote by the full House (Filner 2000). Yet, ten minutes before it was due to be taken up for discussion, Hastert ordered it removed. Moreover, given his timing, Hastert guaranteed that the resolution could not be resubmitted, passed back through committee, and rescheduled for discussion in the time that remained in the House's legislative term. In effect, Hastert "killed" the Armenian Genocide Resolution.
When the resolution was first created, Dennis Hastert had promised several prominent Armenian-American political groups that, if the resolution passed out of committee, he personally would guarantee its discussion on the House floor. Since he reversed his position and violated a public promise, Hastert issued a press release to explain his actions, following a traditional pattern of apologia. What made this case so unique, however, was that Hastert issued the statement via the Internet before any criticisms materialized. In effect, Hastert employed a preemptive apologetic strategy, turning a traditionally defensive rhetorical posture into an offensive rhetorical move. But his justifications and the motives underlying those justifications were so suspect that ultimately the strategy failed. Since Hastert's decision to pull the resolution from the agenda and his application of apologia in a preemptive manner were both so unusual, both merit further consideration.
This essay maintains that Hastert's preemptive apologetic strategy was a calculated move to force identification with an impotent rhetorical vision that sought to deny reality. The anti-596 rhetorical vision promoted by the Turkish delegation, the Clinton White House, and the military-industrial complex was not powerful enough to counter the vision promoted by H.R. 596 and its supporters. To prevent the resolution's passage and hence legitimation of the pro-596 rhetorical vision, Hastert willfully derailed the democratic process by having the resolution removed from debate. And what initially appears to be an instance of apologetic rhetoric turns out to be a subversion of apologetic defensive ritual into an offensive rhetorical weapon.
After outlining the provisions of H. R. 596, Hastert's message is explored through Ware and Linkugel's apologetic taxonomy. Then the frameworks for both genre theory and symbolic convergence theory (SCT) are laid out and combined, and the combination applied to the communiques to the House Committee on International Relations while the resolution was in committee, the testimony offered during committee hearings, a letter written by President Bill Clinton to the Speaker of the House, and Hastert's message. Finally, the results of the analysis are presented and their broader implications discussed.
House Resolution 596 (1)
According to the resolution, the genocidal campaign against the Armenians conducted by the Young Turk government displaced two million Armenians through a series of forced marches across the Syrian desert. Only 500,000 survived. Aware of the Turkish campaign to eliminate the Armenian presence from Turkish soil, the Allied Powers unanimously charged Ottoman Turkey in May 1915 with "crimes against humanity." Described by Henry Morganthau, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, as "a campaign of race extermination," and by General James Harbord, Commander of the American Military Mission to Armenia in 1920, as the "most colossal crime of all the ages," the atrocities prompted the United States Senate to affirm as true the existence of the campaign in May 1920 via Senate Resolution 359.
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to refer to "the systematic destruction of whole national, racial, or religious groups" and pointed to the Armenian case as a definitive example. In 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission also used Armenia as a precedent for the Nuremberg trials. Since then, it has been referenced in reports from such bodies as the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1981, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1985, and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1993. The Armenian genocide has even been recognized in speeches delivered by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton while each was in office. What the resolution sought to do was to make a declaration of foreign policy, calling upon the president to use the term "genocide" instead of "massacre" in his annual message commemorating the event on April 24.
The introduction of the resolution sparked controversy in the House of Representatives. Some Republicans opposed the measure on the grounds that it would upset Turkey, a critical ally of the United States in the Middle East (Sorrells). Democrats were more divided on the issue. Some said that the measure was a political ploy designed to help Representative James Rogan (R-Calif.) win a re-election campaign in California (Sorrells). Others said it was an unnecessary measure since the President already commemorates the massacres (Sorrells). And still others sided with the Clinton White House and Secretary of State Madeline Albright, opposing the measure because it threatened "peace and security in the region" and stood to derail efforts to improve relations between Turkey and Armenia ("Testimony").
Despite the divisiveness of the House over the resolution, it appeared that the resolution would carry a majority of the vote (Filner). Before debate could begin, however, Hastert removed the resolution from consideration. Because the move denied consideration to a bill that was recommended by committee to the House floor and because it violated a promise Hastert had made to the Armenian communities in America, he issued a press release both in paper and electronic formats (see Appendix) attempting to justify the action he had taken.
Within hours after Hastert issued the press release, Representative Frank Pallone (D--NJ), Chair of the House's Armenian Caucus, released his own press statement in both paper and electronic formats, accusing the Speaker of succumbing to Turkish threats against American soldiers and calling Hastert's actions "shameful" ("Statement"). Pallone's press release was followed by one issued on behalf of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), chastising the Speaker for giving in to Turkish threats against U.S. armed personnel instead of putting Turkey "on notice that it would be held fully accountable for the safety of Americans there."
Other groups began joining in the attack. Various Armenian communities labeled Hastert's move a "victory of military interests and realpolitik over morality in public affairs" (Cheterian). An article appeared in the newspaper Hye Sharzhoom (Armenian Movement), published by the Armenian Studies program at California State University, Fresno, criticizing the Speaker for abandoning a promise he had made to the Armenian diaspora in Fresno the previous August to bring the resolution to the House floor for a vote (Jabaghchourian). On October 25, 2000, a vocalist for rock band System of a Down, a band the members of which are all of Armenian descent, likened Hastert's action to "telling the Jews that it is the wrong time to condemn Hitler for the Holocaust" ("System"). Literally hundreds of outraged responses flooded Armenian listserves and electronic bulletin boards such as anca.org and groong.usc.edu for two weeks following the incident.
In a unique case, an American citizen apparently unaffiliated with the Armenian cause was also moved to weigh in on the issue. In a letter submitted to The Boston Globe...
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