Today, the pardoning of the national Thanksgiving turkey is an annual White House staple, complete with TV crews capturing the live pageantry. But this pomp and circumstance surrounding the pardon masks the larger question: Why we are granting clemency or extending mercy to turkeys in the first place?

A pardon entails the waiving of a punishment and the restoring of one’s civil liberties, while a reprieve delays imposition of a sentence or punishment (often because the sentence or punishment is seen as unjust given the crime). Importantly, none of these actions erase the guilt of the person to whom it’s being granted. But turkeys cannot commit crimes. And so the purpose of the president pardoning a turkey (or two) right before Thanksgiving only serves to mask the realities faced by those particular turkeys, and for that matter, most turkeys in the U.S.

Commercially bred turkeys grow quickly and produce a lot of meat, especially breast meat. Their large breasts make natural mating difficult, so they are bred through artificial insemination, and their eggs are placed in an incubator to hatch. Neither the process of collecting semen nor the process of insemination is done gently. The chicks hatch in batches of 10,000.  They are usually debeaked, desnooded, detoed, and have their spurs trimmed so they won’t harm one another as they grow in barns crowded with 7,000 to 10,000 birds. They remain in light at all times to promote eating and growth, reaching their slaughter weight in three to four months.

The U.S. produces about 250 million such turkeys each year. One or two of them are “pardoned,” and are generally sent to an animal sanctuary to live out their lives. But those lives tend to be fairly short. These turkeys usually have to be kept on special diets (which may well leave them hungry most of the time) in order to slow their growth and prolong their lives. If they are allowed to eat normally, they will grow too large for their bones and legs. Given that they have been bred for maximum growth and early maturity, it is not clear that the “pardon” is in the interest of the turkeys. It seems to be about making humans feel better about themselves before they sit down to a Thanksgiving meal.

The Thanksgiving holiday is fraught with hypocrisy and outright brutality. The fate of turkeys in what is now the U.S. is to be a brutalized commercial product that symbolizes a meal of peace that masks the brutality of European settlement here and the genocidal policies that attempted, but did not succeed, in wiping Native people completely off the map. Turkeys are linked to this history; indigenous to the Americas and first domesticated by Native Americans, they played an important role as food and as a religious sacrifice for many Indigenous peoples. But European colonists overhunted wild turkeys and continuously pushed them off their native habitats. By 1930, only a few hundred thousand wild turkeys were left.

Colonists also took turkeys back to Europe—kept in narrow cages and often force fed—where they became a popular food item, particularly for the Christmas holiday. With continued European immigration to the U.S., turkeys became a common food bird here as well. The American meat industry began breeding and raising them in ways that ignored their naturally seasonal reproductive patterns, denied their natural patterns of eating and movement, and showed no respect for their social and inquisitive way of being.

At the same time that the annual numbers of commercially raised turkeys were moving from tens of millions (1940s) to hundreds of millions of birds (1960s), efforts to reintroduce turkeys to the “wild” also started to take hold. But this work was not done for the sake of the turkeys or to make amends for hunting them nearly to extinction. It was done, like many American wildlife restoration efforts, so that turkey hunting could once again be a popular and profitable activity.  Many wildlife restoration efforts in the U.S. owe their success to the fact that hunters wanted to hunt them. The 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act taxed hunting guns and ammunition to fund wildlife restoration efforts. For turkeys these reintroduction efforts were successful, and by 1950, there were about 500,000 “wild,” or more accurately, free-living turkeys in the U.S. By 1973, that number was estimated to be 1.5 million, and in 2005 it reached 7 million. Ironically, it was the ready supply of commercial turkey meat that allowed for the successful reintroduction of free-living turkeys. Since there was such a robust supply of commercially bred turkeys for the dinner table, for lunch meat, and for burgers, the hunting pressure could be removed from the free-living birds and allow them to recover.

While free-living turkeys spend up to five months with their mothers, learning a lot about where to find food and how not to be food for others, domesticated commercial turkeys never know their (or any) mother. They don’t range over territories, mate, brood, or find their own food. They end their very short lives by being tightly packed into crates and shipped to a slaughterhouse, where they are hung upside down while still alive. Most are slaughtered by being electrified, then having their throats slit, but if they are not the standard size, they may survive these measures. This results in live birds being dunked in scalding water before they are defeathered. Given that the turkeys have been living in their own excrement, the slaughter process often promotes the spread of disease. Turkey meat is regularly recalled due to salmonella and listeria contamination. The commercial production of turkeys has a detrimental impact on the environment and harms human health through the consumption of contaminated meat and through air and water pollution.

It seems that the human commercialization and mass consumption of turkeys is a crime that needs our attention, and not a pardon. The poultry industry is guilty of overusing antibiotics, creating toxic amounts of manure, polluting waterways and killing fish, polluting the air, and forcing a painful and unnatural life and death on hundreds of millions of turkeys each year in the U.S. alone. As we rethink the myths this country was built on, it’s a good time to reflect on the crimes we are all complicit in as well.

The post What Crime Does the Thanksgiving Turkey Answer For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From Tibetan Americans to Cambodian Americans to Palestinian Americans, many of these groups have rallied around causes, hoping to improve their homelands’ futures. Yet few have been as successful as the Armenian American community, which secured formal and explicit recognition of the Armenian Genocide from the Biden administration this year—the result of a single-minded, decades-long campaign that defied political obstacles, and reached across generations.

The Armenian American experience offers a crucial lesson to other U.S. immigrant groups working for change: Be patient, be persistent, and be prepared. The steadfast Armenian campaign for recognition needed the right set of circumstances to make its position an undeniable political reality—and when such openings for social change appeared, savvy activists in the diaspora capitalized on them, making such an outsized impact on the global stage. The U.S. government’s reversal on genocide recognition in April may have seemed sudden, but it was built on a century of cultural and political effort.

The cause célèbre for this community has been the pursuit of justice for the Armenian genocide. In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Turkish empire systematically killed or deported its Armenian population. Between 1915 and 1918, over 1 million Armenians perished. Soon after, the Ottoman government (and eventually, the Republic of Turkey) began a denial campaign that continues to this day, discouraging international recognition of the events as anything but an unfortunate but necessary instance of self-defense. The struggle to defeat this denialism provides a quintessential example of how power and entrenched political interests can stand in the way of justice. For over a century, it has fallen to survivors, their descendants, and the international community of human rights supporters to keep the memory of the genocide alive. At the very least, international recognition ensures a place in the historical memory for victims and survivors. Ideally, formal recognition can lay the groundwork for justice and restitution, similar to what was offered to survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The Armenian cause has always had an American dimension. The Armenian American community predated the genocide; even as the massacres were taking place, Armenians in the U.S. were already engaging the American government on the issue. The United States was involved in some of the policy failures that failed to prevent the massacres, and was also a player in contemporary relief efforts. Continually since the early 1900s, the U.S. has remained a leading immigration destination for survivors and their descendants who carry the torch of remembrance, and who have worked for official recognition of what happened.

From the get-go, geopolitical concerns created formidable obstacles. Successive U.S. administrations were hesitant to recognize the genocide; their priority was to preserve the U.S.-Turkish relationship as it was, with its supposed economic, political, and military benefits to both countries. The U.S. foreign policy establishment traditionally saw Turkey as a strategic geopolitical partner since the Cold War era, given the country’s location. And for decades, the Turkish government aggressively lobbied the U.S. government, identifying and supporting academics who shared and promoted the denialist stance, and manufacturing a false debate over the veracity of genocide claims.

Despite these roadblocks, Armenian Americans kept pushing for recognition. At first, these efforts—fundraisers, marches, and campaigns—were often helmed by survivors. Later, direct descendants took over. In 1981, Ken Khachigian—a White House speechwriter whose grandfather fled to America in advance of the Armenian genocide yet lost his grandmother in exile—wrote a Holocaust remembrance speech for Ronald Reagan that implicitly acknowledged the genocide, marking one of the first major instances of U.S. government recognition of the genocide. After significant backlash from the Turkish government, the U.S. government—particularly the State Department—walked back the remarks given political concerns at the time. Reagan and the State Department further disavowed those remarks throughout the 1980s, much to the ongoing chagrin of then California governor George Deukmejian—himself of Armenian descent. Deukmejian, a strong supporter of Reagan, was public about his disappointment but failed to elicit a change of heart among his peers.

Yet advocates marched on, using other domains to keep the cause alive. At the local level, community leaders facilitated protests, and advocated for state- and city-level recognitions of the genocide across the U.S. One of the key Armenian lobbies maintains a list of hundreds of instances of acknowledgment, ranging from a memorial in New Jersey in 1965, an affirmation by the French National assembly in 1985, almost yearly state assembly resolutions in California from the 1980s onward.

On the cultural stage, successive generations of Armenian American artists also mainstreamed genocide recognition, relegating denial to the fringes. Nearly every Armenian American artist who gained mainstream popularity—from mid-20th-century author William Saroyan to the still-active metal band System of a Down to pop icon Cher—has engaged in some kind of public advocacy on the issue, or touched on the genocide question through their art.

Ultimately these local and cultural gains coincided with a shifting global context that made U.S. federal recognition of the genocide possible. Starting in the 2000s and driven largely by the cumulative power of these global advocacy campaigns, many governments in Europe and South America began issuing official recognitions of the genocide—and suffered few, if any, geopolitical repercussions. For all its bluster, the Turkish government could not make good on its promises to punish countries that challenged its denialism. National genocide recognitions, even if they were walked back or met with strong rebukes from Turkey, typically ended in little more than the recall of an ambassador.

Realpolitik became a factor, too. Today, Turkey is no longer the strategic U.S. ally it once was, as that relationship has been strained. Turkey has turned away from the U.S. in favor of stronger relations with Russia and China, while there has been a declining American appetite for engagement in the region. Genocide recognition became a safe—even, potentially, beneficial—political move. The bargaining chip of recognition was replaced with an opportunity for countries to demonstrate their (however belated) commitment to human rights.

Of course, despite the U.S.’s changed course on genocide recognition, the path to true justice for the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide remains unclear. If we look at the history of similar crimes against humanity, acknowledgment is supposed to be just the first step in a long and painful process toward reconciliation for survivors and their descendants. But it is highly unlikely that attitudes in Turkey will ever shift towards acknowledgment or reconciliation. The issue continues to be a flashpoint in contemporary Turkish politics. Today the ethnic cleansing of minorities is a point of pride for some of the country’s right-wing ideologues. Recently, one Turkish politician made headlines when he posted—in advance of Biden’s genocide recognition—a celebratory tweet lauding the masterminds of the Armenian genocide. He noted that Turkey is ready to proudly “do it again”—it being the supposedly non-existent Armenian genocide. In the face of outcry from a Turkish Armenian parliament member, he again threatened a repeat of the genocide.

Recognition of Armenia’s woes by the U.S. stemmed entirely from tireless and multigenerational advocacy, sustained for over a century. But to turn recognition into something more tangible, Armenian Americans will have to keep up the fight—offering yet another lesson for immigrant groups in the U.S. seeking influence on the world beyond. Picking one’s battles is a key question for immigrant groups, and that too was a point of contention for the Armenian community. Some critics of genocide recognition have expressed concern that if the Turkish government refuses to engage the issue, there may not be any value in creating international controversy. A notable critic of the focus on genocide recognition was Turkish Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink, who took massive steps to end the taboo on Armenian issues in the 1990s and 2000s in Turkey. While he was a fearless supporter of Armenians and other minority groups, he believed the obsession with recognition would come at the expense of cross-cultural dialogue. His political project was monumental, and is credited with opening in civic space in Turkey and breaking the taboo on the Armenian question. Yet his untimely assassination at the hands of a Turkish nationalist in 2007 was a cruel testament to the powerful potential of his message.

Waging a campaign for international recognition of a human rights issue is time-intensive, costly, and can be nearly all-encompassing for an immigrant community. But one cannot underestimate the historical and rhetorical benefits of international acknowledgment for crimes against humanity. Recognition offers a chance to firmly correct the record and bring an end to dangerous—and persistent—attempts at historical revisionism. In the Armenian case, the annual commemoration of the genocide leads denial groups in the United States to put up billboards, support scholars who falsely refute the killings, and even promote dancing flash mobs to erase the genocide from history or shift blame onto the Armenian community.

Genocide recognition was never a given for the global Armenian community, even though the people’s struggles have become the flagship issue associated with the violence of the late 19th century. Many instances of ethnic cleansing from that era have faded from view. The Ottoman Empire and early governments of the Turkish Republic committed atrocities against a range of minority communities, including ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Assyrian and Pontic Greek communities concurrent with the Armenian genocide. Other immigrant groups in the United States—not yet able to draw attention to their cause—may feel their own historical struggles are already in danger of erasure.

For all its triumphs, the ongoing story of the United States’ approach to the Armenian genocide poses a cautionary tale for other immigrant communities in the U.S. affected by genocide. What does it take for communities to get their issues on the U.S. agenda, particularly in the face of entrenched political norms? This question looms not just for historic injustices but also for ongoing atrocities, such as the genocide of the Rohingya community in Myanmar, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China. Many other immigrant groups in the United States are far smaller than the Armenian community, and may face even steeper hurdles as they try to change their own political realities. But without a doubt, supporters of human rights should heed the lessons of the Armenian case: recognition requires tireless commitment from survivor communities. It is only that commitment that can keep the prospect of justice alive.

The post What It Takes to Change Your Adopted Nation’s Foreign Policy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.