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Former Denier Donald Quataert now admits it was Genocide

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  • Former Denier Donald Quataert now admits it was Genocide

    Former Genocide Denier Donald Quataert now admits it was indeed a genocide. He has since been forced to resign from the Chairmanship of the board of governors of the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS). This is his review of the Donald Bloxham book.

    Source: http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/



    THE MASSACRES OF OTTOMAN ARMENIANS
    Donald Quataert

    The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the
    Writing of Ottoman History

    Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism,
    and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York, Oxford
    University Press, 2005) 344 pp. $39.95

    In the late 1960s (when I entered graduate studies), there was an
    elephant in the room of Ottoman studies—the slaughter of the
    Ottoman Armenians in 1915.1 This subject continued to be taboo
    for a long time to come. To the best of my knowledge, no one
    ever suggested that the so-called “Armenian question” not be
    studied. Rather, a heavy aura of self-censorship hung over Ottoman
    history writing. Other topics—as diverse as religious identities,
    or the Kurds, or labor history—were also off limits. The Armenians
    were not alone as subjects of scholarly neglect and
    avoidance, nor as victims of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination
    within the Ottoman Empire.

    As Ottomanists remained largely silent, other writers were offering
    Armenians’ points of view, using both the oral testimony of
    Armenian survivors or the records of European and American
    diplomats and missionaries who witnessed, at greater and lesser
    distances, the atrocities of 1915. Journals, memoirs, and village reconstructions appeared in relatively substantial numbers and presented,
    usually in anger or sorrow, the stories of the victims, and
    sometimes their communities, before their disappearance. Much
    of this work was initially by Armenians in the ªrst generation of
    their diaspora and more recently by scholars who often, but not always,
    were Armenian-Americans.


    In the 1980s, another body of writing began to emerge, in
    both Turkish and English, using Ottoman sources, with titles like
    Documents on Ottoman Armenians.3 It quickly became evident that
    the authors were not writing critical history but polemics that
    moved along two fronts. Many of their works were directly sponsored
    and published by the Turkish government and offered either
    English or modern Turkish translations and sometimes reproductions
    of Ottoman documents. Overall, these translations were intended
    to demonstrate that after the Ottoman government ordered
    the deportation of the Armenians from the eastern Anatolian war zones in the spring of 1915, the regime went to considerable trouble to protect the lives and properties of its departing subjects. More or less simultaneously, a second body of Ottomanist literature appeared. These studies added to the account that the years from 1911 to 1922 witnessed a terrible bloodletting
    for all Ottoman subjects and that Muslims died in greater
    numbers than did Christians during the conflaagrations.


    After the long lapse of serious Ottomanist scholarship on the
    Armenian question, it now appears that the Ottomanist wall of silence
    is crumbling. In 1998, for example, the Armenian Forum published
    articles by several Ottomanists, as well as Armenian specialists,
    in which the scholars actually talked to, instead of past, one
    another; they sought to engage in constructive dialogues on the
    massacres and not simply to speak to their own constituencies. A
    remarkable set of events, perhaps even a permanent break in the
    wall, occurred in late 2005. A Turkish university managed to hold
    a two-day conference exploring the events of 1915. The Turkish
    government had blocked several earlier efforts. This time, however,
    despite ofªcial intimidation and public harassment, Turkish
    historians and other Turkish academics debated and discussed this
    once-forbidden subject.

    Such is the backdrop for a discussion of Bloxham’s The Great
    Game of Genocide. Although the book has many faults and short-comings, it is intellectually honest and makes important contributions
    to shattering the taboos that still prevail.

    The author has strong biases, but readers will detect the presence of a scholar struggling with complex political, economic, and moral issues.
    From this reviewer’s perspective—as expressed in The Ottoman
    Empire (Cambridge, 2000)—Ottoman civil and military personnel
    in 1915 committed mass murders of Armenian subjects,
    persons whom they were sworn and bound to protect and defend.
    As I wrote in the second edition to my book, however, debate
    that centers around the term genocide may degenerate into semantics
    and deºect scholars from the real task at hand, to understand
    better the nature of the 1915 events.

    My concern about the term genocide is partly a reflection of
    the current state of debate among Ottomanists and the reluctance
    of both these professional historians and the Turkish government
    to consider the fate of the Armenians. These politics mean that use
    of genocide creates more heat than light and does not seem to promote
    dispassionate inquiry. Moreover, genocide evokes implicit
    comparisons with the Nazi past, which precludes a full understanding
    of the parameters of the Ottoman events. Nonetheless, I
    use the term in the context of this review. Although it may provoke
    anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues, to do otherwise
    in this essay runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive
    and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its
    military and general populace committed against the Armenians.
    Indeed, as I state in the second edition, accumulating evidence is
    indicating that the killings were centrally planned by Ottoman
    government officials and systematically carried out by their underlings.
    [/B]

    Bloxham sometimes offers inadequate evidence to buttress
    his arguments concerning the central planning of the massacres.
    For example, he documents a spring 1915 decision to deport “all
    of the Armenians” from an area in western Anatolia by citing a
    Berlin newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt, of 4 May 1916 (78, n. 88).
    Citing a secondary source dated a year after an event is not presenting
    sufficient historical evidence and does not make a convincing
    case.

    Nonetheless, what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide. Furthermore, Bloxham is correct to say, “The 1915–16 genocide was a one-sided destruction of a largely defenceless community by the agents of a sovereign
    state” Leaving aside any reservations about using the
    term genocide, which did not become part of the international lexicon
    until after World War II, to describe events during World
    War I, the question remains: How do we frame discussions of the
    systematic widespread slaughters that have occurred in the past?


    The Armenians had coexisted in relative peace for most of the
    period during which they were under Ottoman administration.
    The Armenian massacres of the mid-1890s, 1909, and World
    War I were not the inevitable outcome of preexisting primordial
    divides but were historically contingent events. What caused
    them?
    Bloxham’s book is divided into two parts. In the ªrst, he surveys
    late Ottoman history and the genocide (he has no qualms
    about using this term coined in the late 1930s). He then devotes
    slightly more than half of his work to exploring the complicity of
    the Great Powers in the perpetration of the Ottoman atrocities of
    1915 and in supporting the denials of the Turkish Republic following
    the elimination of the Ottoman Empire. Bloxham offers a
    study of imperialism in the Near and Middle East and its consequences
    for the peoples of the region. Toward the end of the
    book, he summarizes his own contribution as “the sorry history of
    the manipulated aspirations of supplicant peoples by the Great
    Powers” (225). Bloxham describes his goal as “an analysis of the
    way that the Armenian question continued periodically and tragically
    to intersect with the greater imperial and military policies of
    the powers” (133). The book is much stronger in Parts II and III,
    in which he discusses the involvement of the Great Powers and
    presents considerable original research. The earlier chapters in
    Part I are weaker, at least partly because Bloxham did not utilize
    much of the new scholarship on Ottoman history that would have
    provided him with richer insights into the structure of Ottoman
    society and the state.
    General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

  • #2
    2.

    Bloxham does not consult Ottoman archival sources. In fact,
    he uses few Turkish secondary ones. Thus, his is not an
    Ottomanist tract according to the deªnition given above—that is,
    a study that uses Ottoman-language sources in signiªcant measure.
    His is always the externalist view, events as seen from the outside
    by Europeans and Americans. He does not offer much insight
    about developments in the nineteenth century from an Ottoman
    point of view, whether domestic or international politics or the
    massacres themselves. In this sense, his book resembles Fromkin’s
    A Peace to End All Peace, which, despite the praise of many historians,
    is deeply troubling for its nearly complete dependence on
    non-Ottoman sources for its analysis of the end of the Ottoman
    Empire.8 But, in Bloxham’s defense, his goal is not to examine the
    events of 1915 for their own sake, but to trace the complicity of
    the Great Powers in them and in their subsequent cover-up. But
    his willingness to use the Turkish government’s compilations of
    Ottoman documents is fraught with peril, since it seems to validate
    the academic legitimacy of material that is no less problematical
    than the German White, French Yellow, British Blue, and the
    other colored “books” that the various Great Powers assembled to
    demonstrate their innocence regarding the outbreak of World
    War I.9
    Bloxham relies heavily on a host of German, Austro-
    Hungarian, French, British, and U.S. primary and secondary
    sources. However, he does not give a sufªcient narrative of the
    unfolding of the 1915 genocide. Since many people, among them
    Ottomanists, deny its reality, and many others do not know the
    details but often only the polemics, Bloxham might have offered a
    summary of the events themselves.
    Bloxham’s exoneration of Imperial Germany from any particular
    wrongdoing in the slaughter and its aftermath is persuasive.
    He is right not to transfer onto the Wilhelmine Reich the sins of
    the Third. By dividing responsibility equally among the Germans,
    Austro-Hungarians, British, French, and Americans, he drives
    home the point that if the Great Powers, as a group, had acted differently,
    the horrors of 1915 might have been averted. He shows
    how the particular alignments in 1914—Britain, France, Russia
    General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

    Comment


    • #3
      3.

      versus Germany and Austria-Hungary—created a favorable
      atmosphere for bigots within the Ottoman government to gain
      inºuence over key parts of the state apparatus (66). Imperialism
      had speciªc effects on Ottoman political decision making.
      Bloxham also makes clear that the United States—the imperialist
      power of our own age—follows, for raison d’etat, the same
      strategy of conveniently looking the other way that its imperial
      predecessors established in the Middle East. Indeed, for much of
      the history of the Turkish Republic, U.S. businessmen, diplomats,
      and politicians have remained silent about the events of 1915, favoring
      the new nation-state for its stabilizing role. “American diplomats
      also swiftly learned that there was no political capital to be
      made in the Armenian cause” (24). Later, the Cold War and Turkey’s
      role as a crucial U.S. ally perpetuated the pattern. Even the
      American Protestant missionaries who had worked among the Ottoman
      Armenians were caught up in the new politics. The Near
      East Mission, in an April 1948 report, wrote of its own role in the
      Cold War as “a bulwark against Communism.”10 Indeed, Bloxham
      is sharply critical of America’s distancing itself from the
      Armenian cause. He entitles a chapter of his book “The USA:
      From Non-intervention to Non-recognition,” and he rebukes
      Congress for its annual refusal to commemorate the Armenian
      Genocide.
      In common with many Ottomanists and non-specialists alike,
      Bloxham consistently betrays a careless use of the terms Turk and
      Turkish when referring to the Ottoman state or some of its Muslim
      subjects. In this regard, he has plenty of company. For example, in
      a richly detailed and important recent book on his years of reporting
      about the Middle East, Fisk includes a powerful and disturbing
      chapter about the Armenian massacres that often parallels Bloxham’s
      arguments. Although its title—“The First Holocaust”—is
      neither illuminating nor helpful, since it focuses attention on comparisons
      with the Nazis rather than analyses of the speciªcities of
      1915, the chapter itself offers substantial, and effective, eyewitness
      testimony, much of it from interviews that Fisk gathered from
      aged Armenian survivors during the early 1990s. Unfortunately,
      however, Fisk proceeds as if the Ottoman Empire scarcely existed;

      he almost always—anachronistically—substitutes Turk or Turkish
      for the historically accurate term Ottoman.11
      Bloxham, by contrast, clearly knows better, but he too very
      often writes Turkish when he means Ottoman. Within the space of
      a single paragraph, he refers to “Turkish suspicion” and “Ottoman
      troops,” and, even worse, in two consecutive sentences, he wavers
      from “the Ottoman army” to “the Turkish armies” (84, 100). That
      he is aware of the difference between Ottomans and Turks is clear
      from the various points at which he speciªcally distinguishes them
      (say, 62, 106). But too often, frequently on the same page, he slips
      back and forth.
      Thus do Bloxham, Fisk, and many others create confusion
      around a key issue. Who committed the deportations and slaughters?
      On a moral plane, does the elision of Turk and Ottoman mean
      that modern-day Turks are liable for the sins of the Ottomans? On
      the historical plane, were the killers Ottoman ofªcials bent on saving
      the state in a wartime crisis, or were they Turkish chauvinists
      or racists bent on purging the land of its non-Turkish populations?
      Bloxham seems to believe the latter to be the case (94, 135). In one
      of his milder formulations, he argues that the military commanders
      of the early Turkish Republic were as “equally nationalistic” as
      ofªcers of the late Empire. But this characterization of the Ottoman
      ofªcers as Turkish nationalists is too simplistic and unfair.
      Many of these ofªcers remained loyal Ottomanists until the elimination
      of the Empire.
      Thus, even though, at many junctures, Bloxham labors to establish
      historical contingency, his narrative has an air of inevitability
      about it. He rushes to judgment too hastily about the ideological
      bent of the late Ottoman civil and military leadership, fully
      ignoring and thus summarily dismissing the opposing position
      (58–59). Considerable scholarship, based on Ottoman archival
      sources and other materials, suggests that most of the Ottoman
      leadership during the ªnal decade of the Empire’s existence remained
      committed to an ideology and system in which Ottoman
      subjects would, or should, be loyal to the state.12 These works explicitly
      reject the notion of a pervasive Turkish nationalism
      General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

      Comment


      • #4
        4.

        or Pan-Turkic movement, arguing instead for the persistence of
        Ottomanism well after the events of 1915. Indeed, some of them
        maintain that Ottoman Muslim nationalism caught up in the crisis
        of saving the state during wartime precipitated the slaughter.13
        Bloxham certainly has the right to disagree with these contentions,
        but he needs to acknowledge and debate them, lest he fall into the
        same trap as those who deny the genocide altogether, content to
        ignore evidence against their own cherished positions. The connection
        between Ottoman and Republican Turkish policies toward
        Armenians richly deserves further study, but Bloxham’s elisions
        of Ottoman and Turkish by no means serve to promote such a
        project.
        Also problematical is Bloxham’s oversimpliªed assessment of
        the policies that Sultan Abdulhamid (1876–1909) directed toward
        Ottoman Muslims (46–48, 55). Bloxham is determined to portray
        this ruler as a proto-Islamist, whereas much of the recent Ottomanist
        literature presents him primarily as a monarchist intent on
        propping up his legitimacy. Abdulhamid’s instruments of legitimation
        included charitable donations, rebuilding the tombs of earlier
        Ottoman sultans, and appeals to fellow Muslims.14 Bloxham ignores
        the ªrst two and stresses the third, thereby gravitating to
        those aspects of the Sultan’s rule that reinforce pre-existing notions
        of Ottoman brutality toward the Armenians instead of exploring
        late Ottoman methods of statecraft. Abdulhamid hardly
        deserves to be cleared from any guilt in the massacres that took
        place on his watch; in fact, research links him with the Armenian
        massacres of 1895 in Istanbul.15 But the effect of Bloxham’s onedimensional
        portrait of him is to shortchange our understanding of
        a complex ruler. It is no less a blight on Bloxham’s otherwise compelling
        analyses and insights as is his careless conºation of Ottomans
        and Turks. Such a gap in the Ottoman context is the equivalent
        of studying Rwanda-Burundi during the 1990s only from the perspective of the U.N. and the U.S., but not of the actual participants
        in the tragedy.
        Given its focus on the foreign policy of the Great Powers, the
        book is sufªciently documented. One confusing note, however,
        occurs at a key point in Bloxham’s discussion of a meeting in an
        eastern Anatolian town at which prominent government leaders
        “agitated for an immediate massacre” of certain Ottoman Armenians.
        Bloxham reports the meeting as taking place on April 18,
        1915, but the footnote cites an April 15, 1915, source for it. Elsewhere
        in the same footnote, Bloxham cites an April 22, 1915,
        source for a different matter, the passage of irregular troops (83 n.
        142). Either one of the dates relating to the meeting is a typographical
        error, or the April 22 source is the one that actually documents
        the meeting. Such an error should not have crept into the
        ªnal manuscript; it will only give credence to those who wish to
        deny and invalidate the author’s arguments—more the pity, given
        the moral integrity in Bloxham’s treatment of a subject over which
        actual blood and not merely scholars’ ink has been spilt.16
        Bloxham’s contributions are many. He calls for a “normalization
        [his stress] of the study of state-sponsored mass murder . . . that
        . . . emerges . . . often piecemeal, informed by ideology but according
        to shifts in circumstances” (69). He criticizes the Eurocentric
        bias among many critics of these Ottoman events who neglect
        imperial Germany’s slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in
        Southwest Africa. Similarly, the silence surrounding the 1880s
        Czarist massacres of Muslim Circassians (who would later themselves
        slaughter Armenians) and the killings of Ottoman Muslims
        either by Ottoman Christian subjects of the sultan or by the newly
        independent states in the former Ottoman Balkans is untenable. A
        double racism appears to be at work. Observers are willing to condemn
        atrocities by the Ottomans against Armenians, but, as
        Bloxham says, they seem to worry less when the victims are those
        not like us, in this case the Herero peoples or Muslims during the
        final Ottoman decades.
        To his credit, Bloxham also places the denials of the republican
        Turkish state in the eighty years since its formation in historical
        context. He notes that Turkey’s leaders feared that “the atten-
        16 I refer also to the assassination of many Turkish diplomats by Armenians during the
        1980s.
        tion of the outside world on matters Armenian” simply would be
        a pretext for interfering in internal Turkish affairs or making
        claims on Turkish territory (111). These republican Turkish concerns
        are not dissimilar to those of certain Ottoman leaders that
        Armenian nationalist claims, coupled with Russian imperial ambitions,
        would lead to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
        Bloxham’s assessment of the positions that the Great Power
        individually espoused is particularly strong. Austria-Hungary,
        another empire struggling with its late nineteenth-century multiethnicity,
        behaved cautiously toward the Armenians. Britain,
        however, opportunistically “adopted publicity of the massacres” as
        a means of wooing U.S. “public opinion against the Central
        Powers” at a point when the American entry into the war was uncertain
        (128). Bloxham also offers a thoughtful, multifaceted explanation
        of why the post–WorldWar I trials “to punish Ottoman
        leaders for crimes against humanity” fell apart (163). The Great
        Powers’ postwar politics and the lack of legal mechanisms available
        “for the prosecution of a state’s mass murder of its own civilians”
        combined to limit the possibility of a full examination of the wartime
        massacres (163).
        Near the end of the study, Bloxham is able to draw only a
        gloomy conclusion from his research: “If there is a concrete policy
        implication from this book, it is not for Ankara but for the Armenian
        diaspora, whose lobbyists should stop putting hope in the
        agenda of the USA and the major European states” (225).
        The recent works by Bloxham and Fisk, among others, illustrate
        a long-standing pattern in the scholarship concerning 1915
        and its aftermath. Ottomanists (like me) have long surrendered academic
        study of this vital topic to those unable or unwilling to use
        the Ottoman archives and other Ottoman-language sources, failing
        to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research.
        Oddly, Ottomanists fall into a camp of either silence or denial
        —both of which are forms of complicity. Those who have the
        linguistic and paleographic tools to unlock the truth must not
        leave the matter for others to debate and resolve. How can we expect
        Bloxham and Fisk to write accurately about the role of
        Ottomans (not Turks) in the deaths of so many Armenians
        when Ottomanists provide no guidance, no leadership, and no
        scholarship?
        Bloxham’s book is a worthy addition to a mounting literature
        that seeks, through critical scholarship, to discuss the horrors of the
        past and their legacies for the living. The best hope is that it will
        stimulate Ottomanists to engage the issues that he has raised and
        encourage the dialogue that has begun to emerge between heretofore
        sharply divided legatees and their supporters.
        General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Joseph View Post
          He has since been forced to resign from the Chairmanship of the board of governors of the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS).
          What is the source for this bit of information?

          Though who would want to sit on a board of governors composed of the likes of Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy!
          Plenipotentiary meow!

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Joseph View Post
            or Pan-Turkic movement, arguing instead for the persistence of
            Ottomanism well after the events of 1915. Indeed, some of them
            maintain that Ottoman Muslim nationalism caught up in the crisis
            of saving the state during wartime precipitated the slaughter.13
            Bloxham certainly has the right to disagree with these contentions,
            but he needs to acknowledge and debate them, lest he fall into the
            same trap as those who deny the genocide altogether, content to
            ignore evidence against their own cherished positions. The connection
            between Ottoman and Republican Turkish policies toward
            Armenians richly deserves further study, but Bloxham’s elisions
            of Ottoman and Turkish by no means serve to promote such a
            project.
            Also problematical is Bloxham’s oversimpliªed assessment of
            the policies that Sultan Abdulhamid (1876–1909) directed toward
            Ottoman Muslims (46–48, 55). Bloxham is determined to portray
            this ruler as a proto-Islamist, whereas much of the recent Ottomanist
            literature presents him primarily as a monarchist intent on
            propping up his legitimacy. Abdulhamid’s instruments of legitimation
            included charitable donations, rebuilding the tombs of earlier
            Ottoman sultans, and appeals to fellow Muslims.14 Bloxham ignores
            the ªrst two and stresses the third, thereby gravitating to
            those aspects of the Sultan’s rule that reinforce pre-existing notions
            of Ottoman brutality toward the Armenians instead of exploring
            late Ottoman methods of statecraft. Abdulhamid hardly
            deserves to be cleared from any guilt in the massacres that took
            place on his watch; in fact, research links him with the Armenian
            massacres of 1895 in Istanbul.15 But the effect of Bloxham’s onedimensional
            portrait of him is to shortchange our understanding of
            a complex ruler. It is no less a blight on Bloxham’s otherwise compelling
            analyses and insights as is his careless conºation of Ottomans
            and Turks. Such a gap in the Ottoman context is the equivalent
            of studying Rwanda-Burundi during the 1990s only from the perspective of the U.N. and the U.S., but not of the actual participants
            in the tragedy.
            Given its focus on the foreign policy of the Great Powers, the
            book is sufªciently documented. One confusing note, however,
            occurs at a key point in Bloxham’s discussion of a meeting in an
            eastern Anatolian town at which prominent government leaders
            “agitated for an immediate massacre” of certain Ottoman Armenians.
            Bloxham reports the meeting as taking place on April 18,
            1915, but the footnote cites an April 15, 1915, source for it. Elsewhere
            in the same footnote, Bloxham cites an April 22, 1915,
            source for a different matter, the passage of irregular troops (83 n.
            142). Either one of the dates relating to the meeting is a typographical
            error, or the April 22 source is the one that actually documents
            the meeting. Such an error should not have crept into the
            ªnal manuscript; it will only give credence to those who wish to
            deny and invalidate the author’s arguments—more the pity, given
            the moral integrity in Bloxham’s treatment of a subject over which
            actual blood and not merely scholars’ ink has been spilt.16
            Bloxham’s contributions are many. He calls for a “normalization
            [his stress] of the study of state-sponsored mass murder . . . that
            . . . emerges . . . often piecemeal, informed by ideology but according
            to shifts in circumstances” (69). He criticizes the Eurocentric
            bias among many critics of these Ottoman events who neglect
            imperial Germany’s slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in
            Southwest Africa. Similarly, the silence surrounding the 1880s
            Czarist massacres of Muslim Circassians (who would later themselves
            slaughter Armenians) and the killings of Ottoman Muslims
            either by Ottoman Christian subjects of the sultan or by the newly
            independent states in the former Ottoman Balkans is untenable. A
            double racism appears to be at work. Observers are willing to condemn
            atrocities by the Ottomans against Armenians, but, as
            Bloxham says, they seem to worry less when the victims are those
            not like us, in this case the Herero peoples or Muslims during the
            final Ottoman decades.
            To his credit, Bloxham also places the denials of the republican
            Turkish state in the eighty years since its formation in historical
            context. He notes that Turkey’s leaders feared that “the atten-
            16 I refer also to the assassination of many Turkish diplomats by Armenians during the
            1980s.
            tion of the outside world on matters Armenian” simply would be
            a pretext for interfering in internal Turkish affairs or making
            claims on Turkish territory (111). These republican Turkish concerns
            are not dissimilar to those of certain Ottoman leaders that
            Armenian nationalist claims, coupled with Russian imperial ambitions,
            would lead to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
            Bloxham’s assessment of the positions that the Great Power
            individually espoused is particularly strong. Austria-Hungary,
            another empire struggling with its late nineteenth-century multiethnicity,
            behaved cautiously toward the Armenians. Britain,
            however, opportunistically “adopted publicity of the massacres” as
            a means of wooing U.S. “public opinion against the Central
            Powers” at a point when the American entry into the war was uncertain
            (128). Bloxham also offers a thoughtful, multifaceted explanation
            of why the post–WorldWar I trials “to punish Ottoman
            leaders for crimes against humanity” fell apart (163). The Great
            Powers’ postwar politics and the lack of legal mechanisms available
            “for the prosecution of a state’s mass murder of its own civilians”
            combined to limit the possibility of a full examination of the wartime
            massacres (163).
            Near the end of the study, Bloxham is able to draw only a
            gloomy conclusion from his research: “If there is a concrete policy
            implication from this book, it is not for Ankara but for the Armenian
            diaspora, whose lobbyists should stop putting hope in the
            agenda of the USA and the major European states” (225).
            The recent works by Bloxham and Fisk, among others, illustrate
            a long-standing pattern in the scholarship concerning 1915
            and its aftermath. Ottomanists (like me) have long surrendered academic
            study of this vital topic to those unable or unwilling to use
            the Ottoman archives and other Ottoman-language sources, failing
            to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research.
            Oddly, Ottomanists fall into a camp of either silence or denial
            —both of which are forms of complicity. Those who have the
            linguistic and paleographic tools to unlock the truth must not
            leave the matter for others to debate and resolve. How can we expect
            Bloxham and Fisk to write accurately about the role of
            Ottomans (not Turks) in the deaths of so many Armenians
            when Ottomanists provide no guidance, no leadership, and no
            scholarship?
            Bloxham’s book is a worthy addition to a mounting literature
            that seeks, through critical scholarship, to discuss the horrors of the
            past and their legacies for the living. The best hope is that it will
            stimulate Ottomanists to engage the issues that he has raised and
            encourage the dialogue that has begun to emerge between heretofore
            sharply divided legatees and their supporters.
            General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

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            • #7
              The Turkish government has a scandal on its hands, thanks to the reckless behavior of its ambassador in Washington, who clearly violated the academic freedom of a prominent American scholar.
              General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”

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