Tweet
THE YEAR OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN APOLOGY TO ARMENIANS AND TURKS
Daily Sabah, Turkey
Jan 13 2015
TAL BUENOS
Expectations of the year 2015 have much to do with the roundness
of the number of years since 1915. They also have much to do with
the political purpose that the historical Ottoman-Armenian conflict
serves to this day and how such purpose has guided the phenomenon
that is the field of genocide study.
The study of genocide in Western academia is at its core a form
of American soft power that has introduced a dominant language
on genocide. This language has been disseminated internationally
through top-down organization and is controlled according to American
interests.
Going by the "Armenian" narrative that this American enterprise has
produced systematically since the 1970s, one might expect the year
2015 to prescribe a whole lot of begging by Armenian and Turkish
lobbyists before American politicians in Washington to make or not
make this or that statement about their shared past.
However, going by two sets of inquiries, one might conclude with
confidence that this year ought to be the year of an Anglo-American
apology to both Armenians and Turks. If a significant breakthrough
is to be achieved this year concerning 1915, an apology from the
U.K. and U.S. might be it.
One inquiry is the exploration of what happened, which is based on
a historical focus on how 1870s' British imperial politics - through
moral pretense and racism - began to ruin relations between Armenians
and their Ottoman sovereign, and set a newly created Armenian political
entity on a fatal collision course with the increasingly vilified
Ottoman state.
Another inquiry is the investigation of what is happening, which is
based on an awareness of American political power in the international
scene and how it translates through scholarly pretense and prejudice
into an overpowering discourse on history and genocide that serves a
modern-day imperial agenda. To understand 1915 in 2015 is to understand
both the history of politics and the politics of history.
The first inquiry points at it being high time for an apology from
London. In the midst of the Bulgarian Agitation in 1876, Britain's
James Bryce selected the native Armenians as his pawns of choice,
mindful of "the services which they may one day render." Before that,
Armenians were for centuries peaceful and unarmed people. Following
that, and certainly by 1915, the Armenian leadership was prepped for
a political function in the form of repeated claims for statehood and
threats of rebellion. As indicated by the existing documentation of
his correspondence and writings throughout these years, Bryce helped
establish this Armenian leadership, inspire it with nationalism,
unfold its narrative and facilitate its organization. The Armenian
people were tagged by Bryce to play a role in the destruction of
the Ottoman Empire, to claim Ottoman land in eastern Anatolia as
the Bulgarians did in southeastern Europe even though the Armenian
population was not the majority in any of the provinces there.
In the 1870s and 1890s the political potential of Armenians was
a partisan project in Britain that propelled Bryce's career as a
Liberal politician and provided pretext for foreign policy polemics
with Conservatives. By 1915, after brewing anti-Turkish sentiment for
decades and with prestigious government positions in his resume such
as president of the Board of Trade and the ambassador to the U.S.,
Bryce utilized his strong ties in the U.S. to build a machinery of
anti-Turkish propaganda on behalf of the British Foreign Office in a
wartime effort that identified Armenian suffering as its fuel. This
machine is still the source of lies about Turks and an instrument
through which Armenians are mobilized.
In the U.K., where there is a convenient post-9/11 state of mind,
there is a rejection of post-colonialist realities. The British
government acts in denial of the kingdom's current social make up
and prefers to avoid a needed recognition and cleanup of a racist
historiography that is offensive to the heritage of many of its
citizens. The anti-Muslim literature of the anti-Ottoman campaign,
which has yet to be officially discredited, is only one example of
how the British government is failing to acknowledge its past and
adjust its national identity.
Just recently, The Economist published a book review in which
the events of 1915 are described several times as genocide in a
matter-of-fact way. The Economist would rather do this and deflect
British responsibility and it does not engage in introspection
regarding this matter. It would rather continue to laud its "most
famous" editor, Walter Bagehot, than consider how British Liberal
perspectives and actions in the 1870s are connected to the sponsoring
of the so-called superior Armenians, or to the racist ideology of Nazi
Germany. Bagehot was part of the same intellectual-political circle
as Bryce, and in his 1873 book about assigning natural selection and
inheritance according to imperial desires, "Physics and Politics; or,
Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection'
and 'Inheritance' to Political Society," he said: "Already the
brain of the civilized man is larger by nearly thirty percent than
the brain of the savage." Yet, on the website of The Economist, the
staff describes Bagehot as probably the weekly newspaper's all-time
"greatest editor in terms of intellect," without regard to the
imperialist underpinnings of his pseudoscientific intellectuality.
The second inquiry is bound to show that an apology from Washington is
warranted. The term "genocide" came from there during World War II to
achieve American goals for post-war Germany. The momentum for the term
genocide was an indicator of the powerful uniqueness of the Holocaust
as well as a testament of U.S. power in international politics.
Despite it being an American idea, the Genocide Convention was not
ratified in the U.S. due to concerns about the colonialist history
of Native American decimation and African enslavement. But later, U.S.
aggression in the Vietnam War introduced new ways in which the
term genocide began to damage the reputation of the U.S. Jean-Paul
Sartre and other intellectuals publicly accused the U.S. of genocide
in Southeast Asia and associated manifestations of genocide with
colonialism. It then became urgent and profitable for the U.S.
government to establish control of how the term is used. One
particular method of controlling the language on genocide was to
create a diversion in the form of an alternative focal point.
Therefore, the reaction to the U.S. campaign in Vietnam provides
the context in which the genocide accusation against Turks began to
emerge in the U.S. Armenian-American scholars who did not previously
speak of genocide suddenly had an incentive to do so and were invited
to publish in academic publications on this matter. This, in turn,
set Armenian territorial claims ablaze once again in the 1970s, and
the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia was motivated
by political rhetoric in the U.S. and inspired by the violence of
the Lebanese Civil War to carry out organized terror attacks against
Turkish diplomats and passersby.
In 1979, the U.S. government signaled a shift on the Armenian narrative
from niche to mainstream through the President's Commission on the
Holocaust, which, among other things, sought to cultivate a controlled
language of genocide under the auspices of the international consensus
on the Holocaust. The major boost in its investment in the Holocaust
allowed the U.S. government to reclaim ownership of the term genocide
from behind the scenes. The new narrative focus on Raphael Lemkin was
designed to dissociate the genocide story from the U.S. government
and lend it a moral spin.
Policy decisions that ran through this commission later evolved into
the planting of centers and institutes for "Holocaust and Genocide"
around the world under which scholars such as Ugur Umit Ungör in
the Netherlands, Colin Tatz in Australia and Israel Charny in Israel
have operated to present the Armenian case as genocide and create a
buzz about Turkish denialism.
Samantha Power's 2002 "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age
of Genocide" was the crowning moment in the mastery of "genocide"
in the U.S. With even more fanfare than Kuper's similarly purposed
book, she not only obliterates the history of American genocidal
activity, but criticizes the U.S. government for not intervening
enough internationally in the name of genocide prevention. Surely,
this "critique" serves the U.S. government well. She does this
at the expense of Armenian and Turkish history. While unable and
possibly unwilling to cite a single Ottoman source, Power cites the
NYT time and time again. Regarding the newspaper's reliability on the
Ottoman-Armenian conflict, she does not even come close to disclose
that Bryce had a correspondence with at least four editors of the
NYT, namely John H. Finley, Charles H. Grasty, Charles R. Miller,
and Rollo Ogden. This of course did not stop her book from being on
the NYT bestseller list. It would be naive to ask how she could draw
such damning conclusions about Turkish culpability without conducting
a fair and thorough examination of her dubious sources and it is
important to research what drove her to do so.
A recent article written by Thomas de Waal for the Council on
Foreign Relations' (CFR) publication, Foreign Affairs, shows that
the U.S. is not yet ready to back down from its abuse of Armenian
and Turkish history. The U.S. is not through with pretending that
its politicians are passively facing Armenian sentiment and Turkish
denial. This article reflects this better than most. Not only is
the CFR currently run by a former State Department director of policy
planning in foreign affairs, Richard Haass, but its very origin is owed
to the marriage between Andrew Carnegie's wealth and Elihu Root's U.S.
government knowhow. Both Carnegie and Root were Bryce's closest
allies in the maneuverings of international politics. The author
of the article, de Waal, is employed by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace (CEIC). To break through the controlled
language on genocide, one must research the Carnegie network - Bryce,
Henry Morgenthau and Woodrow Wilson, to name a few, were members of
Carnegie's various boards of trustees. Lemkin's 1944 book, "Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe," was published by the CEIC and Power, currently
the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was mentored at the CEIC by
Morton Abramowitz, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and assistant
secretary of state for intelligence and research. Whoever is employed
by the CEIC to write on the Ottoman-Armenian conflict and genocide
is likely part of the political game and not an impartial observer.
It is difficult to ask those who are holding the loudest megaphones to
put them down and apologize for the deceptive story that they have
been telling. Why would they feel pressured by muted voices that
cannot compete with their volume?
Nonetheless, apologies are owed by many in the Anglo-American community
of power to many Armenians and Turks - apologies for using Armenian
lives as pawns a century ago, and for using Armenian identity and
emotions to serve as bargaining chips in international politics to
this day, apologies for using racism and feigned morality to justify
anti-Turkish policies a century ago and for using old propaganda to
depict Turks as callous descendants of the perpetrators of genocide
to this day.
* M.A. in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and is
currently a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University
of Utah
http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2015/01/13/the-year-of-an-angloamerican-apology-to-armenians-and-turks
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Daily Sabah, Turkey
Jan 13 2015
TAL BUENOS
Expectations of the year 2015 have much to do with the roundness
of the number of years since 1915. They also have much to do with
the political purpose that the historical Ottoman-Armenian conflict
serves to this day and how such purpose has guided the phenomenon
that is the field of genocide study.
The study of genocide in Western academia is at its core a form
of American soft power that has introduced a dominant language
on genocide. This language has been disseminated internationally
through top-down organization and is controlled according to American
interests.
Going by the "Armenian" narrative that this American enterprise has
produced systematically since the 1970s, one might expect the year
2015 to prescribe a whole lot of begging by Armenian and Turkish
lobbyists before American politicians in Washington to make or not
make this or that statement about their shared past.
However, going by two sets of inquiries, one might conclude with
confidence that this year ought to be the year of an Anglo-American
apology to both Armenians and Turks. If a significant breakthrough
is to be achieved this year concerning 1915, an apology from the
U.K. and U.S. might be it.
One inquiry is the exploration of what happened, which is based on
a historical focus on how 1870s' British imperial politics - through
moral pretense and racism - began to ruin relations between Armenians
and their Ottoman sovereign, and set a newly created Armenian political
entity on a fatal collision course with the increasingly vilified
Ottoman state.
Another inquiry is the investigation of what is happening, which is
based on an awareness of American political power in the international
scene and how it translates through scholarly pretense and prejudice
into an overpowering discourse on history and genocide that serves a
modern-day imperial agenda. To understand 1915 in 2015 is to understand
both the history of politics and the politics of history.
The first inquiry points at it being high time for an apology from
London. In the midst of the Bulgarian Agitation in 1876, Britain's
James Bryce selected the native Armenians as his pawns of choice,
mindful of "the services which they may one day render." Before that,
Armenians were for centuries peaceful and unarmed people. Following
that, and certainly by 1915, the Armenian leadership was prepped for
a political function in the form of repeated claims for statehood and
threats of rebellion. As indicated by the existing documentation of
his correspondence and writings throughout these years, Bryce helped
establish this Armenian leadership, inspire it with nationalism,
unfold its narrative and facilitate its organization. The Armenian
people were tagged by Bryce to play a role in the destruction of
the Ottoman Empire, to claim Ottoman land in eastern Anatolia as
the Bulgarians did in southeastern Europe even though the Armenian
population was not the majority in any of the provinces there.
In the 1870s and 1890s the political potential of Armenians was
a partisan project in Britain that propelled Bryce's career as a
Liberal politician and provided pretext for foreign policy polemics
with Conservatives. By 1915, after brewing anti-Turkish sentiment for
decades and with prestigious government positions in his resume such
as president of the Board of Trade and the ambassador to the U.S.,
Bryce utilized his strong ties in the U.S. to build a machinery of
anti-Turkish propaganda on behalf of the British Foreign Office in a
wartime effort that identified Armenian suffering as its fuel. This
machine is still the source of lies about Turks and an instrument
through which Armenians are mobilized.
In the U.K., where there is a convenient post-9/11 state of mind,
there is a rejection of post-colonialist realities. The British
government acts in denial of the kingdom's current social make up
and prefers to avoid a needed recognition and cleanup of a racist
historiography that is offensive to the heritage of many of its
citizens. The anti-Muslim literature of the anti-Ottoman campaign,
which has yet to be officially discredited, is only one example of
how the British government is failing to acknowledge its past and
adjust its national identity.
Just recently, The Economist published a book review in which
the events of 1915 are described several times as genocide in a
matter-of-fact way. The Economist would rather do this and deflect
British responsibility and it does not engage in introspection
regarding this matter. It would rather continue to laud its "most
famous" editor, Walter Bagehot, than consider how British Liberal
perspectives and actions in the 1870s are connected to the sponsoring
of the so-called superior Armenians, or to the racist ideology of Nazi
Germany. Bagehot was part of the same intellectual-political circle
as Bryce, and in his 1873 book about assigning natural selection and
inheritance according to imperial desires, "Physics and Politics; or,
Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection'
and 'Inheritance' to Political Society," he said: "Already the
brain of the civilized man is larger by nearly thirty percent than
the brain of the savage." Yet, on the website of The Economist, the
staff describes Bagehot as probably the weekly newspaper's all-time
"greatest editor in terms of intellect," without regard to the
imperialist underpinnings of his pseudoscientific intellectuality.
The second inquiry is bound to show that an apology from Washington is
warranted. The term "genocide" came from there during World War II to
achieve American goals for post-war Germany. The momentum for the term
genocide was an indicator of the powerful uniqueness of the Holocaust
as well as a testament of U.S. power in international politics.
Despite it being an American idea, the Genocide Convention was not
ratified in the U.S. due to concerns about the colonialist history
of Native American decimation and African enslavement. But later, U.S.
aggression in the Vietnam War introduced new ways in which the
term genocide began to damage the reputation of the U.S. Jean-Paul
Sartre and other intellectuals publicly accused the U.S. of genocide
in Southeast Asia and associated manifestations of genocide with
colonialism. It then became urgent and profitable for the U.S.
government to establish control of how the term is used. One
particular method of controlling the language on genocide was to
create a diversion in the form of an alternative focal point.
Therefore, the reaction to the U.S. campaign in Vietnam provides
the context in which the genocide accusation against Turks began to
emerge in the U.S. Armenian-American scholars who did not previously
speak of genocide suddenly had an incentive to do so and were invited
to publish in academic publications on this matter. This, in turn,
set Armenian territorial claims ablaze once again in the 1970s, and
the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia was motivated
by political rhetoric in the U.S. and inspired by the violence of
the Lebanese Civil War to carry out organized terror attacks against
Turkish diplomats and passersby.
In 1979, the U.S. government signaled a shift on the Armenian narrative
from niche to mainstream through the President's Commission on the
Holocaust, which, among other things, sought to cultivate a controlled
language of genocide under the auspices of the international consensus
on the Holocaust. The major boost in its investment in the Holocaust
allowed the U.S. government to reclaim ownership of the term genocide
from behind the scenes. The new narrative focus on Raphael Lemkin was
designed to dissociate the genocide story from the U.S. government
and lend it a moral spin.
Policy decisions that ran through this commission later evolved into
the planting of centers and institutes for "Holocaust and Genocide"
around the world under which scholars such as Ugur Umit Ungör in
the Netherlands, Colin Tatz in Australia and Israel Charny in Israel
have operated to present the Armenian case as genocide and create a
buzz about Turkish denialism.
Samantha Power's 2002 "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age
of Genocide" was the crowning moment in the mastery of "genocide"
in the U.S. With even more fanfare than Kuper's similarly purposed
book, she not only obliterates the history of American genocidal
activity, but criticizes the U.S. government for not intervening
enough internationally in the name of genocide prevention. Surely,
this "critique" serves the U.S. government well. She does this
at the expense of Armenian and Turkish history. While unable and
possibly unwilling to cite a single Ottoman source, Power cites the
NYT time and time again. Regarding the newspaper's reliability on the
Ottoman-Armenian conflict, she does not even come close to disclose
that Bryce had a correspondence with at least four editors of the
NYT, namely John H. Finley, Charles H. Grasty, Charles R. Miller,
and Rollo Ogden. This of course did not stop her book from being on
the NYT bestseller list. It would be naive to ask how she could draw
such damning conclusions about Turkish culpability without conducting
a fair and thorough examination of her dubious sources and it is
important to research what drove her to do so.
A recent article written by Thomas de Waal for the Council on
Foreign Relations' (CFR) publication, Foreign Affairs, shows that
the U.S. is not yet ready to back down from its abuse of Armenian
and Turkish history. The U.S. is not through with pretending that
its politicians are passively facing Armenian sentiment and Turkish
denial. This article reflects this better than most. Not only is
the CFR currently run by a former State Department director of policy
planning in foreign affairs, Richard Haass, but its very origin is owed
to the marriage between Andrew Carnegie's wealth and Elihu Root's U.S.
government knowhow. Both Carnegie and Root were Bryce's closest
allies in the maneuverings of international politics. The author
of the article, de Waal, is employed by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace (CEIC). To break through the controlled
language on genocide, one must research the Carnegie network - Bryce,
Henry Morgenthau and Woodrow Wilson, to name a few, were members of
Carnegie's various boards of trustees. Lemkin's 1944 book, "Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe," was published by the CEIC and Power, currently
the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was mentored at the CEIC by
Morton Abramowitz, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and assistant
secretary of state for intelligence and research. Whoever is employed
by the CEIC to write on the Ottoman-Armenian conflict and genocide
is likely part of the political game and not an impartial observer.
It is difficult to ask those who are holding the loudest megaphones to
put them down and apologize for the deceptive story that they have
been telling. Why would they feel pressured by muted voices that
cannot compete with their volume?
Nonetheless, apologies are owed by many in the Anglo-American community
of power to many Armenians and Turks - apologies for using Armenian
lives as pawns a century ago, and for using Armenian identity and
emotions to serve as bargaining chips in international politics to
this day, apologies for using racism and feigned morality to justify
anti-Turkish policies a century ago and for using old propaganda to
depict Turks as callous descendants of the perpetrators of genocide
to this day.
* M.A. in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and is
currently a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University
of Utah
http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2015/01/13/the-year-of-an-angloamerican-apology-to-armenians-and-turks
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress