496) Armenians: Suffering or Genocide?

A typical example by which the hotly debated topic of whether Armenians suffered from a genocide either centers heavily on the claims of the Armenian side of the story, or reporters safely cover themselves by presenting the issue as what "Turks" say and what "Armenians" say. Readers should not care what either side has to say; the only thing that matters is what really happened? And the way to get at the truth is to rely especially on sources from that period that would have had no reason to be untruthful. Test . . .

Once a world power, the Muslim Turks always have carried a stigma; it was very easy for early 20th century Westerners to harbor religious and racial prejudices toward the "Unspeakable" Turk. Edward Said put it well in 1978’s “Orientalism”: “The terror inspired by the Turkish name among all the European peoples was largely responsible for the widely spread popular belief that the Turks were a race of uncivilized barbarians who, wherever they went, left nothing but smoking ruins behind them and stamped out every vestige of civilization”; such resulted in “a state of mind which rendered them for the most part incapable of viewing Turkey and the Turks with an objective and unbiased eye."

As a result, we have pro-Armenian spokesmen like pthe reacher's son President Woodrow Wilson, who forewarned his intentions in 1912 as: "There ain't going to be no Turkey." Ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote a book stating the Turks were unlike any other people, cowardly, inferior, primitive, and a "strange human species." Theodore Roosevelt, a firm believer in the virtues of the "white race," hated the Turks so passionately, he bellowed: "Spain and Turkey are the two powers I would rather smash than any in the world." Zealous Christian missionaries formed the backbone of claims within the British "Blue Book," the basic foundation of today’s genocidal evidence and a byproduct of Wellington House, Britain's war propaganda division. Even the Germans had contempt for their allies, the "alien" Turks, and their centuries-old aversion was not going to be superseded by wartime loyalty.

These are the sources we often hear about, people who were almost never in the interior witnessing the events firsthand. Foreign consuls were stationed in some posts, but they employed Armenians who usually told them a select version of events that were readily accepted. If any diplomats saw anything, like Consul Leslie Davis, it was suffering. Suffering and death in a land were everyone was suffering and dying. (Davis wrote, for example, that bread was almost unobtainable since the start of the war. The epidemics of disease were so disastrous, General Harbord believed 600,000 Turkish soldiers succumbed to typhus alone.)

Of the Turkish claims, what has come to be known as what "the Turkish government says" (in a deceptive effort to make it appear that only the Turkish government claims there was no genocide), what are the sources that are often used? Generally, few Turkish sources are utilized, other than internal Ottoman documents not intended for public relations purposes; Western sources are mainly referred to, and these may be classified as pro-Armenian, since few Westerners were raised with a fondness for Turks.

For example, Mary Graffam, a missionary who was actually allowed to accompany Armenians as they embarked on what pro-Armenians would call a "death march" (in itself evidence disproving an extermination attempt; Hitler allowed no hostile foreign observers into Auschwitz to see what was going on) privately wrote in 1915 that the government was not to blame and that "Most of the higher officials are at their wits end to stop these abuses and carry out the orders which they have received, but this is a flood and it carries all before it." That was a perfect description of events. (Graffam would "revise" her views years later, perhaps because there was a Christian agenda to serve, and money to raise.)

A genocide book edited by J. Winter (“America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915”) claims there was only one American reporter who witnessed events firsthand in the Ottoman interior, in 1915. Much is made of the fact that the Western press published sensational atrocity stories (the New York Times, for example, printed 145 "genocide" tales in 1915 alone; the newspaper’s publisher, interestingly, was a close friend of Morgenthau's), but no one stops to consider all of the information was received secondhand by bigoted or propagandistic sources. (The objective of the British, the provider of much of this information, was to get the USA into the war; Wellington House actually had a branch on U.S. soil.) The sole journalistic eyewitness: George Schreiner, who saw the suffering and the dead, but concluded there was no genocide. (“…Turkish ineptness, more than intentional brutality, was responsible for the hardships the Armenians were subjected to.")

Genocide can only be proven if there is "intent." There have been many theories as to why the bankrupt Ottomans would suddenly spend much needed money and resources to transport hundreds of thousands of Armenians, in an attempt to exterminate them while their nation, besieged by superpowers, was in danger of extinction. None are logical; the Armenians, who enjoyed “internal autonomy,” as Prof. Richard Hovannisian has written, were known as the Loyal Nation for centuries, and prospered greatly within the Ottoman Empire. During the war, there was a life and death struggle to attend to, and the Armenians made the economic and other societal wheels spin. Undertaking a calamitous disruption of the nation’s operation would have made no sense, when survival was at stake.

C. F. Dixon-Johnson put it plainly in 1916’s “The Armenians”: “The Turks had just sustained in the Caucasus a severe defeat. They needed every available man and every round of ammunition to check the advancing Russians. It is therefore incredible that without receiving any provocation they should have chosen that particularly inopportune moment to employ a large force of soldiers and gendarmes with artillery to stir up a hornet’s nest in their rear. Military considerations alone make the suggestion absurd.”

There was one and only one reason why the Armenians were relocated, and even Armenia’s first prime minister, Hovhannes Katchaznouni, spelled it out in 1923: “The proof is, however — and this is essential — that the struggle begun decades ago against the Turkish government brought about the deportation or extermination of the Armenian people in Turkey and the desolation of Turkish Armenia. This was the terrible fact!”

After forty-odd years of terror in which Ku Klux Klan-type Armenian groups massacred innocents in hopes of inciting the same and getting the Europeans to intervene (by the late 19th century, imperialists were circling to get in on their share of the Sick Man's pie), the whole of the Armenian community had turned against their nation. Thousands of Armenian men were armed and ready to hit the Ottoman armies from behind the lines when war struck; thousands more joined the enemy.

One report among many: "The Armenians of Deurt-yol are now well armed with modern rifles, every male adult having one in his possession." From British Consul Fontana to his government, on Oct. 21, 1913… two years before the war.

As Armenian historian Akaby Nassibian tells us, the Armenians were offered actual autonomy by the Turks in 1914 Erzurum, if they would only do their duty as loyal Ottoman citizens. The Dashnak committees agreed (as far as being loyal citizens, and not to stir Russian-Armenians, as they had given their word in 1907), but took a better deal from the Russians, not keeping in mind the many times the Russians had broken their promises to the Armenians and would prove to do so again. When Russia declared war on November 2 of that year, the New York Times featured an article on November 7 reporting: "ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS; Besieging Van—Others operating in Turkish Army's Rear."

After six months of treacherous Armenian betrayal from all over the beleaguered empire, and fighting powerful enemies on multiple fronts, the Ottoman leaders first considered how to resolve the very dangerous factor of Armenian rebellion, with a May 2, 1915 telegram. Enver Pasha wanted to truly "deport" the Armenians out of the country, as the Russians had been doing with hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. The government instead opted to temporarily resettle the Armenians to another area of the nation until the danger had diminished. (Exactly as Americans had done with their Japanese and the French had done with their Alsatians, during WWII, with the difference that these people were loyal.) Orders were signed to safeguard the Armenians and their properties. As often happens with colossal tasks needing to be undertaken at the last minute, and especially with limited resources, things went wrong. Local Turks, lawless bands, and revengeful Kurds preyed on some Armenians who were being transported. (Those who had a railway system to make use of were unmolested.) The vast majority of those who died, however, succumbed to famine and disease, the causes that claimed the lives of the 2.5 million or so Turkish mortality.

Were the Armenians "exterminated"? The Armenian Patriarch's figures can never be taken at face value, as the Patriarch has been known to "exaggerate" (at the 1878 Berlin Congress, for example, the Patriarch claimed there were 3 million Ottoman-Armenians, a figure quickly downgraded to 1,780,000; in 1886, a Patriarchate member, Vahan Vardapet, estimated 1,263,900 Gregorians, getting closer to the truth). The reasonable pre-war median from "neutral" sources (such as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica) worked out to 1.5 million. (The Ottoman census: 1.3 million. Wellington House writer Arnold Toynbee the year before he became a propagandist: 1.2 million.) The Patriarch "exaggerated" again, with 2.1 million.

We know something is wrong with this figure, because German missionary Johannes Lepsius stated "under oath" (at the 1921 trial for the assassin of Talat Pasha) that the Patriarch had provided him with 1,850,000 as the total. (And there is something wrong with that figure as well, since Armenian historian Kevork Aslan, almost certainly utilizing Patriarchate figures, offered a total of 1.8 million.) Lepsius provides a difference of 250,000. If we subtract that difference from the total the Patriarch claimed (as provided by the Peace Conference’s Armenian Delegation, at war’s end) for the dead (840,000), we can see less than 600,000 died. The Patriarch (through the Delegation) claimed a total of 1,260,000 had survived (that is, the remainder of 2.1 million) in what was left of the Empire, in late 1918. (Even the more extreme Armenian scholars today concede one million survived.)

The majority of Armenians had survived, based on a highly biased Armenian source. This is why Armenians managed to work their worldwide numbers from around 3 million (which took them over 2,500 years to reach) to some 7 million, in only ninety years, while mostly dispersed. (The 3 million is pre-war, not accounting for the mortality that took place.)

The 1919-20 Ottoman trials were carried out under a puppet administration, the legality for which was akin to Vichy courts under Nazi occupation; the Allies threatened their Turkish lackeys to come up with culprits for the massacres, otherwise treatment at the Peace Conference would be harsh. Legal standards were so deplorable, the British rejected the findings of these kangaroo courts in their own planned Malta Tribunal, the true counterpart for Nuremberg. No evidence could be found, even in the "last resort" for the British, the archives of the 1921 U.S. State Department. Every Ottoman prisoner held, numbering 144 at one point, was set free. This should have settled the matter in a just world.

200,000 for the number of Armenian dead in the mid-1890s is the propagandistic counterpart of the "1.5 million" killed we hear regarding "1915." The truth is probably closer to one-tenth of that figure (Ottoman numbers added up to 13,432), and no nation reserving the right to put down rebellions should be accused of "massacres." In 1958’s “A History of Armenia,” Vahan Kurkjian concluded a still exaggerated 100,000, further informing us the William Gladstone-influenced British recorded 63,000 in their Blue Book.

The highly anti-Turkish Lepsius offered 88,243 for the total. Lepsius also stated 6,000 had been massacred in the 1895 Zeitun rebellion. Yet the leader of that very rebellion, Aghasi, wrote in his diary that the Turks had lost 20,000 and the Armenians lost only 125 men. To get an idea of the inflation, those figures bear repeating: 6,000 vs. 125.

What is never mentioned in our prejudiced world is that some 5,000 Muslims were killed during the mid-1890s (Aghasi had "exaggerated" with 20,000 for only one rebellion in 1895 alone), and most of these people were truly victims of massacres.

Are we getting the picture that those who write about this historical event scarcely bother to scratch the surface?

It is easy to believe these claims, for the pro-Armenians have been allowed to present their propaganda almost unilaterally, and the Armenians are portrayed as poor, innocent Christian martyrs while the Turks fulfill their familiar role as savages. Where are the deeper thinkers, like Prof. John Dewey, who wrote in a 1928 New Republic article ("The Turkish Tragedy") that the Armenians "boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population." We have the Internet now; it's not difficult to conduct research and get a closer idea of what really happened.

predominant population of the Balkans before this policy of "Death and Exile" (a highly recommended 1995 book by that name was written by Prof. Justin McCarthy) was Muslim. In the century ending around WWI, 5.5 million Muslims were killed through such savagery, and an additional 5 million were expelled. The Turks are the ones who suffered a true Holocaust, and the Western world couldn’t care less.

As a dramatic example, William Gladstone viciously helped turn Western opinion against the Turks, with his 1876 “Bulgarian Horrors” pamphlet. As the Armenians, the Bulgarians had rebelled; their toll was 10,000-15,000. By contrast, the Turkish/Muslim dead amounted to some 260,000, and the exiled was over half a million. Even today, hardly anyone from the Western world acknowledges the much higher suffering of the latter group, least of all “genocide scholars.”

Armenians such as Dro, Antranik, Keri, Garo, Murad and others brutally murdered more Ottoman Muslims (during and after WWI) than the comparatively small number of Armenians (probably in the low 10s of thousands, and almost certainly not exceeding 50,000; in 1977, the French newspaper “Le Figaro” estimated 15,000, and these took into account sickness and other deprivation on the march, not just “murder”) who were massacred by Muslims. It is difficult to find Western corroboration, since Muslims were not regarded as equal human beings. One exception is the British colonel, Wooley, as recorded in the U.S. Archives; he estimated 300,000-400-000 Ottoman Muslims (Kurds) were killed by Armenians; and that was only from two Ottoman districts. Ottoman records, never meant to be publicized, present the final tally at over half a million. (These included non-Muslims as well, like the Jews, and even Greeks. The idea was to “purify” the hoped for “Greater Armenia,” where Armenians lacked a plurality.) What comprises today's Armenia once had a Muslim majority, and "Death & Exile" is the way Armenia became Muslim-free. (As the CIA Fact Book makes evident, the nation is currently some 98% “pure.”)

Armenia demonstrated this favored tactic in 1992, massacring Azeri civilians and scaring what many say is close to a million from Karabakh. Many Azeris are reportedly still languishing in refugee camps, and mum is the word with the biased West. Why are the Armenians never condemned by the genocide community? (The reader gets one gue$$.)

In order to stifle debate, the pro-Armenians, including their terribly hypocritical "genocide scholar" allies (the counterpart to yesterday's missionaries, both groups representing "good" on the surface, and therefore not expected to "exaggerate"), have resorted to highly underhanded tactics. Those such as Israel Charny have accused objective academicians as selling out to "Turkey," by pointing to grants some have received. (One of the two organizations cited was the "American Research Institute," which sounds independent of the Turkish government. "The Institute for Turkish Studies" in Washington was the other.) One professor was such a target of a media-covered smear campaign, he was evidently subjected to a gag order by his university. The message was sent to others who might dare disagree with genocide forces in the future. No academician can allow their precious reputations to get stained by powerful ideologues. Now that the pro-Armenians had a clear field again (news reporting organizations began dropping the word “alleged,” before “genocide”), the time arrived to get politicians to vote for genocide resolutions, in order to legislate what cannot be proven historically; every congressperson from California (with a sizeable Armenian population) supported a recent bill. Some European nations have made it illegal to state there was no genocide; one noted professor was actually taken to court in France. Another, the aforementioned Justin McCarthy, is currently being threatened.

These forces are doing their utmost to continue spreading the poison carried over by 19th century racism, targeting an ethnic group that has a very limited voice in the West. Journalists mindlessly rely on the established propaganda (which John Dewey warned Americans should no longer be deceived by… over three-quarters of a century ago), thereby producing new propaganda. The result has nothing to do with truth and justice, and a lot to do with hatred, bigotry and pain.

By "Holdwater" - 1/17/2006
"Holdwater" operates www.tallarmeniantale.com

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