193) The Key Distortions and Falsehoods in the Methods of the Zoryan Institute

(A Response to the Zoryan Institute's 1999 Response to the Memorandum of the Turkish Ambassador)


The Zoryan Institute is the home of Vahakn Dadrian, a prosecuting professor who has one-sidedly been digging up whatever indications he can find to affirm his genocide, paying no concern to the real historical facts.

Prof. Malcolm Yapp's astute analysis of Dadrian's agenda-ridden techniques bears repeating:

...Although Dadrian produces many reports tending to suggest that members of the Ottoman government wanted to destroy the Armenian, he fails to find any document which constitutes a definite order for massacre...

Professor Vahakn Dadrian

In the last sections of the book, Dadrian describes the various post-war efforts by the Ottoman and Allied authorities to bring those responsible for the massacres to book. The 1919 courts martial, however cannot be taken entirely at face value because they were conducted by a government which was anxious to pin any blame on the CUP leaders...

Despite the numerous documents cited and the careful assembly of information about individuals and organizations, there is no decisive evidence to support Dadrian's case.... Of course one may argue that even without clear unambiguous documentary evidence the weight of so many pieces of indirect and circumstantial evidence brought together could be persuasive, even conclusive, but one must enter a caveat. The author's approach is not that of an historian trying to find out what happened and why but of a lawyer assembling the case for the prosecution in an adversarial system. What he wants are admissions of guilt from the defendants, first Germany as the easier target and then Turkey. What is missing is any adequate recognition of the circumstances in which these events took place; the surge of Armenian nationalism, the ambitions of Russia, the fears of the Ottomans and the panic and indiscipline of war. Dadrian is so obsessed by his theory of the long plan that he too often overlooks the elements of the contingent. (Here's the rest of what Yapp said, and more of Dadrian)






The Zoryan Institute (and we can recognize Zoryan director Dadrian's voice behind what's being said; practically all is a product of Dadrian's research, under the misleading methodology stated above. Dadrian and Zoryan will thus be used interchangeably in the analysis that follows) prepared a 1999 piece entitled: "The Key Distortions and Falsehoods in the Denial of the Armenian Genocide. (A Response to the Memorandum of the Turkish Ambassador)." The essay may be found at Zoryan.org's site.

ADDENDUM, 11-07: Zoryan might have pulled this uncredited page from its site, although it has been reproduced on several other Armenian web sites. Dadrian's authorship, I see, has been confirmed elsewhere. The "23 page analysis" analyzed below was prepared as a "swift response" to counter the "eleven pages of genocide denial and false allegations against the Armenians" by the Turkish ambassador. (Should "Armenian genocide claims" be synonymous with "Armenians"?) It appears a congressman, New Jersey's Steven Rothman, gave "an invitation... to analyze a letter the Turkish Ambassador in Washington sent to every member of Congress," countering the claims of a genocide resolution of the time, Resolution 155. (If it was anything like the utterly dishonest claims of the 2007 resolution, and of course it was, then it sure needed much clarification.) Dadrian's propaganda was immediately "distributed to all Congressmen," and Dadrian later expanded this work into a 92 page book ("Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification"), which the Zoryan Institute is peddling for sale.

The drama began when the Armenians once again attempted to legislate their alleged genocide by using the politicians who are in their pockets, and by exploiting the abundance of their propaganda near-unilaterally presented for a century and longer. Congressmen already not solidly in the corner of the Armenians are not historians. The information about this tragic historical episode comes mainly from the Armenians. They have aligned themselves with "genocide scholars," who mindlessly or purposely accept the Armenian claims just as one-sidedly, but when there are those like Elie Wiesel among them, few are going to stop and scratch beneath the surface.

Whenever there is a voice emerging contrary to this religiously-held genocide view, Dadrian has done an excellent job in coming to the fore, bombarding the listener with his endless compilation of confusing facts and figures, in an attempt to distract from what really happened: The Armenians rebelled, continuing a policy that had been growing over the prior forty years in particular, and they were relocated; not everything went smootly, and every death resulting must dishonestly be presented as cold-blooded murder... even though everyone else was dropping like flies for the same reasons: famine, disease, harsh weather, combat, as well as massacres.

The object of Zoryan/Dadrian's attack: "The Turkish government, through its ambassador in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to all Congressmen, dated May 27, 1999, which included an eleven-page report titled 'An Objective Look At H.Res.155'."



We begin with an excerpt of Ulrich Trumpener's 1968 book, "Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918." The author tells us flat out that "The annihilation of the Armenians" (which Dadrian has helpfully paraphrased for us; he loves to use the word "annihilation" whenever he can, even though the word means "to disappear without a trace." Dadrian himself admitted, in a 1998 genocide commemoration he signed, that a million Armenians survived) was "the result of a deliberate effort by the Ittihad ve Terakki [Young Turk] regime to rid the Anatolian heartland of a politically troublesome ethnic group."

I haven't read this book, but you can bet your bottom holler Trumpener has no evidence, certainly nothing close to the "evidence" that Dadrian has obsessively dug up since 1968. (And we're going to get to the best of what Dadrian has to throw at us, in a minute.) In 1968, as in 1915 and as with today. there was/is no shortage of people with deeply ingrained views. Everyone says the poor, innocent Armenians were knocked off, everyone knows the Turks were (or still are) barbarians as the dictionary's second meaning of "Turk" reminds us, few bother to consider the true historical goings-on as that would uncomfortably challenge our belief systems, and, voila. Instant, irresponsible conclusion: there was a deliberate, systematic extermination attempt by the Ottomans.

If we want to get to the truth, we go to historians who are honor-bound to remain faithful to their profession by leaving their emotions and prejudices out. As Prof. Justin McCarthy reminds us, historians should love only the truth. If there is no evidence whatsoever (besides the Andonian forgeries) that the Ottomans were behind systematic extermination (quite the reverse: their internal reports prove they hoped to safeguard the Armenians), we can conclude the level of credibility of an Ulrich Trumpener, and others like him. Instead, we go with someone like Clair Price, who professionally examined the situation with a level head (The Rebirth of Turkey, 1923):

....[A]rmed [Armenian] opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun. . . Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty of those who remained, removed them from the combatant force and formed them into labour gangs. . . .

In April, Lord Bryce and the ‘Friends of Armenia' in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them {The Dashnaks themselves have pointed to 242,900 rubles from the Russians, as intial funding}. . . . These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May,1919. The rumour immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.

By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take widespread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken.

That was the reason, the only reason, why the Armenians were transferred. The French did the same with some 120,000 of their German-speaking citizens of the Alsace region, moving them to Dordogne and elsewhere, at the point of Nazi invasion. Even without the threat of immediate foreign invasion, it has been customary for suspicious minorities to have been resettled into less dangerous zones, as with the American treatment of their non-rebellious Japanese in WWII.





Richard Falk

Professor Richard Falk

Richard Falk, squarely in the corner of the Dadrians and genocide scholars, has been established to consider strictly the pro-Armenian view, although he might have loosened up in recent years. His quote, "Slowly, yet with increasing authoritativeness, the reality of the Turkish genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people has come to be accepted as established, incontrovertible fact," is true only to the extent that the "genocide" has come to be accepted as the fact. But this perception has nothing to do with historical reality, an area that is not a specialty of the law professor. (The "genocide scholar" with a background in history is a rare breed. Exceptions, like Prof. Henry Huttenbach, who consider only one side of this story, seem to have forgotten what being a "historian" means.) The fact that a lot of people have mindlessly come to one conclusion, helpless against the onslaught of one-sided propaganda and helped by their own ingrained prejudices, does not constitute historical reality.

Another partisan who only considers one side of the story, David Matas, has embarrassingly shown his ignorance by stating: "Because the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were not prosecuted, the Nazi-organized Holocaust against the Jews became possible. There is a direct linkage between the failure to prosecute the crimes against humanity before World War II and their commission during World War II."

The British, French and Russians announced in May 1915 that the perpetrators of Armenian massacres would be punished after the war. They were not interested in the Armenians as much as justifying their divvying up of Ottoman lands, established through secret treaties. Regardless, the British had to make do on this promise, and also hope to justify their relentless war propaganda, portraying the Turks as inhuman monsters. They leaned on the puppet Ottoman government to come up with culprits (or else, they warned, it would have been curtains at the Peace Conference, as Dadrian himself has revealed), but when these false 1919 courts didn't do the trick to the satisfactory extent, the British took the best of the Ottoman "villains" and holed them up in Malta for nearly two-and-a-half years. (Ironically, saving them from a worse fate, as history would bear; the 1919 kangaroo courts were intent on retribution.) The British learned their own propaganda was unusable, and so was everything else available to that point, the bulk of which forming the basis of genocidal evidence today. Every Turk was freed.

So it's not that the "perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were not prosecuted," it's the alleged perpertrators COULD NOT be prosecuted. To their credit, the British came around to the thinking that genuine judicial evidence is what was needed. Where is Matas' honor, to come up with his own conclusions, without such evidence? Would he appreciate it if he were haphazardly accused of a ruinous crime? Would he not "deny" such baseless accusations?

Matas also shows his ignorance and blatant prejudice when he lays the blame for the Holocaust on the doorstep of the Armenian tragedy. Without explaining this "direct linkage" (I guess he is thinking of the "Hitler Quote" that even the rare Armenian scholar has concluded was a fabrication; see Hitler section below), he doesn't think about all the many episodes of potential systematic extermination that came before the "First Holocaust of the 20th century" (another false pro-Armenian claim). The Serbs tried to knock off the Albanians in 1912-3, in part of the "Balkan Wars" theater that claimed the lives of many thousands of civilian Turks/Muslims. The Germans tried to do the same with the Hereros [Africans] in 1904-07, and the Americans with the Filipinos at the turn of the last century. We won't mention the Turks/Muslims who were habitually the victims of systematic extermination efforts of Orthodox nations since the 1821 Greek War of Independence.

Another mindless and irresponsible party who only looks at what she wants to believe, Katherine Bischopi, is quoted as saying: "The future of Holocaust denial may be foreshadowed by the persistent denial of the Armenian genocide." "May be" is right. This is only an opinion. Opinions, aside from outright falsifications and forgeries on the side of the pro-Armenians, are all they have going for them. What's missing is "proof." Bischopi should be ashamed of herself for cheapening the fate of the Holocaust Jews by comparing their lot with an unproved genocide. Never mind the "Rufmord" — murder of reputation — she is committing against the honor of the Turks.




After peppering us with these useless opinions, of which there is no shortage, Zoryan/Dadrian then tackles the crux of the Turkish ambassador's Memorandum.

"What follows is an effort to examine with as little bias as possible the objections and sets of allegations put forward in a lengthy Memorandum by the ambassador, and to demonstrate the spurious character of some of them, and the untenable nature of most of them," we are told. As little bias as possible! When one overlooks the historical reality and only focuses on random bits and pieces, that is nothing but bias.

"It is as if none of them had been effectively rebutted and discredited by eighty years of research and publication by scholars not identified with Armenian interests." The very job of extremist genocide-obsessed Armenians is to discredit. These people don't come from the perspective of truth, as illustrated by Prof. Libaridian's response to Prof. Feigl regarding the Andonian forgeries, or what I have come to call the "Armenian AND? Anthem." One can come up with weasely ways to discredit anything, and these Armenians are professionals at the game, with poster boy Vahan Cardashian (the one who founded what led to ANCA) laying significant “modern era” groundwork. These Armenians know they can't succeed against genuine, impartial historical facts, so their only ethically-challenged strategy is to try and discredit. And they are very effective; Zoryan/Dadrian are a master in creating doubt. They have done a very good job with this paper. Having "effectively rebutted and discredited" has nothing to do with TRUTH, however. Let's see what they have wrought.

Alternate Use of the Words "Ottoman" and "Turkish"



They're not entirely wrong, here. Of course, "Ottoman Empire" and "Turkey" have been used interchangeably, even by Turks. But here's the sleaze factor. We can also use "Soviet Union" and "Russia" interchangeably, as was done often enough during the days of the Cold War. But today's Russia is a different nation than the USSR, their actions in Chechnya notwithstanding. It would be misleading to call a regime by the same name of a past one with a different character.

But one needs especially to be careful with interchanging "Ottoman Empire" and "Turkey"; during the time of the empire, "Turkey" was often used as an informal description of the nation during the days of empire, because the Turks were in charge, and it was a shorthand. Today, however, the hope of the Armenians is to hold modern Turkey responsible for actions, real or imagined, committed in the centuries-old regime that modern Turkey overthrew. This is one reason why they're hoping to equate the two. And whenever they have a chance, they love to point fingers at today's Turkey, attempting to show what an evil country it is. As Peter Balakian blatantly put it, today's democratic, secular Republic of Turkey is "totalitarian." It helps their political agenda to combine today's "evil" Turkey with yesterday's "evil" Turkey into one big bowl of evil Turkish soup. Responsible writers must be very careful to separate the two terms. Richard Hovannisian, for example, sometimes slips and offers the Christian code of "Constantinople" for today's Istanbul. (Subliminally telling his readers, it's us Christians against those barbaric Muslims.) He would not call New York by the older name of New Amsterdam, so why is he doing this? The same reason why the ethically-challenged Dadrian now innocently tries to tell you there is no problem with equating "Ottoman Empire" with "Turkey."

The Allegation of "Inter-Communal Clashes"


This I find the most disgusting deception from those like Dadrian. "There was no Armenian Rebellion" they tell us. Of course; this truth goes squarely against the face of their big lie, that innocent Christian Armenians ... for no reason (except for made up theories like pan-Turanism and Muslims hating Christians), in the depths of desperation fighting a multi-front war against superpowers, with no resources and manpower to spare, would suddenly engage in the gigantean task of eliminating their precious resource, the Armenians, who made the economic wheels turn in the bankrupt empire. Moreover, the Ottomans would spend the equivalent of today's millions of dollars to finance the operation, when the money was desperately needed elsewhere.

"[T]he Armenians, an impotent defenseless minority," Dadrian tells us. The Armenians were the wealthy ones, quite often potently in charge of the industries. They had armed themselves to the teeth in years past, in accordance with Hunchak/Dashnak decrees, including sophisticated weaponry like their Mausers. They were treacherously waiting for the opportunity to strike, when their nation — where the ingrates had prospered for so many centuries — was at its weakest, during war. Days after war was declared, the wildly pro-Armenian New York Times (which would freely print any horror story prepared by the [British propaganda division] Wellington House branch operating illegally on U.S. soil) gave us: “ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS; Besieging Van — Others operating in Turkish Army's Rear,” on November 7, 1914.

The Armenian soldiers deserted in droves to the enemy, taking their weapons with them... which is what led to the disarming of the ones still remaining in the Ottoman army. [Dadrian and his ilk have turned this move into a way to kill off all Armenian men.]

"On August 3, 1914, i.e. three months before Turkey precipitated the war with Russia, all able-bodied Armenian men in the 20-45 age categories, and later in sequences those in the 18-20 and 45-60 categories, were conscripted in the Ottoman army," is what Dadrian tells us. Yes, of course, the Armenians were called to serve in the defense of their country, like all other able-bodied men in the empire were called. (This is why Morgenthau estimated one quarter of the Turkish population died of hunger, because few were left to till the fields.) But most of these traitors went off to Russia to join the Czarist Armenian army of 150,000, the number Boghos Nubar presented in his 1919 Times of London letter, attempting to prove to the Peace Conference that the Armenians were “belligerents de facto.” (“...[S]ince they indignantly refused to side with Turkey,” Nubar added. Of course he’s referring to the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.) Ottoman-Armenians also treacherously joined the other 50,000, according to Nubar, who largely fought as a “fifth column," "operating in Turkish Army's Rear," as the New York Times reported.

ADDENDUM, 11-07: Nubar's total estimate of 200,000 included the Armenians from Russia as well, and not all served in the Trans-caucasian fronts; an estimated 100,000 came from the Ottoman Empire, either by crossing the border to join the Russians, or by staying behind and serving mainly as guerilla units. Armenians from other nations were usually recent transplants from their Ottoman home, as with this example. This Ottoman vs. Russian Armenian issue is given a good look below.

“I must emphasize the fact, unhappily known to few, that ever since the beginning of the war the Armenians fought by the side of the Allies on all fronts.”

Boghos Nubar, 1919 Times of London letter



As World War I threatened and the Ottoman Army mobilized, Armenians who should have served their country instead took the side of the Russians. The Ottoman Army reported: "From Armenians with conscription obligations those in towns and villages East of the Hopa-Erzurum-Hinis-Van line did not comply with the call to enlist but have proceeded East to the border to join the organization in Russia." The effect of this is obvious: If the young Armenian males of the "zone of desertion" had served in the Army, they would have provided more than 50,000 troops. If they had served, there might never have been a Sarikamis defeat.

Prof. Justin McCarthy, March 24, 2005 speech


As far as the widescale conscription into the Ottoman army Dadrian tells us about, a lot of the Armenians refused to join. Just because they were "called" didn't mean they all joined. An Armenian publication tells us that when the governor of Van (a villain of the Armenians who liked to nail horseshoes onto Armenian feet, as detailed in Balakian's "Burning Tigris") asked for 3,000 Armenian soldiers (I don't know why he should have had to "ask"; were these the Armenian men who were over 60, not already conscripted? Of course not), he was turned down flat because (among other reasons) the Armenians knew trench warfare would have put them in danger of death ("...[M]aladie contractée dans les tranchées..."), so contagious were the diseases running rampant at the time. (General Harbord believed 600,000 Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone, a number that should not be taken at face value.)

"What was left behind in the Armenian community was a mass of frightened, if not terrorized, old men, women and children," we are told. No less than the Muslim community of the very same, also subjected to massacres from the Armenians since the 1890s, now completely open — with all the men off at the fronts — to the bloodthirsty attacks of those such as Andranik and Dro. Whereas the Armenian "old men, women and children" were resettled, the majority of whom survived (according to even the most pro-Armenian sources such as Toynbee's April 5, 1916 “Treatment” report and Morgenthau's Sept. 1915 private diary entry, where 500,000 was given (as "making their livings," with Morgenthau's account), the Muslim "old men, women and children" were totally defenseless. Ottoman internal reports, not meant for release and thus cannot be construed as propaganda, have documented 518,000 deaths resulting from these Armenian attacks, abetted by the Russians.
Antranig Ozanian

Andranik

Speaking of the topics of Andranik, Armenian desertions and collaboration with the enemy, here is another internal telegram that cannot be construed as propaganda, sent on December 2, 1914 from the province of Van to the Ministry of the Interior: "At this point, Armenians are calm in the capital and in other areas; however, all the Armenians of the region of Selmas are working with the Russians. The person who leads the bands along the border is the notorious Antranik and his companions, who had once engineered the Taluri rebellion [the second rebellion of Sassun]. After the Hanik battle, some Armenian privates deserted and joined the ranks of the enemy. I was informed that an Armenian bishop was in contact with the Russian Commander in Gari. I had him placed under police supervision." (From "The Armenian File.")

Dadrian digs up the testimony of historian Joseph Pomiankowski, from his 1969 Austrian book translated as "The Collapse of the Ottoman Empire." we are told the one-time vice-marshal who served as "Austro-Hungary's military plenipotentiary (and attached throughout the war to Ottoman General Headquarters), wrote the Young Turk regime first liquidated the able-bodied Armenian men 'in order to render defenseless the rest of the population' which ‘paved the ground for 'their annihilation'."



"I did not see a thin (Armenian refugee) amongst a
good many thousand I saw, and most looked cheery
too. The massacres seem to have been a good deal
exaggerated."

General Sir W. N. Congreve to Chief of Imperial General Staff, General Sir Henry Wilson, Cairo, 19 October 1919



"I sure got to view misery, but planned cruelties? Absolutely nothing."

H.J. Pravitz, genuinely neutral Westerner who was a genuine eyewitness. From "The Situation of the Armenians: By One Who was Among Them," Nya Dagligt Allehanda (Swedish newspaper), April 23, 1917





If the vice-marshal had any evidence backing up those claims, this debate would be over today. Without evidence, what did he rely on? His opinion, based on Christian hearsay. We'll get more to why Germans and Austrians had these kinds of opinions later on... because Dadrian has done a great job of compiling what these select Germans and Austrians had to say, ignoring what other Germans and Austrians have said.

The Redundancy of the Argument of Armenian Rebelliousness


I don't have a copy of the Turkish ambassador's statement, but whomever prepared the Memorandum evidently came up with examples of uprising, and Dadrian hopes to diffuse their truth by writing, "The four instances of uprising were not only isolated, local, and disconnected incidents but, above all, they were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation and thereby avert annihilation. Being strictly defensive undertakings..."

How could they be called "defensive" when we could see from the New York Times report the Armenians were ready and waiting to strike at the outbreak of war? Why are we even attempting to prove the irrefutable fact that the Armenians rebelled, even when their leaders are on record, admitting it? (Quick answer: the Dadrian ilk have little honor, and they have the ears of the prejudiced, ignorant masses.)

The sequence of events was "Armenians stabbed their nation in the back with a force of many thosands according to an Armenian leader," and not "Turks tried to exterminate Armenians and poor, innocent Armenians tried to defend themselves." No, the Turks had their hands full with trying to defend their desperate nation from mighty enemies, particularly Russia, whose policies were to ethnically cleanse conquered regions of Muslims and drive the rest into exile. Since the Ottoman Empire was the last stop, and there was no other land to get exiled into, every Turk knew what lay in store for them if the Russians crashed through the gates. Who would have had the energy or the ability to divert precious resources for extermination of Armenians at this critical juncture, even if the Ottomans were of the mind to do so?

Naturally, the Turkish ambassador's statement couldn't go on and on about all of the Armenian rebellions and gave four examples. These rebellions were far from "isolated, local, and disconnected," as Dadrian deceptively informs us. For example, an internal March 4, 1915 telegram from the Mahmudi district of Van investigated tortures and massacres conducted by the Armenians. after the "kaza was taken back." Killed in Merheku village: 55. Raped and killed: 4. Killed in village of Ishtuju: 11. Among those raped still alive: 5. Wounded: 5. (1/2, KLS520, File 2024, F.11-1) There are a series of telegrams documented in "The Armenian File" (along with Internet sites; here’s a page on TAT) and anyone can see the rebellion was well organized by the Dashnaks and Hunchaks. Anyone who says otherwise, particularly one who has researched the matter as deeply as Dadrian, truly suffers from a total lack of ethics.

I'll bet at least some of the "four" incidents the ambassador's statement referred to took place before the end of May 1915, as the March 4 example presented above. May was when the relocation order was signed. Yet, Dadrian tells us these uprising instances "were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation." (Deportation is the wrong word to use, of course, as that means banishment outside a country's borders.) How could these desperate Armenians have tried to resist "deportation" if the "deportation" wasn't yet even decided upon? Were these Armenians psychic?




We've already seen how Armenians had rebelled in Van on November of 1914, days after Russia declared war. There were a series of rebellions all over the empire, and Van kept having its share. On April 24, the governor sent the following telegram to the Ministry of the Interior:

"Until now approximately 4,000 insurgent Armenians have been brought to the region from the vicinity. The rebels are engaged in highway robbery, attack the neighbouring villages and burn them. It is impossible to prevent this. Now many women and children are left homeless. It is not possible nor suitable to relocate them in tribal villages in the vicinity. Would it be convenient to begin sending them to the western provinces?"
Komitas/Gomidas Vartabed [1869-1935, a.k.a. Soghomon Soghomonian]

Komitas

(Let's all keep in mind the Van governor did not write the above in the hopes of fooling those of us who are studying the matter in the 21st century; his telegram was intended solely for the eyes of the central government.) So here's the interesting situation: it's not the "deportation" of the Armenians that is being thought of in the Armenians' celebrated "date of doom." (As we all know, April 24 is the date 235 Armenian ringleaders were arrested in Istanbul as a result of the rebellions most of these leaders had a hand in planning. Armenian propaganda tells us they were all killed the same day, but even Peter Balakian told us differently in his "Burning Tigris," citing a few survivors. There were others he didn't mention, like the Armenian musician Komitas/Gomidas Vartabed [1869-1935, a.k.a. Soghomon Soghomonian, before his church-proclaimed "rebirth"] who was released after only two weeks' imprisonment in Cankaya Prison, heading off for Paris in the years ahead.) No, it's the Muslims who are being thought of as needing to be "deported"! And "deported" they were, as accounted in “The Armenian Uprising in Van Through the Eyes of Eyewitnesses.”

It was because of the prevalent rebellion of the Armenians that Enver Pasha began to think of a solution. Before the treacherous Armenians helped to deliver Van into the hands of the invading Russians, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief sent the following telegram to Talat Pasha on May 2, 1915:

Around lake Van, and in specific areas known by the Governor of Van, Armenians are constantly gathered and prepared to continue their insurrection. I am convinced that these Armenians who have gathered must be removed from these areas, and that the rebellion's nest must be destroyed. According to the information provided by the 3rd Army Command, the Russians brought the Muslims within their borders into our country under wretched and miserable conditions, on 20 April 1915. In order to respond to this, as well as to reach the goal I have stated above, it is necessary to either send these Armenians and their families to Russia, or to disperse them within Anatolia. I request that the most suitable of these two alternatives be chosen and carried out. If there is no inconvenience I would prefer that the families of the rebels and the population of the region in rebellion are sent outside our borders and that the Muslim community brought into our borders from abroad are relocated to their place.

His preferred idea was to truly "deport" the traitors outside the country's borders, just like the Russians were doing with their innocent Muslims. But the Ottomans did not do that. They knew not all of the Armenians were guilty. They decided on the more humane course of getting them out of the war zone. Given the desperation and lack of preparation and proper resources, not everything went according to plan. But it is up to the reader to determine which was the lesser of two evils. If the WWII Americans had pushed their Japanese into Mexico with the shirts on their backs, as Russia was doing with its Muslim population, and as the Armenians did with the nearly one million Karabagh Armenians in 1992, many of whom are still languishing in refugee centers, would that have been the better thing to do? (Keep in mind that famine and disease, the main causes of death for the relocated Armenians, were no less in force across the border. In 1967, Richard Hovannisian wrote 150,000-odd Armenians died for these reasons while accompanying the Russian retreats, and outlined later conditions in another work, prompting Sam Weems to conclude, "The real Armenian genocide was caused by the Armenian peoples' 'own dictator leaders.'" [Hovannisian: "In 1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5. It was verily a land of death"].)




Near and at war's end, contrary to Armenian propaganda, many Armenians came back. The Armenian Patriarch himself reported (to the British in 1921) up to 644,900 Armenians were inside Ottoman borders shortly before the Sèvres Agreement. Many Armenians didn't dare come back, knowing of the crimes they committed. (500,000 in Transcaucasia/Russia: Hovannisian, "The Republic of Armenia.") Many others had greener pastures to go to, thanks to open doors offered by Christian-sympathetic Americans, French and others. Many preferred to stay in the Arab lands they were relocated to. (Hovannisian gives a total in 1974's 'The Ebb and Flow of the Armenian Minority in the Arab Middle East', Middle East Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1 as: 225,000. That excludes the 50,000 in Iran the Armenians willingly had travelled to, since the Ottomans did not control Iran. (That adds up to a lot of Armenian survivors, from an initial population of around 1.5 million.)

"Leaving Erivan on April 28, 1915... (Armenian volunteers) reached Van on May 14 and organized and carried out a general slaughter of the local Muslim population during the next two days while the small Ottoman garrison had to retreat to the southern side of the lake," wrote Stanford J Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw in "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.," 1977, the year the professors' house was bombed by Armenian extremists.

Dadrian/Zoryan then gives testimony from Metternich, German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (or "Turkey," as Dadrian puts it; see what's going on? The Ottoman Empire, we are being told, was like the Nazi regime. Call them Turkey, and anyone who believes in this “Nazi-Ottoman” connection can equally extend the notion to today's Turkey. Unconscionable), which counts as much as the testimony of another ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, who never travelled outside Istanbul's environs after war's outbreak. (In other words: we know Metternich similarly did not witness anything firsthand, and relied on the accounts of Christian sympathizers.) Testimony of the Venezuelan adventurer and American cattle thief Rafael de Nogales is also alluded to, and, frankly, I have yet to figure de Nogales out. But before Dadrian celebrates de Nogales, he should bear in mind de Nogales also supported the idea of Armenian rebellion. He said (as may be read here), Garo "passed over with almost all the Armenian troops and officers of the Third Army to the Russians; to return with them soon after, burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all of the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands," fully supporting the fact of Armenian treachery. The result, as de Nogales continued, was "the immediate disarmament by the Ottoman authorities of the gendarmes and other Armenian soldiers who still remained in the army (probably because they had been unable to escape)." The Venezuelan flatly tells us the Ottomans had reason to be apprehensive, believing "the rest of the Armenian population in the frontier provinces of Van and Erzurum (would) revolt likewise, and attack them with the sword. This indeed is precisely what happened a few weeks after my coming, when the Armenians of the vilayet of Van rose en masse..."

Isn't it ironic Zoryan/Dadrian would attempt to prove "The Redundancy of the Argument of Armenian Rebelliousness" by citing a witness who clearly reported the revolt of the Armenians? Once again, the Dadrians only give us the part of the story that affirms their agenda, hoping to pull the wool over our eyes.


ADDENDUM, 11-07: Dadrian brought up these four rebellions elsewhere, and they have been examined here.

The Charge of Armenian Treachery



Dadrian/Zoryan makes a lot of points in this section. Let's tackle them all.

Dadrian: "Reference is made to 'the Ottoman Armenians' violent political alliance with the Russian forces.' One is prompted to ask, 'what alliance' and 'by which Ottoman Armenians?'" He attempts to demonstrate Ottoman-Armenian loyalty by claiming "the Dashnaktzoutiun, as early as August 1914, publicly declared their allegiance to the Ottoman state and vowed as citizens of the state to fight for the defense of the country," and also that the Patriarch told the Armenians to, in effect, be good.

Is he serious? Does Dadrian expect us to take the word of these two parties, the terrorist Dashnaks and the often untruthful Patriarch? We don't look at what they said, but what they did.

Who were the Dashnaks? K.S. Papazian, 1934's Patriotism Perverted: "The purpose of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak) is to achieve political and economic freedom in Turkish Armenia by means of rebellion. Terrorism has, from the beginning, been adopted by the Dashnak Committee..." Do terrorists have honor? If a terrorist can bring himself to kill innocent civilians, why would Dadrian expect such immoral people to tell the truth? (Truth is far from a priority for Dadrian; perhaps he identifies with the Dashnaks. It is a fact many Armenians hero-worship their terrorists.)

Papazian continues:

"In August 1914 the young Turks asked the Dashnag Convention, then in session in Erzurum, to carry out their old agreement of 1907, and start an uprising among the Armenians of the Caucasus against the Russian government. The Dashnagtzoutune refused to do this, and gave assurance that in the event of war between Russia and Turkey, they would support Turkey as loyal citizens. On the other hand, they could not be held responsible for the Russian Armenians. . . . The fact remains, however, that the leaders of the Turkish-Armenian section of the Dashnagtzoutune did not carry out their promise of loyalty to the Turkish cause when the Turks entered the war... Prudence was thrown to the winds; even the decision of their own convention of Erzurum was forgotten and a call was sent for Armenian volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasus front."

There you have it, in the words of an Armenian historian, writing before genocide had been overtly politicized. Exposing Dadrian/Zoryan for his blatant lie.

(It was at this conference, not incidentally, that the Armenians were promised actual autonomy... if only they would have done their duty as loyal Ottomans. Instead, the Armenians went with their country's mortal enemy, known to double-cross them many times in the past, and prepared to do so again.)

The first prime minister of Armenia, and primary Dashnak leader in the position to know, Hovhannes Katchaznouni, concurred: "In spite of the decision taken a few weeks before at the General Committee in Erzurum {the same August 1914 event discussed above}, the Dashnagtzoutune actively helped the organization of the aforementioned groups, and especially arming them, against Turkey. . . . In the fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer groups were formed and fought against the Turks."

Dadrian/Zoryan claims the very opposite: "...the leaders of the (Dashnaks) did all they could to stop the Armenian volunteer movement that was gaining momentum in the adjoining Russian Trans-Caucasus, but failed." No source is offered. It is simply unbelievable, the lengths that Dadrian/Zoryan will go to... isn't it? Imagine his expecting us to accept that the Dashnaks were loyal Ottoman citizens.

What of the loyal and trustworthy Patriarch?

In an August 5, 1914 letter, the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin wrote to Vorontsov-Dachkov, the Governor-General of the Caucasus: "Based on the information I have received from the Istanbul Patriachate and the Armenian Assembly..." displaying close cooperation with the Patriarch. The Catholicos was speaking on behalf of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire when he further wrote, "I request from Your Highness that you present to His Majesty the Emperor, the devotion of his faithful subjects on my behalf and on behalf of my congregation in Russia, the sincere loyalty and attachment of the Armenians of Turkey, and at the same time that you defend to the Czar the hopes of the Armenians of Turkey."

Vorontsov-Dachkov's replied on Sept. 2: "I wish that the actions of the Armenians here, as well as those on the other side of the border, be now in accordance with my instructions. I request that you use your authority over your congregation, and ensure that our Armenians and those who reside in the border regions implement the duties and services which I will ask them to carry out in the future, in the event of a Russo-Turkish war, as in the situation of Turkey today."


Kamuran Gurun wrote in “The Armenian File”: "The text of these letters was included in Gr[egory] Tchalkouchian's work entitled The Red Book which was published in Armenian in Paris in 1919. The second letter, in particular, indicates clearly the kind of instructions the Armenians of Turkey would be given in the event of a war."

Gurun provides another source:

"Turkish Armenians living in Marseilles held a large meeting on 5 August 1914, and drew up a declaration which was published in various newspapers." (Bearing Aram Turabian's signature):

The Russian Armenians, in the ranks of the Muscovite army, will do their duty, to revenge the insult made on our brothers' corpses; as for us, the Armenians under the domination of Turkey, no Armenian rifle must be turned towards the friends and allies of France, our second land. Turkey is mobilizing, she calls us on active service, without telling us against whom. Against Russia? Surely not! We shall not go and fight against our own brothers of Caucasus, against the Balkan States, for which we have nothing but sympathy, never! ...
Armenians, Turkey calls you to fight without telling you against whom: join as volunteers the ranks of the French Army and of her allies, to help destroy the army of Wilhelm II, whose railway is built on the corpses of our 300,000 brothers..."

You can see even though these Armenians may technically now be "French-Armenians," they refer to Turkish-Armenians as "us." Of course! Practically all of these Armenians came from the Ottoman Empire.

And it didn't matter whose flag they fought under. We know from the testimony of Russian and French officers the Armenians under their command fought as Armenians, completely out of control, as they wreaked their havoc against the Muslim population in territories they occupied. This is what Armenians have done since olden times, as Tacitus, the Roman historian, recorded in his Annalum Liber: "The Armenians change their position relating to Rome and the Persian Empire, sometimes supporting one and sometimes the other ... they are a strange people." This is what many Armenians did in Georgia, when Armenia attacked Georgia in 1918; they forgot they were "Georgian-Armenians," and betrayed their country. (Georgia responded by "deporting" some of them, according to Hovannisian's "The Republic of Armenia.")

"Although most Armenians maintained a correct attitude vis-à-vis the Ottoman government, it can be asserted with some substantiation that the manifestations of loyalty were insincere, for the sympathy of most Armenians throughout the world was with the Entente, not with the Central Powers. By autumn 1914, several prominent Ottoman Armenians, including a former member of parliament, had slipped away to the Caucasus to collaborate with Russian military officials."

Richard Hovannisian, "Armenia on the Road to Independence," p. 42


The deceptive Prosecutor Dadrian (don't forget the memory trick! The outdated English verb "Didrian" means "to deceive") wants to throw us a curve with, "Still, the fact remains that the bulk of these volunteers eager to fight against the Turks in the ranks of the Russian army were either Russian subjects or citizens of various countries in Europe and North America." All in a day's work of his smoke-and-mirrors act, anything to cloud the truth.

An article in the wildly pro-Armenian New York Times, "The Black Company" (December 15, 1915), correctly labeled "practically all of" the Armenians enjoying a rest stop in "the United States, Canada, England, France, and elsewhere" as "Turkish Armenians." Almost all of them had only been in those other countries for a couple of years, and does anyone believe these colonists were going to give first priority to their identities as, say, "Canadian-Armenians"? The article reports these Turkish-Armenians:

"...[A]re drilled by Russian officers and formed into Armenian regiments, the Russian Government supplying half of their equipment and they themselves buying the rest out of their own pockets. Most of them have had military training in Turkey. For instance, "Charl' Chaplin," the little leader who drilled his company on the careening decks of our ship, had been a lieutenant in the Ottoman army during the first Balkan War. By the 15th of last October 26,000 Turkish Armenians had taken the field against their ancient overloads, and 15,000 more were drilling at Tiflis, these groups being entirely distinct from the 75,000 Russian Armenians that had already been welded into the Czar's army. Fully 2,800 of these Turkish Armenians had been contributed by the Armenian colony in the United States. At the time this article goes to press it is safe to state all of the above figures with a twenty-five per cent increase."

Therefore, of the 150,000 Armenians in the Russian Army that Boghos Nubar told us about, apart from the mostly Turkish-Armenian 50,000 "volunteers" operating from mainly within Ottoman territory, half of what we presume to be "Russian subjects" (as Dadrian calls it) actually came from the ranks of these expatriate Turkish-Armenians.

Dadrian/Zoryan tells us, "In any event, how could the presence of some Ottoman subjects, past and present, among these volunteers in any way justify the resort to the sweeping indictment of 'Ottoman Armenians?'" These volunteers, of course, weren't just "some" Ottoman subjects traitorously fighting against their nation, but the bulk of them. For example, the Sivas governor in an internal telegram wrote on April 22, 1915: "According to the statement of the suspects who were caught, the Armenians have armed 30,000 people in this region,15,000 of them have joined the Russian Army, and the other 15,000 will threaten our Army from the rear..." That's from the mouth of an Armenian prisoner, and all of these Armenians originated from just one region of the Ottoman Empire... putting into plan their full-scaled rebellion.

EXAMPLES OF NOTORIOUS OTTOMAN-ARMENIANS WHO JOINED THE RUSSIANS:

1) ARMEN GARO: Dashnak terrorist , part of the gang involved with the 1896 Ottoman Bank takeover, and later Ottoman Parliamentarian; the one Rafael de Nogales referred to above.

2) MURAD (Hamparsum Boyajian): Hunchak terrorist who led the Kumkapi Rebellion (1890), among others, and later Ottoman Parliamentarian. In 1915, he waged guerilla warfare against the Ottoman Army, from the Yildiz Mountains off Sivas. [ADDENDUM: There was another "Murad" the one described here might not have been Boyajian.]

3) GOURGEN YANIKIAN: 78-year-old hateful fanatic who murdered two Turkish diplomats in 1973, in a Santa Barbara hotel room, setting off a new wave of Armenian terrorism. He had betrayed his homeland as a young man, by going over to the Russians.

4) SOGHOMAN TEHLIRIAN: Dashnak "Nemesis" assassin of Talat Pasha and of a fellow Armenian. The Erzurum Armenian joined the Russians in 1914. His brother, Missak, also similarly betrayed his country. As did an acquaintance, Levon Madatian, of Istanbul.

While an example without famed notoriety, Hamidian is referred to as a "Turkish Armenian" who served as a soldier with the British in Mesopotamia (Ohanus Appressian, "Men Are Like That," p. 166). It was not only the Russians the Ottoman-Armenians joined, when they betrayed their country.

It is not difficult to ascertain the bulk of Ottoman-Armenian young men who joined the enemy. One of the books Vahakn Dadrian admits influenced him on his genocide crusade — "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen" — clearly outlines the highly disloyal mood of the Armenian community within the Ottoman Empire. According to this internal army report, every Armenian over 13, based on confessions by Armenians, were forced to enroll in Armenian committees as functionaries or soldiers, in major cities of the empire.


As for why the “sweeping indictment” of relocating the bulk of Armenians in the war zone and nearby regions, let's review the situation. Superpowers at every front. The collapse of the Turkish force at Sarikamish, not helped by the mass desertion of Ottoman-Armenian soldiers to the ranks of the enemy, meant the eastern gate of the empire laid wide open to the Russians. The Armenians were hitting the Ottoman Army in the back as well as the front. From the back, the entire network of the Armenian community was supporting these traitors; many of the less enthusiastic ones had already learned loyalty to their empire usually meant death, from the examples the Dashanks and Hunchaks made of loyal Armenians. This was a very dangerous situation, nothing like the comparatively safe atmosphere of the USA in WWII, "deporting" their Japanese.

Enver Pasha is given "equal time" in Ambassador Morgenthau's phony book. After Enver supposedly states (Morgenthau's ghostwriter, with Morgenthau's permission, had a habit of putting quotation marks around words that were usually concocted) that he had given the Armenians fair warning, he responds to Morgenthau's similar question by saying: "Your point is all right during peace times. We can then use Platonic means to quiet Armenians and Greeks, but in time of war we cannot investigate and negotiate. We must act promptly and with determination."

What other country would do differently under the same circumstances? I'll bet if the situation was as dire as it was for the Ottomans, many would not have even bothered with a resettlement program.

Dadrian then tries to set up parallels by wondering why the Armenians were targeted for "genocidal selection" when there were Azeris and Kurds fighting in the Russian army against the Turks, and Jews who similarly served with the British? For one thing, Dadrian is foolishly reminding everyone that the "pan-Turanism" theory is an absurd one; should the intention have been to "Turkify," the Kurds and Jews would have also been targeted for "genocidal selection." More directly, the short answer, as Richard Hovannisian admitted when he was caught with his pants down in 1988: "Because the (Ottoman) Jews did not aspire to a homeland of their own."

To elaborate: the reason is, Ottoman Kurds and Jews did not rise up in armed rebellion against their own nation. ADDENDUM, 11-07: Some Ottoman Kurds did rebel, and a token group of Jewish spies also betrayed their nation. The bulk of the Kurds and Jews remained loyal, however; the bulk of the Armenians were disloyal, and posed a significant threat.

Dadrian quotes a Turkish officer as lamenting over the innocent Armenians who needlessly suffered. That's the ugly side of war. The reason why Dadrian is willing to embarrass himself by demonstrating what a blatant prevaricator he is... going against solid evidence that there was a massive armed rebellion by the Armenians... is if he fails to preserve the myth of Armenian innocence, the cat will be out of the bag. If the Armenians did not rebel, nothing would have happened to them, just like nothing happened to the Jews and the Kurds.

And the question is not why Armenians farther from the war zone were included (the reader can get an idea here; note "genocide map" directly below) in the relocation program. (Dadrian wrongly tells us the program "engulfed Armenian population clusters in all corners of the vast Ottoman Empire," failing to mention the 200,000-odd Armenians of the west and northwest were largely exempt.) The question is why were ALL Armenians not included. Armenians were betraying their nation in the western region as well, by providing strategic information to the British, and by poisoning food supplies of Ottoman troops. Even if there was not a single betrayal by an Armenian in the western region, the better question to ask is why were these Armenians exempted at all? Hitler did not exempt the Jews of whole cities like Berlin and Frankfurt, did he?



The Utter Fiction of the Claim of "Relocation"



In a slimy attempt to try and present the picture of the relocation policy being a cover-up for extermination, Dadrian/Zoryan gives us the biased opinions of American personnel in the Ottoman Empire. Someone like Special Agent Lewis Einstein, far from the action in Istanbul's American Embassy, could only rely on the massive propaganda reports being supplied by Morgenthau's bigoted consuls and Wellington House (Britain's propaganda division which Morgenthau, as the representative of a neutral nation, unethically shared information with) which the U.S. press heartily ate up. One of those biased consuls was Leslie Davis, employing Armenian right hands just like Morgenthau employed a few, and Dadrian provides Davis' "Slaughterhouse Province" as evidence. Davis apparently saw a number of corpses which does not prove systematic extermination, in the whole of an empire that served as a graveyard. His report to the State Department of "how huge clusters of Armenian deportee convoys on their way to Mesopotamia were rerouted to Harput 'only to be butchered in this province" was the kind of "evidence" even the British could not make use of when the British Ambassador in Washington studied the best of such horror stories in the U.S. archives, upon preparation for the Malta Tribunal. The reason: the hearsay of sympathetic missionaries and Armenians does not constitute judicial evidence. We are also told "The candid testimony of a Turkish general with military jurisdiction over the Mesopotamia regions in question ... emphatically declared that 'there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees'."

That last one is true. The bankrupt "Sick Man" needing to implement this program in a hurry as a response to wave after wave of Armenian rebellious actions did not perform this task adequately... for which the Ottoman government surely bears responsibility. But it was a life and death situation. Consider our modern times, and America's actions in Iraq (recent at the time of this writing). America had all the time in the world to plan properly for the operation, since there was no emergency reason to invade a nation bearing no connection to 9/11. America is also a very rich nation. Yet, poor planning spelled disasters that could have been avoided; like the killing of a significant portion of Iraqi culture, by not taking necessary steps against the looting of a national museum. War sometimes is just not fair. If the Armenians want to cry, that's an option. But in fairness, if the revolutionary committees undertook treacherous actions, and if the Armenian community as a whole listened to them (most by choice, some by force)... that is, if the Armenians declared war... then who is to blame?




Unlike Dadrian's attempt to deny "the transparently incredible assertion that the deported Armenian population was being merely exiled to the deserts of Mesopotamia where they were being 'relocated'," first, not all of those areas were "deserts."

Admiral Chester, whom the Dadrians of the world have performed their immoral duty in an attempt to discredit: "...[T]he Armenians were moved from the inhospitable regions where they were not welcome and could not actually prosper, to the most delightful and fertile part of Syria. Those from the mountains were taken into Mesopotamia, where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California, whither New York millionaires journey every year for health and recreation. All this was done at great expense of money and effort, and the general outside report was that all, or at least many, had been murdered... In due course of time the deportees, entirely unmassacred and fat and prosperous, returned (if they wished so to do), and an English prisoner of war who was in one of the vacated towns after it had been repopulated told me that he found it filled with these astonishing living ghosts."

Indeed, these regions were and are known as "The Fertile Crescent."

Chester was one of the few unbiased Americans who told it like it is, at great expense to his reputation, the fate or risk of anyone who dares go up against the "smear campaign" practicing Armenian genocide juggernaut. But the Armenian Patriarch himself told us the exiled were allowed to return. Gurun: "In 1921, the Istanbul Patriarch, in a statistic he gave to the British, showed the number of Armenians living within the Ottoman borders before the Sèvres Agreement as 625,000, including those who returned after they had emigrated." (At 1918's end, coinciding with the Ottoman decree officially allowing the Armenians to come back [many had already returned, according to missionary reports], the Patriarch claimed a figure of 1,260,000, nearly double.) Contrast this with Armenian propaganda that loves to tell us no Armenians were left in the empire after the war, all evidently "annihilated." (And let's bear in mind, the Armenians' allies, the Russians, turned their backs on Armenian refugees.)

The relocation law was a temporary decision. It was accompanied by a set of articles designed to safeguard the lives of Armenians and their properties. The following two may be found in the British Archives (Sonyel, Shocking new documents, London,1975; F.O. 371/9158 E.5523) :

Article 21. Should emigrants be attacked on their journey or in camps, the assailants will be immediately arrested, and sent to martial law court.
Article 22. Those who take bribes or gifts from the emigrants, or who rape the women by threats or promises, or those who engage in illicit relations with them, will immediately be removed from office, will be sent to the martial law court and will be punished severely.

If the Dadrians of the world wish to speculate there were two sets of orders, the "secret" ones superseding the Law of the Land, they are welcome to come up with the hard evidence. Opinions and hearsay do not constitute real evidence. We had plenty of opinions before America entered Iraq, regarding Iraq's possessing weapons of mass destruction. We later were reminded speculative opinions were one thing, and proof is another. It's easy to form an opinion.



"Disloyal Ottoman Armenians killed 1.1 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews"



Zoryan/Dadrian is correct to protest. Whomever put the statement of the Turkish ambassador together should be ashamed about claiming 1.1 million Muslims killed, if that is what was written. I don't have information on the number of Jews killed by the Armenians, but 100,000 is obviously exaggerated as well. That doesn't take away from the fact Jews were among those killed in the Armenians' bloodlust for racial purification, in lands they hoped to control, and gain a plurality. Even Greeks in Trabzon were killed by Armenians.

The question is, were these errors purposeful, or repeated because the writer believed in them? I hope it was not the former. The truthful, non-Armenian version of events cannot afford to have its credibility questioned, and those making claims should be very careful. This doesn't even scratch the surface of the myriad of Armenian prevarications, a good many of which have already been exposed in this one paper. Regardless, every time I run across a false fact from the side I believe in, I get upset.

518,000 is the number I believe at this point, as far as the Muslims killed by Armenians, with Russian help; this is the number documented by internal Ottoman reports, not meant for propagandistic exposure. "1.1 million" is off by more than 50%, which is pretty bad. (This is actually around the figure for the loss of all Muslim Ottomans from the eastern areas, dying from all causes.) But it's not as bad as the 1.5 million toll most Armenians claim of their numbers. Of the half million or so Armenians who lost their lives from all causes combined, nobody knows exactly the number who died of massacres. In 1977, Le Figaro estimated 15,000 from all deprivations of the marches, not just massacres. That's only 1% of the figure Armenians would have us typically believe.

But Zoryan/Dadrian shouldn't cry too loudly in outrage. Don't Armenians, when they're squeezed into the corner when confronted with their nonsensical numerical claims, wind up saying, "Numbers don't matter; it was genocide!"



On the Number of Armenian Victims


Zoryan/Dadrian does not agree with the memorandum's statement that "the number of Armenians claimed to have perished has tripled over the last 80 years." They give us 800,000 as the 1919 figure claimed by Ottoman Interior Minister Cemal. (ADDENDUM, 11-07: Here is the lowdown on Cemal.) Figures released from an administration occupied by the enemy are as reliable as WWII Vichy French statistics that can be pointed to for their accuracy. We are told "Excluded from this figure are the Armenian conscripts who, in the wake of their conscription, were liquidated in stages by fellow Turkish soldiers, and countless children, young girls, and brides who were forcibly Islamised," without bothering to tell us the bulk of the Armenian conscripts had deserted, and there is no proof the majority had been murdered, as Armenian propaganda loves to run off the mouth with. Furthermore, children cared for by individual Turkish families was an act of kindness, and most Armenian children remained in orphanages. There is no proof the children and women were "forcibly" Islamised; if the empire's policy was forced religious conversion, all of the Balkans would be Muslim today. That's the Christian code Dadrian is still hoping to milk, since such racist conclusions worked so well in the 19th century. Then there are the German and Austro-Hungarian sources; from the footnotes: German Interim Ambassador to Turkey, Radowitz: 1.5 million Armenians died and 425,000 survived. Even the Armenians like Dadrian concede one million Armenians have survived, so why is Dadrian trying to push this obviously wrong information on us?

The German parliamentarian, Foreign Office Intelligence Director, and later Cabinet minister, Erzberger: estimated 1.5 million victims. Why should we regard a German politician as an authority on this topic? German major Endres, serving in the Turkish army, estimated that "1.2 million Armenians perished in Turkey during the war." Similarly, are we to believe a military officer conducted accurate demographics?

Austrians: Vice Marshal Pomiankowski: one million. Austrian consul Dr. Kwatkiowski: "in round figure 1 million Armenians were with studied cruelty deported from the six eastern Anatolian provinces as well as from Trabzon province and Samsun district. From these only a fraction could escape death." He's saying one million were deported, and he's guessing practically none survived. Another consul, Dr. Nadamlenzki, is quoted as saying, "already 1.5 million Armenians were deported." I thought our topic was the dead, not the "deported." (Wildly anti-Turkish American Consul J. B. Jackson's 1916 report on the "deported", "according to best information," was one-third: 486,000. Dadrian himself has written that "[I]n 1916 ... the genocide had all but run its course.”)

There is a big difference between the 1.5 million one German claimed and the 1 million figure an Austrian wound up with. Somebody has to be wrong, and in this case it happens to be both: since there were some 1.5 million to begin with, and Armenians say one million survived. How could these German and Austrian sources have been so off? The answer lies with the sources they trusted.

Many Germans and the Austrians still harbored deep-seated "Unspeakable Turk" prejudices. Their nations had centuries of war with the race they considered particularly despotic and savage. The Austrians twice were given the shivers at the gates of Vienna. Those memories die hard. In addition, many Germans and Austrians were Christian sympathizers. They believed the horror stories they were getting almost as intensively as the Americans and the British. German missionary Johannes Lepsius was doing his best to spread these hateful, unsubstantiated tales. The alliance with the Turks was born of necessity; Germans and Austrians did not suddenly develop affection or respect for the Turks. (Just a few years previous, the Ausro-Hungary Empire had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina from their Ottoman enemies.)

The facts are these: the pre-war population of the Ottoman-Armenians ranged from 1 million (1912 British Blue Book) to 1.6 million. The Ottoman census, conducted with integrity (the reason why a census was taken was not to fool the world about the Armenians; the Armenians did not exclusively dictate decisions of the Ottoman Empire), was 1.3 million. Standard-bearers Christopher Walker and Richard Hovannisian (1967) estimated a median of 1.75 million. Arnold Toynbee figured a fair 1.6 million in his April 1916 propaganda report. Anything approaching the deceitful Armenian Patriarch's 2.1 million veers off into fairy tale land. In order for 1.5 million to have died, there needed to be 2.5 million in the empire.... since Armenians concede one million survived. Even the Patriarch didn't go that high.

(By the way: as noted above, the Patriatrch in 1918 broke down this 2.1 million winding down to 1,260,000 remaining alive, and 840,000 having died. Can you see the irony? These Christian-sympathizing, propaganda accepting Germans that Dadrian is pushing down our throats actually surpassed the mortality figures claimed by the exaggerating Armenian Patriarch himself.)

In 1919, when the Armenians lobbied General Harbord, they claimed 600,000 dead. 1.5 million is a near tripling of the Armenians' own original figure, and 2 million — another mortality figure the Armenians have claimed — surpasses it.

When one subtracts one million from a pre-war population of roughly 1.5 million, we get an idea the 1919 Armenian figure was not too off the mark.

Most Armenians died from famine, disease, harsh weather and combat, like the rest of their fellow Ottomans. The total mortality does not have anything to do with the number of Armenians who were murdered.



The Legal and Political Import of the May 24, 1915 Declaration of the Allies (The Entente Powers)




Dadrian/Zoryan’s weaseling reaches new heights in this section. Verily, he protests the fact that the Allied declaration to punish the Ottomans after the war was meant as wartime propaganda. However, it was these very same allies who had been conspiring in an Ottoman land grab scheme via secret treaties during the war, and were jockeying in position for years beforehand. Russia had already been calling Istanbul “Czargrad,” for example. The fact that the Allies quickly disposed of the Armenians after war’s end, once the Armenians had served their purpose, also indicates the sincerity of their motives. It must also be borne in mind that Britain attempted to punish the perpetrators not so much to live up to this 1915 declaration as to justify their own hysterical war propaganda; this was the Malta Tribunal. No evidence could be found to convict these “perpetrators” despite over two years of searching desperately in the Ottoman archives the British had full control over, with Armenians in charge, and the archives of their own country, the archives of France that the French were obligated to turn up evidence from, and the archives of the United States.

As for that war propaganda, Dadrian attempts to knock out David Fromkin’s conclusion that "the British official accounts" were “untruthful propaganda.” But Fromkin is far from the only voice with such conclusions. Wellington House was in the business of falsifying the facts, and even a surface examination of their methods can demonstrate the motives of Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee were to make their enemies look as ferocious as possible. When the mainly unnamed sources of the Blue Book are examined (even if they are named, as Ara Sarafian claims to have documented in a reprint edition), anyone can determine the hearsay accounts of missionaries, Armenians, Armenian newspapers in America, and biased consuls all have conflicts of interest. Indeed, the British themselves couldn’t use any of these accounts as valid evidence in their own Malta Tribunal.

Toynbee himself denounced his work as propaganda after the war on pg. 50 of 1922's “The Western Question in Greece and Turkey.”

Alarmed by reports of Armenians’ massacres of Muslims, Toynbee wrote on Sept. 26, 1919: "To lessen the credit of Armenians is to weaken the anti-Turkish action. It was difficult to eradicate the conviction that the Turk is a noble being always in trouble... The treatment of Armenians by the Turks is the biggest asset of his Majesty’s Government, to solve the Turkish problem in a radical manner, and to have it accepted by the public." Later in life, in his 1969 work “Experiences,” Dadrian points out with glee that Toynbee had a change of heart again, writing the Ottoman government made a “largely successful attempt to exterminate” the Armenians. This would be the same “Ottoman institution (that) came perhaps as near as anything in real life could to realizing the ideal of Plato’s Republic,” which Toynbee had also written.

Perhaps all of those fake missionary horror stories he was immersed in as a young man had a delayed effect on his elderly mind. Perhaps he attempted to justify the one stain on his record as a historian, when he compromised his ideals by working for a propaganda division. Perhaps he was too diehard a Christian, as his later pals Ismet Inonu and liberal writer Yalman observed, and deep down couldn't accept the Turks were not the monsters he was raised to believe. Whatever the reasons, it’s not Toynbee the ex-propagandist’s opinion that matters. What counts is the work itself. When one examines the wartime blue books, the blue books that Britain apologized to Germany for in 1936 (for stories such as bayoneting Belgian babies), one can see the distortion of truth on nearly every page. In the very 1916 work Dadrian cites, Toynbee wrote — for example — that there was no Armenian rebellion. Toynbee was a propagandist after Dadrian’s heart. Nearly a century later, Dadrian would still like you to believe the very same.

The seriousness of the May 24, 1915 declaration may also be determined on the basis of new discoveries in the British Archives: "Lloyd George was impressed by the intelligence Zaharoff was able to glean from Abdul Kerim about relations between the Central Powers, and seemed ready to contemplate a payment of $25 million to buy Turkey out of the war." [Keith Hamilton Historian, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Caillard to Zaharoff, 30 Aug 1918.] That carries the implication of a pardon for any alleged war crimes. (Otherwise, how would Enver Pasha, for whom the bribe was targeted, take the offer seriously?) Even the Turk-hating British leader, Lloyd George, didn't give priority to the May 24, 1915 threat; if he truly believed the Turks behaved so monstrously, how could he have even contemplated such a gesture?

As far as Dadrian’s "Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources" attesting to the Young Turk regime’s complicity, there’s not one among them conclusively serving as evidence. What Dadrian’s hard work to find only damning statements boils down to is He said this, and another said that. Dadrian is trying to capitalize on the fact that the Germans and Austrians were Ottoman allies, and the surface impression that they would not have lied. But the religious and racist prejudices instilled in Germans and Austrians superseded all else, even their wartime feelings of loyalty. (As American George Schreiner gave an excellent idea of when he tried to get the truth out through the German press when his side’s censors refused.) The testimony of French and Russian officers is an entirely different tale. The French and the Russians were raised to have positive feelings toward the Armenians, when they had to choose between Armenians and subhuman Muslims. We can then trust implicitly their many accountse of Armenian savagery against the Muslims.



The Non-Existence of "Malta Tribunals"


The Malta Tribunal is among the most damning evidence against the reality of Dadrian/Zoryan’s genocide, and he must do his utmost to try and discredit it. He starts out by telling us, “Turkish suspects were being held for future prosecution on charges of crimes perpetrated against the Armenians,” which is true. Then Prosecutor Dadrian makes a classic weasel turn by informing us the trials “never materialized, however — largely because of political expediency.” He supports his theory by zeroing in on select quotations and shutting his eyes, as usual, to everything else, like the false scholar he is.

Let’s not beat around the bush; many of the British involved with Malta took a cue from their leader’s hateful attitude toward the Turks. (That would be Lloyd "The Turks are a human cancer” George.) There’s going to be no shortage of statements from those such as Lord Curzon offering opinions of anti-Turkish contempt. So what do we make of his opinion, when Lord Curzon thought, “There would have been a row I think...The staunch belief among members [of Parliament is] that one British prisoner is worth a shipload of Turks, and so the exchange was excused"? (Ataturk had captured Britons — twenty two in all —in retaliation for the detention of the Turks at Malta, numbering up to 144 at one point.) If there were a parallel situation in WWII’s Nuremberg, does anyone believe the Allies would have released Goering and company for the sake of bringing home a few grunts?

Dadrian really goes to town in pummeling the truth with his last paragraph. To the Turkish memorandum’s "the charges were exhaustively probed, investigated, and studied," Dadrian bald-facedly replies, “Nothing of the sort happened.” Were the British twiddling their thumbs during the whole near two-and-a-half-years process? Not if one studies the British archives — all of it, and not just the parts serving Dadrian’s agenda.

Dadrian tells us, “The Allies, especially the British, studiously avoided getting judicially involved at that juncture of developments. Everything was deferred for an eventual, anticipated international trial.” This is complete balderdash. There were never plans for an international trial — quite the contrary, the British discouraged other nations from getting involved, particularly after an appeal was sent by the Ottoman Foreign Affairs Minister in early 1919, to five neutral European countries (Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands and Spain). The British decided that "it might be worthwhile to give a 'hint' to the neutral governments concerned." (British Archives: PRO-F. 0.371/4172/29498)

Far from “avoiding getting judicially involved,” the British meticulously searched under every rock for incriminating evidence during that entire near-two-and-a-half-year period. Depleted and frustrated, in early 1921, they enlisted the aid of their own H.M. Attorney General and the Law Office of the Crown, but both eventually refused to involve themselves with the alleged "Armenian massacres"; it seems they sometimes even made sure to avoid the use of the word "massacres," after discovering the flimsiness of the evidence. (In the case of the British Attorney General, at any rate.)

The British had but one shot left, and that was to try and make use of the "large number of documents on Armenian deportations and massacres" from the U.S. archives. This was all of the Morgenthau, Leslie Davis, missionary hearsay Dadrian is still trying to present as legitimate. Now note how Dadrian/Zoryan has been caught embarrassingly on record with his dishonesty. Dadrian provides the above partial quotation because that is the part serving his purpose. Here’s the full quotation from Geddes, the British ambassador in Washington:

"I have made several enquiries of the State Department and today I am informed that while they are in possession of a large number of documents concerning Armenian deportations and massacres, these refer rather to events connected with the perpetration of crimes than to persons implicated." [The source in Gurun's book is F.O. 371/6503/9647/E.6311, vs. Dadrian's FO 371/6503/E6311, folio 34]. What does the above mean? As Gurun writes, "The items of information given by the American Consuls did not consist of eye witness reports but were rumours."

Geddes’ meaning is entirely different than what Dadrian wanted you to believe. Here's the rest of what Dadrian informs us was the meaning of the rest of that June 1 response: "... the Allies were not involved in the specific task of prosecution that would require pre-trial investigations, the administration of interrogatories, and the application of other methods of evidence gathering." Isn't that absurd? Was it the duty of the British ambassador to lecture the home office on what the purpose of the Allies was?

Dadrian deceives by telling us Geddes' message was in response "To an incidental, single inquiry from London." In point of fact, Curzon's first inquiry was on March 31, [F. 0. 371/ 6500/ E. 3552] and when he didn't receive a reply, Curzon inquired a second time, anxious to speed up the process, on May 27. [F. 0. 371/6500/ E. 5845]. Mostly, Dadrian's deception lies with giving us the idea the June 1 response he misrepresented was the only one. In fact, the British Embassy in Washington would go on to write again (some two weeks later, on July 13) that the the U.S. State Department wished not to be identified as the source, should Britain wish to make use of these documents, obviously from embarrassment over the value of the “evidence.”

The clincher of that now famous July 13 reply read: “I regret to inform your Lordship that there was nothing therein which could be used as evidence against the Turks who are being detained for trial in Malta.”

Conclusion of the July 13 message: "...The reports in the possession of the Department of State do not appear in any case to contain evidence against these Turks which would be useful even for the purpose of corroborating information already in possession of His Majesty's Government, I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing any further enquiries to the United States Government in this matter."

That’s what sealed the “The Non-Existence of (the) ‘Malta Tribunals’," as Dadrian used for his heading. Despite the British doing everything they could, the Malta Tribunal never came to be, because no true genocidal evidence could be found (Or as the Foreign Office themselves put it, "Our difficulty is that we have practically no legal evidence and we do not want to prepare for proceeding which will be abortive" [FO 371/6502/E. 5845])... very much in contrast to Dadrian’s final pitiful exclamation, “Nor did the British ‘exhaustively search the archives of many nations,’ not in 1919, not in 1920, or ever!”

The Juxtaposition and Equating of Armenian Losses with Turkish Warfare Losses



In this section, Dadrian attempts to minimize the rare even-handedness General Harbord demonstrated with his acknowledgment of the dreadful Turkish losses ("Not over 20 percent of the Turkish peasants who went to war have returned...Six hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone...”) to Harbord’s testimony corroborating Dadrian’s genocide. ("the wholesale attempt on the [Armenian] race..."Testimony is universal that the massacres have always been ordered from Constantinople.")

Well, we know just where we can put that “testimony”; there are plenty of opinions supporting that “testimony,” but, unfortunately, no evidence whatsoever.
General Harbord

General Harbord

The problem with General Harbord is that while he seemed generally on the level, he came from a very pro-Christian slant, as he exhibited with his writings (“In the old family Bible, the name Armenia...” from Oct. 19, 1919, the U.S. archives’ 66th Congress); and he also had an agenda. Consequently, his report is anti-Muslim, since he mostly used as evidence what he was told by Armenians rather than conducting a fully independent American fact-finding mission (assigned by Preacher’s son, Pres. Woodrow "There ain't going to be no Turkey" Wilson, while considering a mandate for Armenia.) The Harbord reports misrepresented, for example, the findings of Niles and Sutherland, likely because, as Professor Justin McCarthy speculated, "One cannot help but believe that their evidence was not what those in power wished to hear."

One therefore must take with a grain of salt the claims of biased parties. (Even Harbord’s rare “pro-Turkish” claims are doubtful; 600,000 Turkish soldiers probably could not have died from typhus alone.)

Dadrian gives as source a June 1920 International Conciliation report from New York, regarding: "the official reports of the Turkish Government show 1,100,000 as having been deported," and Harbord’s estimate of Armenian dead as "about 800,000." Since the Ottoman census had on record only 1.3 million Armenians (and the successive Ottoman government had to respect that figure), we know 1.1 million couldn’t have been relocated, because Hovannisian himself reported 500,000 Ottoman-Armenians went to Russia/Transcaucasia on their own accord along with 50,000 to Iran, among those who were not subjected to or escaped being relocated. (In addition to the 200,000 or so exempted in the western region of the empire.)

The reports of an enemy occupied puppet Ottoman government cannot be trusted. If Harbord’s estimate of Armenian dead was 800,000, it surpassed what Armenians themselves told him, when they lobbied the general in 1919. Harbord wrote (66th Congress, 2nd session, Doc. 281): “The massacres of 1915-16 totaled some 600,000 of whom no less than 500,000 came from within the borders of the newly proposed state. Probably an equal number were deported from the same area.” So the Armenians told Harbord 600,000 were killed, and another 500,000 were “deported,” coming close to the actual count of Anatolia’s some 1 million Armenians.

Prosecuting the Authors of the Armenian Genocide


Dadrian/Zoryan begins his strategy to try and legitimize the 1919 Ottoman kangaroo courts by telling us, “It was only natural that the occupants of the many Cabinet posts of successive post-war Turkish governments were enemies of the defunct Young Turk regime. So were those sitting in judgment of the Nazis at Nuremberg.” However, Germans did not sit in judgment of the Nazis at Nuremberg; the judges were the Allies. If Dadrian wishes to use a real parallel to Nuremberg, he must go with the Malta Tribunal. But he won’t, because his agenda directs him to try and discredit the Malta Tribunal in whatever manner he can concoct.

Dadrian tells us, “The statement ‘why a government allegedly intent on eliminating a portion of its citizenry would try and convict those who committed crimes against those very citizens’ is an exercise in sophistry.” He explains, “those trying to administer retributive justice in the post-war era were in design and function the very antithesis of those who enacted the genocide during the preceding war.” Indeed! One was an independent and legitimate government, the other a puppet administration under enemy occupation. Besides, that “exercise in sophistry” is an extremely logical question. There were convictions (and executions) of Ottomans who committed crimes against the Armenians during the war, which makes as much sense as Hitler’s punishment of SS men for harming Jews.

Dadrian presents a series of weasely points, holding public trials, defense lawyers, and authentication of documents. Such is the pro-Armenian methodology to cloud and confuse. There is no end to biased testimony from bigoted westerners attesting to an Ottoman “genocide,” but the big picture is that Armenians rebelled and they got moved out; there is no hard evidence proving genocide. Similarly, the Dadrians can present a line-up of arguments designed to detract, but the big picture is that these courts were conducted under enemy occupation. Case closed! Such courts can go through all the surface pretenses they can muster, by providing defense lawyers, authenticating documents, and whatnot. But if the underlying core is rotten and corrupt, who cares? Are we to legitimize Stalin’s courts, which no doubt also made a pretense of justice?

Dadrian/Zoryan is truly making a mockery of whatever passes for his scholarship chops by actually stating the 1919 kangaroo courts had “nothing to do with post-war ‘politics." The trial transcripts (ADDENDUM, 11-07: That is, what was summarized in newspapers beholden to the puppet government; the transcripts for these trials have not survived.) demonstrate the proceedings were mainly about political retribution, and that had everything to do with post-war politics. Here’s the deal: the unelected post war Ottoman government was eventually led by a leader (Ferit Pasha) who not always had truth in mind, doing whatever he could to hold on to power. This puppet administration that would go on to sign the death sentence of their nation, in the form of the Sèvres Treaty, was totally dependent upon the victorious Allied Powers that occupied the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Peter Balakian informed us in his “The Burning Tigris” that there were “almost a million” British soldiers stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire after the Armistice (in November 1918).



The Conviction of Top Young Turk Leaders by the Turkish Military Tribunal



Dadrain/Zoryan decries the Memorandum’s assertion that none of these leaders "were convicted of organizing and executing massacres against the Armenian people." The fact of the matter is that these trials, with political retribution the main goal (although the Turks were certainly and nervously on the look-out for massacre culprits, since Britain warned the consequences would otherwise be most harsh during the Peace Conference), encompassed more than the “genocide.” Offenses ranged from violations of military order as minor as leaving a post without permission. Indeed, everyone knows the primary CUP leaders were sentenced to death in absentia. (Although the Turkish Memorandum was apparently mistaken if it wrote the "Tribunal did not convict Dr. Behaeddin Shakir and Cemal Azmi.") The question is whether these two leaders were found guilty for the Armenian massacres, or for more than the Armenian massacres. Dadrian tells us they were, but Dadrian plays fast and loose with facts, as he demonstrated with the fudging of British archival words in the Malta Tribunal, above. It is Dadrian who likely translated these Takvimi Vekayi reports that he presents as the source, and I’d prefer to reserve judgment until someone trustworthy can take a look at them. Ottoman Turkish in particular requires a deft hand to translate; one nuance can throw the whole meaning off.



On the Value of the Turkish State Archives Relative to the Task of Documenting the Armenian Genocide


Dadrian/Zoryan asks, “how reliable, intact, and complete are these depositories that purportedly cover the entire evidence on the wartime treatment of Ottoman Armenians”? We’re getting at the standard charge that the Turks have “sanitized” these records of incriminating evidence.

"Despite great impediments, the post-war Turkish Military Tribunal had been able to seek, locate, and secure an array of documents, including formal and informal orders for the elimination of the bulk of the empire's Armenian population.”

“Despite great impediments”? Perhaps Dadrian is confusing today’s “sinister” Turkish government which he says restricts access to the archives, with the puppet Ottoman government of 1919. (That’s what Dadrian perhaps gets for using “Turkey” and “Ottoman Empire” interchangeably.) As soon as the British occupied Istanbul, they appointed an Armenian by the name of Haigazn K. Khazarian as the head of the Archives Department. The 1919 kangaroo courts were working under the jurisdiction of the occupying forces. What in the world could these “great impediments” have been?

Dadrian continues: “These documents implicated the Ottoman High Command, the Ministers of Interior and Justice, and the top Young Turk leadership.” (The reassuring source is Dadrian’s very own "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series.") “Yet, nowhere can one find a trace of these archives of the Military Tribunal, which seem to have simply vanished.”

Gurun provides evidence in “The Armenian File” that “the British High Commissioner in Istanbul had access to the Ottoman Archives”:

Dr Salahi Sonyel found document No. 9518 E. 5523 among the dossiers in File No. 371 during research that he undertook in the British Archives. This is the original text of a secret order made by Talat Pasha concerning the relocation of the Armenians. This text was enclosed in a letter dated 22 May 1923, written by Mr Nevile, the then High Commissioner. From this letter it appears that these documents were very probably obtained by the British intelligence service following the Mundros Agreement, that they remained from that time in their safes, and that recently they were sent to the High Commissioner. The last article of the order stated ‘Because this order concerns the disbanding of the Committees, it is necessary that it be implemented in a way that would prevent the Armenian and Muslim elements from massacring each other.'

In his memorandum about this order, D. G. Osborne of the British Foreign Office says: `. . . the last article of the order states that one must refrain from measures which might cause massacre' (371/4241/170751).

What can anyone with a high school degree, let alone a Ph.D, conclude?

1) The British had full access to the Ottoman archives during the entire time they occupied Istanbul since the end of 1918. For over two years, the Armenian in charge had the chance to scour every inch, in the hopes of finding incriminating evidence, before the Turks had the chance to “sanitize” anything. Had the evidence been found, there would have been no reason for the Malta Tribunal process to have lasted until mid-1921; it would have been over by 1919-20, as were the 1919 Ottoman kangaroo courts.

2) If “the post-war Turkish Military Tribunal had been able to seek, locate, and secure an array of documents, including formal and informal orders for the elimination of the bulk of the empire's Armenian population,” as Dadrian tells us, the British would have latched on to them immediately, just as they latched on to the more important Turkish suspects for their own Malta Tribunal. If the British twisted the arms of their puppet Ottomans to find culprits for the massacres, you can bet the British were keeping a big eye out on the proceedings and on whatever incriminating evidence the Turks would uncover. So where exactly is even one of these “formal” orders to exterminate the Armenians? Is this wishful thinking on Dadrian’s part, or is he presenting yet another spurious claim he wants his audience to accept at face value?

3) “Nor is there any credible account as to who made the vast documentary corpus attesting to the facts of the Armenian genocide disappear, and how,” Dadrian continues. Based on Dr. Sonyel’s research, if anyone made off with some of these documents, it was the British. They seem to have focused on the documentation showing the government was working against the massacres.

“[A] regime of preferential treatment was instituted. Those well-known for their pro-Turkish proclivities or open partisanship were allowed access; others were denied it.” Ulrich Trumpener, earlier cited for his 1968 book, was provided as an example, when “Stanford Shaw, on the other hand, had all this time free access to the same archives,” while researching for his 1977 work. However, this period was before the archives were opened in 1989, as Dadrian informed us. How could Dadrian in good conscience provide a pre-1989 example, when the archives people had every right to be selective, for whatever reason they wanted?

As for Ara Sarafian (also footnoted), he was reportedly allowed to freely photocopy thousands of pages, along with fellow genocide proponent, Hilmar Kaiser. Sarafian, in fact, discovered the 702,900 number of Gurun’s relocated Armenians pointed to Muslim refugees. (He also disputed the money spent on the relocation program, analyzed here.) They were both banned for misusing the system... which perhaps meant they couldn’t be trusted with valuable originals; I don’t know. Dr. Stanford Shaw reports: "The only persons I know to have been excluded from the archives are a very few persons who have abused the employees or who have attempted to steal documents."

What I do know is that they were allowed what looks like free access to the archives at one point. (Because both Sarafian and Kaiser are the typical one-sided agenda-ridden “scholars,” it’s easy for this sort to make any claim that suits their purpose. Those who are not approaching the matter honestly are not the kind whose word can be accepted at face value.)

2005-END ADDENDUM: Kaiser's "lifetime ban" was lifted in Sept. 2005. Based on my own investigations, I don't believe there was ever a "ban" in the first place, at least in Kaiser's case. The word of that "ban" came from Kaiser himself, and he might have been dramatizing. TAT's "Archives" page, with copies of documents Kaiser and Sarafian took out (they evidently worked as a "tag team," as the "Sari Gelin" documentary implied), may be found here.

Regardless, we can see the underhanded tactics of genocide proponents from this analysis of Dadrian. Only facts supporting their beloved genocide will be used; these people are not true scholars wishing to look at the whole picture, and to the complete truth. Assuming there is truth to the archive director granting selective access (not agreed to by scholars Shaw and McCarthy here), then I can’t say I would blame them. If somebody is going to come into my house with the sole purpose of wanting to do me dirt, and ignore all the materials pointing to my goodness in favor of that one pornography magazine I might have forgotten in an old drawer, I would think twice before granting complete access as well.

Before Dadrian complains of the archives in Turkey, he ought to, in fairness, campaign for the complete opening of the archives in Armenia, and the ARF archives in Boston. But he knows better than to do that.



Did the Ottoman Authorities Really Punish the Perpetrators of the Massacres of the Armenians During the War?



Here Dadrian will attempt to show the punishments during the war were half-hearted at best, and he has a few weasel facts to throw our way. He begins by complaining Gurun’s book allowed Bernard Lewis to change his views and revise “his earlier recognition of the Armenian genocide which he had seen fit to characterize as a "holocaust." In other words, Lewis is an accursed revisionist, even though it is the duty of the honest historian to revise as better information comes along. Any honest historian who studies Gurun’s impeccable “The Armenian File,” citing reliable sources, would have his or her mind changed as well.


"The brutal Armenian tragedy, which the perpetrators still refuse to acknowledge adequately, was conducted within the context of a ruthless Turkish policy of expulsion and resettlement. It was terrible and caused horrendous suffering but it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people."

Deborah E. Lipstadt, DENYING THE HOLOCAUST



(Meanwhile, it’s okay for a Deborah Lipstadt to proclaim the Armenian episode was not a genocide in her early work, only to go on and sign the awful 1998 commemoration stating very much the reverse. Of course, genocide scholars must acknowledge the Armenians’ story, otherwise they would be restricted access to their exclusive club. Regardless, I haven’t heard anyone label Lipstadt a “revisionist.”)

“Indeed, why would a government organize a mass murder and then turn around and punish some of the actual perpetrators?” Dadrian presents as his set-up. Here is how he attempts to discredit: The ones who were executed were put out of the way because they might “spill the beans” (as Dadrian/Zoryan puts it) about the criminal purposes of the administration. Kind of like the way the Mafia whacks anyone who might come back and finger them. A delightful parallel for those such as Dadrian who are giddy to have you believe the Turks are all criminally minded. To prove his case, of those executed (which might have numbered sixty two, as "An Unjust Trial" put it; but I'd prefer confirmation), he centers on the story of Major Ahmed and Lieutenant Halil, both of whom Dadrian calls “part of the Special Organization's killer squads.” Like a Mafia don, Talat Pasha is quoted as saying of the latter, “His liquidation in any case is necessary. Otherwise he will prove very harmful at a later date.” The source, or one of the two sources, is “Yakin Tarihin Üç Büyük Adam (The three great men from the recent past),” by Ziya Akir.

My Turkish is poor, but even I know the correct translation would be, “Three Great Men from Recent History.” Not much difference between the words “past” and “history”? The point is, if this is the kind of sloppiness Dadrian is comfortable with in his translations, nobody should take his word on his translations at face value. For example, is “liquidation” the real word Talat Pasha used? For a “scholar” who likes to use incriminating words like “annihilation” at every turn, I wouldn’t be surprised if the meaning was entirely different. If Talat Pasha is going to revert to his executioner’s role Franz Werfel made famous in “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” (the book that made Dadrian crack up as a young man), how could the title of this source book have referred to Talat Pasha (assuming he is one of the three in question) as a great man?

Even if this story contains truth, that the Ottoman authorities purposely wanted to murder their own “brigands” for some reason (if the reason was because they massacred Armenians and the bosses were afraid they would “spill the beans,” surely there were more than two killers needed to murder 1.5 million Armenians. Why were the rest who would “spill the beans” let loose? [And what of the countless other personnel not involved directly with the killings but who had to be acquainted with the dirty details of a massive extermination program, similar to the Nazi officer assigned to collect the loot of incoming concentration camp Jews? Couldn’t any of them have “spilled the beans”?] The amazing smoke-and-mirror theories Dadrian comes up with..!), how patently dishonest to make the examples of these two represent the rest who were executed.

For example, in his footnote, Dadrian explains:

“It should be recognized in this respect that not only IVth Army Commander Cemal in Syria and Palestine, but also IIId Army Commander Vehib Pasha in eastern Turkey, despite their strong ties to the Ittihad Party, refused to embrace the secret genocidal agenda of the party's top leadership and whenever they could they tried to resist and discourage the attendant massacres. In 1916, for example, Vehib court-martialed and hanged a gendarmery commander and his accomplice for organizing the massacre of some 2,000 disarmed Armenian labor battalion soldiers. He subsequently issued a proclamation threatening similar swift retribution against any and all who might be tempted to attack and harm the Armenians in the process of being deported. Ariamard (Istanbul), December 10, 1918. Cemal Pasha acted similarly. In 1916, for example, he executed a gendarmery officer on charges of rape and assault.”

So in other words, some of the criminals who were executed deserved it, but most were assassins who “knew too much regarding the lethal secret operations conducted against the victim population” who would have “spilled the beans.” Now imagine this: “Good” German General Rommel discovers what is going on at a concentration camp. He takes it upon himself to conduct a court-martial of the camp’s SS, and hangs a few.

Is this a conceivable scenario? What would Hitler’s reaction have been? Similarly, if Commanders Vehib and Cemal butted in with "party boss" Talat Pasha’s supposed secret orders, and monkeyed around with the systematic extermination plan, how long would they have lasted?

(ADDENDUM, 11-07: The 1919-20 kangaroo courts sentenced Cemal Pasha to death, in a supreme demonstration of how invalid these courts were.)

For a further study of these 2,000 soldiers, here is where to go, including a look at what happened when Armenians slaughtered an equal number of Turkish soldiers... as related by an Armenian army officer. (When Dadrian tells this story elsewhere, by the way, the number goes up to a whopping "2,500.")



ADDENDUM, 03-2006:

Taner Akcam attempted to discredit 1,397 having been punished for crimes against the Armenians, as Kamuran Gurun reported in The Armenian File.

Turkish researchers have updated Gurun's figure, via documents in their country's archives, with the following, as taken from the introduction of an upcoming book: "[B]y mid-1916 the Ottoman Government had brought to justice 1673 people with claims of attacking the Armenian convoys and punished 67 of them with death penalty, 524 were jailed, 68 were exiled or similar, and 227 were found innocent. Out of the 1673 who were court-martialed 170 of them were government officials and 678 were soldiers. Amongst them were majors, commanders, lieutenants, gendarmeries, commanders, and police chiefs."


Dadrian/Zoryan further attempts to provide weasel examples to conclude, “the authorities were not in the slightest interested to prosecute and punish massacrers, but to stop the massive embezzlements. By virtue of these abuses the vast riches of the Armenian victim population were being personally appropriated by the organizers and executioners of the massacres instead of being transferred, as was their duty to do, to the Treasury of the state.” He cites what appears to be a reliable source (even though what he wrote boils down to still another opinion), Toynbee's liberal friend, Ahmed Emin (Yalman), Turkey in the World War, who wrote: “the whole thing amounted more to a demonstration rather than a sincere attempt to fix complete responsibility."

In his memoirs, Talat Pasha explained more could have been done. However, if the criminals were gone after aggressively, morale would have been sacrificed, during a moment of the nation’s history when its very life was at stake. I have seen this happen in my own country, with the Iraq invasion. The tortures of Abu Ghraib were exposed, and only a handful of those involved were brought to trial. (I believe the main perpetrator got fifteen years, the completion of which only time will tell, and he rightly complained that he was “only following orders.”) Naturally! If every single American soldier involved in those war crimes were to be convicted, that would affect the nation’s morale. What’s done is to single out a few representatives, so as not to endanger the already risky large enterprise at hand.

Sometimes the punishments of war crimes amount to a slap on the wrist. Lt. Calley, who led the berserk American regiment that killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese at My Lai, served a total of only three days imprisonment. (Followed by house arrest; no one else from the squad received punishment.) Compare with the nearly 1,400 Ottomans who were punished. It’s disgusting of Dadrian to attempt to show the reverse of the reality: the Ottomans’ hearts were in the right place, regarding the welfare of the Armenians. Dadrian will go to any length to twist the facts to present his distorted picture. If he had a real conscience, he would be asking why Generals Dro and Andranik got off scot free when they helped orchestrate the murder of hundreds of thousands of non-Christian Armenian Ottomans. Did Armenia (or Russia) attempt to convict these, and so many other Armenian mass murderers? Dro was an essential part (War Minister) of the Armenian government until the nation willingly joined the Soviet Union in Dec. 1920, and his remains were flown back (after he had lived a comfortable life in America; the Simon Wiesenthal Institute curiously had no idea — when inquired — of Dro’s work for Der Fuehrer in WWII, nor of any other Nazi-Armenian) to a year 2000 hero’s ceremony attended by that country's president and chief patriarch.



Hitler, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials and the Armenian Genocide



Here Dadrian attempts to prove the truthfulness of the “Hitler Quote.” Of course; if this quote is successfully discredited, what would “Armenian genocide” newspaper articles and TV shows have left, when they try to list the “evidence”? Besides, taking the word of the infamously immoral dictator is critical in establishing the all-important connection to the Holocaust.

Dadrian slimes off: “Hitler is reported to have included in his list the case of ‘the extermination of the Armenians,’ among the mass murders in history that he perceived to have been successful operations.” The key word: “reported.”

The source: “Edouard Calic, Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler. ... 1971.” Already the precious Hitler Quote is endangered since refusing to be admitted at Nuremberg; the officers of the WWII tribunal realized something was fishy. The Armenian genocide obsession gains rebirth in 1965, with a 50th anniversary remembrance. With the renewed interest, we are offered mysteriously “confidential” interviews that hadn’t been uncovered in the quarter-century past, despite the Hitler-mania from many historical quarters. (Perhaps the Andonian-like “Hitler Diaries” forger got the idea from this 1971 work.) Two years after the book is released, an elderly Armenian (related above) who had betrayed his Ottoman homeland as a teenager (by joining the Russians) shoots two Turkish diplomats in California, starting off a new wave of Armenian terrorism.

Dadrian/Zoryan points to Prof. Gerard Weinberg, whom I presented in the TAT site as the only evidence that made me wonder. But not long ago, a reader informed me of a letter Dr. Robert John wrote back at the New York Times (the two were having a little spar), and based on John’s words, I don’t think as highly of Weinberg’s “evidence.” John is the rare Armenian historian who dares to buck the tide, at least with the all-important Hitler Quote.

Dadrian then offers some genocide scholar blather in the form of M. Cherif Bassiouni, who: “links the mass murder of the Armenians ‘now commonly referred to as genocide [and which] remained unpunished,’ to the calamity of World War II.”

What a perfect example of why we should never take the word of ignorant genocide scholars. (1) Hitler didn’t need the example of the Armenians to inspire his Final Solution; his nation had already engaged in systematic extermination in 1904-07 with the Hereros, one of the real “first Holocausts of the 20th century,” among others; the reader is advised to consult Nick's excellent essay examining Hitler's genuine genocidal influences (2) Even if Hitler got influenced, particularly since he was living in Berlin during the Tehlirian trial (where the murderer was allowed to go free), who was to blame? The Ottomans, who were accused of this hoax, or the shrill voices of the West (in Hitler’s country, Vicar Lepsius wasted no opportunity to scream his “Armenian massacres” stories) mindlessly making slanderous accusations with extreme prejudice and no real facts? (3) It is not lawful for an accused to be tried twice for the same crime. By stating the Ottomans “remained unpunished,” Bassiouni obviously never heard of the Malta Tribunal (or listens exclusively to the Dadrians who claim the trial process was non-existent), where the accused were all released.

David Matas perhaps is not off the mark when Dadrian quotes him as saying, "Nothing emboldens a criminal so much as the knowledge he can get away with the crime.” No wonder 1992 Armenia felt free to use the same “Death & Exile” Orthodox technique that served so well in the past, when they massacred innocent Azeri civilians, scaring off nearly a million, to take over Karabakh. That’s because the world didn’t care about the 518,000 non-Armenian Ottomans the Armenians savagely murdered, with Russian help. (Following the precedent of their killer forefathers, the Russians helped also with Karabakh.)

Probably the only conclusive reference that Hitler has been known to make about the Armenians was from a December 12,1942 speech where he called the Armenians "unreliable" (UNZUVERLASSIG) and "dangerous" (GEFAHRLICH).



Raphael Lemkin, International Law and the Armenian Genocide


I never heard of this one! Albert Speer, in “Spandau: The Secret Diaries,” wrote that punishment of World War I’s war criminals "would have encouraged a sense of responsibility on the part of leading political figures if after the First World War the Allies had actually held that (sic) trials they had threatened." But the Allies did prepare the groundwork for that trial. They couldn’t come up with evidence after an exhaustive 1919-1921 search, and the accused were, in effect, found innocent — they were all freed. Perhaps Speer was referring to the unpunished war criminals like Dro and Andranik who helped slaughter hundreds of thousands of defenseless, innocent civilians?

I am not convinced of Dadrian’s explanation of the “facts” that some minor committee of the United Nations giving credence to Armenian propaganda in 1985 constitutes U.N. recognition of the tall Armenian tale. Dadrian concludes, "Of all the members of the U.N., as far as it is known, it is only Turkey that is continuing to interpret this outcome as meaning that the U.N. ‘never recognized’ the Armenian genocide!"

"(The) United Nations has not approved or endorsed a report labeling the Armenian experience as Genocide." Farhan Haq, U.N. spokesman, October 5th, 2000. Juan Mendez, Special U.N. Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, confirmed this non-recognition in a June 2005 genocide conference. The U.N.'s position was also confirmed when Armenia's Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian had the bad taste to usurp a Holocaust commemoration in Jan. 2005, issuing a not-thinly-veiled plea for the U.N. to hop aboard the Armenian genocide bandwagon: "The catharsis that the victims deserve... obligates us here at the UN, and in the international community, to be witness, to call things by their name..."

ADDENDUM: From Bruce Fein's article, "The Armenian Issue Revisited; An Armenian and Muslim Tragedy? Yes! Genocide? No!" claims the exact opposite:

The United Nations Economic and Social Council Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities examined the truthfulness of an Armenian genocide charge leveled by Special Rapporteur, Mr. Benjamin Whitaker, in his submission, "Study of Genocide," during its thirty-eighth session at the U.N. Office in Geneva from August 5-30, 1985. The Sub-Commission after meticulous debate refused to endorse the indictment for lack of convincing evidence, as amplified by attendee and Professor Dr. Ataöv of Ankara University in his publication, "WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN GENEVA: The Truth About the 'Whitaker Report'." [This report is now available on TAT.]

Dadrian has the gall to equate the “three Entente powers(’)...May 24, 1915 declaration threatening the Turkish officials with prosecution and punishment,” with the 1948 U.N. Convention. Never mind the reasons why the three powers made their declaration with no care for the Armenians, as they demonstrated after the war, once the Armenians had served their purpose and abandoned... but rather to justify their greed for Ottoman lands they would steal at war’s end. Leave it to Dadrian to cheapen the noble purpose of the genocide convention.

We are in for more chatter about how the “Nuremberg military aggression and wartime domestic genocide were inter-linked...aptly (fitting) the Turkish model of genocide.” With one important difference: the Holocaust is proven, the Armenian allegations are not.

“Without provocation, but under German prodding and generous promises of rewards, the Ottoman Turks intervened in the war by attacking Russia unilaterally, thereby provoking the intended Russo-Turkish war.” Dadrian must be super-cocky to think he can get away with distorting even well-known details of WWI history. “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” itself outlines how the attack on Russia was commanded by fez-wearing Germans operating the two German ships flying under the Ottoman flag. Minister of the Marine (i.e., Navy) Cemal Pasha had no idea of the action, something Morgenthau seems to have been a genuine eyewitness to, for once. This was the way the Germans hoped to bring the Ottomans into war. (Refer to "The Guns of August" for insight on the real history.) The Ottomans issued apologies, did not follow up with other attacks, but it was too late. Russia declared war in early November, and the treacherous Armenians were ready and waiting to rebel in Van almost instantaneously. (ADDENDUM: It is possible Enver Pasha worked in collusion with the Germans, without the approval of the Ottoman leadership.)

Regarding the application of international law to the case of the Armenians, the reader may take a closer look at the U.N. rules, as well as an analysis of "law expert," Alfred de Zayas.


The Relevance and Significance of the U.S. Archives



Unlike the Entente Powers, Dadrian explains, the USA had the advantage of having a network of consuls throughout, and “this fact renders the American archives highly relevant for the thorough study of Armenian deportations and massacres."

That might have been true if we didn’t already learn these archives were the last-ditch hope to prosecute the Turks at Malta, but none of the hearsay proved usable. So embarrassing was the caliber of this “evidence,” the State Department only agreed to let the British make use of it under the condition the source not be identified. Even in the reports that made mention of two Ottoman officials, the British ambassador commented:

“...[E]ven in these cases the accounts given were confined to the personal opinions of the writers; no concrete facts being given which could constitute satisfactory incriminating evidence.”

That sums up the value of the consular and missionary testimony of the U.S. archives. Aside from outright fabrications, the brunt boiled down to “facts” obtained second hand, and “opinions.”
Whatever Dadrian tries to weasel into our hearts and minds is then meaningless. But let’s see what he has come up with. Before we do that, however...

Let’s examine the attitude of the USA. Even though the USA excluded the Ottomans from their list of foes when the USA finally entered the war (keeping in mind the safety of the vast properties of the missionaries), the anti-Turkish propaganda in the USA exceeded those even in the Entente nations. As Gurun wrote:

Without any doubt the USA was the country where anti-Ottoman views were most prevalent in that period. The information sent by the Protestant American missionaries in Turkey from the 1890s onward, and the attitude of the press has poisoned public opinion in the United States with regard to the Turkish people to such an extent that a member of that race is seldom thought or spoken of in this country otherwise than as the "unspeakable" ... Nor was the government itself impartial in its opinion and attitude concerning the present or the future of the Ottoman state.... When Woodrow Wilson was considering the appointment of ambassadors shortly after his election in 1912, Colonel House suggested Henry Morgenthau as Ambassador to Turkey; Wilson replied, "There ain't going to be no Turkey," to which House rejoined, 'Then let him go look for it.' (“United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914-1924,” 1965)

(The preacher’s son President hated the Ottoman Empire so much, he evidently already had in mind to do what he could do extinguish it. That speaks volumes. No wonder Wilson turned the other cheek with the “self-determination” part of his Fourteen Points after the war, with his carving up intentions of the eastern provinces, giving these territories as a gift to the Armenians.)

It was in this atmosphere that most U.S. consuls entered this alien land, with religious and racist bigotry bursting through their pores, a hatred reinforced through their frequent contact with the only fellow Americans nearby, the missionaries. These are the representatives Dadrian would have us believe entertained a “prism of neutrality.” If any representative would show even a glimmer of neutrality, as with Admiral Bristol a few years later, his character would be subjected to vicious attack as a “pro-Turk.” (ADDENDUM: See also Hovannisian's smear treatment of another objective American officer, Lt. Dunn.) “Neutrality” was defined (as Dadrian is defining it now) by those Turcophobes such as consuls J. B. Jackson and George (“The Blight of Asia”) Horton, the latter of whom felt comfortable with equating the Turks with the anti-Christ.

“[I]t is as if the stories of the Armenian genocide are just an array of falsehoods maliciously fabricated by the representatives of the U.S. government who, in reckless disregard of the mandates of their official duties, deliberately misinformed and misled their superiors in Washington.” There isn’t much in this paper where Dadrian managed to present the truth, but at least he got something right. Let’s keep in mind these falsehoods were spoon-fed to the consuls by missionaries and Armenians. The consuls never eyewitnessed any massacres; Leslie Davis wrote he saw corpses, in a land littered by corpses.






Dadrian attempts to portray Morgenthau’s testimony as unimpeachable, a word Levon Marashlian likes to use for the ex-attorney ambassador. “...[H]e may have submitted to the impulses of his ghostwriter to embellish certain points...” Dadrian writes, of poor, innocent Henry Morgenthau.

“In terms of authenticity and utmost reliability, his wartime reports take precedence over the import of his book.” And it is these letters and diaries Dr. Heath Lowry examined when he wrote “The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story”... some of which cannot be reliable, as Morgenthau gave his Armenian assistant the freedom to write in Morgenthau’s name. However, there are enough examples to see Morgenthau maintained a friendly tone of equality with the Ottoman officials, well in contrast to his book’s depiction of them as monsters, and of Morgenthau as the haughty, morally superior Westerner. (Or, as George Schreiner put it in his critical letter, Morgenthau’s “omniscience and omnipotence.”)

(For example, when Talat bids Henry a final farewell, the second part of the interior minister’s gesture was “We feel almost as though you were one of us," revealing the nature of warmth between the two men. Through the intervention of “second ghostwriter” Secretary of State Robert Lansing, that warm line was dropped, and the mean one, "with the usual insincere oriental politeness," was added in its place.)

“He emphatically confirms the genocidal intentions of the leaders of the Young Turk regime and equally emphatically affirms the reality of the intended genocidal outcome.” Morgenthau indeed does. The question is, why? Was he brainwashed so totally by the tainted reports of his consuls and the Armenian assistants who whispered in his ear? Or did he have an agenda of his own in mind?

Dadrian instructs anyone with doubts regarding the “extraordinary value of the U.S. archives in terms of resolving the controversy on the Armenian genocide” to consult in the U.S. National Archives a document named R.G. 59. 867 with seven separate listings and dates. the first three are from July 10 until Sept. 3, 1915.

In early-to-mid September, after the three reports above, Zenop Bezjian, the Armenian Protestants 'vekil' (representative), paid a visit, which Morgenthau records in his 'Diary':

"Zenop Bezjian, Vekil of Armenian Protestants, called. Schmavonian introduced him; he was his schoolmate. He told me a great deal about conditions [in the interior). I was surprised to hear him report that Armenians at Zor were fairly well satisfied; that they have already settled down to business and are earning their livings; those were the first ones that were sent away and seem to have gotten there without being massacred. He gave me a list where the various camps are and he thinks that over one half million have been displaced. He was most solicitous that they should be helped before winter set in."

That powerful report from the mouth of an Armenian should have instantly made Henry angry about a terribly misleading June 30, 1915 message Consul Leslie Davis wrote, that the Turks’ objective was "to destroy the Armenian race." (Perhaps Morgenthau was too simpatico with Davis, since they both had in common being ex-lawyers, and employing Armenian assistants.)

If these half million Armenians were “earning their livings” in the towns they had settled in — no one can make connotations of “concentration camps,” as we often encounter in deceptive pro-Armenian literature — and if Morgenthau was “resolving the controversy on the Armenian genocide” in the first three reports, then we can see how wrong he was.

And if he was continuing to “resolve” in the next four reports, dated October to December, then we can see what a liar he was.

Morgenthau was like the American officials being deceived years later by being told Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. After latter-day America learned there were no such weapons, then America had to confess its mistake. That's what removes Morgenthau; if Morgenthau were a current American official, after coming across the reality that America was told a falsehood, Morgenthau would still be insisting Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

What was Henry’s motive? Dadrian tells us Lowry’s contention of bringing the USA into the war is without merit, since the letter the ambassador wrote to President Wilson (where Morgenthau “admitted that he wanted to go public with the evidence he had gathered” to "win a victory for the war policy of the government") was dated November 26, 1917, eighteen months after his ambassadorship was through.

Yet we know from the 145 articles in the New York Times from 1915 (its publisher, Adolph Ochs, was an old Morgenthau friend [Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell"], from New York City's Jewish community) that Ambassador Morgenthau kept stressing the horrors; his inclination appeared to be to bring the USA into the war well before he got the idea to write his damning book. He kept writing false reports to the State Department, even though the private word was the Armenians were all right.

ADDENDUM, 11-07: As the reader may determine from the top of this page, as Prof. Lowry informed us, Morgenthau's idea was not to bring the USA into the war (the USA was already in the war by late November 1917, although not against the Turks); because he was "[g]reatly discouraged at the amount of outright opposition and the tremendous indifference to the war," Morgenthau wished to rally support by writing a book of propaganda. Perhaps by concentrating on the demonization of Turks, Morgenthau hoped that the USA's war would expand into the Ottoman Empire, for the reason speculated below. If Dadrian indicated Lowry was misleading us, it turns out that Dadrian was doing the misleading. But what else is new?



In 1915, The New York Times printed this story:

CRITICISES MR. MORGENTHAU

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

London Times Correspondent Says He Wasted Energy on Zionists

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Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
LONDON, Friday, Oct. 8,--The Times published a long account from a correspondent, of the American massacres in which he says:

"Attempts of the American Ambassador to procure some alleviation of the lot of the Armenians have thus far proved unsuccessful. Mr. Morgenthau, in the opinion of good observers, has wasted too much diplomatic energy on behalf of the Zionists of Palestine, who were in no danger of massacre, to have any force to spare.



Henry Morgenthau

Henry Morgenthau

The clue is with one of the New York Times articles accusing Morgenthau of caring more for the Jews. As we learned in “The Burning Tigris,” although author Balakian ingenuously asserted Morgenthau was not a Zionist, the ambassador was under the spell of über-Zionist and hysterical pro-Armenian activist Rabbi Stephen Wise. The ungrateful idea was to knock out history’s greatest pre-USA protector of Judaism, to clear the path for a Jewish homeland... a homeland that could not have gotten started without the Ottomans’ allowance for its roots, in the first place. America’s entry into the war would have guaranteed the defeat of the Sick Man of Europe.
Ambassador Abram Elkus

Abram Elkus -- separated at birth?

Morgenthau’s pre-Bristol successors surely were not going to make radical changes in Morgenthau’s “Hate the Turk” policy, as the bigoted consular network was already well entrenched. The immediate temporary fill-in, U.S. Chargé Hoffman Philip, was likely under the same influences, if he worked under Morgenthau’s wing. We don’t know of the motivations of the official next ambassador, Abram Elkus (who visually appears to have been “separated at birth” with Morgenthau); but he obviously didn’t have the courage or fairness of Admiral Bristol, to look at the picture evenly.


ADDENDUM (06-06)

While it is true Elkus was no Bristol, the above assessment of branding Elkus as a clone of Morgenthau might have been premature. (Aside from the physical resemblance, of course; Elkus also shared Morgenthau's faith and lawyerly occupation.) Joseph Grabill provides clues (in p. 74 of his book) that "Abraham I." Elkus was carefully selected to carry over the outlook of his predecessor. However, as Turkish reporter Recep Guvelioglu put in (in an impressive piece entitled, "Lesser-known facts about the Armenian genocide claims," The New Anatolian, May 16, 2006), and citing Germany, Turkey and Zionism: 1897-1913 (Isaiah Friedman, Oxford, 1977) as reference (a book that appears to corroborate Morgenthau's Zionist intentions, as Guvelioglu puts it: "He thought a British victory would provide the best solution to the Palestine problem and Jewish homeland. He was strongly in favor of U.S. participation in war on the side of Britain for a complete defeat of Turkey"), Elkus is said to have prepared reports and evaluations "very different from those of Morgenthau."

Guvelioglu continues: "Morgenthau was described as a 'charming, but over-emotional, erratic and particularly untactful personality and sometimes acts as a bull in a china store.' ... Elkus was an entirely different personality and had very different political views than Morgenthau. He was described as a quiet but extremely effective diplomat, achieving practical results of far-reaching consequences. He greatly valued good relations between the U.S. and Turkey, and restored them to an excellent relationship which had been in poor shape due to Morgenthau's lack of tact. He was against U.S. participation in the war and strongly opposed a U.S. declaration of war against Turkey and achieved it. Instead of publicity or agitation, he devoted his efforts to provide help to the relocated Armenians."


Dadrian accuses Lowry of pointing to the “few ailing trees — the purported flaws of Morgenthau's book — thereby ignoring the robustness of the forest — the fundamental truth about the extermination of the Ottoman Armenian population.” Is the prosecutor-professor living in a dream world? The forest in its entirety is a black one, with “slander after slander,” as Lowry puts it. The fact that Henry Morgenthau emerges as such an unscrupulous, dishonest character is all we need to know to decide on the worth of this phony book. If he lies constantly, nothing he says can be taken seriously. Perhaps Dadrian cannot understand this concept, since he is another pea in Morgenthau’s deceptive pod. However, the reader can turn to Lowry’s analysis, using as evidence Morgenthau’s own words, and decide.

As an example, Dadrian complains that Morgenthau’s parting words with Talat aren’t evidenced in Morgenthau’s private entries. (Talat says, "We are through with [the Armenians]." Of course, being “through” means the Armenians have been moved out, and the rebellion danger they presented has been averted... in other words, the problem has been solved. However way Morgenthau’s Armenian translator explained this word, assuming Talat actually said such a thing, and whatever other word Morgenthau overlooked to go for a more sinister meaning in the writing of his propagandistic book, Talat surely would not have told Morgenthau that the Armenians were all killed off... even if that were the case.)

With glee, Dadrian points to another account where Talat makes a similar statement to Bernstorff, who happens to be the German ambassador. ('What on earth do you want? The question is settled, there are no more Armenians.') Yet another Christian-sympathizing German, Bernstoff had no idea what was really taking place, like his American ambassadorial counterpart; As George Schreiner wrote in his preface to “The Craft Sinister,” "It is to be hoped that the future historian will not give too much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors.” One future “historian” is Vahakn Dadrian, although we have seen time and again that the sociologist is anything but a historian. A real historian does not cover up the parts that don’t serve his agenda.

One perfect example of Dadrian’s lack of morals is his complete overlooking of Schreiner as the rare, genuine eyewitness of the Armenian convoys. In his book, Schreiner flatly stated there was no extermination policy, and the tragedies that resulted occurred from Ottoman “ineptness.” Dadrian does not like Schreiner’s indictment of Morgenthau, so what does Dadrian do? He presents us with select passages from Schreiner’s books pointing to the suffering of the Armenians.

Genuinely neutral Western eyewitness H.J. Pravitz also recounted terrible Armenian suffering in his own report, but his truth was that there was no extermination policy. ("I have seen dying and dead along the roads — but among hundreds of thousands there must, of course, occur casualties. I have seen childrens' corpses, shredded to pieces by jackals, and pitiful individuals stretch their bony arms with piercing screams of "ekmek" [bread]. But I have never seen direct Turkish assaults against the ones hit by destiny.") Schreiner was the ONLY (yes! The ONLY) American field reporter who witnessed the Ottoman interior in 1915 (Pg. 297, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915"), and he observed terrible suffering. But suffering does not equal genocide; Schreiner's honest testimony that the aim was relocation and not liquidation is one that cannot be ignored.

Forget about the fact that no Turk denies the Armenians suffered, and quite a few died of massacres; even if 1% of 1.5 million as “Le Figaro” figured (from massacres and other deprivations of the marches), that would still be 15,000 too much. If we go with Dadrian’s forest analogy, it is the Armenian prosecutor who neglects the whole, and concentrates on the trees that suit him. Here, the overlying whole from Schreiner is that there was no genocide. How could Dadrian be so wholly devoid of ethics as to try and cover that up?



Conclusion


In this section, Dadrian hopes to have us swallow the notion that the Turks are powerfully influential in the United States. This is not an atypical Armenian tactic. They do the crime, and then point their fingers at the Turks for doing the same.

The fact of the matter is, the Turks are woefully without influence; public relations are their worst point. If the situation were contrary, the Turks would not have the negative image they have today, constantly perpetuated by the hateful and relentless propaganda of Turcophobic groups. Yet, Dadrian informs us that some Turks “are wont to brag that they are ‘the spoiled brats of the Americans!’" (Like who, I wonder.)

Dadrian has it wrong. The Americans don’t grant privileges to the Turks from thin air. American aid generally comes in the form of loans that need to be paid back.

In the rare case when Turkey doesn’t jump to America’s call, as with the Iraqi invasion, suddenly all the many examples of Turkey’s selfless gestures from the past can be forgotten.

A spoiled brat is one who barely lifts a finger to do his bit, and can count on being rewarded regardless. The real spoiled brat are the Armenians. They give nothing to America, but take much in return — thanks to their powerful lobbying organizations like the Armenian Assembly of America, and ANCA. Here’s how Sam Weems described it, in a 2002 interview:

(Championing) Turkish Americans ... are too few and they have little funding to compete against a well-oiled and funded Armenian lobby organization. The Armenians have perhaps 40-50 full time professionals in Washington DC doing nothing but working each and every day to undercut Turkey and Azerbaijan and promote themselves for more foreign aid taxpayer funding. Turkish Americans have -0- staff and office working for them in Washington DC. The Turks really should do more to protect themselves. All they have to do is tell truth! Here is an eye-opening calculation for you:

Armenians, in the last 10 years, have probably spent about 14 million dollars to support all the political candidates that they did. When those candidates got elected, Armenia got 1.4 billion dollars in the same 10 years as US Foreign Aid. That is, for every one dollar Armenian Americans "invested," they got $100 back in US Aid to Armenia! 100 to 1 return!

Dadrian then summons up all his will and tries to submerge his overpowering “Armenian-ness” by briefly waving the American flag. He offers flowery speeches on Jefferson and Lincoln, and reminds us of our nation’s Library of Congress. “Just as libraries are much cherished as fertile grounds for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, so are national archives,” Dadrian says in preparation to sell the nth Armenian genocide resolution before Congress. (He couldn’t sustain his American patriotism for more than a paragraph before reverting to his true passion... Armenia!) He cries the legacy of Thomas Jefferson should be adhered to. “Let the National Archives serve the lofty purpose for which they were created. Let the truth emerge.”







As with “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the Armenian pods have made excellent strides in infiltrating practically every corner of western (and other) societies. The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, for example, claimed a pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population of 1.5 million, the fair norm among “neutral” parties. In 1953, this figure skyrocketed to over 2.5 million. The writer was an Armenian.

National Geographic Magazine came up with a 2004 article on Armenia, where the false 1.5 million mortality claim was repeated., along with other propagandistic claims. An editor of Armenian origin is on the magazine's editorial staff.

Now I’m very proud of the Library of Congress; the Library of Congress should be my nation’s harbinger of truth. So imagine my surprise when I discovered the web site of the Library of Congress repeating the familiar Armenian propaganda:

“...(T)he Ottoman government ordered large-scale roundups, deportations, and systematic torture and murder of Armenians...”

“...Prewar population of about 3 million Armenians...” (That number keeps going up and up!)

“...By 1917 fewer than 200,000 Armenians remained in Turkey...”

"1895: Massacre of 300,000 Armenian subjects by Ottoman Turks."

The Library of Congress has become a hotbed for the worst of Armenian propaganda.

With a little investigation, I learned the man in charge of the appropriate department (the Middle East Division) was one of the pod people, a Dr. Levon Avdoyan. A letter to the head librarian, James Billington, predictably produced no response. Pod people have a tendency to create other pod people.

Billington is so simpatico with the Armenians that he actually besmirched the Library of Congress's good name by co-sponsoring a Sept. 2000 "Armenian Genocide Conference" with... the impossibly partial Armenian National Institute! (This led to the propaganda book, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," edited by pro-genocider Jay Winter. Billington's daughter, Susan Billington Harper, contributed a chapter on a missionary.)

This is the Library of Congress. Anyone pointing to the Library of Congress can expect no second guessing of the information provided there. (Indeed, that’s how I learned about the information; I read a letter from an Armenian saying, SEE! That’s what the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS says. Just like when the missionaries and consuls got their notes together in WWI and their claims substantiated one another. Just like the Armenians and their genocide scholar allies point to each other today. The sinister effect results in what seems to be an overwhelming consensus.

And Vahakn Dadrian wants you to go to these sources to find out the truth. It’s a sad day when one can’t even go to the Library of Congress to let the truth emerge.

To borrow Dadrian's smart-aleck words, the French essayist Montaigne once observed:

no one is exempt from talking nonsense;
the misfortune is to do it solemnly.
- Essays v. III, i.©

Holdwater
tallarmeniantale.com/Dadrian-Zoryan.htm