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Book Review: The Armenians

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  • Book Review: The Armenians

    Christopher J. Walker, The Weekly Standard

    The Weekly Standard
    November 27, 2006 Monday

    The Armenians
    >>From Kings and Priests To
    Merchants and Commissars
    by Razmik Panossian
    Columbia, 442 pp., $40

    In Xenophon's Anabasis--"The March Up-Country"--there is a description
    of the Armenian people. We learn of the clans and their chiefs. We
    are also introduced to the popular custom of drinking beer through
    a straw. Xenophon was writing in 401 B.C.

    Today you can take a plane to Yerevan, capital of the Republic of
    Armenia, not so far from the region that Xenophon was describing,
    and you will meet the descendants of those whose lives were drawn
    by the ancient writer. You'll learn that Armenians have lived
    there continuously, rising to establish great dynasties, falling
    to subsistence, exile, or mass death, before becoming post-Soviet
    citizens. In this fascinating and important book, Razmik Panossian
    traces the connections across the centuries from the experience of
    the past to the reality of the present. He delineates the course of
    the roots that have fed the stems, leaves, and flowers visible today.

    Modern Armenia is a child of World War I. When the great empires
    of Europe and Asia collapsed in 1917-18, having hammered each other
    prostrate in warfare, a host of nation-states took their place. One
    of these was Armenia, which emerged as sovereign in May 1918--more
    than a year after Czar Nicholas II's abdication had set in train the
    process towards the state's independence.

    In a sense, though, Armenia's independence had been maturing for
    centuries, and that course is charted here. We learn how the new
    nation took shape: the processes of development, differentiation,
    learning, understanding, and self-knowledge that stirred the spirit
    of the people. Armenia, like other national cultures that developed
    into states, had been clogged for centuries by the dark weeds and
    oppressive mud of other people's empires, before it found a current
    with which to swim to the clear surface.

    Until World War I, Armenia was divided between the empires of Turkey
    and Russia. Its crises with its empires came relatively late. The
    people were regimented and treated with disdain by their rulers,
    but there was no emergency until the late 19th century. By this time
    the population was on the way to emancipation and self-knowledge,
    and had outgrown the restrictive bureaucracies that governed them. A
    desire to loosen the bonds of empire was a natural corollary.

    As Panossian informs us, a Catholic Armenian order of monks based in
    Venice, known as the Mechitarists, was instrumental in pushing forward
    much of the process of emancipation. From the early 18th century,
    members of this order acted in a startlingly modern and critical
    fashion, ably separating Catholic concerns from matters connected
    with Armenian history and education. They retrieved the history
    and language of the Armenians, collecting texts, sifting facts,
    and building up a clear picture of the nation.

    The people in the homeland were fortunate here, for the order was
    quite possibly acting heretically. Compare the situation with Catholic
    Hapsburg influence on the Czech nation. Compare the situation with
    that of the Czechs, whose language and identity were being abolished
    by agents of God and Emperor. The Jesuit Antonin Konias boasted
    of burning 60,000 books in the Czech language, including the Czech
    Bible. (The true figure is closer to 30,000--still huge.) Henceforth,
    Latin, and then a bastardized form of German, were imposed on the
    Czechs. Lands were confiscated and leading families were compelled
    to leave. The peasantry, denied their reformed faith and resenting
    the imposition of Catholicism, largely relapsed into paganism. Only
    later, through the agency of antiquarians and historians of language,
    did they start to relearn their own language and rediscover their true
    identity--not as Jesuit-driven Hapsburgers, but as the Czech nation.

    The perils that the Czechs had endured under the Hapsburgs attended
    Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1894-96, then those in Russia in
    1903-05, and most seriously in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-16, when the
    Armenian population from the Aegean coast to the Russian border was
    driven out or exterminated in a totality and cruelty so vast as to
    make the charge of genocide a valid one. (Anyone who questions the
    reality of the Armenian genocide should read U.S. consul Leslie Davis's
    dispatches from Kharput.) Is there a thread running through empires,
    which tends to make them, sooner or later, attack or destroy their
    own subject peoples?

    Razmik Panossian writes at length on the origin and nature of
    nationalism, though one regrets his omission of the views of Hans Kohn,
    an able and enlightened writer on the topic. Panossian discusses the
    difference between the constructivists (who believed that national
    identity is a construct) and the primordialists (who believe it was
    always there, waiting to be discovered). From the facts he presents,
    and from his use of the word "retrieve" in the context of Armenian
    national identity, it would seem that he prefers a qualified version
    of the primordialists--which certainly makes most sense in the light
    of historical facts.

    The process of becoming a modern and aware member of a national
    group--a nation in the modern sense--seems best summed up in T. S.

    Eliot's words: To recover what has been lost / And found and lost
    again and again. Intense theories about the construction of nationality
    appear rather less smart and modern when one recalls that the Armenian
    writer Grigor Tatevatsi, writing almost exactly 600 years ago,
    declared that "a nation is divided from another nation by region, by
    language, and by canon law." His text was reprinted in Constantinople
    in 1729. Maybe some of the disputes about modern nationalism amount
    to little more than a barrowful of medieval scholasticism.

    In the light of the facts of rule by empires, any general study of
    the topic should consist less in theorizing about the development of
    national identity than in exploring the dynamics within empires that
    lead them to oppress and crush national communities. In other words,
    we should study the empires more than the subject nationalities,
    since the problem lies with them. The question to answer is: Why are
    empires such a uniquely bad way of organizing human society? Why,
    in their collectivity and tendency towards monopoly, do they end up
    looking like the Soviet Union of about 1974?

    It is odd that some new version of empire is championed as the way
    forward today by thinkers such as Philip Bobbitt and Robert Cooper.

    And it is hard to see how nations like Armenia might fit into such
    a scheme, divided as the country was until 1918 between two empires,
    each, to a greater or lesser extent, destructive. Poland was not better
    off divided among three empires than as a unitary state. There was a
    farcical situation in New Caledonia, the Pacific territory over which,
    in colonial times, Britain and France perpetually quarreled.

    This led to the requirement that the native people speak French one
    day, and English the next.

    Examples spring to mind from the Baltic countries. In Lithuania,
    in 1861, the czarist governor Muraviev had said he looked forward
    to a time 40 years hence when there would be no trace of Lithuania
    or Lithuanians. The czarist authorities actually dynamited Catholic
    churches in Lithuania. The Lithuanian language was forbidden. Anyone
    caught even coming out of church with a Lithuanian prayer book was
    punished. In Estonia and Latvia, the native people sought freedom
    from both Germans and Russians, but the Russian paternalistic fanatic
    Pobiedonostsev, a modern Grand Inquisitor representing the power
    of extreme orthodoxy, declared that no czar possessed the power to
    diminish his own authority!

    What these few examples show is that nationalism--local pride--is often
    little more than a common-sense response to the actions of empires:
    an expression of ordinary local folk against an Orwellian nightmare of
    giganticism; a struggle to retain a human face, an identity grounded
    in town or neighborhood, when confronted by a governmental monster
    grinding towards political monopoly. We saw this in the last months of
    the Soviet empire (with Lithuania again in the forefront), and we have
    been witnessing it in the steady maintenance of Tibetan nationalism
    against the bullying nastiness of the Chinese empire. The British
    in Ireland also edged into imperial terrorism, by acts of collective
    punishment and, from 1831, by compelling children to speak English,
    forcing a cruel contraption into the mouths of kids unable or unwilling
    to do so.

    Panossian's book is a warning against the return of empires, and a
    plea for localism. Few people in the world have endured more from
    the lack of localism, and from the intrusion of grandiose, secretive
    political conglomerates, than the Armenians. They, and other small
    nations, look for a world order, perhaps untidy, of many voices.

    Their history is an argument against big government. We are
    reminded that the Armenian people have always worked hard, and been
    self-supporting, and that from that work ethic has come a devotion
    to their heritage.

    Even the merchants, active across the world in late medieval and early
    modern times, favored patriotic activities, building churches and
    keeping in mind the historical, ecclesiastical, and cultural legacy of
    their people, especially their unique alphabet. Financial success only
    denationalized some of those in the Ottoman capital. The record of the
    generous and patriotic Armenian capitalist extends to the present day.

    Panossian's study of the background to modern Armenia has a further
    value. He informs us of the activities of the Indian Armenians,
    who pioneered Armenian journalism in the 1770s and contributed a
    major history of the homeland; this was when the monks in Venice
    were working hardest. Their enterprise had been made possible by
    the privileged position that Armenian merchants had been granted in
    Iran in 1604. Local educational establishments were also set up in
    the Caucasus. Enterprising and patriotic Armenians established an
    academy in Moscow in 1815.

    All these activities predated the arrival of American missionaries, and
    Panossian proves the falsity of a malign theory about the Armenians,
    proposed by Elie Kedourie and repeated by Maurice Cowling, that by
    accepting modernization from U.S. missionaries (who first arrived in
    1829), the Armenians prepared for their own disasters. The introduction
    of Western values into an Eastern society, so the theory goes, created
    an impossible marriage, and the Eastern society was driven to murder.

    The Ottoman campaigns of extreme violence of 1894-06 and of 1915-16
    were, in effect, a lengthy Armenian suicide. (Armenians in the Russian
    empire lie outside this curious metaphysic.) Besides being constructed
    around a spineless concept of political responsibility, the theory
    ignores the point that development came from many more directions,
    and at an earlier date, than just from American missionaries. Change
    was more nuanced, and the Turks themselves had been moving towards some
    modernization: scientific education, printing, and so forth. The ruling
    elite was not terminally reactionary. So this theory is disproved by
    historical facts, and cannot stand up by reason of its scant regard
    for basic knowledge.

    Two points need more extensive treatment than what Panossian offers
    us. The presence of the Kurds in historic Armenia requires explanation:
    Kurdish tribes, as Sunni Muslims, were introduced into western Armenia
    by the Turkish sultan, following his victory over the Persians at the
    Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Their purpose was to guard the frontier
    against the Shiite nation. This mandate lapsed with a treaty in 1639,
    but the Armenians were thereafter compelled to share their land with
    a privileged ethnicity, which was re-privileged in 1891 when the
    sultan, sensing a spirit of Kurdish revolt, nipped it in the bud by
    creating loyal Kurdish regiments, turning their threats towards the
    Armenians. A brilliant and cynical imperial ruse.

    The book could also benefit from a stronger awareness of the
    international political situation. Though the Armenian nation has
    never been large, the homeland is located on a pivotal part of the
    earth's surface, which has led to an excessive interest in Armenia by
    outside powers that do not share the usual Armenian characteristics
    of culture and self-limitation.

    There is, perhaps, a third point: that the author himself shows some
    of the partisanship that has divided the worldwide Armenian community
    for almost 90 years. His fondness for the Armenian Revolutionary
    Federation, which has shown genuine and dedicated service and activity,
    leads him to downplay the legacy of the scholarly and cautious Ramkavar
    party: less noisy, more conservative, but with a deep understanding
    of Armenia's history, culture, and options.

    A word about this book's physical appearance. Columbia University
    Press has done a fine job in producing a volume that, besides making
    public a valuable text, is easily usable and attractive. The design
    of the book and its evocative jacket owe something to Shaker art,
    and something to the English Arts and Crafts movement--a classic of
    book-making, an item for anyone who values fine books.

    Christopher J. Walker is the author, most recently, of Oliver Baldwin:
    A Life of Dissent.
    General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”
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