The Armenian Genocide

[Beutlin]

Tomorrow will be the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government still denies that the genocide ever happened and many countries avoid using the term “genocide”. Germany, among all places, is struggling to appease both Armenians and the Turkish government, (so far) trying to deliberately avoid the term. I hope German President Joachim Gauck casts away any diplomatic considerations tomorrow and calls a spade a spade. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has regrettably backtracked on his conviction to recognize the Armenian genocide. When he ran for office President Obama promised to recognize the Armenian genocide, but alas, the term “genocide” will not appear in his speech on Friday. I am pleasantly surprised that the imbeciles in my national government managed to recognize the events for what they were; Turkey immediately recalled its ambassador, of course.



Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-32418286
http://www.timesofisrael.com/rivlin-bac ... cognition/
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/22/8465257/armenian-genocide
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/21/polit ... niversary/
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wir ... s-30508875

PS: I am anything but an overt political idealist, and I realize that Turkey is an important strategic ally in the Middle East, for America, the European Union and (recently to a lesser degree) Israel. I still think however that sometimes, and after so many years, things have to be called by their name.

PPS: I am not implying that all Turks deny the Armenian genocide. Over the last years there have been several prominent Turkish intellectuals who voiced their recognition of the massacres.

[Túrin Turambar]

The Kardashians (who are of Armenian background) have apparently travelled back to Armenia for the commemorations, and I am curious to see if this gives the Armenian Genocide a higher profile in popular culture than it does now.

The Armenian Genocide was always the 'prototype' genocide, and I read somewhere that Hitler used the fact that people didn't seem to care about it as the basis for the idea that he could get away with the Holocaust. From a historical perspective, I think that it may have suffered from the fact that many of the perpetrators and victims were illiterate and that the First World War greatly-limited access to the areas where it occurred.

Still, I have never quite understood why modern Turks feel the need to try and suppress it. If it is out of pride in the Ottoman Empire, I think the pride is misplaced - modern secular Turkey is a far greater achievement than the backwards and sprawling 'sick man of Europe'. That said, when I refer to it in my book I take the soft option of stating that the Ottoman persecution of the Armenians is "recognised by most modern historians as genocide".

And just as we shouldn't forget non-Jewish victims of Nazi oppression, so too we shouldn't forget Greeks, Caucasus Russians and other Christians who were persecuted and killed by the Ottoman Empire during the Great War.

[axordil]

For me, the things that define genocide are the close cousins of intent and focus. There must be both a clearly stated goal of killing off a whole population, broadly shared across the government, and an implementation that attempts to accomplish the goal in as short a time as possible, so as to prevent outside agency from interfering. The latter implies self-consciousness about the nature of the act--a recognition that others will deem it evil--that raises it above garden-variety mass murder, even state-sponsored, or the unfortunately numerous examples of blithe slaughter that stretch back into antiquity and beyond.

In those terms, the Armenian Genocide was pretty clearly the modern prototype. As inhumane and loathsome as the colonial period actions of Europeans were, there was always tension between the advocates of killing, the advocates of enslaving, and the advocates of "civilizing" the indigenous peoples we overran. One might make an argument for some of the actions of the Mongols qualifying, but in those cases the annihilation of resisting populations always had a strategic design: teaching a lesson to the next target.

I would add "dehumanizing" the victims as a qualification, except then one would have to tease out the possibly imaginary differences between the dehumanizing effects of propaganda against them and that of propaganda against wartime enemies, which has become endemic to modern warfare.