Cecil has given the straight dope on whether there was an Armenian genocide in http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050520.html
But straight dope can only be provided if both sides of a story are fully investigated. Cecil, as have so many others who don’t bother to scratch beneath the surface, has investigated only one.
Many do so on this topic because we have been indoctrinated to believe the Turks must be guilty. They have a very bad reputation in the West… have had so for centuries, in fact… and we only hear from those who have settled in the West and have axes to grind.
In order to get at truth, we must only consider sources who have no, or almost no, reason to lie. The “evidence” for this so-called genocide comes almost entirely from conflicted sources, or those with agendas.
For centuries, the Turks and Armenians lived tolerably side by side. In the 19th century, as the “Sick Man” began to disintegrate, Armenians hoped to get in on the action of setting an independent state, as had happened with their Christian cousins in the Balkans, with the help of imperialist nations hungry for valuable Ottoman land.
The Armenians set up terror groups, such as the Dashnaks and the Hunchaks. The aim was to commit massacres, to incite the locals to commit counter massacres. Thus would the European imperialists be invited to come in and give the Armenians the rewards they were seeking.
In the Hunchak charter, the aim was to strike when the Ottomans were at their weakest, that is, at war. Ottoman-Armenians, that is, the extremists among them (and by this time, most of the Armenian community was going along, either by choice or coercion from the terrorists among them), were armed and ready. As soon as Russia declared war in early November 1914, the Armenians rebelled in Van. Even the New York Times, excessively prejudiced against the Turks as were the media in all Western nations, recorded this fact. (See (NYT-ARMENIANS FIGHT TURKS) Tall Armenian Tale: The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide)
The 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide does not consider those who ally themselves politically. The victims must be entirely innocent, as the Jews were under the Nazis. The Jews were targeted for no other reason than for being Jews. There was no history of hatred against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Quite the contrary, the Armenians prospered, compared to most Muslims. (What Cecil offered, “their main offense was to be a Christian minority in a crumbling Islamic empire,” bears no relation to the reality. The objective Western sources of the period know this explanation to be pure propaganda. The Ottoman Empire was, if anything, way ahead of other multi-cultural nations in its tolerance.)
Yet Boghos Nubar, an important Armenian leader of the period, spelled out the treachery of the Armenians in a Jan. 30, 1919 letter to the Times of London: The Armenians were “belligerents de facto,” he wrote, as they indignantly refused to side with Turkey.
Many thousands of Ottoman-Armenian men crossed over to Russia. Many refused to be conscripted in the army of their own nation. Ones who were conscripted acted treacherously. This is why they were disarmed in 1915, after having been trained and equipped in 1914. The Ottoman Empire was hurting for manpower (the desperate nation would eventually be accosted on many fronts, by the world’s strongest powers, Russia, England and France), and not being able to rely on Armenians came as a severe blow.
Whenever a minority behaves traitorously, there will always be repercussions in any nation. Thus, the Ottomans decided to move the traitorous Armenian community away from the eastern danger zone, and other areas where Armenians were rebelling or in danger of rebelling. Note the USA had done the same with the Japanese community in WWII, even though the Japanese-Americans were not disloyal.
The Sick Man was at a loss to transport hundreds of thousands in an effective manner. The nation was bankrupt, and famine and disease were everywhere. Some Armenians who had to leave on foot (in areas where there was no mass transport; even Ottoman soldiers had to march on foot) were attacked by renegade forces and were massacred. Some of these forces were out for gain. Many struck in revenge for what Armenians had done to their families.
And so we arrive at the second requirement of the U.N. Convention. Was there “intent” to systematically exterminate the Armenians?
None supported by factual evidence. The British tried very hard at war’s end with their equivalent of Nuremberg, the Malta Tribunal (1919-1921.) To their credit, they would only consider real evidence. (They rejected, for example, the findings of the post war Ottoman government, puppets of the Allies.) In the end, the British freed every accused Ottoman.
No “intent,” no genocide.
The evidence points to the Ottomans safeguarding the Armenians. That’s what is clearly apparent in the internal orders, never meant to be public relations exercises. These orders weren’t always followed in chaotic conditions, but the real intent was in protecting the Armenians.
As Prof. Guenter Lewy noted in a most scholarly study, *“The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide” * (which everyone who wishes to get at the truth should read), the relocation process was ‘relatively humane.’
Moreover, the authorities punished those who committed crimes against Armenians. Some to the point of execution. There were over 1,600 such cases.
This was a tragic time for everyone concerned. Over 2.5 million other Ottomans mostly died of the same reason the Armenians mostly died of, famine and disease. But we never hear about them. The reason is prejudice.
Half a million Ottomans were killed by Armenians, with a little help from their Russian allies (most Russian officers were aghast at the actions of the Armenians), when the Armenians tried to set up an independent state in eastern Anatolia, and the tides of war swung their way.
One of the very few Americans who took note of this other side of the coin was Professor John Dewey, who wrote in 1928 (http://www.ataa.org/ataa/ref/armenian/tragedy.html):
"Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population. "
People simply did not care about Turkish casualties, because the victims were Turks and they did not rate as equal human beings. This may be reluctantly excused in modern times, because we’re talking about attitudes nearly a century ago. Yet, why does this terrible prejudice persist to this day?
Cecil is a very fair person, but let’s look at the way he built his case:
“Hardly anyone remembers this appalling crime,” he wrote, but that is not true. After the Holocaust, this made-up genocide is the one most remembered. Just run an Internet search, and you will be overwhelmed.
“Even though at a million-plus deaths it was the first modern holocaust,” Cecil offered, but what exactly is he implying? That over a million were all murdered? That simply is not true. Most died from the conditions of the time that did not involve murder.
The pre-war population was 1.5 million, according to most Western (that is, Turk-unfriendly) sources of the period. The British felt the number was around a million, based on their pre-war Blue Book. (The Ottoman census was 1.3 million.)
Today, most Armenian propagandists concede one million survived. If you subtract one million from 1.5 million, the mortality does not amount to over a million.
The reason why people cite this figure is because they accept the pre-war figure of the Armenian Patriarch, which was 2.1 million. But the Armenian Patriarch was not known for upholding the truth. Elsewhere, the Patriarch felt the figure was actually 1.85 million.
But even with the bloated 2.1 million, even the Armenian Patriarch, at war’s end, broke down the mortality as such: 1,260,000 survivors and 840,000 dead. Ironically, the Patriarch, one of the main instruments of Armenian propaganda of the period, did not go as high as the propagandists of today.
Prof. Dewey had written in the aforementioned article that “it is at least time that Americans ceased to be deceived by [Armenian] propaganda.” How sad that Americans, even educated Americans such as Cecil, completely accept this propaganda.
Cecil bases his findings on the work of “genocide historian R. J. Rummel.” But Rummel has based his findings by relying almost exclusively on propagandistic sources, as do the rest of what are called “genocide scholars.” [See (RUDY RUMMEL) Tall Armenian Tale: The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide]
Those who use propaganda as their source become propagandists themselves.
Cecil tells us, “the murders … spanned 30 years,” but that is nonsense. What is known as the “Armenian Genocide” really refers to the resettlement of the Armenians, which lasted 1915-16. Some propagandists (like Rummel) tell us the “genocide” went on until 1923, but the Ottoman administration ceased to be an entity at war’s end, 1918. (Cecil has bought into this as well, telling us the period of “massacres” extended until 1922.)
So who was performing a state-sponsored genocide from 1918-1923, even when there was technically no state? The blame goes to the nationalists, headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Now think about this: anyone who knows the history of modern Turkey knows Ataturk accomplished a miracle. Turkey was completely defeated, left only to be picked by the imperialistic vultures. Out of nothing, Ataturk managed to kick out the invaders of his country. Without resources and manpower in this monumentally desperate time, Ataturk was going to devote his attention on committing mass murder?
The reason why people think this way is because of prejudice. The problem is, actually, that people just don’t even care to think. The propagandists hold common ground, and people just want to listen to what is being said, because it all feels so comfortable. Everyone knows Turks have it in them to be savage killers.
Cecil writes about “Turkey’s adamant refusal to acknowledge the massacres,” but that is incorrect. The Turks agree there were massacres. What is at issue is not massacres, but whether there was a Nazi-like “Final Solution” committed. If anyone perpetrated such ethnic cleansing, it was the Armenians. They also exterminated the Azeri Turks and other Muslims in Armenia, from 1918-20.
Why don’t we hear about the crimes of the Armenians? Because the Armenian diaspora, though small in number in nations of the world, are extremely influential, wealthy, and obsessed. They have the ear of the biased “Christian” West.
We have seen evidence of the crimes of Armenians in recent times, in 1992 Karabakh. Why isn’t the world up in arms about this? (With one billion in Russian military aid and many millions of American taxpayer money, the Armenians pulled a surprise attack in 1992, massacred many Azeris in order to force the rest – some estimate a million – to flee, many still in refugee camps today.)
Westerners reported the crimes during the events; for example:
**One man I met in September, Murat Shukarov, whose mother was an Armenian, maintained that even individuals who were only a quarter Azerbaijani and are not even Muslims were driven away in order to “purify” Karabakh of all traces of non-Armenianness. Shukarov is also now reported dead. ** (“A Town Betrayed; The Killing Ground in Karabakh,” Thomas Goltz, The Washington Post, March 8, 1992)
Then it was all swept under the rug. The double standards in play are simply awful.
Cecil tells us “hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women, and children were shot, beheaded, burned alive, or otherwise done away with.” That is overblown, and if a statement such as this is made, one had better make sure the factual evidence is provided.
In 1977, the French newspaper “Le Figaro,” not known to be Turk-sympathetic, committed an investigation in response to the worldwide Armenian terrorism of the period, and concluded only 15,000 were killed in such a manner. We will never know the real figure, but it’s a certainty Armenians who died violently were well under a hundred thousand.
Cecil tells us Armenians were forced into exile. That isn’t true, either.
The Armenian Patriarch reported in 1921 that 644,900 Armenians still remained in what was left in the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands had already left, on their own accord, to lands the Ottomans were not in control of. Most of the rest would leave by choice. According to the terms of the Gumru and Lausanne Treaties, all Ottomans – including Armenians – were permitted to return within a specified time, if they chose to do so.
(But the Armenians knew the sympathetic Christian nations of the world opened their doors widely. Obviously, most felt their lives would have higher quality than in the devastated post Ottoman Empire.)
Cecil further reported that “the first large-scale killings took place from 1894 through 1896, when by conservative estimate 200,000 Armenians died.”
If anyone makes a study of the horrifying exaggerations perpetrated by the bigoted people and press of the time, 200,000 can be called anything but “conservative.” More reasonable estimates hovered at around 50,000. The Ottoman figure was some 13,000, and the reality is in between. Once again, no one speaks of the thousands of Turks who died at the hands of the terrorist Armenians. The idea was to kill the Turks so that Armenians would be killed in turn, so that the Europeans could come in and attain the Armenians’ goals.
Cecil tells us “A massacre of 15,000 to 25,000 Armenians in 1909 set the table for the main event during World War I.” So what happened here? Did the Turks’ mouths water and did they say, look, Armenians, let’s kill them? (If that were the idea, the Armenians would have been cleaned out long before.) Once again, the Armenians started this mess, mostly incited by an Armenian priest and the freedom to carry weapons. The reason why more Armenians got killed was because they were greatly outnumbered. Once again, no one talks about the Turks who got killed during this episode.
In order to understand why Cecil is very one-sided is revealed at the end of his offering:
“One difficulty in researching this topic now is that much of what’s written about it is the work of Armenian or Turkish partisans and so of uncertain reliability. For this column I’ve relied on The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response by Peter Balakian, a persuasive 2003 account by an Armenian-American university professor.”
We don’t care about what “Armenian” or “Turkish” partisans write. What we care, in order to find the truth, is the reliability of their sources. When missionaries, diplomats and other bigoted Christians and puppet Ottomans are the source, do we listen to them? Not if we conclude they have a conflict of interest. But when Westen sources reveal otherwise, we know they would have no reason to lie for Turks. We also know internal Ottoman documents would not have been prepared to fool future historians. These are the honest sources we must heed.
But the ironic part about Cecil’s explanation is that he decided to consider an author who is notoriously partisan, Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American who fully subscribes to the Dashnak “end justifies the means” practice. Balakian will say anything as long as it affirms his genocide. For example, in the “Burning Tigris.” he actually gives credit to Aram Andonian’s “Talat Pasha telegrams,” proven to be forgeries. Meanwhile, Peter Balakian made no mention of Armenian terror groups, the Malta Tribunal (he blended these deceptively with the 1919-20 puppet Ottoman trials), or anything else that would have demonstrated his genocide to be the myth that it is. Peter Balakian is not the kind of writer one who wishes to learn the truth would consult.
Cecil, if you are reading, I would recommend you clear your mind and heart, and look at sources that are painful for your apparently ingrained beliefs. Please consult Guenter Lewy’s book. He doesn’t care about defending anyone. All he cares about is what we all should care about: learning the real truth.