A detailed, "no-stone-left-unturned" analysis of Producer-Writer-Director Andrew Goldberg's "The Armenian Genocide," presented in association with Oregon's PBS affiliate and overseen by PBS's national office, first broadcast on April 17, 2006.
PBS, America's Public Broadcasting Service television network, has broadcast Armenian propaganda films exclusively throughout the years. One would think the fair and educated Americans who run PBS would become a little more savvy to the facts behind the pro-Armenians' allegations. If anything, with their decision to air as potent a propagandistic piece as ever in April 2006 points to how hopelessly prejudiced the directors of PBS and affiliates are... as liberal and as unprejudiced as they no doubt think of themselves. They are so hand-in-hand with the likes of Peter Balakian and his ilk, whom the naive PBS people mostly look up to as "human rights" champions (a cause dear to hearts of most liberals... and I say that as a progressive individual in my own right), that perhaps the network's name should be changed to ABS. "A" is, of course, for "Armenian," and "BS" speaks for itself.
The Producer/Director/Writer
Let's give a little background on this latest PBS escapade. Producer-Director Andrew Goldberg once again made use of his "Jewish consciousness" (as he put it during a pledge break for his previous Armenian genocide extravaganza that has been analyzed on TAT; see link at page bottom of Part II), to affirm this mythical genocide. By now, Andrew has become a trusted proponent of the Armenians, and the easy money he gets from the diaspora's deep pockets has enabled him to focus almost entirely on Armenian-related excursions. (He managed to scrounge up a reported $650,000 from them in this go-round; a list of underwriters may be found below. That's a lot of dough for a short documentary requiring cheap interview camera set-ups and filled mostly with photographs and old footage, supplemented by a gaggle of Armenians in the end credits, many donating services for the "Cause." Reason for a film producer to be so Armenian-centric — Thar's gold in them thar Armenian Genocide hills.)
(PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler's April 21 column reported, "Both PBS and the New York-based filmmaker, Andrew Goldberg... emphasize that all funders were scrutinized and approved by PBS before accepting the film." That implies PBS executives informed Getler that they took pains to make sure there was no partisanship involved, even though in the same column we see they also tried to cover themselves: "PBS executives say about 60 percent of the funds came from foundations 'of broad interests' and the rest from individuals, and that the network does not get into the business of assessing the interests of individual donors." Goldberg spoke for himself and PBS by adding, “funders had no involvement in any editorial decisions." Getler added, "I have no reason to doubt that," and he is right... but the reason has nothing to do with this travesty's being on the up and up. The reason why the funders left Goldberg alone is because they entirely trusted Andrew Goldberg to represent their propaganda.)
Andrew actually had gotten in touch with me to correct the title of his previous program, when he saw it reviewed on TAT. Then I heard from my "Two Cats" friend again in 2005, and he wondered if I could give a hand in drumming up a voice from the camp of the deniers, for his next Armenian project. You mean another one financed by the Manoogian Foundation? I sneered, that is, yet another purely propagandistic effort? Andrew replied the Manoogian folks would not be the major force, and my wishful thinking, or my natural instinct to give the benefit of a doubt, made me desire to be fair... who knows, perhaps Andrew, a very intelligent man who has fiddled around at the TAT site, might have had an awakening of his real "Jewish consciousness." (What humanity owes a debt to; not that the Jews have a monopoly on morality, but you know the beautifully humanitarian Jewish people — and I'm obviously not referring to the Ariel Sharon variety — can generally be relied on to distinguish right from wrong. In the dark days of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, when few white people cared to play a part, we had a disproportionate number of Jewish people having the courage to get involved, and at least one paid for his courage with his life. Those like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had the courage to protest the inhumanity of Menachem Begin and his Freedom Party, in a December 4, 1948 letter to The New York Times. "Jewish consciousness" has a deep meaning for me. What I believe Andrew meant when he referred to the concept was "fellow genocide victim," but I'm taking it to a more profound level.)
Since there was a possibility Andrew had mended his ways at least somewhat and was going to produce a relatively objective documentary (what also allowed my glasses to be rose-colored was that I figured surely PBS would be a little more aware and sensitive by this point, after having presented twenty-five years worth of pure Armenian propaganda), I did my best to look around. It was then that I learned there really weren't any qualified contra-genocide spokespeople for the finding. (The shortage of spokespeople is why the contra-genocide representative in a rare 1982 debate was a medical doctor who took it upon himself to study the issues.)
Andrew in fact wrote me another note listing names of those he had approached, all having turned him down. I think I sneered back, what do you expect? You're clearly regarded as a propagandist, and nobody wants to take the chance to be made to look like a fool.
I couldn't find anyone who was Turkish (the candidate was also required to be a professor), but I learned, through those who knew him, that Edward Tashji, neither ethnically Turkish nor a professor (but by this point, it was difficult to be choosy), might be willing. So I proposed the idea to Andrew, still thinking that he might have been approaching this film as a real filmmaker, and said Mr. Tashji was not in good health, and here was a "last chance" opportunity to get him preserved on celluloid. (That is, videotape. I dunno, that kind of thing always excites me. I loved the idea that Mae West appeared in 1978's SEXTETTE, as embarrassing as that film was, because what a gift to future generations to record such a "last chance" appearance of a personality.)
Andrew shot that idea down immediately. I was beginning to get the picture... surely the appearance of a fellow Armenian testifying that there was no genocide would not have met with the approval of Andrew's Armenian benefactors. (Mr. Tashji died soon afterwards.) But I still didn't give up; I learned one of the few Turkish-Americans who squawks over this issue had appeared on some other interview medium to vouch for "The Other Side," contacted him, and he said he would be willing. The Goldberg team got in touch with him, but then the Turkish-American's wife discovered Andrew's "Armenian Genocide" proposal on his web site, and all hopes for an objective production were dashed! A taste:
"The Armenian Genocide of 1915 was an event in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and Kurds. This event took place under cover of war in the area that today is considered Eastern Turkey. It is one of the most understudied events in modern history and in many ways it has been the template for all Genocide since then.
What makes this event all the more troubling than the fact that it was the first Genocide of the 20th century and one of the largest ever mass-murders, is that the perpetrators and their successors — the Ottoman Turks and the succeeding Turkish governments — flatly deny that this well-documented episode in history ever occurred."
Yes indeed, pure propaganda to the max. 1.5 million, when the Armenian Patriarch himself had offered a still inflated 840,000 by 1918's end? (And all of these victims, according to Andrew and his brand of Jewish consciousness, were "murdered," naturally.) "One of the most understudied events"...? Only if we're talking about researchers who are objective and without agendas. Run an Internet search and compare the hits for the Armenians vs., say, the Tasmanians, the victims of the rare, successful extermination campaign. And even if what happened to the Armenians could be construed as a genocide, what's that about its being the "first"? What about the pre-1915 20th century Albanians, Hereros, Filipinos... even if we pay no mind (as usual) to the tragic fate of the Balkan Turks? These prevarications formed only the tip of the iceberg.
Hilmar Kaiser, the Armenian Genocide industry's bad boy, Sen. Robert Dole, and the tail-wagging Dr. Robert Melson were those who didn't make it to the final cut. "Easily accessible" Enver Pasha grandsons, Osman Mayatepek and Prof. Ethem Eldem, were planned to be snagged, but they were no-shows. Further high hopes:
"But beyond those already mentioned, there are hundreds-of-thousands of children and grandchildren of Genocide perpetrators — Kurdish and Turkish — who are still living today. We will find these people, including the Pasha offspring and people will hear for the first time, the true stories of what was done to the Armenians by the Turks and Kurds themselves."
At this point, the Turkish-American candidate felt disgusted, and bowed out of the negotiation process. Months passed.
Andrew worked with Oregon Public Broadcasting's David Davis, OPB’s v.p. of national production, who must be a pretty big genocide believer in his own right. The PBS bigwigs felt it may be fair to also produce a twenty-five minute panel discussion, a half-hearted attempt at equal time. It was a very poor attempt, mind you, since the Goldberg show offered nearly an hour's worth of pure propaganda, and real equal time would have excluded the participation of two of the meaner genocide propagandists around, Peter Balakian and Taner Akcam. On the other side of the podium were good old Prof. Justin McCarthy, and a spectacularly English-challenged Turkish professor (Omer Turan) who turned out to be a complete wash-out (I found out firsthand how hard it is to get contra-genocide specialists, but one must question the motives of whomever made this doomed-from-the-start choice).
As lopsided as this panel discussion was, at least it was something to offset the awful propaganda of PBS and Goldberg. But PBS did its best to sabotage this feeble effort by letting its affiliates know that PBS "acknowledges and accepts the genocide," giving the affiliates the choice to air the discussion or not. Naturally, few did. The PBS publication, Current, told us in a March 6, 2006 article by Geneva Collins (entitled "Panel show riles rather than soothes genocide furor") that the Goldberg show would "air on stations in nine of the top 10 markets, but only two — in Chicago and Houston — plan to show the follow-up program, Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues." (The lone hold-out would be Los Angeles' KCET, "the station in the city with the largest population of Armenians outside... Armenia," which opted instead to go for an even more ferocious French-made effort, acquired at relative great expense, to mollify the Armenians in their audience. They also scheduled a second propaganda film (from a Canadian-Armenian) for April, in what they designated "Armenian Remembrance Month," with an option to air the free Goldberg film in the future. Not to be outdone, Goldberg rented out L.A.'s Egyptian Theater (according to a March 23 Los Angeles Times article) to show his film to genocide-batty Californian-Armenians on April 17, at a cost of $10,000 the article told us came out of Goldberg's own pocket. Uh-huh.)
But even though PBS successfully did its best to discourage the follow up discussion, it wasn't good enough for the Armenians. They got up-in-arms, seeing what they could do to sabotage the showing of this discussion in the few markets that tried to maintain an open mind.
Activist Publisher Harut Sassounian, in a March 3, 2006 piece entitled "VP of PBS Should Be Dismissed For Insulting Armenians" shed significant light upon the familiar pressure tactics:
"Congressmen Adam Schiff (D-CA), George Radanovich (R-CA), Armenian Caucus Co-Chairmen Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) asked all members of the House of Representatives to sign a joint letter expressing their opposition to the PBS panel discussion. It is expected that many of the 150 members of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues would sign this letter. The Caucus makes up more than one-third of the entire House, a significant number when the time comes to allocate funding to PBS."
In yet another indication of how enthusiastically PBS takes the side of the Armenians, a good number of Armenians received pre-screenings, (While the ignored contra-genocide folk, the usual personas non grata, had to wait until the April 17 broadcast.) Prof. Dennis Papazian was one of the many privileged, and in an article from Appo Jabarian from USA Armenian Life Magazine, Papazian was furious, as he revealed in an e-mail to Harut Sassounian:
“I have just previewed the post documentary discussion and it made me sick to my stomach to see Justin McCarthy and the Turks come out with blatant lies and deceptive assertions. I thought Taner and Peter ‘won the debate,’ but the denialists undoubtedly would plant doubt in the minds of innocent American viewers... You did right to lead the attack against the showing of the ‘discussion.’"
Sassounian (along with other activist forces such as ANCA, some members of whom were listed in the film's end credits) got the faithful to overrun PBS and its affiliates to not show the panel discussion. He also unleashed both barrels on a PBS senior v.p. and co-chief programming head, Jacoba Atlas, even though she was on record for stating that PBS stands behind Goldberg’s film (as Current reported), has been quoted in the Washington Post as stating the genocide is "settled history," and from the N.Y. Times article, it was a spokeswoman (Lea Sloan) from Coby's very own office who let us all officially know that PBS "acknowledges and accepts that there was a genocide."
What was Sassounian's gripe? In a response that Atlas wrote to ANCA (West branch) Chairman Steve Dadaian (that Dadaian evidently made sure to provide for Sassounian; they sure know how to combine their resources and work together), Atlas wrote: "You and others have likened our decision to following a documentary on the genocide of Jews during WW II with a panel of Holocaust deniers. With all due respect, the comparison is not entirely analogous."
So even though Atlas comes so close to giving her heart and soul to PBS's beloved Armenians, by accepting and acknowledging their mythical genocide, it simply is not good enough for the Armenians! Just as the way Armenians have attacked their greatest friends from Woodrow Wilson to the Rev. James Barton, for not going far enough, the itsiest, bitsiest sign of not being 100% in alignment with genocide fantasies becomes grounds for vicious attack.
"PBS is a publicly funded entity," said Steve Dadaian, the Western region chairman of the Armenian National Committee. "They exist because tax dollars fund them. If they are going to use the network to give a national stage to this kind of hate, to denialists of the genocide, then we don't want our tax dollars going there."
"Armenian Furor Over PBS Plan for Debate," Randal Archibold, New York Times, Feb. 25, 2006
Sassounian employed his dastardly Dashnak terror tactics by writing: "I must now single out Jacoba Atlas, the Senior Vice President of PBS programming, not only for being responsible for this misguided decision, but also for insulting Armenians worldwide by stating that the Armenian Genocide 'is not entirely analogous' to the Jewish Holocaust." (He was not entirely correct in singling out Ms. Atlas, but at least he consistently strives to uphold the fine standards of Yellow Journalism: according to a Q&A from the PBS Ombudsman's March 17th column, PBS Programmer John Wilson was equally in on the deal. At least Sassounian was aware there was another programming head besides Atlas, but he had his facts wrong, as usual: Oregon's David Davis was confused as PBS's "national" director of programming, in Sassounian's "Boycott PBS Stations that Air 'Balancing' Panel on Genocide" from Feb. 9) Sassounian declared from his grimy throne that poor Ms. Atlas, who must have had no idea of the benevolent terrorism she was in for (her office was bombarded by 3,500 protest e-mails, Sassounian beamed), had an "anti-Armenian Genocide stance" (!) and his headline said it all: "VP of PBS Should Be Dismissed For Insulting Armenians."
Coby Atlas
In response, one of the mad dogs of the flock, the Armenian operator of an awful Turk-hating site (this sad fellow, an apparent doctor from Chicago with multiple offices no less, was once [maybe not intentionally] sicced on the TAT site — as deduced through a process of elimination [there was a four-way correspondence going on at the time] — by Prof. Dennis Papazian. One of the doctor's charming notes: "Do you own a gun?") featured the shell-shocked Ms. Atlas on his hate site, complete with her sweet-looking photograph, accompanied by the usual snarling words.
(Ironically, Atlas proved that PBS truly stood by Goldberg's film, as she promised, since the film establishes a clear analogy between the Armenian experience and the Holocaust, as Samantha Power's statement makes clear toward the end of the show, along with other indications. We'll get to that later.)
As I wrote in the typically unanswered letter to a PBS honcho (it comes as no surprise that the Armenians usually get responses to their letters), "If the truth is on the Armenians' side, why should they (and PBS) have had reason to be afraid?" But, of course, "truth" plays little part in these decisions. Lopsided and ineffective though the panel discussion might have been, the pro-Armenian furor did its best to silence it.
Rep. Anthony Weiner
For example, the New York City affiliate planned to air the panel discussion, at first. However, as Sassounian reported, there was a gaggle of "Armenian demonstrators outside the studios of WNET/13." To tighten the noose, the Armenians recruited an ethnic pandering politician, in this instance Congressman "Anthony Weiner, who joined others at a protest outside WNET's office in Manhattan," as reported by a Feb. 28 A.P. account ("NY PBS Affiliate Decides Not to Air Panel on Armenian Genocide"). Weiner "applauded the move" WNET was sure to make, to cancel its initial plans to air the panel discussion. Forgetting that he is supposed to be representing all of the people, Rep. Weiner was quoted as stating that the panel "is an insult to the history of that time." (How fortunate the U.S. Congress got so much for its money in Weiner; a congressman, and an expert on world history, to boot.)
WNET did not want to appear "wussy," so we were offered a song-and-dance (as reported in Current):
"Spokeswoman Stella Giammasi said execs changed course not because they had received a letter of protest from U.S. Reps. Anthony Weiner and Carolyn Maloney (both D-N.Y.) but because it had initially decided to air both programs before viewing them. 'When the program panel saw it, we really felt the follow-up didn’t add anything to the documentary,' she said. Most of the other programming execs contacted who had rejected airing the panel program issued similar opinions."
In fact, affiliates went out of their way to offer the same rubber-stamp explanation. For example, Audience Services Coordinator Daniel McCoy from PBS's Washington affiliate (which had once broken ground by producing a real debate back in 1983, also featuring good old Prof. Justin McCarthy), wrote in what was mostly a form letter:
WETA feels "the program stands on its own as an honest and thorough examination of that chapter in world history, especially as it includes a balanced presentation of the opinions of both those who believe that an act of genocide occurred and those who do not."
[T]he fact that so many stations caved is a measure of something else: PBS's growing vulnerability to pressure and, perhaps accordingly, the erosion of viewers' trust in public television.
A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate, Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times, April 17, 2006
Naturally, the idea that the panel discussion did not add anything was ludicrous. If that were the case, the Armenians and their Congressional supporters would not have given the furious re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party that they did. (They might say the reason why they have done so was because of their outrage over giving voice to "Holocuast deniers": but Prof. McCarthy, by accepting the Turks as equal human beings, surely is the antithesis of the "white supremacist," which is what Peter Balakian actually compared him to, in Current. What the pro-Armenians were really afraid of was lessening the impact of their propaganda, as Dennis Papazian admitted in his e-mail to Sassounian.)
That, of course, is the most outrageous statement. PBS and some of its affiliates turned down an American-produced documentary entitled THE ARMENIAN REVOLT, which did not minimize the suffering of the Armenians (whereas the Goldberg film disgracefully danced around the issue of the Armenians' extermination campaign against fellow Ottomans), because it was "biased." For example, WNET'S Executive Director of Broadcasting, Kent Steele, was challenged by the person who had submitted THE ARMENIAN REVOLT, after Steele listed as the rejection reasons that the film was "biased" and had "loaded" language, on whether Steele thought the Goldberg film was unbiased. Steele was reminded of the long list of Armenian underwriters. After a reported pause, Steele responded "yes." Who could blame him? Of course he had to protect his station's irresponsible decision to air a work of pure propaganda. (Partisan Steele received "Special Thanks" in the end credits of the Goldberg production.)
The indication of the bias goes well beyond the endless list of Armenian underwriters. "Genocide" is accepted as an established fact in the show's title, which an honest documentary examining a hot-button topic would not have dared to do. (This factor alone violated the mandate of PBS's "overseer," the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB], ensuring “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.�)
The program was timed to support the regular April 24 commemorations. The partisan track record of the filmmaker served as a dead giveaway. There were twelve genocide advocates afforded nearly all of the screen time, versus the scant seconds granted one interviewed contra-genocide spokesman, who was already suspect, as an "agent of the Turkish government." (Another "agent," an ex-ambassador, was shown in pre-exisiting footage, but only as a point to be assassinated by the final say of the film's counter-point.) Appo Jabarian, critical of the Goldberg film (it didn't go far enough, you see), couldn't stand that "an alarming portion of the airtime — approximately 30% — is devoted to deceptive deniers." Did he watch the same program, or does he define "denier" content as the kind that is only 98% pro-genocide, and not 128%?
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-C. Objectivity: To begin with, journalists must enter into any inquiry with an open mind, not with the intent to present a predetermined point of view... the audience generally should be able to know not only who the sources of information are, but also why they were chosen and what their potential biases might be.
The reason why PBS people are so mindlessly accepting of this propaganda is the same reason why other lazy-thinking educated and fair-minded folk, from journalists to professors, rarely bother to scratch beneath the surface. It's all that conditioned brainwashing, about a people whom we've always been told are somewhat less than human. The cumulative effect of anti-Turkish propaganda serves its intended goal. Those as Kent Steele who normally would be among the last candidates that we would qualify as bigoted, appears to have been influenced by his deep, ingrained prejudices.
For example, Peter Balakian lied outright in the Current article, by stating that he was, in effect, blackmailed into appearing on the panel discussion. His "morals" were deeply compromised (Balakian loves to remind us of his morals every chance he gets, perhaps to make sure we don't look too hard to see where these morals possibly could be), but he had to make the supreme sacrifice, carrying the proud tradition of innocent, martyred Armenians, in order to "save the documentary. The documentary was way too important. They put me in a morally difficult position.�
Naturally that was pure hokum, because an entire show was not going to be sacrificed if the self-important Balakian had chosen to give the edge to his "morals." PBS's own ombudsman, Michael Getler, checked out this story, and exposed Balakian's lie.
Yet how did OPB's Davis respond to Balakian's wild claim? “I don’t want to address that directly,� Davis said, in the Current piece. Why didn't Davis just come right out and say Balakian was a liar? Could it be that he didn't want to open the Pandora's Box that practically everything else in his co-produced propagandistic program had little bearing to truth?
(After this writing, it was discovered Getler added a disclaimer by Balakian, the second of Balakian's communications that Getler has generously allowed to infiltrate the three columns he has written to date about this program. Was Balakian's damage control the truth, or was he trying to cover up his lie with another lie? [Readers can judge by looking at this analysis.] Shouldn't this example of at least the possibility of dishonesty have set off alarm bells in the dense heads of PBS personnel? Shouldn't they have stopped and asked themselves — particularly since they have a duty to their own editorial standards of integrity — what else could the Armenians have been telling them that is equally deceptive? But they can't seem to help themselves. The genocide facts are just too comfortable. Everyone knows the Armenians were poor, innocent Christians and the bloody Turks loved to eat them for lunch. Why upset such a fun formula? [Not that prejudice is the only reason. Pro-Armenian intimidation tactics and Armenian wealth also enter into the equation.])
Princeton Professor Norman Itzkowitz stated in a talk that the reason why an Armenian student did not come back after being given a long list of books that countered the history of his grandmother was because, "[A]ll of this ethnic conflict business I think we have to understand at the bottom is irrational; it has nothing to do with rationality. They don't want to know anything, and they will not take the time to inform themselves about what is going on."
We know that is the way the Armeni-Lemmings operate, because they look at their nationalistically-binding genocide from the perspective of fanatic religious faith, and not reason. What a pity so many non-Armenians also fall into the same dishonest trap. Even those who have a duty to provide impartial information, as America's Public Broadcasting Service.
In an enlightening article, a fair-minded Armenophile by the name of Richard Davey called Armenian propagandists "professional patriots." He apologized for the beloved Armenians at every turn, even though he could not take off his "hat to their integrity." But he had to admire their "uncommon shrewdness and plausibility."
"Their industry is incessant. They form associations, and, by their singular persuasiveness, manage to obtain permission — sometimes enthusiastically granted — to place certain conspicuous names upon their committee lists. Their well-organised meetings are not unfrequently presided over by cabinet ministers and other distinguished persons, who should really know better than to have anything whatever to do with such proceedings." Just as the pro-Armenians have done with this Goldberg show. They got the PBS people in their pockets. They fooled celebrities into lending their voices for what must have come across as a noble cause. All of these educated, honorable people really should have known better. But they don't know, and they don't care to know. It just feels so cozy to cuddle with the adorable Armenians.
Not incidentally, Davey wrote his article all the way back in 1895. Yes, the Armenians are still using the same hoodwinking techniques that have worked so well for them, for so long. And even though Davey served as apologist for Armenians when he chose to "applaud their pluck in keeping their wrongs before the public," he also warned, "surely it is not for us to endorse falsehoods and exaggerations without taking the trouble to verify them." And that's what it boils down to, ladies and gentlemen. Responsible people still choose to accept pro-Armenian claims at face value, not at all "taking the trouble to verify them."
The Current article also stated Goldberg as saying he could accept the panel discussion that he doubted the necessity of because: “I knew that for our film we had done our homework six ways from Sunday. Every fact was quadruple-checked and had been vetted by so many people-historians, journalists — that I knew there was no way that the after-show was an interpretation of our reporting.�
Unfortunately, the rationale is the same that genocide scholars and other historian-pretenders utilize. They hobnob with each other, and confirm their facts by using their shared, corrupt information, giving the impression of a consensus... because there are now so many of them.
When you only check what one side has to say, of course everything is going to be cleanly confirmed. One does not arrive at truth by resorting to propagandistic sources exclusively.
OPB logo
Let us now examine how on-the-ball was Goldberg's painstaking homework, as well as how PBS measured up to its own standards.
(PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV. Editorial Standards: By placing its logo at the end of a program... PBS makes itself accountable for the quality and integrity of the content.)
The Key Distortions and Falsehoods of PBS's "The Armenian Genocide"
With much of THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE bathed in that typical sob-producing string music, we get right down to the action. (Actually, the main instrument might be of the woodwind variety; regardless, we'll term this "Violin music.") Ronald Suny starts off the show by giving us a variation of Peter Balakian's Elie Wiesel-borrowed "double-killing" phrase (that viewers were offfered during WNET's "pledge break" from Goldberg's previous genocide show, when Balakian and Goldberg formed a genocide propagandists' tag team); this time we're told that Armenians are in "incomplete mourning," so, in effect, phooey on the Turkish government for not alleviating their suffering, by saying "sorry." To this, perhaps the Armenians should keep in mind rare is the folk who have not suffered tragedies in their histories, and one has a choice: to unhealthily dwell on real or perceived wounds, or to get a life and move on. That is what the Turks have done, after suffering a loss of five million exiled, and five and a half million killed in the century ending 1922 (as documented in the book, "Death and Exile").
In order for Turks to say "sorry," first, the crime needs to be established. Were there crimes against Armenians? You bet. Over a thousand accused of committing these crimes were taken to court during the war, most punished, over sixty by execution. (Naturally, many more victimizers got away, just as with the soldiers of the regiment of the My Lai Massacre. The fact that the Ottoman government attempted some punishment, however, speaks volumes. The My Lai punishment only targeted the officer in charge, and his penalty was three days' imprisonment, before house arrest.) Was there a government sponsored extermination plan? That is the very crime that needs to be established, before apologies can be forthcoming. Does the program prove this crime has been committed? Let's see how much the quadruple-checking Goldberg and company have fared.
TANER AKCAM: "People want to know what really happened. We are fed up with all these stories, denial stories, and propaganda and so on; really, the new generation want to know what happened 1915." Begorrah! How in the name of the Gods did Taner Akcam ever get a job in an American university as a "visiting professor" with that level of English? And why is his spoken English so much worse than the impeccable English he offers in his genocide reports? It's not like he would have a support system or anything like that, would it?
When he says "We," alluding to the "new generation," he must have appointed himself to speak for his "fellow Turks." He does not. He only speaks for a very, very small club of Turkish opportunists or fellow extreme lefties who think the Turkish nation is on a same par as that frightened, enslaved country ("Latveria"?) Dr. Doom was in charge of, from the "Fantastic Four" comic books.
NARRATOR: "How is it possible for a massacre of such epic proportions to take place. Why did it happen... and why has it remained one of the greatest untold stories of the 20th century?" We can see Andrew Goldberg made good on the promise of his proposal, by making it seem every one of those 1.5 million were "murdered." Yes, as if every single Armenian who died during that catastrophic period was a victim of "a massacre of such epic proportions." And just as he promised in his proposal's "It is one of the most understudied events in modern history," one of the greatest told stories of the 20th century, at the exclusion of so many truly untold examples of inhumanity, became "untold."
At show's start, I appreciated the showing of what seemed to be a whole minute of underwriters. The list went on and on, but we were also told "a complete list is available from PBS." (The Manoogian Foundation made it to fourth position this time.) The fact that this long list of supporters presented at the beginning of the film (and it was repeated also at the end) must have been a bone thrown by PBS, in a gesture of fairness. The viewer who is paying attention gets the idea off the bat that this may not be the most objective film after all.
"The Armenians. There are between six and seven million alive today..."
Wow! Armenian propaganda sites go out of their way to make it seem like there are ten million. A point for Andrew Goldberg!
"They are an ancient people... who originally came from Anatolia some 2,500 years ago."
Another point by not going overboard with the number of years. Good show, Andrew! Why, at this rate, I might just believe PBS's claims that this is really an "unbiased" show...
But hold up. What's that? The Armenians originated from Anatolia? Now we're running into trouble.
The fact is, since Armenian history is mostly written by Armenians, we can't be sure exactly what went on. But since the Armenians are an "Indo-European" people, the odds are, they did not originate from Asian Anatolia. (Although of course some Indo-Europeans came from the Caucasus, but in this case, the contention is slanderous. What is Goldberg telling us, that the superior Aryan Armenians are cousins to the inferior, Asiatic, Mongol Turks?) No, they probably came from the Balkans, as some respectable scholars (such as Bedrich Hrozny, the famous Hittitologist/archaeologist, in 1947) have concluded .
This is too big a topic to get into, the origins of the Armenians, but there is reason to believe that ancient land called "Armenia" was called as such for reasons that had nothing to do with today's Armenians. Today's Armenians originated from a tribe called the Haiks. They were one of many, many, many tribes who came and went over the centuries. If the Haiks were the original inhabitants of what we know of Armenia, the odds are foreigners would have dubbed the nation by a variation of what Armenians called themselves. That would be a derivative of the Armenian name for Armenia, Hayastan. (Or as W. G. Palgrave put it for different reasons in 1878, "Who ever heard of Armenistan?") The real evidence points to the Haiks plopping themselves down and claiming other peoples' leftovers, like the fortresses of the Uraritans, as their own. There were times when the Haiks had their little kingdoms, but they were well dispersed by 1828, when Russia had conquered the Erivan, Nakhichevan and Karabakh Khanates from Iran and encouraged what became a massive Armenian immigration into those regions... mostly from the Ottoman Empire, beginning with a wave of some 100,000, around 1828... since Armenians would be more faithful as Christians, and they could be played off against the Muslim inhabitants, the clear majority at the time. (As late as 1918, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Soviets' Encyclopedia Britannica, Muslims comprised 38% of Erivan and environs. In just a few years, that figure would drop down to a comparatively inconsequential number... what The Jewish Times called "an appropriate analogy to the Holocaust.") There are a lot of theories as to the origins of the Armenians, but it's almost certain they did not spring from the earth of Anatolia. Before the Urartians, whose history the Haiks have "borrowed," were the Hurrians; their settlements in eastern Anatolia date back to 6,000-5,000 B.C.; The Hittites also showed their faces 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. The Assyrians made trouble for Urartu, and then the Scythians started making trouble for the Assyrians, causing the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in 609 B.C. The Scythians did not settle in these regions, moving to Egypt, allowing for the Medes to take over whatever was left of Urartu. Then the Medes got into a conflict with the Lydians. It was around this time the Armenians first started trickling into their "ancient homeland," probably from the Balkans or Thrace; they were first mentioned by Darius in 515 B.C. The Armenians were already under the Persians' sphere of influence, right from the get-go. (Most, but not all, of the above comes courtesy of Prof. Erich Feigl's "A Myth of Terror.")
As C. F. Dixon-Johnson aptly put it, "The earliest history of Armenia, as Kurdistan was called previous to its conquest by the Osrnanli Turks, is lost in the mists of mythology." He mentions yet another theory that "one of the lost tribes of Israel wandered to the shores of Lake Van and settled there, intermarrying with the Haikian(s)." Wouldn't that be a kick in the head to the more extremist Armenians, who hate Jews almost as much as they hate Turks. (One wonders whether Andrew Goldberg and his Jewish consciousness has ever visited Armenian forums.)
To get an idea of the confusion over the origins of Armenians:
"The Armenians are the former inhabitants of today's Switzerland"
Ruppen Courian, Armenian author of Promartyrs de la Civilization (1964, p. 27)
Prof. Ronald Suny described the Millet system as "discriminatory, unequal, hierarchical"; but being the comparatively more reasonable genocide advocate that he is, fairly added, "the Armenians did rather well for centuries, actually." (Although we get the strong hint that the well-doing occurred in spite of the Turks.) But then Peter Balakian gets his turn, and we all know what that means. The Armenians were "legally designated infidels." Now, infidels didn't mean you were banished, but it meant you were "subjected to a different social, political, legal, structure." In case the viewer didn't get the idea that the poor, helpless Armenians were constantly persecuted, the narrator pipes in with Goldberg's words (although they are possibly Balakian's, since he was part of the "tag team" again, billed as "Editorial Consultant Additional Writer" in the end credits): "The Armenians also had fewer rights in Islamic courts. They paid higher taxes than their Muslim neighbors. And they were generally not allowed in the military, or civil service." (That statement is far from as true for the civil service as it is for the military. Regarding the latter, surely the Armenians were the apple of their unlucky Turkish neighbors' eyes, who bore the brunt of fighting and dying in the nation's many wars.)
It's getting awfully tiresome to hear this "persecution" song all the time. Armenians generally made more money, so of course they paid higher taxes. Did Armenians expect to live in a utopia? How were French peasants faring? (Remember, there was a reason for the French Revolution.) Weren't Russian peasants little more than slaves? And forget about the native inhabitants of the different Western, more "civilized" countries, how did the minorities in the other multi-ethnic empires fare? How were Moslems treated, for example, in the British Empire? Could they have gone as far as the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire?
Let's listen to Pierre Loti:
“From Turkey we French have taken Algeria, Tunis, Morocco. The English have robbed her of Egypt. Poor, beautiful, meretricious Italy, thinking she was marching to glory, turned Tripolitania into a charnel house. We lay our heavy and disdainful hands upon these conquered countries; the least of our little bureaucrats treats every Moslem as a slave. From these believers we have taken, little by little, their trust in prayer; and upon these dreamers we have imposed our futile excitements, our anger, our speed, our alcohol, our intrigues, our iron civilisation; unrest follows us everywhere, together with ambition and despair. The Turks are misunderstood by Westerners who have never set foot in this country. I do not believe there is a race of men more thoroughly good, loyal, kind."
Let's get one thing straight, pro-Armenian propagandists: there was no utopia, anywhere in the world. But compared to what we like to think of most "enlightened" Christian nations, you had better believe the reputation for the Turks' tolerance was not ill-received. This is why the Ottoman Empire was known as a haven, and those from many different ethnicities and religions made sure to head there, knowing they would be living in, as Arnold Toynbee himself described, the closest thing to Plato's Republic.
NARRATOR: "Toward the end of the 1800s, the Armenians became increasingly dissatisfied with their second-class status, and began to demand change."
Does the following sound like the Armenians were dissatisfied?
"This community constitutes the very life of Turkey, for the Turks, long accustomed to rule rather than serve, have relinquished to them all branches of industry. Hence the Armenians are the bankers, merchants, mechanics, and traders of all sorts in Turkey." Hatchik Oscanyan, "The Sultan and his People" (New York, 1857)
The deception is truly hard to bear. No, the reason for the changes had nothing to do with discontentment or persecution. Are you kidding? The Armenians were the masters of Ottoman society, in a sense. (Sure, eastern Armenians suffered from the lack of law, at the hands of Kurds and others. But these were in regions where Ottoman control was weak. It must be kept in mind that lawless bands did not discriminate, and preyed on Muslims as well.)
Here is how Armenian "colonists" in Britain made their complaints, echoing the above, hoping to extract British sympathy (this was in 1878, when Armenians were not as spoiled; their propaganda campaign was only beginning. See how this plea was indirectly responded to by an amazing Briton, W. G. Palgrave:
"The evils from which the Armenian Christians suffer are partly those endured in common by all the subjects of the Porte, partly others peculiar to the region they inhabit... But the greatest evil by far is the presence in their country of Kurds and other predatory tribes, who carry on a perpetual war against them... The Government is utterly powerless to control the Kurds, who follow their own chieftains and do not care for the officials of the Sultan. These officials seldom venture to interfere; but if they do, the Kurds take vengeance probably on them, and certainly on the village of the Armenian who has dared to complain."
A primary reason why the Ottoman government was failing to protect its people was because the "Sick Man" was targeted by the European imperialists. And one way the imperialists were making the Ottoman Empire weaker was by using Ottoman Christians. The more zealous among the Armenians formed terror groups, to increase the attention of the European imperialists.
BALAKIAN: "The Armenian people pushed the political envelope in the Ottoman Empire by asking again and again, can a Christian be the equal of a Muslim in the Ottoman Empire... and the answer to that question was decidedly, again and again, no."
Peter Balakian and his fist of fury
The situation, of course, was much more complicated than that. The fact is, the Armenians kept getting increased freedoms during the 19th century. But the more freedoms received meant greater opportunities for causing mischief. If anything, now that the imperialists had decided to gang up on the Ottomans, Armenians got again and again bolder, knowing they would enjoy the protection of the biased European consuls. Note there is no mention here, or anywhere in the program, of the terror groups like the Hunchaks and Dashnaks. In the Goldberg show's propagandistic zeal to present the impression of "poor, persecuted Christians," what is avoided is one basic truth. It was not the "Armenian people" who expressed their wish to become more equal. (The British-Armenian plea from above also stated: "The Armenians ... have nearly all the trade in their hands, being, as is generally admitted, superior to the Moslems both in natural intelligence and in education." They were not only, for all intents and purposes, equal, but "superior" in terms of being the masters of society.) The ones who forced their demands both on the Ottoman government and the mostly unwilling (at first) fellow Armenians were the fanatical Armenian terrorist leaders.
"Never were a people so fully prepared for the hand of a tyrant; never were a people so easy to be preyed upon by revolutionary societies; never was there a people so difficult to lead or to reform. That these characteristics are the result of Muslim oppression I do not for one moment believe."
Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliph’s Last Heritage (London, 1915)
Prof. Elizabeth Frierson tells us the Sultan was only interested in reforms for Ottomans, "first and foremost. You can be an Ottoman-Armenian, that was wonderful. But if you tried to simply be an Armenian, that was an act of treason against the state."
Elizabeth Frierson
Let us allow those incredibly stupid words to sink in. This may come as news for Professor Frierson, but there is not a nation on earth that would allow a citizen's individual nationality to supersede that of the state's. The Armenians simply don't get it. They think they are special (Sykes: "The pride of race brings about many singularities"), and no matter which nation they live in, most believe they should be considered as Armenians first. Davey explained this phenomenon back in 1895: "[A]lthough one or two generations (of Armenians) may be born among us, like their first cousins the Jews, they never thoroughly assimilate themselves with us. They remain, a people apart." This is why the Armenian diaspora, no matter where they are in the world, have a tendency to think of their Armenian nationalism first. We are not talking about all Armenians, of course; but we have plenty of examples. (Such as Armenians in post WWI Georgia.) It is a universally accepted rule that when a person resides in a nation as a citizen, one's loyalty is expected "first and foremost" to that nation, otherwise that nation would regard the disloyalty as "treason." Many Armenians may not get this idea, but what is apologist Prof. Frierson's excuse?
The program next tells us that more Armenians "agitated" for their rights, met with increasing resistance by the Sultan, who ultimately called his sometimes uncontrollable Kurdish regiment, the Hamidiyeh. What we are not told is the form in which that agitation took place: the Armenians rebelled. They massacred. The idea was to draw Europe's attention, like what was happening or had happened in Ottoman Europe. When they committed such treasonous and criminal acts against the state, any state would reserve the right to put down such a rebellion. Only, when the Ottoman Empire did it, it became a "massacre."
In 1895, there were 22 provocations throughout different provinces of the empire in the last three months alone. In Diyarbakir, the second of November, shots were fired on Muslims praying in the mosque, and a fire was later started, destroying mosques and shops, 90% of which belonged to Muslims. (Carton 313, File 70, 10/28/1311 telegram). The last incident of the uprisings, on August 26, 1896, was the famous raid on the Ottoman Bank, which was mercilessly bombed. Secretary F.A. Baker wrote, "Their hatred of the Turks was beyond all description...it had been their (the Dashnaks') intention to kill all the Turks." (F.O. 424/188, No. 174, enclosure 4.) The Dashnaks would attempt the assassination of their sultan on July 21, 1905; the "Bloody Sultan" pardoned them.
(Later in the program, a quick reference would be made to 1890s, or actually all pre-1915 disturbances, of which there were only "three"; we'll get to that later.)
We get a letter from a Hamidiye soldier from 1895 testifying that 1,200 Armenians were killed as "food for the dogs," having made war on the "Armenian unbelievers." How shocking that there was a Kurd who knew how to write (among Muslim peasants, who made up the bulk of the military, literacy was not always widespread), and even more shocking that such a letter would have been preserved. We don't know the source, but even if it is true, what was the context? (Armenian propagandists always love to leave out the context.)
Could that Hamidiyeh soldier have been fighting against the Armenian rebels of Zeitun, for example? Here is what the Hunchak leader of that 1895 rebellion, Aghasi, wrote in his diary:
This brave population, who for a while had been forced to show restraint voluntarily came to our call. A great number of Zeitunites came to join us in the mountains where we had been hiding. . . . They had all come with arms; there were even children who carried a knife or a gun. (p. 189) ... Then we saw Vartabed Sahag, a 90-year-old lame man; he seemed happy and was crying out to thank God: `Praise the Lord! I was afraid of dying before smelling for the last time gunpowder; the perfume of incense was beginning to disgust me, and sometimes I would put gunpowder in the incenser.' [p. 214] ... The women, armed with axes, guns, daggers, and sticks, chased the Turkish prisoners who were escaping, and killed most of them, only 56 of them were able to escape. [p. 289] ... From the beginning until the end of the insurrection, the Turks lost 20,000 men, 13,000 of whom were soldiers, and the rest were bashi-bozuks [irregulars]. We had lost only 125 men, 60 of whom had died in battle, and 65 of whom were dastardly killed during the cease-fire. (p. 306]
Fikret Adanir, another pro-genocide
Turk, made a cameo appearance
Balakian tells us the Hamidiyeh would go on to massacre "tens of thousands of innocent people in the next couple of years." We can see not all of those people were that innocent. The film provides newspaper clippings from Western publications as "proof," ending with a headline sure to water the mouth of any genocide advocate: "Another Armenian Holocaust." (Sept. 10, 1895, a London newspaper; "The Daily News"?) As to the validity of these accounts, Davey wrote:
If anyone wishes to form an idea of how Armenian atrocities are manufactured and exaggerated, let him read the Blue-books on "affairs at Aleppo," 1879. The London papers, inspired by the "patriots," announced, with a great flourish of trumpets, that 500 Armenians had been tortured and massacred in the neighbourhood of that city; and there was, so to speak, a great Armenian horrors' boom all over the western world and America too. Well, after all this sensationalism, the number of slain was eventually reduced by our own and the American consuls to eight.
NARRATOR: "These events gave the sultan worldwide infamy, and the nickname, 'The Bloody Sultan.'"
More a reflection on the attitude of the bigoted western world than the actual events. Here's what Davey wrote (I refer to Davey because he was an Armenian apologist. But he was also a fair man. There are many other Western writers who could also be referred to, those who kept a lid on their anti-Turkish prejudices... such as Russian General Mayewski and British Captain Norman):
"It is impossible to withhold sympathy and respect for a Sultan of such blameless private life as Abdul Ahmed, who works incessantly at what he believes to be the welfare of his people. To accuse him, as I have seen lately, even in respectable English papers, of being a sort of Tackleton who delights in tormenting his Armenian subjects as that worthy did in scrunching crickets, is not only unjust but in preposterously bad taste. In the first place, the Sultan is so free from the spirit oi cruelty which disgraced some of his ancestors, that it is difficult to get him to sign even the death-warrant of a murderer. He invariably commutes the sentence to imprisonment. He has much to contend with."
We then get the typical propaganda figure of 200,000 killed between 1894-1896. The reality was probably more like a tenth of that figure (the Ottoman number was 13,432), and no one talks about the 5,000 Muslims who were killed. (Barring the word of Aghasi, where the Turk-casualty was 20,000 for one rebellion alone.) Among Western sources, we get plenty of estimates that don't come close to the figure Andrew Goldberg chose to go with for his Armenian-backed show. (We should thank him for not going as skyward as 300,000, the preferred figure for one of his more zealous spokespeople, Tessa Savvidis Hofmann.) Examples: Vahan M. Kurkjian, A History of Armenia, 1958, p. 296: 100,000; also mentions British Blue Book "conservative estimate" of 63,000. From The Armenian File: .Lepsius: 88,243; Bliss: 35,032, or approximately 42,000 when the 6,000-7,000 dead from the 1896 incidents are added. "The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide," p. 24: Hepworth, "Through Armenia on Horseback": 50,000. Dec. 1895 account from the German ambassador: 60,000-80,000.
With the Young Turk takeover in 1908, Peter Balakian, assuming his typically arrogant pose, tells us there is talk of reforms. "For example, very soon Armenians will be allowed in the army. There is a sense of a new era here that the Armenians are excited about." Yes, all Ottomans were excited, not just the "exclusive victims," the Armenians. But let's get something straight: most Armenians were anything but bowled over regarding the prospect of getting dragged into the beleaguered nation's many wars, to be shot at and get killed or maimed.
Fatma Muge Gocek
We are then told of the Balkan nations breaking away in 1912-13. Taner Akcam explains almost 75% of the European territories were lost, and ties that in with "fear of collapse." Fatma Muge Gocek elaborates Anatolia is the last hold-out for the Turkish nation, and that "they feel" it must be preserved "at all costs, and therefore they think that everything they can do for it is justifiable." The narrator fills in the rest: "As thousands of refugees and Muslim Turks returned from lost battles and territories in the Balkans, Turkish nationalism and religious tensions grew. This intensified the animosity toward Christians in the empire." Vahakn Dadrian, of all people, emphasized the Turks' "misery, destitution, bitterness, lost all their belongings, dying from hunger, their Ottoman state not able to take care of them..." He put the number who "fled" in "excess of 100,000."
We all know where this is going; the big murder motive. Before we get there, though, can we dwell on what happened to the Balkan Turks? Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia acted in the most repulsive, murderous fashion. The idea was to kill every single Turk or Muslim they could get their hands on, in order to frighten the rest into leaving. Here was definite "intent" to exterminate. This is the real "untold" story, a true genocidal campaign that was one of the first of the 20th century, the extent of which was a catastrophe the biased world has yet to acknowledge in its true dimension. The reader is advised to turn to the only major work on the topic, Justin McCarthy's "Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922." These Orthodox peoples behaved in the utmost ferocity, mannerisms the Armenians would make sure to emulate in coming years on a massive scale of their own. (But with the difference the Armenians killed more for killing's sake in many occasions, rather than killing to chase the others away.) The intense anti-Muslim hatred, the pillaging and destruction of villages, the forced conversion to Christianity; what took place was what we could truly call a genuine holocaust in its own right. Because of the rapid collapse of the Ottoman armies, refugees were attacked on the roads before they could reach places of relative safety. Many were stricken by disease. Many tried to return, despite the dangers; they had their homes for centuries, after all. The victims included not only Muslims, but Jews as well.
Note the program only alluded to refugees, not to deaths, and Dadrian's number was a willful undercount. (Musn't share any of that precious sympathy!) The Muslim refugees from the Balkans, for the years 1912-20, had a total of 413,922. The Muslims had been an absolute majority before the wars had begun. Greece before: 746,485, vs. 124,460 after. Bulgaria before, 327,732 vs. 179,176 after. Serbia before, 1,241,076, Yugoslavia after: 566.478. The difference in these totals: 1,445,179. That amounted to a loss of 62%. Of these, 632,408, or 27% of the Muslim population of the conquered European territories, had died. The number of Ottoman victims for both "Death" and "Exile" parallels the entire pre-war Armenian population (some 1.5 million) and the post war Armenian mortality (up to 600,000.) Note how much the world focuses on the latter, but doesn't care one iota about the former.
What do we call a program that stresses the suffering of one people and doesn't even mention one Muslim who died, regarding the Balkan Wars? I think we can go safely beyond the realm of "propaganda" and think along the lines of "racist."
Prof. Frierson neatly explains how the animosity of these refugees against the Christians who, plain and simple, tried to exterminate them, led to "genocide." So simple, isn't it? She is surely proving herself to be a deep thinker, taking everything into account. Certainly there was antipathy from the refugees who had lost everything and witnessed the cruelty of the Orthodox Christians firsthand; but the utter dishonesty with this statement comes from the fact that if the Armenians had not rebelled, if they had been "first and foremost" Ottoman citizens (a concept Frierson apparently found outrageous) as the Jews were, nothing would have happened to them. (This was the "terrible fact," as stated by no less an authority than Armenia's first prime minister.) There was no network of hatred in Ottoman society, as, say, the Nazis had established in their society against the Jews.
That is an area Goldberg's propaganda refuses to go near, and with good reason. The Armenians' "Myth of Innocence" must be preserved. The last thing the pro-Armenian propagandists can afford to do is to admit that "ever since the beginning of the war the Armenians fought by the side of the Allies on all fronts," and that "they indignantly refused to side with Turkey," as leader Boghos Nubar flatly admitted.
Enver Pasha: We are Turks, and we will kill!
An ominous held musical note accompanies the portrait of an unfriendly-looking Enver Pasha, as he speaks of the anger produced by what had happened to the Balkan Turks. With such catastrophic losses, what other emotion would anyone have felt? Enver is quoted as wishing for "revenge, revenge, revenge." Those are magic words to the ear of more extremist Armenians. (For example, author Sarkis Atamian, The Armenian Review, Nov. 1960: "[W]ithout retribution, justice is merely a word.") The creepy notion is that Enver and company would take out their frustrations on an entirely innocent people, the Armenians, simply because they were Christian. That is an ugly, propagandistic notion, without basis in fact. (Leon Surmelian's Uncle Leon was quoted as thus in "I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen," a work that gave Enver, not Talat, the credit for "genocide": "Enver had nothing but praise for our soldiers during the Balkan War. It wasn’t easy for our boys to fight against the Christian Bulgarians — with Antranik serving in their army." If Enver was talking about "revenge," he was not thinking about the Armenians.)
We then move on to the notion that a mad nationalism had taken over the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, as the tolerant ways of the empire formed the reason why intense minority nationalism took hold, the Ottomans realized the idealistic old ways would lead to their own extinction, since everyone else was playing by different rules. But there is a world of difference between realizing they had to start looking out for Number One, and using nationalism as a justification for exterminating others.
The magic phrase to convey this notion? "Turkey for the Turks." What worked in "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" back in 1918 is still being presented some ninety years later to deceive and distort. The idea of runaway Turkish nationalism prompting the Ottomans' attempt to "exterminate" the Armenians had no basis in Morgenthau's private letters and diaries (as Prof. Lowry pointed out), and it has no basis here. As written in "Grand Turk," "Every ill against which the patriots had been struggling had arisen from foreign minorities within or from foreign interference from without, frequently from both simultaneously." The natural outcome was to stress a national identity, a practice that any nation partakes in. Who could argue with one-time pro-Armenian George A. Plimpton, when he wrote in 1926’s “The New Turkey�: "We believe in America for the Americans, why not Turkey for the Turks?" In both cases, the idea has nothing to do with race, but with nationality. Neither heterogeneous nation can point to a "racially pure" identity; in Turkey's case, after centuries of co-mingling, encompassing all forms of different peoples (from the Laz to the Circassians to the Bosnians to many, many others), an ethically pure race as “Turk� is a thing of the past. Yet, unscrupulous propagandists like Vahakn Dadrian will sink to the ugly level of statements such as, "The slogans 'Deutschland Judenrein' (Germany free of Jews) and 'Turkey for the Turks' are emblematic of these goal-directed genocides.� Anyone who simple-mindedly believes "Turkey for the Turks" equals a motivation for genocide should ask why other non-Turkish minorities, like the Jews (or better yet, like the Arabs, who rebelled as the Armenians did), were not targeted for extermination.
The program gives an account of Sarikamish without paying note to the crucial part traitorous Ottoman-Armenians had played in that defeat. A few months later, the program goes on to tell us that 120,000 invading Russians were accompanied by a contingent of 5-6,000 Armenian soldiers consisting of "both Russian-Armenian conscripts and a smaller number of Ottoman-Armenians who had defected." It's the first time we get a hint of the betrayal of Ottoman-Armenians of their nation. But the situation was far more serious:
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, Turkish Grand National Assembly speech, March 24, 2005.
Prof. McCarthy and his wife. It takes great strength
to deal with the dirty tactics of the Dashnaks.
(This was the speech McCarthy was invited by Turkey to present that Balakian detestably pointed to in the panel discussion, in order to accuse McCarthy of essentially being an "agent of the Turkish government." Balakian's slimy Dashnak smear tactic was to detract from the messenger's message.)
Boghos Nubar offered a figure of 150,000 Armenians in the Russian Army, and up to 50,000 Armenian volunteers, while an Armenian historian, Aykouni, estimated "more than 250,000" who fought with the Russians. Propagandists try to minimize the number of Ottoman-Armenians who served in the Russian Army as a "small number," but the fact is a good chunk of these Russian-Armenians, as well as the Armenians who travelled from other countries (see "The Black Company," relating the voyage of Armenians from America; they are correctly referred to as "Turkish Armenians"), derived from the Ottoman Empire a short time before. And when Armenians get together, their intense nationalism allows them to be just plain Armenians, regardless of the country they happen to be occupying.
Prof. McCarthy also pointed out in his above speech:
"In Eastern Anatolia, Armenians formed bands to fight a guerilla war against their government. Others fled only to return with the Russian Army, serving as scouts and advance units for the Russian invaders. It was those who stayed behind who were the greatest danger to the Ottoman war effort and the greatest danger to the lives of the Muslims of Eastern Anatolia."
The program goes into overdrive with Peter Balakian explaining Sarikamish had led to the distrust and disarmament of Ottoman-Armenian soldiers. They were put into labor battalions, "grunt work forces by which they were building roads, cleaning latrines and so forth, and were easily segregated, rounded up and just massacred en masse."
So here we have a desperate Ottoman army so short of manpower that Ambassador Morgenthau had written few were left to till the fields, causing the death of thousands of Turks daily, by starvation. The empire was hit on all sides; men were desperately needed. Now, labor battalions serve as an essential function in any army; it's not just about getting sent to the front to get shot at. Would it be logical that these needed bodies would have been massacred? Even if there was an extermination policy, it would have made better sense to use them up first, and then kill them.
There were examples of massacres of Armenian soldiers. In perhaps the best example, an Ottoman commander, Vehip (or Vehib) Pasha, actually executed a few of the perpetrators ... providing evidence against a government-run plan for extermination. (Whoever heard of SS men being punished for abusing or killing Jews?) But these crimes were committed by renegade forces. There is no evidence that there was a systematic plan to massacre Armenian soldiers, and it is despicable for this program to throw out such an unfounded assertion. (Must have been one of those facts that Andrew Goldberg "quadruple checked." Did he ask himself what the proof was? If he actually had the integrity to do so, he couldn't have produced this program. The whole program, up until this point as you have seen, consists of one unsubstantiated claim after another.)
As the violin music plays in the background, the narrator fills in by stating, "The massacres of the Armenian soldiers were the first stage of the Armenian genocide. But it was still just the beginning." Luckily, we have Peter Balakian to continue his arrogant patter by telling us about some 250 Armenian intellectuals who were arrested on April 24 in "Constantinople," to be "deport[ed]" to a prison (is that the correct word for a professor of English to be using? When Al Capone was sent to Alcatraz, was he "deported"?), where most were killed and tortured. "So just as you have able-bodied men who were wiped out by Ottoman soldiers in the winter of 1915, in the spring of 1915, the intellectual head of the culture is cut off."
Hope you all caught that: Peter Balakian asserted the Armenians in the Ottoman army were "wiped out" in early 1915. Looks like Peternocchio is suffering from an erection, once again. Two wildly pro-Armenian sources that attested to witnessing plenty of Armenian soldiers in later years were the missionary Mary Graffam, and even U.S. Consul Leslie Davis. ("During the last two months quite a number of Armenian soldiers have been brought back in groups of two or three hundred from Erzurum." The Slaughterhouse Province, p. 181.) So this is very important; please pay attention. Peter Balakian is telling us the "extermination plan" began with a two-step process:
1) Knock off the Armenian soldiers
2) Knock off the Armenian intelligentsia.
We just demonstrated his lying with his first contention, at least regarding the timetable. Now, if one should confront him with his lie, he will say, no, I didn't mean all the Armenian soldiers were killed by early 1915. He will say something like what Tessa Hofmann claimed in her March 27, 2004 Tokyo lecture, "(Armenian soldiers) surviving were finished off with bayonets, once they had completed their task." But Tessa Hofmann has no proof. Neither does Peter Balakian. If they point to Armenian soldiers actually having been massacred, as with the Vehip Pasha example, those are isolated; they no more prove that the massacre of Armenian soldiers was a state policy than the My Lai Massacre proves the United States government intended to exterminate every Vietnamese civilian. It's horrible that these unethical people will make any and every false statement in the support of their agenda, without offering factual evidence.
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-B. Accuracy: The honesty and integrity of informational content depends heavily upon its factual accuracy. Every effort must be made to assure that content is presented accurately and in context... A commitment to accuracy includes a willingness to correct the record if persuasive new information that warrants a correction comes to light....
What the program does not mention, of course, is that there was a full-fledged Armenian rebellion going on. Prof. McCarthy, from the above speech, provided a powerful source attesting to how ready the Armenians were, waiting for their moment to strike: As early as 1908, British consul Dickson had reported:
The Armenian revolutionaries in Van and Salmas [in Iran] have been informed by their Committee in Tiflis that in the event of war they will side with the Russians against Turkey. Unaided by the Russians, they could mobilize about 3,500 armed sharpshooters to harass the Turks about the frontier, and their lines of communication.[4]
The moment war was declared by Russia in early November 1914, according to Peter Balakian's favored New York Times, the Armenians made good on their treacherous plans: "ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS Besieging Van — Others operating in Turkish Army's Rear."
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-A. Fairness: Fairness to the audience implies several responsibilities. Producers must neither oversimplify complex situations nor camouflage straightforward facts.
For those who equate "gendarmes" with "soldiers"
According to yet another genocide-advocating "Turkish scholar," we are told in ‘A Reign of Terror’ - CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923� that during the middle of 1915, armed Armenian gendarmes were allowed to operate. Yet Peter Balakian told us Armenian "security agents" were not only disarmed, but "wiped out" by early 1915.
(P. 45: "While the war was raging in all intensity on the eastern front, the CUP began questioning the loyalty of the Ottoman Armenians even more. On 5 May 1915 Talat authorized the Third Army to disarm all Armenian gendarmes in Diyarbekir.")
The paper also tells us two Armenians were still allowed to work as deputies for the government.
(P. 59: "Vartkes Serengulian [1871-1915], deputy for Erzurum and Krikor Zohrab [1861-1915], author and deputy for Istanbul. On 12 May 1915 Vartkes dashed to Talat’s house to protest against the mass arrests of the Armenian intelligentsia.")
Even if these two turned out to be "genocide victims" later, how very odd that members of the "Armenian intelligentsia" were still allowed to operate, to the extent of visiting their executioner's house!)
Someone had to be planning this rebellion. That someone had to be mostly from ranks of the Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders, those with the brains and the networking abilities. No doubt some of the arrested were innocent. Most of the ringleaders were not, and nearly all countries treated — especially in those days — treason as a crime punishable by death. Only Turkey or the Ottoman Empire are accused of "massacres" when they follow the same rules everyone else does.
If the idea was to exterminate these Armenians, not one would have been released. Yet, there were a number of examples, like Komitas, the famous musician, let go after two weeks of confinement. Peter Balakian's own relative, the "Action Priest," also managed to live to tell his tale. In his case, he "escaped," but that's the word of the Balakians, to be accepted at one's own risk. (The real scoop behind April 24.)
Tessa Hofmann offers her opinion that it's easier to commit genocide once the leaders have been eliminated. Now, are we actually asked to believe everyone who was left had the intelligence of a flea and were totally useless? If that was the case, eastern Anatolia could not have been occupied and run by Ottoman-Armenians, during and especially after the Russian presence.
There's Peter Balakian again; Andrew Goldberg has certainly made good use of his friend, offering him the most generous screen time. Now he's offering the Holocaust parallel of the railways, in the same underhanded method employed by Jay Winter and that other PBS genocide show, THE GREAT WAR. Cattle cars for the Jews? Same with the Ottomans. The difference: the Ottomans were even more evil than the Nazis, because they charged the Armenians for the trip.
Utterly deplorable. Let's refresh our memories. The year: 1915. The place: the bankrupt "Sick Man." Why were there "cattle cars"? Because there was no other kind. The fact that there was any train at all was good fortune enough. Prof. Guenter Lewy elaborates on the conditions:
"Moreover, the food that was available in Turkey often could not be distributed. The country’s few existing one-track railroads were overburdened, and shortages of coal and wood frequently rendered locomotives unusable. A crucial tunnel on the line toward Syria — the famous Baghdad railway — remained unfinished until late in the war. The resulting scarcities afflicted even the Turkish army, whose troops, as one German officer reported, received a maximum of one third of their allotted rations. In circumstances where soldiers in the Turkish army were dying of undernourishment, it is not so surprising that little if any food was made available to the deported Armenians. Indeed, the mistreatment of common Turkish soldiers, the subject of many comments by contemporaries, makes an instructive comparison with the wretched lot of the Armenians. Although 'provisions and clothing had been confiscated to supply the army,' wrote an American missionary in Van, 'the soldiers profited very little by this. They were poorly fed and poorly clothed when fed or clothed at all.' The Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen noted in her diary on February 7, 1915: 'The officers are filling their pockets, while the soldiers die of starvation, lack of hygiene, and illness.'�
What killed most of the Armenians was not massacres. The causes were mostly famine and disease. Did the Ottoman government bear responsibility for not taking better care of the Armenians? Yes, they did. Did the Ottoman government similarly bear responsibility for not taking care of their 2.5 million other Ottomans who also mostly died of famine and disease? Yes, they did. Could it be said the Armenians were deliberately killed because they were not supplied with sufficient food and medicine? No, it cannot; not when the rest of Ottoman society was dying of the same factors. Would as many Armenians have died if they were not subjected to a relocation policy? Probably not. But when a bankrupt nation is attacked on all sides by superpower enemies and threatened with extinction, and if a disloyal minority decided to join these enemies and become "belligerents de facto since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey," as leader Boghos Nubar flatly admitted, then who bears the responsibility? (It's not that a government would be without responsibility to make sure the poor innocents among the relocated would not be better taken care of. But the fact is, if the Armenian leaders had not taken their people down this road, there simply would not have been a relocation policy, as there was none for the other Ottoman minorities, like the Greeks and the Jews.)
Getting back to the matter of the rails, it's not that the Ottomans were being evil by charging the Armenians who were able to travel by rail the cost of their tickets. The fact that they allowed the Armenians to travel by rail at all is a point in the Ottomans' favor, given that other competing war necessities were compromised by the usage of the precious one-track railroad. These Armenians could have easily been subjected to travel on foot, as their cousins in the east, where there was no railroad... and no choice. As a pro-Armenian relief worker noted: "the distance between Cilicia and the Syrian wasteland was considerably shorter, and although many thousands died in blistering exile, at least half of the deportees from Cilicia still clung to life when the world war ended." (Kerr, "The Lions of Marash," p. xxi. Referring to at least some of these transported folks, an en route foreign resident by the name of Miss Frearson observed that they "looked so much better off in every way than any refugees we had seen that they hardly seemed like refugees at all." From "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire," 1916, p. 543.) Regarding use of the rails, the most critical issue for those of us who are attempting to see whether there was a premeditated plan of murder is, as Gwynne Dyer put it: "Armenians living in areas served by the railway could buy tickets and travel safely, (and) there were no further attacks on Armenians who reached Syria."
With his annoying, barely hidden half-cocked smile, secure in the knowledge that his propaganda will be going out unchallenged, and with the sad violin music in the background, Peter Balakian further tells us: "We're familiar with the images of Jews being crammed into box cars in Germany and Poland; box cars were now filled with eighty to a hundred people who were dying just of asphyxiation and starvation on their journey alone." Meanwhile, we are provided with a picture of a railroad car with slatted openings.
Can the thoroughly deceptive Peter Balakian provide any reliable evidence that Armenians had died of asphyxiation? NO, he cannot. Why is he saying it? Because Peter Balakian employs an unscrupulously Dashnak "end justifies the means" level of morality, and he is out of control, having a field day with presenting this "Holocaust parallel" to unwary and ignorant American viewers.
Balakian adds that the Ottomans had told the Armenians they would be returning. "This is what the Nazis told the Jews as they arrested them and deported them as well." The Ottoman decree in relocating the Armenians (Balakian the English professor should know "deportation" means banishment outside a country's borders; this is not the correct term to use for the Armenians who were moved around and not out of the country, and it is certainly not the correct way to describe Jews sent to certain death by the Nazis), enacted on May 27 and made effective June 1, was put forth as a temporary law. By 1917, the Ottoman government was discussing the possibility of allowing the Armenians to return. Not that they weren't already returning, as witnessed by the missionary Mary Graffam (the relocated Armenians were not kept under lock and key in the same manner as Nazi concentration camps, particularly those who had been integrated into villages and not in the ill-guarded settlements, and more than a few travelled freely); the missionary Ernest Partridge also referred to what appears to have been the period after the Ottoman decree of Dec. 21, 1918, officially permitting the Armenians to return: "I found Sivas a very busy place at the time of our arrival. Deported Armenians were trekking back to their former homes, and we had through our city a constant stream of people returning way up to the Black Sea coast." In 1921, the Armenian Patriarch provided a report to the British stating 644,900 Armenians remained within what was left of the empire. Many hundreds of thousands of Armenians had gone off to other areas on their own accord (travelling freely since the places they went to were not in Ottoman control), 50,000 to Iran and 500,000 to Transcaucasia by Richard Hovannisian's count, among others. So if the Ottomans told the Armenians they would be returning, were they lying? The reader may judge who the real liar is.
Tessa Savvidis Hofmann
"Purposely the people were driven under escort, long marches, in order to exhaust them. They were driven ... over mountains, and sometimes in circles, in order to make them weary," not allowed to rest or drink when they were thirsty, killing off the weakest, the children, pregnant women. So stated Tessa Hofmann. The reason why the people were forced to march was because there simply was no mode of transportation. Everyone was subjected to the same rules... even those who stood between life and death for the nation, the soldiers. Here is an example of a convoy, forced to march, and massacred.
It is utterly despicable for the agenda-ridden Hofmann to make conclusions such as "purposely" when she cannot provide the evidence. As Prof. Bernard Lewis put it, "There is no evidence of a decision to massacre. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence of attempt to prevent it, which were not very successful... The massacres were carried out by irregulars, by local villagers responding to what had been done to them and in number of other ways." The proof for Hofmann's admirable ability to fill a zeppelin-sized hot air balloon was provided by the Armenian Patriarch himself in his 1921 report. If the idea was to murder all of these Armenians, instead of 644,900 being around, there would have been closer to zero.
We are treated to a sad story of how a gendarme viciously stabbed a grandmother, once she sounded off on the injustice of their trek. "Unable to silence her with repeated dagger thrusts, the gendarme mercifully pumped some bullets into her and ended her life." The source: "Haig Baronian, Genocide Survivor," when he was a child. Is the story true? Possibly. There were certainly lowlifes among the gendarmes, and some definitely committed crimes. Should "Armenian oral history" be accepted at face value? Not if one is after genuine truth. The real question: if the idea was to murder the Armenians, how could Haig Baronian have possibly remained a "genocide survivor"? Especially if the mad gendarme, generous with his bullets, was ticked off solely by the woman's mutterings. If this kid was observing his own beloved grandmother getting so brutally murdered right in front of his eyes, what do you think he would have been doing? The same as any other frightened, horrified child: screaming at the top of his lungs. If the simple sounds from the grandmother are what made the gendarme turn into Michael Myers from the HALLOWEEN horror movie series, what would have possibly prevented him from turning his rifle toward the hysterical grandson?
PROF. SUNY: "We have evidence that so many people died and were thrown into the Euphrates River, that the river ran red with blood. Indeed, many people who could not take the marches could not stand the pain and torture, killed themselves by dropping into the river."
I am beginning to lose my already reluctant respect for Prof. Suny. He is dangerously getting close to Peter Balakian-Vahakn Dadrian territory. What are the sources Prof. Suny is referring to? He is consulting missionary sources such as Dr. William Rockwell, prone to issuing statements of scenes he was never close to, as "...hundreds are dying daily; that mothers are throwing babies into the Euphrates in despair..." (from the Oct. 1916 New York Times article, "The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead"; here's another New York Times example.) A genuine truth-seeker without an agenda would have beans in his brains to rely on missionary accounts. In their prayers, the missionaries were given "license from God" to vilify the Turks. These people of the Book abhorrently broke the Ninth Commandment constantly.
As Dr. Justin McCarthy described in his excellent report on British war propaganda:
In all of the writings of the missionaries Turks were never victims; Armenians were always victims. Armenians never killed; Turks always killed. Turks, and I am not exaggerating in any way, Turks persecuted orphans; Turks were cannibals; Turks held auctions of Armenian women; Armenians were a majority all over the east of Anatolia; all young Armenian males had been killed by Turks; all women, every one, were raped by Turks; the Turks hated education and always persecuted the educated; no Christians had ever been part of the Ottoman government. Turks needed Christians because the Turks were racially incapable of being "doctors, dentists, tailors, carpenters, every profession or trade requiring the least skill." And the missionaries wrote that now that the Turks had killed the Armenians, Westerners who were going to have to come in and take over Turkey, because the Turks had rid themselves of the only people with brains, the Armenians, and the Turks could not run the country themselves.
Here lies the distinction between the propagandist and the genuinely impartial researcher. When one proves ones case by pointing to propaganda, one is either affirming ones already existing status as a propagandist, or is adding oneself to the ranks of the propagandists. In order to become a researcher of integrity, one must seek unconflicted sources. Sources such as H. Pravitz, a Swede who was so disgusted by what Richard Davey had termed the "great Armenian horrors' boom all over the western world and America too" that he was compelled to pen an article, in which he reported:
For fourteen days, I followed the Euphrates; it is completely out of the question that I during this time would not have seen at least some of the Armenian corpses that, according to Mrs. Stjernstedt’s statements, should have drifted along the river en masse at that time. A travel companion of mine, Dr. Schacht, was also travelling along the river. He also had nothing to tell when we later met in Baghdad.
In summary, I think that Mrs. Stjernstedt, somewhat uncritically, has accepted the hair-raising stories from more or less biased sources, which formed the basis for her lecture.
By this, I do not want to deny the bad situation for the Armenians, which probably can motivate the collection initialized by Mrs. Stjernstedt.
But I do want to, as far as it can be considered to be within the powers of an eyewitness, deny that the regular Turkish gendarme forces, who supervised the transports, are guilty of any cruelties.
Missionary Maria Jacobsen
As if on cue, the program offers the August 1915 testimony of "Christian Missionary from Denmark," Maria Jacobsen, as voiced by actress Laura Linney. "These were the hated Christians now in the hands of their enemies" the hopelessly pro-Christian missionary tells us, neglecting to add that if the Christians were in line to get murdered by these enemies because of hatred, there is no way any Ottoman Christian would have been alive after many centuries of such hatred. "It was impossible to talk to these people about God while they cried, pulled and tore at us; and the soldiers shouted at them and struck them with their sticks."
Indeed, in an impossible situation like this, where "soldiers" are assigned to keep order among those who are half out of their mind with hunger and misery, rare would be the trying-to-psychologically-cope police force anywhere in the world that would give first consideration to sensitivity and niceties. As H. J. Pravitz recorded from the above article, "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." It's the intention of the program to present these gendarmes as vicious Nazis. But if they were Nazis, why would they have allowed a Christian missionary to come in and comfort the Armenians in the first place?
The picture Jacobsen painted is a terrible one. But what is also terrible is that the bigoted missionary neglected to keep in mind the beautiful teaching of Jesus that every human life is costly to God. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3.28) But to ones such as Maria Jacobsen, the only worthy human beings were the Armenians. The Muslim population who was similarly suffering — Morgenthau estimated in his book that an entire quarter of the Turkish population fell to starvation — had little place in her selective heart. (It wasn't like she was totally oblivious; we already provided an example above, where she wrote in February 1915 that the Turkish soldiers were themselves dying of starvation, lack of hygiene, and illness. But this partisan religious fanatic didn't dwell on the miseries of what she very likely considered the infidel subhumans.)
NARRATOR: "Central to the process of massacre and deportation was a certain group within the Committee of Union and Progress known as the Special Organization, led by a physician named Behaeddin Shakir."
Balakian chimes in, "He is a fanatical CUP member committted to the extermination of the Armenians with a plan to create mobile killing units that would do the dirty work of exterminating the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire." (I am getting the feeling friend Balakian was called in during post production, and Goldberg asked him to provide scripted, neat little tie-ins. If so, quite a performance. By the way, Shakir, this "Heinrich Himmler," raised two Armenian boys.)
The Special Organization is a ready little culprit that Vahakn Dadrian tried to fit his selective hearsay and other "evidence" to implicate. It wouldn't do to have a genocide thesis without an SS squad. Such are the unscrupulous tactics of the Armenian genocide industry.
Prof. Guenter Lewy exposed the holes in Dadrian's nonsensical Special Organization claims in his book, a sample of which may be read in this article. Significantly, the one Western scholar, Philip H. Stoddard, who made a full study of the Special Organization, summed up the force as "a significant unionist vehicle for dealing with both Arab separatism and Western imperialism," and maintained they played no role in the Armenian relocation program.
Halil Berktay, the "Turkish scholar" in league with the genocide industry, eagerly supplements the Dadrian contention by adding that the Special Organization was composed of the "scum of the earth, convicts, people... deliberately released from prison for this kind of purpose, and they started... massacring Armenian convoys... either on the move or when they were in camps in certain places, or inside certain towns."
It is alleged that because a secret organization existed it must have been intended to do evil, including the genocide of the Armenians. As further "proof," it is noted that officers of the Teskilat were present in areas where Armenians died. Since Teskilat officers were all over Anatolia, this should surprise no one. By this dubious logic, Teskilat members must also have been responsible for the deaths of Muslims because they were also present in areas where Muslims died. Does this prove that no Teskilat members killed or even massacred Armenians? It does not. It would be odd if during wartime no members of a large organization had not committed such actions, and they undoubtedly did so. What it in no way proves is that the Teskilat was ordered to commit genocide. — Prof. Justin McCarthy, April 11, 2001
Berktay has no evidence to support his wild claims. Let's dwell on Berktay for a moment, as he was part of a scandal, relating this very film production. (Referring to the appearances of Halacoglu and Aktan.)
Ruhat Mengi
Seems like one of Halil Berktay's e-mails was taken from his university computer and sent to a reporter (Ruhat Mengi) from one of Turkey's newspapers, "Vatan." He wrote to Stephen Feinstein of the University of Minnesota's CHGS (the university is where Taner Akcam is allowed to peddle his wares), and the reporter wrote a series of mid-March 2006 columns, based on what became a mild scandal. Berktay's words:
While “we� may know the truth about the likes of Aktan and Halacoglu, the point is to get the general public to recognize it… Including that is decisive in the long run, i.e. the Turkish public in Turkey and outside Turkey. We should find some Turks that can speak like us, make statements fitting our needs. It is needed to find support for all these tasks.
(The above provides only the gist, as what was sent to me was a rough translation from the original Turkish.)
The reporter added, "I wonder if the 'support to convince the Turks to speak like (pro-genocide advocates),' is to give them a plaque or take them to a dinner! This must be asked of H. Berktay." Naturally, what she is alluding to is the vast financial reserves of the genocide industry. One reason why Taner Akcam has been allowed to remain at respectable American universities to teach his one-note poison as a perpetual "visiting professor" is because his academic positions have been subsidized by Armenian foundations, at least some of the time. (There is no end to wealthy Armenian foundations, as the list of underwriters for this program tells us.) The current Akcam benefactor is reportedly the Cafesjian Foundation.
Halil Berktay protested that “some persons� had stolen the letter, which is probably true. The ultra-leftist from Turkey's anarchic "left vs. right" days of the 1970s also reportedly maintained “Feinstein is not defending the Genocide issue,� which would be exactly in keeping with the truth Berktay maintained regarding the Special Organization.
The reporter added from her editorial: Halil Berktay, in two notices he sent to me, says that there is no such mail, that what I say is lie, fabrication and slander. Berktay “guarantees the scholarly honor� of all academicians defending the genocide thesis and adds that this erupts from the fact that I am totally a stranger to the concept and true honor of scholarship.
Halil Berktay: He is angry and not going
to take it anymore
(That's a common tactic of these genocide advocates; for example, Dadrian loves to accuse those who are not in line (with his genocidal views) of poor scholarship, as he did with Lewy and Erickson. This is part of what Prof. Lewy labeled beautifully as the "superb arrogance" of genocide advocates. By the way, it was confusing to figure out what was going on here; first Berktay protested his letter was stolen, and there was also another bit about his claiming to have written to the web page of Michigan University instead, with copies sent to Dr. Gerard Libaridian and Harut Sassounian. Yet above Berktay evidently claimed there was no such mail. The reporter is adamant that there was, and adds a copy was sent to a Yahoo group called "armenian" or something. These have been roughly translated from the original Turkish so, as I said, it's confusing.)
Another writer from "Milliyet," Melih Asik (entitled "Caught," or Yakalandi, March 12, 2006), fills in more of this episode's holes; Berktay was responding to a query by Feinstein, as Feinstein was apparently concerned about the destructive effects of Halacoglu and Aktan's appearances on the PBS-Goldberg show. Berktay replied these two men are agents of the Turkish government, half fascist and neo-nationalist, the enemies of truth. Despite these qualities, their participation on the program will not be that harmful. Then he gives his opinion that Turks who think along the same lines as "us" (the genocide crowd) ought to be found, and provided with support.
Quite obviously the support would need to be financial. And there we have an inside glimpse regarding the dirty dealings of the genocide industry, where truth all too often takes a back seat.
PROF. SUNY: "The genocide of the Armenians was ordered and initiated from the top. But in many ways it was a disorganized event. As these deportation marches occurred, ordinary people became involved. Kurds, Circassians, Turks along the road, anyone who could find any advantage in killing Armenians, stealing their jewels, or whatever they might have."
I sure wish Suny did not approach Dadrian territory, where Dadrian loves to point out that it was "jihad" sensibilities that persuaded ordinary Turks to kill, because God told them to. Suny isn't tying in Turkish misbehavior with religious fanaticism with his statement, but he is still maintaining ordinary citizens joined in the melee. Were there ordinary citizens who opportunistically took advantage of the poor Armenians? Most definitely. Did some of them kill Armenians? Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. But this is a dangerous assertion, as it perpetuates the Terrible Turk stereotype, one where the world has been programmed to believe the Turks have a genetic predisposition to kill. Killings were committed by lawless bands and those out for revenge, for what Armenians had done to their families, for the most part. It was wrong of Suny to have given the impression that ordinary Turks participated in killings as a rule. Suny should leave that sort of ugliness to Dadrian and Balakian.
Turks are a very honorable, moralistic people. Even the rare missionary thought so: ("[The Turks] are the most honest and moral of the Orientals.") The common reaction of the ordinary Turk to the movement of the Armenians was as Leon Surmelian pointed out, in "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen": "We were curious to know how the rank and file of the Turks, families like this one, took the deportation order. The women were veiled and we could not see their expressions, but the men seemed to tell us with their sad eyes: 'Why should such things happen? Isn’t there room enough for all of us to live in peace? You have done us no harm, and we wish you no harm. Allah be with you'."
But where Prof. Suny entered truly "disgraceful" territory was with his assertion that his genocide was ordered from the top. Who says so? Aram Andonian? Other than Andonian's forgeries, there is simply no evidence that points to such a conclusion, and Suny has truly compromised his scholarly credentials with that one.
Andrew Goldberg made good on the promise from his proposal to get some Turks in Turkey to lend genocidal support. We have four brief interviews of unnamed individuals.
Let me take a quick break here and admit the easy way for genociders (as Harut Sassounian, among many others) to try and discredit this site is that the author has chosen to go by a pseudonym. My answer (knowing full well that the time-honored Dashnak tactic is to go after the messenger) is that the message is important, not the messenger. I form my opinions around the sources I have staked my beliefs upon. Thinking critics would know to put my opinions aside, and concentrate mainly on the validity of the sources.
One who presents the picture of filming a valid documentary as Goldberg cannot afford the same luxury by choosing not to identify the spotlighted individuals. The only thing these on-camera people are offering are their own opinions. The credibility of the production cannot be compromised by refusing to name them. Otherwise, they could be hired actors.
Goldberg could defend his choice by telling us he needed to safeguard these folks from the "evil" Turkish government. That explanation might have worked in 1916, when Lord Bryce pointed to his anonymous Blue Book witnesses as "Mr. X" or "a very reliable gentleman." (Bryce provided the excuse that the well-being of his witnesses needed to be safeguarded from the similarly evil Ottoman government.) In today's Turkey, these people don't need to worry about the Turkish Gestapo mowing them down with machine guns. Otherwise, a propagandist like Halil Berktay could not have possibly operated this long on Turkish soil, and, besides, if the "agents of the Turkish government" really wanted to track down these "traitors," their filmed faces would provide an excellent start.
Persons number one and number three (the fourth one comes later, but is part of this group) are apparently Kurds, as they were not speaking Turkish. Their interviews appear to have been pre-arranged, in interior settings. It's not hard to find Kurds with a beef against Turkey, and who go along with Armenian claims (the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"), so their testimony can be tainted. The single Turk (not that speaking Turkish would necessarily make someone a Turk, but that's what we have to go by), person number two, was a man on the street. What Goldberg and his camera crew was apparently forced to do was to stop passers-by and hope to luck out with one who presented "pro-genocide" views. (Later in the production we will be offered other men on the street, to demonstrate how brainwashed Turkish people are, refusing to acknowledge this genocide.)
Person number two says his grandfather told a story about how he and others put Armenians in a barn and burned them; "their voices didn't leave his ears for years." Is this the truth? Very likely. Let's try to get something straight: what happened during those catastrophic years was along the lines of a "blood feud," where the situation had deteriorated to the extent that "tribespeople" had to choose sides. Similar in recent memory to how the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians tried to do each other in during the hell that was the break-up of Yugoslavia. But what individuals did to each other cannot be used as evidence that there was a state-sponsored genocide; particularly when the state is on record for punishing some who committed crimes against Armenians..
Presumed Kurd number one states words that is music to an Armenian propagandist's ears. The state ordered the mass killings, and the mullahs permitted the locals to kill because the Armenians were Christians (Vahakn Dadrian is in heaven!). "This is according to my father," he adds. Presumed Kurd number two testifies "some faithless people" said that the killings were permitted, and if enough were killed, entry into Heaven would be assured. Minutes later, another unnamed and pre-arranged interviewee speaking the same foreign dialect states his grandfather said the state ordered the mass killings, some religious people saying the killing was permitted.
It is heartwarming the Kurds have let bygones be bygones with the Armenians.
A British colonel reported that the Armenians “massacred between 300,000 and 400,000 Kurdish Muslims in the Van and Bitlis districts.�
(British Colonel Wooley, U.S. Archives, 12.9.1919, 184.021/265)
It can't be ruled out that there were times the ignorance of religious fanaticism played a part with some killers. But I am uneasy that all three presumed Kurds appeared to be reading from the same script, saying very similar things. Something is fishy. (A clue: in the end credits, there are two Kurdish references among a total of six under the "Translations" department, one being the "American Kurdish Association." We can't leave out the possibility, given the scruples of this propagandistic production, that these were anti-Turkish Kurds from outside Turkey, possibly aided by a little coaching.)
(Some of these anti-Turkish Kurds hate Turks so much, they get the anti-Turkish European countries they live in to choose sides.)
Presumed Kurd number three wrapped up with more music to the ears of the Armenian propagandist, that Armenian women were taken. At this point, as the voice-over dramatically goes dead (but as the never-ending sad violin music keeps playing), we are treated to a shot of a pretty woman... footage that could have easily been taken from a silent French film. (She is truly in marked contrast to the miserable Armenian women we have been offered thus far.) What is the message? These bloody, barbaric, heathen, lustful Turks violated "our" pure white women, fellow anti-Muslim American viewer! At least no secret is being made of the propagandists' manipulation tactics, and if Joseph Goebbels were alive today, he just might have forced himself to shake Andrew Goldberg's hand.
Showing no let up with the propagandistic hogwash, Goldberg delivers with the dishonest notion that the takeover of Van was really "self-defense": "Occasionally, the Armenians did fight back. In the city of Van, in 1915, they killed Turkish soldiers and held off Turkish forces for more than a month." It wasn't just Turkish soldiers they killed, but every Muslim they could get their hands on.
It is unconscionable of Andrew Goldberg, who has surely seen the non-conflicted sources backing up the claims of the contra-genocide camp, to not utter a word about the death, torture, misery and simply hideous crimes perpetrated by the Armenians. And, yes, Muslim women were violated in droves. But instead of being taken to "harems," as we'll learn in moments regarding Armenian women, the Muslim women were usually killed after being raped. Where is Andrew Goldberg's "Jewish consciousness" when he needs it?
The Armenians began their rebellion the moment after war was declared upon the empire. There are many places for the reader to visit to get the lowdown, as this page, where one thing we can see is an August 13th, 1915 reportage from enemy France (Le Temps): "At the beginning of this war, Aram (Manoukian) took up arms and became the head of the insurgents of Van. Russia which possesses at present this province named Aram governor for it, wishing to satisfy the Armenian element which so brilliantly participated in the war against Turkey." Another French newspaper credited Aram with 10,000 fighters; if this were "self-defense," it must be asked why the Van rebellion began before "April 24." By February 1915, the Russians had already given a quarter-million rubles "for the initial cost of arming and preparing the Turkish Armenians."
Everything Islamic in Van was destroyed. When the Ottomans were finally forced to evacuate Van (it was in April when the Armenians had actually taken control of Van, around the time of the April 24 Armenian "Date of Doom," and then came under siege from Ottoman troops, arriving after the city had fallen), many forced to flee were set upon by Armenian bands on the roads, what Vahakn Dadrian might refer to as the "Armenian Special Organization." Among the victims, Andrew Goldberg and his consciousness might pay note, were (and this is not the only example) three hundred Jews who tried to escape toward Hakkari. Most were literally chopped to pieces; they simply did not fit the Aryan-Armenian mold. As Prof. McCarthy footnoted in his "Death and Exile," "By the end of World War I, the Jewish presence in southeastern Anatolia, which had existed since antiquity, was over."
Notes
Underwriters of THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, in order and appearance of the program's credits (Getler, April 21: "PBS executives say about 60 percent of the funds came from foundations 'of broad interests' and the rest from individuals"):
MR. JOHN C. & MRS. JUDITH D. BEDROSIAN;
AVANESSIANS FAMILY FOUNDATION;
THE LINCY FOUNDATION;
THE MANOOGIAN SIMONE FOUNDATION;
THE KULHANJIAN STRAUCH FAMILY FDN;
THE HAMPARIAN FAMILY FOUNDATION;
KAZANJIAN BROS.;
SARKIS KECHEJIAN;
BALIAN FAMILY FOUNDATION, INC.;
BOB AND LORA KHEDERIAN IN MEMORY OF
MYRON AND ROSE KHEDERIAN
CALIFORNIA COMMERCE CLUB;
FRANCK MULLER USA;
HAGOPIAN FAMILY FOUNDATION;
JEANETTE SARKISIAN WAGNER AND
PAUL A. WAGNER IN MEMORY OF
THE SARKISIAN AND NORSIGIAN FAMILIES
KECHEJIAN FOUNDATION;
SIRAN & ANOUSH MATHEVOSIAN
CHARITABLE FOUNDATION;
UNITED ARMENIAN CHARITIES;
ST. GREGORY THE ILLUMINATOR ARMENIAN CHURCH;
ARMEN AND NORA HAMPAR;
FALCON MANAGEMENT CORPORATION;
GEORGE AND ALICE KEVORKIAN FOUNDATION;
GRS MANAGEMENT;
HAGOP AND ERANICAKOUYOUMDJIAN;
THE JONATHAN SOBEL & MARCIA DUNN FOUNDATION;
MARDIGIAN FOUNDATION;
RICH ASLANIAN;
SUZANNE M. AND RAZMIK ABNOUS;
YERVANT DEMIRJIAN;
ADAM KABLANIAN;
DR. HAROUTUNE MEKHJIAN AND
SHAKE MEKHJIAN FOUNDATION;
JEFFREY C. BABIKIAN;
(PBS SITE ADDS:) VARIOUS INDIVIDUALS; VARIOUS PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS
The end credits also featured endless other Armenian names and organizations, including [under "Special Thanks"] the Gomidas Institute, the AGBU, and individuals from ANCA.
NARRATOR: "There were similar uprisings in three other villages."
Only "three." Hoo-boy. What kind of quadruple-checking of the facts, doing "homework six ways from Sunday" is this? Andrew Goldberg would be conducting a public service if he would release the long list of "so many people-historians, journalists" who helped check his facts, so that the world can know to stay away from such incompetent and/or prejudiced "experts."
To give an idea, from "The Armenian File," a list of events taking place in a snapshot of time from late February 1915; let us bear in mind these are all internal Ottoman communications, and never meant to be publicized:
The Governor of Bitlis sent the following telegram to the Ministry of the Interior on 21 February 1915: `The Armenians of the nahiye of Haksef have rebelled. In the village of Siranun under the jurisdiction of the central kaza of Mush, shots were fired on our detachment, and the confrontation continued for two hours. In the village of Kumes, under the jurisdiction of the bujak of Akan, shots were fired at the house where the bujak superintendent and the gendarmes were staying, and the confrontation lasted for eight hours.'33
The same day, the governor of Bitlis, in a second telegram, stated: `Armenians have revolted in many villages. I became suspicious when I saw that among the Armenians who opened fire in Kumes, a village in the bujak of Akan, were Rupen, the Tashnak delegate of Van, Zovin, and Eshroone of the Tashnak leaders in Mush. As a precaution, I had the delegate of Van, Papazian, be a guest of the sanjak governor, to hold him as a hostage.'34
On 27 February, about 300 volunteer soldiers from Sürt, who were on their way from Adiljevaz to Van, wanted to spend the night in the Armenian village of Arin. The Armenians, who attempted to prevent this, opened fire and killed eight privates. Upon this a detachment was sent from Erchish to Van, but the Armenian bands escaped to Lake Van.
Imagine the pressure the Ottomans were under, being besieged by their mortal, merciless foe Russia (this was before the French-British attacks on other fronts), and having their treacherous Armenians attacking from within, from all sides. What would any nation have done, under the same, desperate circumstances? It is amazing, actually, that the Ottomans waited as late as May, suffering a whole half year of Armenian revolts, before even considering the relocation program in a serious manner.
Goldberg goes back and squeezes in pre-1915 Armenian uprisings. Here is how he handles it:
"Armenians responded to what they considered to be excessive taxes and oppression with violence against Turks and Kurds, and engaged in three uprisings."
We've already covered this chapter, and know the Armenians were fairly content, and the reasons for the uprisings had only to do with the criminal attacks of their fanatical terroristic leaders. Andrew Goldberg is trying to pass off the number "three" again, but that only represented the tip of the iceberg. "They even took over an Ottoman bank by force," we're told as one of these "three" uprisings, but there is a huge difference between just any bank and THE Ottoman Bank. Turkish casualties, as presented by Andrew Goldberg and his "six ways from Sunday" homework: "Experts estimate that Armenians killed close to a hundred Turkish officials in these attacks."
Perhaps Goldberg's utterly unqualified "experts" mistook the pre-1915 period for the Armenian terrorism from the 1970s and 80s, where close to a hundred Turkish officials and others were killed. But the casualty list before 1915, as with 1915 and after 1915, included more than just Turkish "officials." The ones who were mainly targeted were the common people. The idea was to incite the Turks into counter-massacres, and hopefully bring in European intervention. Why, a better "expert" from those days, Aghasi, the Armenian rebel leader, claimed he killed 20,000 Turks from one battle alone!
It is necessary to think about how many immoral acts were committed upon corpses of killed Muslims by Armenians (for example, like the cutting off of some of their organs and putting these organs in their mouths), inciting anger and revenge.
General Mayewski, Russian Consul General of Bitlis and Van, regarding events of 1895-96
BALAKIAN: "In Trabzon, they decided to take men, women and children out in boats, and just dumped them in the Black Sea, where they drowned."
The background information on Lord Bryce's propagandistic beginnings of this anecdote may be read here. The initial idea was that 10,000 had been drowned in one afternoon, yet another unverified horror story the New York Times was quick to spotlight (it helped that the most trusted Briton in America, former Ambassador James Bryce, was behind the statement. Bryce was the head of the Turkish division of his country's war propaganda bureau, Wellington House. At least the tag team of Goldberg and Balakian didn't go as far as 10,000 in an afternoon, but they sure made it sound like this was a systematic policy, didn't they? (Not to say there weren't drownings. But the number of people killed via this method must have been small.)
Goldberg outdid himself and his quadruple fact-checking by allowing the bigoted Tessa Savvidis Hofmann to include absolutely pure propaganda, based on hearsay: "Diarbekir was then under the leadership of the notoriously Christian-Armenian hating governor, and he was one who got notorious for his particular cruel ways of torturing Armenian clerics which were (indecipherable) with burning iron, stripped naked and chased around and other ways of torture." (Propagandistic paintings served as the accompanying imagery; must be the "proof.")
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-L: "Responsible treatment of important issues may sometimes require the inclusion of controversial or sensitive material, but good taste must prevail in PBS content. Morbid or sensational details... should not be included unless it is necessary to an understanding of the matter at hand."
The photo representing the
"Diarbekir governor." No name
was provided.
Why, if this keeps up, we can almost expect the arrogant Peter Balakian to give an actual demonstration of how that other Christian-hating governor of Van, Jevdet Bey, nailed horseshoes onto Armenian feet... as Balakian wrote in his Burning Tigris, without providing any evidence.
(A Feb. 12, 1919 N. Y. Times article, "Turkish Trials Begin," shown later in the program, identified the Diyarbakir governor as "Keimal Bey." This requires closer scrutiny, but the closest party found guilty was Mehmet Kemal Bey, an ex-governor of Bogazliyan [in Yozgat, a vilayet in Ankara, the center of the country. Diyarbakir is toward the southeast] and hanged by the puppet Ottomans on April 10, 1919.)
At least we can be thankful for one thing. There is no shortage of well-rendered illustrations depicting "genocide" that the program has made sure to adorn itself with. Perhaps these paintings and pictures can substitute for actual "evidence."
Vahakn Dadrian
After that old women's rights advocate, Vahakn Dadrian, gets through telling us that very few Armenian women were spared, we get into Aurora Mardiganian's experience. (Her voice-over, from Natalie Portman, sounds down-home American, whereas Enver Pasha's voice-over earlier was slightly "foreign," and therefore somewhat sinister). She was the star, along with Henry Morgenthau himself, of the notoriously propagandistic 1919 film, RAVISHED ARMENIA. As the Chairman of the National Motion Picture Committee stated, Aurora was the tool to make "as many adults as possible ... know the story of Armenia, and the screen was selected as the medium because it reached the millions, where the printed word reaches the thousands." Goldberg makes use of his professional propagandistic tool to shed light on how Armenian girls were violated in the "harem" (this is a misuse of the term, and old stereotypes. Ordinary Turks did not have "harems," not in the way Westerners think of that word, where female slaves were for the taking. Even the one-and-only imperial harem did not operate in such a fashion.) Footage is presented with the caption "100 girls all under age 20 from Turkish harems." That is really impressive for producer Goldberg, and his quadruple fact-checking skills, to have tracked down each of these people and verified their age and status.
Were Armenian women abused, raped, violated and killed? Of course they were. Unfortunately, the rape of women is a constant of war. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, who can forget the tactic of the Bosnian Serbs, to systematically impregnate Bosnian Muslims, with the knowledge of the Muslims' cultural shame and fear of being regarded as "soiled" would be devastating? One who is aware of the hateful and destructively propagandistic tactics of this film must force oneself to be numb to these assaults. Just as Goldberg makes no mention of a single Turkish victim of the Armenians (unless the Turks are soldiers or officials), was there no reverse side to this coin? Turkish women who fell into the clutches of vicious Armenian bands would consider themselves lucky if their ordeal ended with rape. (This hateful film does not mention the fact that many younger Armenians were taken into good Turkish homes as a measure of humanistic goodwill, as happened to Leon Surmelian's sister in "I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen." By using the word "harem," we are, of course, being made to think these women were all sexual slaves.) To remind all there is no "exclusive victimhood" going on with these tragic years, here are a few Turkish women who evidently escaped with their lives: And for good measure, a few more:
As with every other facet of anti-Turkish propaganda, this omnipresent "harem" notion meant to suggest the inhuman cruelty of the Lustful and Terrible Turk has another side.
Next,. we are shown a list of notable Americans such as Ezra Pound, Woodrow Wilson, Rabbi Stephen Wise and others speaking out for "the Armenian cause." (With Editorial Consultant and Writer Peter Balakian at the helm, what this show really turned out to be was a filmed version of Balakian's "The Burning Tigris"... chapter by chapter.) Teddy Roosevelt described the events as "the greatest crime of the war."
What is the intended effect of presenting the views of these upstanding Americans? Imagine, the robust former president, Theodore Roosevelt himself confirming the Armenian propagandistic claims. As usual, the honest truth-seeker must always dig deep beneath the surface. Roosevelt was very much into the "whites are superior" notion that was popular during his day. He thought of the Turks as, basically, human sewage. All of that Armenian propaganda, compounding the existing age-old anti-Turkish prejudices, served as a driving influence for all of these people... a practice that goes on to this very day, although not as overtly racist, as demonstrated by what drives the people of PBS and its affiliates.
Each one of these men had their own reasons for despising Turks. Woodrow Wilson was a deeply religious preacher's son, and Rabbi Wise was a confirmed Zionist, like his friend, Ambassador Morgenthau. Engaging in the vicious rhetoric could more speedily knock the Ottomans out, ensuring a quicker path to a Jewish homeland. (Ironically, the Sultan had offered this very homeland back in 1516, but the Jews declined, feeling their best protection against Christian anti-Semitism rested with remaining under Ottoman jurisdiction.) The Ottomans were history's greatest pure-hearted defender of Judaism, and unfortunately some who claim they have a "Jewish consciousness" partake in films (whose propagandistic power the National Motion Picture Committee's chairwoman spelled out paragraphs ago) that defame the honor of the Turks and results in hatred against the Turks.
Kamuran Gurun noted in The Armenian File:
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"...
Straight out of Balakian's book:
"In 1915 alone, the New York Times ran 145 articles, and the reporter? was clear: This was government planned, systematic, race extermination."
It was not up to the New York Times to determine history, since they were mindlessly printing second-hand reports, like every other publication in the biased West. "The Great Armenian Horror Boom," as the Armenophile Richard Davey coined back in 1895, had seen no let-up. The public wanted to read tales of the monstrous Turks victimizing the poor, innocent Christians; this kind of sensationalism made money. As an example dating back to the 19th century, Davey had written: "Within the past six weeks the London papers have been gloating over the 'atrocities' committed upon Armenians at, and in, Sasoun. The number of the killed was at first 2,000, then 3,000, and finally, thanks to a telegram from Boston, from 'one who had received a letter from Sasoun' — how the letter had time to reach America, and how it had been allowed to get out of Turkey, were details never explained! — it was declared that the 'massacred Armenians exceeded 10,000'." Davey warned his readers that "The truth must prevail, and the truth about Armenia is terrible enough, without the aid of hysterical sensationalism."
TWO FUN "PRESS" FACTS:
1) New York Times Publisher Adolph Ochs was close friends with Henry Morgenthau, according to Balakian's friend, Samantha Power ("A Problem from Hell — America and the Age of Genocide"). Both men were members of New York City's wealthy Jewish elite, going to the same social events... they must have gotten pretty chummy. Not that Ochs would have needed his pal to put up all the genocide news unfit to print, since every other media publication was doing the same... but to the extent of one article about every two and a half days?
2) According to a propagandistic book where Balakian, Dadrian and Hovannisian contributed chapters, Jay Winter's "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," there was one and only one American newspaper correspondent who travelled into the Ottoman interior in 1915 to witness events firsthand. Can you imagine? Only ONE American reporter. Can there be a greater indication that these 145 "genocide" articles from the New York Times, and all the many from America's other newspapers were almost exclusively based on hearsay and propaganda? (That reporter's name, by the way: George Schreiner. He's the one who blistered Henry Morgenthau with a late 1918 letter, appalled over the lies of Henry's "Story" book... and he's the one who concluded there was no "genocide."
PBS Armenian genocide propaganda "big gun" Leslie Davis, the U.S. consul from Harput, is once again utilized as a witness, this time gaining further weight with the commanding voice of actor Ed Harris. (It is unsurprising that such a voice of integrity was not chosen to represent Enver Pasha.) He was the rare Westerner who left his comfy diplomat's office to check out what was going on outside.
"We saw hundreds of bodies and many bodies in the water below. It was rumored that many of the people who were brought here had been pushed over the cliffs by their gendarme. That rumor was fully confirmed by what we saw."
One of Goldberg's "gendarmes"; by
making him a regular soldier,
he gets closer to working for the
central "genocidal" government
Goldberg flashes an image of two snappily dressed regular Turkish soldiers, equating them with the gendarmes who served a sort of police duty. Yet note the absurdity of Davis' words. If these people were massacred, as apparent, how do we know who killed them? How could the fact that the killers were the gendarmes, and not, say, Kurds or other lawless bands, have been "confirmed"? (According to another Davis report not mentioned in the program, a Kurd had told him — falling under the category of hearsay, but likely not without truth — the gendarmes had made an arrangement with the Kurds; in exchange for a sum that the Kurds would have to pay the gendarmes, "and were to have for themselves whatever they found on the bodies of the Armenians in excess of that sum." Davis's best information told him the actual killings were done by the Kurds. In his six ways from Sunday homework, Goldberg must have neglected to read Davis' report of Feb. 9, 1918, as recorded in Ara Sarafian's "United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide," vol. 3, p. 86. No, Goldberg wanted to make it seem as though the gendarmes, as "agents of the Turkish government," directed the actual killing.)
WERE GENDARMES "SOLDIERS"?
Andrew Goldberg used a picture of Ottoman soldiers, varying greatly from the outfits of the guards accompanying the convoys that were represented in his other photographs. Was the quadruple-fact checking producer correct?
Here is how Sir Mark Sykes described The Gendarme, or Zaptieh:
"He rides, jobs, carries the post, fights, and occasionally makes an arrest. He is one of the great features of the Turkish Empire; but to the greater number of untravelled Englishmen he is unknown. If he is seen he is taken for a soldier, which he is certainly not. A Quaker would not be more shocked than he would if you asked him if he were one. And yet what is he? If you talk of fighting his eyes blaze. He tells you how he alone would fight twenty Bedouins, and so I believe he would."
Sykes, who got to know the Turks close up, and wasn't yet working for his government's war propaganda division, sized them up as such: "The average Turk is as honourable as the average Englishman when he receives his pay, and as dishonest as when he does not."
If we're searching for "murder" motives, assuming the story told by the Kurd was true, here is the sensible recipe: [1] Ottoman Empire: Bankrupt. [2] Gendarmes: Can't get their meager pay [3] With the good men away at the fronts, the 1915 gendarmes were composed of enough not-so-good men. [4] Away from central government control, the more corrupt gendarmes saw the way to make a quick buck; some no doubt saw the Armenians as traitors who deserved what they got. [5] Conclusion: these massacres were perpetrated by renegade forces, acting on their own.
Let's add one more, just for fun: [6] The Ottoman "S.S.," Vahakn Dadrian's "Special Organization" whose duty was to supposedly polish off the Armenians, was nowhere in sight.
A somewhat energetic Ara Sarafian himself appears right afterwards (having met director Goldberg face to face, and could have set Goldberg straight on who perpetrated the killings, since Sarafian was behind our "untold" Leslie Davis report), declaring that "this is an American consul who is describing what he himself saw directly to the American government in 1915. So this is the sort of information that we have about the Armenian Genocide in the American archives. It's not hearsay, it's not secondary, it's not maybe this and that. It is outright killing on a massive scale."
Ara Sarafian
Yet Ara Sarafian, who made such a noble effort to be truthful at least once (before getting savagely kicked by a Dashnak-style smear attack, since "Turth" and "Hai Tahd" are polar opposites), neglected the following:
1) Leslie Davis is one of the very few consuls, perhaps the only one, who witnessed corpses to such an extent. The rest rarely ventured from their consular offices, and were content to listen to the words of missionaries and Armenians. So this might have been perhaps the only example in the U.S. archives, at least in the case of a U.S. official, where there was no hearsay. The rest of the U.S. archives is practically useless, as the British ambassador in Washington determined in 1921. They looked at the cream of the crop, and concluded practically all of it boiled down to "personal opinions" which is what we would call "hearsay."
2) Even if we accept what Davis had to say as the truth — let's not forget how prejudiced Americans were, and he was one of the biased Morgenthau's men, and under Morgenthau's instructions (like Morgenthau, Davis was dependent on Armenian translators, and had Armenian assistants, one of the few people in this alien culture who could speak Davis's language, eliciting Davis' sympathies; moreover, the Christian Davis was also under the influence of the constantly exaggerating missionaries. On the second of three trips he took on horseback to check out these corpses, his partner was the missionary, Herbert Atkinson) — the best information we have is that these massacres were directed by what Halil Berktay had described (it looks like he borrowed what Germany's Col. Stange had said about the Special Organization, "scums," or at least what Dadrian told us Stange had said) as "scum of the earth," immoral men who were out to make a fast dollar. Such criminal actions cannot implicate these bad-apple gendarmes' central government, so far away, and so powerless to control forces deciding to act independently. Even if Davis was being one hundred percent honest, he was witness to a massacre. As My Lai demonstrates, a massacre does not equal a genocide.
Next, we are featured to a long tirade by a U.S. consul, Jesse Jackson, who certainly has demonstrated his bigotry against Turks in a good several writings. Jackson felt "careful estimates placed the number of those surviving even this far as being less than 150,000," and ends with "there seems to be about one million persons lost, up to this date." (September, 1915.)
All the way with J. B. J.:
Jesse B. Jackson
Jackson had trouble with his numbers on other occasions. On this particular occasion, what he stated was especially wacky, because he himself prepared a report for boss Morgenthau on Feb. 8, 1916, contending that 486,000 represented "the statistics of Armenian immigrants, according to best information."
The next month, Morgenthau was quoted by Vahan Cardashian, in a letter to Lord Bryce, as stating the Ottoman government's attitude toward Armenians was "passive" and that the "Armenians were found in good numbers in almost all the interior cities of Turkey." [The Armenian Review, Winter 1957, p. 107.] That is, the relocation was all but over, as even Vahakn Dadrian has kindly taught us. (Talat Pasha had first ordered the movements to stop as early as August, 1915; locals had different ideas. But we can see the bulk of the relocation had been finished with by the time Jackson had filed his September report.) So let's put aside the pertinent question the PBS people should have asked themselves, that is, if the idea were state-sponsored extermination, why would the genocide (that's a synonym for "relocation," among genocide folks) process have come to a halt so soon; let's concentrate on the following:
If Jesse Jackson agreed the number of the "deported" ran only around half a million in early 1916, and if hundreds of thousands of Armenians still remained in the empire, and if hundreds of thousands of Armenians were with the Russians (Hovannisian would tell us some 150,000 of these would go on to die of starvation and disease with Turks nowhere in sight; of course, these numbers must also be added to the "genocide" toll), and if many thousands of Armenians had also gone off to other lands on their own accord (since the Ottomans did not control lands like Iran and Greece), and if the pre-war population of the Armenians hovered around 1.5 million (and not at exaggerated levels as the Patriarch's 2.1 million), then how in the world could it have been possible for one million Armenians to have died by September 1915?
Let's think about the above in another way. There were only "odds and ends" displacements of Armenians going on until 1916, as the bulk had already been moved out by Sept. 1915 or so. If Jackson is saying there were 150,000 survivors in September and then jacked up this figure by a whopping 350,000 or so in the following February, we know these extra 350,000 did not magically appear. Especially when there is reliable evidence on record that there were some 500,000 survivors in September, as an Armenian representative himself told Morgenthau. The obvious conclusion: Jackson's report isn't worth the pimple on a baboon's butt. So why are Goldberg and Balakian choosing to include this terribly incorrect information? (That is a rhetorical question.)
The irresponsible producer included yet another biased personal opinion of some traveling businessman named August Berneau , who witnessed the suffering Armenians and concluded the "1,001 horrors" boiled down to "governmental barbarianism which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey." There you have it— "proof" that the starvation of the Armenians was intended. (He also used the helpful word "executioners" at one point.)
A shot of a few Turks that
Goldberg forgot to put in his film
As the ever-present sad violin music plays in the background, Berneau also added, "I gave them some bread; they threw themselves on it like dogs dying of hunger." (This voice was particularly overacted and irritatingly melodramatic, oozing with sanctimony. Orlando Bloom, the talent, might have asked Goldberg what his motivation should be, and Goldberg must have surely thought of the perfect directorial guidance: "Think of the Turks as those monstrous Orcs you fought in LORD OF THE RINGS.") If we may refer to a previous "genocide witness," Consul Leslie Davis, we may learn: "Since the beginning of the war even bread is almost unobtainable." As Morgenthau had written, the desperate life or death war required every able-bodied man to be mobilized, leaving few to till the fields. As a result, thousands of Turks were dying daily of starvation. (That is what Morgenthau himself wrote, and it bears repeating: thousands of Turks... dying... daily.) Add to this grim situation the British naval blockade, making sure no supplies could reach the nation's ports. (What else could the British have been striving for, save for a true "systematic annihilation through starvation"?) Even the nation's first line of defense, its soldiers, were dropping like flies from hunger. (Testimony of Liman von Sanders, 1921 Berlin trial: "...The economic situation was so dismal that not only many Armenians, but thousands of Turkish soldiers as well died of the lack of food supplies, disease, and other consequences of poor organization in the Turkish government. In my division alone, after the battle of Gallipoli, thousands died of malnutrition.")
It's one thing if the oppressors were fat and jolly while their victims were turning into living skeletons, as in the case of the Nazis and their Jewish victims. It's quite another when everyone is in the same boat. We'll need a lot more than the opinion of a Christian-sympathizing Westerner whose emotions ran away with him, before concluding the Armenians' starvation was purposefully forced. Incidentally, if this fellow was a "travelling businessman," did he not see the plight of the Moslems? Let's put our heads together and wonder why he likely never wrote such anguished words about the humans who did not share his own faith.
NARRATOR: "These men, and other American diplomats filed reports on the atrocities they witnessed which today are housed in the U.S. National Archives. They constitute nearly 4,000 pages of testimony and witness to the Armenian genocide."
To my knowledge, only Leslie Davis firsthand saw corpses in great numbers (aside from various missionaries, whose word cannot be taken at face value), and we've already established such is a far cry from genocide, as we can never be sure who killed those people, and why. Genocide is a very serious charge, and singular massacres do not prove genocide. The definition of "atrocities" in my dictionary: "Savage or brutal acts committed in wartime." What the above businessman witnessed was heart-wrenching misery and suffering, but not "atrocities." In 1919, Armenian leaders, through their corruption and neglect, caused what Sam Weems called the "real genocide of the Armenian people," basing his information on Richard Hovannisian's history. "It was verily a land of death," wrote Hovannisian ("8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5"); could these constitute as "atrocities"?
What those 4,000 pages are filled with are mostly the opinions of biased Christians, indoctrinated with hatred against what they were raised to believe were a different species, the "unspeakable" Turk. They might have witnessed suffering, but suffering does not equal genocide. As mentioned before, the British, in their desperate search for factual evidence in order to convict Ottomans accused of crimes against Armenians at Malta, rejected these worthless documents. ("I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing any further enquiries to the United States Government in this matter.") What's more, the British Embassy's report made clear that "officials of the Department of State expressed the wish... that no information supplied by them in this connection should be employed in the court of law." What does that mean? It means the embarrassed State Department was aware of how utterly unreliable and false the caliber of their 4,000 documents was.
NARRATOR: "The International Association of Genocide Scholars affirms that over one million Armenians died during the Armenian Genocide. Other scholars put the numbers as high as 1.5 million."
"The International Association of Genocide Scholars" is frequently referred to in order to strengthen the genocide thesis. Who are these people? In order to join the genocide club, they must first agree there was an Armenian genocide because, for one thing, wealthy Armenians support the genocide industry. For another thing, anyone who begins a thesis with a conclusion first and then tries to fit the evidence around the conclusion is anything but a scholar; such a person can more accurately be termed a "propagandist." These people unquestioningly take what unscrupulous researchers as Vahakn Dadrian have written, and accept them at face value. Like the people at PBS, their ingrained belief system, after years of propaganda bombardment, tells them the barbaric Turks must have been guilty. Very few of these so-called scholars have a background in history. A famous one, Israel Charny, for example, has a background in psychology. Charny has mainly edited other people's research. Israel Charny, who serves as the Association's current president, is not a "scholar." (As Prof. Guenter Lewy — not incidentally, a Holocaust survivor — succinctly put it: "I am less than impressed by the unanimous vote of the International Association of Genocide Scholars... The great majority of these self-proclaimed experts on Ottoman history have never set foot in an archive or done any other original research on the subject in question." Commentary. Feb. 2006.)
Few of these hypocrites ever concentrate on the many other examples of historical extermination campaigns. The two that are the best financed attract them the most, but at least one of these two happens to be a real genocide. Regardless, majority opinion can never substitute for genuine history. Because there is a preponderance of ignorant, agenda-ridden bigots who are in agreement does not make "The International Association of Genocide Scholars " any more valid than the "4,000 pages" of the U.S. Archives.
Simply look at the propagandistic numbers "The International Association of Genocide Scholars" has agreed on, to demonstrate their partisanship. The pre-war Armenian population was around 1.5 million, and hardcore Armenian propagandists themselves agree there were one million survivors. 1.5 million minus 1 million does not equal the result these scholarly frauds would like us to believe. What they are basing their estimate on is the propagandistic pre-war population figure provided by the Armenian Patriarch, 2.1 million. (Lepsius swore, under oath at the 1921 Berlin trial of Talat's assassin, that the Patriarch had told Lepsius 1,850,000... but that's the Armenian Patriarch for you.) Regardless, even the dishonest Armenian Patriarch broke down his initial 2.1 million figure as such, at the tail end of 1918: 1,260,000 survivors, and 840,000 dead. "The International Association of Genocide Scholars" have the shame to out-propagandize even the propagandistic Armenian Patriarch.
NARRATOR: In 1919, shortly after W.W. I ended, the British pushed the Turks to hold war crimes tribunals for the Armenian massacres. A series of trials were then held in Constantinople. DADRIAN: "The Turkish court-martials are a very significant event... in terms of future settlements of the issue of the Armenian genocide, because the Turkish military tribunal scrupulously investigated the issue of the Armenian genocide and concluded in its final verdict that the Young Turk party as responsible for the conception, organization, and execution of the Armenian genocide."
Whew! Old man Dadrian sure knows how to stick the phrase "the Armenian genocide" into his sentences, doesn't he? (By the way, the issue of "future settlements" has already been resolved; the Armenians had put their John Hancock on a treaty wherein they "agreed 'to forego their rights to ask for damages . . . as a result of the general war, thus closing the doors FOREVER to reparations for the enormous destruction of Armenian life and property," in the words of Arthur Derounian.
Let's say, God forbid, the Nazis had defeated the Americans during WWII and installed a puppet government in Washington. They held a gun to the Americans' heads and forced war crimes trials to be held for Truman, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, and other war principals. Otherwise, the Nazis would come in and really take control of the nation, as they eventually did with Vichy France. Should these trials be considered as legitimate?
The 1919-20 trials were such a travesty, even the British rejected their findings during the longer process of the 1919-21 Malta Tribunal. What's more, Dadrian, who investigated and translated the "transcripts" of these trials (actually, the summaries printed in lackey Ottoman government newspapers; the transcripts are unavailable)... the unscrupulous Vahakn Dadrian, cited for his "misleading quotations" and the "selective use of sources" even by fellow pro-Armenian "genocide scholar" Hilmar Kaiser... desperately points to these kangaroo courts as his "evidence," because he has nothing else. Naturally, he is desperate to suggest these courts were conducted professionally (as he reminds us above with the word "scrupulously"), but when their legitimacy does not serve his purposes, he has been known to quickly reverse himself, in the typical style of a shifty Dashnak "historian." If readers want to get what lay behind these spurious courts, please tune in to Prof. Guenter Lewy's even-handed evaluation.
NARRATOR: "On March 15th, 1921, a young man named Soghoman Tehlirian approached Talat, tapped him on the shoulder, then shot him in the head... Tehlirian, an Armenian student, was arrested by the German police and tried for murder. He was found not guilty."
Yet this cursory two-day trial was another kangaroo court, where only witnesses for the defense were allowed, and wealthy Armenians throughout the world hired the best German legal talent money could buy, through a "Soghoman Tehlirian Defense Fund"... a tactic Armenians would follow in the defense of their future terrorists. The imbalance of the trial was further demonstrated when several of the high-priced lawyers took their turn versus one for the District Attorney, and there was further mention in the transcripts that the verdict could have been pre-determined. A defense lawyer provided reason; the Germans were seen as the masterminds behind the Armenian "genocide," and the freshly defeated and demoralized nation figured the best way to get let off the hook would be to let the murderer go. What this trial amounted to was a historic case of murder justification, and the German nation will have to live forever with this shame. The verdict's destructive effect would become apparent in future years, as other Armenian terrorists figured they could get away with murder. Many did, in the courtrooms of the biased Western world.
The quadruple-fact checking Andrew Goldberg was aware of easily available Internet resources such as the TAT site, yet still chose to go with the typical propaganda. (But it's looking more and more like "Writer" Goldberg was the "Ambassador Morgenthau" to "Additional Writer" Balakian's "Burton Hendrick," the ghost writer of Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.) Tehlirian did not tap Talat's shoulder; the trial transcript tells us he waited for Talat to pass by, and shot Talat in the back of the head, in a fashion befitting the cowardly murderer. It was Tehlirian's second known assassination, according to a 1960 article about him in The Armenian Review; he also knocked off an Armenian, suspected of snitching on Ottoman-Armenians to Talat Pasha, in 1915. Tehlirian might have taken dance lessons to idle his itchy trigger finger in Berlin, but he was not a "student"; he was a member of Nemesis, the Dashnak organization's professional hit squad. Tehlirian had betrayed his Ottoman nation, among the many other Armenians who defected to Russia, at age 17 and war's outset, 1914. Eventually fighting under Antranik, he doubtless was behind many of the cold-blooded mass killings the Armenians perpetrated in eastern Anatolia.
Ataturk Marches On.
At least Goldberg did not go so far as to claim, while continuing to tell us of the fate of other Ottoman officials, that Enver Pasha was felled by the bullet of an Armenian, as Armenian propaganda likes to tell us. (The newspaper clip states Enver was "left dead on the field after desperate fight in Bokhara.") The producer also found an exciting "Time Marches On" type of newsreel, popular in movie theaters at the time, regarding Mustafa Kemal.
Halil Berktay, always with a mysterious ax to grind against his country that (to him) can do no right, has his heart broken as he relates the secular and westernized changes Ataturk implemented: "As a result, Britain, France, Germany, everybody else, they were now out to court this new Turkey to try to become friends with it, and the great powers did not have any interest in pursuing the dirty matter of what had happened in 1915, and all kinds of reasons like this, made it undesirable for the Republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915. And as a result, you have an enormously constructed, fabricated, national memory."
This boy really has a chip on his shoulder. He makes it sound like it was a bad thing for the other nations to want to become friends with his own country. Even if everything about the Armenian "genocide" were true, note the double standard: Turkey must forever be held to past ills, while what England had done in Kenya (with the Mau Mau) during the 1950s is never talked about, France's "dirty business" in Algeria (also from the later 20th century, as well as before; France may also have been complicit in the Rwandan Genocide) is frequently brushed aside, and in one of the real first genocides of the 20th century, German colonialist actions in South West Africa (evidently the real influence for Hitler's "Final Solution" instead of his fabricated quote), is paid only lip service to. Why isn't Berktay up in arms over these, and many, many other examples of historical "Man's Inhumanity to Man"?
As we have seen from the Malta Tribunal process, it is not as though the powers had lost interest. What happened is that they simply could not find the real evidence. In the long 1919 to 1921 process, the Western world discovered what deceivers the Armenians and Greeks had been. Their lies had begun even to filter down to the common person, as William T. Ellis nicely put it in a 1928 article about "Smyrna": "[T]he average American was beginning to grow sophisticated and sceptical concerning propaganda about the Near East."
What Ataturk had achieved was truly miraculous. He conducted what might be televisionalistically (I coined that) called today as an "extreme makeover" for his country. In order to make the transition more successful, the nation's back was turned to the old history. But far from what a one-note thinker as Berktay has his heart bleeding over, the detriment came not in hiding dirty laundry, but in reducing the pride of Turks over their rich history. That is one reason why Turkey has an identity crisis, and is often unsure of itself today.
The benefit, however, came in keeping future generations free of hatred; Turkish people had an excellent reason to be resentful of the traitorous Armenians, who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish people. That is the real reason this catastrophic period was not dwelled upon in Turkish schools. Would it have been better to foster hatred in the hearts of the young, as Armenian parents and churches have been doing with their own innocent youth?
There is no "fabrication" for Turkey's national memory. As may be seen from this page's analysis, utilizing almost exclusively pro-Armenian sources, the real history was that the "Sick Man" was in for a fight for its life, a fight that ultimately resulted in its death. During this most dangerous moment, the Armenians turned traitor and joined the enemy. Treacherous actions bear consequences, as with any other nation, and the price for the Armenians to pay was their relocation under horrible circumstances. The circumstances were not horrible out of "intent," because manpower and resources were painfully limited, and the rest of the nation was also suffering dreadfully. Anyone who wishes to detract from this very real history is the real fabricator.
We then get into how Turkey is in denial. With objective academicians frightened away from this debate, through the unscrupulous smear tactics of the genocide industry, the strategy has been to single out the propagandistically ill-reputed Turkish government as the sole "denier." Naturally; who is going to believe the word of the "criminal"?
After establishing that Turkey is a crook, the sole contra-genocide spokesman on the program, Prof. Yusuf Halacoglu, is introduced as "the head of the Turkish Historical Society in Turkey." In other words, he is an "agent of the Turkish government." Already the viewer is biased against what he has to say. The fair choice would have been to feature a speaker having no links to the Turks. (I realize these were hard to find for the producer, because of the producer's partisan reputation, but the producer should have tried harder to do so... assuming he were objective. But his instructions to me was that he was looking for a "Turkish" professor. Later on, as he was getting more desperate, he mentiond that he did ask one non-Turk, Justin McCarthy, but McCarthy declined.)
Finally we get the first word on the program that "many Moslems were massacred by Armenians." Unfortunately, it came from the mouth of a man who had already been discredited on the surface. Halacoglu concludes with the point that if both sides were killing each other, that could only amount to a "civil war." However, while the producer did a good job with the show's Turkish translations, based on my own limited knowledge — it was good to not have a dubbed voice-over, and only subtitles, so those who are interested could make out what was being said — this was not the best translation. I wouldn't otherwise quibble, but this point is critical, as I don't prefer the term "civil war." [The reason why liberty may have been taken with this translation is because Armenian propagandists have ready-made arguments for what Dadrian calls, "the futility of the argument of civil war."] What the professor said was "ic catismasi," and not "ic savasi." "Catismak" means, as I just looked it up in a dictionary, "to come up against one another in dispute or competition." (And "ic" means internal; "savas" means war.) What Halacoglu was getting at was along the lines of "intercommunal fighting," and not "civil war." (In a broad sense, "civil war" is not incorrect, because the whole of the Ottoman-Armenian community sided with the enemy, by choice or coercion. However, "civil war" connotes the clash of two armies, as in the American experience. "Fifth column" Armenians within the empire mainly engaged in guerilla warfare... although there were rare times when Armenians, armed with artillery, engaged in what was a clash of armies.)
Gunduz Aktan in Congress, Sept. 2000
Then we get Congressional hearing footage from Sept. 2000 with ex-Ambassador Gunduz Aktan. (Why, isn't that Robert Melson's dome in the background? One can always count on Melson to pay visits to Congress, to defend beloved Armenians.) Aktan stated the relocation affected "only the eastern Anatolian Armenians," but that was a misstatement; Armenians from other communities were affected as well, as in the heartland's Sivas; Armenians were rebelling there, too. Aktan explains the Armenians were collaborating with the invading Russians, with the aim of creating an independent state of their own, "in areas where they were only a minority, by ethnically cleansing the majority Turks... Many Armenians were killed, but many more Muslims and Turks perished as well."
Now get a load of Ara Sarafian's response: "It's complete garbage, of course." Ara, how could you! The only blunder in what Aktan stated was the part about the eastern Armenians. But the affected WERE mostly the eastern Armenians (and some of the central ones, and a dab and dash from the rest of the country), so even that was not an attempt at deception. The western Armenians were mostly untouched, as even a "genocide map" on the program demonstrated. (Although this silly map featured a HUGE dot in the Istanbul vicinity. Two people were behind the program's maps in the end credits, and Ara was one of them.)
Above is a "genocide map" taken from Armenian sites. It's very standard, and may be seen all over the place. Note how the "deportations" are concentrated in the eastern and central areas of Anatolia. Note the big dot in the center, which is Sivas. This map has not been cropped, that is, the cut-off at left was their doing.
Now this is the map used on the program. Note all the dots from the northeast, especially the gargantuan one from around Istanbul. As everyone knows, the Armenians of Istanbul were mostly untouched. Also, note the biggest dot in the center, which on this map is well right of center. That's Sivas too, but look at all the other dots that have sprung up toward the left, and in fact, all around.
The Armenians of Istanbul, and the Armenians in the sanjak of Kutahya and the province of Aydin had not been required to emigrate. The Armenians who at the present time are in the sanjak of Izmit and in Bursa, Kastamonu, Ankara, and Konya, are those who had emigrated from these areas, and who have returned. There are many Armenians in the sanjak of Kaiseri, and in Sivas, Kharput, Diyarbekir, and especially in Cicilia and in Istanbul, who have returned, but who are unable to go to their villages. The rest of the Armenians of Erzurum and Bitlis are in Cilicia.
The Armenian Patrirch, elaborating after the late 1918 decree permitting Armenians to return; British Archives, F.O. 371/6556/E.2730/800/44
(ADDENDUM: Turkish historians have a breakdown of Armenians who were forced to leave on this outside page, and there was a large number — 58,000 — relocated from Izmit, which is next to Istanbul. That would be the smaller big dot, to the right of the gargantuan "Istanbul" one.)
Sarafian explains that there was no systematic killing on the part of the Armenians. In his defense, he may not have been responding to what Aktan said specifically, just responding to "Turkish propaganda" in general; but Aktan said nothing about "systematic" killing (although "ethnic cleansing" does carry a systematic connotation). Systematic killing certainly enters into the area of genocide, but Ara: let's face facts. The allies of the Armenians, the Russians and the French, that is the honorable officers among them, have provided many accounts of the savage actions of your forefathers, where killing was conducted for killing's sake, in an attempt to create a "Greater Armenia." There were even American observers a little later, those who went in there generally sympathetic to the Armenians, like Lt. Robert Dunn and Niles and Sutherland ... and even the Armenophile, General Harbord himself... who reported exactly on the unbelievable crimes the Armenians had committed, on a wide, massive scale. It's heart-breaking that Ara Sarafian, the "new breed" of Armenian researchers, Sarafian who has issues with the repulsively deceptive ways of the old Dadrian-Hovannisian guard, would sit there with a straight face and regard these truths as "garbage," and "not true."
The Armenians behaved even more ruthlessly than the invading Greeks from western Anatolia, and the Western world bore too much of a witness to the unbelievably atrocious actions of the Greeks. This is why the Armenians are getting a cleaner bill of health than the Greeks; the only Westerners around in eastern Anatolia to see what was happening were in the Turks' enemy camp. And Muslim lives were considered comparatively worthless anyway.
Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they 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.
Prof. John Dewey, 1928
Prof. Suny informs us reasons for Turkey's "denial" stems from fear of compensation (which is a non-issue, as the Treaty of Gumru/Alexandropol made clear; unless Prof. Suny is insecure about Armenians keeping their word), and that they are so nationalistic, "Turks do not want to recognize that they actually committed this terrible crime."
It looks like Suny has been hanging out with his sociologist pal, Fatma Muge Gocek too long. She is sociologically-challenged to think even Turkish-Americans are mindless drones of the Turkish state, when the truth is Turks in the USA, with no supportive immigrant network, assimilate into American society, very often at the expense of their Turkish identity, and are quite able to think independently. As for the Turks in Turkey, it is naturally the propagandists' aim to make it seem as though the Turkish government is a Stalinist state exercising mind-control over its citizens. The fact is, Turks are like every other people in a free society who can gather the facts and come up with the correct conclusions. (And for those who can't accept that Turkey is a democracy, keep in mind, especially with the Internet, even totalitarian states like China have trouble maintaining a grip on their people). If anything, unlike diaspora Armenians, who generally think of Armenia first and sacrifice honest scruples for Hai Tahd (the Armenian Cause), Turks are guided by honesty and truth. This is why, when Turks come to America and are bombarded by the incessant Armenian propaganda (learning about these issues for the first time in a big way, since their schooling largely avoided the matter... as Gocek herself has related as her own experience), too many get suckered in. That's because they know the truth takes precedence over "my country, right or wrong" notions. And just like ignorant genocide scholars and PBS people who refuse to look beneath the surface, if everyone else is saying there was an Armenian genocide, these Turks can be the perfect pigeons.
Silly Samantha Power lends her personal opinion that Turkey is afraid of "putting itself permanently in the company of Adolf Hitler." She is severely into the Turk-Nazi association, but this particular notion can much better be categorized as a Problem from Her Own Hell. Shall we count the number of nations who have committed extermination campaigns, starting with her own, which... if we leave the obvious example of the Indians aside... probably truly earns the distinction of committing "The First Genocide of the 20th Century." As the 1900s began, American troops — commanded by veterans of the Indian wars, where the philosophy was "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" — carried a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians (the 20,000 Filipino military mortality was separate). If Samantha Power would stop being such a "genocide club hypocrite" and direct her outrage in this direction, and Americans were to be made aware of this shameful chapter, how many Americans would associate their nation with the Nazis? Even now, with Americans aware of what their nation had done to the Indians, their nation's being on a par with Hitler is the farthest thing from their minds. (She also goes on to say another factor for Turkish intransigence is "an unwilligness to wrap your mind around atrocities carried out by people like you." Is that why Power doesn't focus on the crimes of her nation, because she can't bear the fact that she happens to be just like the 19th-early 20th century Americans who committed cold-blooded murder? And to think, Turk-biased members of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, like William Safire, actually thought this woman worthy of that prize... with nutty logic like that.)
Samantha Power
Because Samantha Power and her bigoted ilk are in a frenzy to have the world believe there is no difference between the Turks and the Nazis... and Power will make this link crystal-clear by the show's close... she probably believes Turks will never get over their shame, even if it is proven the Ottoman Empire acted genocidally. She is truly in a world of "denial" of her own. Turks already acknowledge their forefathers had committed massacres. So if the genocide hoax becomes authenticated, it will be no skin off any Turk's nose. Life will go on. Every nation has blood on its hands, and no nation with an "exterminating" past is going to put itself on a plane with the Nazi regime that committed a crime unique into itself.
"The Jewish experience in World War II particularly, where the full power of an industrial state like Germany, were trained on a single people... for no crime except that they were Jewish; and where, of the six million people who died, over a million and a half were children under twelve years old; we think is unique. There has been nothing like it in history."
Barry Jacobs, Jewish Committee Director, "Sari Gelin" documentary
What Turks hate are these ugly lies being perpetuated in the prejudiced and ignorant West. Being compared to the Nazis when it's painfully obvious the allegations have nothing to do with genuine facts is what hurts. And when one tries to present the case, providing sources that are infinitely more reliable than the tainted sources pro-Armenians rely upon, and when fair, educated folks as those who run PBS can't bear to listen because their prejudices are so ingrained... that is exactly what stabs Turks in the heart.
Goldberg now makes use of the ample footage that he shot, trying to grab that one Turk on the street who gave a "genocide"-supportive opinion, of all the many Turks who don't believe there was a genocide. (To Goldberg's credit, he did not translate the last part of the first fellow's line, that Turkey couldn't have committed genocide because Turkey is not that kind of a nation, Turkey is a Moslem nation. The producer restrained himself from further agitating the minds of anti-Muslim American viewers, and his "Jewish consciousness" made a fleeting appearance for real.)
Yusuf Halacoglu
While Goldberg was in moral territory, he permitted the one moment in the entire program that seriously offset the propaganda that had come before; that was when Halacoglu was allowed to calmly state, without an Ara Sarafian following with a dismissal that it's garbage, "There are many people in Turkey that you can show crying on TV. People know that their relatives were murdered and they can cry too. But just because people cry doesn't make this written history." (No sad violin music was playing in the background at this point.)
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-A. Fairness: Fair treatment of individuals generally requires that a producer represent the words and actions of the people portrayed or identified in a way that presents their strongest case, and gives individuals or organizations that are the subject of attack or criticism an opportunity to respond. Fairness also requires that a producer be willing to consider all relevant information and points of view.
We next get into the technicalities of "genocide." Aktan asks why Armenians are not content with words like catastrophe, tragedy or disaster. He states what determines genocide is not the number of casualties or the cruelty of the persecutions, but the intent to destroy a group. Turks have never harbored any anti-Armenianism. The victims of genocide must be totally innocent.
And that's the 100% truth. Now let's see how Samantha Power, "genocide scholar," addresses this. Like almost all genocide scholars, she has no background in history, but at least she can utilize her skills as the attorney that she is:
"What the word genocide connotes is a systematic campaign of destruction. If you simply call the horrors of 1915 'crimes against humanity' or 'atrocities,' it doesn't fully convey just how methodical this campaign of slaughter and deportation really was. And I think that's why historians look at the record and they really can come to no other conclusion but that this word genocide applies to this methodical campaign of destruction."
If Ms. Power is referring to "genocide scholars" as "historians," she is getting herself into very deep water. Let us remind ourselves of what is expected of a real historian: "A historian has a duty to try to write only the truth. Before historians write they must look at all relevant sources."
There were more real historians a generation ago, such as the sixty-nine Western academicians who signed this 1985 declaration. But such real historians have been frightened away by unscrupulous genocide advocates like Israel Charny, who think nothing of harming the precious reputations of real historians. But brave ones do surface now and then, such as Prof. Guenter Lewy, whose scholarly methodology puts the partisan genocide scholars' pretensions to shame. Lewy reminds us there are still some real historians around who do their duty and look at all relevant sources: "Distinguished scholars of Ottoman history like Roderic Davison, J. C. Hurewitz, Bernard Lewis, and Andrew Mango have rejected the appropriateness of the genocide label for those occurrences." (Commentary, Feb. 2006)
Counselor refers to how "methodical" was "this campaign of slaughter and deportation." Deportation, or more accurately relocation in this case, is not genocide. Relocation is not pretty, but it has nothing to do with an "intent to destroy." Otherwise, WWII relocations of Alsatians in France and Japanese in the USA & Canada could be called genocide, which would be ridiculous.
So let's focus on what Ms. Power should have been addressing, Aktan's statement that there was no "intent." Ms. Power can use all the words like "methodical" and especially "systematic campaign of destruction" as she likes. But where is the proof of this "intent"? There is nothing in Goldberg's program that proves "intent." We were offered plenty of sad violin music, the personal opinions of endless ignorants and bigots, accounts of biased newspapers ready to print second-hand stories, decisions of courts lacking due process and conducted under enemy occupation... everything but genuine, factual evidence. Meanwhile:
—There was no mention of Ottoman orders safeguarding the lives of Armenians and their properties, displaying a formal commitment to, as Dr. Lewy put it, a "relatively humane" process.
—There was no mention of Dashnak and Hunchak revolutionaries who bragged in their publications not of "self-defense," but of their heroic fight for national liberation, nor was there mention of Armenians being the "Seventh Ally" of the Entente Powers, as the Daily Chronicle beamed on Sept. 23, 1914. (5-6,000 Armenians accompanying the Russians was mentioned, but that didn't give the idea.)
—There was no mention of the punishment of Turks who committed crimes against Armenians, during the war, at times to the point of execution.
—There was no mention of the callous disregard the Ottoman government had for the welfare of its own people, revealing the Armenians were not singled out as a deprived party, nor was there mention of the suffering of all of the Ottoman people, of famine and disease.
—There was no mention of the counterpart of Nuremberg, the Malta Tribunal.
That is little more than the tip of the iceberg for facts there was no mention of. But again, most importantly, there was no mention of the real facts that would prove "intent." A lawyer like Samantha Power should know that without "intent," there can be no "genocide." Assuming, of course, that she is not as poor a lawyer as she is a "scholar."
Goldberg found a great old CBS-TV news clip where Raphael Lemkin (at the time a "professor of law at Yale University"), who coined the "genocide" word, was shown revealing that he thought of the Armenian experience as genocide.
But here, it looks like Goldberg pulled a fast one. After the interviewer asked Lemkin of his interest in genocide, Lemkin replies, "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times, it happened to the Armenians. and, uh, after the Armenians..."
Lemkin takes a second to formulate his next words, and we stay on his face while he is thinking. And then we suddenly switch to what appears to be an insert shot of the interviewer as Lemkin continues in voice-over, "...Hitler took action..." If Goldberg did what I think he did, replace Lemkin's next words with words that came later in the program in order to make the all-important Hitler connection, he proved himself to be a man after Vahakn Dadrian's blackened heart. Engaging in "misleading quotations" and the "selective use of sources," and an all-around breach of ethics.
Reasons lending themselves to possible manipulation are that, number one, "quick-cutting" was not the style of the older television programs. Number two, while a guest is briefly pausing with his thoughts to possibly come up with a revealing statement, it would be the rare TV director who would cut away and miss out on something important, for the sake of an undramatic non-reaction shot. And number three, the "...Hitler took action..." comment unnaturally starts the instant of the reaction shot, and as soon as the line ends... that is, lasting about one second, much too quick for the editing style of the period... we're back on Lemkin again, with the show's voice-over taking over. (Not to say it couldn't have happened this way; but the sequence was so jumpy, it caught my immediate notice.)
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-K, Unacceptable Production Practices: Never invent or add elements that were not originally there; and Never make choices that mislead or deceive the audience.
ADDENDUM (5-06):
Looks like this TV clip was not all that novel a find; the relentless genocide industry certainly has dug up every genocide scrap in existence. Here is how an Armenian genocide site transcribed the order of Lemkin's words:
Raphael Lemkin Interview on CBS TV (1949):
I became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians; and after[wards] the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished. You know that they [the Ottoman Turks Holdwater: Lemkin was referring to the Armenians' NEMESIS here, not the Turks] were organized in a terroristic organization which took justice into its own hands. The trial of Talaat Pasha in 1921 in Berlin is very instructive. A man (Soghomon Tehlirian), whose mother was killed in the genocide, killed Talaat Pasha. And he told the court that he did it because his mother came in his sleep ... many times. Here, …the murder of your mother, you would do something about it!
We can therefore make two deductions: [1] Mr. Hitler was not on Lemkin's mind at this point in the interview, and [2] For wholeheartedly accepting Armenian propaganda without question, Lemkin was either too prejudiced and/or not all that bright.
Lemkin, a "Polish Jew" as the program informs us (have you noticed that whenever we run into a description of Lemkin, those words, "Polish Jew," are sure to follow?), grew up in Poland, mainly a Christian country. Like genocide advocates who never scratch beneath the surface because they arrogantly think they are right, like the prejudiced people who run PBS and its affiliates, the only thing that reached Lemkin's ear was "Terrible Turk" propaganda. If everyone was saying the Turks were bloody butchers, why should Lemkin have had the desire to poke around, to find the real truth? (It doesn't say much about Lemkin's scholarly integrity, to allow his emotions to supersede his science, since he did go on to become a professor... but his specialty was in law, and just because someone specializes in law does not make that person a specialist in history. As we know so piercingly from Samantha Power's example.) The fact that Lemkin believed there was a genocide of the Armenians was nothing more than his "personal opinon," as relevant as the consensus of "personal opinions" of the hypocritical "International Association of Genocide Scholars."
We then move on to how the "Turkish state" is steadfast in its refusal to accept the charge of genocide, but now there is an "increasing number of Turkish intellectuals" who have broken with the state line. Cue in a fuming Halil Berktay:
"I was speaking out of a feeling of utter disgust at all the hypocrisy surrounding this question. That is to say, the nauseating repetition of all the state line phrases about the 'Armenian slanders,' the 'so-called genocide,' the 'false Armenian allegations,' and so on and so forth. It was fairly clear that somehow the state... was signaling the press that this was how they should be talking, and the media, the press, the journalists, the TV anchorman, etcetera were all instinctively falling into line."
"Falsified Genocide"!
Part of the visuals accompanying the above were the scrolling written words like "allegations" that Berktay was listing. The last and central example was "Falsified Genocide," which came to a stop and remained frozen by itself for seconds, getting the most screen time. Since, most likely, nobody had used the word "Falsified" in relation to this genocide matter before the creation of the TAT site (the reason why it was chosen to represent the site's slogan was that the word catchily rhymed with "The Other Side" and "Genocide"), it's a sure bet Andrew Goldberg was paying a nod to TAT, for which TAT feels honored, and gives thanks.
This is the first time I am seeing Professor Berktay "in action," seeing what he really looks like, and sounds like. He comes across as a man who is really, if you'll pardon the expression, pissed-off. As opposed to many of the Armenian propagandist scholars, who know the real facts and purposely stray from them, I am getting the impression that Halil Berktay really believes everything he is saying.
Berktay proudly relates how he was proclaiming that the emperor has no clothes, only to receive accusations for being a traitor, and of aiding and abetting the enemy. If he genuinely believes in what he is saying, all of that would have been terribly unfair, because what he would be suffering from would be "delusion" and poor scholarship. He used to be part of a Marxist movement that wanted to save his Fascist state. Maybe he feels his Fascist state is beyond redemption, and this is his patriotic way of saving Turkey... who knows? (Although whole-heartedly joining a camp that is clearly hostile to his country would be a funny way of saving his country.) The one thing that is clear is that if Halil Berktay has been allowed to spew his poison in Turkey for so many years, Turkey cannot possibly be the "totalitarian" state that Peternocchio Balakian likes to say it is.
The publisher
We are next treated to the tale of a publisher in Turkey whose office was bombed by extremists, for having published genocide books, some dozen years back. This is kind of like when Prof. Stanford Shaw's house in California was bombed by extremists in 1977, because his version of Ottoman history was not the preferred variety (no mention of this bomb attack in Goldberg's program, in case you were wondering; fittingly, the publisher in question, Ragip Zarakolu, would appear in Glendale, California, addressing genocide-cuckoo Armenians, days after this film's airing. Balakian shared his 2005 "Rapahel Lemkin prize" with Zarakolu, and Zarakolu was happy to publish the Turkish-translated version of Balakian's "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" in Turkey... especially with its lovely Chapter XXII, "The Turk Reverts to the Ancestral Type," as much of a must-read book as "Mein Kampf" would be in Israel.)
"Les Arméniens," by Yves Ternon, is an example of
the publisher's output. With his choice of imagery, we
can see where the fellow's heart lies. One must ask,
where is this fellow getting the money, to run his
propagandistic enterprise? Unfounded rumor: George
Soros. There are many other candidates..
That was then, and this is now. The tentacles of the powerful genocide industry have infiltrated Turkey, and genocide books now line the shelves of book stores. Even a book by the dreaded Vahakn Dadrian has made an appearance... all in a sinister attempt to mold gullible and ignorant Turkish minds.
Turkey's position in the world is vulnerable, despite its powerful military. Enemies from within and without are working constantly to undermine the country. The hostiles include supposed friends from Europe, who can't regard Turkey as a friend, despite all the gestures Turkey has shown since its inception. The West is simply too prejudiced. They will take the side of the Greeks in Cyprus, they will take the side of Kurdish terrorists, they will turn a blind eye to Armenia's aggressive and illegal actions in Karabakh, and the European Union will demand that Turkey admit to the lie of a mythological Armenian genocide before membership can be considered, despite the fact that Turkey has been waiting like a dog for many years. In the wake of these very real dangers, of course some of the brighter Turks in Turkey are going to be resistant to efforts designed to weaken their nation. Europe will herald principles of human rights and freedom, deploring defensive moves made by the Turks, applauding the chipping away of safeguards maintaining the separation of church and state, all the while employing their usual double standards, as they have been doing since some of these nations tried to split the Ottoman Empire apart. One example here: outlawing the freedom of thought in some European countries, as far as affirming the contra-genocide view.
Compare with the United States. "The Burning Tigris" finds a major publisher, while Sam Weems' "Armenia - Secrets of a 'Christian' Terrorist State," fetches $200 on Amazon.com a short year after its release because it is nowhere to be found. There is an effective censorship in place regarding the contra-genocide view. The journalists and media all step into line, as Berktay put it regarding Turkey, and block out the alternative view. Part out of ignorance, part out of prejudice, part out of fear of intimidation from the fanatics among the Armenians. PBS thinks this Goldberg propaganda is "unbiased," while the genuine history reflected in the American-made THE ARMENIAN REVOLT is quickly rejected for being "biased." The situation is so dismal, Guenter Lewy, a mainstream, respected scholar with a track record, almost could not find a publisher for his "Disputed Genocide" book. I understand, through the grapevine, the book was rejected one publisher after another. Part out of ignorance, part out of prejudice, part out of fear of intimidation from the fanatics among the Armenians.
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005, IV-F. Courage and Controversy: The surest road to intellectual stagnation and social isolation is to stifle the expression of uncommon ideas; today's dissent may be tomorrow's orthodoxy.
So here Goldberg is attempting to demonstrate what a closed society Turkey is by pointing to the experiences of Berktay and the publisher. But the freedom of the press and freedom of speech regarding this same genocide topic is effectively curtailed in Western nations, including his own. When people like Taner Akcam and Elif Shafak are allowed to write columns in Turkish newspapers, and there is no counterpart of a contra-genocide writer to get his or her views out in print in America, ironically, Goldberg's own nation emerges as the more restrictive one.
Next, we get a rundown on the Armenian terrorism that took place, "from roughly 1975 to 1985" (I wonder why Producer/Writer Goldberg did not actually specify 1973-1987, and chose to cut the time period down by 30%?), committing "over a hundred" attacks (again, the attempt to minimize; the number of attacks, if I counted correctly, was two hundred and ten. Source: Dr. Heath Lowry's "Chronological Breakdown of Armenian Terrorists Incidents 1973-1987"), that "resulted in the deaths of several dozen Turkish diplomats and many innocent civilians." The segment ends with the line, "Turkey continued to maintain its position on the genocide," that could be construed as praising these murderers; that is, despite the good efforts of the terrorists, villainous Turkey still refused to budge. (It is no secret that the Armenian community regarded these killers as heroes.)
Fatma Muge Gocek wonders why she didn't know anything about the genocide that she would go on to admit personal responsibility for years later, while being raised in Turkey and getting the best education that country had to offer. She is implying her nation chose to cover up its crimes, instead of celebrating the mature decision her nation took, in guiding its young to emphasize brotherhood and love, rather than nurturing the kind of hatred that caused many young Armenian fanatics to kill so many and to wound and maim hundreds more, during the terror spree of the 1970s-80s... aside from committing untold violence then and now, in the form of "Rufmord."
Prof. Suny complains about Turkey's Ministry of National Education finally waking up and including this matter in its curriculum, in April 2003. (Before, his pal Gocek implied Turkey was evil for avoiding the topic. Now Suny will imply Turkey is evil for including the topic.) His gripe is that the Turkish schools were directed to show this matter as groundless. Sorry, Prof. Suny, they were only doing what is right, since the claims happen to be groundless. Suny's point is that this is "official denial by the state," once more reinforcing what a "totalitarian" country Turkey is. Yet, many nations have such central bureaus that determine which direction some topics should be taught, wthin their nation's classrooms. For example, Yossi Sarid, as Minister of Education of Israel, directed that the Armenian "genocide" would be included in the country's school curriculum and that he would do everything possible to make sure Israeli children learned the subject thoroughly. He did so because he had faith in Ambassador Morgenthau (specifying that Morgenthau was "Jewish," meaning, I guess, that must have had something to do with Morgenthau's truthfulness), and because Sarid was influenced as a child by the fiction of a novel, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh." (The author of which Sarid also stressed was "Jewish," in April 24, 2000.) He planned to put "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" on reading lists for Israeli schoolchildren, corrupting their innocent minds with an exciting new "Nazi" role model, based on fiction.
Note the double standard; what does Suny think is happening in his own country, regarding this topic? The wealthy, obsessed Armenians have infiltrated school boards across the land, forcing their propaganda into the school curriculum. (Along with other underhanded tactics, such as intimidating universities from initiating Turkish studies departments.) There might not be a national education minister making these directives (On the federal level, a Department of Education could be in existence), but the Land of the Free's "official denial by the state" is directed through its individual states. The topic is presented strictly from the Armenian perspective in most cases, and at the time of this writing, a lawsuit is brewing in Massachusetts, challenging the partisan bigots who are running the show. (Many of these folks got into the act purely for "freedom of choice" reasons, but believing in the validity of the genocide thesis... similar to how the American Civil Liberties Union once defended the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to hold a parade; thet is, the notion might be hated, but the rights still need to be defended. My understanding is, the involved people are beginning to have their eyes opened as to the real history, once they were forced to look into the issues more carefully.) The ones behind the case, aside from a dirt-poor Turkish association: a Jewish student, at least one Jewish teacher, and Jewish attorneys. Now THAT'S the kind of real "Jewish consciousness" that brings tears to my eyes.
But, of course, in the barrels of humanity, not all of the apples will be lip-smacking good. Israel Charny, the epitome of "genocide scholars" with his own peculiar brand of "Jewish consciousness," is up next:
"Imagine for a moment the history books of the Western world being printed without having the story of World War I in there."
Israel Charny
Let's make a record of that, folks. Israel Charny is asking us to believe there are no history books in Turkey covering World War I. I suppose the utter stupidity of such a remark goes well with the domain of being what Charny is identified as onscreen, the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. (As stated earlier, not only is this non-scholar part of the club, he is actually the president. This is very appropriate.)
What Charny really means is that the "genocide" part has not been stressed, and we have gotten into the reasons why. He just doesn't get it that World War I for the Turks encompasses far more than the Armenian story. But what Charny means is far different than what he says. The ignorant and unwary will actually believe that the nation of Turkey is "totalitarian" enough to have pretended this defining event of their history, World War I, does not exist; Turkey is so ashamed, and the Armenian matter so completely describes the Turkish WWI experience, there was simply no other way for the Turks to have covered up their great crime, but to do away with the WWI topic altogether.
Using Charny's words, a far more pertinent question to ask is: "Imagine for a moment the history of what happened between the Turks and the Armenians is printed without having the story of the Turks in there."
"Here is a significant country in our world, spending an enormous amount of its money, of its resources, on one subject: Don't you mention the Armenian genocide."
The only time Turkey spends significant sums, to my awareness, is when the services of those with clout (mainly, political representatives) are paid huge fees to lobby for the Turkish side when the umpteenth Armenian genocide resolution is introduced legislatively (on the Federal level; the Armenians have had free rein with the states, which is one reason why so many states have passed meaningless resolutions). It's also said Turkey spends a lot on P.R. firms, but here is what lies behind those kinds of claims.
The sad fact of the matter is, that Turkish government, made out to look so diabolical by propagandists like Israel Charny, usually has no idea of what it is doing. Here's Sam Weems on the topic
"I am stupefied, and I am wondering where in the world are the Turks? What is the Turkish government doing? Where in heaven's name is the Turkish Foreign Service? No one seems to be doing a darn thing in defending truth and the Turkish interest. If a non-Turk American, like me, can research and find such unbelievable data so destructive for the Turks' and Turkey's vital interests, I ask myself why in the world don't the Turks..?"
He sure laid it on the line. The proof that Charny is talking out of his scrawny derriere is exactly this: if Turkey is really spending an enormous amount of its money to fool everybody, why is it making no dent on the lazy-thinking world's acceptance of the "genocide"? As usual, the "Armenians" do the crime, and then point to the Turks as having committed the same crime; Weems again:
I know a few Turkish Americans who are true champions for Turkey. Sad truth is that they 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!
The main ones doing the fighting are a very few Turkish-Americans, whose voices are almost always met with an automatic censorship by media outlets (this PBS episode serving as but one example), not only because of the anti-Turkish baggage of Westerners, but because Armenian propaganda is now so powerful, those with contra-genocide views are put in the same boat as neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. (Which was exactly the unscrupulous genocide industry's goal... insidious.) Most "Picnic" Turks couldn't care less. The few who are doing the fighting are only motivated by their anger against the great injustice over the situation. Aside from the Turks' laziness, one important reason why more Turks don't get involved is because the facts of the "genocide"... that is, the hideous crimes the Armenians perpetrated on the Turks on a widespread and (if we can use Samantha Power's word) methodical scale ... have been kept from them. As a result, Turks have no hatred, which was precisely the noble idea. The reason why the Armenian genocide juggernaut is so functional is because too many Armenians are taught to hate.
One last tidbit from Weems: "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! This is a better return than Las Vegas casinos!"
So here is Armenia, landlocked, poor, their people leaving the nation in droves (not too many of those hypocritical diaspora Armenians from America are going off to live in their "ancient homeland" that they pay such loving lip service to), their corrupt dictator Dashnak leaders not caring for the welfare of the people as usual, instigating violence and terror as usual (as in Karabakh), and knowing they will get away with it because they are the darlings of the Turk-unfriendly West. Armenia that continuously has its hand out to get millions in American taxpayer money without offering America anything in return (the crooks still have to pony up the $50 million they borrowed from the USA, at 5% interest, all the way back in 1919); the real question for Israel Charny is not what the Turkish government is doing to protect itself from constant vicious propaganda and slander... but why is Armenia spending millions of its limited dollars to perpetuate their mythological genocide? (But that is the last question Israel Charny would want to ask.)
We are told the story of how the 1935 MGM production of "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was stopped because a Turkish diplomat in the USA expressed his concern, as if it were a crime to defend "oneself" while victimized by vicious propaganda. (The author of the book, Franz Werfel, according to his friend, Albert Amateau — who became a rabbi later in life — realized he had been lied to by Armenians, relying on such poppycock as the Andonian forgeries. [Which the creepy Vahakn Dadrian will still tell you, by the way, is perfectly good evidence.] But Werfel kept quiet, because he had also discovered the power of the fanatical "Armenian Curtain of Fear"; one wrong move against Hai Tahd, and it could be curtains).
The real story is that Ataturk, a man who was in close competition to become TIME Magazine's Man of the Century (but whose selection was doomed from the start; TIME Magazine was not going to be caught dead choosing Ataturk, in this anti-Turkish world), and for colossally good reason for those who know about his greatness, has never been depicted in an American movie, or even a European movie, to my knowledge. (In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood was churning out biographies or historical movies on just about every conceivable personality or topic.) Not even in a bit role. The last time an attempt was made to make a film about Ataturk, by the son of Laurence Olivier, the rabid Turk-hating groups (this time the Greeks) put a stop to the production, by intimidating the star and his celebrity wife. (At around the same time ARARAT got made with no problem; a few Turks objected, but Miramax's ignorant Harvey Weinstein simply gave the finger to the "Nazis." Goldberg — more likely, Balakian, as this subject is also from his Tigris book — is going all the way back to 1935 and pointing to what was an unusual lark to demonstrate the "power" of the supposedly omnipotent Turkish government.)
SAMANTHA POWER, after explaining that she expected to defend her handling of the Armenian "genocide" while she was on tour for her book: "What amazed me was that there were deniers — there were people who raised their hands, you know, from time to time, y'know, as I travelled around — but they were always either Turkish or, ah, officials or individuals who had been sent out by the Turkish embassy."
How very disingenuous of Ms. Power, having had a thorough knowledge of how the genocide club had been operating by the time of her tour (that is, the dynamics of the Armenian genocide industry), to express how "amazed" she was that there were no critical non-Turks in the audience. The Armenian propaganda apparatus had intimidated everyone from the debate; those teachers who would present the authentic history in classrooms would be harassed to the point of learning to stay away from the topic. (For example, after Prof. Richard Hovannisian reportedly branded fellow UCLA instructor, Prof. Stanford Shaw, a "criminal," Hovannisian's mad dog students did their best to disrupt Shaw's classes. The cowed university offered no support, and Shaw was forced into early retirement.) So nobody really knew the Turkish side... nobody wants to know, because of prejudice and a brainwashing that has taken effect from years of repeated Armenian propaganda bombardment. The reason why there were no Turks, and Power could not have been naive enough not to know this, boils down to the five words movie critic Pauline Kael used, to describe how Hollywood could get away with making such a racist movie like MIDNIGHT EXPRESS: "Who wants to defend Turks?" (Even Turks don't care to defend Turks, because Turks have better things to do. The reason why the Embassy sometimes — and I stress the word "sometimes" — gets involved is not because they are the diabolical villains from some James Bond movie implementing a sinister plan; it's because they know they are the last stop. If they don't say anything, no one will. Here is an example of Power coming across a couple of Turks in the audience; neither was associated with nor needed the Turkish Embassy to attend this particular meeting.)
Not incidentally, the fact that Power can make a claim like anonymous folks in the audience raising their hands having been sent by the Turkish Embassy, when she would have had no way of knowing where the people in the audience came from (unless she asked them, which we all know would have been unlikely... or unless the audience member voluntarily revealed they were from or sent by the Embassy, which would also not have been a matter of course; come to think of it, even though the odds were that these people were Turks, how could she even be sure they were all Turks? Would she have stopped and quizzed each one on their ethnicity?) sheds great light on the level of the attorney's "scholarship"; carelessly producing statements not supported by genuine facts, but speculation.
She follows the above chatter about Turks defending their honor against this horrible defamation campaign with her conclusion of what the obvious "sign" is. And the way in which she does that turns out to be one of the most vicious and irresponsible statements from the whole production (for one thing, now present day Turks are equated with neo-Nazis, just as Ottoman Turks must be depicted as Nazis):
"That's a sign, in a way that already Turkish deniers are becoming the equivalent socially, culturally, of Holocaust deniers."
Andrew Goldberg goes to town with the above "Turks are Nazis" juxtaposition, accompanying Power's voice-over... reminiscent of the way horrible Nazi propaganda movies juxtaposed scurrying vermin with Jews; we are simply replacing one "subhuman" species with another. Is this the kind of imagery an honest PBS documentary would carry, from the perspective of the producer?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, sums up precisely why unscrupulous genocide advocates, who care nothing for genuine history and only for their agendas, know what deep trouble they are in as regards their Armenian genocide propaganda. They have the wool pulled over the people's eyes for the moment because of their great wealth, political power and underhanded "end justifies the means" tactics, in addition to the Western world's racist antipathy toward Turks, and Turkish indifference. The one thing these genocide advocates can't afford to do is to engage in legitimate debate. So they know they must discredit their opponents by undermining their character, in age-old ad hominem style.
This is the definition of the loser. When they can't win with the truth, they must get personal.
PBS Debate: "Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues"
Little more than half of PBS affiliates around the United States, and only two of the top ten markets, aired (on April 17, 2006) the follow-up panel discussion to the propaganda film, "The Armenian Genocide"... covered extensively at TAT. “Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues" was PBS's half-hearted attempt at "equal time," which PBS wholeheartedly sabotaged with its announcement that PBS "acknowledges and accepts the genocide." Add a full-fledged campaign of Armenian extremists and their political allies to boycott the show, and the rug was effectively pulled out from under this debate Perhaps it wasn't a bad thing, as the PBS producers (one being Oregon Public Broadcasting's David Davis, an Armenophile who let the propagandists get away with every claim for the film; he co-produced this panel discussion, as well) did their best to make the debate an extension of their propaganda. As PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler phrased it in his April 21, 2006 column, regarding one-half the "Turkish" team: "Turan, with halting English in the company of three fast-talking and articulate other panelists, made little, if any impact." It boiled down to "two against one," as Getler further wrote, and the two from the "Armenian" side happened to be among the most unethical the Armenian genocide industry has to offer. Add to this mix a pro-genocide moderator who made no bones about where his prejudices lay, and this sorry "debate" basically boiled down to three against one. Despite the odds, at least some truths leaked through, and those who were unable to watch it at least will have the chance to study the transcript of the program. An analysis follows of, first, The Host, and next, The Program, referencing the points of the transcript through footnotes.
Scott Simon
SIMON: Hello. I'm Scott Simon. Thank you for joining us. You've just seen a program describing events that occurred during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. For the next half hour, we are going to discuss some of the issues that were raised in this documentary, and we are joined by four guests. Justin McCarthy is a professor of history at the University of Louisville, Taner Akcam, who appeared on the program, is a Turkish sociologist and historian [1], is currently a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. [2] Ömer Turan is an associate professor of history at the Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey; and Peter Balakian, who also appeared in the program, is a poet and a {?}, and a professor of Humanities at the Colgate University.
Gentlemen, thanks all very much for being with us. I want to turn to you first, Professor McCarthy, because I know you have a different viewpoint than some of what we have seen in the film. I have to begin by saying it's impossible not to see this very powerful film, pictures of the killing fields, the cattle cars, the very vivid descriptions of people who saw firsthand what happened, and not to conclude that what the world saw was an extinction, a genocide of the Armenian people. [3]
McCARTHY: Well, I think that proves that the propagandists {?} work very well. Because this is really propaganda masquerading as history. It is true that the Armenians suffered terribly. The difficulty is, by only presenting half of a story, by only showing you the Armenian dead, they make it appear like a genocide. The Armenians did suffer terribly; but the Muslims, the Turks and the Kurds, they suffered equally as badly. And by skipping that, their not putting that in, they made what was actually closer to a civil war, or perhaps a mutual genocide [4], appear like a slaughter by of one group by another. This movie, unfortunately, is {?} historically, extremely inaccurate. Not simply about Armenians....
SIMON: Can you point out a couple of specific inaccuracies in your {?}
Justin McCarthy
McCARTHY: Well, pick something that has nothing to do with this issue, for instance; they talk about the Balkan Wars, which were fought in 1912-1913. They misidentified the countries. They say that Rumania fought against the Ottomans, which it didn't. They imply that Greece and Serbia and Rumania and these places didn't exist until then, when they took themselves free of the Ottoman Empire...
SIMON: What about some inaccuracies in regards to the Armenian Genocide?
McCARTHY: The biggest inaccuracy is the crime of omission, to me. For instance, they don't mention that the beginning of what's called the Armenian Genocide was revolt by Armenians, especially in the province of Van, that began when mobilization took place even before the war took place — began almost a year before the events of any deportations — and which had an attendant upon it, a tremendous slaughter of Muslim civilians. Now, this was the first thing that happened. I don't think it's terribly important what happened first, because this is an inhuman time for everyone. But to not mention what happened to the Armenians happened primarily out of revenge, for things that Armenians did, is simply to falsify history tremendously. It's like taking the American Civil War and saying it's a genocide of the south, because you don't mention that the northern people died as well.
SIMON: Why don't we... Peter Balakian.
Peter Balakian
BALAKIAN: Well [ahem], I think what we've heard from Mr. McCarthy is a fantasy, and I think it's important to say that Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Turan have worked for the Turkish government, to help that government deny the Armenian genocide; and I think it's important for our viewers to understand that the Turkish government has had an egregious human rights record against intellectuals, against intellectual freedom, it has made the Armenian genocide taboo and illegal, in its own country, and to be working with that kind of project is already to make it clear what kind of propaganda you are engaged in. What I think this documentary shows so brilliantly is the mainstream, international scholarly discourse that is imbedded in the Armenian genocide discourse. For the first time, we see terrific Turkish scholars like Taner Akcam, Muge Gocek, Mr. Berktay, Mr. Adanir, talk self-critically about their past. What the Turkish government has outlawed is self-critical analysis of its past, and unfortunately, these gentlemen are part of that project, and I think that tells you a great deal. There is no propaganda about the Armenian genocide outside of Turkey. Turkey is where the genocide is generated, and it's part of a nationalist project. Let me also say what I think is so powerful about this film. We see Raphael Lemkin on national television in 1949, the man who invented the concept of genocide talking about genocide — using the term Armenian genocide publicly in a very early moment in the morphology of that concept, and that's very powerful, because the Armenian case was part of Raphael Lemkin's understanding of what genocide was. [5]
SIMON: Let me turn to Ömer Turan if I could; what do you make of these very vivid firsthand accounts that appeared in newspapers, that were sent back to embassies, ah, missionaries, people who saw firsthand what was happening, and the word "genocide" wasn't commonly used, but they certainly referred to as a slaughter, and as a massacre, that was deliberately intended to extinguish the Armenian people.[6]
TURAN: I worked in that missionary archives, and I also worked in the archives of Admiral Bristol, who was the High Commissioner of the United States in Istanbul. And in his report, Admiral Bristol says that I know that there is a strong propaganda being carried out in the United States in favor of the Greeks and Armenians, and I have read articles in which I know they contain great inaccuratacies, if not {?}. I can give...
SIMON: (I believe) inaccuracies is the word..?
TURAN: Yes. I can give some more...ahh... examples from what Admiral Bristol... ahh... said about propaganda work, ahh, in the United States.
SIMON: Well, I'm obviously not familiar with that, but it seems to me that to take one out of a morass of firsthand accounts and to have somebody refer to that as some inaccuracies or {representatives} is different than impeaching the firsthand accounts of the people who were there, and saw what happened. What explanation is there for that?[7]
TURAN: Those informations, informations, let me call, was given, was sent to the United States from the same sources; in one of others ahh, record, Admiral Bristol says that he discussed in one of his interviews with Bishop Darlington, and, ahh, he speaks, Bishop Darlington speaks about two million deaths of the Armenians, and, ahh, he says, ahh, it's written in all, ahh, {serious} American, French, British newspapers, and Admiral Bristol say that, well, it's written in all those newspapers, but their sources are the same. From one source...
SIMON: I'm not sure I follow that, but you wouldn't dispute that there were hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths, would you?[7b]
TURAN: No, ahh...
SIMON: Even if the exact, even if the exact figure...
TURAN: Someone claims it, as Admiral Bristol says, that these claims, ahh, are coming from the same source. In all these newspapers.
SIMON: Professor Akcam.
Taner Akcam
AKCAM: {I mean...} not a necessary debate. There, I'm working on the archives, and I know the archives materials. Generally, everyone should know that. There is no inconsistency between American, German, British, and Ottoman, and Austria-Hungary materials. All these archival materials, including the Ottoman materials, gives a very clear picture of the genocidal intent of the authori, Ottoman authorities. To pick up one document, and to explain all that, these are not, we are scholars, and we have to be very careful, and we have to avoid making {weight} unsupported generalizations. There were German casualties in the second World War. The number of German deaths was more than killed Jewish people. Muslim casualties in first World War, maybe one and a half million, two million[8], but it had nothing to do with the 1915 and with the genocidal intent of the authori, Ottoman authorities. What we are discussing here, whether or not Ottoman authority is intently wanted to eliminate a population because they belonged to a certain ethnic and religious group. And this is the reality, and this is the beginning of the discussion. This must be why? Because this is the history of Turkey; if you don't know the Turkish history, you will surprise and see that there are two opinions, there are two different positions and so on. You know, we discussed in Turkey, thirty years whether there are Kurds or not in Turkey.
SIMON: Whether there are not, ahh, whether Kurds are not...
AKCAM: Yes! We discussed. Because Turkish republic, if you want to understand, you have to know that this republic, based, because of these or other reason, certain myths. Certain, there are legends, on which we build our republic. And one of the legends is that there are no Kurds, in Turkey; the other legend was there were no social classes in Turkey, and no social class struggle in Turkey, and for which I was imprisoned[9], and there was third, there were no Armenian genocide. Today, nobody talks about existing of the Kurds in Turkey, because this problem is lifted out. Now we are talking about the Armenian genocide[10], this will also lifted out. After ten years; in the process of European Union, Turkey being a member...
SIMON: Let me, let me...
AKCAM: ...We will not discuss this issue...
SIMON: Let me turn to this side for a moment and ask if we can put the conversation forward a bit. Why do we have the impression in the West, which seems to be a fair one, that in Turkey you can still be thrown into prison for saying that there was a, a genocide. Why, why is the government so sensitive, and unwilling to entertain discussion of that word?[11]
McCARTHY: I think, first of all, we have to say, and I have to say, although I know it's going a little away from what you were saying, I have just been accused of being a person who was working for the Turkish government. This is a lie.
BALAKIAN: But Reuters has a piece about you that...
McCARTHY: I don't care what Reuters said...
BALAKIAN: But I have the piece here...
McCARTHY: ...It is a lie, it is not true.
SIMON: You did address the Turkish Parliament, didn't you?[12]
McCARTHY: I addressed the Turkish Parliament, for which, if that's working for the Turkish government...
Balakian: called on his creepiness,
pathetically tried to cover up
BALAKIAN: Well, I think it's working with the Turkish government...
McCARTHY: ...In any case...
BALAKIAN: ...In an advisory capacity.
McCARTHY: ...In any case, when someone insists on attacking the personality of the historian...
BALAKIAN: ...Sir, I'm not attacking the personality.
McCARTHY: ...Generally because they don't have the facts, then this upsets me.
SIMON: I'm, I'm not sure your personality was attacked...[13]
BALAKIAN: No sir, not at all.[13b]
SIMON: ...And I don't want to attack it, but let's see if we can get back on, on target. Why is the Turkish government, to certainly the appearance of the outside world, unwilling to have Turks today entertain this debate?
McCARTHY: Well, actually, there's a couple of things...
SIMON: I know the debate, I know the debate goes on despite that, but people have been in fact imprisoned...
McCARTHY: Well, for instance, Mr. Akcam's books are published in Turkey, for instance, ah, so it is...
SIMON (addressing Akcam): How long, how long have you been in prison?[14]
McCARTHY: ...It is...
AKCAM: I was one year in prison, between 1976, '77...
McCARTHY: That has nothing to do with the Armenian case, though, I would say (laughs)...
AKCAM: Because of the, because of the {?}...
McCARTHY: It was a political matter. In any case, there is a debate in Turkey, unquestionably. There are professors in Turkish universities who are in favor of this issue. But the main thing that bothers me is that Turkey has a law that should not be there, and this is a law that says you should not defame the Turkish government, this is a silly law, they should get rid of it, (be)cause it allows every small time prosecutor to bring a case that shouldn't be, that shouldn't happen. But I want to make sure that we understand that Turkey is not the only country that has a law. For instance, I can't go to France. I can't go to France, why? ¸— and speak — because France has a law against my saying that there was not an Armenian genocide, or more precisely saying it was a mutual genocide. I can't go to Switzerland, because Switzerland has laws against that, and Switzerland puts people in jail. Now, it is definitely wrong for Turkey, for Turkey to stop people from saying what they want to say, especially professors who have a duty to profess. But it is {?} definitely wrong for countries that we revere, like France and Switzerland, to do much worse; because in Turkey, indeed, there are people who deny the Armenian genocide and people who support the Armenian genocide; scholars who have a definite conversation. But in countries like France, if you open your mouth, you end up sued or in jail.
SIMON: Let me return to Professor...
BALAKIAN: Can I just respond that first, Mr. McCarthy, I read a two page article by Reuters about you, advising closely the Turkish government on how to deny the Armenian genocide in Europe and particularly, and you're quoted extensively. (McCarthy shakes head, no.) I do have the article, but I'm sure you have it too...
McCARTHY: Bring it out. It's a lie.
BALAKIAN: ... Because it was big news.[15] But let me say this. We have to make a distinction between France and Switzerland and their laws against hate speech.[16] And the fact that right now two hundred writers and journalists are facing prison sentences in Turkey for intellectual thought; thirteen of them have to do with the Armenian genocide. My own publisher in Turkey, Ragip Zarakolu, is in Turkey tomorrow to face trial for two books he published. In the 1990s, Turkey led the world in imprisoned writers and intellectuals ahead of China and Syria, almost every year, ah, more children tortured in Turkey than any country in the world; mostly, these were Kurdish kids who were in jail.[17] The, the history of, of violence against intellectual thought is intimately intertwined wth the history of the Armenian genocide. And I would note that the documentary has such a compelling moment in which it discusses the rounding up of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, 250 of them, almost all of them who were tortured, killed, and murdered {?}...
SIMON: {?} April 24...
BALAKIAN: At the very beginning. And it also spoke to the systematic nature of the genocidal program, 'cause you cut the head of the state, the culture you want to kill off first. And this happened throughout Anatolia, so that Armenia lost all of its intellectuals in 1915 and 16.[18]
SIMON: Let me raise with both of you, if I might, a question that was raised in the documentary, which is, why is it important to you that this be labeled a genocide, as opposed to a tragedy, or a war crime, or uhmm, a fiasco or a disaster?[19]
AKCAM: I have a more concern than whether we have to label as a genocide or not. [20]The main concern is whether Turkey should be a democratic country or not. Whether Turkey should face its own history or not. Armenian genocide is only a part of it. In Turkish history, we have a lot other human right abuses, a lot other human rights violations, and if Turkey want to be a democratic country, and want to be a part of European Union, Turkey should face its own history and it is, it should not be a problem for Turkish scholars, intellectuals, to talk about the past.[21] It is not only related to Armenian genocide. It was not easy to talk about the past, about the Kurdish issue, this was the reason why I was arrested 1976, and it was today, for example, two days ago, Mr. Justin McCarthy, two police officer came to the, a journal where I write regularly, Birikim, and ask me {?} to the public prosecutor for an article that I wrote about the motive in genocide generally, a theoretical article, and this is where we are. The basic problem in Turkey is if we don't face our history, if we don't discuss the human rights abuses in the past, we can not establish a democratic future. This is the basic problem, and Armenian genocide is the major {of elemental}. Whether it's genocide or not, it is so unimportant, because according to international law, you cannot describe it another way. It is impossible.[22] Today, we call in Yugoslavia killing of 7,000 men as a genocide. So that it is not the basic problem.
SIMON: If you want to say something...
BALAKIAN: I would like to actually read what Raphael Lemkin, the man who defined genocide, for the international legal community, wrote, in 1954, as he was struggling to get the United States to pass the U. N. Genocide Convention, and he writes this: "This convention (meaning the U. N. Genocide Convention) is a matter of conscience, and is a test of our personal relationship to evil. I know it is very hot in July and August for work and planning, but without becoming sentimental, or trying to use colorful speech, let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us, than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau, and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo, which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915." I think that's a profoundly eloquent statement, and also bringing a relationship between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. And this is the man who invented the concept...
SIMON: Let...
BALAKIAN: ...And he was brilliant..[23]
SIMON: Let me turn to Professor Turan, and if you want to add something, Professor McCarthy, by all means. Ahh, I think it's safe to say that whatever crimes the German nation committed in the past, there are a lot of people around the world who admired the way, over the past generation, individual Germans and the German government have faced up to the genocide the Germans perpetrated, and not alone, during World War II, against, against the Jewish people. And they have joined the community of nations, and they, and they are admired, and, ahh, in NATO and the world community, we think nothing of a German diplomat assigned to a place like Kosovo to head up an international mission because they have, they have through their integrity and hard work, gained a seat back at the world community of nations. Can Turkey do that, until they are willing to confront these events, and not imprison people, who simply want to enter in this debate.
TURAN: Turkey should be more democratic country, and all the countries of the world should be more democratic. There is nothing wrong with being more democratic. But democratic doesn't mean, ahhh, accepting someone, ah, implements, ahh, someone forces you to say something which is not true. As an historian, ahh, I thought we were here to, to discuss ah, so-called gen, ah, Armenian genocide claims, but we are discussing so many other things, and it's a bit confusing.[24]
SIMON: Would you like an opportunity to make another point about the history, from your point of view?
Turan could not believe the host
could be so blatantly one-sided
TURAN: Well, ahhh, why only Armenians? There were many other non-Muslim communities, ahh, in Turkey, at that time. Why Armenian was especially chosen. Ahh, in that documentary, ahh, they called Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders. What about revolutionary organizations? What about the Hintchak (Hunchak) Party, what about Tashnak (Dashnak) Party, what about their rebellions, what about their uprisings, what about declaring...
SIMON: I mean, if you broaden the definition, eventually it will get to extinguish, ah, extinguish everyone. I-I don't... are you trying to re-define the victims? Or...[25]
(Shot of Prof. Turan, with a stunned, frozen expression.)
McCARTHY: Why didn't you mention the others. He's saying, why didn't...
SIMON: In the film?
McCARTHY: ...{?} the dead Muslims in the film. Why not mention all the other people...
SIMON: I'm not certain, I'm not certain that they weren't. At least if they weren't specifically mentioned as a group.
(Sitting up in disbelief)
Now it was McCarthy's turn:
Was this host for real?
McCARTHY: Honestly?
SIMON: Yeah.
McCARTHY: You saw this in the film? I must have missed it.
SIMON: Well, I-I certainly saw references.[26]
McCARTHY: Well, references. But I must say, we are at the point that...
(Akcam interrupts; Simon requests that McCarthy continue.)
McCARTHY: We are hearing a lot about the reason the Turks deny this, the reason that, we're hearing claims made about supposedly working with the government, we're hearing all this kind of thing; the fact of the matter is, the real question is not the supposed reason why Turks do this, the question was whether it happened the way they say it happened.[27] And I say, that by looking at this film, one gets a completely false idea of history. One gets misstatements, for instance, about the so-called Special Organization, which was supposedly set up to kill Armenians; which actually was set up to fight some Armenians all right. Armenian guerilla bands. Which was quite different than massacring civilians. And which, no one to my knowledge, has ever brought up actual evidence that they did this sort of thing. We see, we see constantly, in the movie references to slaughters of Armenians, many of which actually took place, but never a reference to the tremendous slaughter of Muslims. We never see the fact that Muslims were slaughtered in greater numbers, and died first. We don't see any reference to that. What we should be discussing is the actual history. And if people disagree about history, then we should be having extended debates in other fora, obviously.
SIMON: Professor Akcam? We've only got about three minutes left.
AKCAM: What happened in history has the traces. The Muslim that the Armenian killed during that period, the Muslims, is a new legend. There were Russian, in Russian army, Armenian volunteers. But Muslims killing of, the, by the Armenians, it is a legend. It is not true, and...[28]
(Turan injects a few words.)
SIMON: There were Armenians who, who fought back...[29]
(A mild commotion; Balakian is laughing.)[30]
McCARTHY (looks to moderator, in frustration): This is simply not what happened![31]
AKCAM: I'm not finished. There was a revenge act, there was revenge act, of, revenge of Ormanian, ehh, Armenians {after} 1918-1919. There was party congresses of the CUP, Union and Progress Party, who organized the genocide. If there were Muslim killings by Armenians, in this party congress, they made a report, what the Armenian activities was. They made a list of the Armenian activities. 1916 congress, 1917 congress, 1918 party congress. And these events that they're mentioning there, the event that we now. This is Van, this is {?}, this is Urfa, most of them resistance of the Armenians to the deportation.[32]
BALAKIAN: The resistance to death and...
AKCAM: I'm not done, I'm not done. One more thing I have to...
SIMON: We've only got a couple of minutes...
Tolerating Akcam, as he gets almost hysterical
AKCAM: There is enough evidence that Teskilat-i Mahsusa units were put on the job to kill the Armenians; it is that we have enough testimonies, and enough evidences, in 1919 in the trials, the generals gave these testimonies personally, and the governors gave these testimonies personally. They were not Armenians, they were Turkish governors, they were Turkish generals, and they said that Teskilat-i Mahsusa units implemented to kill the Armenians, and there were a lot of members of these Teskilat-i Mahsusa units were sentenced by the military tribunal in Istanbul.[33]
SIMON: (To Balakian:) But let me get you, because I'm going to give you the last word.[34] (To McCarthy and Turan:) Did you have, in the minute we have left, a response to, ah, the professor...
Justin McCarthy
McCARTHY: {?} ...That these are extended, extended, difficult issues that should be discussed by historians, which I believe is why the Turkish government proposed that a neutral commission be set up to study this issue. Proposed that they would present scholars, the Armenians would prevent,[35] present scholars, that all archives would be opened, that they would discuss this. The Turkish government officially asked this, the Armenian government, of Armenia, refused, and the president of Armenia stated he did wish to have a neutral commission because this was a political issue. Now that seems to me to indicate that all these statements probably are not very accurate about the Turks not wanting to come to a {truce}.
SIMON: (To Balakian:) What about professor...
BALAKIAN: The Turkish government's ah, attack on this history is so well documented that it's a scandal in modern history. And what Professor McCarthy has said is absolutely not true.
(A reaction shot of McCarthy, raising his eyebrows.)[36]
BALAKIAN: But let me just say this one final thing; if we're going to pretend to do history without assessing power, and the meaning of power, and we're going to pretend that a stateless minority population, Christian minority population, ah, unarmed, is, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, civil war, we're living in the realm of the absurd. Taking the basic {Fulconian} notion of power here is just a basic understanding of history. Were there some Armenian resistances? Sure, as Professor Akcam has spoken, a little bit like the Warsaw Ghetto. People don't want to die as sheep.[37] But I think what the documentary does so brilliantly is that it shows you the evolution of a culture of massacre against this Christian minority population that presented a problem to the Ottoman government, and how the evolution of this culture of massacre went from the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s to full-scale genocide in 1915.
SIMON: Gentlemen, I want to thank you all very much for participating in this conversation; we've seen a very powerful film and, ah, certainly understand that, ah, that the issues that it, ah, raises continue to provide powerful discussion and perhaps instruction for the future. Thanks very much for being with us, ah, this afternoon. And we want to thank, ah, people watching at home, ahhh, for following the film and this conversation. I'm Scott Simon. Thank you.
Producers: David Davis, Nadine Jelsing. Director: Sean Ceigersmidt. 2006, Oregon Public Broadcasting
The Analysis
Since PBS "fixed" this debate in favor of their own propaganda show, choosing a biased moderator who defended the "genocide" at every turn, it's only fair to examine the statements and dynamics of this "debate" in greater detail. First, a look at the host.
The Host
Scott Simon is host of "Weekend Edition Saturday" on NPR, the radio end of America's "Public Broadcasting." This is generally a fine and reliable outlet, as is PBS, the television end.
A response I received from a PBS affiliate, KPBS, while inquiring about the PBS propaganda show, before its airing:
The intent of the discussion is not to give special credence to an opposing point of view, or to make apologies for the documentary — it is a forum for both sides to meet and openly discuss their views, and attempt to understand how these facts should be worded in historical texts/discussions. Further, keep in mind that the moderator is Scott Simon, an excellent NPR journalist who is a professional when it comes to moderating discussions of this nature. We believe that he will be a fair and effective moderator, and we have faith that he will make sure all points of view are fairly heard, and insist on a factual and enlightening discussion.
Sarah
Audience and Membership Services
When I read that, I was somewhat relieved, knowing Scott Simon to be a fair man, and I suppose I was looking for anything to hang on to, in full knowledge of the awful propaganda PBS would soon be perpetuating. I conveniently forgot, however, that Scott Simon was a "liberal." That's the camp I'm in line with as well for the most part, but as we all know, blind belief is not the sole domain of conservatives, particularly neo-conservatives. Hardcore liberals hate Turkey (as do hardcore conservatives, the latter primarily for religious reasons.) Too many moderate liberals also side with anti-Turkish forces, not because they are blind to reason as the more extremist liberals, but because
[A] There is anti-Turkish prejudice in the West to begin with, affecting everyone, and
[B] Moderate liberals, quite naturally, accept the prevailing "liberal" view on peripheral subjects they have no emotional stake in closely examining. Human rights groups (a favorite "liberal" cause) have hypocritically concentrated on making a favorite whipping boy of Turkey, while turning a relative blind eye to the excesses of many other nations. (For example, the dictator state of Armenia.) Beyond the racial prejudice that hits everyone (even "liberals" are affected by this human condition.. if all one hears about a particular group is negative, even the fairest among us can be influenced), the anti-Turkish forces are all in it together. (As Steven Mufson summed up in a Washington Post article from October 9, 2000: "The Armenian Assembly has also made allies with Greek Americans and human rights groups, longtime critics of Turkey.")
However, one would think a liberal like Scott Simon would have known better. As a professional journalist, he has a duty to be impartial. The code of ethics of NPR, co-written by Jeffrey Dvorkin (who also appears to blindly accept "Armenian genocide" claims, based on a very fair April 5 article he wrote on Turkish journalists: "Many in Turkey consider the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians to be the first Holocaust in modern times"), specify:
3. Might my personal feelings have affected my handling of this story in any way?
"In pursuit of Fairness, Accuracy and Balance," p. 15, "Independence and Integrity II."
And Simon is smart enough to know about the tactics of propaganda films. While criticizing fellow liberal Michael Moore, Simon wrote:
"A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth."
"When Punchline Trumps Honesty: There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore," July 27, 2004, opinionjournal.com
Scott Simon
Yet note even a smart guy like Simon simply accepted the claims of such an obviously manipulative and propagandistic film, like Andrew Goldberg's PBS show. (Even if one agrees with the claims, shouldn't the over-the-top techniques, like the manipulative music and tricks — juxtaposing modern Turks with Nazis, for example, techniques Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of — have tipped Simon off, to look a bit more closely?)
But even fans of Simon know he failed to live up to his professional duty. A letter from PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler's column (The Ombudsman's Mailbag, April 28, 2006):
I had planned to write my comment to you before I discovered your review of the program on the Armenian genocide. I have no dog in this fight, being neither Turkish, Armenian, or affiliated with anyone in either camp. Your review was most enlightening and thoughtful.
Here is my concern: Though a fan of Scott Simon, I was disappointed by my impression that he clearly seemed to "side" with the Armenian scholars on the panel. His vocal tones, facial expressions, and dialog departed from that of critical skepticism of the positions of McCarthy into being frankly dismissive of them. He participated instead of moderated, and he seemed to me to be the "fifth" panel member. This allowed the Armenian defenders to drift into personal attacks without interference by Mr. Simon. When McCarthy near the end of the panel time finally protested that he thought he came to debate the historical facts, I tended to agree that the moderator made too little effort to keep the panel focused on the available facts. If, as the Turks assert, that millions of Turks died first, and at the hands of the Armenians, Mr. Simon could have focused attention to the location and veracity of the sources of those "facts." If the sources and veracity of those facts are unconvincing and weak, then so is their argument, and it's there for everyone to see and judge. Mr. Simon could have focused the group on the undeniable fact of the expungment of history by the Turkish government, and explored the reasons and avenues of change.
The panel discussion and the documentary itself, was weakened by the absence of scholars of the stature of Bernard Lewis, as well as a moderator who seemed less than neutral. The question arose in my mind, was Scott Simon more concerned about the perception viewers might have of him, than his task at hand of forging a meaningful exchange from panelists with obvious personal tensions between themselves?
Charles Sherwood, Jackson, MS
Simon's prejudice disallowed him from conducting even the most basic historical research, like having no idea who Admiral Bristol was, and thinking that the Hunchaks and Dashnaks were innocent Armenians in line to be exterminated. Simon was perfectly content to allow his surface knowledge of hateful Armenian propaganda to guide him.
Simon was so firmly convinced the "genocide" was an established fact, the nature of questions he asked were political ones intended to show how "bad" Turkey was, rather than trying to separate genocidal fact from fiction. This is one of the reasons that allowed Peter Balakian to express overt glee at one point, while Akcam was emotionally making dishonest claims, which Balakian knew would come across as convincing. It is no wonder that the debate came across as believable to those already influenced by genocide propaganda. For example, Alessandra Stanley, in an April 17, 2006 New York Times look, was very partial to the claims of the film (also using Simon's descriptive word: "powerful"), and was much in the corner of Balakian and Akcam (she added the latter was a "well-known defender of human rights in Turkey"), as both "lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy's points apart." Stanley, like Simon, is already a confirmed believer, and sees what she wants to see. The lies of Balakian and Akcam come across as sweet music to those who just know the Armenians were innocent, defenseless Christians, and the Turks bloody barbarians.
Stanley further opined, "Tone and appearance on television can be as persuasive as talk. Mr. McCarthy mostly sounds condescending and defensive, while Mr. Balakian is smooth and keeps his cool." When the decks are stacked in one's favor, it's easy to be cool. Balakian was sitting very prettily, since even the host was his ally. (The one point Balakian lost his cool — his facial expressions contorting in the most delightfully snivelling manner, in the knowledge that he was "caught"— when McCarthy called Balakian for the liar he was, Balakian still had little to worry about. Simon would defend Balakian.)
Balakian Gives "Buddy" Scott Simon High Marks
I find Ms. Atlas’ explanation for the post-show program a bit disingenuous. She claims that its goal was not to provide a “platform for those who deny the genocide,� but to “explore how serious historians do their work and look at evidence.� However, by inviting two professional deniers (who have worked close[ly] with the Turkish government) on to PBS, a large platform was provided for the repulsive lies, known as denial. And, in the twenty-five minutes we had there was not even a remote possibility that the show could explore how historians work. As fine a job as Scott Simon did hosting it, the post show is a staged “bake-off� and sadly a forum that abused the reality and memory of one of the major human rights crimes of our time.
Peter Balakian, letter to Michael Getler, March 22, 2006. What an awful slanderer. Exposed for being a liar regarding McCarthy's having "worked... with the Turkish government," given that his "Reuters evidence" proved no such thing, what evidence does Balakian have that his other opponent, Prof. Turan, has been an "agent of the Turkish government"? Is Balakian's "evidence" the fact that Turan is a Turkish professor working in a Turkish university? That must be it; Balakian slimily loves to present the notion that every Turk, in what Balakian calls the "totalitarian" nation of Turkey, is a mindless "agent of the Turkish government," except for Halil Berktay. How interesting that this utterly creepy man is taken so seriously by people like Scott Simon and David Davis.
CPB Ombudsman's Two Cents
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is kind of the "boss" of PBS (Public television) and NPR (Public radio.) Its ombudsman, Dr. Ken Bode, did not bode well with his view on the subject ("The Armenian Genocide," April 28, 2006), yet another lazy-thinking adherent of the Armenians' propaganda: "My conclusion is that this was an excellent documentary, well supported with historical fact and expert witnesses." Among many troubling points raised, Bode easily gushes over Samantha Power's insensitive and hateful remarks. He also offers this description:
Consistent with the PBS position on "settled history," the objective of the panel was to "explore more deeply the question of why the Turkish government and its supporters continue to reject the genocide label."
Such widely differs from Atlas' description of the panel's objective that Balakian quoted in his letter above, "how serious historians do their work and look at evidence,� and the KPBS description featured at top ("it is a forum for both sides to meet and openly discuss their views, and attempt to understand... these facts.") I have never heard Bode's description before, as much as I have been following this matter in numerous reports. The "Atlas" explanation was the true one, since McCarthy and Turan obviously appeared in the belief that they would be discussing history; they would have never come aboard if they were told the idea was to put them on the spot, and that they would be expected to explain basically why Turkey is so "evil." I have a feeling Bode's explanation was worded after the hoopla, in part to justify PBS's biased and ignorant judgment of history. Yet, Bode's description is exactly how the panel was conducted: Simon's questions centered on putting McCarthy and Turan on the spot, and Simon could not have cared less about the historical issues... evidently convinced as he was what the "real history" amounted to. Therefore, if Producer David Davis lured McCarthy and Turan to the show by providing Atlas' explanation only to perform the old bait and switch, the production committed a fraud.
Yet Dr. Bode raised this very valid point:
The group should not have included members who already had their say in the preceding documentary, and care should have been taken to be sure that all participants had an adequate facility with English.
Since Bode also adds that "the discussion was taped at National Geographic studios in Washington, D.C.," and not in Oregon as I thought (because OPB's Davis served as producer), then we must add one more element to Bode's valid point; the partisan producer David Davis also should not have been included.
The honorable thing for Simon to have done, when he was offered the job of moderating this debate, would have been to say to the producer that Simon could not accept the job. (Like a judge who must recuse himself in a case where the judge has a conflict-of-interest) Simon could not accept, because he is already a believer in the "Armenian Genocide," and that belief would get in the way of fair moderation, as it so painfully did. (Assuming, of course, that the idea was fair moderation; as may be seen directly above, the CPB ombudsman indicates that was not the idea.) However, Simon's "boss" here, OPB's David Davis, is also a firm genocide believer, judging by dishonorably allowing Andrew Goldberg and Peter Balakian to get away with any and every claim in the film itself. It's very possible Davis wished to stack the deck in his favor, by deliberately choosing a partisan host, so that (along with insuring a member of the opposition team's language skills would render him practically void) the end result would truly be "three against one."
The Program
1. Akcam's degree is in sociology. In good conscience, he cannot be called a "historian."
2. Akcam was brought into the USA by Dr. Dennis Papazian. Local Turks forced Akcam out of the University of Michigan because his case did not abide by the university's rules for visiting professorship. That other hotbed of Armenian propaganda, the University of Minnesota, evidently altered its rules to accommodate Akcam, perhaps with the help of Stephen Feinstein. Akcam no longer has a home university in Germany to be "visiting" from. It does not look like he ever served on a faculty in any German university. Akcam's position as a perpetual "visiting professor" is reportedly subsidized by the Cafesjian Foundation. If it was not for his Armenian benefactors, the undistinguished academic would have no opportunity to be spreading his poison in an American university (or upon America's shores), and would perhaps still be sweeping floors in Hamburg. It was for valuable cases as this television program, a "Turkish scholar" affirming the "genocide," that Akcam has been well paid for. Akcam's one-time friend and fellow ex-terrorist, PKK thug Abdullah Ocalan, charged: "(Akcam's) personality is dubious... He is open for manipulation in the future."
3. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." There were no "killing fields" in the film. Photographs, the origins of which can't be vouched for, showed suffering and sometimes dead, but (of the latter) we don't know what the context was. (For example, a shot of people hanged. Who were those people? Why were they hanged? If they were Armenians, were they hanged for being Armenians? If that was the case, why was not every single Armenian hanged? Or is it possible that these people had broken the law, for which the penalty would have been death for any Ottoman?) Simon should have known that all "cattle cars" are not alike. As far as "vivid descriptions," those concerned the lot of the suffering. Suffering does not equal genocide. There is not a single, non-Armenian "firsthand" account of a massacre. That does not mean all the Armenian tales were false, but unfortunately, there is too great a record of Armenian falsification. There were certainly massacres, but massacres in themselves do not prove a genocide. These examples that Simon naively cites as "evidence" do not count as factual evidence.
4. McCarthy would make reference to "mutual genocide" again in the program, but note this appears to have been an "off the top of his head" description, and this first reference is preceded by "perhaps." (And the second reference — "France has a law against my saying that there was not an Armenian genocide, or more precisely saying it was a mutual genocide" — was a shorthand reference regarding the taboo on the other side of the coin, Armenian extermination effort against Turks.) What McCarthy was doing here, to my ear, was echoing the sentiment of Prof. Bernard Lewis, who stated in an interview, "[N]owadays the word 'genocide' is used very loosely even in cases where no bloodshed is involved at all." This was dangerous territory, because as McCarthy well knows, the word "genocide" is applied in the Armenian case exactly as what the Nazis had done to the Jews. McCarthy certainly does not believe that. He stakes his belief in the historical reality that there were times both groups tried to kill off the other. Whether the order came from the top, as far as the Ottomans' end, lies at the very core of the genocide argument. There is no evidence to convict the Turks of a systematic extermination effort. However, as McCarthy himself reported regarding — for example — Erzurum, the Armenians killed for killing's sake, and these cases were not isolated, as in the case of the Turks. This is why many, many more Turks, Muslims, and other non-Christian Armenians were slaughtered than the number of Armenians who died strictly from massacres.
5. Peter Balakian wastes no time in employing his unethical Dashnak-style "the end justifies the means" attack. Note that he simply counters McCarthy's facts with the notion that it's a "fantasy," but offers no evidence to prove it. The revolt in Van has been well documented. Even before the disturbances taking place in early 1915, Armenians rebelled in Van as soon as Russia declared war, in early November of 1914... as vouched for by no less a favorite Balakian source than The New York Times. Armenians slaughtered the Muslims of Van by the tens of thousands, and the "deportation decision" resulted from the Armenians' criminality and betrayal. (The only talk of "deportation" on April 24 concerned the Muslims of Van, as the governor inquired about moving them out, threatened by rebellious Armenians, as they were.) It's very typical of these unscrupulous genocide partisans to handle facts they don't like with the simple charge of "Liar, liar, pants on fire." The real lying is on Peternocchio's end, and he begins his campaign of dishonesty by claiming genocide talk in Turkey as "taboo and illegal." McCarthy will later correctly state that Akcam's genocide books have been on sale in Turkey, as an example, showing up Balakian's disregard for truth. But Balakian's worst attack is making it seem as though McCarthy is an agent of the Turkish government, which will be addressed more fully in a moment.
6. Newspaper accounts were often third-rate accounts. The sources were Wellington House, Britain's propaganda division allowed to also operate on American soil, as well as Armenians and missionaries, the latter of which can hardly be pointed to as reliable witnesses, with their "mission from God" (as evident in their prayers) to vilify Turks. Perhaps the only American journalist allowed to travel into the Ottoman interior in 1915, that is, a rare example of a genuine "firsthand account," concluded there was no "genocide."
7. Once again, please make sure whether those were really "firsthand accounts," and also try to determine whether these "firsthand accounts" might have had reason to be untruthful. You would think a "professional journalist" such as Scott Simon would be the first to concede one can't always believe what one reads, simply because it's in print. Secondly, arbitrary claims should not be given equal weight to the conclusions of the impartial U.S. High Commissioner, whose people received reports from every corner. Unfortunately, Simon is way too ignorant for the job.
7b. Yes, Prof. Turan's level of English left something to be desired, but it's not like Turan's point with this exchange was impossible to follow. I can't believe Simon would be that slow, but he gave several other indications throughout that his dimmer switch was on. Simon simply chose to ignore Turan's point, as Simon was evidently in a rush to get Turan's view on whether the evil Turks killed "millions." Pretty disgraceful.
8. McCarthy's carefully constituted demographic figures results in a final tally of 2,736,000 ("Who Are the Turks") as the Muslim loss in Anatolia, from 1912-1921. The common consensus for dead WWI "Turks" is 2.5 million. How interesting that Taner Akcam is going out of his way to minimize the mortality of his "own." In addition, Akcam is trying to make it sound like he has conducted a lot of personal research in the archives of the countries mentioned. I don't know how he would have had the time or, in the case of the Ottoman archives, the opportunity. The Armenian propaganda machinery had already conducted the most meticulous research before Akcam was a blip on the radar screen. I would believe that he is mainly making use of what has already been uncovered, and like his friend Fatma Gocek, attempting to come across as "scholarly," putting across the notion that he has conducted personal research. (He did spend time as a researcher while in Hamburg; perhaps he dabbled in the German archives.)
9. Akcam provided a different story in a radio interview: "...I was arrested in 1976 because of the article I wrote in a students’ newspaper. The reason why I was arrested is that I wrote that there are Kurds living in Turkey." The real fact is that Akcam was imprisoned for being a terrorist. He played a part in the violence of Turkey's tumultuous 1970s, where anarchy reigned at times, and people were being shot on the streets for belonging to the right or the left. For example, on November 4, 1975, Akcam reportedly participated in an act of violence in Malatya, which resulted in an injury to a cab driver. An old terrorist friend went so far as to accuse Akcam of murder, and of causing "heavy casualties." (Certainly we must be careful before accepting the word of terrorists. Similarly, we must also pause before accepting the word of Taner Akcam.)
10. Akcam heard his partner say: "(Turkey) has made the Armenian genocide taboo and illegal" minutes ago, and exposes Balakian as a liar!
11. Note this typical line of questioning. Yes, PBS and Simon might have "accept(ed) and acknowledg(ed) the genocide," but the reason why McCarthy and Turan are on the show is because they dispute this conclusion. Here Simon is wondering why Turkey is having difficulty with the word "genocide." Could it be for the same reason that Simon would have difficulty with terms such as "rapist," "murderer," or "child molester," if he were on the receiving end of such ruinous charges, based entirely on hearsay? But of course, Simon is utterly unqualified in asking the kinds of questions he should have been asking, historical questions, because he did not even perform the minimal objective historical research.
12. You know the cliché in mystery/crime novels or movies where the suspect unwittingly reveals a key detail like, "when was he drowned?", to which the detective replies, "I never said he was drowned"? BUSTED! Similarly, how odd that Scott Simon, revealing total ignorance on historical details such as Admiral Bristol or the Dashnaks, would happen to know McCarthy had addressed the Turkish Parliament. Balakian didn't reveal that little detail in his charge. Do you think Balakian took Simon aside before the show, perhaps with Armenophile OPB boss Davis, and said, "Pssst! Here's how we can trip up the denialist." (Maybe Balakian used the term "white supremacist" to describe McCarthy; that is the comparative term Peter Balakian actually used to describe McCarthy, in PBS's Current Magazine.)
13. We can certainly expect Peter Balakian to pathetically "deny" his vicious ad hominem attack on McCarthy's character, since Balakian prides himself on Dashnak dishonesty. But what is Scott Simon's excuse? What is Scott Simon talking about, that he's not sure McCarthy's personality was attacked? Balakian sleazily suggested, on the basis of no evidence (coming up), that McCarthy worked for the Turkish government. Balakian has gone around sleazily suggesting this against McCarthy and other contra-genocide scholars (Balakian helped spear-head such an attack on Prof. Heath Lowry in 1995, knocking Lowry out of the debate), the fact that they are "agents of the Turkish government," but this might have been the first time he dared to say as such to the face of one of his victims, and he deserved to get punched on his nose. We can kind of understand Peter Balakian, because he was just being Peter Balakian, but how atrocious that Scott Simon not only wasn't outraged, he actually defended Balakian. This was an attack on one's reputation, of the worst order. The idea Balakian was clearly conveying was that McCarthy was being paid off, thus selling his soul, and compromising his integrity. (Simon's very next line was that he didn't want to attack McCarthy's character either. What did that mean?? Was he patronizing McCarthy, as though McCarthy was being immature and overreacting? If anything, McCarthy showed incredible restraint.)
13b. We can almost read the thought balloon over Balakian's head: "Whew! Thanks, Scotty, old pal, old buddy, for coming to the rescue. Us 'human rights' champions need to stick together, against the denialist villains." Balakian plays his Dashnak role to a tee. First, he commits his act of destruction. Then he innocently says, "Who, me?" Such a poor, defenseless, unarmed, Christian martyr.
14. Fortunately, McCarthy addressed this horrendous stupidity on Simon's part. What did Akcam's prison sentence have to do with the Armenian "genocide"? But Simon appears not to have been concerned with the "genocide"; he was only interested in showing what a "bad boy" Turkey can be, imprisoning poor, innocent "human rights champion," Taner Akcam.
15. If it was "big news," the event of McCarthy's going to speak before the Turkish Parliament would have been covered everywhere, not just Reuters. Balakian has some nerve to return to his shameful charge again... the man is simply out of control. Let's put a rest to his baseless slander. The reader can go to TAT's Peter Balakian page, and read the relevant and McCarthy-related portion of the Reuters article. There is nothing about McCarthy "working" for the Turkish government, there is nothing about McCarthy "advising" the Turkish government. When one is invited to give a speech, because one is recognized as a specialist in a field based entirely on one's individual accomplishment or research, that would normally be considered an "honor." Similar to, as the reader may read further above on the Balakian page, how Balakian gave a speech in the Museum of Tolerance; nobody can say Balakian was "working" for the Museum of Tolerance. (McCarthy's speech may be read here. After concentrating on the historical events, he sums up that the genocide is a lie, and that the Turks should not give in to such a lie, in their desire to join the European Union. If this is what Balakian is pointing to as "advising," he should keep in mind these are McCarthy's heartfelt conclusions that he wished to share. These are the presentations of ideas in a speech. Ideas are what speeches are about. "Advising" is something that takes place behind closed doors.) How absolutely despicable to twist this honor, and make it appear as though McCarthy was compromising his integrity. The genocide advocating Dutch historian, Prof. Erik Zürcher, was awarded a rare medal by the Turkish government during the same year. Does that mean Zürcher was working for the Turkish government? Balakian wants to show that the Turkish government is so "evil," that anyone who deals with the Turkish government must be in cahoots, and similarly evil. The only true evil that emerges in a case as this is from the hateful proponent of such a charge.
What About Advising?
We can see giving a speech has nothing to do with "advising," but what happens when a professor does give advice, behind closed doors? For example when Prof. Richard Hovannisian was elected into Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences in 1990, should Roger Smith, Eric Markusen and Robert Jay Lifton have written a paper on Hovannisian's "Professional Ethics"?
Balakian had succeeded an earlier time he smeared a contra-genocide scholar with this charge, when he helped spearhead an attack on Prof. Heath Lowry in 1995. (At the time, Balakian labeled Lowry a "propagandist," just as he indirectly called McCarthy a "white supremacist" in 2006.) Lowry did not sell his soul in any way. He had come upon his own historical conclusions, through independent scholarship. The Turkish ambassador at the time, not historically adept, needed enlightenment and asked for Lowry's advice. Lowry gave his advice regarding Robert Jay Lipton's unprofessional and blind devotion to a singular source, the deceptive Vahakn Dadrian, aware as Lowry was of the damage being caused by the lies of Armenian propaganda. Lowry's only duty lay with the truth.
But Balakian made it sound as though Lowry had compromised his academic integrity, purposely lying for the Turkish government. Naturally, Balakian had no proof of a "pay-off," which would have justified Lowry's supposed dishonesty. (The real proof lies in Lowry's research. Challenging facts is harder for someone like Peter Balakian, as we have seen in this PBS debate; that's why Balakian opts for sleazy low blows.) Just the charge of "working for the Turkish government" is enough for the likes of Peter Balakian, knowing as well as he does what a black eye the reputation of the Turkish government has, thanks to the efforts of unscrupulous parties such as Balakian.
This is why Peter Balakian has gone out of his way to describe Turkey as a "totalitarian" state. Anyone who has a connection with such an "evil" nation must be condemned for being similarly "evil." Balakian was hoping for lightning to strike twice, in his attempt to damage McCarthy's reputation. Balakian is fully aware prejudiced parties like Scott Simon and others in public broadcasting are aligned with this view. As before, the only true evil that emerges in a case as this is from the hateful proponent of such a charge.
16. The reality is that the influential and often intimidating Armenian diaspora exploited the rules on the books regarding the Holocaust, as well as the anti-Turkish feelings of the French and Swiss politicians. The hate speech is not negating the myth of the Armenian "genocide." The real hate speech takes place in affirming it. The affirmation takes place without factual evidence, thus contributing to the further hatred against Turks. And let us not lose sight these original laws that the Armenians have hijacked are based on a proven genocide. Comparing a true genocide to a fake one serves to cheapen and dishonor the victims of the real genocide. (And even if we concentrate solely on "hate speech" laws regarding the Holocaust... are we supposed to approve of countries like France, Switzerland and Austria, actually jailing people for what they believe, as wrong as what they believe might be?)
17. The fault in allowing Peter Balakian on a PBS show rests really much less with Peter Balakian, who can't seem to mentally help himself, than the PBS people in charge, like OPB's Davis. David Davis should be ashamed of himself for allowing such a liar like Peter Balakian on PBS's precious airwaves, and freely disseminate such "hate speech." So Peter Balakian is asking us to believe, without providing any evidence, that children — that is, those before puberty, aged perhaps 2-12 — are not only imprisoned in droves in Turkey, but are "tortured." It's incredible.
18. There was no "Armenia" in 1915-16, save for the minds of wishful thinkers. Is this a "Freudian Slip" by Balakian, admitting that the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were not really faithful to the nation that treated them so well and allowed them to prosper for over half a millennium? So if these Armenians rebelled, who could have planned such a rebellion? Naturally, it would have had to be the "intellectuals and cultural leaders." Last we looked, turning traitor to one's country results in the heaviest of penalties in any nation, which usually means execution. If the idea was to murder all of the Armenians arrested on April 24, none could have survived; among the survivors was Balakian's own relative. And obviously, despite Balakian's sob story, not all of the "smart people" of Armenia could have been knocked off, otherwise no one could have ruled eastern Anatolia for a few years, nor the soon-to-be-born Republic of Armenia. (Not to say the people in charge were necessarily smart, of course.)
19. For the record, this was Simon's only "tough question" for his team. Never mind that it was not really answered.
20. Akcam was singing quite a different tune earlier in his career, when he wrote "The Genocide of the Armenians and the Silence of the Turks" (well... we don't know who really wrote it, judging by its excellent English), where the word "genocide" was repeated an unbelievable 64 times. He is not being entirely sincere here, by stating he's not so concerned about "genocide," but what else is new? (He states here that his "main concern is whether Turkey should be a democratic country." Just one year before this debate, in a radio interview, Akcam stated he had "no time" because "working on the Genocide is more important.")
21. Didn't he just tell us the Kurds are no longer a closed subject, and neither is his precious genocide? So why is he telling us Turkey had better get its act together? More importantly, this convicted felon who sold out his own nation is not in a position to advise on what constitutes a civilized country. Furthermore, is there a country on earth that does not dwell on the past ills of history? Are Americans obsessed with the Indians, slavery, the Philippine War, the Vietnam War? What a ridiculous double standard. What is he suggesting, Turks should hate themselves, in the similar manner that Akcam has a disturbing anti-Turkish chip on his shoulder?
22. Because Akcam has succeeded in going around and making people like Scott Simon believe Akcam is a "historian," is Akcam now telling us he has equally succeeded in becoming a specialist in International Law? Here is a little look at how the international law of 1915, the kind other nations held high for themselves, applied to the Armenians. If Akcam is trying to tell us the 1948 U.N. Convention is in agreement with the Armenian example, others may see if he is correct.
23. I don't know that much about Raphael Lemkin; I'm sure he was an intelligent man, but because he coined the term "genocide" does not make him "brilliant." If anything, his brilliance has a very dull shine, if he allowed his prejudices to run away with him, and did not bother to scratch the surface beneath the Armenian "genocide" claim. One might say he was a role model for today's "genocide scholar," and these people who come up with their faith-based conclusions first and then build their cases with selective evidence later are anything but real scholars. What's more, they suffer from a shameful lack of ethics, branding people genocidal killers without factual evidence. (While ignoring the many other cases of historical extermination efforts, because they are not politically worthwhile, or as profitable. Who is going to buy books or watch TV shows regarding extermination efforts against Turks, for example?) This is what Raphael Lemkin did in the case of the Ottoman Turks, and such a man deserves contempt, not praise. None of us would like an accusatory finger pointed at us, strictly on the basis of hateful hearsay.
And get a load of Lemkin's ridiculous line, "...the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo, which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims." If these bodies were burned "to death," that implies they were alive before. What does that mean, simply being in Aleppo's heat did them in? Does the Aleppo sun roast bodies to death? And were these "Christian Armenian victims" actually in the "desert"? Sure, it must have been hot, but the areas were near the rivers, historically known as the "Fertile Crescent." What killed the bulk of the Armenians was famine and disease, the same factors that killed the bulk of the 2.5 million other Ottomans we never hear about. It looks like Lemkin was not free of his own racial prejudices, totally ignoring what had happened to these other people, perhaps because they were Muslims. Otherwise, why did he choose to add the word "Christian," when he described the "Christian Armenian victims"? Did their Christianity make them more worthwhile human beings?
24. Poor Prof. Turan did not have a chance to excel in this English-speaking forum, but this point of his nailed it on the head.
25. This exchange was worth the price of admission. You can see in Prof. Turan's face that he realized the impossible situation that he got himself mixed up in, and barely uttered a word after this revealing moment. Imagine that Simon was so lost in his "Turks are evil" genocidal thoughts, that Simon actually thought the villains of the equation were to be regarded as the typical, innocent, Christian Armenian martyrs.
An Armenian Propagandist Sounds Off on this Show
Dr. Dennis Papazian, from an e-mail to Harut Sassounian:
“I have just previewed the post documentary discussion and it made me sick to my stomach to see Justin McCarthy and the Turks come out with blatant lies and deceptive assertions. I thought Taner and Peter ‘won the debate,’ but the denialists undoubtedly would plant doubt in the minds of innocent American viewers... You did right to lead the attack against the showing of the ‘discussion.’"
What exactly were these "blatant lies and deceptive assertions," from the end of Justin McCarthy and the "Turks"? Ask Papazian, and he will have no end of examples. The trouble is, his examples have no foundation. See how he managed when he tried to expose the supposed deceptions of another "denialist." It is the duty of these pro-Armenian propagandists to make accusatory condemnations. But when you corner them and don't let them get away with their nonsense, and since they will never be "man" enough to admit wrongdoing, the only thing they can resort to... so lacking in the genuine facts as they are... is to stick out their tongues and cry, "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
26. Wow! I am so impressed that McCarthy managed to keep his cool. While there was a quick reference to the suffering, but not to the deaths, of the Balkan Turks, and while the show pointed out that the Armenians had killed a handful of Turkish soldiers and officials (some soldiers in Van; only a hundred officials killed in all of the years before 1915), the one reference to Turks getting massacred was this point on the show. And the one who said it had already been discredited on the surface as an "agent of the Turkish government"... so it barely even counted. The partisan host actually tried to make it appear as though the PBS propaganda program was "fair."
27. Exactly! That is the whole point. But in order to explore the actual realities, one needs a host who does not allow his prejudices to get in the way, a host who is historically knowledgeable to some degree, and a host who asks tough questions of both sides.
28. With this outburst, Akcam hit a low that was too low for even Akcam. He is actually saying no Muslims were massacred by Armenians, and that the contention is a "legend." This is his euphemism for "lie," but if he's going to use these words as synonyms, let us say instead that Taner Akcam is a legend in his own time.
29. Pro-genocide partisan Scott Simon lets no opportunity slip past, in giving support to his team. He helpfully points out here that, if there were Armenians who killed Muslims, why, it must have been only because the poor, defenseless, innocent Christian martyrs were fighting back, and it was all in self-defense. Only, we're not talking about Ottoman soldiers whom the Armenians killed, but defenseless Muslim citizens, a concept that Scott Simon evidently finds very hard to handle.
30. Wouldn't you be laughing too, if you've got it made in the shade? Denialists, look out — the Balakian propaganda is sailing through..!
31. It's like a scene from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Prof. McCarthy, please don't waste your time looking at the moderator... he is also one of the "Pod People"!
32. Akcam's adrenaline is running high, now. He's got the world on a string, and nobody is going to stop him from meowing his way through. Now he's telling us, I guess, that if Armenians killed Muslims it was only after 1918, because... because the Ottoman government prepared reports, and if there were massacres, we would have known from these reports? Is he stopping to consider that these lands were traded back and forth during those years, and the Ottomans weren't always in control of those lands... so the government really wasn't aware of what the bloodthirsty Armenians were doing? And the reason why the racist world only slightly acknowledges the Armenians' brutal crimes was because of reports from the occasional American or other Westerner (including Russian officers), such as Niles and Sutherland? That is, Americans who were usually very pro-Armenian, until they discovered, to their horror, the hideous crimes the Armenians had perpetrated?
Akcam was such a wild man, he deserves a gallery!
Truly, Akcam was ranting and raving so uncontrollably, I began to think, "The European polish which (he) had sedulously acquired dropped like a mask; I now saw him for what he really was — a savage, bloodthirsty Turk."
(Of course, that passage is from "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," describing Enver Pasha.)
My favorite shot had to be the one below, which I found strangely symbolic:
33. Were there government units involved in massacres of Armenians, as Akcam blabbered out? While there is no real evidence, such probably took place. (We know in one case government units certainly massacred Armenian soldiers, for which a couple of the perpetrators were executed — by Vehip Pasha — during the war, providing evidence against genocide; but there is no evidence regarding Armenian civilians.) Do the isolated massacres locals carried out, the ones we can only speculate about, constitute a state-sponsored extermination plan? Not if we are also willing to concede that My Lai proved the United States government planned to murder every single Vietnamese civilian. Genocide is a highly serious charge, the greatest crime against humanity, and if the accusers are not basing their conclusions upon genuine evidence, they are committing a crime in their own right.
One thing is for sure: the 1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo courts held under enemy occupation and performed without due process cannot constitute evidence. The "confessions" that generals and governors might have made means nothing when these men were the prisoners of the British, and the British and their Ottoman lackeys were desperate to find culprits. It would be as though the Nazis had defeated the British in WWII, set up a puppet government as the Nazis had done with Vichy France, and established courts to try Churchill and Montgomery for war crimes. No one would look upon these types of courts as legally valid, and certainly not even the British took the 1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo courts seriously. The British regarded these courts as such a travesty of justice that they rejected the courts' findings, in the process of the Malta Tribunal, the real "Nuremberg" of World War I. Read more about the 1919-20 kangaroo courts.
34. Not only did the Balakian-Akcam team get an extra turn with Simon's only "tough" question, but the team will now be granted the last word.
35. "[T]he Armenians would prevent scholars" Now there is a "Freudian" slip with the ring of truth. (When we're talking about genuine scholars, of course.)
36. Wasn't that true, what McCarthy uttered around Footnote 13: "...{S]omeone insists on attacking the personality of the historian... because they don't have the facts." Look at Balakian here. He doesn't have the facts. Indeed, what McCarthy told us was the truth, and nothing but the truth. The Turkish government said to the Armenian government, let's get to the bottom of this madness in a "manly" way, and try to put it behind us. The Armenian government, would have none of it (are you kidding? The "genocide" is the greatest racket the Armenians have going). Balakian doesn't like this truth. After all, if the Armenians had nothing to hide, why wouldn't the Armenians have jumped at the opportunity? So even though in this instance, Balakian was not going after McCarthy's personality the way he shamefully had done earlier, his only defense is, basically, "Liar, liar, pants on fire." He can't afford to let the truth out. But because he doesn't have the facts, he just says, "what Professor McCarthy has said is absolutely not true," and lets it go at that. Since the brainwashed and biased public, represented by those as New York Times reviewer Alessandra Stanley, is already in the Armenians' corner, Balakian knows crying "Liar" will be enough in most cases.
37. Here we go again, with the poor, innocent, Christian, unarmed population. Truly, how can this Balakian character look at himself in the mirror? And I don't mean because he would need to step far back, on account of his always-growing Peternocchio nose.
Genocide Guru Henry Morgenthau on the subject:
...it would seem as if an Armenian insurrection to help the Russians had broken out at Van. Thus a former deputy here, one Pastormadjian who had assisted our proposed railway concessions some years ago, is now supposed to be fighting with the Turks with a legion of Armenian volunteers. These insurgents are said to be in possession of a part of Van and to be conducting guerilla warfare in a country where regular military operations are extremely difficult. To what extent they are organised or what successes they have gained it is impossible for me to say; their numbers have been variously estimated but none puts them at less than ten thousand and twenty-five thousand is probably closer to the truth.
(National Archives and Records Administration [NARA], College Park, Maryland, Morgenthau to the Secretary of State, 25 May 1915, RG 353 [Internal Affairs, Turkey], Roll 41, p. 3. Footnoted from Dr. Edward J. Erickson's "Bayonets on Musa Dagh: Ottoman Counterinsurgency Operations — 1915," The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, 529-548, June 2005.)
Balakian tells us that his "Christian minority population"... we always must be reminded that this was a "Christian" population, of course... being "somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, civil war" points to the "realm of the absurd." Yet, if one multiplies the thousands of Armenian fighters, culled from the ranks of the traitorous Armenian population who refused to be conscripted n the Ottoman army, added to the ranks of those who had deserted, times the many Ottoman provinces (as Sivas, Erzurum, Adana, Diyarbakir, Bitlis, and Van) these traitors formed a fifth column and hit the Ottoman Army in the back, you had better believe they had declared war upon their own Ottoman nation; they posed a serious threat to the beleaguered forces of the "Sick Man," in a fight for its very life. The fact that this treacherous population was temporarily moved away, instead of being heartlessly "deported" as the Russians were doing with their entirely innocent Muslims, pointed to a "relatively humane" process (as Prof. Guenter Lewy put it; Balakian did not like that) by the Ottomans. Do not forget that most of the relocated Armenians had survived. The ones who died in greatest numbers were the ones who remained in the war zone of eastern Anatolia.
The comparison to the Warsaw Ghetto was more applicable to the doomed Muslims under the control of the Armenians briefly in charge of eastern Anatolia, with and without the Russians. Since the little bit of "Armenian resistance" that Balakian concedes here is justified because "People don't want to die as sheep," take a look at the date of Morgenthau's report, above. May 25, days before the resettlement policy was implemented. Since Balakian's "genocide" hadn't even begun, what was happening in Van could hardly be called "self-defense." It was the Armenians who were the attackers. (As this mid-1915 newspaper report from enemy France made crystal-clear.)
The better determinant of whether there was a real genocide is, since we have established there were indeed many thousands of Armenian fighters behind Ottoman lines, mostly involved in guerilla warfare, since the convoys (or what the genocide industry would call "death marches") were so poorly guarded (sometimes with as few as two guards; the guards themselves were pulled from the bottom of the barrel, as the best men were needed at the many desperate fronts. These low-quality gendarmes would have been a cinch to knock off), why didn't the Armenian fighters attack the convoys? And rescue their women and children from certain death? This is the critical question a U.S. senator asked, while the USA was considering its mandate for Armenia, comparing with how the American settler would have behaved in the same circumstances: "whoever heard of an American frontiersman laying down his gun while the Indians slit his wife's throat and scalped his children?")
Unless the Armenian men really didn't care about their women and children (we know the leaders did not care about their own people in earlier times, encouraging massacres so the West would intervene; so this is, unfortunately, a deplorable possibility), how could they have not attacked the convoys? Especially since the Armenians were armed and ready to strike, for years? The only answer could be, the Armenians knew there was no death sentence awaiting their women and children. The ones who were murdered were attacked by renegade forces, but the Armenians knew the Ottoman government did not have a "Final Solution" policy in place, the proof for which in retrospect is that the majority of Armenians survived. (Balakian himself says one million. The pre-war population was some 1.5 million. Truly, if the idea was extermination, closer to "zero" would have survived. There were still 644,900 Armenians in what was left of the Ottoman Empire, in 1921, according to the Armenian Patriarch.) The only logical conclusion is that the "genocide" was invented in later years, for political purposes. After the war, the Armenians were not bawling about a "genocide," but instead bragging about their belligerence.
One Conclusion
This "debate" excruciatingly demonstrated that debate with pro-Armenians is useless... unless the moderator is extremely conscientious, knowledgeable and objective, unwilling to let anyone get away with falsehoods. For lack of such a crackerjack moderator, we can see what the unscrupulous pro-Armenians are capable of.
1) Ad hominem attacks, focusing on the messenger, instead of the message
2) Making any statement, regardless of the facts
3) When cornered and unable to cover the many holes of the genocide mythology, simply stick out a tongue and yelp, "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
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© Holdwater
The source site of this article gets revised often, as better
information comes along. For the most up-to-date version, and
the related photos, the reader may consider reviewing
the direct link as follows:
www.tallarmeniantale.com/PBS-Armenian-genocide1.htm
www.tallarmeniantale.com/PBS-Armenian-genocide2.htm
www.tallarmeniantale.com/PBS-Debate-2006Arm-gen.htm
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27.5.06
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