Brian Merchant, at Motherboard:
My grandfather credits Dirhouie “Medsmir” Chorbajian with the fact that our family exists at all. She was the one who, after receiving word of the slaughter of tens of thousands of Armenians in Turkey between 1894 and 1896, in what would be named the Hamidian massacres after the sultan who ordered them, urged her husband to emigrate to the United States. According to family lore, Medsmir, my great-great-great grandmother, was blunt: “It is time for us to leave.”
She proved persuasive, and the Chorbajian family moved to Massachusetts, and then on to Fresno, California. Less than twenty years later, one and a half million Armenians, among them her friends, peers, and relatives, were systematically deported and killed by the agents of the Ottoman Empire. My ancestors escaped the first and least-remembered genocide of the twenty-first century, which, for a long time, escaped my understanding, too…
Only now, thanks to my grandfather and some powerful new technologies of remembrance that are helping to shed light on the Armenian plight, am I beginning to come to grips with the heritage that begat, then transformed my name.
This April marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide. On April 24th, 1915, the Turkish government executed some 200 Armenian intellectual leaders in Constantinople, in what scholars now refer to as a “decapitation strike” meant to hobble the whole people. Thus began the genocide in earnest; the brutal, organized effort to empty Anatolia of its entire Armenian population, through a process the state referred to only as “deportation.”
Two million Armenians were forced from their homes, and sent marching through the desert, their final destination grim camps clearly not intended for long-term occupation. One and a half million Armenians died in the process; many from starvation (they often went unfed), many from exhaustion (the old and the young alike marched for days on end), many from disease (cholera ravaged the camps), and many directly at the hands of Turkish officials (shootings, hangings, rape, even decapitation were not uncommon).
The US government still refuses to recognize the state-ordained mass exterminations that began in 1915 as a genocide, despite a mountain of supporting evidence and coalescing international agreement—because, to this day, Turkey, a NATO ally, denies that any systematic killing took place at all, and chalks the event up to the cloudy ambiguities of war. The generations-spanning erasure of ‘Chorbajian’ from my own identity, it can seem at times, dovetails with the decades-spanning erasure of ‘Armenian genocide’ from the American cultural fabric…
I spent the next several Sunday afternoon hours on YouTube, on Armenia’s online genocide museum, on Wikipedia. I passed the evening with indexed survivor testimonies, sprawling image archives, grainy digitized video; in the desert sweep of the killing fields, with the hanged bodies, the slain poets, and children half-buried in dust. I was reminded again of a history that I had learned of before, but long failed to internalize.
The web, for its part, was keeping pace with my kindled curiosity. So often, when the internet is heralded as a democratizer of knowledge, the words ring hollow when put under scrutiny. But in the case of the Armenian genocide, it’s true. Google the term in the US, and you’ll find that geopolitics have been swept away, and the truth is laid out in hyperlinks. Unlike the US’s craven official stance, or the media’s tendency in the latter half of the 20th century to reduce the genocide question to he said/she said, the search results paint an accurate representation of the current scholarship—that there is no doubt that what occurred was, under the UN definition of the term, a capital-G genocide…
Mike J
Different genocide:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDhWOPLWYAAPioF.jpg
Corner Stone
Father into your hands, I commend my spirit
Father into your hands
why have you forsaken me
In your eyes forsaken me
In your thoughts forsaken me
Mike in NC
Wife loved her visit to Turkey with her retired State Department cousin several years ago. Of course they couldn’t even mention the fate of the Armenians in polite company.
She’s a huge fan of Russell Crowe and wants to see the new movie he stars in and directed, “The Water Diviner”, about an Australian rancher who goes to Turkey after WW1 to try to find out what happened to his three sons who were MIA after the Gallipoli campaign.
Mike J
@Corner Stone: I’m pretty cynical about rock groups trying to get a message to audiences, but I’ve seen more than one person online say they had no idea until SoaD talked about it. Consciousness raising is the first step towards change, even if TPoH made fun of it.
catclub
I finally looked at a map of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, and the location of Anatolia is surprising. I would have thought that it would be far in the east – toward the Russian border, because one of the excuses was that some Armenians fought with Russia against the Ottoman Empire. But Anatolia is in far western Turkey – west and north of Syria.
srv
If Holocaust Deniers and enablers are evil, what does that make Obama?
Erdogan meets all the criteria for a terrorist supporter, but Obama will never drone him.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: Poor trolling. Just read the links in the OP.
MariedeGournay
They did the same to a lot of the native Greek population. My grandfather was the only one of his family to get out of the country alive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
He survived, made it to the US, married, worked as a short order cook, married an Irish girl, had kids. My dad said he would only talk about it if he was really, really drunk. It was the only time he ever saw him cry.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
For 10 years we lived at ground zero of recent Armenian immigration to Southern California — Glendale, CA. The commemoration is huge every year and, frankly, not nearly as solemn as one would think, especially when all of the 20-year-old guys cruise the streets with Armenian flags hanging off their cars.
Rep. Adam Schiff got himself into a bit of trouble with the State Dept. for sponsoring a House resolution about the genocide a few years ago — Turkey was VERY unhappy and was threatening diplomatic consequences. Frankly, if Turkey would stop being such dicks about the whole thing, it could probably be resolved, but they’re so dedicated to a policy of genocide denial (complete with jailing people who try to talk about it) that it would be hard for them to back down.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@srv:
So you oppose normalizing relations with Iran?
MattF
A new book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire that I’m reading. It’s a piece of the Great War that’s generally overshadowed by the Western Front- a great deal of information here about Middle Eastern history that’s generally unknown.
And while I’m pushing history books, there’s this, another recent book, about the military catastrophes suffered by the Austrians in the first year of the war. It’s an antidote for that feeling of nostalgia about the Habsburgs.
Howard Beale IV
@Mike J: A very underrated album. I was listening to it to it while I hacking Minix 1.5 under Atrai ST. I loved Loved a Villinga in Portugal from the Downward Road much better.
Omnes Omnibus
How important is it for the US government to use the word “genocide?” Is it as important as calling something a “terrorist act” instead of “an act of terrorism?”
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s pretty important. What’s especially disappointing is the recent Turkish reversion to flat-out denial. This needs to be condemned.
srv
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Iran got rid of Ahmadinejad. And yet we still have Obama.
MattF
@srv: So, why do trolls always end up saying ridiculous things? Is there some sort of law about that?
Omnes Omnibus
@MattF:Um, are we condemning the US or Turkey?
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry for being unclear. Turkey’s position is historically and morally unacceptable. Period. And the US should not hedge about that.
srv
W is fed up too:
@MattF: If you mean Ahmadinejad, and he was a master troll, at least it had consequences for him.
Omnes Omnibus
@MattF: Of course it is. Now, must the US formally say that about a NATO ally?
ETA: Do the Germans need to say that the US’s behavior toward indigenous peoples was horrific? Or can we take it as read?
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: I think Serj Tankian is awesome.
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: I think so. One could note as well that the extermination of the Armenians was deeply woven into the drama of the creation of the modern Turkish state. A tragedy for everyone involved.
Omnes Omnibus
@MattF: You think so about what? I posed three questions.
askew
I wish Obama would include this in his bucket list. It’s embarassing that the U.S. won’t call this a genocide. There are billboards up in town over this issue and it always takes me awhile to remember why.
On a side note, I took a course in Middle East politics back in the 1990s with this Turkish American professor who was trying to describe how chaotic Turkey’s governments have been in the past few decades. He had been driven out of Turkey by one government only to be welcomed back with open arms a few years later with the next government and then driven out again shortly. Crazy.
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, it was genocide. Yes, the US should say so. No, the distinction is just an excuse for political name-calling.
Omnes Omnibus
@MattF: How many truly reliable allies does the the US have in the Middle East? Is Turkey one of them? Is the word “genocide” worth losing an ally?
Violet
This issue has recently received a lot more attention because Kim Kardashian commented on it. I think she and Kanye West and their daughter went there. Maybe some other Kardashians too? They’ve got Armenian heritage.
Corner Stone
@Violet:
Ensign Ro.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Zero. Turkey is about the best we have, but they aren’t particularly reliable. If we actually had a reliable ally in the Middle East, our foreign policy there would probably be a lot more sensible.
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: How ‘reliable’ is an ally that’s in denial about their own history? IMO, the Turks will go their own way regardless of what we do or say. “Do what I want, or I’ll throw a fit” is not a lasting basis for positive international relationships.
ETA: I’m going to bed now.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: Well, yeah.
@MattF:
Ever read anything about Native Americans in the US? I’ll assume that you know something about the fate of “involuntary African immigrants.”
Mike J
@MattF:
That would make the US the world’s worst ally.
The real question is, is the US better off with Turkey as a semi-reliable ally, or would we be better off with Turkey refusing to even speak to us? If we insisted on referring to the genocide as genocide, would it make things better for Armenians? With no outside influence from the US, would the situation for the Kurds get better or worse?
NotMax
@srv
They didn’t “get rid” of him. He was term-limited and couldn’t run again .
Just like – – – oh, never mind.
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
I think the real question is how much referring to the Armenian Genocide as a genocide would actually hurt our relationship. Plenty of other countries, including most of the members of NATO, have officially recognized it, and Turkey still maintains relationships with them. IMO, letting Turkey bully us on the issue is probably hurting us overall, since it shows just how craven we are about caving to ridiculous demands by our allies.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Truly reliable? Zero.
Israel and Turkey come the closest, but they will (understandably) put their concerns higher than ours. And Turkey is a chaotic kleptocracy on the brink of devolving into a cluster of fiefdoms — again. Still. The country’s always on the brink of falling to shards, and the refusal to admit that the current nation was founded on genocide and ethnic cleansing is a foundational part of its instability.
No. Best you can say about Turkey as an “ally” is that they hate Americans just slightly less than they hate Europeans — and a lot less than they hate their own minority citizens (Kurds, Armenians, Christians, etc.)
While “we” have the money to buy off the generals, Turkey will be a nominal ally. Unless/until some of those generals get what they consider a better offer from a third party — say, the Saudi Wahabbists, should things go sufficiently pearshaped — and can enforce their new loyalties on the rest of their fellows.
As far as I can tell, “our” greatest security in Turkey is the centuries-old tradition of the Turkish military distrusting each other more than they mutually hate the rest of the world.
Not to President Obama’s advisors, or a lot of other world leaders’ advisors, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Mnemosyne
@srv:
So the problem was that Ahmadinejad was personally a Holocaust denier and it wasn’t a policy of the Iranian government?
@srv:
So you agree with George W Bush that the Iran deal should be scuttled because they’re Holocaust deniers?
ETA: You seem to be trying to hedge your bets. Either Ahmadinejad was the problem, or Iran is the problem. So your position is the same as Bush, McCain, Cheney, Bolton, etc. that we should continue to ostracize Iran?
Mike J
@Roger Moore: I think you’re absolutely correct. It’s good to introduce the realpolitik argument so we can question their premises.
mai naem mobile
Okay, so Obama has George W. Bush’s stamp of disapproval on eliminating the Iran Sanctions which guarantees that it is in fact the right thing to do.
srv
@Mnemosyne: It was not the policy of the Iranian gov’t, unless you think Ahmadinejad was the gov’t. That would be very Orientalist of you.
@Mnemosyne: Analysis and advocacy are sometimes the same thing, and sometimes not.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
I agree with this.
If you’re descending to the level of non-state actors, a case could probably be made for the Kurds.
srv
Lowered expectations.
NotMax
@Chris
And they are hardly monolithic. In Iraq, each of the Barzanis has his own popular Kurdish political faction, the differences between them currently bandaged over as a matter of necessity.
Viva BrisVegas
@Omnes Omnibus:
By “reliable”, I take it you mean, asks “how high” when the US says “jump”.
If you mean a country that hosted US nuclear missiles on its territory in the Cold War to face down the Soviets and thereby put themselves in the nuclear firing line, then maybe yes.
Every country has a past. Even Norway once mistreated the Saami.
If the US gets to berate the Turks over this, do they get backsies over the Indian Wars, Jim Crow and slavery?
ChaseBears
Armenia is a nice place but its feuds with Azerbaijan are…disturbing. The genocide denial is cold war bullshit that shoulda been called out in the 90s. The effort the Soviets put into the genocide memorial/museum (it’s pretty nice!) makes it clear that battle lines were drawn on this issue and we chose the convenient but morally shitty one.
brantl
Twentieth, not twenty-first.0-100 is 1st, 1900-2000 is 20th.
AxelFoley
@srv:
And we will until January 2017, assmunch.
I hope it galls you for eternity, bitch.
Cluttered Mind
@Anne Laurie:
I can think of another country that fits that description.
We can talk about the need for a country to recognize its own history all we want but if you look at actual history you’ll find that it’s pretty rare for a country to be fully honest with itself about what it did. Germany is about the only example I can think of, actually. Part of the problem is that countries are made up of human beings and human beings don’t like to think too much about unpleasant truths if a pleasant lie is freely available. And like I said, we aren’t on any sort of moral high ground on this issue. The United States has no business demanding that another country face up to its shameful past while we still treat natives and blacks like trash and still teach our kids in some public schools that the Trail of Tears was a voluntary relocation that the natives were happy to go along with. Not making that last part up, my wife grew up in small town Ohio and it wasn’t until she graduated high school and left the state that she learned anything about American history that was actually true. Glass houses, stones, etc. Leave Turkey alone on this, they’ve got enough of their own problems to deal with and the only thing we’re going to do by demanding a recognition of the Armenian genocide is look like hypocritical fools on the world stage. Again.
Cluttered Mind
@Viva BrisVegas: 100% agreed with everything you said there. “Ally” does not mean “lapdog client state” and perhaps too many years of being a superpower have caused many in this country to forget that. By any reasonable standard, Turkey is an ally and a friend. They certainly are better allies and friends than Saudi Arabia ever was. I don’t recall any of the 9/11 hijackers being Turks, after all.
David Koch
Our relationship with Armenia will be better in the next administration, just as soon as Armenia makes a generous donation to the Clinton Foundation.
Barbara
I am afraid that the time to have persuaded the Turks to come clean about the founders of modern Turkey being directly responsible for what happened to Armenians has come and gone, perhaps to come back again. I say that only because Turkey itself has become more repressive, and Erdogan has made all kinds of statements that you would call, at best, backward looking and not associated with a more liberal society that is open to discussing the difficult things that happened in its past — e.g., women who use contraception are an abomination. Stuff like that. I read three articles about the centenary over the weekend in a variety of places, and I would like for someone to explain to me why the word genocide is so important for reasons other than potential reparations. I get that it puts a very specific connotation onto history — that what Turkey did was not the byproduct of the ferocious conflict of WWI, but rather, Turkey used that conflict as a justification for imposing violence, slaughter and expropriation of property that was beyond anything that was necessary to defend itself. And that is pretty much the official Turkish story to this day. It is wrong, of course, but I go back to the word genocide — is that absolutely necessary or if Turkey just admitted that its founders directed the extermination of Armenians for political and economic gain, would that be enough?
boatboy_srq
@Anne Laurie:
It goes back much further than that. Turkey may be fairly new, but the Ottoman Empire that preceded it was no better, nor any more cohesive after its first couple centuries. The epithet “Sick Man of Europe” is far older than modern Turkey, going back to Napoleonic discussions. The same way some Confederatists pine for antebellum Dixie, there are Turks who miss the good old days when half of Europe was theirs and they were knocking on the gates of Vienna.
Barbara
@Cluttered Mind: Right, and perhaps Obama’s reluctance to use the word “genocide” is at least in part attributable to his much greater understanding of American history.
Read the above passage again — the author’s family was able to go to the U.S. because, fortunately for them, America’s genocidal and racist regime had already laid the groundwork that made possible the acceptance of a Caucasian Christian family from halfway across the world without a word of English into the mainstream of the American economic engine even as people who had lived here for centuries faced harsh circumstances and unequal treatment. I don’t want to overdo this — but is this not more than a little obvious? Armenians emigrated to the U.S. at the same time that many people in my family did, e.g., in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century — after Native Americans had been mostly obliterated and while Jim Crow was still very strong, de jure in the South, and de facto in many Northern places. Are Armenian and Eastern European immigrants (among others) to the United States responsible for what happened to Native Americans and African Americans along the trajectory of U.S. history?
I think Turkey should be honest and should absolutely encourage Turkish people to understand what happened and not what Turkey wishes had happened. But still, isn’t the claim for a moral high ground ever tempered by how you gained at the expense of others and not just what others did to you and gained at your expense?
Cluttered Mind
@Barbara: I do see, recognize, and understand your point. Unfortunately, only Turkey can come to terms with what Turkey has done. They’ll either own up to it or they won’t, history doesn’t really offer up many examples of a country being forced by external powers to do genuine soul searching. It’s not that I don’t think Turkey should recognize and own up to what it did, it’s that I don’t think any amount of external pressure will be able to make that happen. All we’d accomplish by trying is alienating them for what would amount to a feel-good political statement. Given the situation in that part of the world, if we’re going to alienate one of our few real allies, I would hope we stood to actually gain something tangible from that effort.
Let me be very clear: If I thought we had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually convincing Turkey to recognize the Armenian Genocide, I’d be all for it. I just don’t think that we have that chance.
Elizabelle
C-Span 1 now. Awaiting swearing in of Loretta Lynch as new AG; Joe Biden will officiate, then speech.
A big bucking deal.
Per C-Span: 83rd Attorney General. Her confirmation took longer than the previous 7 AGs combined.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@srv: Because every American President of the last 100 years, except the evil Muslim Kenyan-born usurper, issued full-throated denunciations of the Turks for this atrocity. Right?
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Roger Moore: Where is the upvote button again?
Flatlander
@catclub: Catclub, you might want to take another look. Whereas the traditional definition of Anatolia is the peninsula between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the pre-genocide Armenian Turkish population was largely concentrated east of that, near the borders with the Persian and Russian empires, around Lake Van and in the Transcaucasus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide#/media/File:Ethnic_map_of_Asia_Minor_and_Caucasus_in_1914.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenians_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#/media/File:Armenian_population_map_1896.jpg
When people talk about the Armenians being expelled from Anatolia, they are using Anatolia in its broader sense as the entire area of the modern Turkish state.
In any case, the history is terrible. Modern Turkey was born from blood and genocide… just like the US.
Barbara makes an excellent point. The author’s Armenian family escaped a genocide in Ottoman territory to come be the beneficiaries of another genocide in American territory.
Moving to California, the Merchants even got to benefit from a second ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion, as the Spanish-speaking families who had resided in the northern half of Mexico for centuries were forced out of the new US states. Living in Fresno in the 20s and 30s, they could watch up close as hundreds of thousands of US citizens were forcibly repatriated to Mexico for being the wrong color and speaking the wrong language. I’d be fascinated to hear what they though of that.
Barbara
@Cluttered Mind: I don’t agree that “only” Turkey can do this. I think recognition of the historical record by non-Turkish has an impact on the extent to which Turkey can maintain a status of denial. And it certainly encourages those within Turkey — not an insubstantial number — to persevere when their work and efforts are recognized internationally.
Cluttered Mind
@Barbara: Can you define recognition in this case for me then? I really don’t think there are all that many people who actually don’t think that the Armenian Genocide happened. It’s like holocaust deniers, only a tiny few of them actually believe it didn’t happen, it’s more of just a thing that they say to wave their flags of nationalism and bigotry. Code words, etc etc.
Everyone knows what happened, the historical records are there for anyone who wants to access them, and there isn’t any sort of international coverup preventing people from hearing the truth. The official stance of Turkey is that it didn’t happen the way everyone knows it happened. Well, the official stance of Japan is that they weren’t the aggressors in WWII because they were manipulated into attacking Pearl Harbor because reasons, but that doesn’t mean that the truth isn’t globally recognized.
All I’m trying to say is that a U.N. statement recognizing and condemning the Armenian Genocide would do about as much good right now as a U.N. statement recognizing and condemning the Japanese unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. Whatever positive feelings may come out of it would be more than outweighed by the diplomatic fallout.
Please don’t think I am trying to justify Turkey’s behavior on this. I just don’t think there’s anything that we can do about it that won’t do more harm than good. It’s quite likely we won’t be able to agree on this point, but I feel I’ve stated my case as well as I can and I thank you for engaging with me civilly on this.
Aaron Baker
I think the first genocide of the twentieth century was that perpetrated by the Germans on the Hereros and Nama of Southern Africa (1904- 1907): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_Genocide
Barbara
@Cluttered Mind: People said much the same about apartheid in South Africa. It’s not exactly the same thing, obviously, but it’s clear that what the rest of the world thought eventually made a very large difference. So we will have to agree to disagree.
Citizen Alan
@MattF:
It is strangely perverse to consider this question on a day in which state offices in Mississippi were closed for Confederate Remembrance Day. We will publicly condemn Turkey for the Armenian Genocide right around the time we condemn Japan for the Bataan Death March, allow a UN vote against Israel vis a vis Palestine instead of vetoing it, and honor any treaty obligation towards the Native American tribes that more than mildly inconveniences the U.S. government.