I. Introduction
Statesmen in western countries are often besieged by representatives of Armenian groups representing huge voting blocks demanding resolutions or "Denier" legislation -with penalties- in connection with events that occurred in Eastern Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY: THE EARNED REPUBLIC by Stanford J. Shaw
Lecture given at Koc University, Istanbul, on 4 November 1998 as part of the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic.
During the tumultuous years that followed immediately after World War I, many independent states were . . established in Europe and the Middle East. Almost all of these were set up by decree of the Great Powers of Europe and America during and after the Paris Peace Conference. They were gifts by the Powers to the different peoples involved. These gifts, however, had many strings attached. The most important of these was the insistence of the Powers that many of the supposedly independent states that they set up be subjected to their control through a system of Mandates or other supervisory systems. These were justified on the grounds that the newly independent states lacked the ability and experience to govern themselves and that they needed to be trained and educated by what the Powers considered to be their own superior ability and experience before they could finally achieve full independence in the very indefinite future. These mandates were in fact disguised efforts by the Powers to continue or establish colonial control over the states who were being promised their full independence. The results of this arrangement were variable. Most of the supposedly independent states continued under the control of the one Power or another until the end of World War II, and even after they emerged with full independence following the war, they continued to suffer from grave internal difficulties which made the achievements of independence seem illustory indeed.
There was only one state that was not given its independence by the Powers after World War I. That state was Turkey. The Powers of Europe, and in particular their most powerful member, Great Britain, in fact decided that the Turks lacked the ability to ever govern themselves and that most of the territory in which Turks formed the majority of the population should in fact be turned over to the other peoples so that the Turks would remain a subjected minority in areas where they in fact constituted sizeable majorities. Even in the small section of central Anatolia which, according to the Treaty of Sevres, was to remain under a presumably independent Turkish state, that state was to be subjected to such control by the Powers that for all practical purpose it would have been no more than another colony in the colonial empires of England and France.
That this arrangement was not carried out was due, not to any revision of policy by the Powers but rather to the will of the Turkish people who, alone among the subject peoples who emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, fought for an d gained their own independence, an independence which was real because it had been secured by their own effort, not by the grant of the Powers. The Turkish Republic was the only Successor State of the Ottoman Empire, which was formed despite the contrary will of the Powers. The Turkish Republic was the only successor state of the Ottoman Empire that was an earned Republic, a state achieved through he will and action of its people in what amounted tot he first War of National Liberation in the twentieth century. The Turkish War of National Liberation set the pattern which would be followed throughout the later years of the century by many people whom the so-called Great Western Powers sought to subject and control.
How was this accomplished? And how in the factors of success did the Turkish people point the way for their future and the future of the Republic that they had created? Let us look at a number of factors.
1.A Very important factor of success was disunity among the Allied Powers that occupied Istanbul and other remnants of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Great Britain had supplied most of the men and supplies in the occupation, and its commanders therefore dominated the occupation, placing the other Allied commanders in what amounted to subordinate positions, and arranging the occupation in such a way that British economic and political objectives would be achieved at the expense of those its Allies.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George supported the establishment of a greater Greece, including Izmir, much of Southwester Anatolia and even Istanbul because of the feeling that Greece could be controlled by Britain and it therefore would serve to preserve British domination of the entire East Mediterranean area even after the formal occupation came to an end. But these promises violated similar promises made to Italy in secret agreements signed during the war which turned Izmir and much of southern Anatolia over to Italy as part of its ambition to establish its own Italian empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. Italy therefore initially vetoed the British efforts to turn these territories over to Greece. When Italy boycotted the Peace Conference for a time due to Allied decisions to turn Trieste and much of the Adriatic coast over to the new Yugoslav state they had created, the Allies took advantage of the Italian absence to authorize the Greek invasion of Anatolia in order to enable it to seize these areas by force and thus deny them to Italy. Italy was allowed to occupy the south Anatolian coast, including Antalya and Adalya, but in response to the loss of Izmir to Greece, it began helping the Turkish War for National Liberation. It turned over its won weapons to the Turkish national army which Ismet Inn was forming near Ankara; it allowed Turkish agents to got to Italy and use Italy as a base to buy airplanes and other weapons, to ship them in Italian boats to Antalya, and to transport them through the Italian zone of occupation to the newly formed Turkish national army. It also received in its zone of occupation thousands of Turkish refugees from both the Greek invasion and the French occupation of Southeastern Anatolia, giving them food, housing and medical assistance and then sending them back to join the growing Turkish resistance.
France also began to quarrel with Britain over the results of the occupation. The French commanders in Istanbul increasingly resented British domination and began to turn information regarding British and Greek military movements over to Turkish nationalist agents. In the east, while France initially sought to secure its own colonial ambitions by occupying Cukurova as well as Syria, it resented the fact that Britain had forced it to give up the rich oil fields of Musul and Kerkuk which had been promised to it during the war. France also was embarrassed by the behavior of the Armenian Legion that it brought with to occupy Cukurova. The Legion began massacring large numbers of Turks throughout the area. France therefore deserted the Alliance by signing the separate peace treaty of Ankara with the Turkish nationalist government. Even more important, as it evacuated Cukurova, it turned almost all its cannons, weapons and ammunition over to the Turkish nationalists, who quickly shipped them across Anatolia to the growing Turkish national army.
Then there was Russia, which at the time was embroiled in a civil war fought between the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Stalin and the so-called White forces, which sought to restore the Czarist of the past. The Bolsheviks had renounced its claim to the territories of Istanbul and Eastern Anatolia, which had been promised, to Russia by the wartime agreements among the Allies, but they still maintained a long-range objective of gaining control, not only of Istanbul but also much of Turkey, by turning the Turkish national movement into a Communist revolution. They wanted to transform the new Turkish State into a Communist satellite and make it the spearhead for spreading communism among all the peoples of the East who had been or were being colonized by the colonial powers as part of the peace settlement. They also had a short range objective of stopping the flow of arms and men which the British and the Greeks were sending through Istanbul and the Black Sea to support the White armies in their struggles against the Bolsheviks. I might point out in this respect that the British arms were accompanied by large numbers of Greek soldiers sent to show Greek support for its Orthodox cousin Russia, and that these were used by the White army to massacre thousands of Jews as well as Russian Christians who supported the Bolsheviks in Southern Russia. Thousands of people were killed, and thousands more were forced to flee across the Black Sea to Turkey, including in the end the commanders and last remnants of the White armies. In any case, both to stop the flow of western arms to the Whites, and to communize the new Turkish national movement, the Bolsheviks sent large quantities of arms to the Turkish national army. The newly established Armenian Republic refused to allow these arms to pass through its territory by land, so for the most part they were sent through the Black Sea, mainly to Trabzon, from which they were sent overland to the Turkish national army.
Of course, Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish nationalists were happy to accept weapons and money whoever was willing to give them, but they had absolutely no intention of allowing the Bolsheviks to communize the Turkish Revolution. And the Bolsheviks themselves, when they saw that their efforts to establish a Turkish Communist Party were being suppressed, decided that it was more important to them to end the British occupation of Istanbul and the British use of Istanbul to supply the Whites than it was to communize Turkey, so they continued to send arms and money even after the Turkish Communists were suppressed in Turkey.
2.A second factor of success was the nature of the Allied occupation itself. While initially the British allowed what was left of the Ottoman government to continue its operations in Istanbul, the fact that many members of that government secretly helped the Turkish national resistance in Anatolia, and that the newly elected Ottoman parliament supported and confirmed the Turkish National Pact, led the British to take over the Ottoman government and imprison many of its leaders. This harsh occupation caused many of those who had initially supported the occupation, as well as those who had secretly helped the nationalists, to flee to Anatolia where they joined the Turkish national movement. British discrimination against Turks in the occupation areas added to Turkish resentment and disabused most Turks of the idea that many of them held that the Allies had come to help them. Even more, however, it was the utter brutality of the Greek occupation of Southwestern Anatolia and of the French occupation of the Southeast, which contributed in major way to determination of most Turks to resist the entire occupation. When the Greek army landed in Izmir, and as it advanced through Anatolia toward Ankara, it slaughtered thousands of Turkish Muslims and Jews with the major assistance of the Greek peasants and urban dwellers who lived in the area and thought the time had come to openly express their hatred of Islam and Judaism which they had concealed for centuries. I might add that later on as the Turkish national movement drove the Greeks out of Anatolia, they burned most of the towns and cities that lay in their path, including the great port of Izmir, in the process establishing the pattern which is followed today by the Serbs as they slaughter and burn Muslim areas in Bosnia and Kosovo, and then blame the slaughtered people for their own destruction.
At the same time in the Southeast, while the French themselves wanted to show the Turks the benefits of French rule, there were very few Frenchmen in the French occupying army. France had just emerged from the devastation of World War I. Thousands of French soldiers had been killed. The country itself had been the scene of most of the devastating battles of the war, so that it lay in ruins. They occupying army therefore consisted mainly of colonial troops from Black Africa assisted by what was known as the Armenian Legion, composed of young Armenians brought from Egypt as well as Europe and America, and committed to a campaign of vengeance against Turks and other Muslims. So while the French tried to establish order and security in the towns of Cukurova, the African troops and even more members of the Armenian Legion spread out in the countryside, ravaging, raiding and killing to the point where the French commanders themselves were outraged. After trying to bring the Legion under control, they finally dissolved it and at least tried to send its members away in an effort to end the carnage, which was being carried out in the name of France. Bu the memory of what had happened stirred most Turks to resist, not just the French occupation, but the entire occupation throughout Turkey.
3.A third factor of success lay in Greece. Just as the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the nineteenth century could not have been achieved without the help of the British navy, so also the Greek army that invaded Anatolia could not have advanced so rapidly after World War I had it not been for major military assistance given it by Great Britain. But back in Greece these very successes emboldened the Greek people to throw out Prime Minister Venizelos and his government, which had been installed by a British invasion of Greece in 1917 and to bring back Greek King Constantine, who had been dethroned by the British because of his determination to keep Greece neutral or have it join Germany during the war. The restoration of King Constantine in Greece came just in time when the famous British historian, Arnold Toynbee, went to Anatolia as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian and began to publish accounts of the barbarous conduct of the Greek army as it advanced in Southwestern Anatolia. This caused the British people to awaken to the fact that Greek barbarism was being carried out with the material as well as moral support of Great Britain, and when combined with their revulsion against the restoration of the pro-German King Constantine, led Britain to end its support of the Greek invasion of Anatolia. This involved not merely the cessation of assistance with money and arms, but also prohibitions against Greece sending supplies to its Anatolian expeditionary force from the Sea of Marmara, leaving it to send supplies only from its occupation base at Izmir, in caravans and trains shipments which were easily attacked and destroyed by the Turkish cavalry.
4.A fourth factor in Turkish success was the ever present racial and religious prejudice against Muslims in general and Turks in particular by the Christian nations and people in the West. This, of course, had existed ever since the time of the Prophet, and particularly since the time of the Crusades, and I am sorry to say it continues to exist right to this present day. However, much fundamentalists Christians dislike Jews for not accepting Christ as their Savior, they dislike and disdain Muslims even more for following what they consider to be a false religion. Added to this is discrimination against Turks, who for most Christians have been the principal symbol of Islam, again right to the present day. It was as a result of this prejudice that Europe built up the myth of "the terrible Turk" and readily accepted all the myths of massacre and persecution spread by non Muslim immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, completely ignoring the massacre as inflicted on Muslims by the Russian expansion into Central Asia and the newly-independent Christian states of Southeastern Europe, starting with Greek Revolution in the early 19th century which massacred thousands of Muslims and Jews in the process of creating a homogeneous Greek and Christian state. Insofar as this prejudice effected Turkey following World War I, it led the victorious Allies to two fateful policies. First of all, as we mentioned already, the Allies concluded that the Turks as Muslims lacked the ability to ever rule themselves, and that therefore not only non Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire but also areas where the Turks lived as sizeable majorities had to be placed under the control, either of the Powers themselves, or under the non Muslim peoples who were promised their own independent states regardless of the makeup of the people in the territories which were being given to them. The second result of the racial and religious prejudice of Christian Europe was t think that they could impose such draconian arrangement on the Turks with a relatively small expeditionary force which at its peak numbered no more than 50,000 men, aside from the approximately 100,000 men which were to be provided by Greece for the occupation of western Anatolia and its annexation to Greece. Insofar as the Allies were concerned, not only were the Turks incapable of ruling themselves, but they also were incapable of defending themselves, and would be forced to accept whatever the Allies dictated as their fate. Of course, the Allies were entirely disabused of this idea by what followed.
All of these factor of success could not have automatically brought success to the Turkish War of National Liberation had it not been for the ability of the Turkish people to take advantage of them to neutralize and/or drive out the occupying powers. How were the Turks able to accomplish this? 1.First and foremost, there was the reaction of the Turkish people to the harshness of the Allied occupation. Throughout the 19th century, those Turks who supported Ottoman reform looked to the democratic nations of America and Western Europe as the model of the rejuvenated Empire they hoped would emerge. They thought that these states would selflessly give them assistance they needed to create a new and modern Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. They thought that point 12 of Woodrow Wilson's 14 points announced in January 1918, which stated that all the subjected people of the Ottoman Empire, like others, were entitled to their own independence, would apply to the Turks as well as to the other people who had been subjected by the Ottomans. However, the brutality of the occupation along with the realization by most Turks as a result that the Allies had come to Turkey to subject the Turks, not to liberate and modernize them, caused most Turks to unite in the Turkish War of National Liberation. The national movement thus united Turks who were parts of a wide political religious spectrum. There were supporters of the Ottoman Sultans, advocates of a Republic, secularists, religious leaders, who subordinated their personal desires to the common objective of defending the Turkish people and enabling them to defeat the effort to subject them to foreign rule. Without this unity, the Turks could never have taken advantage of the factors of success.
2.The second factor that enabled the Turkish people to take advantage of the factors of success was the unity of the leadership achieved among leaders and followers alike, the willingness of the various Turkish political, religious, and military leaders to work together for the good of the nation as a whole, and the willingness of the Turkish people do whatever was necessary to support their efforts, whether by joining the national army or by providing it with food, supplies and weapons. There were many leaders who lead successful resistance movements in various parts of Thrace and Anatolia early in the war of National Liberation, to name but a very few Kazim Karabekir and Fevzi Cakmak in addition to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Ismet Inönü. There were all the leaders of the different local resistance groups that arose throughout Thrace and Anatolia in reaction to the occupation, groups that were later given unified names, the National Forces, even though they were anything but unified at the time. Each of them had his own ambitions and policies. But the very reality of the Allied occupation made it essential for them to work together. That they did so was due to the political genius of Mustafa Ataturk. Mustafa Kemal's greatest contribution tot he Turkish War of National Liberation lay in his ability to use the dangers that the Turks faced to bring all the leaders together, to get them to postpone their individual ambitions and political and religious goals, and to get them to work together for the common cause. How difficult a task this was and how brilliant Mustafa Kemal's success in getting all these divergent individuals and groups to unite under his leadership is shown by the disunity that emerged among the same leaders as soon as the war was won and the Turkish Republic was established, and I might add by the political disunity which has seriously damaged Turkey's position in the world in recent years.
3.A third factor which enabled the Turkish people to win out over those who wanted to oppress them was willingness to abandon the past, to lay into the dust of history the Ottoman Empire which had shone so brilliantly well into the nineteenth century but which had been condemned to dissolution of the rise of nationalism and democratic liberalism since the time of the French Revolution and the industrial progress of Europe. The multinational Ottoman Empire which had done so much to enable peoples of different ethnic origins to live together peacefully over many centuries had become obsolete due to the spread among its Christian subject peoples of the kind of nationalism which dictated not only that they had the right to become independent, but that all those who did not share their ethnic myths and their religion had to be massacred or driven out. The nationalistic policy of ethnic cleansing which has been followed by Serbia in recent years, first in Bosnia and now in Kosovo, was in fact born during the Greek Revolution early in the 19th century, when the Christian peoples living in what has become Greece adopted the ancient Greeks as their ancestors, borrowed ancient Hellenic culture as their own, and then went on to massacre or drive out all those who did not accept their vision, including not only Muslims but also Jews. The same policies of ethnic cleansing were followed by the Bulgars, the Romanians, the Hungarians and the Serbs in their drive to create independent states in subsequent years. The excesses of the Greek invasion of Anatolia in the name of the Paris Peace Conference showed the Turks that is they were to survive and to avoid being subjected to extermination in their own homeland, they would have to give up the ideal of the multi ethnic and multi-religious state which they had maintained for so long in the Ottoman Empire and instead create their own national Turkish state, which could be done only if the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire were abandoned, along with the Sultanate and the Caliphate. While the multi-ethnic demographic composition of the Ottoman Empire was no longer valid for the new state, the Republic turned its attention to defining being Turkish not in terms of race or ethnicity, but regarding those who were of the land and shared common goals of an independent, progressive, contemporary Republic which would be apart of the family of nations, this creating an inclusive rather than an exclusive identity for Turks.
4.A fourth reason that the Turks were able to use conditions to their advantage was their determination to follow policies which they felt were good for their own nation and to ignore the opinions and desires of the Great Powers. This would seem to be obvious, but it was not at the time. Throughout the Tanzimat reform era of the nineteenth century, many Ottoman leaders looked to Europe as the model for the reforms they wanted to follow. They considered Europe to be more advanced, and they sought to create an Ottoman Empire in the image of Europe. This was one of the many reasons that the Tanzimat was not entirely successful, since in many areas it failed to adopt European institutions to meet Ottoman customs and traditions. Even after World War I, however, when the European powers were occupying the country, many Ottoman leaders felt that Europe knew best, Europe was more advanced, the desires of the Europeans had to be followed, and that if the Europeans said that Turks were unfit to govern themselves, then so be it, the diktat of the Powers had to be accepted. One of the Powers, either Britain or the United States, had to be accepted as a Mandatory power to make the Turks capable of governing themselves. Had this opinion been accepted, there would have been no Turkish Republic, at least until the end of World War II. It was because Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his colleagues refused this idea, refused the plan to establish a British or American mandate, and in the process refused to accept the opinions of the westerners regarding Turks that Turks were emboldened to resist, and resist successfully.
© Holdwater
The source site of this article gets revised often, as better information comes along. For the most up-to-date version, links and the related photos, the reader may consider reviewing the direct link as follows:
www.tallarmeniantale.com/shaw-earnedrepublic.htm
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Why do so many Armenians, and too many of their supporters, willingly engage in outright lying, regarding their genocide obsession? (This is a theme touched upon in an early TAT page, Armenian Scholars' Disregard for the Truth.)
Before we continue, let’s keep in mind two factors. One is, as Alexandre Dumas wisely wrote, “All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.” Because so many Armenians lie when it comes to their genocide obsession, that does not mean all Armenians have a natural tendency to bend the truth. Of course; people are people everywhere, and there are some wonderful, honorable Armenians. (Yet, when it comes to the “genocide,” the honorable Armenians choose to remain quiet, and as we know from genocide-speak, “silence means compliance.” We will refer to this troubling point later.)
The second point is, even though there are too many Armenians who willingly lie for their cause, they still represent the minority of the Armenian people. Most Armenians who fling themselves into the genocide arena are irrationalists who deeply believe in their genocide myth. Here, it would be helpful to note what James Morgan Read wrote in “Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-19 (1941, p. 187): "Lying is an act of conscious deception. Much of British atrocity propaganda was unconscious deception built upon erroneous reports and impressions." Most of the Armenian rank-and-file, taught to hate Turks by their parents, churches and teachers (given genocide indoctrination from an early age, in order to develop soldiers for Hai Tahd, the Armenian Cause), are simply too brainwashed and are immersed in genocide-mania to a religious extent. (Armenian propaganda, in yet another example of Armenians doing the crime and blaming Turks for the same, tells us it is the Turks who are brainwashed; but even Fatma Muge Gocek revealed that Turkish schools avoided the genocide topic, and many Turks have gotten their first exposure to this madness once they had moved away from Turkey, and were blasted by the Armenians’ version of events in nations such as the USA and France.) In short: Most Armenian believers who perpetuate their genocide tale engage in “unconscious deception,” since they believe in their genocide as a God-substitute. By contrast, we must believe nearly all Armenian professors who specialize in the field know the real truth and work at “conscious deception,” that is, “lying.”
This, the professors and other educated Armenians feel, is the patriotic thing to do; many of these “scholars” are Dashnak-oriented, and this terrorist group has always followed an end-justifies-the-means strategy. The fanatical Dashnaks today enjoy a stranglehold over the worldwide Armenian diaspora, and the Republic of Armenia.
The genocide scholars are an altogether different can of worms. Hardly any specialize in history, and the few who do have forgotten the rules of honest history. Wealthy Armenians have cleverly made certain to support the hypocritical genocide institutions, and many genocide scholars (those mostly into the Holocaust) don’t know a thing about the Armenian episode other than the Armenian genocide propaganda they have read. Genocide is their religion, as long as the genocides have been politically selected, and whether these folks are consciously or unconsciously deceiving (surely there are examples of both varieties), one thing is for sure: the term “genocide scholar” is a misnomer, since those who begin their theses with the conclusion first, and who study only one side of a story, have nothing to do with scholarship, and everything to do with propaganda.
What inspired this page was a commentary by Peter Beinart that appeared in the October 1, 2007 issue of TIME Magazine, entitled, “The Devil in Every Fan: We cheer when our teams cheat. That’s because all we care about is winning. And if that makes us immoral, so what?”
Isn’t that exactly the mode for the genocide-mad Armenians and most of their genocide scholar allies? All that matters is getting their genocide agenda across. It doesn’t matter what kind of corrupt information they use, it doesn’t matter whose reputations they help destroy with their vicious character assassination strategies, all that matters is “winning.” And what makes these people especially despicable is that they pretend to be moral, given that they try to come across as fighting for human rights and genocide prevention (when the truth is, by selecting the worthier humans, and by comparing their designated villains with Nazis, they perpetuate hatred and racism, as well as the fact that there can be no genocide prevention any more than there could be murder prevention). What they are really about is, if their tactics “make them immoral, so what?”
Coach Bill Belichick
The TIME article informs us that the fans of an American football team, the New England Patriots, learned that Coach Bill Belichick cheated (by getting an assistant to videotape the defensive coaches of a rival team, trying to steal their signs); he was fined, criticized by sports writers and editorialists, yet cheered by the fans. The “fans already knew that Belichick doesn’t play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.” (As alleged by a player, the coach is such a creep, the player was forced to train despite having suffered a concussion, and today has brain damage. Yet such a revelation has not hurt the coach’s reputation; the writer tells us there is “only one thing that could: losing.”)
We can say no less about the Armenian genocide extremists and most of their genocide scholar allies; the Marquis of Queensbury rules are a foreign concept, and whatever they can get away with, they will get away with... as long as their selected genocides, or what they tell us constitute genocides, reign supreme.
This is their “dirty little secret,” as Author Beinart wrote about sports fans: “We’re basically amoral.” An amoral person, of course, cannot discern right from wrong, which is sometimes even scarier than the way an immoral person conducts himself. An immoral person knows what he is doing is wrong, but does it anyway. The immoral person makes a choice, but the amoral person is too lost to even consider choosing. It could perhaps be said that the Armenian professors (conscious deceivers) who know the truth but choose to prevaricate are immoral, and the irrational Armenian rank and file (unconscious deceivers) can’t bring themselves to conduct the proper research (since the fulfillment of their genocide religion takes precedence over all else) may have the tendency to dance along amoral lines.
Beinart continues: “Kant said that acting ethically means treating other people as ends in and of themselves, not merely as means to our own desires. But that’s exactly how fans treat coaches and players. We want them to win because when they do, we bask in the glory.
Fans don’t really care how their teams win. They aren’t moral universalists; they don’t care about being fair to the other guys.”
The rank and file similarly “bask in the glory” as long as their genocide fetish is affirmed. They don’t care how their defenders do the job, as long as their team wins. And they certainly don’t care about being fair to the other guys. There is no end to examples from Armenian professors, from the way Richard Hovannisian ultimately drove Stanford Shaw out of UCLA, to the ways in which Vahakn Dadrian has tried to crucify those such as Guenter Lewy and Edward Erickson (charging them with poor scholarship, or with the stupidity to be manipulated by evil Turks), to how Peter Balakian compared Justin McCarthy to a “white supremacist.” But it’s not just the obsessed Armenians; the genocide scholars can be equally unethical.
Take the “Professional Ethics” paper co-authored by Robert Jay Lifton, Eric Markusen and Roger Smith. Lifton committed a huge faux pas by strictly relying on the word of master manipulator Vahakn Dadrian, in order to conclude Ottoman physicians behaved as the Nazi doctor, Mengele. The Turkish ambassador at the time enlisted the help of academician Dr. Heath Lowry to conduct a scholarly criticism, and was foolish enough to include Lowry’s report to Lifton, as a way to demonstrate to Lifton that the criticism derived from a worthy peer. (One of many examples of Turkish gullibility and/or knuckleheadedness; the Turk had no idea that he was feeding Lowry to the wolves.) Naturally, these three jumped on the opportunity, lashed out at Lowry as an “agent of the Turkish government” (lying outright in the process, by claiming that Lowry’s report was included “inadvertently”), encouraging Peter Balakian and others to enlist the aid of naive/prejudiced famous authors to help fry Lowry even more, and succeeding in knocking Lowry out of the genocide debate. To this date, this “Professional Ethics” paper, prepared by these unethical genocide scholars, is used as a tool for Armenian propaganda.
And then there is good old Israel Charny. He didn’t like that sixty-nine mostly Western scholars signed their names to a 1985 advertisement questioning the validity of the Armenians’ genocide, and Charny, with the help of the notorious ANCA, did a background check on these academicians. Some had received grants from two organizations with “Turkish” in the title (ARIT and the ITS), which clearly, to poor Israel Charny’s mind, must have been controlled by the sinister Turkish government. Charny unethically implied that most of these academicians must be “agents of the Turkish government” (although Fatma Muge Gocek, clearly in the Armenians’ corner, had received grants from the very same organizations as well; any scholar knows that accepting a grant is hardly tantamount to selling one’s academic soul), thus demonstrating to genuine historians how dirtily the Armenians and their genocide scholar allies play, and the last thing on their minds is “being fair to the other guys.” As a result, the real historians were frightened away from the debate, and the “genocide” field has since been dominated by fraudulent Armenians and their nearly-as-fraudulent genocide scholar allies.
Beinart wrote further: “In the abstract, fans oppose cheating. They may even oppose cheating by their own team, since the team could get caught, thus eliciting penalties that outweigh any potential gain. They may also fear the psychological penalties: if your team wins but people think it cheated, it’s harder to do a victory dance around the office watercooler. But fearing the consequences of cheating is a far cry from opposing it because it’s wrong.”
When Armenian terrorism raged globally in the 1970s and 80s (killing over seventy, and wounding over five hundred; the second greatest terror conducted in the USA between 1980-86 came courtesy of the Armenians), Armenians supported these “heroes,” even though “in the abstract” they claimed not to condone terrorism. Hardly any Armenian came out publicly to decry these vicious acts, because many Armenians felt points were being scored for their team. (Some even excused them. On the other hand, there was one highly sad and dramatic example of an Armenian-Turk who protested Armenian terror.)
George Mason, the moderate publisher of The California Courier (before the hardcore Harut Sassounian took over), commented: "There are many Armenian Americans in California who feel great sympathy and support for Armenian terrorists. I have talked to numerous peaceful, fair, and thoughtful men who have expressed support for the terrorists."
The aim of these terrorists, after all, was to bring recognition to the Armenian genocide myth, an aim that proved to be successful; most Western news accounts of these violent incidents would quickly add their take on Armenian propaganda in their biased reportage. Once the genocide team won and is currently enjoying their prominent status today, Armenians have learned to “cool it,” and these days restrict their attacks to character assassination and intimidation. The team is aware that if any fanatic should flip his lid and do something physically destructive, “Hai Tahd” could be set back a few years, and cost their cause “psychological penalties.”
Beinart continued: “When the refs go to review a close play, fans don’t sit there thinking, I hope they’ll make the right call. They pray that the call goes their way.”
This brings to mind debating with irrational Armenian extremists. Tell Armenian genocidists a rock-solid fact, and the last thing on their minds would be to consider the validity of what is being said. That is because the truth, or the “right call,” is not what they are after. Their first instinct will be to see how they could discredit what is being said, in a delirious attempt to see “that the call goes their way.” If the fact is too powerful, the strategy will be to ignore the fact completely, and to counter the momentary setback by throwing forth endless distracting weasel facts that the Armenian propaganda machinery has compiled through the years. Since their opponent will usually operate from a standpoint of honesty and fairness, generally, this trick will work. The opponent will then shift his or her attention to deal with the new points, and the original point will thus lose its potency.
Of course, another trick is to counter the rock-solid fact with the claim that it’s untrue. Particularly if the debate is on an important public forum, the Armenian genocidist will know the bigoted public has already been conditioned to be on the side of the noble “victims,” rather than the nasty “deniers,” and will accept whatever the genocidist claims, at face value. Both Peter Balakian and Taner Akcam used this particular trick to advantage, in their PBS debate; at times, they simply lied through their teeth.
And this leads to the crux of what this page set about to explore: why do so many Armenians lie?
Marmaduke Pickthall
The British author, Marmaduke Pickthall, made an enormously revealing point, when he clashed with Arnold Toynbee in the pages of The New Age (December 16, 1915, Vol. XVIII. No. 7), after Toynbee defended the sources of his Blue Book (“Mr. Arnold J. Toynbee invited me to read his book entitled ‘Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation,’ seeming confident that, if I did so, I should change my views... I have read Mr. Toynbee’s book, and can find there nothing serious in support of his contention that the Turkish Government ordered ‘the extermination of the Armenian race.’”) Pickthall demolishes Toynbee’s horrible work of propaganda, and then there was this:
“Mr. Toynbee quotes the ‘Frankfurter Zeitung’ to the effect that the Armenians are more intelligent than the Turks. Well, so they are, and in precisely the same way they are more intelligent than the English. It was an Armenian- Nubar Pasha who called us ‘the Turks of the West.’ There are certain efforts of the intelligence which do not occur to us as possible for man to make. The Armenian recognises no such limitations, and this it is which has made him so disliked throughout the East.
The typical Armenian esteems it meritorious not only to exaggerate but to invent occurrences calculated to excite the pity of the Western world.”
That reminds me of Rafael Ishkhanian’s words:
"[T]o curse at Muslims and especially at Turks, to talk much about the Armenian Genocide, and to remind others constantly of the brutality of the Turks are all regarded as expressions of patriotism. Among the leaders of the past we consider those who curse Turks and killed Turks to be the most patriotic. Our most recent heroes are those who assassinated Turkish diplomats in European cities... [this] is the dominant mentality."
It’s pretty terrible to point out so many Armenians engage in lying, and let’s please keep in mind there are many honorable Armenians (at least as long as the topic is not about genocide, regarding those willing to share their views publicly), but unfortunately, this is the reality. It’s not simply that these Armenian extremists lie, but that they consider it their patriotic duty to lie. There is a pattern here: the Ottoman-Armenians who served as interpreters for already prejudiced Westerners passed on their outrageous horror stories, and the Westerners accepted these stories at face value. No different than the massive voice of genocide-obsessed Armenians today, tenaciously writing letters or contributing to forums at anything and everything that might pose a threat to Hai Tahd.
Pickthall sheds light from his travels in an earlier issue of The New Age (September 25, 1913, Vol. XIII. No. 22); he saw many foreign war correspondents while spending over two weeks at the Pera Palace Hotel, and he took note of the many people who attempted to influence the reporters, including one Armenian who repeatedly claimed that he possessed private information, presumably of fictional Turkish misdeeds. This illustrated a customary way in which the uncritical Western journalists collected their details, often referring to their usually unnamed sources as reliable. Pickthall also recounts his time with his Turkish language teacher, a Christian from Diyarbakir. “Though we talked together long and freely, I could not discover that he had ever so much as heard of Turkish fanaticism — Christian though he was, and mixing, as he did, continually with Mahommedans.”
The Armenian penchant for dishonesty has been recorded widely by Westerners who got to know them. One, whom Peter Balakian ironically pointed to (in “The Burning Tigris”) as a voice affirming the “genocide,” was the American poet Ezra Pound, who wrote in The New Age (October 21, 1915, Vol. XVII. No. 25): “I mistrust all accounts of Armenians.”
We're going to take a look at this characteristic, peculiar to too many Armenians who have lent their voices publicly on their genocide, as much as we'd rather adopt the high road followed in Kamuran Gurun's excellent book, "The Armenian File." Gurun had written in his introduction:
"Because it was not our intent to slander the Armenian nation, nor to blame all Armenians for the actions of a small group... we have also avoided observations and opinions against the Armenians as a people which were contained in many of our sources."
So what's the idea here, with this page? Number one, there is no limitation in Armenian propaganda referring to how subhuman the Turks are as a people; it is simply disgraceful that these bigoted accounts are being pointed to in this day and age, and accepted without criticism in what is supposed to be an enlightened and "race-sensitive" age. But here, when the missionaries or when those such as Henry Morgenthau tried to present the Turks as the worst beings on earth, they had prejudices and/or agendas. In addition, the far greater number of writers who never had firsthand experience with the Turkish people directly, simply parroted the racist observations that were omnipresent. (There are plenty of accounts telling us that when Westerners got to know Turks firsthand, they were quickly won over by the goodness of the Turks.)
By contrast, Westerners who developed a low opinion of Armenians did so through firsthand experience. They often began with the most positive feelings toward the Armenians, as cultivated in their Christian home countries, but then through personal observations, began to make generalizations about certain Armenian characteristics.
Secondly, it's important to shed light on this penchant for dishonesty, because the prejudiced world today naively accepts whatever a Vahakn Dadrian or Peter Balakian throws their way. (At one time, that was not the case: "[T]he average American was beginning to grow sophisticated and sceptical concerning propaganda about the Near East," as William T. Ellis nicely put it in a 1928 article about "Smyrna"; that is one reason Armenians kept quiet roughly until 1965, on the 50th anniversary of their "genocide," time to get the hateful ball rolling again.)
A few of these observations have already been sprinkled throughout the site, as when the Armenians' great post WWI friend, Lord Curzon remarked, "the Turk is honest; the Christian is a liar and a cheat," as a result of his travels in "Armenia," in the early 1850s. Baron Max von Thielmann remarked on the tendency of Armenians to be "seldom if ever conscientious," from his own 1875 travel memoirs, but added importantly, "Still it must not be concluded from this that there are no honourable exceptions..."
"[N]o one, not even the missionaries, seems to have a good word to say about them," thought Lt. General Sir W. N. Congreve in 1919. A "gentleman" remarked, in Gratan Geary's 1878 travel memoirs, on how "a Mohammedan" may be trusted on his word, whereas a native Christian caused him to ask himself "where the deception lies — in what direction I am going to be tricked. There are exceptions, of course."
Historian-turned-genocide-scholar Dr. Margaret Lavinia Anderson compiled a few other examples of Westerners' views on the character of Armenians, in her article entitled, “Down in Turkey, far away” (Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective, The Journal of Modern History, volume 79, 2007); she points to an article (later expanded into a booklet) in Die Zukunft, written by Hans Barth, whom the author describes as a "polemicist," and a "turcophile." (The rare Westerner giving a fair shake to Turks usually risks such a description, since everyone knows Turks are rotten, and who else would be of the right mind to write favorably of them?)
"Barth then grasped the nettle of the victims’ national character," Anderson writes. "Armenians... were impossible not to dislike. In contrast to (the Turkish Peasantry)..., these guys were usurers who 'plundered' their honest, hardworking Muslim neighbors. Pretty flimsy stuff." What is so flimsy about those in power positions ("[T]he Armenians are the bankers, merchants, mechanics, and traders of all sorts in Turkey... so that without them the Osmanlis could not survive a single day"; Hatchik Oscanyan, 1857) ripping off those less fortunate? This is called "Capitalism," which often goes hand in hand with "exploitation," and if the ones on top exhibit signs of not being particular about ethics, it's not unusual for such people to bend the rules in their favor. This sort of thing happens with U.S. corporations all the time.
The ninth century poetess Kassia (in the Frankfurter Zeitung's series, “Famous Women in Ancient Greece and Byzantium”; Prof. Anderson gently mocked the editors of the influential German publication for excusing the following as a "contribution to the current debate," but probably would not have protested when the same publication wrote lines to the extent that "the Armenians are more intelligent than the Turks," as Arnold Toynbee quoted, and Pickthall responded to, above) described the Armenians as “quite horrifying people,” and as Anderson summed up, "malicious in low positions, worse when prosperous, and worst of all when they rose to high estate." Left Liberal leader Friedrich Naumann's travel articles also maintained a low opinion: "Naumann quoted at length one who, to unanimous accord, justified the massacres as the 'self-defense' of honest, upright Turks, a people exploited by the grasping Armenian, who would steal from his own brother, sell his wife and prepubescent daughter, and morally befoul the whole city." Karl May, "the era’s most popular adventure writer," spoke of the Armenians (in The Empire of the Silver Lion, 1898) as those who (“speaking generally and on average”) could be behind “any kind of vile thing” taking place "whenever and wherever in the Orient."
Sir Mark Sykes, with one of the natives
Sir Mark Sykes is damned with a scandalous statement for these politically correct times (but only for select peoples): “Even Jews have their good points, but Armenians have none,” as quoted in G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (1996). Hopefully the reader will allow a "Sykes digression" here, since Sykes got to know the Armenians and Turks very well, as he demonstrated in travel books such as Dar-ul-Islam; however, he did an "about face" in his views come WWI. (Likely for patriotic reasons; he was recruited to write anti-Turkish propaganda for Wellington House, where he indulged in fabrications and demonization — Sykes described Turks as "pure barbarians" and "degenerate," for example — and had a major hand in 1916's secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, outlining the Ottoman land-grabbing scheme between Britain and France.) Sir Sykes didn't care for being quoted in C. F. Dixon-Johnson's "The Armenians," as he illustrated in a letter to The Times. Marmaduke Picktall called Sykes on his change of heart, as Sykes made it seem that his words constituted "an attack on the Armenians, and that the quotations (by Sykes)... were wrested from their true meaning, or unwarrantably introduced in such a work?" After Pickthall quotes a revealing passage on the nature of the Armenians (from Sykes' The Caliphs’ Last Heritage, 1915; see under "Addendum, 9-07" here), of which Pickthall remarks: "The utterance is indeed so decided that the author’s firm conviction of its truth alone could justify its publication. I believe it, from my own slight knowledge of Armenians, to be true; and I, in common with many other Englishmen who have hitherto regarded Sir Mark Sykes as a friend and possible champion of the much misjudged Mohammedan majority in Turkey, am anxious to know what has caused this sudden change in his opinions... if the pro- Armenian friends of Sir Mark Sykes object to temperate and reasoned opposition, they must be in a truly pitiable state of mind. I ask every reader of ‘The Armenians,’ by C. F. Dixon-Johnson, to compare it with the pamphlet ‘Armenian Massacres: The Murder of a Nation,’ by Mr. Arnold J. Toynbee, and then, and not till then, to think about it.”
Otto von Bismarck’s epithets for an Austrian he did not care for included "Tartar, mouse-trap dealer, Armenian," as quoted in a 1950 book by Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire. (I have a feeling Prof. Anderson could find the first word acceptable as a curse term; "Tartar," of course, is often a description for Azeris or other Turkic peoples from Asia.) Barth is faulted for bringing up the proverb which states an Armenian is better able to cheat Greeks and Jews, elements found "in the works of orientalists such as Alfred Korte, the archaeologist; Karl Krummbacher, founder of Byzantine studies in Germany; and Hugo Grothe, a geographer who assured readers that not Muslim fanaticism (the explanation of choice among armenophiles) but Armenian exploitation was responsible for the violence." Grothe's line of thinking, we are told, may better be understood by the fact that Grothe later became a Nazi. Does that mean those who pointed out unappealing characteristics of Armenians were all Nazis at heart?
For example, are we to believe this next speaker was in line to sport a Swastika?
"One of the disappointments in the present terrible situation and one of the saddest commentaries on American missionary work among the Armenians is their lack of religious and moral principles and the general baseness of the race. During all that has happened during the past year I have not heard of a single act of heroism or of self-sacrifice and the noble acts, if any, have been very few. On the contrary mothers have given their daughters to the lowest and vilest Turks to save their own lives; to change their religion is a matter of little importance to most of the people; lying and trickery and inordinate love of money are besetting sins of almost all, even while they stand in the very shadow of death. On one occasion, when the students of the Armenian theological seminary were arrested, nearly every one of them lied about one thing or another to save himself. Absolute truthfulness is almost unknown among the members of this race. Money is sought at any price, even at the risk of their lives, as in the case of the young man already mentioned in this despatch whom I had saved from death and tried to help for several months by keeping him in the Consulate. Every trick and device are resorted to by those who are not in need as well as by those who are to obtain money and often by depriving others of it who are in much greater need. From every point of view the race is one that cannot be admired although it is one to be pitied."
The author was U.S. Consul Leslie Davis, from one of the "Bibles" of the Armenians' genocide, The Slaughterhouse Province.
Now here is where Professor Anderson really goes overboard: "Extenuating the massacres in 1896 are Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, who note that in the course of the violence the sultan ordered 'the government to crack down on the Armenian merchants of Istanbul to lessen their substantial economic power.'" (History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, 1997). The professor comments: "Imagine if a historian wrote that Hitler’s government had decided to 'crack down' on Berlin’s Jews."
The legitimate history of these mid-1890s events is that the Armenians, excited by their fanatical leaders, committed revolts and massacres, in order to induce European imperialists to step in and give the Armenians free hand-outs. No matter how often propagandists tell us otherwise, this irrefutable fact is confirmed in too many Armenian friendly sources to be questioned. (Missionary Cyrus Hamlin, for one.) Logically, too, after six hundred years of fairly harmonious co-existence, the reasons provided by propagandists, such as Muslims hating Christians, cannot explain why the Ottomans suddenly decided to massacre Armenians. So if imperialist-inducement serves as the backdrop, and if Sultan Abdul Hamid decided to curtail the power of the Armenians who had an economic grip over his nation, because he figured — for very good reason — the traditional "Loyal Nation" of the Armenians were suddenly untrustworthy and dangerous (who, after all, was financing the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks? It was the wealthy Armenians, whether by choice or coercion), then any government would have done what the Professors Shaw have reported that the Sultan has done. This episode cannot be compared with the German Jews of WWII, because the Jews were entirely innocent, and were not out to topple Germany; and besides, if this historical claim happened, then it is the duty of professional historians to report it as a fact. Note that Prof. Anderson does not examine the factual nature of the claim itself, as she needed to do, if she didn't like what was being said. No, Prof. Anderson is actually insinuating that the Professors Shaw were closet neo-Nazis! In other words, she is focusing on maligning the character of the historians, rather than sticking to the facts or non-facts of the historians' work.
This kind of practice is truly despicable, but it is only in a day's work for the typical genocide scholar. Prof. Anderson's paper is filled with falsehoods and speculations, but I am not going to address the many other eyebrow-raising points she makes in her quest to uphold the golden equation, "Armenians=good; Turks=bad." (That is not the point of this page, for one thing, and her work has already been examined in a page of her own.) Nevertheless, there are two of her points I would like to address: she tells us the number for the 1894-96 Armenian dead amounts to "some 200,000 or more Armenians," and we get the idea from her footnote that the figure is a fair median. The two extremes? Lepsius, whom she has stated elsewhere is a "hero" of hers, figured 88,000, later updated to 100,000 (not including those who died later, the professor points out, for reasons such as "loss of breadwinner"), and on the higher end: "By 1903, French and Italian commentators were putting the number of victims at 300,000 (Pour l’Arménie et la Macédoine, Paris, 1904)."
Isn't that remarkable?
In the same New Age letter where Pickthall took apart Toynbee's "Blue Book" work (the one Prof. Anderson assigns to her students as legitimate history; Pickthall's New Age letter appeared in the Dec. 16, 1915 issue), he reported that in the same vein as the 1876 Bulgarian victims first given as 60,000 and later proven by British Ambassador Layard to be 3,500 ("including the Turks, who were, in the first instance, slain by the Christians"), similarly, the 1894 Sassun massacres" (Placed in quotation marks by Pickthall) were first slated at 8,000, "and afterwards reduced in the final report of the Commission of Enquiry to 900." There are many other examples of such "appalling fabrications," as Pickthall worded it, that are on record.
The rare conscientious missionary, George Lamsa, wrote in his 1923 book "The Secret of the Near East," that 40,000 Armenians were reported killed, 10,000 women taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute, "In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses." The Armenian-sympathetic Briton, Richard Davey, gave us an excellent idea as to how the game worked: "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."
Of course, the bigoted French and Italian writers were going to give credence to this malarkey, just as today's genocide scholars accept such propaganda without question. The 300,000 figure is so totally without foundation, how obscene to even mention it. It is Lepsius's figure of 100,000 that is actually on the high end (this is the figure that Wellington House propagandist, and another devout Christian, Lord Bryce, also provided as the mid-1890s toll), because men such as Lepsius and Bryce shared the agenda to make the Turks appear as horrible as possible. The estimate of Barth (29,000, maximum) is much closer to the truth, more than double the figure of the Ottomans' 13,432. (As usual, the Turks killed by the Armenians during the same period — some 5,000 — remain invisible.) And how does Prof. Anderson handle this estimate? (And this is the second point of hers I would like to highlight for criticism.) She writes that Barth was "almost certainly on the take"! That's right! The German author was an "agent of the Turkish government," in other words, a government that was "almost ludicrously innocent of the propagandist’s art," as master Wellington House propagandist Arnold Toynbee himself worded it (in Western Question in Greece and Turkey," 1922.)
The fact of the matter is, despite Prof. Anderson's cruel term, "Turkey's 'lie factory,'" the Turks — then and now — usually have no idea of what they are doing, as far as protecting themselves. Pickthall pinned their psychology perfectly, in another New Age letter (July 10, 1919, Vol. XXV. No. 11): "[T]he Turk never sticks up for himself in the controversy against Europe. He does not know how to do so... he puts himself in the wrong from a tendency to accept the point of view of his opponents... There is also the feeling that it is a waste of time to seek to demolish prejudices so robust as those which Europe cherishes regarding Turkey, even though those prejudices may be based upon false information. The Turk is thus the worst possible champion of his own cause. Anyone in possession of the facts could state his case much better than he can state it." This brings to mind two points: it is this combination of fatalism, helplessness and apathy, in addition to pride, that has caused the Turks to mostly keep quiet against genocide allegations for years, allowing the genocide juggernaut to grow as powerful as it has become today, seducing professors with bonafide history degrees to get in on the beneficial game. Secondly, because the easy charge of being an "agent of the Turkish government" is perfectly in line with the Armenians' tendency to "pay off" those who can help with their political cause — as in the case of Taner Akcam — once again, the Armenians do the crime, and blame the Turks of the same crime. Genocide scholars and others, prejudiced to begin with, easily accept and repeat these baseless charges.
How did Prof. Anderson demonstrate her outrageous accusation against Barth? Here was her "proof": "Who else would have covered the costs of publishing Turk, Defend Yourself! a pamphlet on steroids, with gilt-edged pages? Of having it translated into French?" (Would it have cost such an unreasonable fortune to have published a "pamphlet" in 1898 Germany?) What Prof. Anderson is really getting at is, the Turks are simply so awful, anyone who is interested in telling the historical truth (which, unfortunately for such writers, involves portraying Turks as actual human beings) must be getting paid off. And this comes from a woman fancying herself as one for human rights, a woman who apologizes for the Armenians at every turn, portraying those who have pointed out the Armenians' less desirable qualities as ones who raise their right arms, click their boots, and cry, "Ja wohl, mein Fuehrer."
Turnabout is fair play, in this page examining the dishonesty of Armenians, and Prof. Anderson makes a fair point; she reveals that the 1988 Turkish version of Barth's "Turk, Defend Yourself!" pamphlet was mistranslated as "O Turk, Awake." Just as the travel books from the 19th century, written by Westerners without axes to grind against the Turks, confirmed the honesty of the Turks and Kurds versus the dishonesty of Ottoman Christians (for example, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, in the words of Marx, felt "the mass of the Turkish people" was "unconditionally one of the bravest and most moral representatives of the European peasantry" [Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, 1973], and even the rare missionary, Elder Tanner, thought of the Turks as the "most honest and moral of the Orientals," in 1886), I have learned not to always accept the claims of Turks when it comes to genocide matters. (Whereas, when I seriously first got into this surreal genocide world, I would accept Turkish word at face value, because with truth on their side, I figured, why would Turks have a reason to falsify?)
But Turks suffer, generally, from two problems. The main problem is a lack of attention to detail, and such sloppiness sometimes goes hand in hand with a "this is good enough" attitude. What is the excuse for mistranslating the title of another author's book? There is none, and that certainly does not induce confidence in how carefully the rest of the book may have been translated. Secondly — and luckily, this happens rarely, but it does happen — some Turks do lie outright on genocide claims. For example, some fool made up quotes, attributing these quotes to actual personalities, attesting to how Armenians had killed 2.5 million Turks. Whatever parties concocted such falsehoods must not have given any consideration to the overall damage caused; the Turks are already seen, in the prejudiced Western world, as the liars of this genocide matter, and how absolutely stupid to create further dents in Turkish integrity. (Similar to prejudiced Westerners who accept Armenian propaganda at face value, the Turks who have read these lines and then have gone on to repeat them also suffer from a blind, unquestioning acceptance.)
Where does this dishonesty come from, when the Turks have no reason to lie? I believe it's frustration. The extremist Armenians may be observed in trying every dirty trick in the book, in the defense of Hai Tahd. From outright lying to ad hominem attacks, to financially supporting Turkish opportunists, to pretending to be Turkish in the forums they contribute to or in the web sites they establish... you name it, they've done it. Some Turks then become weak, and start thinking in terms of "two can play at that game." That is the worst thing they can do, of course.
This is the downside of committing wrongs. The Turks and Armenians were the best of friends for centuries, until some greedy Armenians went nuts and started committing ghastly crimes against the Turks, hoping for a response in turn. Sometimes, of course, they got what they wished for. On a smaller scale, that is exactly what has happened with the concept of spreading falsehoods. The dishonesty of these extremist Armenians know no bounds, and there are times such infectious poison will spread.
Let us revisit the state of the Armenian professors. Is there one, when it comes to the "genocide" subject, who is honest? Forget about the old guard like Dadrian and Hovannisian, they are beyond redemption. The comparative younger generation, illustrated by the likes of Peter Balakian, have followed in the same footsteps. There are some who have tried to keep a lid on the dishonesty, such as Ara Sarafian and Ronald Suny (the former's reward with one episode was practically to be accused as an "agent of the Turkish government," the same fate that awaited his one-time partner who gave honesty a shot, Vincent Lima), but how can you defend the indefensible? No matter how these people try to go about it, there simply was no "Final Solution" plan against the Armenians, and whatever these Armenian scholars are going to say, it's going to turn out to be a lie. The only relevant factor then becomes, how far will they be willing to stretch the truth? (The only respectable Armenian scholar I know from the world of genocide is Dr. Robert John; that's pathetic.)
This page has not been an easy one to prepare, because as stated off the bat, all generalizations are dangerous. And the last thing I want to do is give the impression that Armenians can be counted on for their dishonesty. That is certainly not the case; there are extremely honorable Armenians out there, and I have had the privilege to know a few. The problem is, these are the ones who are keeping quiet. Either they don't want to get mixed up with the mad dogs among them (that's the age-old "Curtain of Fear" at play), or their own patriotic feelings are such that they feel the liars are performing a valuable service for Hai Tahd... which would not make them very honorable. (Recall the former Courier publisher's words above, referring to the "peaceful, fair, and thoughtful men who have expressed support for the terrorists"; these Armenians sound like they would have come from the "honorable" category, but their misguided patriotism superseded their honor.)
But our world is increasingly becoming ethically-challenged, and this kind of behavior is not restricted to Armenians. As the TIME essay went on to offer:
A study demonstrated that “a significant minority of fans — if guaranteed anonymity — would even support injuring an opposing player or coach.” In 1940, a football team "forfeited a victory after realizing that it had been mistakenly given an extra play. If a coach did that today, sports writers would declare him a saint. And his team’s fans would boil him in oil."
On the other hand, there is a definite pattern of Armenian mendacity through the ages, regardless of how much the apologists for Armenians attempt to cast the writers of such opinions as racist Nazis. If an Armenian champion as Leslie Davis writes, "Absolute truthfulness is almost unknown among the members of this race," then it is difficult not to pay notice. If Marmaduke Pickthall, who surely was not raised with any prejudices toward Armenians in his Armenian-sappy nation of Great Britain, writes, based on his own observations and interactions that "The typical Armenian esteems it meritorious not only to exaggerate but to invent occurrences calculated to excite the pity of the Western world,” we have got to pay attention. Because when it comes to their genocide obsession, this is the way Armenians behave, as a rule; at least the ones who make their voices heard publicly. We have to pay attention, because it is these ethically-challenged Armenians who are snookering the already prejudiced world with their genocide lies, breeding the grounds for further prejudice and hatred. The stakes are high; when "neutral" observers look into these matters, they must be forewarned not to accept Armenian claims without deep study. They must entertain a healthy "mistrust [of] ... accounts of Armenians,” as another Armenian champion, Ezra Pound, felt he must do.
Furthermore, this pattern of Armenian dishonesty is a stain upon the Armenians' national honor. The honorable Armenians must force themselves to adhere to the truth, and nothing but the truth, no matter how much it hurts. This will mean turning one's back on the claims of Armenian professors and their genocide scholar allies. That will be an extremely difficult thing for most Armenians to attempt, but the honorable Armenian must do it. The honorable Armenian must put the truth above his or her feelings of patriotism, and/or pathological victimhood. If the honorable Armenian can get rid of the blind, religious genocide faith and drum up the necessary rationality, and see where the truth really stands (it's not that difficult; for example, here is a French historian's 1920 account, and the account is perfectly in line with the version derogatorily called "Turkish propaganda." There is no way this French historian was a "turcophile", nor was he "on the take," especially from a nearly nonexistent 1920 Ottoman government under British and French control. After the read, and after having paid note to the fact that the French historian also made use of propagandistic Armenian sources, there is a question that begs to be asked: why doesn't a "historian" like Prof. Anderson go near the sources examinng the role of the Dashnaks and Hunchaks in depth, as a real historian would be duty-bound to do?). Then the honorable Armenian must do the most difficult thing: SPEAK UP.
(Currently, and since the death of Edward Tashji, there is only one — or, I should say, there are one-and-a-half, as the second one can be ambiguous, perhaps on purpose so as not to lose his audience — Armenians I am aware of who publicly question the "genocide." That is ridiculous.)
It is the duty of the right-minded Armenian to stringently stress the genuine truth. If my national heritage has become known for a negative trait, and there is sound reason for it (as opposed to the negative traits that Turks have become known for, as a result of vicious propaganda; Sir Mark Sykes' charges of Turks being "pure barbarians" and "degenerate" may top the long list), then I would want to do whatever I could do to dispel this negative image that has the potential of hurting my kind.
The TIME article goes on to tell us that "Sports are often compared to war. The team is our army, battling for our honor. But there’s a key twist: the players aren’t citizen-soldiers; they’re mercenaries. They can be bought, bartered and sold, and once they are, they go from heroes to enemies."
And this genocide battle is a war, a war that the Armenians and their supporters are handily winning, because of their dishonesty, wealth, and sheer brute force, along with existing anti-Turkish prejudices in the Western world, as well as Turkish apathy. Naturally, if the honorable Armenians begin to speak the truth, they will go from heroes to enemies within the Armenian and genocide scholar camp. That will take plenty of courage, and it is easy to understand why almost no Armenians have put themselves on the line, as who needs to face the destructive actions of these unscrupulous extremists? Yet, Armenian national honor needs to be protected. The honorable Armenian must consider what line of action would constitute greater patriotism, while also considering the price of ostracism and character defamation, practiced by the screwballs on the genocide team.
The honorable Armenians who don't speak up will risk being guilty of exactly what the TIME author has said about the sports fans:
"we aren’t innocent victims; we’re co-conspirators." (An Armenian who is not an "innocent victim"? Unfathomable.)
The conclusion of the TIME article is right on the money, as far as the rest of the pack, the dishonorable Armenians. Simply substitute "The genocide-obsessed Armenian activist" for "Belicheck."
"Belicheck... knows that as long as he wins, all will be forgiven. And that once he stops, it won’t matter if he becomes Mother Teresa. He doesn’t care about being fair to the other team; he doesn’t even really care about his own players. He just wants to win."
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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, links and the related photos, the reader may consider reviewing the direct link as follows:
www.tallarmeniantale.com/ethics-genociders.htm
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(December 24, 2006) I was deeply saddened to have learned of the death of Professor Stanford J. Shaw at the age of 76. Professor Shaw was an Ottomanist, a world renowned expert on Jewish life in Turkey during and after the era of the sultan. Although I had never met the professor in person, we had struck up an Internet friendship that had lasted many years. As a Turkish Jew and a lover of Ottoman Jewish history, I found a deep appreciation for this man that spent nearly his whole life researching, writing about and focusing on my people. Professor Shaw contributed such a tremendous wealth of knowledge to the body of history on the Jews of Turkey, that the debt of gratitude that is owed him can never be repaid. His academic work strengthened our understanding of what Jewish life was life under the sultan, from as early as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain to as late as the development of Ataturk's modern Republic.
"A Tremendous Loss for the Jewish, Turkish and Academic World"
A unique soul, he was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on May 5, 1930 to Jewish parents that had immigrated from England and Russia. His formal education started at Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, where he graduated in 1947, one out of only five students from a student body of 500 who went to college. He went on to Stanford University, where he majored in British History, with a minor in Near Eastern History. He received his B.A. at Stanford in 1951. He then studied Middle Eastern history along with Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a Graduate Student at Princeton University starting in 1952, receiving an M.A. in 1955. Afterward, he went to England to study with Bernard Lewis and Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and also at Oxford University. Following this, he went to Egypt to study at the University of Cairo and Shaikh Sayyid at the Azhar University, also doing research in the Ottoman archives of Egypt in Cairo. Professor Shaw received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958; his dissertation was titled, "The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798," a paper which told much about Sephardic Jewry in the Ottoman Empire.
Professor Stanford Shaw was not afraid to challenge the Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the Ottomans. Shaw stood by his position, one shared by many others, that the wars that the Ottoman Empire faced were brutal to people of all races and various ethnic groups. After studying in the Turkish archives, he took the position that there was no directly intended genocidal attempt and that all parties were liable for the high numbers of deaths due to the vicious warfare that occurred. Professor Shaw realized that the people of the Christian West (i.e. the United States) had been so poisoned against Muslims by wartime propaganda that it was easy for the Americans to jump on the 'blame the Turks' bandwagon. Because of his opinions, Shaw's house in California was bombed in 1977 by Armenian extremists.
Professor Shaw is best remembered for the near 30 years he served at UCLA in the department of history as professor of Turkish History and Judeo-Turkish History and even before that he spent a decade at Harvard University from 1958 until 1968. His final post was at Bilkent University as professor of Ottoman and Turkish history from 1999 to 2006.
Professor Shaw's death is a tremendous loss for the Jewish, Turkish and academic world. He is one of those greats which come along once in a generation. The professor will be remembered among the ranks of other great Jewish historians such as Yitzhak Baer (1888-1980), Cecil Roth (1899-1970) and Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989).
The awards and recognition Professor Shaw received worldwide are too numerous to mention and range from honorary degrees from Harvard University to honorary membership in multiple organizations. He was the author of numerous books on Turkey and Ottoman history. Among his major works on Turkey are "Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789-1807;" "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey;" "The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic;" "Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945;" and "Studies in Ottoman and Turkish History: A Life with the Ottomans."
Professor Shaw was one of the first people to email me to congratulate me on my Website "Home of the Ottoman Sepharadim" which went online in 1997, one of the very first Sephardic Websites. From that, we developed an Internet friendship which I have treasured over the years. The professor advised me on the status of archives in Turkey, and was always helpful on any questions I had relating to Turkish and Ottoman Jewry. One of the greatest acknowledgments I received was a congratulatory note by Professor Shaw upon the founding of the International Sephardic Journal that I launched in 2005. Although I didn't attend UCLA, I consider myself a student of Professor Stanford Shaw, and will continue to learn from him through the numerous brilliant volumes he has left the world to treasure.
© Shelomo Alfassa
www.alfassa.com
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Naturally, our title should also reflect Ezel Kural Shaw, Stanford Shaw's wife; but it was really Stanford Shaw the Armenian activists were gunning for, once the Shaws' magnificent History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey was released. The "Armenian" section only encompassed some seven out of nearly one thousand pages, but naturally the Armenocentrics made the entire history of the Turks out to be about the Armenians. They stopped at nothing to try and ruin the reputation of the book, and Prof. Shaw. As always, a compliant and prejudiced Western audience mindlessly took the Armenians' side.
You can tell how infuriated Hovannisian sounds here; how dare the dirty, propagandistic presentation of his "history" be questioned. In his frustration, he strikes out any way he can, even by citing the silliest sources to prove his point. This was a rare time, however, when a contra-genocide specialist would have the last word; Shaw was the editor of the journal this forum appeared in. But Shaw did not need such an edge; Hovannisian sank his own ship, as you'll be reading.
In his eternal arrogance and racism, he is outraged that Turkish sources were being utilized, instead of the hateful sources that must be consulted in his own prejudiced world of genocide, in order to write Turkish history. And does he ever shoot himself in the foot; as an example, Hovannisian takes issue with the fact that the Armenians tried to assassinate the sultan in 1896. Naturally, he knows about the famous "Yildiz" attempt on Sultan Abdül Hamit's life in 1905, but he has no clue about the earlier episode. The reason, as the Shaws speculate: he only reads the sources he prefers, as the amateur scholar that he is.
It's really incredible the stupid things he says, even contradicting some of the writings in his own works. For example, he tried to give the idea the Armenians were persecuted, as his propaganda mill leaves him duty-bound to do. Yet in his 1967 book, Hovannisian himself conceded the Armenians had an "internal autonomy."
The Shaws really clobber him with what real scholarship entails. The expression, separating the men from the boys comes to mind. When Hovannisian tries to sell his perspective, he comes across as a child. And this fellow actually has made a profitable career as a "historian." It's mind-boggling.
Of course, Hovannisian had the last laugh in his "feud" with Shaw. He called him a "criminal," and sicced the mad dogs in his flock upon Shaw, who disrupted and, in short, terrorized his classrooms. Some of these loons bombed the Shaws' house in 1977. (The Shaws were inside; they could have been killed.) At every opportunity, Hovannisian tried to discredit Shaw; their mutual university (UCLA), at a loss to deal with fanatical Armenian intimidation, couldn't give Shaw much support. Ultimately, these Armenians made poor Prof. Shaw a nervous wreck, forcing him to leave his university.
Prof. Shaw was a "gentleman and a scholar" in the truest sense of the words, and refrained from divulging the outrages foisted upon him, attempting to not veer away from what really mattered, the history. Yet here is one example from the behind-the-scenes intimidation practices of the academic Armenians, following the usual Dashnak strategy to suppress freedom of speech: Marjorie Housepian (whose propagandistc "Smyrna" book Hovannisian will point to as a valid source in his essay below) contacted the Cambridge University Press and demanded that Shaw's History of the Ottoman Empire be withdrawn because her views on the subject were not accepted. Hovannisian led an entire Armenian delegation to the press and made very ugly threats, forcing the then editor of the book, Walter Lippincott, to take special security precautions.
Hovannisian has been at the discrediting game for a long time, and he surely has not stopped with Shaw. In early 2006, for example, he appeared at the University of Utah, in order to speak ill of the work of another amazing scholar, Prof. Guenter Lewy.
International Journal of Middle East studies
Vol. 9 No. 3, August 1978
Printed in Great Britain
FORUM: THE ARMENIAN QUESTiON
THE CRITIC’S VIEW: BEYOND REVISlONISM
The recent publication by the Cambridge University Press of Professor Stanford J. Shaw’s two-volume study entitled History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey should have met the need for a competent survey history in the field.1 Even casual perusal reveals that the work has required great labor. Hence, it is all the more disappointing that the study is marred throughout by the lack of sound historical methodology and balance. There is certainly room for a revisionist history of the Ottoman empire, but the effectiveness of such an endeavor must rest on convincing scholarship. It is regrettable that the author has frequently attempted to defend the Ottoman power structure and to disparage popular movements that had the potential of diminishing the authority of the reigning dynasty. In issues of intense controversy, Professor Shaw has relied almost exclusively on Turkish and a few supportive foreign sources and has repeatedly disregarded the enormous corpus of material that contradicts his thesis.
The image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ was perpetuated in Europe and America during the nineteenth century by hundreds of accounts and studies of Christian tribulations and a crusading spirit to assist these subject peoples. Although that general sentiment did not prevent the Western governments from ultimately coming to terms with the Turks in the 1920s, the unfavorable impression persisted for many years longer. It was only with the development of Ottoman and Turkish studies in the United States and the training of a generation of Turkish students in the West that significant strides were made in dissipating the heavy cloud that blotted the reputation of the Turkish nation. At the same time, several younger American scholars who had studied the Ottoman and modern Turkish languages and lived in Turkey began to reject the more traditionalist approach of diplomatic historians and the long-standing view of Turkish barbarities. They tried to show, for example, that the Turks had been more exploited by European political and economic imperialism than they themselves had exploited their subject nationalities. In this revisionist process, some researchers tended to blur the distinction between the character and content of European expansionism and that of domestic repression within the Ottoman empire. Critical standards applied in the use of Western sources often seemed to evaporate in the presence of Turkish materials. Armed with a knowledge of Turkish, the revisionists were excited by their ability to penetrate the inner chambers of past Turkish cabinets, to understand the concerns and motivations of the sultans, and to view events, as it were, from the other shore.
As a part of this approach, American and European sources relating to the treatment of the Ottoman Armenians were regarded with skepticism and no heed was given to the extensive literature and documentation in the Armenian language. There seemed to be a compulsion to legitimize the present and in so doing to view unfavorably any historical circumstances that could have affected or changed the current political structure. There existed, after all, a Turkish republic with certain given boundaries and this was proper because it was reality. Hence, even the tragic fate of the Armenians could be seen as a step, if not a necessity, in the formation of the Turkish republic, which was a good thing. This thesis was introduced in 1951 by long-time resident of Turkey Professor Lewis V. Thomas of Robert College and Princeton University:
By 1918, with the definitive excision of the total Armenian Christian population from Anatolia and the Straits Area, except for a small and wholly insignificant enclave in Istanbul city, the hitherto largely peaceful processes of Turkification and Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force. How else can one assess the final blame except to say that this was a tragic consequence of the impact of western European nationalism upon Anatolia? Had Turkification and Moslemization not been accelerated there by the use of force, there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.2
Professor Thomas confused historical scholarship with a subjective assessment of American national interest and unwittingly provided a license to exclusivist regimes prepared to employ stringent policies to achieve uniformity and homogeneity. The
views of Thomas were furthered by several other Turkish specialists before one of his students, S. J. Shaw, pressed them to the zenith with his two-volume survey history. Transcending all previous limits of revisionist scholarship, the work has already provoked intense controversy and has made it all the more difficult to dissociate the study of racial and religious questions in the Ottoman empire from contemporary political issues.
While there is much to be said about Professor Shaw’s attitude toward the other subject nationalities, it is my intent in these few pages to assess his treatment of the Armenians in Volume II, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975, which was co-authored with his wife, Dr. Ezel Kural Shaw. Their discussion of the Armenian question is neat and uncomplicated, but it is far from convincing. There was, the reader is told, no real Armenian problem prior to 1876. ‘The Armenians were as free to lead their own lives as were all the other subjects of the sultan. Their churches, schools, and hospitals were maintained and operated to meet the needs of the people. There was no significant dissatisfaction,’3 Armenian troubles began only when a part of the population succumbed to the machinations of nationalist provocateurs and Russian propagandists, who incited the villagers against the Ottoman empire during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878.
This interpretation ignores the more than 500 appeals that the Armenian patriarchs submitted to the government during the preceding twenty years, detailing the extortion, robbery, murder, abduction, and rape that had become commonplace in the Armenian provinces. Unable to endure the harsh exploitation, thousands of peasants forsook their native homes, allowing once-fertile fields to revert to wastelands. The appeals called attention to the law-abiding nature of the Armenians and their role as loyal taxpayers and tillers of the soil in contrast with the disloyalty of the nomadic marauders who paid no taxes and devastated the land. Expressing confidence in the paternalism of the padishah, the Armenians insisted that they had no separatist ambitions or political goals other than enjoyment of the rights granted in the various reform measures previously decreed. That the Armenian population was beset by anarchic conditions is certainly no exaggeration, for similar reports flowed in from the Balkans and the Arab provinces, and even the Turkish Muslim peasantry of Anatolia was frequently victimized. Such events were a fact of Ottoman life in the nineteenth century, not isolated instances invented by Armenian spokesmen. The records of the National Assembly of the Armenian millet, Atenagrutiunk azgayin zhoghovy, bear witness to the deplorable state of affairs in the interior provinces before 1876 and the repeated Armenian professions of loyalty and pleas for assistance against the predatory elements. And these conditions are further detailed in the extensive diplomatic correspondence and reports printed in such official publications as the British Blue Books.4
At the time of the Russo-Turkish war, Armenian religious leaders exhorted their people to join in the defense of the Ottoman empire and continued to express hope that the government would implement the essential reforms in the Turkish Armenian provinces. When the Russian army reached the outskirts of Constantinople and Patriarch Nerses Varzhapetian called on Grand Duke Nicholas at San Stefano to ask that the peace terms include provisions to protect the Armenian rural population from nomadic incursions, he did so with the knowledge of Turkish officials and he made no mention of an independent Armenian region. Yet, the Shaws give the following inaccurate information: ‘Inspired by the Russian propaganda, Armenian nationalist feeling had been stirred up among some intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire, and the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul, Nerses, went to San Stefano to ask the Russians to create an independent Armenian state in eastern Anatolia in return for help against the Ottomans during the war.’5
This passage is one example of the factual errors in the text, hut there are even more distortions caused by the selective use or omission of crucial facts. In the six pages dealing with the Armenian question in the nineteenth century (pp. 200-205), the Shaws have created the image of numerous peaceful, law-abiding Muslim villages being wiped out indiscriminately by Armenian ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism.’ terms used six times on a single page (203). They level the grave charge that the Armenian nationalists went on a rampage of massacre ‘to stimulate’ a slaughter of their own people and thereby gain European intercession. The accusation is not new, but those who have made it have failed to provide proof.6 The Hunchak organization (the founding date of which is given incorrectly) and the Dashnaktsutiun assertedly unleashed a reign of terror to provoke reprisals: ‘This would bring about foreign intervention and help the nationalists secure an independent, socialist Armenian republic, presumably in the six east Anatolian provinces from, which the Muslims would be driven out or simply killed.”7 The reader is asked to believe that small hands of Armenian revolutionaries were able to devastate one Muslim village after another but that Ahdul-Hamid’s provincial police were so ‘efficient’ that they prevented the Muslim population from responding in kind. This absence of retaliation, it is asserted, roused the revolutionaries to even greater violence and ‘within a short time, despite all the efforts of the government to keep order, the Hunchaks had what they wanted, reprisals from Muslim tribesmen and viIlagers.’8
Yet, in the very next paragraph, the Shaws state that 'the Hunchaks were denied the kind of harsh reprisal that they really needed to make their case in Europe.’ This contradiction was allowed to stand in order to provide a plausible explanation for the disturbances in Sasun in 1894. Since the Hunchaks had not been able to elicit sufficient retribution against their own people, they assertedly stirred up the rugged peasants of the Sasun district and met the Ottoman tax collectors with rifles and swords. When the regular army was called in, the rebels fled into the mountainous recesses, supposedly ‘ravaging the Muslim villages in the area as they went, knowing that the remaining Armenian peasants would suffer the Consequences.’ The responsibility thus having been placed on the Armenians, the authors continue, ‘and suffer they did, as the regular troops and Hamidiye regiments ravaged Sasun: after having seen the tragedies left in the nearby Muslim villages, where the entire Population had been wiped out.’ Accepting only the official Turkish account of the crisis, they then explain:
The countermassacre had burn undertaken entirely on the initiative of the Ottoman troops and local commanders and without any order to this effect from the central government. But the deed had been done, and the network of revolutionary propaganda was put into action to develop a popular European reaction similar to that which had followed the earlier events in Bulgaria. Once again the circumstances were ignored and the provocation forgotten. The Ottoman government was accused of ordering the destruction ot 25 villages in the area and of the execution of 20,000 Armenian villagers! Detailed investigations made by a mixed Ottoman and foreign commission demonstrated the exaggerated nature of the claims, but European public opinion, followed closely by its politicians, was ever ready to believe the worst of the Muslims. The sultan attempted to conciliate Europe and make it easier for their politicians to accept what they knew to be true by promising once again to make the reforms he was, in fact. already making in the east, and the powers therefore declined to intervene. 9
While it is not my intent to suggest that the Armenians were always guiltless or that some of them did not commit irresponsible acts, this simple, neat version presented liv the Shaws flies in the face of extensive international documentation. Even if the authors choose to ignore the accounts of foreign missionaries and of the Armenian survivors who testified that young men were bound together, covered with brushwood, and burned alive, that women were locked in churches where the soldiers and Hamidiye units were given free rein, and that children were put in single file and shot to see how many could be killed with a single bullet, they must certainly be aware that the records of the mission of inquiry and its European delegates are preserved in the French foreign ministry publication entitled Documents diplomatiques: Affaires arméniennes and in the British Parliamentary Sessional Papers entitled Events at Sassoon, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush. 10 The documents in these collections reveal that the Ottoman authorities prevented foreigners from entering Sasun after the massacre of the Armenians on the pretext of a cholera epidemic and hindered in many ways the investigation of the European delegates. Nonetheless, the Inquiry Commission, sitting in Mush, conducted its study during the first half of 1895. interviewing 190 witnesses, including civil and military officials and both Kurdish and Armenian inhabitants. The European delegates, far from confirming the ‘exaggerated nature of the claims,’ concluded that the Armenians had taken arms in self-defense and that the Turkish troops had committed acts of repulsive cruelty without regard for age or sex:
The absolute ruin of the district can never be regarded a measure proportionate to the punishment even of a revolt; à fortiori, in the present case, the only crimes of the Armenians, namely, those of having sheltered or perhaps concealed Murad and his band, of having committed some isolated acts of brigandage against the Kurds, or disregarded the authorities, and possibly of having offered some slight resistance to the Imperial troops under circumstances which have not been cleared up, cannot possibly justify the state of misery to which tile people and the country have been reduced. An equal responsibility rests on the local authorities, civil and military, for the absence of all measures to prevent a pseudo-revolt which is said to have shown itself as early as May, or to put a stop later to the strife between the Armenians and the Kurds, and the losses of all kinds which were the consequences. 11
It is puzzling how the authors can ignore this and other indictments and claim that the politicians of Europe refused to intervene because the knew that the official account of the Turkish government was true.
One of the most significant acts of omission in History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey is in the glossing over of the Armenian massacres of 1895-1896. The documentation relating to that systematic pogrom, during which thousands of people were killed, hundreds of villages pillaged and burned, and countless families forced to flee abroad, fills numerous dossiers in the archives of every major and many lesser powers.12 The holocaust enveloped the entire Armenian plateau and every Armenian-inhabited district of Asia Minor. Yet, disregarding the infinite sources that gainsay their presentation, the authors simply mention ‘communal disturbances’ in Trebizond and 'several other cities and towns.’13 For the nonspecialist reader, this treatment not only obscures a critical phase of the Armenian question but also conceals the cause-and-effect relationship in the next event upon which the Shaws dwell in order to strengthen their portrayal of the Armenians as fanatic, cold-hearted terrorists:
On August 26, 1896, a group of Armenians took over the main Ottoman Bank in Beyoglu, Bombs were planted throughout the building, some of the bank employees were held as hostages, and preparations were made for a lengthy siege in the hope of rousing European interest. Soon alter, a second group forced its way into the Sublime Porte, wounding several officials and threatening the grand vizer with a pistol. Revolutionary units ran through the old quarter of Istanbul, throwing bombs, and firing wildly with rifles and pistols, killing and wounding a number of innocent bystanders. Another bomb was thrown at the sultan as he was going to the Aya Sofya mosque for Friday prayers, with more than 20 policemen guarding him being killed. 14
Dr. Richard Hovannisian
Giving no intimation that the twenty-six youths who barricaded themselves in the Ottoman Bank were reacting to two years of massacre and plunder throughout Anatolia, the authors scoff at Armenian demands for reforms entailing the appointment of Christian governors and administrative officials in the Turkish Armenian provinces, the recruitment of Christian police, gendarmes, and militiamen, the forgiveness of taxes for five years and their reduction thereafter, the increase of state expenditures for
schools and other local needs, and a general pardon and the restoration of all confiscated property. ‘Abdulharnit could not accept these demands if he was to retain an authority in his empire so he rejected them.’ 15 Nonetheless, to reduce tension the sultan decreed an amnesty soon thereafter and supposedly began to appoint Christian administrators in the east, even though the Christians were a minority, and the Armenians, according to the Shaws but contrary to many other sources, numbered no more than 1,300,000 persons in the entire empire.16
In their treatment of this crisis, Mr. and Mrs. Shaw have committed a serious error by running together unrelated events to create the effect of a broad-ranging, coordinated conspiracy. There was no attempt on the life of either the grand vizer or the sultan in 1896; that is a fact. The sensational description in the text may have reference to events that occurred years later, but the authors do not say so and wrongly link a plot of regicide with the siege of the Ottoman Bank. What is more, they pass over in complete silence the massacre of several thousand Armenians in Constantinople during and immediately after the Bank episode. According to numerous eyewitnesses and members of the diplomatic corps, the mobs had been armed and organized by the police authorities. Led by theological students (softas), they indiscriminately bludgeoned and hacked to death Armenians in Pershembe-bazaar and in the quarters of Peru, Galata, Pancaldi, Tophane, Beshiktash, and Kassim Pasha and then fanned out into the villages of the Bosporus, including Bebek, Rumelihisar, and Candili. The source materials and published literature relating to the bloodshed are far too extensive to escape the attention of the objective historian.17 Yet the Shaws have skipped over these violent events and the preceding general massacres of 1895-1896 and have singled out the capture of the Ottoman Bank to build their case against the Armenians. The historical methodology used in this process cannot but come into question.
Moving on to the Young Turk era, 1908- 1918, S. J. and E. K. Shaw outline the events leading up to the counterrevolution by Abdul-Hamid’s conservative supporters in 1909. The hard-pressed Committee of Union and Progress, the reader is informed, sought the help of the national minorities with which the Young Turks had previously co-operated, but ‘The only result of this was an Armenian uprising in Adana that stimulated a severe repression on the part of the local garrison, with massacre and countermassacre following until as many as 20,000 people of all religions were killed (April 14, 1909). 18 As in numerous other instances throughout the book, in one sentence and citing one Turkish source, the authors would wipe away the countless documents, personal accounts, and studies relating to the turmoil, which spread all the way to Marash and Antioch. Armenian businesses were again looted, Armenian villages and city quarters binned, and the Christian population set upon by mobs of Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Fellahs, and Muslim refugees from Crete. The violence, which lasted for more than two weeks, resulted in the deaths of 18,660 Armenians, 745 other Christians (Greeks, Syrians, Chaldeans), and 620 Muslims. A parliamentary commission of inquiry found that the civil and military officials cif the Adana vilayet had not only been criminally negligent in their duty to protect the inhabitants but had actually incited the mobs.19
Perhaps the most inexplicable manifestation in the two-volume survey is the effort to whitewash the extirpation of the Ottoman Armenian population in 1915-1916. Minister of War Enver, it is stated, made a final effort to gain Armenian support during a crucial meeting with Armenian leaders at Erzerum in 1914, but the mission failed because assertedly Russia had already promised the Armenians an autonomous state inclusive of both Russian Armenia and a substantial part of Turkish Armenia, as well as assistance in driving out or eliminating the remaining Muslim population. This statement is untrue, as is the created impression that Enver conferred with Armenian spokesmen in Erzerum.
Listing my works as being the most reliable accounts of the Armenian national movement, the authors then quote me out of context, tacking on their own conclusion and making it appear to be mine in order to substantiate the Turkish and their own charge of Armenian disloyalty. They write:
The Armenian leaders told Enver only that they wanted to remain neutral, but their sympathy for the Russians was evident, and in fact soon after the meeting 'several prominent Ottoman Armenians, including a former member of parliament, slipped away to collaborate with Russian military officials,’ making it clear that the Armenians would do everything they could to frustrate Ottoman military action.20
Here, at the end of their interpretation, the Shaws cite my book, Armenia on the Road to Independence. What I actually wrote is markedly different both in content and in context:
When Ottoman participation in the World War became a reality, the apprehensive Armenian leaders strove to convince the Ittihad government of their fidelity and patriotism. The Patriarch instructed the prelates of all the dioceses within the Empire to perform religious services for the victory of the Ottoman homeland. Azatamart, the influential organ of Dashnaktsutiun, exhorted the Armenians to act as exemplary citizens and to avoid friction with other elements of the Empire. Aknuni and several other leaders of Dashnaktsutiun depended on their personal friendship with Enver and Talaat to persuade the ruling clique of Turkey that the Armenians were resolved to protect the integrity of the common fatherland. Although most Armenians maintained a correct attitude vis-à-vis the Ottoman government, it can he asserted with some substantiation that the manifestations of loyalty were insincere, for the sympathy of most Armenians throughout the world was with the Entente, not with the Central Powers. By autumn, 1914, several prominent Ottoman Armenians, including a former member of Parliament, had slipped away to the Caucasus to collaborate with Russian military officials, Such acts provided the Ittihadist Triumvirate with the desired excuse to eradicate the Armenian problem and eliminate the major racial barrier between the Turkic peoples of the Ottoman and Russian enipires.21
The contrast between the thrust of the two quotations and the implications of this manipulation need no further comment.
Subsumed under a misleading heading entitled ‘The Northeastern Front, 1914-1916’ (pp. 314-317), the authors’ presentation of the most traumatic event in Armenian history is so extraordinary that a full paragraph must be quoted here:
In the initial stages of the Caucasus campaign the Russians had demonstrated the best means of organizing a campaign by evacuating the Armenians from their side of the border to clear the area (or battle, with the Armenians going quite willingly in the expectation that a Russian victory would soon enable them not merely to return to their homes but also to occupy those of the Turks across the border. Enver followed this example to prepare the Ottoman side and to resist the expected Russian invasion. Armenian leaders in any case now declared their open support of the enemy, and there seemed no other alternative. It would be impossible to determine which of the Armenians would remain loyal and which would follow the appeals of their leaders. As soon as spring came, then, in mid-May 1915 orders were issued to evacuate the entire Armenian population from the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum, to get them away from all areas where they might undermine the Ottoman campaigns, against Russia or against the British in Egypt, with arrangements made to settle them in towns and camps in the Mosul area of northern Iraq. In addition, Armenians residing in the countryside (but not the cities) of the Cilician districts as well as those of north Syria were to be sent to central Syria for the same reason. Specific instructions were issued for the army to protect the Armenians against nomadic attacks and to provide them with sufficient food and other supplies to meet their needs during the march and alter they were settled. Warnings were sent to the Ottoman military commanders to make certain that neither the Kurds nor any other Muslims used the situation to gain vengeance for the long years of Armenian terrorism. The Armenians were to he protected and cared for until they returned to their homes after the war. A supplementary law established a special commission to record the properties of some deportees and to sell them at auction at fair prices, with the revenues being held in trust until their return. Muslims wishing to occupy abandoned buildings could do so only as renters, with the revenues paid to the trust funds, and with the understanding that they would have to leave when the original ossirers returned. The deportees and their possessions were to be guarded by the army while in transit as well as in Iraq and Syria, and the government would provide for their return once the crisis was over.22
In the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary, the authors would have the reader believe that the Armenians were removed only from a few strategic regions and this, with the utmost of concern for the safety of their persons and properties. In view of what actually happened to the entire Ottoman Armenian population, the belaboring of this point is ludicrous. Such uncritical acceptance and reiteration of Turkish denials, rationalizations, and subterfuge turns revisionism into falsification. But the Shaws have even more to say on the subject:
The Entente propaganda mills and Armenian nationalists claimed that over a million Armenians were massacred during the war. But this was based on the assumption that the prewar Armenian population numbered about 2.5 million. The total number of Armenians in the empire before the war in fact came to at most 1,300,000, according to the Ottoman census. About half of these were resident in the affected areas, but, with the city dwellers allowed to remain, the number actually transported came to no more than 400,000, including some terrorists and agitators from the cities rounded up soon after the war began. In addition, approximately one-half million Armenians subsequently fled into the Caucasus and elsewhere during the remainder of the war. Since about 100,000 Armenians lived in the empire afterward, and about 150,000 to 200,000 immigrated to Western Europe and the United States, one can assume that about 200,000 perished as a result not only of the transportation but also of the same conditions of famine, disease, and war action that carried away some 2 million Muslims at the same time. Careful examination of the secret records of the Ottoman cabinet at the time reveals no evidence that any of the CUP leaders, or anyone else in the central government, ordered massacres. To the contrary, orders were to the provincial forces to prevent all kinds of raids and communal disturbances that might cause loss of life.23
Hence, with total disregard for the monumental historical evidence that refutes their narrative, S. J. and E. K. Shaw claim that the Turks merely followed the example of the Russians, that the Armenian leaders in the Ottoman empire openly sided with Russia and exhorted their people to disloyalty, that only the Armenians of Van, Bitlis, Erzerum, and the Cilician countryside but not those of the cities were ‘transported’ (a euphemism for ‘deported’) to northern Iraq and central Syria (a euphemism for ‘deserts’), that no more than 400,000 were ‘actually transported,’ that only about 200,000 perished as the result of all causes, and that there is no evidence of either government or Young Turk complicity in the ruthlessly executed extirpation.
As for examining the official Turkish records, it is pretentious to expect that if documents relating to the government’s role in the Armenian massacres still exist they would be made accessible to an American — or for that matter to any — researcher. The issue has been one of extreme sensitivity for every Turkish cabinet since the end of World War I. And even if there are no official Turkish records relating to the subject, what cannot be dismissed is the evidence in the thousands of eyewitness reports -. many by individuals whose governments were allied with Turkey, in the detailed accounts of the survivors, and in the extensive diplomatic correspondence. It is inconceivable that a scholar who has investigated the subject could remain unaware that the Armenian population was eliminated, not just in a few border districts, hut in all the Armenian plateau and Anatolia, starting in Erzerum and Cilicia and sweeping inland to Diarbekir, Harput, Sivas, Kaiseri, Yozgat, and the heart of the peninsula; along the Black Sea from Trebizond to Ordu, Samson, and Kastamuni; throughout western Anatolia from Bardizak, Ismid, and Adabazar to Bursa, Eskeshehir, Kutahia, and Konia; and in Europe from Thrace to the shores of the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. It should not have been difficult to learn that nearly all able-bodied males in the Turkish Armenian provinces were killed within a few days’ march of their homes, that thousands of Ottoman Armenian soldiers were segregated into unarmed labor battalions and then slain, and that the death caravans of women and children did not lead to previously prepared relocation centers but rather into the clutches of personal slavery, ravaging venereal diseases, scorching heat, freezing cold, and belly-swelling starvation.24 Yet the authors have endeavored to minimize the scope of the tragedy and have even claimed that the worst atrocities of the war befell the Muslim population and that after the Turkish surrender in 1918 the minority elements, including the Armenians, ‘massacred large numbers of recently discharged Ottoman soldiers as well as thousands of civilians without any visible effort by the Allied forces to intervene.’25 Many other errors and untenable assertions have been made in the sections of the book dealing with the Transcaucasian government in 1917-1918, the Turkish invasion of tile Caucasus in 1918, the Republic of Armenia in 1918-1920, Soviet-Turkish collaboration in 1920, and the burning of Smyrna in 1922, but mere mention of these must suffice here.26
The fact that a strongly biased work such as History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey has been authored by an individual enjoying considerable academic recognition and published by a highly reputable press causes deep consternation. It is most regrettable that the specialists to whom the publisher sent the manuscript for expert advice could not or would not draw attention to the shortcomings and make recommendations that might have saved the book from becoming a disservice to scholarship in general and to the study of Armenian-Turkish relations in particular. One may speculate why a work with such serious flaws in methodology and objectivity would emanate from the pen of Professor Shaw. But about the book there can be no speculation. What could have been — what should have been — a valuable text is instead an unfortunate example of nonscholarly selectivity and deceptive presentation. The study of Armenian-Turkish relations has been carried far beyond the realm of revisionism.
RICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN
Professor of Arrnenian and Near Eastern History
University of California,
Los Angeles
Footnotes
1 Volume I by S. J. Shaw is subtitled Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808. Volume II by S. J, Show and Ezel Kural Shaw is subtitled Reform, Revolutions and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808—1975 (Cambridge, London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1976-1977). All citations of the work in this paper refer to Volume II (cited hereafter as Shaw and Shaw).
2 Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 61.
3 Shaw and Shaw, pp. 201-202
4 Aside from the Armenian records, see, for example, Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Reports by Her Majesty’s Diplomatic and Consular Agents in Turkey respecting Conditions of the Christian Subjects of the Porte, 1868-1875, Sessional Papers, 1877, Vol XCII, c. 1739. and Instructions to Her Majesty’s Embassy at Constantinople respecting Financial and Administrative Reform, and Protection of Christians in Turkey, 1856-1875, Sessional Papers, 1877, Vol. XCII, c. 1740. See also the several Blue Books published between 1876 and 1881 and entitled Correspondence respecting the Conditions o,f the Population in Asia Minor and Syria.
5 Shaw and Shaw. p. 188.
6 See, for example, William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902 (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935), I, 157-160.
7 Shaw and Shaw, p. 203.
8 Ibid.
9 Shaw and Shaw, pp. 203-204.
10 France, Ministere des Affaires Etrangerès. Documents diplomatiques: Affaires arméniennes: Projets de réformes dans l’empire Ottoman, 1893-1897 (Paris: Irnprimerie nationale, I897); Great Britain, House of Commons, Correspondence relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Sessional Papers, 1895, Vol. CIX, part r, c. 7894, 'Events at Sassoon, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush'; part 2, c. 7894-r, ‘Commission of Inquiry at Moush: Procés-verbaux and Separate Depositions.’ See also United States of America, The National Archives, Record Group 59, Despatches from United States Ministers to Turkey, 1818-1906, Microfilm Publication M46, rolls 56-58, March 1894-August 1895; and Diplomatic Instructions of the Department of State, 1801-1906, M77, rolls 166-167, October 1888-December 1896.
11 Great Britain, Sessional Papers, c. 7874, p. 173. See also Correspondence respecting the Introduction of Reforms in the Armenian Provinces of Asiatic Turkey, Sessional Papers, 1896, VoL XCV, c. 7923.
12 See especially the British Sessional Papers entitled Correspondence relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, and Correspondence relative to the Armenian Question and Reports from Her Majesty’s Consular Officers in Asiatic Turkey. For the period 1892-1896, these are c. 7927, c. 8015, c. 8108, and c. 8273. See also France, Affaires arméniennes, documents 91-235, and Supplément, 1895-1896 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897); Gerrnary, Auswartiges Amt, Die grosse Politik der europaischen Kabinette, 1871-1914 (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagagesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1922-1927), X, nos. 2410 2476 passim; United States, National Archives, Record Group 59, Despatches from United States Consuls; Sivas, 1886-1906, Microfilm Publication T681;; Erzerum, 1895-1904,T568; Harput, 1895-1906, T579; Despatches from United States Ministers to Turkey, M46, rolls 59-62, September1895-February 1897; Diplomatic Instructions of the Department of State, M77, roll 167, October 1894-December1896. For representative eyewitness accounts and studies by Europeans and Americans, see Johannes Lepsius, Armenien und Europa (Berlin: Faber, 1896. French ed., Lausanne: Payot, 1896. English ed, London; Hodder and Stoughton, 1897); J, R. Harris and Helen B. Harris, Letters from the Scenes of Recent Massacres in Armenia (London: Nisbet, 1897); W. W. Howard, Horrors of Armenia: The Story of an Eye-Witness (New York: Armenian Relief Association, 1896); Félix Charmentant, Maryrologe arménien: Tableau officiel des massacres d'Arménie (Paris: Belin Frères, 1896).
13 Shaw and Shiaw, p. 204.
14 Ibid., pp. 204 205.
15 Shaw and Shaw, p. 205.
16 Ibid.
17 See, for example, Great Britain, House of Commons, Further Correspondence respecting the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey and Events in Constantinople, Sessional Papers, 1897, Vol. Cl, c. 8305; France, Affaires arrnéniennes, nos. 236-296, and Foreign Ministry Archives, Nouve!le série, Correspondance politique et commerciale: Turquie, politique intérieure, n.s. 71-72, February 1896 April 1897. See also Armenian accounts in Armen Garo [Garegin Pasdermadjian], Aprvadi orer (Boston: Hairenik, 1948), pp. 95-162, and Hushapatum H. H. Dashnaktsutian, 1899-1950 (Boston: Hairenik, 1950), pp. 280-301.
18 Shaw and Shaw, p. 281.
19 See, for example, France, Foreign Ministry Archives, n.s. 83, January 1908-February 1910; United States, National Archives, Numerical File 1906—1910: Turkey, 1909. The report of Hagop Babiguian, a member of the Ottoman Parliament and its commission of inquiry is published as La situation des Arméniens en Turquie exposèe par des documents (1908-1912): Rapport en 1909 sur les massacres arméniens d’Adana. See also The Adana Massacres: Who Is Responsible? The Parliamentary Commission to Adana (Constantinople, 1909): Z. Duckett Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor during April, 1909 (London, 1913); Georges Brézol, Les Turcs ont passé là; Recueil de documents. . . sur les massacres d’Adana en 1909 (Paris: l’Auteur, 1911); J. d’Annezay, Au pays des massacres, saignée arménienne de 1909 (Paris, Bloud, 1910); M. Séropian, Les vépres ciliciennes: Let responsabilités: Faits et documents (Alexandria: Della Rocca, 1909); A. Adossides, Arméniens et Jeunes-Turcs: les massacres de Cilicie (Paris: Stock, 1910).
20 Shaw and Shaw, p. 314.
21 Richard G. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to lndependence, 1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 42.
22 Shaw and Shaw, p. 315.
23 Shaw and Shaw, p. 315-316.
24 For an extensive bibliography of archival and published materials in Western languages relating to the elimination of the Ottoman Armenian population, see Richard C. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography relating to the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915 -1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Armenian Heritage Press, 1978).
25 Shaw and Shaw, p. 330.
26 Ibid., pp. 322-323, 324-326, 356-357, 362-363. Not mentioning the study of Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair (New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966, British ed, London: Faber and Faber, 1972), the Shaws write, ‘Perhaps the last atrocity of the war was the suggestion, quickly taken up by the Western press, that the victorious Turkish army was responsible for burning the conquered second city of the empire’ (Shaw and Shaw, p. 363).
THE AUTHORS RESPOND
No historical survey of so vast a subject as the Ottoman empire can possibly provide detailed and definitive coverage of every topic it includes. Thus we hope and expect that controversial subjects touched on in our book will stimulate responsible academic criticism, further research, and eventually a fuller understanding of that very elusive goal, the ‘truth,’ It is unfortunate that in presenting his view Dr. Hovannisian argues more like a prosecuting attorney seeking to denigrate or suppress information unfavorable to his position than a historian dealing with particular issues within an academic context. He allows that there is ‘room for a revisionist history of the Ottoman Empire’ provided that it is based on ‘convincing scholarship.’ To those who are ethnically, politically, and emotionally committed to a particular cause, however, no amount of scholarship could bring ‘conviction.’ Does Dr. Hovannisian really wish to perpetuate the biased image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ that has its roots in the age of the Crusades? Does not his suspicion of Turkish source material, nay his complete disregard of it, reflect anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim propensities? The weight of his accusations rests on the contention that the authors relied ‘almost exclusively on Turkish and a few supportive foreign sources’ and neglected ‘the enormous corpus of material that contradicts’ their thesis. First, this happens to be Ottoman history, and as such, Ottoman and Turkish source materials must he deemed of primary significance and importance. No history of France would be considered methodologically sound and balanced if it were construed on the basis of Italian and English or Spanish sources. Second, both primary and secondary non-Ottoman as well as Ottoman sources were extensively used and cited in the book, as is reflected in our citations given below in response to specific points raised by Dr. Hovannisian. Third, the matter of which source is given greater weight on a specific issue, factors of credibility aside, depends on the issue one is seeking to illuminate. If the question is how the Armenians suffered, then accounts of personal experience are of greatest import. If it is how deeply they suffered, it would be in order to take into account the sufferings of other peoples, Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Jews and the like, in the same circumstances. If it involves Ottoman government policies, Ottoman sources must be considered and used, first and foremost. If the question is why tragedies took place, one must treat the topic in the broader context of socio-economic, political, and ideological currents that are of relevance. Engaging in such an analytical interpretation is every historian’s privilege and duty. It is not a justification of what happened but, rather, an attempt to explain some of the complexities that surround ‘controversial’ issues.
The whole trend of Ottoman and Middle Eastern historiographv during the last two generations has, indeed, been to develop and use Ottoman Turkish and Arabic source materials in order to correct the long-standing Western ignorance of and prejudice regarding the Turks, the Arabs, and lslam. The late Lewis V. Thomas, who resided in Turkey for a short time during World War II before beginning a brilliant career at Princeton, was one of the pioneers of this movement. But Dr. Hovannisian’s effort to equate a subjective and almost apologetic remark by Professor Thomas with our overall interpretation of Ottoman and Turkish history is another misrepresentation and an absurdity. While we recognize and record the effects of nationalism on the different peoples of the Ottoman Empire, nowhere in the two volumes do we claim that forced ‘Turkification and Moslemization’ was a necessary precondition for the Turkish Republic. The Republic was secularist in outlook even before its realization, and whatever homogeneity it has was a product of its struggle for existence during and after World War I.
Dr. Hovannisian refuses to use or accept the principal sources available on the issues he mentions simply because they were written by Turks and insists that research he limited to carefully chosen contemporary wartime propaganda and politically and racially motivated ‘investigation’ reports whose flawed methods and one-sided procedures are apparent from even a cursory examination of their records, He reacts to an objective study of the issues and an attempt to explain the events of the time with accusations of bias and by citing entire paragraphs in a general context of refutation without actually indicating which of their statements he believes to be in error and on what basis. Even where certain controversial issues could be elucidated by the use of relevant Armenian documents, he fails to do so, It is difficult also to understand his insistence that everything we write of interest to him is new, and revisionary, and based entirely on Ottoman sources since most of our statements have long since been established in Western and Turkish scholarly studies and on the basis of sources in numerous languages, including Armenian.
The various discussions in the History of the Ottoman Empire — and Professor Hovannisian in fact is looking at only seven out of almost one thousand pages — are based on some twenty years of research in Western as well as Ottoman archives and are fully documented in the bibliography of the work. In addition to the reports found in the Public Record Office, London, the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, the Haus- Hof- und Staazs-Archiv, Vienna, and the National Archives, Washington, the following records were consulted by the authors in the Basbakanlik Arsivi/Prime Minister’s Archives, Istanbul: (a) Minutes of the Council of Ministers/Meclis-i Vükela Mazbatalari, which are only partly complete for 1885 to 1893 and then fully complete until 1922, in 224 bound volumes; (b) Reports to the Council of Ministers and dossiers leading to imperial decrees/Mazbata ve irade-i seniye dosyalari, 16 bound volumes for 1881 through 1916; (c) Draft copies or orders, protocols and other official documents issued by the Council of Ministers/Iradat-i seniye re tezakir-i resmiye ye mazbata musveddati, 46 bound volumes for 1916 through 1922; (d) Dossiers of petitions presented to the Council of Ministers, including supporting documents/Tezakir-i seniya dosyalari, 117 volumes for 1888 through 1897; (e) Archives of the Sublime Porte/Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi, consisting of some 200,000 dossiers emanating from the office of the Grand Vezir, in particular his correspondence with the Ministry of the Interior (catalogued in registers nos, 52-122), the Ministry of War (registers nos. 193- 223), the Ministry/Department of Gendarmerie (registers nos. 650—663), the Anatolian Inspection (Commission (registers nos. 664-668), and the Ministry of Finance (registers nos. 400-517); registers of all secret telegrams sen[t] to and from the Sublime Porte (registers nos. 690-705), and registers of foreign and minority affairs (registers nos. 706-715), all between 1876 and 1922; (f) Dossiers of trade legislation relating to the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1809 and 1916; (g) the Archives of the Yildiz Palace, covering the reign of Abdulhamit II (1876-1909); (h) the Mesail-i Mühimme (registers of important problems) on the Armenian Question, 1876-1878; (i) Registers concerning the non-Muslim millets/Gayri Muslim cemaatlara ait defterler, series 8-21 registers of decrees concerning the Armenians between 1860 and 1904 — and series 9 — registers of berats issued to Armenians between 1839 and 1910.
In the Yildiz Palace Archives (at the Basbakanlik Arsivi), the following general reports and dossiers were consulted: K-I/2156/22,23 and 24, memoranda by Abdulhamit II on the Armenian disturbances in the east; K13/ZII2/35, reports by the Anatolian Investigation Commission regarding revolts and disturbances in the eastern provinces; K24/Z162/332M, orders issued by Hakki Pas[h]a while he was governor of Sivas; K30/Z98/36 and 50, various reports on the Armenian Question; K18/Z93/553/50, 52-59, reports on the state of the population in Anatolia, Bitlis, Sivas, Musul, Van, Hakkari, Maras[h], Konya, Ankara, Sivas and Koçgiri; K18/Z93/60-84, organization and activities of the Ottoman gendarmerie in the different eastern provinces, including several commission reports; K14/Z126/298, Report on the Armenians in Anatolia by Mehmet el-Mansur Efendi; K30/Z31, K31/Z27/299 and K30/Z50, memoranda and reports on the Armenian Question between 1895 and 1903.
Hovannisian fails to understand that all scholars need not have his biases and interests. He insists that, regarding issues and problems that concern him, others share his approaches and emphases, accusing those who do not of bias or worse. He also does not understand that issues that are of vital importance to Armenian history may not have the same standing in the context of Ottoman history. These tendencies appear very clearly in his analyses of particular points in our book with which he disagrees.
(1) Regarding the massacres and countermassacres that took place in Anatolia in 1895-1896, we did in fact state: ‘The winter of 1895-1896 witnessed large-scale suffering throughout Anatolia as general security broke down, but little could he done until the army was brought in during the Spring’ (II, 204). The methods used by the Armenian nationalist groups to secure foreign intervention at this time were very well documented by the distinguished Harvard University diplomatic historian, the late William L. Langer, in Diplomacy of Imperialism (2d ed.; New York, 1956), on the basis of Armenian as well as Western reports, and without any use of Turkish sources. Thus he found in the British Parliamentary Papers (Turkey No. 10, 1879, nos. 45 and 62 and Turkey No. 7, 1880, no. 3) statements from the British ambassador in June and July, 1879, such as ‘The same intrigues are now being carried on in Asia Minor to establish an Armenian nationality and to bring about a state of things which may give rise to a Christian outcry and European interference’ (p. 153); in the platform of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, it was stated that arrangements should be made ‘to organize revolutionary bands which should fight the government incessantly and should terrorize government officials, traitors, usurers, and all kinds of exploiters’ (Platform of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, 1892; M. Hovhannesian, Dashnagtzoutiune ev nera Hageratorinere [Tiflis, 1906], pp. 19-20, 151-152; quoted in Langer, p. 155). Avedis Nazarbek, founder of the Hunchaks, wrote (quoted in Langer, p. 156) that his aim was ‘to start a great insurrectionary movement in Turkey.... It was confidently expected that when the whole Empire was aflame, the European powers would step in and secure the rights of the small nations. Then, ultimately, it might be possible to unite Turkish, Russian and Persian Amerians in one socialist state’ (Henchak, I, 1 [Nov. 1887], I, 11-12 [Oct—Nov. 1888]; Nazarbek, ‘Zeitun,’ Contemporary Review, April 1896, pp. 513-528; Nazarbek, Through the Storm (London, 1899); Vicomte des Coursons, La Rébellion Arméniene (Paris, 1895), pp. 42 ff; Victor Bérard, La Politique du Sultan (Paris, 1897), pp. 155-156, 166-170). Langer reports (p. 157) that
Revolutionary placards were being posted in the cities, and there were not a few cases of the blackmailing of wealthy Armenians, who were forced to contribute to the cause. Europeans in Turkey were agreed that the immediate aim of the agitators was to incite disorder, bring about inhuman reprisals, and so provoke the intervention of the powers. For that reason, it was said, they operated by preference in areas where the Armenians were in a hopeless minority, so that the reprisals would be certain.
Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, founder of Robert College, reported that a Hunchak member told him that his organization would ‘watch their opportunity to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains. The enraged Moslems will then rise, and fall upon the defenseless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarity that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilization and take possession.’ He concluded that ‘we Armenians have determined to be free. Europe listened to the Bulgarian horrors and made Bulgaria free. She will listen to our cry when it goes up in the shrieks and blood of millions of women and children . . .‘ (Boston Congregationalist, December 23, 1893, reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1895, p. 1416, and in Great Britain, Turkey No 6, [1896]). Of the Dashnaks, the English vice-consul at Van, Mr. Williams, reported in March, 1896 that 'They terrorize over their countrymen, and by their outrages and folly, excite the Mohammedan population and render nugatory all efforts to carry out reforms. I am firmly convinced that if they could be put down, or even kept quiet, one of the greatest obstacles to security in this district, as probably all over Anatolia, would he removed.' He went on to state: ‘The more I learn of past events and the present state of this province, the more clearly I see that the criminal actions of these societies have been largely responsible for the terrible scenes enacted here and all over Anatolia during the last autumn, much as the Turks are to blame’ (Turkey No. 8, 1896, no. 117 Langer, p. 322). Langer reports: ‘That the members of the Federation meant business was shown by the outbreak it organized in Van in mid-June 1896. The Armenians fell on the Kurds and killed a goodly number, with the usual result, the massacre of the innocent population. The outbreak was evidently meant as the first move in the new campaign of frightfulness which was to attract the attention of the powers, for in rapid succession similar “disturbances” took place in many other centres’ (Langer, p. 322; Lord Warkworth, Notes from a Diary in Asiatic Turkey [London, 1898], pp. 122 ff.; Great Britain, Turkey No. 8 [1896], nos. 246 ff., 273, and esp. no. 337; Affaires Arméniennes, 1893-1897, no. 220). These events were the background to the Armenian occupation of the Ottoman Bank on 26 August 1896 (described in Langer, pp. 323-324). Following the occupation, when the British diplomat F. A. Barker returned to Istanbul after conveying some of the Armenian nationalists to Greece, he reported that when he indicated his fear that innocent people would die as a result of their actions, they answered, ‘Those who die will do so as true patriots and martyrs, and as to the sympathy of the Powers, if we had thought we would lose it, we would have forced their hands by remaining in the Bank.’ He added, ‘They also told me that it had been their intention to kill all the Turks in the employ of the Bank before blowing the latter up, but that they had not had time, as things finished sooner than they had expected' (Langer, p. 324; front M. Varandian, Hai Heghapoghagan Dashnaghtzoutan Badmoutiun [Paris, 1932], I, 158 ff.; Great Britain, Turkey No. 1 [1897], nos. 25, 26; Affaires Arméniennes, nos. 236 ff., 254; and ‘The Constantinople Massacre,’ Contemporary Review, October, 1896, pp. 457-465.) Is more proof needed?
Dr. William Langer: an extraordinary scholar
Regarding the massacres and countermassacres that took place in Istanbul following the occupation of the bank in 1896, Langer states,
Nothing is further removed from my intention than to condone the Constantinople massacres or any other. At the same time it is the duty of the historian to look at the facts from all possible angles, and to avoid being carried away by the tidal wave of uncritical emotionalism. The British and the Americans were, from the start, the most gullible and the most thirsty for stories of blood-curdling atrocities. The greater credit, therefore, to those among them who managed to keep some sense of perspective. Mr. Herbert, the British chargé, appreciated the provocation to the Turks. Mr. Hume-Beaman, an expert on things oriental, roundly declared that every member of the Armenian committees should be hanged, and that the responsibilities for the massacres rested divided between these cowardly committees and the ‘braggart and ineffectual intervention of Europe’.
Speaking of the Sultan, Hume-Beaman continued:
It is all very well to call him ‘the Great Assassin’, but from the Muslim point of view he was very fairly justified in killing any number of rebellious infidels who were being supported by combined Europe in what he and every Turk considered as a plot against the realm. The Turks retorted on England especially that we used to blow Moslems from the muzzles of our guns and burn whole villages and mosques in India for an insult offered to one of our officials... (Langer, pp. 324-325; Turkey No, 1, 1897; Sidney Whitman, Turkish Memories [London, 1914], ch, ii; Louis Rarnbert, Notes et Impressions de Turquie [Paris, 1926]. pp. 15 ff.; A. G. Hume-Beaman, Twenty Years in the Near East [London. 1898], pp. 304-305).
Similar utterances were quoted in Sir Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople (New York, 1916) and in numerous issues of the British Parliamentary reports on Turkey, quoted by Langer on p. 157. Langer concluded (p. 163) that ‘Enough has been said above to make unnecessary any further reference here to the Hentchak and its program and methods. The leaders were quite prepared to have thousands of their fellow-countrymen massacred in order to force intervention by the European powers and in order to raise from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a new Armenian socialist state.’
Professor Louise Nalbandian, in her Armenian Revolutionary Movement, based on Armenian sources (University of California Press, 1963), summarizes the Hunchak program:
Agitation and terror were needed to ‘elevate the spirit of the people’ ....The people were also to be incited against their enemies and were to ‘profit’ from the retaliatory actions of these same enemies. Terror was to be used as a method of protecting the people and winning their confidence in the Hunchak program. The party aimed at terrorizing the Ottoman government, thus contributing toward lowering the prestige of that regime and working toward its complete disintegration. The government itself was not to be the only focus of terroristic tactics. The Hunchaks wanted to annihilate the most dangerous of the Armenian and Turkish individuals who were then working for the government as well as to destroy all spies and informers. To assist them in carrying out all of these terroristic acts, the party was to organize an exclusive branch specificity devoted to performing acts of terrorism.... The most opportune time to institute the general rebellion far carrying out immediate objectives was when Turkey was engaged in a war (pp. 110-111).
She goes on to state that ‘The Hunchaks made the most of Turkish oppression by spreading various alarming reports through their publications, including exaggeration of Turkish atrocities’ (p. 119). The Dashnak program (pp. 168-171) included aspirations 'To organize fighting bands..., to use every means to arm the people..., to stimulate fighting and terrorize government officials, informers, traitors, usurers and every kind of exploiter,’ and ‘to expose government establishments to looting and destruction.’ Nalbandian concludes that ‘The Program of 1892 officially sanctioned terrorism as a method of activity, and in this respect coincided with the tactics of the Hunchaks.... The Hunchaks had used terroristic methods even before 1892. . ‘.
The late, great Dr. Stanford Shaw
This information is supported by Ottoman documents on the subject. Nazim Pas[h]a, Ermeni Tarih-i Vukuati, Basbakanlik .Arsivi, Yildiz K36/Z131/139(80), contains almost one thousand pages of captured Armenian documents. See also: Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi (Ankara, 1950), pp. 423-577; Yildiz K35/Z50/345, Report of an Investigation Commission on the activities of the Hunchaks; K97/Z50/334M, French and Ottoman documents describing the activities of secret Armenian groups in the Ottoman Empire; and K-C/11, pp. 1-389, reports of Ali Ferruh Bey, Ottoman Ambassador to Washington, on Armenian activities in the United States between 1897 and 1900. It should be noted that these tactics, the accounts of which Dr. Hovannisian finds unconvincing, were not unique in the empire at that time. They were shared by some of the Balkan nationalists who were fighting the Ottomans in Macedonia. Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, in their recent study of The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (University of Washington Press, 1977), remark that the Bulgarian nationalists ‘did not hesitate to send raiding parties into Macedonia to terrorize villages or even to assassinate Turks with the hope that reprisals would force the population to revolt. The Greeks and Serbs responded with their own acts of violence. . . . Not only did the local population suffer from the action of their more fanatical members, but the Ottoman authorities also were caught in a dilemma. They were responsible for maintaining order, yet if they acted to apprehend and punish the guilty, they could find themselves pilloried in the European press as barbaric and oppressive even when the charges were not deserved’ (p. 212). Further research in the Dashnak archives, now located in Boston. is needed to see whether the charges related by Langer, Cyrus Hamlin, and others were, in fact, justified.
(2) On the Sasun affair. Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, pp. 160-161, related: ‘After numerous minor exploits the Armenian revolutionaries arranged for a grand coup They organized a really formidable rising among the Armenian mountaineers of the Sassun region, just to the southwest of Mush.’ Similar information on it and the Mus[h] affair is found in: Great Britain, Turkey No. 1 (1895), no. 252; Turkey No. 1 (1897), no. 142; Turkey No. 8(1896), nos. 117, 246, 247, 273, 337; Louise Nalbandian, Armenian Revolutionary Movement, pp. 121-122; Sidney Whitman, Turkish Memories (London, 1914); and Sir Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe (London, 1900), p. 456. The complete investigation commission reports were found in the Yildiz Palace Archives: K22/Z141/386, K22/Z153/415, K9/Z72/1072, K11/Z120/1222, K14/Z126/390, K31/Z148/2582, K31/Z158/2021, K31/Z45/1863, K31/Z45/2023, K36/Z141/386. K36/Z141/419 K36/Z148/2581, K31/Z111/1985, K36/Z36/393, K35/Z50/2261, K35/Z85/35 (foreign documents), K35/Z30/33, K97/Z50/306, K35/Z30/29, K13/Z112/44 and K11/Z120/1222. The reports of the Anatolian investigation Commission, in the Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi, listed in register no. 667, and the reports to it (listed in register no. 664) also were studied before we reached our conclusions.
The information regarding the population of the Ottoman Empire is fully documented in History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, pp. 117, 170(101), 239-241, 268(31), 270(96), 337(160); also Kemal H. Karpat, ‘Ottoman Population Records and the Census of 1881/82-1893,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978), 237-274; and S. J. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman Census System and Population. 1831-1914,’ IJMES, 9 (1978), 325-338. That all elements of the Ottoman population suffered terribly is demonstrated by a recent study of Ottoman population records, subjected to detailed computer analysis, which concludes that 20 per cent of the entire Muslim population of Anatolia, about 2.9 million people, were killed between 1914 and 1923 (Justin McCarthy, ‘The Muslim Population of Anatolia, 1878-1927,’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978).
(3) On the oppression of the mass of Armenians by the Armenian oligarchy and the Patriarch, we based our information on a survey of the relevant Ottoman records. Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, also related:
Like the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Gregorian Church had been given practical self-government by Mohammad the Conquerer, so that the Patriarch of Constantinople was an important and powerful official. In actual practice, however, he was, in the early 19th century, merely the agent of the wealthy Armenian officials and bankers of the capital who formed a sort of aristocracy, cringing before their Turkish masters but taking a high hand in all questions concerning the Armenian Church and the Armenian people (M A. Ubicini, Letters on Turkey [London, 1856], II, letters iv-vii ; M. B. Dadian, ‘La Société Arménienne Contemporaine,’ Revue des Deux Mondes [15 June 1867], pp. 903-938; Leon Arpée, The Armenian Awakening, [Chicaco, 1909], ch. ix).
(4) On Russian encouragement of Armenian revolts against the Sultan, we relied principally on Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, who stated:
In the 18th century they looked to Christian Russia to save them. They established contact with Peter the Great who promised much and did little. They were encouraged by Catherine the Great to hope for the erection of a Kingdom of Ararat under Russian protection. . . . [And] It was not until Russia began to embark upon a crusade to liberate the Christians under the Ottoman yoke that the Armenians of the Caucasus bethought them of their brothers across the frontier (p. 150). [Also] As the Russian armies, commanded chiefly by Russian-Armenian generals, approached Erzurum in 1877, the Christian populatton was enthusiastic and prepared to join the invaders, but when the Russians were obliged to fall back the Armenians hastily changed their minds (p. 151). [And] At Constantinople the Armenian leaders at first repudiated any connexion with the Russians and protested loudly against all suggestions of revolt. But the insurrection in Bulgaria, followed by the active intervention of the western powers. brought about a chance of mind (p. 151) [and so forth).
(5) Professor Hovannisian simply is mistaken in denying that attempts were made on the lives of the Sultan and Grand Vezir during the 1896 disturbances, presumably because of his reliance on the Western press instead of the Ottoman documents available on the subject. Investigation reports on the attacks were consuted in the Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi nos. 137562 and 139421; Yildiz K48/Z145/2479, K36/Z141/282, K24/Z162/31, and K35/Z34/1397. As a result, the Sultan rarely left the palace grounds during the next twenty years, attending the Friday prayers at a mosque built on the palace grounds and learning about what was going on in his empire from an ever increasing army of police, secret police, spies, and photographers.
(6) If Dr. Hovannisian looks at a map of the entire Ottoman empire, he will see why the title ‘Northeastern Front' was correctly used to describe the events in eastern Anatohia during World War I. Nor does he seem to have read our discussion, We do describe how over 90 per cent of the Armenian residents of the empire died or fled during and after the war, and obviously from all the provinces, not just from those in the east where deportations were carried out in, 1915 and 1916. He also seems confused regarding our method of citation. Footnotes indicate mainly sources of quotations or particular laws or documents. The Bibliography indicates complete references on particular subjects. Regarding the deportations and other wartime events in Anatolia, we consulted the minutes of the Ottoman Council of Ministers (Meclis-i Vükela Masbatalari), which set policies, received a mass of information, and discussed the problems that arose, particularly in the sessions of May 14/27 and May 17/30, 1331 / 1915. Substantial documentation also was found in the Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi dossiers no. 179608, 189578, 175321, 203987, and 148765; Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Turk Inkilabi Tarihi (3 vols. in 10 parts, Ankara, 1940-1967), II/3, pp. 18-100, Ill/1, pp. 349-380, 111/3, pp. 35-89; Gen. Fahri Belen, Birinci Cihan Harbinde Turk Harbi, 5 vols., Ankara, 1963-1967; M. Larcher, La guerre turque dans Ia guerre mondiale, Paris, 1926; Ahmet Emin (Yalman), Turkey in the World War, New Haven, Conn., and London, 1930; Halide Edib (Adivar), The Memoirs of Halidé Edib, London, 1926; lrfan Orga, Portrait of a Turkish Family, London, 1950; Ali lhsan Sabis, Harb Hatiralarim, 2 vols., Istanbul, 1943-1951; C. Korganoff, La participation des Arméniens à la guerre mondiale sur le front du Caucase, 1914-1918, Paris, 1927; A. Poidebard, Le rôle militaire des Arméniens sur le front du Caucase, Paris, 1920; and F. Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasis, 1914-1921, New York, 1951.
Dr. Ezel Kural Shaw, in 1990
Among the more important dispatches consulted in the British Foreign Office archives (Public Record Office) were FO 371 /2130/15735, dispatch from the German Ambassador in Istanbul to the British Foreign Office, received in London, 9 April1914; FO 371/2130/31141, Sir Louis Mallet to Sir Edward Grey, 2 July 1914; FO 371/2146/70404, Cheetham to Grey, 12 November 1914; FO 371/2485, containing copies of various Armenian nationalist plans for action against the Ottoman government at the start of the war; FO 371/2484/25167, Sir H. Bax Ironside to Foreign Office, 3 March 1915; FO 371/2484/37609, Ironside to Grey, 6 March 1915; FO 371/2485/41444, Armenian National Defense Committee in Boston to Grey, 23 March 1915 ; FO 371/4241/170751, Admiral de Robeck to Curzon, 12 December 1919, containing copies of orders issued by Ottoman officials concerning the deportations; FO 371 /2768/39517; FO 371/2130/5748, Ian Smith to Sir Louis Mallet, 10 January 1914; FO 371/5045/ E2736, Wardrop to Foreign Office, Tiflis, 11 March 1920; FO 371/4962/E14033, 9 November 1920; FO 371/4946/E14102, 13 November 1920; FO 371/5041/E357, 17 February 1920; FO 371/4965/E15131, minute by Lord Curzon, 5 December 1920; FO 371/3658/158226, Director of Military Intelligence to Foreign Office, 16 Septermber 1918; FO 371/3660/144753, 22 September 1919; FO /3660/154951, 20 October 1919, Etela ul-Mulk to Cox; FO 371/3550/157887, Wardrop to Foreign Office; FO 371/4159/137901, Robeck to Curzon, 25 September 1919; FO 371/4854/E2775, Wardrop to Curzon, 4 March 1920; FO/4161/E173267, secret intelligence report dated 18 December 1920; FO 371/4960/E12174; FO 371 /4215/157720, Sir Eyre Crowe to George Kidston, 1 December 1919; FO 371/4215/153371, Kidston to Crowe, 28 November 1919; FO 371/9158/E5523, Talat Pas[h]a’s instructions for the Armenian deportations in 1915; FO 371/3410/455, Vahan Cardashian to Lord Robert Cecil, 7 July 1918; FO 371/4222/142744, British Intelligence to Director of Military Intelligence, 15 September 1919; FO 3714240/161530, Lord Granville to Foreign Office, 8 December 1919; FO 371/4240/161530, M. Constantinis and C. Pissani to Lloyd George, received 26 February 1920; FO 371/4958/E9127, Minute by D. G. Osborn, 19 July 1920; FO 371/5135/E12594, Venizelos to Lloyd George, 5 October 1920, E371/5054/E9984, Robeck to Curzon, 16 August 1920: FO 371/4161/169898, Aueurin Williams to Cecil Harmsworth, 9 January 1920; FO 371/5120/E14122, Union Nationale Armenienne to Foreign Office, 30 October 1920; [FO] 371/5210/E13870, Minute by D. G. Osborne, 9 October 1921; FO 371/4157/66819, C. F. Bates to Albert Howe Lybyer, 12 April 1920; FO 371/4165/79400, A. F. Wavell to British High Commissioner, Istanbul, 15 April 1919; FO 371 /5053/E8264, Percy Christian to Lord Allenby, 2 May 1920; FO 371/5051/E6966, Lord Derby to Curzon, 21 June 1920; FO 371/5210//E13870, A. de Fleauriau to Sir J, Tilley, 8 November 1920; FO 371/5210/14898, Sir Horace Rumbold to Curzon, 19 November 1920; FO 371/3658/84426, Admiral Richard Webb to Curzon, 17 May 1919; FO 371/4185/156735, Robeck to Curzon, 19 November 1919; and FO 371/5043/1358. The most recent studies of this newly opened material are by Salahi R. Sonyel, 'Yeni Belgelerin Isigi altinda Ermeni Tehcirleri — Armenian Deportations: A Re-Appraisal in the Light of New Documents’, Belleten, 36 (1972), 31-69, and ‘Tehcir ye “Kirimlar” Konusunda Ermeni Propagandasi, Hiristiyanlik Dünyasini Nasil Aldatti,’ Belleten, 40 (1977), 137-185, both of which are based on extensive research in the British Foreign Office archives.
Among Ottoman documents of interest are: Ministry of interior general order of 28 April 1915, which, after ordering the imprisonment and deportation of members of the Hunchak and Dashnak groups, adds: ‘As this order is exclusively a measure against the extension of the Committees, avoid executing it in such a way which might cause the mutual massacre of Muslim and Armenian groups’ (found in Public Record Office, FO 371/4241/170751 along with an annotation by W. S. Edmonds, Consular Officer of the Eastern Department, that ‘There is not enough evidence here to bring home the charge of massacre any closer.’)
On 30 July 1915, Minister of Interior Talat Pasa ordered his governors: ‘Forbid the entry or free circulation of all foreigners and suspicious persons in the localities to be evacuated; if such people are already in the district they should be made to leave at once ; if such persons have bought goods (of evacuated persons) at ridiculous prices, measures should be made to annul the sale, restore prices to the proper level, and thus prevent illegal profits from being made; Armenians should be allowed and authorized to take away with them everything they want; if there is found goods not taken away which have deteriorated as a result, sell it by auction; if other merchandise can remain without deteriorating, keep it on behalf of the original owner; prevent all agreements regarding renting, pawning, attaching or sale or mortgage which is likely to deprive the owner of his property . . .‘ (FO 371/9158/E5523).
On 30 July 1915, Talat’s secretary Ali Münif ordered ‘. . . Make arrangements for special officials to accompany groups of Armenians being relocated, and make sure they are provided with food and other things they need, with all expenditures incurred in this way being paid out of government allottments [sic] for the emigrants’ (FO 371/9158/E5523).
On 15 August 1930 [1915], the Ministry of Interior’s instructions on the transportation of Armenians to Syria and lrak included: ‘If among those to be relocated . . . there are produced official documents showing that a family supporter is an Ottoman soldier, or if there are women or orphans without supporters, or Catholics and Protestants who do not wish to go to the assigned places, they should be separated and settled among the villages of the provinces and districts adjacent to the stations. The families of soldiers, Protestants and Catholics not yet relocated . . . must be left in their places of residence; also artisans and manufacturers necessary to the country and workers employed in factories which produce goods of public use or who are employed on the railways and in railway stations, . . . The food necessary for emigrants while on their journey until they reach their destinations must be provided . . . for poor emigrants by credit for the installation of the emigrants. The camps provided for transported persons must be kept under regular supervision; the necessary steps for their well-being should he taken, also to provide order and security. Make sure that indigent emigrants are given sufficient food and that their health is assured by daily visits from a doctor ....Sick people, poor people, women and children must be sent by rail, and others should be sent on mules, in carts or on foot according totheir powers of endurance. Each convoy should be accompanied by a detachment of the guards, and the food supplies for each convoy must be guarded until the destination is reached. . . . In cases where emigrants are attacked, either in the camps or during the journeys, these attacks must be repelled immediately. . . . Officials who receive bribes from the emigrants, or who abuse women by promises or threats, or who establish illicit relations with them. will be immediately recalled, with particulars to be sent to their court martials for severe punishment’ (FO 371/9158/5523).
The Ottoman cabinet minutes, Meclis-i vükela rnazbatalari, at the Basbakanlik Arsivi, Istanbul, report again and again of disorders in eastern Anatolia, of killings and deaths of Muslims and Christians alike as the result of the activities of maurauding [sic] armies and bandit forces, large-scale communal massacres and countermassacres, and famine and disease; investigation commissions were sent, and on the basis of their repons efforts were made to restore order and end the killings and deaths and to punish all those responsible, both Muslim and Christian (see, e.g., reports of meetings of 15 August 1915, 1331, 29 August 1916/1332, 17 December 1916/1332, 1 March 1917/1333 10 September 1915/1331, 16 September 1915/1331, 10 October 1915/1333, 26 October 1915/1331 14 May 1915/1331, 17 May 1915/1331, (summarized in Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Turk Inkilabi Tarihi (3 vols. in 10 parts; Ankara, 1940-1967), II/3. 18-100, and III/3, 35-59); 2 July 1915/1331, 13 July 1915/1331, 29 July 1915/1331, 12 March 1917/1333, 17 March 1917/1333, 3 April 1917/1333, 10 May 1917/1333, 17 May 1917/1333, 15 June 1917/1333, and 1 July 1917/1333.) We have not yet seen the cabinet records for 1918/1334. Nor have we seen the following records which still are in the process of being catalogued, but promise to provide important additional information on the years of World War I and the truce that followed:
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HR-DVE- 1 General problems and affairs
HR-DVE-1.1 Military affairs
HR-DVE-1.2 Political affairs
HR-DVE-1.2.1 Truce discussions
HR-DVE-1.2.2 Matters concerning the Allied occupation
HR-DVE-1.2.3 Matters concerning the truce and conclusion of peace
MINISTRY OF WAR
HB-1 General problems
HB-1.1 General military affairs
HB- 1.2 Specific military activities
HB-1.2.1 Truce affairs
H B-1.2.2 Matters concerning the Allied occupation
MINISTRY OF INTERIOR
DH-1 General problems in the provinces
DH-1.1 Military problems
DH-1.2 Political problems
DH-1.2.1 Problems concerned with the Allied occupation
DH-1.2.3 Problems concerning the conclusion of peace
MINISTRY OF PROVISIONS
IA-1 General problem of provisioning the population
IA-1.1 Provisions for Istanbul
IA- 1.2 Provisions for the province
IA-1.2.1 Problems involved with exports and imports
MINISTRY OF THE NAVY
BH-1 General problems
BH-1.1 Military activities
BH-1.2 Political activities
BH-1.2.1 Truce problems
BH-1.2.2 Problems involving the Allied occupation
MINISTRY OF FINANCE
M L-1 General problems
ML-1.1 Military affairs
ML-1.2 Political affairs
ML-1.2.1 Truce affairs
ML-1.2.2 Occupation affairs
ML-1.2.3 Conclusion of peace
The reports of various provincial investigation commissions, some of which we used and cited in our hook and earlier in this paper, have been recatalogued as follows:
A-TF Investigation matters in general
A-TFA Anatolian Investigation Commissions
A-TFA-1 Anatolian Inspectorship
A-TFHC Hicaz Inspection Committee
A-TFK Investigation Commission
A-TFS Military Inspection Commissions
A-TFR Rumelia Inspection Commissions
A-TFR-1
Inspectorship for Vilavet of Rumelia. Separate files for financial, military, administrative, miscellaneous, complaint, gendarmerie, Kosova, Manastir, Iskodra, Selanik and Edirne affairs.
Finally, separate files are now being established concerning the affairs of all the major non-Muslim ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenians, and these should be of immense assistance when they become available.
For additional information, see an important new article by Attila Cetin, ‘Basbakanlik Arsivinde Uygulanan Tasnif Sistemi ye Kullanilan Kotlar,’ Tarih Dergisi, 31 (March, 1977), 235-268, as well as Midhat Sertoglu, Muhteva Bakimindan Basvekalet Arsivi (Ankara, 1955).
For additional information, see an important new article by Attila Cetin, ‘Basbakanlik Arsivinde Uygulanan Tasnif Sistemi ye Kullanilan Kotlar,’ Tarih Dergisi, 31 (March, 1977), 235-268, as well as Midhat Sertoglu, Muhteva Bakimindan Basvekalet Arsivi (Ankara, 1955).
(7) Concerning the condition of the Ottoman Armenians before 1876, in stating that ‘The Armenians were as free to lead their own lives as were all other subjects of the Sultan,’ we were referring to the existence of the millet system, and the Armenian millet in particular, which gave them, as it did the other subject peoples of the empire, including the Muslims, a substantial amount of autonomy. The complaints of the Patriarchs, to which Hovannisian refers, certainly only substantiate our previous remarks, in the same paragraph, (p. 201) that ‘they [the Armenians] were interspersed with the Muslim cultivators and nomadic tribesmen, the latter of both Turkish and Kurdish origin, whose condition was no worse but certainly no better than that of their Armenian brothers. If there were economic and social problems, these involved the misrule of the bureaucrats and the great landowners and the age-old tendency of the tribesmen to raid the cultivated areas, but these conditions affected Muslims and Christians alike.’ We certainly did not state or imply that conditions were idyllic for anyone, That is why the Ottoman government had been making efforts at reform since 1808. It is difficult to understand why Professor Hovannisian, in attempting to prove his point, omitted these words. In addition, if we had, indeed, included information regarding the Patriarchial complaints to which Dr. Hovannisian refers, we most certainly would have had to do the same for similar documents received from Arabs, Turks, Jews, Kurds. Greeks, and all the other people in the empire, a simply impossible task for a book of this sort.
(8) Regarding the efforts of Patriarch Nerses and Khrimian Hairig, during the conferences of San Stefano and Berlin, to secure autonomy or independence for the east Anatolian provinces under Armenian control, we relied on Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, pp. 151-153; Tchohanian, ‘Badaskhanaduoutiunnere’ (Responsibilities), .Anahid, 1, 3 (January 1899); Léart, La Question Arménienne à la lumière des Documents (Paris, 1913), pp. 27-40; and various Ottoman reports in the Yildiz archives, K31 /Z45/1917, K28/Z114/22, K28/Z114/1473 (report on Karatodori Pas[h]a on results of meeting with Bismarck, 14 June 1878), K39/Z20/1629 (Bismarck letter to Ottoman Foreign Minister), K31/Z45/1925M (14 Cemazi I 1312, report by Said Pas[h]a). K36/Z139/2 (Memorandum on the subject by the Sultan), K14/Z126/1288 (report by Artin Efendi), K14/Z120/1260 (report by Karatodori Pas[h]a), and K28/Z114/1813. Obviously the Patriarchal archives should be examined for information on this subject.
(9) In his only effort to use Ottoman sources, regarding the Adana disturbances of 1909, Dr. Hovannisian has failed to apply the normal techniques of historical analysis. If he had, he would have found that the parliamentary reports in question were in fact part of an effort to discredit the supporters of the recently deposed Sultan Abdülhamit II, and that they did not correspond with the actual investigation reports, which are found in the papers of the Anatolian Investigation Commission, file A-TFA in the Basbakanlik Arsivi. Our discussion also was based on Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler, pp. 557-577 and Ikdam, 28 February 1909/1324.
Other collections which we used included Topkapi Saray Arsivi, E4202, Armenian nationalist documents, and their Ottoman translations, confiscated after 1882; Yildiz K36/Z4l /386, registers of orders issued on the Armenian problem between 1890 and 1905; K36 /146/2328, report on the problems of Armenians in 1877, K36 /Z148/2581, report on Armenian nationalist committees based in Bitlis and their role in the Sasun affair; Hususi Iradat 1311/3 August 1309, dossier on Armenians who had emigrated to the United States attempting to return to the Ottoman empire to foment trouble; Hususi Tradat 1311, no, 34, 5 Sentember 1311, Declaration of loyalty to the Sultan on the part of his Armenian subjects; Hususi Iradat 1311, no. 83, 12 September 1311, dossier on the Committee on Armenian Rights; Yildiz K31/Z158/2021, 4 Zilhicce 1312, report by Kamil Pas[h]a on the Armenian Question; K31/Z27/299, report by Ahmet Cevdet Pas[h]a on the Armenian millet; K33/Z73/2273, ten registers of documents concerning Ottoman Russian relations between 1876 and 1906; K31/Z45/2023, Said Pas[h]a report on the Armenian revolt, 19 Cemazi II 1313; K31/Z158/2016, Kamil Pas[h]a report on the state of the eastern Anatolian provinces, 14 Cemazi I 1312; K31/Z158/2020, Kamil Pas[h]a recommendations for reform in the eastern provinces, 24 Safar 1313; K36/Z139/53, report by S[h]akir Pas[h]a on his inspection of eastern Anatolia between 1893 and 1900; K36/Z139/84, reports of investigation commissions sent to Monastir and Van between 1890 and 1900; K36/Z140/105, register of complaints from Arakil Kuyumcuyan regarding the misdeeds of the Armenian millet leader in Kayseri Bedros in collecting the military substitution tax (bedel-i askerive) between 1902 and 1909; K37/Z47/329M, problems involved in the selection of a new Armenian Patriarch; K37/Z47/27, reports on the activities of the Hamidiye Suvari Alayi; lrade, Meclis-i Mahsus 1308/4957, reports and complaints from foreign ambassadors concerning the situation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi 104328, dossier on provision of annual subsidy to Garabed Utüciyan, publisher of Massis, by Ottoman Ministry of the Interior (16 October 1315); and Yildiz K35/Z50/334M, reports from Ottoman missions in St. Petersburg and the Caucasus on activities of the Armenian Committee of Tiflis.
The existence of these Ottoman archives has been publicized by S. J. Shaw on several occasions, in particular in ‘The Yildiz Palace Archives of Abdülhamit II,’ Archivum Ottomanicum, 3 (1971), 211-237. and ‘Ottoman Archival Materials for the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Archives of Istanbul,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6 (1975), 94-114, in the hope that other scholars would go to Istanbul to work through them. We await with interest similar detailed information about the nature and availability of the relevant Armenian archives.
No one denies, or seeks to deny, that the Armenian people suffered terribly during the last two decades of the Ottoman Empire. The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey makes this clear, but in the context of Ottoman history and not, evidently, in the massive detail and with time kind of overtones Hovannisian would like to see. The point that he overlooks is that the experience of the Armenians, however terrible it undoubtedly was, was not unique to them. It was part of a general tragedy that engulfed all the people of the Empire Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Jews, and others as well, all of whom have traumatic memories of the period. Innumerable stories of the same sort of suffering as that mentioned by Hovannisian emanate from these people as well, but they also could not find a place in the few pages available on the subject in a general textbook. And even more important, this situation was the product, not of a conscious effort at extermination of any of these groups, as he alleges — this seems clear from careful examination of the Ottoman cabinet records — but, rather, of the final breakup of a multinational society as the result of a whole series of national revolts, terroristic attacks, massacres and counterrnassacres, and famine and disease, compounded by destructive and brutal foreign invasions, in which all the people of the empire, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, had their victims and criminals, and against which the Ottoman government found itself powerless to act despite numerous efforts to do so. The recent tragic events in the Lebanon provide a very limited example, on a relatively small scale, of the actual situation.
We appreciate, understand, and sympathize with the sensitivity of Professor Hovannisian and other Armenians on this issue. They and their friends and families bear tragic memories of the past. But it is to the interest of all concerned, Armenians, Turks, and others interested in the cause of humanity, that all sources be examined without preconceptions or prejudice. We do not believe that the gates of research on the Armenian Question closed a half-century ago. Nor do we claim that our work is anything more than a beginning In cases concerning Ottoman actions and Ottoman policies, Ottoman sources must be considered primary, but substantial materials in the Ottoman archives remain to be consulted, most important among which are the records of the ministries of the Interior and the Army, even though some of them arc duplicated in the Bab-i Ali Evrak Odasi. On the other hand, in matters concerning Armenian actions, policies, and experiences, Armenian sources must be consulted, and for this purpose the Dashnak archives in Boston as well as those of the Hunchaks and the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul should he itemized, described, and made available to all researchers wishing to use them. Obviously considerable linguistic, paleographic, and historical training is needed to prepare for this work. Only through consultation of all relevant records by different researchers, each giving his own differential weight to the sources at his disposal to present his interpretation, will a definitive picture emerge. The many facets of ‘truth’ will appear only when the inquiring mind of the reader examines all the interpretations and reaches its own conclusions.
STANFORD J. SHAW
Professor of Turkish and Near
Eastern History
EZEL KURAL SHAW
Research Associate in Near
Eastern History
University of California, Los Angeles
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