202) Richard Korn's Flakes, Supporting the "Genocide"

 

 

 

 One of the countless gullible and/or bigoted suckers who got taken by pro-Armenian claims was criminologist-scholar Richard R. Korn. We've all seen detective shows where the investigator looks at every little clue before arriving at conclusions regarding who the killer is. By the way Dr. Korn examined the story behind the Armenian "Genocide," it is shocking that he might have been recognized as an expert in the criminology field. He only took the word of the accuser, and he conducted no independent research whatsoever. (So it would appear — unless his prejudices were so thick, he dismissed the counter-evidence out of hand. That would have made him worse than simply incompetent.)

 

The following analyzes Dr. Korn's rubber stamp "Armenian" conclusions from his article, "Turkey's Genocidal Crime and Silence — Mass-Murder of the Armenian People"; the piece was written for the Institute for the Study of Genocide (at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Genocide-gaga Helen Fein has been the executive director since 1987... she's one of the two "genocide scholars" who threatened “to publicize Microsoft's censorship,� when Microsoft wanted to remove Helen's favorite G-word from her Armenian "genocide" entry written for Encarta. Microsoft backed down, and the episode was unethically publicized anyway..!)
 

 

Dr. Richard Korn (1923-2002)

 

ADDENDUM: Further reading revealed Korn was technically a professor in the Sociology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice... so while my analysis below (written earlier) refers to him as a criminologist (which is what I read elsewhere; for example, once he had taught at Berkeley's School of Criminology) looks like his real claim to fame was in sociology —  just like Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akcam, and so many other pseudo-historian Armenian "genocide" fanciers. (Korn's criminology experience was mainly in the area of penal reform.) He actually co-founded  the Institute for the Study of Genocide in 1984, with Simon Wiesenthal.

 

Prof. Korn seems like he was a pretty good fellow overall, compassionate over the rights of people not always regarded as equal human beings, like the Japanese during his days of fighting in WWII, and American blacks. As a card-carrying liberal, the one "less equal human group" he saved his venom for... in typical liberal fashion... was the Turks. (I, Holdwater, feel more at home with liberal thought... although hypocrisy must be pointed out wherever encountered.)

 

Korn's article may be read at cwis.org/fwj/21/tgc.html

 
  
  

 

All we need to do is look at Dr. Korn's reference section to see how one-sided this so-called scholar was. A real scholar would take a balanced approach, consulting diverse sources, and not simply partisan ones.

 

Richard Korn had a Ph.D. Now we know the value of that; it's admirable for anyone to work hard enough to earn an advanced degree. But the advanced degree in itself does not prove either how smart or how fair a person can be.

 

The problem with these emotional "genocide scholars" is that most do not have their training in history. Korn, as mentioned, was a criminologist.

 

Look at the way he gets his tainted facts wrong.

 

"Under the supervision of the central government, between 800,000 and 1,200,000 Armenians were murdered."
 

 

There is no proof the central government was involved. And an average of one million Armenians couldn't have died if one million survived (as Armenians say), and the pre-war population ranged from 1-1.6 million, according to the bulk of non-Armenian sources. (And some even Armenian.)

 

All the Armenians who died were not "murdered." How naive and silly of the late Dr. Korn to have thought so. The bulk died from the same reasons that claimed their fellow Turks: famine, disease, bad weather, and combat. Ambassador Morgenthau wrote "thousands were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition; I believe that the empire has lost a quarter of its Turkish population since the war started," because every man was needed at the fronts to contain the desperate country from invasion... and few farmers could be spared.

 

 Genocidal Proof!

 

 Did I say there was no proof? Perhaps I spoke too soon... Dr. Korn gives us a Talat Pasha telegram. ("...The Government will regard the feeding of such [Armenian] children or any attempt to prolong their lives as an act entirely opposed to its purpose, since it considers the survival of these children as detrimental.")

 

Yes, the poor "scholar" actually gave credence to the forgeries of Aram Andonian. Is that the kind of painstaking attention he paid while engaging in criminal study, to accept evidence at face value?

 

 

 

Another forged telegram, as pictured above, had Talat Pasha say: "Kill every Armenian woman, child and man without concern for anything." Some fools believed in these faked documents all the way back in 1920, but how could any fool believe in them during contemporary times?

 

 
"Witnesses" Who Never Witnessed 

 

Korn cited the typical "witnesses, including foreign observers and diplomats." None of these people witnessed anything, except dead bodies. Dead bodies covered the landscape of the dying empire, and do not prove a genocide. HOW did these dead bodies become dead... that should be the critical question asked of any good criminologist. Did they die of famine or disease? If they were massacred, who massacred them? Ottoman troops? Or Kurds, Arab bandits, or individual Turks... many who were out for revenge, for what the Armenians had done to their families?

 

The "foreign observers" were mostly missionaries, out of their minds with anti-Turkish prejudice. The same could be said for most of the diplomats, bred with the notion that the Turks were less than human. Some had a propagandistic agenda, like Henry Morgenthau and his consuls... looking to get the USA into the war.

 

He unintelligently tells us the Allies promised to punish the perpetrators, but "In the sordid horse-trading which followed the allied victory, none of these promises were carried out." Of course... how could he have heard of the Malta Tribunal, the "Nuremberg" of WWI? The presumptuous scholar only considered pro-Armenian sources. Fact is, the British tried desperately to convict the 144 Turks they had imprisoned for over two years. They couldn't find any evidence, even with all the Ottoman documents available to them in Allied-occupied Istanbul.. and they had to let every Turk go free, for lack of evidence.

 

Turkey Strongarms the World

 

 Korn gives us only one side of the story of the 1982 Israeli conference, alluding to Turkish pressure to ban the Armenians. Now, what kind of power could Turkey have possibly had to influence Israel, especially before the days of the two countries' current alliance? It was the Israelis who were troubled by the Armenians, and that's why their participation was limited. This was during the heated days of Armenian terrorism, when groups like ASALA were killing people right and left.

 

Korn was appalled at the idea that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights removed a paragraph on the fake genocide, once the Turks and others objected. (The others being Pakistan, Italy, France, Tunisia and the United States. Is Turkey such an all powerful country that it could influence nations such as these? Especially in 1971?)

 

If the paragraph tarnishes the honor of a nation by making a terrible accusation for which there is no proof... did Dr. Korn think the accused party would have had no right to insist on its removal? Anyone would think that goes against one of the basic grains of criminology.

 

Dr. Korn actually goes on to repeat the words Hitler likely never said that is reproduced in just about every Armenian "genocide" article. Embarrassing.

 

We are naively reminded "The Armenian murders were soon to be emulated. By 1933 the Soviet Union had liquidated between 5 and 15 million people in the Ukraine." By the word "emulated," it appears the amateurishly jumping-at-conclusions criminologist preferred for his reader to believe the Soviets were inspired by the Turks' awful example. Did the biased "scholar" bother to look into the 5 million Turks/Muslims who were expulsed by Tsarist Russia and the 5.5 million who were slaughtered... well before and including the WWI years? A good criminologist should study events of the past, in order to come up with studied conclusions.

 

He really shows his ignorance when he writes, "Up to the time of Turkey's genocidal crimes against Armenians, the lower limit of state-perpetrated atrocity was defined by occasional massacres and pogroms." Incredible.

 

What about the crimes of his own nation, the United States? Perhaps from 200,000 to 500,000 Filipino civilians (not soldiers) were wiped out when the USA was occupying the Philippines, a few years before "1915." (In all likelihood, making this episode the first genocide of the 20th century... negating the claim pro-Armenians love to put forth as their "genocide" being the first.) Many Filipinos believe up to a million of their people were murdered.
 

 

"KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN"

 

All you say about the Philippines, the conflict there between the Americans, military and civil, and the pig headedness of the military and their habits of setting "bulldogs to catch rabbits" is immensely cheering to me, because it is precisely what we are doing in South Africa. --Rudyard Kipling

 

And look at this utterly simplistic and shameless conclusion:

 

"It was Turkey's acts of genocide which made the Holocaust thinkable and morally possible."

 

Quite the contrary, the Germans had already been on record before 1915 with their tendency to mass murder. Another "genocide of the 20th century" that preceded 1915 was when German colonialists rubbed out perhaps 70% of the Herero people, in southwest Africa.

 

WHICH GENOCIDE INSPIRED THE GREEKS?

 

When George Horton, Christian missionary in Smyrna and a Turcophobe of no small distinction (author of “The Blight of Asia�), asked a Greek about reports of wholesale massacres carried out by Greeks against Turks in Western Anatolia during 1921-22, the answer that he got was that Greek actions were modeled after the punitive expeditions carried out by U.S. forces in the Philippines between 1899-1905. (Horton, George “The Blight of Asia� 1926. reprint Sterndale Classics, London. 2003. p 60.)

 

Nick's essay, "Telling a Good Story"

 

If the "Armenian Genocide" inspired the Holocaust as Dr. Korn ridiculously asserts, why didn't it inspire the Greeks? Particularly since the "Armenian Genocide" was so much fresher in memory and close to the Greeks' part of the world, in 1921?

 

Korn then attempts to give credence to a 1984 "Tribunal" where the jury consisted of characters such as Richard Hovannisian, Gerald Libaridian, Christopher Walker, Tessa Hoffman and several Armenian survivors. I'm sure Judge Roy Bean would have been envious with the objectivity demonstrated by that particular "court."

 

Unfortunately, misled and prejudiced people like the late Richard Korn are the rule in this debate, stemming from the pro-Armenian perspective. And not the exception.

 

He will forever remain on record with his embarrassingly simplistic and defamatory observations, once the world comes to accept the real truth of this equation. The truth always has a way of prevailing.

 

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© Holdwater 

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