418) Sir Martin Gilbert: In the Armenians' Corner

Sir Martin Gilbert is known as a biographer of Winston Churchill; his web site tells us he has written some 75 books. A good chunk of these are Holocaust (9 books) and genocide-related. Here we have another genocide-centric scholar who has completely accepted at face value the Armenian Genocide Industry's claims. . . .

He participated in a 2000 "Armenian Genocide" conference co-sponsored by the Armenian National Institute, and the result became a 2003 book entitled, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," edited by Jay Winter — who had already established himself in the Armenians' corner, with the PBS production, The Great War. Let's examine the caliber of his work.


"Twentieth-century genocides"

Already we run into trouble as Sir Gilbert designates a few "genocide personalities" as "pioneer scholars who have shown just how widespread the barbarism of governments can be." He cites, for example, Israel Charny. Charny is a self-appointed "genocide scholar" who has not written any major works. The psychotherapist's publication list shows mainly volumes that he has edited. Why Sir Gilbert would want to include this putative scholar as one to be respected sheds light on Sir Gilbert's own academic values. (See "Revealing the true identity of the sham 'genocide expert' Dr. Israel Charny," written by a fellow Israeli, on this page.)


Israel Charny

Sir Gilbert arrives at the conclusion that "Ottoman Turkey had already, in 1894 and 1895, massacred 100,000 Armenians," and reminds us (as if the Western-provided nickname should serve as evidence) that the sultan in power was universally known as "Abdul the Damned." At least Sir Gilbert didn't go totally overboard with the numbers (but he left out 1896), as does Vahakn Dadrian, who gave a count of 250,000 in a recent interview (in this book's collection, Dadrian has a chapter where he cites 150,000-200,000, following the Armenian genocide principle that "numbers are not important" for Armenians who love to provide figures dependent on where the wind blows; the real casualty rate of the late 1890s hovered around 20,000). No word whatsoever on the fact that the Armenians and Turks got along harmoniously in previous centuries, and the reasons for these "massacres" stemmed from Armenian terror groups massacring Muslims (5,000 were killed, lives that no one cares about), in order to invite European imperialists in to give the Armenians free hand-outs. As Kamuran Gurun wrote in The Armenian File, "it would be fair... to remember how many people lost their lives in rebellions or disorders in their own or other countries, and think how much right they have to use the term massacre."

Yet, Sir Gilbert has no compunction in using the term massacre to describe the cause of death of of his inflated number of Armenians. We are beginning to learn how "fair" Sir Gilbert is.

We will soon learn how "competent" Sir Gilbert is, as a scholar. Ignoring the other side of the story is the kiss of death for any valid historian.


Sir Martin Gilbert

Gilbert provides an account of Kurds murdering 60-400 Armenians, and how Armenians in a church were burned by Turkish troops. His footnote is from his own book (as are many of the others), A History of the Twentieth Century, 1900-1933, vol. I. Perhaps Gilbert relied on a report by British Vice-Consul (he makes reference to this consul in the text), but (if this is the case) relying exclusively on one source does not make for a good historian. Particularly when the British were in their post Gladstone "Hate the Turk" phase. In addition, he irresponsibly portrays the Kurds and Turks as brutes who murdered Armenians for no reason... based on a hatred that suddently evolved out of nowhere, after centuries of peaceful co-existence. He provides no word on the violent actions of fellows like this man.

Let's reproduce what Gilbert has written about other examples of inhumanity (pp. 10-13):

Thus the century began, and the fate of the Armenians was at its core. In the hundred years ahead, not only war, but racist, genocidal impulses that sometimes hide in the fog of war, were to be the grim counters to progress in the medical, technological, and environmental sciences, and the civilizing influences of the arts. It was only a narrow line between hatreds which generate war and the killing of soldiers and civilians, and genocides which set out to destroy a whole race. Also in 1900, in an attempt to weaken the Boer guerrilla movement in South Africa, the British Government seized thousands of women and children and forced them into what were called, at that time, "concentration camps." The idea was not to exterminate the Boer people, but to cut the fighting soldiers off from their homes and isolate them to the point of despair. Seventeen concentration camps were established. They had little food and almost no medical facilities. A further thirty-five camps were set up for Black Africans who worked on the farms of the absent fighters, so that they too would be unable to plough, or harvest crops, or look after livestock.

The death toll in the camps was high. A British woman, Emily Hobhouse, who visited the camps, wrote:

I began to compare a parish I had known at home of two thousand people, where a funeral was an event - and usually of an old person. Here some twenty to twenty- five were carried away daily . . . The full realisation of the position dawned on me - it was a death rate such as had never been known except in the times of the Great Plagues . . . The whole talk was of death - who died yesterday, who lay dying today, who would be dead tomorrow.3

Returning to Britain, Emily Hobhouse led a campaign against the camps, which were forcefully denounced by the Liberal Party leader. Henry Campbell-Bannerman. "When is a war not a war?" he asked, and gave die answer: "When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa."4 The British Government quickly instituted improvements, and the death rate fell. The final toll, however, was far higher than that of ±e battlefield: 28,000 Boer women and children died in the camps, and more than 50,000 Africans.5

The cruelty of the concentration camps in South Africa was certainly barbarism, but it was not genocide. (Emphasis Holdwater's.) The Boers and British signed a peace treaty in 1902 and the Boers flourished — so much so that within fifty years they were imposing their own tyrannical apartheid ideology on the Black African majority.

Elsewhere in southern Africa a more sustained attempt to destroy a whole people took place in that same first decade of the twentieth century in German-ruled South-West Africa (now Namibia), where the local people — the Hereros — found their land and livelihood taken away by a group of German colonists, less than 5,000 in all, who had been acquiring land with what the German colonial department itself described as "fraud and extortion."6 The Hereros rose in revolt. In the punitive expedition launched against them, thousands were killed. When news of the severity of the punitive measures reached Europe, there was widespread indignation, including in the German Parliament, that such savage destruction had been inflicted by a colonial power. The Herero people survived; so too does their folk memory of the cruelties inflicted on them. The fierceness of colonial reaction to local "native" rebellion was often fuelled by racial, dehumanizing animosities — hatred, scorn, contempt — that could certainly be described as genocidal. In the Dutch East Indies nearly 1,000 local women and children were killed when the Dutch suppressed a rebellion there in 1904. There was indignation in Holland at what had happened, not only amongst the socialist Opposition, but also within the government. One member of the governing party declared the Dutch soldiers had behaved like "Huns and Tatars" massacring the women and children for the commercial ends of mining and oil exploration.7

Since May 1903 news of a reign of terror in the Belgian Congo was reaching Europe as a result of the efforts of Edmund Morel, a shipping clerk in Liverpool. Morel published graphic accounts of atrocities which arose out of the system of forced labor which was imposed by the Belgian authorities — under the direct rule of King Leopold — on the local inhabitants.8 What he described had all the hallmarks of genocide: Belgian punitive expeditions which, on their return to base, brought baskets of human hands as proof of their ruthlessness.

Nine months after Morel's first published exposure of the crimes, Roger Casement, the British Consul in the Belgian Congo, sent an eye-witness report of Congolese women and children chained in sheds as hostages, and men beaten up for failure to produce sufficient rubber at collection points. He wrote of mass executions, and terrible mutilations inflicted on the natives by white officials. Casement estimated that as many as 3 million native Congolese had died of disease, torture, or shooting during the previous fifteen years. A Congolese soldier who was sent to get rubber, and had to open fire to do so, had to bring back a right hand for every bullet he expended. At one rubber collection site, Casement reported, the soldiers had used 6,000 cartridges, "which means," he noted, "that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated; it means more than 6,000 — for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns."9

As news of the Congolese atrocities spread. President Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Joseph Conrad were among those who protested.10 It was only after two years of international protests, how- ever, that the Belgian Parliament debated the situation in the Congo, and another two years until Leopold agreed to hand over his personal control of the Congo to the Belgian Parliament. The atrocities ceased. International protest had prevailed, though long after the initial cruelties were made known.

Within the Russian Empire, the fires of political and national dissent that had been lit at the beginning of 1905 continued to smolder and burst into flame. In the Armenian provinces of Russia, where resentment against Russian anti-minority policies had been smoldering for most of the year, the conflict was made all the more bloody when, in September, Azeris (a Muslim people then indentified as Tatars) attacked Armenian homes in Baku, Tiflis, and Erevan. Fearing Armenian national ambitions, and noting that the Armenians had been joined in their protest in Baku by Russian revolutionaries, the Tsarist authorities took the side of the Tatars. For their part, the Tatars raised the green banner of Islam and proclaimed a Holy War against the Armenians. Hundreds of Armenians were killed, and dozens of Armenian villages destroyed.11

In 1906 it was the turn of the British Government, then a Liberal government — led by those who had condemned the "methods of barbarism" in South Africa six years earlier — to suppress a Zulu revolt in southern Africa with great severity. More than 3,000 Zulus were killed.12 A racist attitude of mind underlay the brutality of the action, which amounted to an exercise in extermination. That same genocidal potential was in evidence a mere three years later, in 1909, when 20,000 Armenians living in Adana and Tarsus, in southern Anatolia, were massacred by the Turks.

There were episodes during which Armenian men, women, and chil- dren were forced into churches, which were then set on fire: those who tried to run out were shot dead by armed Turkish soldiers.13 Thirty years later, in September 1939, in German-occupied Poland, Jews were driven into synagogues which were then similarly set alight — the SS then shooting dead those who broke out.14


2 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, pp. 31-2.
3 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 38.
4 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, pp. 38-9.
5 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 39.
6 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 99.
7 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 100.
8 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 94.
9 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, pp. 94-5.
10 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 95.
11 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, I, pp. 112-13.
12 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 131.
13 Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63-4.
14 Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1989) p. 7.


What a nice outline of some (but not all, by a long shot) 20th century tragedies preceding the Armenians' tale. Thanks, Sir Gilbert, for reminding us the Armenians' often-heard claim of being "The First Holocaust of the 20th Century" is a lie. It's too bad Sir did not gather a clue here, as to the validity of the rest of the Armenians' claims. (But he may be beyond hope. In the only non-Gilbert footnote provided above, he stakes his reliance on the hearsay of Armenian Oral History.)

Whenever there is a conflict between Armenians and Muslims, Sir Gilbert will treat the Armenians as poor, innocent victims. Note how he makes the Azeris the aggressors. Yet even Armenian sources give evidence to the contrary:

In the Armenian-Tartar War of 1905 the Armenians had much the better of the fighting. Many of our men had served in the Russian Army, and were trained soldiers. We Armenians were rich and possessed arms. The Tartars had never received military training. They were poor, and possessed few arms beyond knives.

(Ohanus Appressian, Armenian soldier who documented one of the "genocides" Sir Gilbert conveniently left out, that of the systematic extermination of Turkic Azeris and other Muslims [in the Republic of Armenia, during post WWI], as told in Men Are Like That, 1926; this was regarded as "an appropriate analogy to the Jewish Holocaust" by a writer in the June 21, 1990 issue of The Jewish Times.)

Since Sir Gilbert reminds us of the travesty committed upon the Congolese, we must wonder if Adolf Hitler actually uttered his famed quote, why he did not say, Who today remembers the extermination of the Congolese? Imagine... a toll of 10 million (plus countless mutilated) at the hands of one of the many European imperialists, and the talk today is on the falsified "genocide" of a people who know how to shriek loudly, are white, wealthy and Christian.

What industry could be more hypocritical than the genocide industry? Only the victims deemed "worthy" are highlighted, and the ones who suffered greater catastrophes are only given reluctant lip service.

To showcase the hypocrisy of Sir Gilbert himself, let's compare the details of the Boer War that he provides, to the Armenian experience:


Oscanyan in 1863

1) The Boer people rebelled to escape the British yoke. Ottoman-Armenians too rebelled to escape the "Turkish yoke," as we are often told. (But the real reason was Armenian greed for land, hoping to cash in on the fortunes of Orthodox cousins in the Balkans; the fact is, Armenians never prospered in their history as much as they did under the Turks. As H. Oscanyan wrote [The Sultan and His People, 1857]: "[The Armenian) community constitutes the very life of Turkey, ... there exists a congeniality and community of interest between them and the Musulmans."])

2) The British put the families of the Boers into concentration camps, to isolate the fighters. The Turks had a much better reason to move the families of the Armenians who had rebelled (and those innocent ones who were caught in the middle, in a desperate time when friend could not be told from foe): the existence of the nation was at stake, fighting a world war on multiple fronts against superpower enemies who were designing to eliminate the Turkish nation.

3) Poor planning and a lack for humanistic concerns allowed many Boers to starve and suffer. Poor planning, chaos of war and the shortage of manpower and resources allowed many Armenians to starve and suffer. In the case of the latter, the bulk of the relocated Armenians still survived, 500,000 by the count of Morgenthau (Sept. 1915) and Toynbee (early-to-mid 1916).

One of these, Sir Gilbert is quick to brand as genocide, completely concentrating on pro-Armenian sources. The other, coincidentally the actions of his own nation, Sir Gilbert tells us "was not genocide."


Sir Gilbert delves into familiar propagandistic territory:

With Russia at war with Turkey since October 1914, the large Armenian Christian population in Anatolia, which had long been denied any national rights by the Turks, hoped against hope that a Russian victory over Turkey might lead to the recognition of Armenian national aspirations. The Russians tried to woo the Armenians. On 30 December 1914 the Tsar, on a visit to the Caucasus front, declared: "a most brilliant future awaits the Armenians."15 As Russian troops pushed deeper and deeper into eastern Turkey, the Turks accused the Armenians of being secretly and even actively loyal to Russia. Starting on 8 April 1915, Armenians throughout Anatolia were attacked and massacred. Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman army, who had already been segregated into unarmed labor battalions, were taken out of their battalions in small groups, and killed.16

15 Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), p. 108.
16 Gilbert, Twentieth Century, vol. I, p. 356.

Russia declared war in November 1914, when the Ottoman-Armenians were primed to attack their country immediately.

"Long been denied any national rights by the Turks" Sir Gilbert is making music to the Armenian hosts of his conference, who love to think that the Armenians were no more than slaves. Yet, as soon as the Armenians were freed from the harsh rule of their co-religionist Byzantine rulers, their lot became incomparably better.

How odd that the "historian" Sir Gilbert appears to have no idea that the Armenian millet had been granted a landless autonomy, according to even Richard Hovannisian... leading to the preservation of their "national" language, religion, overall "racial purity" and culture since the end of the 11th century. (Compare with the "national rights" of Hawaiians, after a mere century of U.S. rule.) Generally, the prosperous Armenians lived better lives than their Muslim counterparts. The Armenians kept getting more rights, marked especially by the Imperial Reform Edict of February 18, 1856, granting legal equality between Ottoman Muslims and Christians. Almost all areas of Ottoman society were open to Armenians, even to the extent of serving in government. The gap kept narrowing until the Young Turks' decree of 1909. The trouble was foreign interference and Armenian greed; greater freedoms meant greater ease for treacherous Armenians to work against the interests of the state.

Leon Surmelian demonstrates how wholeheartedly everyday Armenians were in support of the Russians, in "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen." (It's a matter of irrefutable record the Armenians rebelled against their government; leader Boghos Nubar stated plainly the Armenians were "belligerents de facto." Why does Sir Gilbert amateurishly phrase this historic fact in a manner that makes his reader think this conclusion was a flight of fancy in the minds of the Turks? "The Turks accused the Armenians of being secretly and even actively loyal to Russia.")

"Starting on 8 April 1915, Armenians throughout Anatolia were attacked and massacred." Horrible. Sir Gilbert should be ashamed for his irresponsible and propagandistic documentation. According to him, the Terrible Turks conducted themselves in the manner that Turks know best, go about a murderous spree simply on suspicion that the Armenians might have done something wrong. What a racist attitude.

The fact of the matter was that Armenians were rebelling throughout the Empire, beginning as soon as Russia had declared war in November 1914. There were a whole list of "disturbances" caused by Armenians that the tolerant Turks tried to overlook before deciding on the resettlement policy.

As for the Armenians in the army... here was a desperate life or death struggle where every man was needed to ward off the invading superpowers, particularly mortal enemy Russia. Would it make sense to draft these much needed Ottomans into the army, arm them and train them, only to take their weapons away? The reason why this action was necessary was because the treacherous Armenians deserted in large numbers with their arms to the side of the enemy, and those who remained fired blanks and resorted to other acts of betrayal. (Of course there were "good" Armenians among them, just as with the civilians who were relocated. But the actions of the traitors ruined it for everyone, during a most dangerous period for the country.) And yes, some Armenians were killed. Not to be admired, but this is called "human nature," and no human of any nation is above taking action against those who are regarded as traitors, particularly when the survival of the nation is at stake. But if Gilbert is presenting the notion that these soldiers were all killed as a matter of policy, he is showing real propagandistic stripes.

During the last two months quite a number of Armenian soldiers have been brought back in groups of two or three hundred from Erzurum. They have arrived in a most pitiable state due to their exposure on the way at this season of the year and in the privations they had suffered.

Leslie Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, p. 181. (Davis was a U.S. consul in Harput. Quite a distance the Ottomans had these soldiers travel, if the idea was to knock them all off. [Another hostile witness, this missionary also relates the transfer of large numbers of Armenian troops into Sivas, the center of Anatolia.] As far as the "pitiable state," let's not make the usual mistake of only concentrating on the Armenians' woes; the Turkish soldiers were not having any picnics.)


"Underfed, misused, paid but little and that rarely, ragged and dirty, these Turkish troops were as wretched in their liberty as we were in our captivity."

Harold Armstrong, British POW, “Turkey in Travail,� 1925, p. 23

"Even before the war many Turkish troops had been in the most wretched condition. In 1916 some were fighting with ‘no overcoats and no boots’..."

Akaby Nassibian, “Britain and the Armenian Question, 1915-1923,� 1984, p. 121

"...[E]ven the Moslems suffered. I felt sorry for these recruits. They were such a miserable, submissive lot, just resigned to their kismet. They never joked or laughed. Some of them were barefooted. They lived on bean soup and brown bread, but the soup was like dishwater, and lucky was the man who fished out a bean. They were starving."

Leon Surmelian, "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen," 1945, pp. 74-5.

“The Turkish soldier...was not protected from heat and cold, nor from sickness.�

Dr. C. D. Ussher, American ABCFM missionary and physician in Van, whose memoirs were the basis for the film, ARARAT



Sir Gilbert enlists the aid of a favorite Armenian guru:

Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador in Constantinople, himself a Jew, reported to Washington on the atrocities which took place between 15 April and 20 April. His report reveals an intensity of terror with which students of the fate of the Jews a quarter of a century later will be familiar:


Morgenthau

The Turks' army turned aside and invaded their own territory of Van. Instead of fighting the trained Russian army of men, they turned their rifles, machine guns, and other weapons upon the Armenian women, children, and old men in the villages of Van. Following their usual custom, they distributed the most beautiful Armenian women among the Moslems, sacked and burned the Armenian villages, and massacred uninterruptedly for days.

On April 15, about 500 young Armenian men of Akantz were mustered to hear an order of the Sultan; at sunset they were marched outside the town and every man shot in cold blood. This procedure was repeated in about eighty Armenian villages in the district north of Lake Van, and in three days 24,000 Armenians were murdered in this atrocious fashion.17

Djevdet Bey, Governor of Van, then demanded 4,000 Armenian men from the city of Van to serve in the Turkish army. Believing this was an attempt to deny the Armenians of Van their only means of self-defense, the Armenians refused. Morgenthau's report continued:

On April 20, a band of Turkish soldiers seized several Armenian women who were entering the city, a couple of Armenians ran to their assistance and were shot dead. The Turks now opened fire on the Armenian quarters with rifles and artillery, soon a large part of the town was in flames and a regular siege had started. The whole Armenian fighting force consisted of only 1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and a most inadequate supply of ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of 5,000 men, completely equipped and supplied.18

17 Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, p. 297.
18 Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, p. 297.

Uncanny! What true historian would resort to the propagandistic poppycock of Ambassador Morgenthau's Story?

Morgenthau (aside from a trip to Palestine he relates in his "Story" book) never left the environs of Istanbul. He relied on his information from consuls, who similarly never served as eyewitnesses (other than seeing some dead, and not seeing how they died and [in the case of murdered victims] by whose hand, as with Leslie Davis). These parties got all their information from biased missionaries and often-deceitful Armenians. Morgenthau relied on Armenian translators, who frequently distorted the translating for their cause, as did Morgenthau's consuls. Morgenthau the Zionist hoped to get America to war against the Ottomans, to better carve a path for a Jewish homeland.

Note all the typical propagandistic nonsense that Gilbert is unbelievably presenting as actual fact. The Russians are at the gate, and whatever was left of the Turkish forces (after the Sarikamish disaster, not helped by the many thousands of Ottoman-Armenian soldiers who were counted on but did not show up) were going to take time out to conduct an extermination campaign? They were naturally going to pass around the Armenian women amongst themselves, manna to influence Christian sympathizers in the USA.

"Turks are vastly more moral respecting women than Europeans."

Mormon Missionary Tanner, also observing that the Turks "are the most honest and moral of the Orientals." From his "Who Can be So Polite and Courteous As a Turk,� 1886. (And this doesn't mean there weren't bad Turkish men who were incapable of committing crimes against women; humans of every stripe have both their devils and angels. The point here is that as a rule, the upbringing of the Turks disallowed them from showing discourtesy toward women and children. The opposite of what racist pro-Armenian propaganda would have us believe, that Turkish men were genetically predisposed to brutally ravage.)

It's maddening that Gilbert would perpetuate the terrible lie of poor, helpless Armenians trying to hold off a superior Turkish force (300 rifles against 5,000 men; sounds like this other nutty story printed in the newspaper of Morgenthau's pal, Adolph Ochs); the Armenians were the ones with the sophisticated weaponry, against the rusty rifles of whatever few Turkish men were left behind to use them. It was the weaponry-stockpiling Armenians of Van who could afford the very best... chiefly Mauser pistols and rifles that worked like machine guns. In contrast, weapons provided by the Turkish government were basic old-fashioned rifles, so primitive they would explode after only a few shots. The local Muslims also had limited ammunition.

The real scoop is presented by Cevdet Bey's April 24 telegram to the Ministry of the Interior (Four days after Morgenthau's phony account, above):

"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?"

Note that on the Armenians' "Date of Doom," the only "deportation" in mind was the relocation of the Turks themselves.

Perhaps this telegram is where "historian" Gilbert got the 4,000 figure (differing from what is below) that he wrote was demanded of the Armenians by the Van governor. Gilbert tells us Believing this was an attempt to deny the Armenians of Van their only means of self-defense, the Armenians refused. Putting aside the notion that conscription into the army of one's nation is not generally a matter of choice, let's straighten out Gilbert's propaganda: it was the Van Armenians who were the aggressors, and "self defense" was not a consideration. Prof. Turkkaya Ataov relied on an Armenian source (La Défense héroïque de Van, p. 4.), while explaining another reason behind this denial of troops:

[A]n Armenian book, printed in the war years, honestly admitted that people "contracted diseases in the trenches" (...maladie contractée dans les tranchées...). The Armenians had then refused, according to the same source, to give Cevdet Bey, the Governor of Van, the 3,000 soldiers whom he had asked from them, one of the reasons being fear that they might die of epidemics. The reference in the title of the book above (namely, “the heroic defence of Van�), by the way, actually concerns the successful attempt of the Armenians, as Ottoman citizens, to seize that strategic town and hand it over to joint control with the invading Russian forces.

Gilbert writes: "There was one brief moment of respite for the Armenians, when Russian forces reached the besieged town of Van, and rescued those Armenians who had been trapped there under Turkish bombardment for thirty days." (Hoo-boy.) He continues: "...the killings went on. In Bitlis, 15,000 Armenian civilians were killed in eight days. In the Black Sea port of Trebizond, in the course of a two-week orgy of destruction, an estimated 15,000 Turkish troops murdered all but 100 of the 17,000 Armenian inhabitants of the town. The Italian Consul-General was an eye-witness to the terrors of Trebizond..."

C.F. Dixon-Johnson's 1916 "The Armenians," a source as legitimate as they come (a Briton daring to deviate during wartime) exposed the lies of the Italian consul, who, according to Lord Bryce, "saw (the Trabzon drownings of 8-10,000 Armenians) done with his own eyes." The account of the same event, as given in the Messagero of Rome, is "entirely different, the (Italian) Consul (Signor Corrini) being made to say that the banishment of Armenians under escort, and wholesale shootings in the streets, continued for a whole month, while there is nothing about the Armenians having been shipped out to sea and drowned en masse in one afternoon."

In 1916, Dixon-Johnson called the Signor's story "preposterous." In 2000, Sir Martin Gilbert tried to pass the story on as "fact." If there are better shortcuts to ruin a scholar's credibility, it's hard to think of any.

Sir Martin Gilbert does not miss a beat in his perpetuation of Armenian propaganda, by telling us the 235 Armenian leaders arrested on April 24 were all put to death. There was a rebellion throughout the country; such a rebellion needed to be led by leaders. While no doubt innocents were among those accused, the majority of these arrested were ringleaders of the rebellion. (Accordng to the Autumn 1960 Armenian Review's article on assassin Soghoman Tehlirian, Harootyoun Mugurditchian ratted them out; Tehlirian murdered the "traitor.") The accused were sent to prison, and some were executed, as any nation would have done with wartime traitors. Peter Balakian gives evidence of some survivors in his "Burning Tigris," like a relative priest who "escaped." (This is the one who earns the nickname, the Action Priest.) The famed Armenian musician, Komitas, was released after two weeks.

Gilbert then reminds us that The British, French, and Russian Governments, each of them at war with Turkey, issued a joint public denunciation, on 24 May 1915, of the Turkish "mass murders" of the Armenians, describing the killings as "a crime against humanity and civilization," without bothering to tell us it suited the purpose of these governments to take the heat off Russia's treatment of Polish/Lithuanian Jews and to come up with a better monster to influence American opinion. Gilbert also fails to mention each of these governments had secret treaties to divvy up the Ottoman nation between themselves, and what better justification than to accuse their enemy of a terrible crime? If he were fair, Gilbert would also have covered the fact that none of these Entente nations held the moral high ground, their histories awash in blood at the expense of conquered peoples. But what can we expect from a "historian" who can't even get the name of a country correct? (Of course, the Ottoman Empire was called "Turkey" informally, at the time. When a historian writes a scholarly piece, however, it's time to get formal; the Soviet Union was also informally called "Russia," but no historian writing about the Soviet Union would be caught dead calling it "Russia." What unethical "genocide scholars" attempt to do with this "error," of course, is to try and link the actions of the Ottoman Empire with today's Turkey.)


Estimates of the Ottoman-Armenian population

Nobody is surprised in the audience when Gilbert labels the weasely Prosecutor Vahakn Dadrian as an "eminent scholar" (I suppose Gilbert must admire Dadrian's methods of focusing only on one side of a story; Gilbert has done a pretty good Dadrian-style presentation of "history" himself). He contends that in April and November 1915 more than 600,000 Armenian men, women, and children were murdered (fact: there were around 1.5 million pre-war Ottoman Armenians. Fact: even Dadrian signed his name to a proclamation, agreeing one million survived. Gilbert is invited to do the subtraction); to back up his claim, he gives us another example of hearsay-ridden Armenian Oral History.

Further, Gilbert steams ahead with: More than half a million Armenians were deported by the Turks southward to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Of these deportees only 90,000 survived repeated attacks by the Turks, beatings, and executions, as they were driven southward. (Yet even Toynbee and Morgenthau are on record for believing 500,000 were alive, by April 1916 ["Treatment of Armenians..."], in the former's case; Morgenthau was also quoted [by Vahan Cardashian, in a March 3, 1916 letter to Lord Bryce] as saying Armenians were found in good numbers in almost all the interior cities of Turkey, and that the attitude of the Government was passive. [The Armenian Review, Winter 1957, p. 107.]) Gilbert also tells us 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam, giving his Twentieth Century book as a source. There were no forcible conversions; if such were Ottoman policy, all of the Balkans would have been Islamic today. Many Armenians converted voluntarily, in hopes of getting exempted from the relocation policy. Many discovered the government did not fall for the ploy.

The man is simply out of control.

Here is a passage I found interesting:

One eye-witness to the terrible suffering of the Armenian deportees was 25-year-old Jewish woman, Sarah Aaronsohn — a member of a Jewish espionage group working for the British against the Turks — who had set out from Constantinople to her home in Palestine, and traveled that December through the Taurus mountains to Aleppo. Her biographer, Anita Engle, has written:

She saw vultures hovering over children who had fallen dead by the roadside. She saw beings crawling along, maimed, starving and begging for bread. From time to time she passed soldiers driving before them with whips and rifle-butts whole families, men, women and children, shrieking, pleading, wailing. These were the Armenian people setting out for exile in the desert from which there was no return. (The NIli Spies, 1959, p. 62)

Whole families! Thanks, Sarah, for putting to rest the Armenian propagandistic notion that all the Armenian men were all killed.

We are aware by now that most resettled Armenians had a terrible time, and quite a number died. This is the tragedy the Armenians suffered... a tragedy they could have avoided if they did not listen to their greedy, fanatical revolutionary leaders. When one decides to become belligerents de facto, there will be unpleasant consequences. Unfortunately, the innocent also would get caught up in this tragedy, but nobody said war was fair.

Once again, we hear only about the Armenian suffering. Gilbert's favored witness, Ambassador Morgenthau, also wrote in his "Story" book that thousands of Turks were dying daily of starvation, estimating an entire quarter of the Turkish population died as a result.

As far as the reliability of the above, were there soldiers who mistreated these civilians? Undoubtedly; "law enforcement officers" are known for their heavy-handed ways in any country. Here is a rare, genuinely neutral witness (the 25-year-old lady in this story was not neutral; like the Armenians, she worked against her nation) who wrote, "I sure got to view misery, but planned cruelties? Absolutely nothing."

"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. A single time I saw a Turkish gendarme in passing hit a couple of slow moving people with his whip; but similar things have happened to me in Russia, without me complaining, not then, nor later."

Note how both bore witness to similar scenes. Yet in one, the implication is intended cruelty; the other is steeped in reality, and reason.

Any "witness" who uses the sympathy-evoking term "desert" is already suspect. The fact is, the Armenians were transported to regions known as "The Fertile Crescent."

Ottoman Jews were the one millet who remained loyal. In an emotional encounter, one summed it up:

"The Ottoman dynasty is the saviour of Turkish Jews. When our ancestors were driven out of Spain, and looked for a country to take them in, it was the Ottomans who agreed to give us shelter and saved us from extinction. Through the generosity of their government, once again they received freedom of religion and language, protection for their women, their possessions and their lives. Therefore our conscience obliges to serve you as much as we can in your darkest hour."

That is how the Armenians should have felt (and of course, some did feel that way) and why apologists for the Armenians, like Sir Martin Gilbert, deserve to be exposed for their shoddy scholarship. With the Jews, there were those who behaved abominably, such as Ambassador Morgenthau: dishonoring the one nation that was probably the most pure-hearted defender of Judaism throughout history. However, the few Ottoman-Jews who betrayed their nation, for the same Zionist principles, cannot be condemned enough... and their claims would need to be taken with a grain of salt, since they were working for the overthrow of their nation. The testimony of traitors like Sarah Aaronsohn must only be held credible by people who write propaganda, such as Sir Martin Gilbert. (And let's not forget this testimony comes second-hand, through a biographer. We are further informed that Sarah Aaronsohn was "Captured by the Turks two years later... taken to Damascus, tortured, and took her own life to avoid betraying her companions." Source: Gilbert's "The First World War.")

Gilbert continues with his shamefully one-sided reportage by telling us, "In 1920 more than 30,000 Armenians were killed in Cilicia." (His sources: "The Lions of Marash, 1973," and "La Passions de la Cilicie 1919-1922," 1954) Once again, the notion that the poor, helpless Armenians were viciously murdered. What really happened was:

About 120,000 Armenian settlers were brought to Cilicia during these years, in addition to the 50,000 who came from Istanbul and elsewhere in Anatolia to Antep, Marash and Zeytun, all for the purpose of establishing an Armenian state in Cilicia under the permanent protection of France. The Armenian legion went out of control, just as Russian officers discovered to their horror (with out-of-control Armenians under Russian command) in eastern Anatolia.

With the occupation of Cilicia by the légionnaires the local Muslims soon found themselves in a state of lawlessness under the French rule. While the French officers witnessed massacres caused by their légionnaires, Gautherot went on to describe a horrific event that occurred in February of 1919. In a summary the following event occurred: “About one hundred Armenian légionnaires left their quarters for the city without any orders from their French commanders. They set up posts where they were stopping the civilians and asking them about ‘their religion and their papers.’ Subsequently the first Muslim was killed on the spot just for being a Muslim. Then these men went on a rampage of creating anarchy among the local Muslim inhabitants. Many, including women and children, were killed without provocation.

Once again, the Armenians commit their terrible crimes. They act, and the Muslims react. And once again, unethical or ignorant, biased scholars only report the damage done to the poor, helpless Armenians. It's sickening.

Gilbert also tells us:

In the early months of 1918... several former Russian imperial cities fell to the advancing Turkish army, among them towns with large Armenian populations: Ardahan, Ardanuj, Kars, Erevan, and Baku. During this Turkish military advance, 400,000 Armenians were killed. (Source: Gilbert's "Twentieth Century.")

400,000! So many Armenians were killed, it's a wonder how their worldwide population mushroomed from a pre-war 3 million to around 7 million today.

(Gilbert actually goes on to claim 7 million was... the pre-war worldwide population!! Indeed, the 1.5 million in the empire, the 1.1 million or so in Russia, and the half-million or so in the rest of the world must have added up to Gilbert's incredible figure. Even the Armenian historian Pastermadjian, son of terrorist Armen Garo, did not dare to climb so skyward, settling at 4.1 million.)


Sir Martin Gilbert

This "historian," I fear, relied on the same biased sources as his fellow genocide scholars, like Rudy Rummel. For example, wildly pro-Armenian Near East Relief representatives were on the spot attesting that there were no massacres of Armenians in Kars. However, pro-Armenian authors like Christopher Walker and Dickran Boyajian insist 6,000 to 10,000 Armenians were massacred. We don't have to guess very hard as to which account or version Gilbert prefers to give credence to.

Gilbert moves on to "one further tragic act in the destruction of Armenian life and livelihood. In September 1922 with the loss of tens of thousands of lives, the Armenians living in the western regions of Anatolia, particularly in Izmir and Aidin, were driven from their homes and forced into exile in distant lands."

E. Alexander Powell sets a straight record as to what really happened, in his "The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia," 1923:

A case in point was the burning of Smyrna in September, 1922. There was scarcely a newspaper of importance in the United States that did not editorially lay that outrage at the door of the Turks, without waiting to hear the Turkish version, yet, after it had been attested by American, English, and French eye-witnesses, and by a French commission of inquiry, that the city had been deliberately fired by the Greeks and Armenians in order to prevent it falling into Turkish hands, how many newspapers had the courage to admit that they had done the Turks a grave injustice?

The kind of injustice Sir Gilbert has committed time and again, within this chapter. He gives the impression that once more the poor, helpless Armenians were set upon by the Muslim hordes for no reason. No mention of the glee with which the Armenian portion of Izmir's population had helped the invading Greeks with atrocities committed upon the Turkish population. As the victorious Turks came in to reclaim their city, the Armenians felt they had to get out — just as the Armenians of Cilicia, once the tables turned.

Gilbert: "Between April 1915 and September 1922, 1,450,000 Armenians had been murdered. In the anguished words of Richard Hovannisian, "Our generation didn't have grandparents. Why didn't we have grandparents?"

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Sir Martin Gilbert is actually trying to sell us on the idea that out of a pre-war population of around 1.5 million, nearly all Armenians had been "murdered." Even though Armenians themselves concede one million survived. He is proving time and time again that any book with the author "Sir Martin Gilbert" is to be avoided at all costs, if such is the level of his expertise.

And Richard Hovannisian is quite the comedian. If it weren't for all the surviving grandparents, Hovannisian's generation (and successive ones) of Armenians would not be so filled with anti-Turkish hatred.

As it turns out, Hovannisian's own surviving grandmother (yes, as a representative of his generation, he had at least one grandparent) filled his head with genocide stories. The professor has been quoted as saying: "These stories took fairy-tale form in my imagination, full of childlike impressions of a far away land and a mythic struggle of good against evil." ("Hovannisian Introduces Students to Study of Armenian Genocide," Edward Thurber) If we are to examine the psychology behind such mind-destruction common to so many Armenians:

"Dr. D. Calonne indicated that [the] grandmother figure was also important in the writings of Saroyan, Najarian and Balakian, as it was in Alishan's poems. The grandmother was the factor that transmitted the disaster to the following generations and thus establishing a link with the past. The grandmother was 'mad as her people's history.' Her madness passed onto her grandson. Calonne noted that the grandmother gained the stature of 'Magna Mater' as explained in the book titled 'The Great Mother' by Erich Neumann. Certain Jungians claim that this pre-monotheistic figure reflected a very regressive characteristic and was close to madness."

Turkish grandparents did not dwell on their sufferings and treat their tragedies as a "religion." Thus, the Turks have been spared by the hatred too many Armenians sport. How ironic, since Gilbert's thesis is based on hatred as a cause of what he calls a genocide. The Turks and Kurds from those years did not carry hatred in their hearts, either. Some came to hate, after experiencing the terrible horrors the Armenians had perpetrated against them and their families... but even these sufferers looked to tomorrow, and did not poison the minds of their children.

Quite the contrary to Gilbert's conclusions, if there were racial hatred, it was the Armenians who exhibitied it. Ohanus Appressian, from "Men Are Like That":

"For too many years Armenian mothers had lulled their children to sleep with songs whose theme was Turkish fierceness and savagery."

When Sir Mark Sykes (another "Sir" who vilified the Turk, but at least he had the excuse of doing it for patriotic reasons, in the service of Wellington House) wrote, "The pride of race brings about many singularities and prompts the Armenians to prey on missionaries, Jesuits, consuls and European traveler with rapacity and ingratitude," what he was getting at was a feeling of superiority the Armenians possess with their "pride of race." The name of the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) originally was "Tzeghagron," which literally means 'to make a religion of one’s race. (Hairenik's Nejdeh wrote: 'The Racial Religious believes in his racial blood as a deity. Race above everything and before everything. Race comes first. Everything is for the race.') It is this supreme racism that stems in the minds of too many Armenians today, all too apparent in their forums.

It is this racism that enabled the Armenians to look down upon the Turks as the subhuman untermensch, enabling them to kill off non-Armenians (including Jews) in large numbers... over half a million in and after WWI that the world simply doesn't give a hoot about. It is this racism that allowed the Armenians to clear out as many non-Armenians from their country — which barely had Armenians two centuries ago — and to establish as racially pure a state as possible. The hatred has been on the side of the Armenians.

Gilbert predictably gives credence to the Bryce-Toynbee Wellington House report, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, claiming that the propaganda "detailed the killings with unequivocal documentation." Amazing. We're told that the author of the report, Arnold Toynbee, stressed that the Turkish claim of Armenian treason and rebellion against the Turks could not "bear examination" and was "easily rebutted." This would be the same Arnold Toynbee who later admitted his work at the agency was "war propaganda," and it is the propagandist's job not to uphold the principles of truth. There is no question the Armenians rebelled, when even Armenian leaders from the period are on record for having admitted no less. It is absolutely amazing that an "established" author as Sir Gilbert would still try to pass off propaganda as "unequivocal" evidence in this day and age. But just when one thinks he can sink no lower, Gilbert then attempts to fortify his case with a work of outright fiction, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."

He then relates Michael Hagopian's "mulberry bush" story. ("As Turkish soldiers rampaged through the town in the summer of 1915, an Armenian mother hid her baby boy in a mulberry bush and prayed to God that the Turkish soldiers would not find him.") Hagopian is the man behind "The Armenian Film Foundation," which has produced a number of Armenian propaganda films since 1979.

Gilbert tells us of how "While the Armenian massacres were at their height, a 21-year-old Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was then studying law at Lvov University, found himself in discussion with his professors about one of the dramatic events of the day": the assassination of Talaat Pasha on 15 March 1921. (1921 was when "the Armenian massacres were at their height"?) When Lemkin's professors defended the Turkish action against the Armenians invoking the argument about sovereignty of States, Lemkin replied, in part: "Sovereignty cannot be conceived of as the right to kill millions of innocent people."

Yes, the man who would be behind the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide was similarly brainwashed by the ongoing propaganda of the day. (Lemkin ironically argued, however, that those who had formed political alliances, as the Armenians had done with the Russians and other allies, would be exempt from the U.N. definition.) Lemkin was so influenced by the one-sided reportage that no doubt appeared in the "Christian" Polish press, he actually believed the Turks had killed millions.

Luckily, Sir Gilbert steps in to correct Lemkin's mistaken notion by writing in the next sentence: "million and a half Armenians murdered between 1915 and 1922." Thanks, Sir Gilbert, for presenting such a "fact."

The Sir then moves on to more general war and genocide information. With his record for honoring blatant inaccuracies, one must approach this putative scholar's offerings with caution; he reveals:

In the Allied naval blockade of Germany an estimated 500,000 German civilians died of starvation as food supplies were ruthlessly blockaded — the same number of Germans that were killed in the bombing raids of the Second World War.

Rudy Rummel had written: "During the war the British navy blockaded Turkey, including the Turkish Levant. No food was allowed in by sea." This situation exacerbated the massive famine already taking place within the Ottoman Empire (few were left to till the fields, according to Ambassador Morgenthau, since every man was needed at the multiple fronts.) Yet Gilbert (along with fellow "genocide scholar" Rummel) prefer to use the word "murdered" for all of the Armenian casualties (up tp 600,000 — the actual figure — who died from all causes combined, a number equivalent to the German civilians, we are told, who died from hunger.)

Yet Gilbert does not accuse the German government of "murdering" its people who died of starvation. Isn't that interesting?

Sir then provides details regarding the "Rape of Nanking" (where some 300,000 were killed from a population of perhaps 650,000.) After providing examples of some horrors, Gilbert concludes:

Such was the fate of human beings whose only "crime" — judged to make them worthy of death — was that they had been born Chinese, just as the only "crime" of the Armenians between 1915 and 1922 was ro have been born Armenian, the only "crime" of the Jews between 1939 and 1945 to have been born Jewish.

What an irresponsibly ugly parallel. Indeed, many Japanese thought of the Chinese as subhumans, as did the Nazis with the Jews. But the Turks had a brotherly feeling toward the Armenians, through centuries of mostly harmonious coexistence. Gilbert, in his propagandistic frenzy, is wishing to convey the notion the Armenians were killed because of racial hatred.

No. The Armenians suffered their fate because most in their community supported the revolutionary zeal of their fanatical leaders. They rebelled. Even with the rebellion, the Ottoman government tried to take good care of them. (Based on genuine orders.) Some were not carried out properly, thanks to wartime chaos and corruption, and a shortage of manpower and resources. Those who died mostly died for the same reasons all Ottomans died: famine, disease and combat. Yet, the majority, some two-thirds of the original population, survived. Those who were murdered mostly fell victim to bandits —frequently Kurds and Arabs — who terrorized the ill-guarded caravans. Many Kurds acted in reprisal for the terrible crimes the Armenians had committed upon Kurdish families.


Gilbert slips into fantasyland:

There is one little-mentioned element of the Holocaust which I should like to mention. From the moment of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the SS killing squads inside Russia itemized daily and sent back to Berlin lists of the thousands of Jews they had killed. They noted down with pedantic precision, in separate listings, the exact numbers of Jewish men, women, and children whom they had murdered each day. They also listed, from time to time, individual Armenians whom they had killed. Like the Jews, these Armenians were not killed because they were soldiers or partisans, or constituted a threat to German rule, but because they had been characterized as beneath the dignity of human beings. Whenever I am in Lvov, one of the centres of the SS killing areas, I visit the Armenian quarter there, conscious of this link: that even the Holocaust had an Armenian aspect.

If the SS killed Soviet-Armenians, they must have slipped up on their Nazi ideology; the European-Armenians got themselves to be recognized as fellow Aryans, and contributed with gusto to the killing of the Jews. I suspect if Soviet-Armenians were killed "from time to time," the reasons had nothing to do with racial extermination. Otherwise, enough Armenians would have been victimized, and these boo-hoo'ing people would have been the first to advertise the fact.

It's incredible that Gilbert the "historian" would speculate to such a level of absurdity; I suppose he's so hasty to declare the Armenians a genocidal brothers-in-arms, that he will go to extremes to find any imaginary link.

Gilbert then whitewashes the events of Karabakh. He relates the 1988 incidents in Sumgait as "indiscriminate, brutal torture and killing, the mutilation and rape, the looting and burning" by Azerbaijanis against the typically helpless, innocent Armenians, without saying a word about the atrocious behavior of the Armenians, especially in 1992.

What a racist attitude.

Sir Gilbert should be deeply ashamed. As a scholar, he relies upon propaganda for the presentation of his facts. Those who utilize propaganda as their source produce propaganda. His credibility as a genuine scholar can be seen for what it is worth. He has completely shown the Armenians to be helpless, innocent martyrs, while characterizing the "rampaging" Turks as bloodthirsty savages.

As a Briton, he has a responsibility to expose the terrible war propaganda of his nation that demonized the Turk, evils which continue to spread their poison today. Gilbert serves as an agent of that poison spreading, to make matters worse. He actually still points to sources such as Bryce and Toynbee, as discredited as these sources were, even immediately after the war.

As a presumed Jew, he should be most ashamed. He is denigrating the one nation that has defended Judaism over the centuries, when Jews were being persecuted all over the "Christian" world. He is accusing "Turkey" (that's what he calls the Ottoman Empire) of the worst crime against humanity, without offering any factual evidence, besides the hearsay and canards of Armenian propaganda.

These immoral "genocide scholars" have been allowed to get away with the spreading of their hatred for far too long.

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© Holdwater
tallarmeniantale.com/GS-Gilbert.htm
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