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Chapter 5THE ARMENIANGENOCIDE:REVISIONISM AND DENIALby Rouben AdalianThe Turkish government has adopted three linesof argument to convince the world that nothingout of the ordinary happened to the Armeniansduring the years 1915-1923. Three theses havebeen advanced: the denial thesis; the revisionistthesis; and the justification thesis. The threetheses can in turn be divided among sixcategories of authors as follows: participants,apologists, rationalizers, revisionists,disinformers, and distorters. In the years since1923 several factors have contributed to theworld's acquiescence in the Turkish program ofdenial and revisionism. First, Turkey becamerespectable as the Turkish Republic underKemal Attaturk; second, Turkey joined theUnited Nations as a charter member in 1945;and third, Turkey joined the North AtlanticTreaty Organization in 1952.In the unfolding process of genocide, denial is thefinal stage. There was little doubt at the end of WorldWar I that the Young Turk government had implementedmeasures which resulted in the decimation of theArmenian population in the Ottoman Empire. Yet twoyears later, the effort to rehabilitate the survivors wasabandoned. Three years after that, the question ofresponsibility was entirely forgotten. Since then, thegovernment of Turkey has found it convenient to denythat anything out of the ordinary happened to theArmenians.The coverup of the Armenian genocide was notthe work of the Turkish government alone. The courseof political developments in the decades followingWorld War I furnished a favorable environment forignoring the consequences of genocide. The silence ofthe international community emboldened the Turkishgovernment to make the denial of the Armeniangenocide a state policy. Only the matter of legitimizingthe official view on the non-occurrence of the eventremained.Post-War UnsettlementThe rapid changes in government that took placeafter World War I, including the shift of power fromIstanbul to Ankara and the emergence of new leaders,hopelessly complicated the effort for a serious deliberationon the Armenian genocide. Defeated in war, theYoung Turk cabinet resigned in 1918. The Committeeof Union and Progress (CUP), which led the YoungTurk movement, disbanded. The administration of whatThe Armenian Genocide: Revisionism and Denial 85
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: 1915-1923AN INTRODUCTIONby Rouben AdalianWhen in the Spring of 1915 the Young Turkgovernment issued orders for the mass deportationof the Armenians from Armenia and Anatolia toSyria and Mesopotamia, the' U. S. ambassador toTurkey, Henry Morgenthau, realized that the edictswere only part of a larger scheme to destroy theArmenian people. In prior decades Armenians in theOttoman Empire had endured large-scale atrocitiesand tens of thousands had fallen victim to the brutalrepression practiced by the Ottoman sultans. Yet,the sultans had had no policy that affected the totalityof the Armenian population throughout the empire.By 1923 when the modern-day Turkish Republic wasfounded, close to two million Armenians had vanishedfrom a part of the world which they hadinhabited for thousands of years. The only exceptionto this annihilation was a community that survivedin Constantinople."The Murder of a Nation"Morgenthau and Arnold Toynbee, then a youngscholar entrusted with the task of documenting theevents of 1915 and 1916, described the forcibleremoval of the Armenians from their homes and theirexpulsion to the desert as "the murder of a nation. "The Young Turk government carried out the deportationsunder conditions of extreme deprivation andat a pace that induced death by starvation, dehydration,and exhaustion. It also organized special unitswhich conducted a thoroughgoing slaughter ofcivilians — men, women, and children. Called aresettlement plan, the deportations and massacreswere nothing less than a gigantic scheme to deprivethe Armenians of their property, lives, and right tocontinued habitation in their ancestral homeland.In the final analysis the genocide resulted inthe theft of the contested homeland of the Armenians,for without Armenians there could be no Armenia.The possibility that the aspirations of this peoplemight lead to a claim to a separate national existencehad become anathema to the Young Turk party thatgoverned the Ottoman Empire during World WarI. Their solution was to destroy both the people andtheir nationalist aspirations.Armeniansas a Subject MinorityThe Armenians had lived as a subject minorityin the Ottoman Empire for some 400 years. Influencedby Western political thought in the nineteenthcentury, they began to organize and to petition thegovernmentto improve their living conditions, whichwere characterized by maladministration and theabsence of security. In some parts of the Ottomanstate Armenians fared well; they were dominant incertain sectors of the economy such as commerceand the specialized crafts. The combinationof theirfinancial success and their political activism becamethe source of an autocratic regime's obstinanterefusal to consider reform, for reform and improvementmight have led to a measure of self-government.The Young TurksNo less opposed to the regime were the reformmindedOttomans who organized the Committee forUnion and Progress. This group, known as theYoung Turks, overthrew the Sultan. Their ownnationalist plank, however, tended to emphasize onceagain racial privilege for Turks and exclusion of theArmenians who clearly gained nothing in the changeof government. On the contrary, as Germany encouragedthe war party to join in the impending conflictin 1914, the Armenians were caught in a vise. Tothe east where the Ottomans intended to advance laythe vast stretches of the Russian Empire. Becausemost of the Armenians lived on either side of theborder, inevitably their homes would be engulfedin a battle area. Although loyal to their government,with thousands responding to the draft, the Armenianpopulation was not sympathetic to the cause of thewar.A HomogenousTurkish StateDetermined to use the opportunity of war andthe alliance with Germany to restore the prestige ofthe declining Ottoman state, the Young Turks movedmercilessly against the Armenians whom theyaccused of treason and sedition once the war beganto go badly for them. Unable to create the envisionedempire that would include all of the Turkic peoplesto the East, the Ottoman government devised amethod of purging the state of an ethno-religiousminority whose existence stood at odds with theideology of the extremist Young Turks. The decisionto wage war against an unsuspecting civilian populationwas but an incremental escalation of a successionof decisions taken illegally and secretly to bringabout the entry of the Ottomans into World War I.(continued on page 87)86 GENOCIDE
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GenocldeIn OurTlme- ,*"f* *An Annot
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DEDICATIONTo Raphael Lemkin(1901-19
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Chapter 5:The Armenian Genocide: Re
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Appendix 167Appendix: Chronology of
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ending sources of joy and hope. In
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Massive human suffering caused by p
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world without any reification and u
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CIIAPTER IETHNOCIDEby Alison Palmer
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als are tempted away by the promise
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Interactionsof Ethnocide and Genoci
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Chapter 1: AnnotatedBibliographyRea
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the inevitable extinction of tribal
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upon the purge of cultural and scie
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traditional ethnic and socio-cultur
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whites. Lizot proposes that integra
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¹ 1. 53 ¹Olson, James S. , and Ra
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tion of indigenes into state politi
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as a potential irredentist national
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serious questions about the notion
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ate and beleaguered institutions th
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In one of the most important works
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focusing on children, the most vuln
Page 46 and 47: ~ 2. 35 ~Sereny, Gita. Into That Da
Page 48 and 49: were less than 200 Jewish survivors
Page 50 and 51: ~ 2. 68 ~Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. Aus
Page 52 and 53: of the war. The movement was known
Page 54 and 55: ~ 2. 103 ~Wyman, David S. The Aband
Page 56 and 57: * 2. 122 ~Wiesenthal, Simon. The Su
Page 58 and 59: and Christianity. He argues that it
Page 60 and 61: Chapter 3THE ISSUE OF THE HOLOCAUST
Page 62 and 63: if we are to escape the mystificati
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Page 66 and 67: historical event. All transformatio
Page 68 and 69: 32. For an excellent understanding
Page 70 and 71: 3 7Berenbaum, Michael. "The Uniquen
Page 72 and 73: Holocaust, a meaning with which we
Page 74 and 75: the Nazi exterminating drive, a pos
Page 76 and 77: framework, Marrus accepts the Holoc
Page 78 and 79: as "the cement of Jewish identity,
Page 80 and 81: 'cry and you cry alone. ' So we kep
Page 82 and 83: of the body, combined with so many
Page 84 and 85: 10. Lawrence Langer, Versions of Su
Page 86 and 87: ~ 4. 10 ~Sichrovsky, Peter. Born Gu
Page 88 and 89: Appendix: The Diaryby Agi Rubinwith
Page 90 and 91: ella story. We could have eaten all
Page 92 and 93: which hardly anybody remains? Who k
Page 94 and 95: find a wise one who will solve it.
Page 98 and 99: The genocide was the culmination of
Page 100 and 101: Abdications and Retributions Turkey
Page 102 and 103: scene. They primarily targeted the
Page 104 and 105: Turkish and non-Turkish apologists
Page 106 and 107: and London: University Press of New
Page 108 and 109: supporters of Armenian independence
Page 110 and 111: that the history of the Armenians c
Page 112 and 113: Realities Based on Ottoman Document
Page 114 and 115: designed to falsely accuse Ottoman
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Page 118 and 119: ambition to retain as much of Russi
Page 120 and 121: Terror-FamineMemoir literature and
Page 122 and 123: independence and viability of the U
Page 124 and 125: So many members of the All-Ukraine
Page 126 and 127: ~ 6. 26 ~Heller, Mikhail, and Aleks
Page 128 and 129: ousness of the present one. In his
Page 130 and 131: of structured social inequality, cr
Page 132 and 133: or religious group, as such. "" The
Page 134 and 135: and the general degradation of publ
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Page 138 and 139: 26. William Safire, "Object: Surviv
Page 140 and 141: 74. Quoted in Paul Walker and Eric
Page 142 and 143: es: People in the Machines of Death
Page 144 and 145: ¹ 7. 16 ¹Dadrian, Vahakn N. "A Th
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Corporate Enterprise at Auschwitz"
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* 7. 47 +Nolan, Janne E. , and Albe
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and sometimes irrational. " (p. 7)
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able to evaluate various nuclear we
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In an angry, stimulating book, Aske
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Lang reflects on how technology fac
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This is a pioneering collection of
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"good reasons" for not offering the
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take consistent ethical actions aga
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sadisChart: Taking a Stand Against
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This indicator refers to an advance
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14. Louis Rene Beres, "Genocide, St
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to horrible new acts of violence ag
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* 8. 27 ~Horowitz, Irving Louis. Ge
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~ 8. 41 ~Lifton, Robert J. , and Er
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~ 8. 56 ~Thompson, John L. P. "Geno
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CountryDatesPer petratorsVictimsEst
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Dwork, DeborahDyer, Gwynne. . . . .
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Morgenthau, Henry . . . . . '. . .
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TITLE INDEXThe Abandonment of the J
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"Epilogue: The Nuclear Arms Raceand
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The Industrialization of Soviet Rus
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Psychiatric Aspects of the Preventi
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When Memory ComesWhile Six Million
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