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BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST--ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: 1915-1918
RenewAmerica
April 15 2015
By Ellis Washington
"Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate
its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being
thereby disturbed by foreign intervention."
~ Hitler (circa 1915)
Prologue to 20th century's first Holocaust
Recently I watched a very interesting yet disturbing documentary
about the Armenian genocide where the Muslim Ottoman Turks shortly
after taking power in a coup, ruthlessly committed genocide against
the Armenian Christians, a relatively small and unassuming minority
population in Turkey. Titled, The Armenian Genocide, this documentary
was first broadcasted nationally on PBS in April 2006 coinciding
with the week leading to the 91st anniversary commemoration of the
Armenian Genocide.
This essay marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most horrific
episodes of human depravity of the 20th century; a Holocaust that
predated Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Holocaust against 6 million Jews
by 20 years, yet foreshadowed many of the grotesque techniques the
Nazis would emulated by the bloodthirsty Ottoman Turks who killed
the Armenians, not for domestic insurrection or terrorist activities
against the Turkish State, but for this singular reason - the Armenians
where Christians, therefore besides being an ethnic genocide, the
Armenian Genocide by the Turks was a Muslim genocide specifically
directed against a Christian minority population.
Narrated by Julianna Margulies and produced by Andrew Goldberg of Two
Cats Productions and with Oregon Public Broadcasting, the documentary
cuts through 100 years of Turkey's Holocaust denials and affirms in no
uncertain terms the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Next a series of critical historical questions is presented such as
how was it possible for a massacre of such grand magnitude allowed
to occur, why did it happen, and why has the Genocide remained one of
the greatest untold stories of the twentieth century? These questions
of ultimate concern and many others are addressed and systematically
answered during this revelatory documentary which lasts just under
an hour.
The Armenian Genocide pays meticulous detail to putting this event
in its proper historical context including numerous statements about
the Genocide given by many scholars, including Ronald Suny of the
University of Chicago, Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate,
Vahakn Dadrian, Director of Genocide Research for the Zoryan Institute,
Elizabeth Frierson of Princeton University, Samantha Power, author
of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and Israel
Charny, President, International Association of Genocide Scholars. The
documentary gives an outstanding historical overview of the Armenians
from antiquity up to their current existence in Turkey in modern
times. The documentary history of the Armenians is a very useful
narrative particularly for those viewers not acquainted with the
Armenians or Armenian history.
The Hamidian massacres (1894-1896)
The Armenian Genocide in a most compelling manner discusses the
Armenians' aspiration for political and social equality in the
Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the historical source materials on the
Armenians in the 19th century is crucial in explaining the precursors
of the Genocide. Despite the fact that the Armenians have lived in the
Anatolia region of Turkey for over 3,000 years, for the past several
hundred years they have been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, and following
the standard religious discriminatory practices of dhimmitude, the
Armenians (along with other non-Muslim religious minorities like the
Jews and the Kurds) were subjected to second-class citizen existence
where they were taxed at higher rates than the Muslims yet every
other aspect of their lives were inferior and demeaning.
The documentary also has an interesting narrative regarding the
Hamidian massacres, which the narrator said, "according to German
foreign ministry operatives and French diplomatic sources an estimated
200,000 people were killed between 1894-1896 the Hamidian massacres,
but this was only a foreshadowing of what was to come."
The banality of genocide
History Professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago
characterized the Turkish Muslim violence against the Armenian
Christian minority as "repressive violence; that is a relatively
weak government in order to maintain its own control over the local
population, uses as an instrument of government massacre to establish
law and order, to keep those rebellious elements in their place. This
repressive violence leads to what may be called a habit of violence
or a culture of violence in which violence becomes justified." This
Muslim tactic and strategy of "repressive violence" reminds me of a
phrase philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in the 1930s to define the
widespread, yet almost pedestrian use of Nazi genocide against the
Jews she called "the banality of evil."
Sociologists Taner Akcam of the University of Minnesota and Fatma
Muge Gocek of the University of Michigan give compelling viewpoints
from the perspective of Turkish professors, who argued that the
Genocide is a historical fact. Fikret Adanir, Professor of History,
Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, Tessa Hoffman, Ajarian University,
Armenia, and historian Ara Sarafian of the Gomidas Institute, London,
offered further commentary on many matters throughout the documentary.
The Armenian Genocide took place in the historical backdrop of the
beginning of World War I where the pretext of this diabolical plan
of Genocide by the Ottoman Turks was initially considered, planned,
and executed. Like future tyrannical regimes of the succeeding
decades - Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Pol Pot,
the first priority by the Ottoman regime was the disarming the
Armenian soldiers, followed by arresting the Armenian leadership
of Constantinople on April 14, 1915, and the subsequent jailing and
execution of all Armenian intellectuals, and then the deportation, via
railroad of the general population, however, in most cases the Muslim
Turks without warning forced the Armenians from their homes usually on
foot amounting to Armenian "death marches" where the causalities of
the elderly, children and pregnant women was very high. Twenty years
before Hitler's "Final Solution" against the Jews, the Ottoman Turks
had their own version of a Final Solution - the final eradication of
the Armenian Christians throughout the country of Turkey.
The Armenian Genocide did not occur in a vacuum or without notice by
the international community. For example, documentation is cited via
numerous op-eds published in the New York Times who filed 137 reports
during the Armenian Genocide (1915-18). Also American consuls including
Leslie Davis, Oscar Heizer, and Jessie Benjamin Jackson knew of this
Genocide and in gruesome detail described the scenes of inhumanity
in their dispatches to Henry Morgenthau, the U.S.
Ambassador to Turkey. The Armenian Genocide documentary also utilized
never before seen photos, video and other archival documents
and arranges it into an impressive visual effect, together with
discussions with Kurdish and Turkish citizens in modern day Turkey,
who freely reminisce about the stories they recalled hearing from their
grandparents, parents and other eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide.
Vahakn Dadrian, Director of Genocide Research for the Zoryan Institute,
speaks about the Turkish government denial and the 1919 military war
crimes trials, an important incident in Turkish and international
history which predated the Nuremberg Trials by 35 years.
The military court rigorously examined the charges and determined
that the Committee of Union and Progress was guilty for the planning,
plotting, and execution of the crimes of Genocide. Known as the "Three
Pashas" of the Ottoman Empire represents to the Grand Vizier (prime
minister) and Minister of the Interior, Mehmed Talaat (1874-1921);
the Minister of War, Ismail Enver Pasha (1881-1922); and the Minister
of the Navy, Ahmed Djemal Pasha (1872-1922). They were the leading
political figures of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, mainly
responsible for its entrance into the war. Although after the war
they escaped to Germany and Russia and thus avoided the judgment of
the Armenian Genocide Trials, eventually all three Pashas were killed
by Armenian citizens who tracked them down and took their revenge on
behalf of the 1.5 million Armenians they committed genocide against.
My only criticism of this documentary was the moral equivalency
arguments presented by Gunduz Aktan, a former Turkish diplomat,
in his clumsy attempt at balancing the authorized Turkish "point of
view" (denial of the Armenian Genocide) with the historical truth
that shortly after the 1913 Ottoman coup d'etat, political policies
were immediately enacted amounting to governmental, systematic and
sustained genocide against the relatively small Christian Armenian
minority population which was planned, plotted and executed under
the leadership of the Three Pashas.
Epilogue: Modern Turkey - 100 years of Holocaust denial
Tragically this obscene Holocaust denial view is still very popular
in modern times and was recently echoed by Turkish President Tayyip
Erdogan where he condemned Pope Francis for comments the Pope made in
his Resurrection Day message that the 1915 mass killing of Armenians
was genocide. President Erdogan warned the Pope not to make such a
statement again. "We will not allow historical incidents to be taken
out of their genuine context and be used as a tool to campaign against
our country," Erdogan said in a speech to a business group.
Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New
War on Christians. He is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. In
an excellent 2013 article he wrote for Human Events on the Armenian
Genocide, Ibrahim wrote, most objective American historians who have
studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate,
calculated genocide. Ibrahim further wrote:
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution,
starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A
people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than
double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied
Anatolia, now known as "Turkey"] lost its homeland and was profoundly
decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within
Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.... Despite the vast amount
of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian
Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic
evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors,
denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has
gone on from 1915 to the present.
In 1915, Adolf Hitler said, "Turkey is taking advantage of the war in
order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous
Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention."
This was a foreshadowing of Hitler's gross rationalization and
historical revisionism he and the Nazi regime would so skillfully use
again and again some three decades later to achieve his genocidal plans
to murder millions of Jews within the 42,500 death camps. The Nazis
spread these death camps throughout Germany and German-controlled
territories, for example, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec and
Mauthausen among many, many other locations all over Europe during
World War II. Later Hitler would ask rhetorically: "Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, "Those cannot
learn from history are doomed to repeat it." If the Armenian genocide
of 1915-18 has taught the world anything it is that humanity has
learned nothing from history as we see before our eyes in 2015 the rise
of ISIS and Iran as devout Muslim hegemony daily triumphs throughout
the Middle East, Africa, Asia and now an ISIS training camp on Mexico's
border with Texas, while Christians and other ethnic minorities are
wantonly slaughtered in the name of Islam.
Even to this day Turkey stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the genocide
of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turkish government of
President Erdogan. To date the number of Christian victims of Muslim
genocide and Islamic jihad is approximately 270 million. Specific
terrorist attacks by Muslims against Christians is chronicled here.
And who speaks today of the slaughter and virtual extinction of
Christians under Islam and Islamic countries? We have learned nothing
from history?
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/washington/150415
RenewAmerica
April 15 2015
By Ellis Washington
"Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate
its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being
thereby disturbed by foreign intervention."
~ Hitler (circa 1915)
Prologue to 20th century's first Holocaust
Recently I watched a very interesting yet disturbing documentary
about the Armenian genocide where the Muslim Ottoman Turks shortly
after taking power in a coup, ruthlessly committed genocide against
the Armenian Christians, a relatively small and unassuming minority
population in Turkey. Titled, The Armenian Genocide, this documentary
was first broadcasted nationally on PBS in April 2006 coinciding
with the week leading to the 91st anniversary commemoration of the
Armenian Genocide.
This essay marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most horrific
episodes of human depravity of the 20th century; a Holocaust that
predated Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Holocaust against 6 million Jews
by 20 years, yet foreshadowed many of the grotesque techniques the
Nazis would emulated by the bloodthirsty Ottoman Turks who killed
the Armenians, not for domestic insurrection or terrorist activities
against the Turkish State, but for this singular reason - the Armenians
where Christians, therefore besides being an ethnic genocide, the
Armenian Genocide by the Turks was a Muslim genocide specifically
directed against a Christian minority population.
Narrated by Julianna Margulies and produced by Andrew Goldberg of Two
Cats Productions and with Oregon Public Broadcasting, the documentary
cuts through 100 years of Turkey's Holocaust denials and affirms in no
uncertain terms the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Next a series of critical historical questions is presented such as
how was it possible for a massacre of such grand magnitude allowed
to occur, why did it happen, and why has the Genocide remained one of
the greatest untold stories of the twentieth century? These questions
of ultimate concern and many others are addressed and systematically
answered during this revelatory documentary which lasts just under
an hour.
The Armenian Genocide pays meticulous detail to putting this event
in its proper historical context including numerous statements about
the Genocide given by many scholars, including Ronald Suny of the
University of Chicago, Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate,
Vahakn Dadrian, Director of Genocide Research for the Zoryan Institute,
Elizabeth Frierson of Princeton University, Samantha Power, author
of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and Israel
Charny, President, International Association of Genocide Scholars. The
documentary gives an outstanding historical overview of the Armenians
from antiquity up to their current existence in Turkey in modern
times. The documentary history of the Armenians is a very useful
narrative particularly for those viewers not acquainted with the
Armenians or Armenian history.
The Hamidian massacres (1894-1896)
The Armenian Genocide in a most compelling manner discusses the
Armenians' aspiration for political and social equality in the
Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the historical source materials on the
Armenians in the 19th century is crucial in explaining the precursors
of the Genocide. Despite the fact that the Armenians have lived in the
Anatolia region of Turkey for over 3,000 years, for the past several
hundred years they have been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, and following
the standard religious discriminatory practices of dhimmitude, the
Armenians (along with other non-Muslim religious minorities like the
Jews and the Kurds) were subjected to second-class citizen existence
where they were taxed at higher rates than the Muslims yet every
other aspect of their lives were inferior and demeaning.
The documentary also has an interesting narrative regarding the
Hamidian massacres, which the narrator said, "according to German
foreign ministry operatives and French diplomatic sources an estimated
200,000 people were killed between 1894-1896 the Hamidian massacres,
but this was only a foreshadowing of what was to come."
The banality of genocide
History Professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago
characterized the Turkish Muslim violence against the Armenian
Christian minority as "repressive violence; that is a relatively
weak government in order to maintain its own control over the local
population, uses as an instrument of government massacre to establish
law and order, to keep those rebellious elements in their place. This
repressive violence leads to what may be called a habit of violence
or a culture of violence in which violence becomes justified." This
Muslim tactic and strategy of "repressive violence" reminds me of a
phrase philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in the 1930s to define the
widespread, yet almost pedestrian use of Nazi genocide against the
Jews she called "the banality of evil."
Sociologists Taner Akcam of the University of Minnesota and Fatma
Muge Gocek of the University of Michigan give compelling viewpoints
from the perspective of Turkish professors, who argued that the
Genocide is a historical fact. Fikret Adanir, Professor of History,
Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, Tessa Hoffman, Ajarian University,
Armenia, and historian Ara Sarafian of the Gomidas Institute, London,
offered further commentary on many matters throughout the documentary.
The Armenian Genocide took place in the historical backdrop of the
beginning of World War I where the pretext of this diabolical plan
of Genocide by the Ottoman Turks was initially considered, planned,
and executed. Like future tyrannical regimes of the succeeding
decades - Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Pol Pot,
the first priority by the Ottoman regime was the disarming the
Armenian soldiers, followed by arresting the Armenian leadership
of Constantinople on April 14, 1915, and the subsequent jailing and
execution of all Armenian intellectuals, and then the deportation, via
railroad of the general population, however, in most cases the Muslim
Turks without warning forced the Armenians from their homes usually on
foot amounting to Armenian "death marches" where the causalities of
the elderly, children and pregnant women was very high. Twenty years
before Hitler's "Final Solution" against the Jews, the Ottoman Turks
had their own version of a Final Solution - the final eradication of
the Armenian Christians throughout the country of Turkey.
The Armenian Genocide did not occur in a vacuum or without notice by
the international community. For example, documentation is cited via
numerous op-eds published in the New York Times who filed 137 reports
during the Armenian Genocide (1915-18). Also American consuls including
Leslie Davis, Oscar Heizer, and Jessie Benjamin Jackson knew of this
Genocide and in gruesome detail described the scenes of inhumanity
in their dispatches to Henry Morgenthau, the U.S.
Ambassador to Turkey. The Armenian Genocide documentary also utilized
never before seen photos, video and other archival documents
and arranges it into an impressive visual effect, together with
discussions with Kurdish and Turkish citizens in modern day Turkey,
who freely reminisce about the stories they recalled hearing from their
grandparents, parents and other eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide.
Vahakn Dadrian, Director of Genocide Research for the Zoryan Institute,
speaks about the Turkish government denial and the 1919 military war
crimes trials, an important incident in Turkish and international
history which predated the Nuremberg Trials by 35 years.
The military court rigorously examined the charges and determined
that the Committee of Union and Progress was guilty for the planning,
plotting, and execution of the crimes of Genocide. Known as the "Three
Pashas" of the Ottoman Empire represents to the Grand Vizier (prime
minister) and Minister of the Interior, Mehmed Talaat (1874-1921);
the Minister of War, Ismail Enver Pasha (1881-1922); and the Minister
of the Navy, Ahmed Djemal Pasha (1872-1922). They were the leading
political figures of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, mainly
responsible for its entrance into the war. Although after the war
they escaped to Germany and Russia and thus avoided the judgment of
the Armenian Genocide Trials, eventually all three Pashas were killed
by Armenian citizens who tracked them down and took their revenge on
behalf of the 1.5 million Armenians they committed genocide against.
My only criticism of this documentary was the moral equivalency
arguments presented by Gunduz Aktan, a former Turkish diplomat,
in his clumsy attempt at balancing the authorized Turkish "point of
view" (denial of the Armenian Genocide) with the historical truth
that shortly after the 1913 Ottoman coup d'etat, political policies
were immediately enacted amounting to governmental, systematic and
sustained genocide against the relatively small Christian Armenian
minority population which was planned, plotted and executed under
the leadership of the Three Pashas.
Epilogue: Modern Turkey - 100 years of Holocaust denial
Tragically this obscene Holocaust denial view is still very popular
in modern times and was recently echoed by Turkish President Tayyip
Erdogan where he condemned Pope Francis for comments the Pope made in
his Resurrection Day message that the 1915 mass killing of Armenians
was genocide. President Erdogan warned the Pope not to make such a
statement again. "We will not allow historical incidents to be taken
out of their genuine context and be used as a tool to campaign against
our country," Erdogan said in a speech to a business group.
Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New
War on Christians. He is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. In
an excellent 2013 article he wrote for Human Events on the Armenian
Genocide, Ibrahim wrote, most objective American historians who have
studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate,
calculated genocide. Ibrahim further wrote:
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution,
starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A
people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than
double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied
Anatolia, now known as "Turkey"] lost its homeland and was profoundly
decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within
Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.... Despite the vast amount
of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian
Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic
evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors,
denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has
gone on from 1915 to the present.
In 1915, Adolf Hitler said, "Turkey is taking advantage of the war in
order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous
Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention."
This was a foreshadowing of Hitler's gross rationalization and
historical revisionism he and the Nazi regime would so skillfully use
again and again some three decades later to achieve his genocidal plans
to murder millions of Jews within the 42,500 death camps. The Nazis
spread these death camps throughout Germany and German-controlled
territories, for example, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec and
Mauthausen among many, many other locations all over Europe during
World War II. Later Hitler would ask rhetorically: "Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, "Those cannot
learn from history are doomed to repeat it." If the Armenian genocide
of 1915-18 has taught the world anything it is that humanity has
learned nothing from history as we see before our eyes in 2015 the rise
of ISIS and Iran as devout Muslim hegemony daily triumphs throughout
the Middle East, Africa, Asia and now an ISIS training camp on Mexico's
border with Texas, while Christians and other ethnic minorities are
wantonly slaughtered in the name of Islam.
Even to this day Turkey stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the genocide
of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turkish government of
President Erdogan. To date the number of Christian victims of Muslim
genocide and Islamic jihad is approximately 270 million. Specific
terrorist attacks by Muslims against Christians is chronicled here.
And who speaks today of the slaughter and virtual extinction of
Christians under Islam and Islamic countries? We have learned nothing
from history?
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/washington/150415