Armenian Holocaust Deniers

Armenian Holocaust Deniers (in response to Gwyn Dyer’s article on the subject)

           

For centuries, Armenians, as a Christian minority, suffered repeated pogroms and massacres under Ottoman rule. Armenians were not considered “persons,” had no legal status or recourse to Ottoman law and were subject to the totalitarian whims of their Ottoman overlords. For example in 1870 and then 1895 just twenty years before the final “ethnic cleansing” of Armenians from eastern Anatolia, under orders from the last Ottoman, Sultan Hamid,  tens of thousands of Armenians were slaughtered  from Istambul to Erzerum in eastern Turkey.

For centuries Armenians were denied the right to be educated in, or to even speak their own language. They were  forced to read the Bible in Turkish. They were forced to adopt Turkish names. The “ian “ suffix in Armenian surnames was added to the root prefix which was invariably Turkish. The “ian” was added to distinguish the individual as an Armenian and a Christian. True Armenian names have no such ending.

We see the same story playing itself out in the plight of Kurds under Turkish rule today. It is ironic because the Kurds were instrumental in the extermination of the Armenians in 1915. All the lands that the Armenians were purged from have now suddenly become “Kurdistan.” The Kurds were a nomadic people who were brought to eastern Anatolia in the late 18th century by one of the Ottoman Sultans to pepper that region with people of muslim background because the Turks of the time and since then have been loathe to live in that region, considered by them to be wild hinterlands. Even to this day, the racial memory of the atrocities haunts the region and it still remains grossly underpopulated. The Kurds being  nomadic in their social structure built nothing. They herded their sheep and goats and even their mosques till the last couple of generations were simply gathering places facing at the most a wall.
By the most conservative accounts 1.5 Armenians were systematically killed. The more likely figure is 2 to 3 million. The proof of that is that all of eastern Turkey, the provinces of Erzerum, Kars, Ardanhan and Van were purged of every Armenian. From the Mediterranean sea and the Kingdoms of Cilicia  to the Black Sea in the north, to the Caucasus mountains, all gone.  Where Armenians had lived for thousands of years; our direct history goes back to at least a 1000 B.C.and even further back to the lands of Urartu and Nairi which were contemporaneous with the Hittite period, none live today. The Turks have descended to the barbarity of even destroying ancient temples, churches and any vestiges of ruins and using the stones to build sheep fences amongst other things. This is our bitter legacy.

            For Mr. Dyer to argue that the genocide of Armenians by the Turks is not in the same category as the Jewish holocaust in terms of “premeditation” is utter holocaust denying criminal nonsense. The facts say otherwise. The Nazis used the Armenian holocaust as the blueprint for their extermination of the Jews. Except for the “advance” in the technology of  poison gas and the crematoria, all the other elements of  dispossession, transportation, starvation, rape, murder and massacre were identical.

           In the case of the Turks it stemmed from  central command,the triumvirate of the so-called “young Turks” who supplanted Sultan Hamid and then were embroiled in the First World War on the losing side. In order to galvanize their tenuous authority they whipped up hysteria against the Armenians, in exactly the same way Hitler was to do twenty years later, against a population that was an easy and convenient target. Armenians and Jews share an uncanny similarity in their historical diaspora. It was Hitler after all who said: “and who remembers the Armenians.” Perhaps if the Armenians were remembered, the Jewish Holocaust may have never materialized.

The first Armenians to be liquidated on mass on the eve of the 1915 genocide were the intellectual, religious and political elites of Armenian communities right across Turkey. Without  leadership, the rest of the Armenians were easy pickings despite the hopelessly pathetic resistance put up in isolated communities and now used as an excuse by the Turkish government and the likes of Dyer to promulgate the idea of an organized uprising. The only such uprising took place when a couple of companies of Armenian conscripts of the Turkish army deserted and joined Russian forces on the eastern front.

For Dyer to accuse Armenian “activists” as instigators is adding insult to injury as it perpetuates the obscenity of  blaming the victim. It’s like saying that the resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto brought on the cataclysm that overtook them.

Untold generations of Armenians have preserved their history and memory of these atrocities against their identity  and will continue to do so in perpetuity until the Turks own up to their crimes against humanity whether Israel, or Turkey acknowledge that a genocide took place. We feel the same outrage upon hearing the denial as all those good people who bristle at the denial of the Jewish Holocaust. There is a hypocritically obscene travesty in accepting one and denying the other. Every Armenian living today has first hand accounts of members of their families who were murdered by the Turks and the Kurds.

Anyone accusing Jewish “activists” today of unnecessarily perpetuating the memory of the Jewish holocaust  would be branded as a racist monster and be relegated to the trash bin of  public discourse if not jail time. Not a day goes by without a memorial, a museum, a book or a movie commemorating the victims of that horror so that we, collectively, will never forget and hopefully learn from our mistakes. Another sad irony is that despite the remonstrance of a host of Israeli intellectuals including Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate in literature against  the policy of successive Israeli governments to deny the Armenian holocaust, Israel has never acknowledged the event as such. And we know the reason: Turkey has been a staunch Western ally, and Mr. Dyer would like to keep it that way. So much for Israeli solidarity. After Turkey, Israel must surely be labelled as Armenian Holocaust denier par excellence. In many respects, Israel’s denial is even more heartbreaking and shameless than Turkey’s.

For Armenians to demand a simple acknowledgement by  the Turkish State is verboten and labelled “activist” by a presumably neo-liberal journalist. Dyer wants us to shelve the Armenian holocaust as an unpremeditated atrocity so that present day Turkey can get on with its so-called democratic reforms and buttress its position as a staunch ally of the West,  and as a bulwark against radical Islam, much as it has acted and been an ally in the past against the Soviet Union, and before that against the Russians, with whom they have quarrelled for centuries.

Sorry, Mr. Dyer, the caveat is that Turkey will never aspire to these lofty democratic ideals and principles you so cherish till it first acknowledges its guilt and begins making reparations to the Armenian community and by extension to our collective humanity by doing so. It will show its readiness to join the human race never mind ass-kissing the Europeans to be included in their Union. 

Bogos Kalemkiar

Toronto

November, 2007

P.S. In light of recent developments and with an Islamic government running Turkey today and with the spat between Israel and Turkey, first over a Turkish television show depicting Israeli atrocities against muslims and then the attack on the aid flotilla by the Israeli navy, it seems that the once staunch allies are now at each other's throats. It seems highly ironic and to Armenians, well, we'll just have to wait and see. Personally I don't think Israel will ever acknowledge the Armenian Genocide...after all who would want to give up that monopoly!  
March 2, 2011
Toronto