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**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:44 AM

Peter Balakian

Progress, Obstacles, Hope, 92 Years Later: Some Reflections

By Peter Balakian

Talk given at the Armenians and the Left Symposium on March 31.

First, let me say how delighted I am to be here with you this evening, and to share the podium with professor Henry Theriault and professor Halil Berktay, who has been an important, courageous, progressive voice in Turkey over the past decades.

When my memoir was published 10 years ago, my editor asked me, in a whisper voice, at our first meeting after she bought the book: �How far out on a limb are we?� She was afraid that the subject of the Armenian Genocide was so obscure, the book would go belly-up in a few days. I told her we�d be fine; but truthfully, I had no idea what would happen to a book that dealt with a history that had happened more than 80 years before. I just held my breath.

If you�d told me then that 10 years later�9 decades after the event�the Genocide would again be appearing on the front page of the New York Times and in the media regularly, I�d have said you were crazy. Sadly, it was Hrant Dink�s assassination that wound up on the front page of the Times, but the Armenian Genocide is nonetheless news and at the forefront of contemporary affairs. The rapid advancement of scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, the EU accession process, and the forces of democracy and courageous intellectuals in Turkey are all responsible for this.

It is quite an extraordinary moment for this history; 92 years later, after decades of obscurity, the Armenian Genocide is an important ethical, intellectual and political issue. And yet, as a kind of leaping progress has been made due largely to a scholarly process and a culture of liberal education, for example, here in the States, there has been a violent backlash from forces inside Turkey. This has created a quandary, a conflict, a problem to be solved.

The assassination of Hrant Dink is in some way emblematic of it. An Armenian citizen of Istanbul who was writing and speaking about the Armenian Genocide openly in Turkey. He was taking democratic society seriously. And, for this, he was murdered. He was inhabiting a delicate, civic space in Turkey�s complex world. In his final essay, he told us he felt like a pigeon�at once vulnerable, yet free, he so hoped. But he was gunned down, apparently by the �Deep State,� by forces of repression and violence against free expression and thought, and he was demonized and made a pariah by Turkey�s penal code Article 301.

Dink�s murder resonated with Armenians because it evoked the murder of thousands of intellectuals and cultural leaders in 1915. There was a genocidal taint to it. It reenacted our history. Yet, Dink�s murder also resonated with Turkish culture. It brought more than a hundred thousand people into the streets of Istanbul�Armenians and Turks�to express anger, outrage and solidarity. People in the streets shouting �We are all Hrant Dink, We are all Armenian.� It was something new; Dink�s assassination became one catalyst for the democracy movement in Turkey. It represented hope for change. And change is the key.

A hundred years ago, progressive Armenians were working with the Young Turk movement for change and for a new age of constitutional reform. It didn�t work out, as we well know. A hundred years later, Armenians of the Diaspora and of the Republic�ironically�may still be able to play a role in Turkey�s quest for genuine democracy. We are not citizens of Turkey but we are a long shadow of Turkey�s conscience. (Armenians in the Republic are as well, although they have a unique situation to grapple with.) We are connected to an issue that is a cornerstone to Turkish democracy.

Diasporan Armenians are a complex community: they are American, French, Canadian, Greek and many other nationalities; and most have grown up in cultures and educational systems that value serious mechanisms of critique, and historical and cultural evaluation. This often creates a gap between Diasporan Armenians and Turks, who have been socialized by a different kind of culture. Because the issue of the Armenian past in Turkey embodies the idea of Turkey�s democratic capacity for self-criticism and historical critique, might Armenians of the Diaspora be part of a process that brings about that change? Or are they a hindrance? Can Armenians enter into a productive dialogue with Turkish citizens or Turks in the diaspora?

First, let me note that while there has been a positive opening-up of dialogue between Armenians and Turks in recent years, there are some basic issues that create obstacles for deeper dialogue, and I encounter these issues when I speak with Turkish-Americans who come to protest my lectures and even with some of the Turkish scholars on the Armenian-Turkish listserv to which I belong.

As I note them, I know very well that Armenians need to understand things about Turks and their worldviews and their complex society. And, I in no way mean to suggest that Armenians and Armenian culture is any more fault-free than any other culture in the world. However, in the ongoing dialogue between Turks and Armenians, I feel it is important for Turks to understand the issue of power, and how asymmetrical it was in 1915 and continues to be between our two cultures. Armenians are often astounded when Turks respond to them as if, on the issue of the Genocide, we are on an even playing field.

First, the asymmetry of power is a key element in the act of genocide. In 1915 the perpetrator used its military, its state bureaucracy, and an unequal social structure to enact a plan of extermination against a people who were a defenseless, Christian minority. The Turkish government�s subsequent denial became a further manifestation of such radical asymmetry in which a large, strategically important, nation-state uses all of its political and military means�including blackmail, coercion and cajoling�to get third parties to cooperate with it in delegitimizing the history of the Armenian Genocide. The goal is to absolve Turkey of responsibility for the events of 1915 and to undermine its moral definition. The main power that the Armenians of the Diaspora have is the truth of the ever-growing discourse about the history of 1915. (Yes, there are Diasporan lobbies and money, but this seems rather small potatoes compared to the Turkish state�s massive efforts and its apparatus).

This asymmetry is also a factor in the dialogue about nationalism: Which culture�s nationalism is worse and was more responsible for the problems leading to the Genocide, and which nationalism is now worse in resolving the pursuit of justice following the Genocide. Having come to this entire issue through the discourse of peace studies and human rights (I am not an Armenologist, a Middle East studies area scholar), I have little affinity with nationalist projects or modalities of any kind and from any culture. But it seems clear from having studied this history that, for the most part, dangerous Armenian expressions of nationalism have been reactive to Turkish power and its abuses. Whether Armenians were trying to dig out from under their infidel status as Christians in the Ottoman Empire, or were resisting massacre and deportation when possible during the Genocide, or reacting with anger and political activism in the face of Turkish government campaigns of denial, Armenians often felt and feel trapped in a syndrome of reactive-ness, because of the inherent asymmetry of power between the two cultures. Not to acknowledge this is to de-contextualize history.

The Turkish government continues its abuse of power in its multi-million dollar denial campaign. How would it look if today the German government were going around the world blaming the Jews for what happened to them during World War II, or the Cambodian government were blaming the victims of Pol Pot�s genocide for what happened to them? This abuse of state power for the purpose of inflicting on the third parties around the world a false narrative about the events of 1915 leaves Armenians with a sense of moral revulsion and it adds to their trauma. The Turkish state appears to many as desperate in seeking to suppress the reality of its past, and at costs that are dear to its own future. (I, for one, would like not to spend the rest of my life dealing with the mess of Turkish denial. I would like to be able to play golf, and play golf with Halil Berktay).

Most Armenians�and I must say many, many others in the media, in politics, in intellectual life�are deeply troubled and even shocked by the Turkish state�s present aggressive campaign of denial. In fact, what Turkey is now doing in Washington in its effort to stop a non-binding Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian Genocide evokes Orwellian comedy and absurd theater. But it is not farce. It is tragedy, and tragedy for both cultures in different ways. Congressmen have told me that in their several decades on Capitol Hill they have never seen a foreign country come to our halls of government to intervene on any issue as Turkey is doing now. And for what purpose? For Armenians, to watch this kind of theater is bewildering, enraging, hard to fathom. Since the Armenian Genocide was carried out with impunity, these small acts of moral and historical acknowledgement have symbolic meaning, but symbolic meaning is at least some meaning for a survivor culture that has been robbed of a great deal more.

So this situation of asymmetrical power has resulted in a serious kind of trauma� that often misunderstood concept�that I hope Turkish people will come to accept. Armenians have been deeply traumatized by their history under Turkish rule and now by the denialist extremism of the Turkish state in the long aftermath of 1915. Let me say clearly that I am in no way an apologist for Armenian acts of wanton violence such as the killings of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s. These kinds of distorted manifestations of trauma have no place in conflict resolution and are destructive to all. Nor am I affirming anything like a cult of victimization, for such states are the result of trauma that has become one-dimensional and can find no creative way to move forward and heal. And, Armenians must always be seeking ways to heal and move forward, and not get stuck in the rut of their rage or rigidity.

This traumatic state is the result of being bludgeoned again and again by Turkish power. Armenians have had to work hard to repair themselves and make new worlds after everything was destroyed in 1915�a whole civilization, a homeland and millions of lives. This is not a history that individuals get over easily, and especially when the perpetrator�s legacy continues to blame the victims and falsify the narrative. This creates a morally unacceptable situation that can produce a condition of moral chaos which Armenians are always struggling to stave off by insisting on the truth of history.

One would hope that as we get to know each other, Turks will not retort to Armenians by claiming that Turkish trauma is worse than Armenian trauma. In the particular context of 1915, with an understanding of power, this strikes me as unethical and inappropriate. Just as Germans don�t equate their sufferings during WWII with the sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust. Some space must be afforded with respect. Conversely, Armenians need to listen to Turks talk about their issues, their anxieties, their traumas, their different worldviews.

As I look back at the past decade, I note many changes, and among them, the presence of Turkish friends and colleagues. Where once there was a black hole of abstraction about Turkey for many of us, now there is a more visible and complex world. In the past decade, Turkish intellectuals and others have made great inroads that are now visible to us and have given us a deeper understanding of Turkey as a place of many layers and nuances, a place not simply defined by ultra-nationalism and �Deep State� forces. Armenians need to embrace the new sense of complexity they have given us�of our shared history, of our shared humanity, of the understanding that there is no future in denying the past. Our Turkish friends are vital to our sense of a future and a hope for healing.

It�s important for Armenians to accept that the Armenian Genocide is not only an Armenian issue; the discourse should be de-ethnicized as much as possible. The idea that this is a debate between two cultures is wrong and ahistorical. It is not �Armenians say� and then �Turks say.� Here, there is an important place for the international scholarly community and I would also point to the community of genocide scholars. The first person to use the term genocide to define what happened to the Armenians was Raphael Lemkin (he used it on January 31, 1949, on American TV). In some ways, scholars of genocide can shed light on things that scholars who are part of national discourses or area studies can�t. Rather than defending or rejecting a particular national narrative, scholars of genocide are able to see the anatomy of such events in a comparative context across a global expanse. They are able to show us that the Armenian Genocide is part of a human history that involves many perpetrators and many victims. Turkey is not to be singled out, nor is it alone. Just look at American history and its genocidal acts against Native Americans and African Americans.

It seems as if there has never been a more open moment for bonds to be forged between Turks and Armenians on the issue that haunts both their cultures. Hrant Dink was concerned that pressure on Turkey from the outside world would backfire or endanger the lives of people inside Turkey, and his perspective I respect deeply; he paid the highest price for it. And yet, while his fears were and are a genuine response to the effect of mechanisms of terror and repression inside Turkey, the fact remains, I believe, that the process of education about the history of the Armenian Genocide is an inexorable force, a ground zero of intellectual freedom and discourse. It can�t be stopped, or controlled, by any entity. It is part of knowledge. We cannot allow the accepted history of the Armenian Genocide to be falsified by the blackmail and threats of the Turkish state.

In this new era, Armenians, I hope, will find ways of joining hands with their new Turkish colleagues and friends to work for change in whatever ways�creative ways and pragmatic ways, not rigid, ideological or romantic. Armenians in both the Diaspora and in the Republic must divest themselves of stereotypes and essentialist notions about Turks, and open themselves to the complexity of Turkish society. There are new openings in this landscape and there are new pitfalls and fears. There is anger, frustration and paranoia among Armenians. There are threats of violence from the new wave of Turkish ultranationalists; and there are many people inside Turkey asking for broad, democratic change, so that religious and ethnic minorities can achieve equality, and intellectual freedom and free speech can be realized. Only last week more than a hundred students at Bogazici University in Istanbul staged a protest with the slogan �against the darkness,� and they chanted Hrant Dink�s name and their solidarity with Armenians. These are the forces that Armenians want to join with and work with in pursuit of an open and free society in Turkey.

As it is wrong of Armenians to essentialize or demonize Turks, I think it is also unfair of the Turkish world to demonize the Armenian Diaspora because it seeks to deal with this history and its own traumatic past with passion and a need for truth and resolution. To do this to the Armenian Diaspora is to decontextualize history and the moral reality of 1915, and it essentializes what is a complex and multilayered international community and culture. Armenians of the Diaspora have little choice but to continue their role in the educational process, for it is only through scholarly discourse, school curricula, and educating the media and public that an important history will find its proper place in the world�s history, and perhaps some resolution to the conflict with Turkey can happen.

William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem Easter, 1916: �He too has been changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly;/ A terrible beauty is born.� And in that same poem: �Too long a sacrifice/can make a stone of the heart.� Yeats had thought deeply about what a struggle for justice can embody. For many Armenians, the cause of pursuing justice in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide has been going on for nearly a century; and this can turn the heart into stone. We cannot let our hearts turn to stone. We must find the human in the other, the spaces of camaraderie with our Turkish colleagues and all people who cherish human rights. We must find ways to push democracy forward in Turkey, and openness in our own culture. We must defuse our own tendencies to totalize, generalize, to over-simplify, to use history to impede dialogue. We live in a time of a terrible beauty; the power of the truth of history has been born and it comes with responsibilities.

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:45 AM

Halil Berktay

A Genocide, Three Constituencies, Thoughts for the Future (Part I)

By Halil Berktay

Talk given at the Armenians and the Left Symposium on March 31.(1)

Thank you for inviting me to this special occasion. Over the past seven or eight years, I have become accustomed to talking about (various aspects of) the Armenian question mostly in Turkey, to Turkish audiences. Of course, there have also been some international conferences.

Notable in this regard was the first-ever Turkish-Armenian historians� workshop in spring 2000 in Chicago, organized by professors Muge Gocek and Ron Grigor Suny, which will probably come to be assessed in future histories as a crucial turning point. About a year later, in spring 2001, there was another conference in Muhlheim, which in contrast was marred by too much shouting and yay- or nay-saying (not surprising, perhaps, given that the audience was tensely polarized between a German-Turkish half and a German-Armenian Diaspora half). Over October 28-30, 2004, there was a conference in Venice organized by professor (Father) Levon Boghos Zekiyan, as well as an October 2005 NATO Rose-Roth Seminar in Yerevan. But apart from these, I cannot really say that I have had that much contact with Armenian (or Armenian Diasporan) audiences.

Now in the U.S. over the last two months or more, however, all that has been changing rather quickly, both by force of location and the tragic events enveloping us. While I was teaching for a month at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, first there was, there had to be, a major tribute meeting for Hrant Dink; and then there was also an evening that Murat Belge and I spent talking to and with an audience from the Armenian community of Detroit and its suburbs. Here, now, is this one-day symposium, which again I feel privileged to be a part of�though not for the purposes of a nebulous or ill-defined notion of �dialogue.� For example, in the two presentations by Henry Theriault and Peter Balakian, my perception is that there have been too many different concepts of �dialogue� floating around. Thus, so-called �dialogue� with Turkey or Turkish officialdom has been mentioned, and reference has been made to the ill-born, state-stacked, and therefore unsurprisingly abortive TARC as one of its second-track channels or avenues. All these are vertically embedded in, and a reflection of, institutionalized power relations. And therefore what they make out to be �dialogue� is actually bargaining in the narrow marketplace or diplomacy sense, for which I have no taste whatsoever.(2) On the other hand, there can also be genuine multi-lateral conversations aimed at insuring an autonomous efflorescence of information flow, opening more and more space for mutual un-learning and re-learning processes, and ultimately changing both �our� and �their� mentalities, between Turkish and Armenian civil society elments, groups, leaderships or individuals. As far as I am concerned, it is only this kind of lateral activity which really merits being addressed as dialogue.

A Habitus of the Left

This is especially so, I would submit, at a conference under the broad title of �Armenians and the Left,� where I might have preferred to take part not as a dialogue-bringer but as a comrade, if only history had been otherwise. I have various reasons for saying this, not the least being that I feel I have belonged to the Left, and not just a Turkish Left but a more international Left, from time immemorial. Well, not really from time immemorial, of course, but from my childhood onward, having been born into a rare Turkish Communist family and household (and a very intellectual one at that), since my father (Erdogan Berktay) was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) that was the subject of a massive crackdown in 1951-52, at the height of the Korea-related tidal wave of McCarthyism that then hit Turkey. So inevitably, I grew up with memories of his being taken away when I was four, and being away for a long time, first in prison and then in �internal exile,� eventually returning with a more finely-lined face, emerging into the limelight (though all too briefly) as a leading public intellectual in the 1960s. Meanwhile, I myself was growing up, through adolescence to youth and young adulthood, in this dense atmosphere where one talked all the time of the French and Russian revolutions, and of the Soviet Union, and the International Communist Movement, and of China, and Cuba, and new Third World struggles�and precisely as part of that revolutionist culture, also of non-Marxist, non-Communist revolutions and revolutionaries, past and present, including most emphatically national-revolutionaries of an entire historical period when nationalism was (or was regarded as) a revolutionary ideology in close affinity with both liberal democracy and socialism, and was therefore contraposing itself to an entire generation of oppressive, defunct (Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) empires.

This was why and how I became devoted to Chopin (persecuted by the Tsarist police), and not just for his Nocturnes but also for his Etude Revolutionnaire; and also to Byron not just for his ineffable love poetry but also for the heroic spirit which took him to fight and die at Missolonghi in the ranks of the Greek Revolution (not because he was �anti-Turkish,� as today Turkish nationalism makes him out to be, but because he was against �Ottoman despotism� as a Romantic revolutionary democrat.) Now this is pretty much what I am likely to have thought of the ARF or the Dashnaksoutiun, too, if I had known of it (or them) in those days when I was still in my mid-teens, though I did not, because�and here is the point�although my household was very unusual for Turkey in the 1950s and 60s (imbued with this �proletarian internationalism� also fed by Enlightenment ideals, as well as this radical Left dislike of Turkish hard-nationalists, which led us to cherish a liberated, conscientious refusal to regard the Greeks and other Balkan peoples or indeed the Armenians as �the enemies of the Turks�), nevertheless, despite all these ethical attitudes and positions:

1) nationalism as such, as an ideology, was hardly ever discussed, dissected, criticized;

2) in particular, not much was ever said about all those �national disputes� attending the breakup of empire, which national-revolutionaries of different countries had once fought over, and which continued to pit, now, various CPs against one another, other than that those bloody, disgraceful incidents could all be put down to imperialist, colonialist �divide and rule� conspiracies against our �good peoples�;

3) even more specifically, nothing was said of the Armenian Genocide, which of course was the greatest horror of all.(3)

This probably explains why, while growing up as an enlightened internationalist, and also as part of an isolated, persecuted, marginalized milieu, thereby coming to sympathize with other cases of marginalization, exclusion or persecution, I had no sense of the Armenian national-revolutionaries of the early 20th century, because it was not part of the Left intellectualism and discourse that had become my habitus.

On top of this there came my own Left activism, first here in the U.S. in the context of the civil rights and the anti-war movements of the 1960s (when I became part of a circle that eventually initiated the founding of the Yale chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society), and then back in Turkey, where my reaction to the defeat of both the Paris and Prague Springs of 1968 led further and further away from a libertarian spirit into a more and more rigid and dogmatic utopian platform. In brief, out of an extreme quest for purity, for a fundamentalist Marxism supposedly untainted by any human frailty or impurity, I became and remained a Maoist for two decades, going through all the travails of an entire Turkish generation under the two successive military coups of March 12, 1971 and September 12, 1980, when tens of thousands went through cycles of arrest, torture and harsh conditions of imprisonment. The mid- or late-80s, however, became a time of more seriously critical self-questioning. It was then that, taking my distances vis-�-vis any espousal, however �scientifically� theorized, of a violent revolution or of revolutionary violence, I sought to re-commit myself, now as a critical democrat and an independent Left-intellectual, to a less directly power-oriented and more cultural-educational vision of social change. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, and the emergence of a new generation of national(ist) bloodshed in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, as well as in south-eastern Turkey (not to speak of Africa or elsewhere in what used to be called the Third World), I also started moving to a much deeper and comprehensive critical engagement with nationalism, and therefore also to a new universalism of Turkish, Greek, Balkan, Armenian and other scholars or intellectuals, all of us standing in opposition to �our own� nationalism, nationalist education, mythistories, textbooks and conflict-inciting media�or simply, in W. H. Auden�s words, to all the various sorts of �elderly rubbish that dictators talk / to an apathetic grave.�

Nevertheless, while all this has been happening, and my notions and many others� notions of future utopias and �long-distance� aims and objectives have all been changing, out of my four decades or so on the Left, I have still retained, I think, certain notions of strategy and tactics, and building alliances or even united fronts in pursuit of admittedly different and much more peaceful, much more democratic goals. So it is with this kind of background, experience and political culture that I would like to address the two or three big questions of 1) the historical reality of 1915; 2) what to call it; and 3) how to go about getting it recognized today. Before I go further, however, I should like to make a brief statement about one paper in particular that has been given before me. I am against virtually everything that Henry Theriault has said and argued for in his presentation�against his pseudo-philosophical, ahistorical absolutes and essentialisms, against his self-righteous moralizing about an eternal Turkish �dominance� versus an equally eternal Armenian �victimhood,� and also against the frightfully patronizing, condescending �advice� that he has volunteered at various points, such as his remarks about why dissident Turks should quickly move on from debating what to call 1915 to discussing reparations. But I suppose I should be thankful for this sort of discourse and position, since it so usefully represents all that I find problematic about certain Armenian attitudes.

The Historical Reality of 1915

�The 90th anniversary of the expulsion and extermination of the Armenians� (Zum 90. Jahrestag der Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Armenier) was part of the title used for a one-day symposium held in Berlin on April 18, 2005. It was organized by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and from Turkey it was Hrant Dink, Etyen Mahcupyan and I myself that had been invited and participated. If you look at it, it is a pretty strong statement��expulsion and extermination��in itself, is it not? So, does this fit the definition of genocide? And if it does, as a verbal expression or statement does it become weaker or stronger, does it lose force or gather force because the �g-word� is not present ? Is the term �genocide� absolutely necessary, at all times and under all circumstances, for any and all conversations regarding the events of 1915? Does it, in other words, happen to be an absolutely indispensable norm for all such conversations to conform to? Should its absence in the Berlin title be construed as denialism, and therefore a victory for (Turkish) nationalism or a defeat for the cause of historical truth? And if we start thinking always in this way, what are some of the possible consequences?

First things first. Whether we say the �massacring� or �the expulsion and extermination� or �the uprooting and annihilation� of Ottoman-Armenians, or utilize any one of such long descriptions, does this fit the definition of genocide at least as understood by (or in terms of) the 1948 UN Convention? My answer is that it does, and that furthermore, we have to understand why. My understanding of what happened in 1915 comprises the following key elements. During and in the wake of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the CUP (Unionist or Ittihatci) leadership moved with great haste and alacrity to a new ideological position of regarding the remaining non-Muslim, non-Turkish populations of the Empire as intrinsically suspect. Already in 1913-14, this led to an initial ethnic cleansing of a large Greek population, estimated at around 100,000 to 150,000, from parts of Thrace and western Anatolia�an expulsion achieved through methods of bullying and intimidation (short of outright bloodshed) that in retrospect appears very much like an unarmed dress rehearsal for what would happen in 1915. In between, the outbreak of World War I and various events on the Eastern front led to a further targeting of Armenians as unreliable and potentially treacherous. The war also put even greater power in the hands of the military triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Cemal, rendering their dictatorship even less accountable both to the Ottoman parliament and to world public opinion, simultaneously isolating Ottoman-Armenians from Europe and the Great Powers. Under these circumstances, the Unionist leadership got parliament to pass a law legalizing tehcir or forced (internal) deportation and re-settlement. On that basis, when it came to implementation, Talaat Pasha as Interior Minister sent out (and kept sending out) not one but two sets of orders from Istanbul to the provinces. The first set of orders, delivered through normal channels to all governors, sub-governors or military garrison commanders, asked for all Armenians to be immediately rounded up and forcibly moved to pre-set destinations. This had to be done within 48 hours, and inevitably entailed forcing Armenians to leave all their immovable wealth and propeties behind, as well as a good deal of their movable wealth (all of which were to be put at the disposal of special government commissions which were expected to channel this new wealth into the war effort). Hence among other things, this set of orders entailed not just a deracination but also a massive, drastic and irreversible expropriation of virtually the entire Ottoman-Armenian community, effectively destroying its conditions of existence. Furthermore, let me emphasize that no distinctions were made between, for example, loyal and law-abiding citizens (in the eyes of the state) and those involved in or suspected of criminal activities; no evidence was sought and given of Dashnak or Hnchak or other sympathies or affiliations. In other words, both the law and this first set of executive orders relative to its implementation targeted (all) Armenians for no other reason than that they were Armenians. In themselves, the orders could be construed as formally legal (in the sense of being based at least partially on a previous act of legislation), but were certainly not lawful (in the sense of conforming to any �spirit of the laws� as commonly understood since Montesquieu, or in other words to the basic requirements of a state of law). In effect, what they did was to remove the Ottoman-Armenian population from protection by and under that state of law.(4) Just this much, therefore, is roughly comparable to all the anti-Jewish persecution unchained by the Nazis from 1933 to around 1941-42, that is to say prior to the launching of the Final Solution. Hence, too, just this much is enough to satisfy Article C of the current UN definition, which has to do with �deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part��even if additional killings had not been involved.

But actually, such acts of mass murder were also involved, and systematically and on an enormous scale; for Talaat, the Nietzschean amoral �evil genius� of the Unionist leadership, did not rest content with just this first set of orders, horrible as they were. In addition to his official Interior Ministry headquarters, he also set up a second and paralel �deep state� command center in his own apartment, replete with telephones and telegraphs, which he started using to control his Special Organization (literally Teskilat-y Mahsusa, henceforth TM) field operatives. This Special Organization was the secret armed wing of the CUP, thus a forerunner of many such �armed wings� that would become familiar in the course of the 20th century, standing to the party in roughly the same relationship as the IRA to Sinn Fein, or for that matter the SA�s to NASDAP�though Hitler�s Brown Shirts were much more numerous and public, while the Special Organization was narrow, elite and covert, comprising hard-bitten secret agents receiving their orders only from Enver and Talaat, and cloaked in totally non-accountable anonymity. Ahead of the late April roundups that marked the beginning of the end, Talaat had already sent some of his top TM men into the region, and as convoys of uprooted and destitute Armenian deportees began to move into central, eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, the latter came under attack from death squads of indeterminate mixture as well as tribal groups that had themselves been forced out of the Caucasus by the Tsarist expansion southward, and had therefore acquired a vindictive hatred for all things Christian, Armenian, or otherwise smacking of complicity with Russia. Such primary massacres (in the sense of being directly masterminded by the state(5)) would then seem to have conveyed to the general public the message that the Armenians were �fair game,� as a result of which a more general �shooting season� appears to have opened; in an extreme situation of the sort that brings out the best and the worst in humanity, such worst elements of the local population, too, came forth in a series of secondary massacres to claim their share.6 On long marches in the desert or over other difficult terrain, the cold and the heat, as well as hunger, thirst, lack of sanitation and the resulting outbursts of typhus or dysentery also took their toll(7), as well as sheer brutalization at the hands of the gendarmes that were ostensibly there to guard and protect them. In the end, huge numbers died or were killed, frequently right in front of their parents or children, or their siblings, or other beloveds.

How many? No more than 250 to 400,000, as official or semi-official Turkish authors have claimed? Around 600,000 (or perhaps 800,000), as given by most 20th century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica? As many as 1 or even 1.5 million, to which ceiling Armenian statements on the subject have been tending to escalate over the last decade? I rather doubt the first and last figures, though that is not so important in itself. What really matters is that an entire people were subjected to sudden, drastic and comprehensive ethnic cleansing, most of which was compressed into a single year, and which, unfortunately, was rather comprehensively successful, so that basically the large and significant Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire came to an end.(8)

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:46 AM

Halil Berktay PART II

Secondly, there is the question of intent. �Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group�� goes the 1948 definition (italics mine). A lot of denialist time and energy is invested on just this point, trying to demonstrate that there was no such intent with regard to the Armenians.(9) It is at this point, too, that the Ottoman archives are brought in. On a very general level, what this reflects is the rather ethnocentric belief that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is to be found only in the Ottoman archives�and that by implication, all else, anywhere else in the world, must be unreliable. More specifically, it is thereby argued that if there was any such intent of partial or total group destruction, it must be embodied in written directives; conversely, if we cannot find any such statement of purpose in the archives, the case for genocide must be thrown out. But of course, even the most powerful dictators hardly ever commit such things to paper, which is why we do not have written orders for the Holocaust either. Fortunately, such evil discretion notwithstanding, intent also becomes something deducible from the overall context and march of events, and from the total picture�and it is here that the targeting of all Armenians qua Armenians becomes its own proof. Last but not least, there is the question of ideological motivation. Not only politicians and journalists, but even some respectable scholars in Turkey have carelessly repeated clich�s to the effect that given the late-developing nature of Turkish nationalism, there can have been no such nationalist ethnic cleansing logic behind the 1915 deportations and massacres.(10) What this overlooks is, yes, the late but also the extraordinarily rapid development of Turkish nationalism under the impact of Italy�s invasion of Tripoli in 1911 and then the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Recent research by both Taner Akcam and Fuat Dundar clearly demonstrates the following two points: 1) the CUP leadership, and Talaat in particular, had actually come up with a new policy for the Turkification of Anatolia; 2) it was in this context that over 1913-15, the Armenians (along with the Greeks and others) were coming to be eyed and targeted as a suspect population. It is further supported by new light shed (notably by Sukru Hanioglu) on the increasingly strident Social Darwinistic strain in Young Turk thought. It is also supported by large numbers of memoirs, reminiscences or recollections dating from the 1920s and 30s�when, as I shall later note, denialist ideology did not yet exist, and everybody knew and could be un-selfconsciously frank about what had happened. It is also supported by my own ongoing research into Turkish literature of the period, where one can find ample evidence of the shaping of an anxious and fearful, and therefore also vindictively murderous nationalism, replete with all the Social Darwinistic justifications for its own malevolence.

Hence, thirdly, the horrors of 1915 also fit into a broader historical pattern. At the end of the day, I am not a lawyer but a historian. And for historians, frequently it is not an event by and in itself, but the overall context, if any, that that event can be fitted into, and from which it might perhaps derive a further meaning, that becomes important. Descartes and Newton both argued, let us remember, that science should strive to achieve a �complete� explanation of any given phenomenon, or at least as complete as possible. In terms of modern European history, 1915 fits into a pattern of nationalist, Social Darwinistically fed ideologies of mobilization and violence, and accompanying agendas of national purification and ethnic cleansing, extending increasingly harshly from the late 19th century to the 1942-45 Holocaust. With or without the extraneous help of Hitler�s apocryphical words (�Who remembers the Armenians?�), 1915 is indeed such a crucial link in this chain of expansion and escalation that, in its absence, the Holocaust, too, would be much more difficult to understand. In terms of my historical sensibilities and holistic aesthetics, this, too, is crucial.

So then, this was the genocide, and why it was genocide. The next question is what to do about it. (Part II will appear in the Weekly in May.)

Endnotes

(1) This is the full and expanded text of what I originally prepared for the Armenians and the Left conference on March 31, 2007. It is considerably longer even than what was probably an insufferably long talk on the day, since I have incorporated both what I had already written but did not read, and also some subsequent additions.

(2) In fact, liberated scholarship and civil society dissidence, on the one hand, and second-track diplomacy, on the other, can be perceived by some people to be contrary to each other. In spring 2000, there was the Chicago conference, as I have already noted. Later that year, I spoke out on the Armenian Genocide in the mainstream Turkish press, when, on October 9, 2000, the daily Radikal published a full-page interview with me done by Ms. Nese Duzel. There was a furore, and many more subsequently. I felt I had contributed to the cause of recognition and reconciliation. Not so, I was told by one of the organizers of the TARC enterprise. For some reason, his view was that I had ruined what they were trying to do. It is this same TARC that, in the Turkish Daily News article that I have just seen online (April 19, 2007), David Phillips credits with breaking �the taboo on discussing Armenian issues.� He writes: �The taboo on discussing Armenian issues was broken by the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2001.�

(3) In retrospect, I would put this down not only to considerations about the USSR and Soviet Armenia in a Cold War context, but also to Marxism�s, and especially Comintern and Third World Marxism�s unhappy marriage with nationalism at both a tactical-political and also a theoretical level. It was this entire edifice that resulted in the Turkish Left�s protracted unwillingness to challenge Kemalism over its two most sacrosanct taboos: the Kurdish question and the Armenian Genocide. Why, after all, does even Nazim Hikmet have so little to say about the Armenians?

(4) So unlawful were these orders in a broad sense, that numerous members of the Ottoman-Turkish bureaucracy either refused to believe them (thinking that they were being tested by the center), or else did not want to implement them. In many cases, these orders could therefore be implemented only after repeated commands and dire warnings from Istanbul, and in some cases after the removal and replacement of the reluctant functionaries.

(5) Do we have direct proof of these secret orders? No, we do not. That is to say, we do not have a single telegram or two that we can point to as actually ordering state functionaries or operatives to slaughter this or that group of Armenians. But we do have an enormous amount of indirect evidence, of circumstantial evidence, so that in fact whether things that surface from illegality or extra legality, it is fairly clear what happened. We have something very close to a smoking gun, in terms of present American political idioms.

(6) Turkish nationalist discourse typically obliterates this distinction between primary and secondary in a causal sense, trying to make it seem as if whatever massacres that took place were purely the work of �bandits� which were both unpremeditated and could somehow not be prevented, though clearly it was the signals emitted by the TM-organized primary massacres that emboldened the worst elements of the local population for the rest.

(7) Once more, in Turkish nationalist apologetics there is the pretense that this was all that happened�and that it was basically an unforeseen, unfortunate accident. Even supposing for a moment that there were no massacres, by what logic might the death of tens of thousands of detainees supposedly under state protection due to hunger, thirst or disease be regarded as not coming under the responsibility of that state?

(8) From a population of around 1.5 million or more, only a few tens of thousands have been left. Such decimation notwithstanding, the latest �wisdom� from some varieties of denialism is that �even if there is a single survivor, it cannot be called genocide.�

(9) Many of the retired diplomat Gunduz Aktan�s newspaper columns, for example, are devoted to legalistic hair-splitting around just this point.

(10) In an article published in the immediate aftermath of the September 24-25, 2005 �Ottoman Armenians� conference, professor Zafer Toprak, for example, has gone so far as to call the notion of the CUP�s Turkification policy �a fabrication.�

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:47 AM

George Aghjayan

Criminalizing the Victim

By George Aghjayan

Over the past two years, I have been writing about the reasons Armenians should�no, must�be angry. The reasons are many: the malicious Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC) and the dismissal of any notion of reparations for the Armenian Genocide are just two of the most obvious.

The current phase in the assault on Armenian rights began with the near vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 on an Armenian Genocide resolution. Even though the vote did not take place, it was obvious to all that the Armenian Genocide was accepted as historical fact. The debate centered on Turkey as a strategic ally of the United States, not whether the Genocide had happened. Initiatives around the globe since have only confirmed this view.

Those that worked so long and hard against any acknowledgement of the Genocide were desperate for a new approach. Thus, TARC was born.

While the unrelenting march towards justice for the Armenian Genocide has continued, so also have attempts to demoralize the Armenian community. In the past year, there have been a number of developments that twist the roles of victim and perpetrator.

First, the Turkish government has proposed an historical commission to �find out once and for all what really happened, and how it took place.� This concept has gained traction in some circles. Some liberal Turkish historians have suggested this proposal was a departure from the standard hard line for the Turkish government and, thus, offered a possible opportunity that Armenians should not dismiss as out of hand.

In response, Armenians have pointed out that contrary to being a move forward, it is actually a retreat from the current state of scholarship on the Armenian Genocide. The proposal is seen as yet another deflection by the Turkish government which will mire the discussion in the quicksand of an endless study that cannot possibly build consensus.

More to the point, there are numerous opportunities for any scholar to present findings either in academic journals, at conferences or in published books. Why must a special commission be formed, the Turkish state has sponsored the publication of a colossal amount of works denying the Genocide. The failure to attract acceptance, even with the full credibility of state backing, is very telling. The denial of the Armenian Genocide is intellectually bankrupt. Another study cannot advance us further, but it can set us back by implying all the previous studies and documentation of the Genocide are insufficient and in some way lacking.

Shockingly, the rejection by Armenians is portrayed as restricting debate, an assault on free speech and comparable to the Turkish state restricting discussion of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey�in essence, criminalizing the victim.

Another troubling development is the view that all dialogue between Turks and Armenians is good and even necessary. Somehow the background of the participants has become irrelevant. Turkish and Armenian societies suffer a great illness that cannot be cured without dialogue. Thus, it is presented that any and all dialogue between Turks and Armenians must be good and encouraged.

However, an issue arises when those participating in the dialogue have actively denied the Armenian Genocide and, thus, caused psychological violence to Armenians. Genocide deniers are ill suited for dialogue with the victims since they have an agenda that has little to do with reconciliation. At its core, this is what caused the demise of TARC.

Yet, some are quick to label Armenians as fanatics when they resist participating in events sponsored by deniers who have not distanced themselves from the denial. The recent cancellation of the concert at Brown University is an example. Again, the victim is being criminalized.

Free speech does not require us to supply a forum for deniers, nor does it require us to participate in dialogue with deniers. Deniers have the means to create their own venues; we all have the right to boycott. That is equally a measure of freedom and democracy, not of fanaticism (I would argue it is a measure of our sanity).

Finally, the next stage of Hai Tahd requires the democratization of Turkey and, thus, it is posited that the Armenian Genocide must be approached from that perspective. The corollary to this thesis is that a democratic Turkey will necessarily lead to security for Armenia.

While democracy leads to increased security and prosperity for a country and its citizens, it does not necessarily lead to security for its neighbors.

The truth is that varied players with very different agendas use the Armenian Genocide as a tool. The United States and Israel, as well as other countries, have used the Armenian Genocide as a weapon to extort concessions from Turkey. Within Turkey, there are agents that use the Genocide as a tool for increasing their own freedoms and democracy in general, while others use it as a tool to foster ultra-nationalist prejudice. Some in Turkey are starting to suggest that acknowledgement by the U.S. would free Turkey from the extortion without any negative consequences. Even within the Armenian community there are those that use the Armenian Genocide as a means to increase their own influence and personal agenda.

Increasingly, Turkish Armenian dialogue is being framed solely from the agenda of Turkey and the Turkish people without any consideration for the victims and their descendents. The victims are instead being criminalized, and that is the final insult to us all.

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:51 AM

Henry Theriault

Post-Genocide Imperial Domination

By Henry Theriault

As a genocide recedes into history, past the point at which remembrance is mainly the labor of survivors, victim group members become more distant from�and even distance themselves from�the lived reality of that genocide. This is not because the impact of a genocide lessens in time; quite the contrary, the magnitude of its total destructive consequences compounds with each passing day that the original devastation remains unrepaired (at least to the extent that some reparation is possible), as initial losses of what would have been the bases of the victim group�s future resource increases, political security, cultural and identity stability and other social, political, cultural, and economic gains as well as individual familial, economic, and other aspects of well-being, mean losses of all those gains. I am also not referring to emotions of sympathy or even empathy felt at reading or hearing of the suffering of genocide victims. I am referring instead to the emotional connectedness to the experience of genocide itself. Of course, those who did not directly experience a genocide can never feel and should never assume to feel what its immediate victims felt, but that does not mean that later generations can have no experience of the legacy of a genocide, of its impact�indeed, of the objective results of the genocide.

Imperial Domination, Not Mutual Negotiation

What do I mean? The most obvious example is the form of renewed assault against the victim group through denial of the genocide in question. Through the experience of denial�merely hearing or reading it, but even more so in struggling against it, being publicly attacked by deniers, etc.�those in the victim group are targeted by aggressors acting out of the same attitudes, ideologies, and agendas that motivated the genocide itself. (As an aside, it is for this reason that deniers� attacks on Turks who recognize the Armenian Genocide�whether with this term or some euphemism�and their resulting suffering should never be equated with what Armenians who recognize the Genocide experience. Such Turks might be victimized by aggression from other Turks, but they do not experience reassertion of the genocide perpetrator-victim relationship itself. They remain in the dominant position, even if within that position they are marginalized.) Israel Charny has offered the premiere analysis of the deep nature of denial along these lines.

But too great a focus on the extremism of deniers obscures the complexity of the impact of the Armenian Genocide on contemporary Armenian-Turkish relations and other�more subtle�forms of domination. As I argue in �Dehumanization or Hyper-Domination: A Philosophical Challenge to the Reigning Model of Genocide,� forthcoming in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies (edited by Richard G. Hovannisian and to be published by Transaction Press), underlying and driving the Armenian Genocide was a pre-existing imperial domination structure and normalized assumption of Ottoman Turkish/Muslim superiority over Armenians and other second-class subjects. This dominance relation was initially determined by the fact that Turks conquered Armenians (and the other groups, though I will focus here on Armenians, as my title suggests). It was made an enduring societal fact because the relation of imperial conquest was institutionalized in the millet system, complete with not only legal discrimination and other disadvantaging of Armenians, but associated violence against Armenians that continually extended the concrete experience of the initial conquest, replaying it in an almost ritualized manner as if to reassure the dominant Turks and other Muslims and to reemphasize for Armenians and other victims that the domination would remain in effect.

The Armenian Genocide pushed this relation to its ultimate level. As I argue in �Dehumanization or Hyper-Domination,� the determining force driving the Genocide was rejection of Armenian equality with Turks put into at least nominal and thus conceptual effect with the 1908 revolution and establishment of a liberal constitution for the Ottoman Empire. The Genocide was a means of maintaining the old form of domination in a new context that made a static hierarchy such as the millet system impossible. The strength of the imposition of dominance through the Genocide shows how fundamental this drive to domination was.

In my paper at the June 2005 6th Biennial Conference of the Association of Genocide Scholars as well as my presentation at the March 31, 2007, Armenians and the Left (AATL) panel on Armenian-Turkish dialogue, I extended this discussion to the post-Genocide era. My central point was that the hyper-domination of the Armenian Genocide did not end with the cessation of the killing, but rather established the post-Genocidal relation between Turks and Armenians as an extreme dominance hierarchy, the most obvious manifestations of which we can see in aggressive denialism and other anti-Armenian attitudes pervasive in Turkey, and even violence such as the assassination of Hrant Dink. But of course the broader, material forms of that dominance are its foundation, from the Turkish state�s much great military strength, political security (including viability as a state), and economic power, to the stability of Turkish identity based in a strong state compared to the on-going erosion of Armenian identity due to the destructive effects of the Genocide in many aspects (cultural destruction, population dispersion, family destruction, etc.), and much more. This domination hierarchy conditions all aspects of the general Armenian-Turkish relationship, and yet in none of the various �dialogue� efforts of recent years has this been acknowledged. Quasi-governmental efforts such as TARC, formal academic exercises such as the University of Michigan Armenian and Turkish scholars conferences, and even informal email lists have operated as negotiative exchanges between �Armenians� and �Turks� treated as equivalent parties, parties with equal power, rights, history (even a �shared history,� as if their roles in that history were similar), etc. Thus, by their very structures, these efforts have failed to engage the central feature of the general Armenian-Turkish relationship and cannot make meaningful progress, despite any even profound personal and academic changes that have occurred.

My further point in my AATL presentation was that the dominance relation has been normalized in the psychology of not only traditional elements of Turkish society (the less educated, the incorrigibly chauvinist, the propagandized) that are disparaged by progressive-minded Turks, but also progressive Turks themselves. I discussed the various ways this plays out. Three important examples from my AATL remarks are:

(1) Progressive Turks often treat the Armenian Genocide instrumentally, as a tool for transforming Turkish society toward liberal democracy and progressive openness. Unfortunately, the meaning of the Genocide for Armenians drops out of consideration, and the resolution of the Genocide issue for Turks becomes democratization of Turkey. Progressive Turks thus take control of the Genocide issue itself, which becomes one more piece of appropriated property. Often, such progressives disparage�as �extremism,� �nationalism,� and other four-letter words in left circles�efforts by the �Armenian Diaspora� to retain some kind of priority in discussions of the Genocide and to keep the focus on issues of concern to the victim group. The Armenian Genocide becomes an instrument for Turkish democratization along the lines of the agenda of a particular segment of the Turkish elite, rather than the crisis in the Turkish-Armenian (domination) relation it truly is. At best, �Turkish democratization� is presented as the ultimate solution of the Armenian Genocide that will resolve all outstanding issues for Armenians, too. While it could, of course, improve the situation of Armenians in Turkey, Turkish democratization is not at all inconsistent with anti-Armenianism. Democratization cannot address the attitude and material realities of imperial superiority; only directly engaging this domination of Armenians can. In fact, proper democratization depends on ending this domination, not the other way around. This is quite clear through even a cursory look at US history and, specifically, the compatibility of deep oppression of various groups inside and outside US borders with democracy for the US �majority� throughout the history of the United States.

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:52 AM

Part II

(2) Progressives often equate Turkish and Armenian �nationalism� as equally retrogressive, misguided and dangerous. There are deep flaws in this approach. First, Armenian �nationalism� must be analyzed on its own terms, with recognition of the historical conditions of oppression and the civil rights struggle that gave rise to it. The effort to resist domination and to strive for basic human rights within an overarching Ottoman structure should not be equated with Turkish extreme and dominational nationalisms that justified and drove the destruction of Armenian �others� in an effort to nationalize the Ottoman Empire and have subsequently motivated an aggressive, intolerant, imperialist political outlook and acts. To equate the two nationalisms by counter-factually assuming that all Armenian nationalisms are like this as well and would do the same thing as standard Turkish nationalism given the chance despite the fact that Armenians have not committed a genocide, engaged in a history of imperial conquest, etc., is, in essence, to hold Armenian nationalisms accountable for the sins of Turkish nationalisms. Even to the extent that some post-Genocide Armenian nationalisms have come to take on territorial claims for land depopulated of Armenians through the Genocide is not the same as Turkish imperial/expansionist territorial desires, but it is often presented as such.

(3) Progressive Turks often choose not to label the 1915 violence against Armenians �genocide.� They employ various rationales for this, such as the view that the word was not coined until years after the Armenian Genocide occurred�which of course neglects the fact that Raphael Lemkin coined the term �genocide� specifically to refer to a set of events that included very centrally the Armenian Genocide and applied it to the Armenian Genocide himself. Most prevalent is the view that using the term, even if proper, will just produce a defensive reaction by Turks that will prevent them from engaging the Armenian Genocide issue at all. Thus, because some Turks might get upset, we must not label the Armenian Genocide by the proper, correct, appropriate term. There are two obvious problems with this position. First, if the only way most Turks today will take seriously the history of genocide against Armenians is if it is presented as something less serious than it was/is, then will those Turks who are thus comfortable enough to talk about the �events of 1915� actually be engaging the Genocide at all? Indeed, if Armenians (and progressive Turks) have to worry about upsetting and even provoking a violent reaction by Turks by raising the Armenian Genocide issue in its proper form, then does this not signal the fact that there is a deep underlying refusal to accept the reality of the Armenian Genocide and to do the serious work of transforming contemporary Turkish society away from the genocidal anti-Armenianism that has been perpetuated unchallenged for 92 years? To use the terms of Kibibi Tyehimba of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, to let the �sleeping dog� of genocidal anti-Armenianism lie undisturbed and thus unchallenged means that it will remain present as a foundational element of contemporary and future Turkish culture and politics. Until the majority of Turks today can confront the harsh reality of the Armenian Genocide in its true form and full implications for Turks today, then what sense does it make to speak of progress in Armenian-Turkish relations?

Second, this sacrifice of the proper term reveals a subtle attitude on the part of progressives who embrace this approach. They are clearly much more concerned about upsetting Turks who possess an anti-Armenian attitude and who lack the moral courage to confront history as it truly was than they are about harming Armenians by yet again downplaying the reality of the Armenian Genocide. Indeed, no Turk that I am aware of who has adopted this strategy has even acknowledged the moral tension that this approach creates, signaling just how absent Armenian well-being is in their consideration of the Armenian Genocide.

I ended my remarks with recognition of the difficulties faced by progressive Turks who engage the Armenian Genocide in a context of hostility and repression, inside and outside of Turkey. Their efforts in this context should be applauded. At the same time, I cautioned against mistaking a �situational� appraisal of their views for an objective one. Relative to their situation, positions about not using the term �genocide� in reference to the Armenian Genocide, a focus on Turkish democratization, etc., are understandable. But that does not make such views objectively right, and it is against objective standards of morality that we must judge how anyone engages the Armenian Genocide. One could add that, relative to the heinous anti-Armenianism of deniers and Turkish imperialists, these progressives are quite laudable. But, being better than morally bad deniers does not automatically qualify one for superior moral status�despite the frequent standing ovations by appreciative Armenians. After genocide and so many years of denial, the very framework through which most Turks and Armenians view the �Armenian Question� is deeply skewed, and proper engagement of the Armenian Genocide requires first a critical analysis of this skewing and establishment of a balanced framework that has not been determined by denialism. So long as many Turks�and Armenians�see the issue through the skewed framework, genuine progress on it is difficult if not impossible. Only by directly confronting the domination relation and correcting through a variety of reparative measures for the victims and a deep social transformation away from genocidal imperial domination on the part of the perpetrator can the domination relation be overcome.

My views are certainly not in the mainstream of the general literature on �truth and reconciliation� after mass human rights violations such as genocides, and have been almost entirely absent from at least the academic discourse on the Armenian Genocide. In fact, I am not aware of any approach to the post-Genocide relation between Turks and Armenians that characterized it as a domination relation of Turks over Armenians marked by a material and conceptual power imbalance, prior to my introduction of this analysis in my June 2005 IAGS paper (final title, �Toward a New Conceptual Framework for Resolution: The Necessity of Recognizing the Perpetrator-Victim Dominance Relation in the Aftermath of Genocide�). But, that does not mean that the view can be dismissed as entirely unworthy of consideration. On the contrary, some Armenians and others have recognized this as a productive intervention in the contemporary discourse on the Armenian Genocide. Peter Balakian, for instance, who attended my 2005 IAGS paper, appears to approve of the core of my analysis of the Turkish-Armenian dominance/power relation, as evidenced by his own AATL presentation, which drew on my 2005 IAGS analysis of the post-genocide dominance/power relation of perpetrator group over surviving victim group.

A Case Study of Imperial Domination

Given this, what happened in the third presentation of the March 31 panel was fascinating. Halil Berktay, the final panelist to whom I showed respect in my remarks and after, rejected my presentation not through a critique of the specific points I made, but through personal attack. He dismissed my presentation as �patronizing� as well as guilty of a number of vague academic sins, such as being �reductive,� �ethically absolutist,� and more. My remarks were, according to him, �comprehensively wrong� �apparently so obviously so that they warranted no actual refutation.

Though the tone of Berktay�s comments was rude and hostile, this would have been a minor issue had their content been meaningful academic discourse, that is, supported by a specific critique of at least some of the points I had made, stating precisely how I had been �reductive,� �ethically absolutist,� etc., or why my �reduction� and �ethical absolutism� was actually incorrect in the context. As for the last charge, it is significant that I included a full section (see above) discussing the ethical complexities of any appraisal of Turkish engagements with the Armenian Genocide. If my remarks manifested an objectivist view of ethical issues regarding genocide, I certainly did not take on this view naively�and I certainly invite concrete debate about the ethical theory I advanced and the application I made.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that Berktay never made a concrete criticism of my views. In his talk, he stated that the use of the term �genocide� had become an obsession of the �Armenian Diaspora� (did he mean all Diasporan Armenians? did he assume we somehow all think the same on this or any other issue?) to the point of obscuring the reality that the term was supposed to refer to. He seems to have meant that, by using the term as a kind of buzzword or shorthand, Armenians had come to see the Genocide as a simple historical event without internal complexity. Presumably this meant not recognizing the currents and counter-currents in Turkish society and politics leading up to the Genocide and other such things. Apparently, he was unaware of my and many others� repeated discussion of this complexity, but this is not the main problem here. During the brief �question and answer� session, he added that use of the term �genocide� caused students and others to focus on an overall unified event, instead of seeing the details of a complex process. I pointed out that his approach assumed that using the term �genocide� to recognize that in fact a general event had occurred and at the same time recognizing and exploring the complex, multi-directional elements in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the Genocide were mutually exclusive, but that there was no reason one could not look at the issue on both levels at once. I used the example of a microphone, which we can recognize as a particular object with a particular function and at the same time as a collection of individual atoms. His response was pejorative again, as he stated that �as a philosopher I should know better,� should know that a �genocide cannot be compared to a microphone.� Not only was this a mark of intellectual condescension, implying that I am not a good philosopher and do not understand what any minimally decent philosopher should find obvious, but he never explained why the analogy I drew between parsing a physical object such as a microphone and a historical event such as the Armenian Genocide did not hold in the relevant respects. I had, after all, prefaced my comments with a discussion of a philosophical approach to parsing objects in the world (physical and social) that many prominent philosophers such as Hilary Putnam recognize as a perceptual activity that occurs relative to the conceptual frameworks (in the case here, levels of analysis, visible object or atomic) that are employed. I was hardly taking an unprofessional, underdeveloped, or irresponsible philosophical position. Rather than disagreeing with it as part of a productive intellectual exchange, he rejected my legitimacy to state it and thus to participate in such an exchange.

My intent here is not to go through a point-by-point expose of the academic and ethical faults of Berktay�s remarks as they pertained to my views. To be honest, I cannot do justice with words on a page to the level of disdain he showed me (down to an angry glare after numerous statements in his hour-long talk that he must have felt were particular �zingers� against me, as a number of audience members commented to me after the program). An exhaustive presentation would be viewed as reflecting much more negatively on me than on him. I also do not mean to substitute my analysis of Berktay�s talk and treatment of me for readers� own: I encourage all readers to go to www.armeniansandtheleft.com to view the panel presentations themselves, and to form their own conclusions about what transpired. I invite any criticisms and corrections to my analysis as presented here, as part of the on-going discussion of Turkish-Armenian relations and my own educational process on them. To be honest, I would like to be convinced that I have overstated the issues here, in the hope that more progress is being made than my experiences indicate.

But, it seems unlikely that I have overstated. Numerous audience members after the panel and in later communications to me confirmed my understanding of Berktay�s treatment of me. At one time, it turns out, an audience member had sent a note to one of the panel organizers pointing out to that audience member�s amazement that Berktay was enacting the precise relation of imperial domination over me as an Armenian that I had detailed�and that no one was saying anything about it. Another (Armenian) audience member even said he/she had to leave the room because he/she could not accept witnessing the degradation of an Armenian in this way as it was allowed to continue.

Why did Berktay act this way? To be honest, prior to March 31, I knew very little about him, except that he had publicly acknowledged in Turkey that the Armenian Genocide happened and had taken some heat for this. I certainly did not set out in my remarks to insult him, but rather to present an intellectual position on the topic at hand. And I did not insult him any more than Hrant Dink had �insulted Turkishness.� What I did was to point out (1) the real issue at the core of the contemporary Armenian-Turkish relationship, (2) the ethical challenges it poses, and (3) the fact that even many Turkish progressives, however much their strides forward might be appreciated, have not met these challenges. Far from insult, I provided Berktay an excellent opportunity to engage these ethical challenges and to distinguish himself as a truly progressive force in Turkish-Armenian relations. I provided him tools that he might have used to reflect on certain neglected aspects of the construction of Turkish identity that might have led to a better understanding of it and Turkish relations to Armenians. I did this, as people of color have so often provided the service to whites in the United States, for us as whites to understand ourselves more deeply and better than we could in the absence of a discourse on race and racism. I even highlighted in my own talk how uncomfortable and difficult I knew facing these challenges is for all concerned, Armenians and Turks. I opened the door for him...

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:53 AM

Part III

And he slammed it in my face. Again, why? As that audience member recognized (and as I did but could not say during the panel), Berktay enacted the very imperial domination I described in my remarks. In his mind, apparently, it is acceptable to demean Armenians when they do not agree with him, present uncomfortable ethical challenges, and do not cow-tow to progressive Turks. I did not insult him, but did something worse�I acted as his moral and intellectual equal. I asserted my views on a difficult issue and expected them to be taken seriously�views that included a challenge to progressive Turks. I provided a special opportunity�a �golden opportunity� �for Berktay to show just how far Armenian-Turkish relations had come, by showing respect to an Armenian who had challenged the prevailing sense of their own political accomplishments held by many progressive Turks. I dared to make the challenge, to step out of the place where �good,� agreeable Armenians stay and make Turks, progressive and not, comfortable with their historical relationship to Armenians.

Berktay�s reaction confirmed just how deeply I had challenged the self-understanding of at least some progressive Turks. He had no substantive response because a true response would have required recognition of the imperial dominance relation that he was participating in and the ways in which it has shaped his and many other progressive Turks��as well as the bulk of Turkish society�s�attitudes toward and concrete treatment of Armenians. Instead of accepting the critique as a responsible scholar and Turkish individual committed to transforming the nature of Turkish attitudes and treatment of Armenians, he reacted with academic aggression and denigrated me publicly. I am not saying that he had to agree with me, but as a Turk claiming to want to build positive relations with Armenians he should have recognized that my views came out of the horrific history of violence and domination of Armenians by Turks, and reflected on them to considered why given that history I would raise questions about various aspects of even apparent progress in Armenian-Turkish relations. He should have taken the responsibility to try to convince me, by argument but also by example, that my concerns were unnecessary, however much he recognized them as understandable. Instead, he attacked the cause of the discomfort he suddenly faced when forced to confront these difficult questions.

My challenge violated a sense of imperial superiority and entitlement to decide how he would engage the Armenian Genocide, to determine the bounds of what he would feel about it and what he should do about it. Berktay displayed a sense of automatic (progressive or otherwise) Turkish legitimacy relative to Armenians, that Turks are always in some sense right or possessed of superior understanding, in an individual manifestation of the imperial dominance relations confirmed, extended, and intensified by the Armenian Genocide. From that skewed perspective, the problem could never be in the Turkish individual, but had to be in the Armenian. Thus, Berktay could dismiss me and anyone else in the Armenian Diaspora who holds political views different from his and engages in civil rights activism for Armenians as narrow, simple-minded, extremist �nationalists.� We Armenians are the problem and deserve to be condemned�the old familiar tune once more. (Of course, plenty of Armenians have shown him the proper deference, and so these �good� Armenians can be accepted and even lauded.)

This hostile dismissal has become a ritual that is beyond simply blaming the victim. It is a permanent (flawed) ethical outlook and ideology that automatically delegitimizes any political action or view by an Armenian that challenges in a meaningful way the status quo of domination. The sense of Turkish superiority is so normalized that when an Armenian asserts him-/herself as an equal party in the discourse on the future of Turkey and its relation to Armenians and presents countervailing views, the Armenian appears to be taking a position of superiority, because the Armenian is claiming a position that is above his/her �rightful� place of subservience. Indeed, Berktay�s belief that I was �patronizing� toward him and other progressive Turks seems to have been a function of this skewed perspective: when an Armenian steps up to assume his/her own equality to a Turk and to exercise the autonomy of thought and engagement of the Armenian Genocide that a full human being has the right to, this appears to be an act of superiority because the Armenian has stepped above his/her properly inferior position. The imbalance in perception and power is quite clear: at least this prominent progressive Turk refuses to engage in self-reflection when positions he takes are questioned, yet he does not hesitate in the slightest to disparage the general attitudes, political activities, and intellectual level of Diasporan Armenians, as he did in his AATL presentation.

However progressive its possessor might feel, this reaction functions to help maintain the status quo of domination. It silences or marginalizes some Armenians, and disciplines others. So long as nothing is done to change the material facts of domination and the attitudes that buttress them and prevent serious discussion of changing this domination�yes, this includes responsible discussion of reparations aimed addressing the damage done to Armenians in order to mitigate somewhat the effects of the Armenian Genocide, including Turkish advantages over Armenians and Armenian disadvantage caused by the Genocide and the oppression before and after it�then the dominance relation remains unchanged. Denial can be defeated, but denial is just a symptom of the deeper problem, and defeating denial alone will not change the imperial domination of Armenians and the Turkish attitudes that at once support it and result from it. One can shift and change how the dominance relation is played out, abandoning denial as a well-used but now not so effective move, as a means not of overcoming the domination relation, but as an intentional tactical or unaware psychological effort to preserve domination in an outwardly new form.

From the skewed perspective within which Turkish imperial superiority to Armenians is normalized, it is legitimate to mistreat Armenians. Armenians do not deserve the basic respect that would be accorded Turks or others. Of course, there is no reason to target inoffensive Armenians, but when Armenians cross the line, get �uppity,� then from this perspective it is morally acceptable to demean them, condescend to them, to belittle them. But if degrading Armenians, particularly those who act like equal human beings, is acceptable, then we are always part-way down a slippery slope. Now, even as an Armenian, I for one would never be so disrespectful, presumptions, and simplistic about my position in the world to claim that I am part of some �we� �who are all Hrant Dink.� And, I do not suggest that my experience in the face of Turkish imperial power was anything like what Hrant Dink faced in Turkey, which was a daily life and death matter for him. But, they are on the same continuum. While denial does not unite progressives to the militarist/chauvinists who pursue denial out of ideological delusion or political agenda, as my AATL talk pointed out, it has become clear that in their actual acts and statements that some progressive Turks maintain an imperial attitude that is also at the origin of denial. This does not mean that these progressives are in any way reducible to such deniers or militarists, who embrace the violence of the Armenian Genocide as they deny it, but that they are part of an overall imperial structure. The leaders who condemned Dink legally and publicly for insulting Turkishness did not actually fire the guns that killed him, but they did share a fundamental attitude with his killer(s). Progressives who maintain a masked form of imperial superiority likewise share in the attitude. In a similar way, the majority of whites in the United States might run the gamut from right-wing Christian fundamentalists to left-wing socialists, and yet still be united in their participation in a racist system, regardless of their perceptions of their individual attitudes toward non-whites. The racism might come out in different ways, with right-wing militarist Turks using aggression, threats, power-politics, money-lobbying, etc., and progressive Turks using dialogue that splits the Armenian community into �good� and �bad� Armenians and thus molds that dominated community toward accommodation to the final imperial order produced by the Genocide. But the core is the same�imperial privilege and dominance.

Two important caveats are necessary. First, I have focused on Halil Berktay because his public imperialist assertion was so egregious and blatant that it requires correction, but perhaps more importantly because consideration of it brings into relief some of the key aspects of Turkish-Armenian relations with a depth and clarity not possible through a general treatment. But my goal is not to critique him particularly, but to use the example his behavior on March 31 provides to help Turks, Armenians, and others to understand the core issue of contemporary Turkish-Armenian relations. What is more, he is certainly not alone among progressives in displaying an imperial attitude toward Armenians. During the AATL panel, I treated the issue in general terms, highlighting views prevalent among progressive Turks rather than looking at specific individuals, in order to provide a framework of analysis for attendees.

Second, I am using the term �uppity� in this article advisedly. Of course it is meant to refer to the demeaning characterization of African Americans who, under slavery or Jim Crow, did not behave as inferiors to whites, as many whites expected them to, personally and politically. But, the denigration I experienced on March 31 was an isolated incident for me. It was not connected to any explicit possibility of violence, and did not �follow me home� after the program, as a permanent feature of my life invading the different aspects of my daily existence. While one could argue that the imperial domination of Armenians could have had and have in the future some career impact, as Armenians deferential to Turkish authority might be selected out for professional benefits, positions, etc., of such scholars as me, on the grand scale of things this is a relatively minor issue, if it exists. People of color, women, and others marginalized in our society and around the world face disparagement on a regular basis when they assert themselves as full human beings relative to whites, men, Euro-Americans, local elites, and others in positions of power. In our own society, the countless African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, etc., who point out the violence, discrimination, and exploitation they face and the systematic domination foundational to US society are marginalized, ridiculed, attacked, and belittled continually as a matter of course. And there is no escape into the privileged �white male-hood� that I partake of. They are maligned and threatened by rednecks, blatant sexists, etc., but also dismissed as extremists, condescended to, ignored, academically defamed and degraded, and kept in their inferior positions by subtle assumptions and structural exclusions by �white liberal� progressives who are convinced of their own freedom from racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. I wish to be clear that, by using the term �uppity� my intent is to inform my analysis of Turkish domination of Armenians with an understanding of U.S. racial, gender, etc., domination, but not to suggest that as an Armenian I share the position, experiences, or level of oppression of people of color, women, etc., in our society�even if some Armenians in other historical and political contexts (during the Genocide, in contemporary Turkey, etc.) have and do.

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:53 AM

Part IV

An Uppity Armenian Gives Voice to His Dignity

During the panel discussion, I wished to respond to Berktay�s degrading conduct toward me, but the context restricted me to making only substantive responses to the content of certain positions he took, not to his treatment of me and its implications for Turkish-Armenian relations. Had I pointed out the imperialist nature of his personal attacks and their ethical unacceptability, I would likely have been perceived to have lowered the discourse to an interpersonal conflict, which would have obscured the fact that what was playing out, as many audience members understood, was a post-genocidal imperial dominance relation. My critique would have been relativized to one part of a mutual conflict. Even if recognized as political in nature, as a conflict between �a Turk� and �an Armenian,� the true political nature of what transpired would have been obscured.

Given my difficult position of having to take public debasement without response, it was a serious problem that not a single individual in the audience made clear that Berktay was demeaning me and that this was not acceptable. And, because no audience member actually pointed this out publicly and I could not, Berktay and many audience members presumably left the discussion with the experience of denigration of an Armenian as an acceptable activity. The lack of response reinforced the normalization of the inferiority of Armenians, as fit targets of vilification. Even those who reacted against this emotionally were left to feel that, if morally wrong, it was acceptable in the context of practical reality�that the reality of Turkish domination of Armenians makes such ill-treatment legitimate despite moral considerations.

My resistance to the normalization of Armenian inferiority is part of the reason I have included the critique of Berktay here as part of my discussion Turkish-Armenian relations. If I could not speak out during the panel to challenge my disparagement and no audience members, who were in the position to respond to this treatment, chose to respond, then I feel I must speak out now. Of course, I risk just as much now, and my remarks here will surely be dismissed and derided in angry responses from Turkish and Armenian sources. This itself is an aspect of the imperial power dynamic. As John Stuart Mill points out in Chapter 2 of On Liberty, voices representing views against the established norms will inevitably be viewed as strident and extremist, regardless of their actual tone or content. Sometimes this criticism is justified, but often it is not. To follow this logic further, to the extent an imperial dominance relation between Turks and Armenians has been normalized then voices that challenge this norm will be perceived as disruptive, uncivil, aggressive, etc. The violence�past violence of the Genocide and potential violence ready to be unleashed should the imperial system be challenged, as Hrant Dink�s assassination shows*�and power�political, economic, ideological, etc.�that supports the imperial system is hidden from view, safely relegated to past history or hidden behind a misleading �stasis� that is a stalemate between denialist and other imperial forces and challenges to them. Those in positions of relative power in this imperial relation have the luxury of not having to exert themselves under normal circumstances to enjoy the benefits of and to maintain the power differential. This situation is similar to that in the United States, where whites do not have to exhibit explicitly racist attitudes or behaviors in order to enjoy the benefits of a racial hierarchy, as that hierarchy remains frozen because decisive action is not taken against it and �egalitarianism� merely perpetuates the hierarchy by treating high and low status in the same way. It is those in a subjugated position who have to take exceptional action in order to challenge the hierarchy, which makes the resulting �conflict� appear to be their fault and renders reactions from those in dominant positions as �understandable� reactions to destabilizing forces. Those who do not acknowledge the dominance structure in place will see Berktay�s behavior perhaps as a minor individual excess, but not as the mark of a power relation. My response on the other hand will be seen by such individuals as an extreme over-reaction to a subjective perception of ill-treatment, and the more strongly and logically I make the case that it was much more, the more I extreme I will be seen to be. Just as Berktay was in a position to dismiss my comments through denigration, rather than to engage them as legitimate concerns, so those who refuse to see the imperial order will dismiss the present analysis. They will likely say that I have presented a person �conflict� as a political issue. But, how can one speak of a purely personal relation between Turkish and Armenian individuals in the context of a discussion of the Armenian Genocide and its implications for the socio-political relations between the two groups? The �personal� here is infused with the political, and Turks who engage Armenians have the responsibility of understanding this and acting accordingly.

The subjugated are in a Catch-22. To say something meaningful about their oppression means being misconstrued as a extremist disruptor; to say nothing is to normalize yet another assault on their dignity, to further ingest the poison of an �accepted� inferiority and to confirm that inferiority by imposed inaction. (In one sense, of course, saying nothing is completely understandable. It is a function of the oppression of Armenians that we are put into this Catch-22 in the first place, and the mere fact of having to respond to assertions of domination is itself an unfair imposition of that domination.) The subjugated are forced to make a choice in a �double-bind� (to use feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye�s term and analysis, from The Politics of Reality): to accept domination or resist it, with each option entailing negative consequences. Regardless, my choice is clear: giving voice to my dignity is far more important than winning a public relations contest. And anyway, those Armenians and Turks who take seriously what I am saying will have, I believe, a useful tool for making sense of their experiences within the domination relation.

How does the foregoing shed light on the performance of the AATL panel audience? This, and not Berktay�s comments, was what truly saddened me that night. It is not that many did not �get it� �so many made clear to me that they did that night and in subsequent communications to me. It is that they failed to raise their own voices publicly when it really mattered�for me and for them. I am not in the habit of attacking �Armenians,� the �Armenian Diaspora,� or smaller segments of the global Armenian community, such as organizations, political parties, etc. Except in rare circumstances I do not see any point in adding to the surplus of calumny heaped on Armenians generally or these or those Armenians particularly. (I should add that it is no more justified to engage in unjustified attacks on Turks, regardless of the situation Armenians are in. It is crucial to judge different Turkish individuals, including Berktay, only and exactly on what they say and do, and to avoid generalizations. If criticisms are warranted in some or many cases, so is praise for the many Turks who from good motives saved Armenians during the Genocide and the key government officials, clerics, and other leaders who resisted the genocide, refused to participate in it, and often paid penalties for doing so.) Some Armenians spend quite a bit of time and effort deriding other Armenians, denialist Turks spend just as much vilifying most or all Armenians, and even some progressive Turks spend too much effort stating their disapproval of select Armenians, �Armenian attitudes� and Armenian groups. Much of the internal maligning among Armenians is a function of the internalized oppression resulting from the Genocide and the years of subjugation before and since. Some segments of a subjugated group, blocked from real equality with the oppressor group and subjected to reassertions of its power, claim a position of dominance against the only people to whom they have that kind of access, (some) other members of their own group. Rather than engaging in political activity to challenge the domination of Armenians, they relieve their feelings of inferiority by asserting superiority over and/or discharging anger and frustration against (some) other Armenians. (This is a simplified account, of course, but a full treatment is far beyond the scope of this paper and not essential for the issues taken up here.)

Obviously some acts and attitudes by Armenians do deserve criticism, and it would be chauvinist to avoid this, just as much as to unduly criticize Turkish individuals or the group as a whole. My disappointment in the mainly Armenian audience of the AATL panel is deep. I would estimate that the audience contained on the order of 200 Armenians (in addition to some non-Armenians), who witnessed a noteworthy Turkish individual demean an Armenian based on the latter�s political views and made possible by his inferior Armenian status, and not a single one protested this treatment. I have long been trained by experiences with aggressive deniers to face bad treatment in public. While of course I felt the pain of denigration, I could have accepted it if it had not been so acceptable to everyone else. But the failure of others to protest forced me to recognize that the entire audience, including the organizers of the panel, seemed to accept my denigration, too. With only one exception, those who asked questions directed at Berktay did so in deferential ways, further reinforcing his legitimacy and the illegitimacy of my recognition of ill-treatment. The moderator and other Armenians and the Left organizers had a special obligation to deal with Berktay�s behavior, if not to intervene as it happened (the moderator, for instance, could have simply kept Berktay to something close to his allotted time, rather than allowing him a full hour to speak, further reinforcing Berktay�s special legitimacy), then at least to offer some balancing response after his remarks and thus to go on record pointing out that Berktay�s conduct was not acceptable.

In the end, though, it was not my dignity that suffered, even as I take this opportunity to further reclaim it. Those Armenians who saw nothing wrong with what transpired were robbed of the important educational opportunity of a critical analysis that might have helped them reflect on the extent to which Turkish priority over and mistreatment of Armenians has been normalized in their own outlooks. It is not whether these Armenians agreed with what I said or not�that is not the issue, because my mere statement of a political viewpoint does not justify the maltreatment that occurred. Denial has trained us to accept mistreatment, expressions of hatred and prejudice, etc., as inevitable and thus in effect as acceptable. Here was an opportunity for some Armenians to become aware of this faulty norm and to begin the process of overcoming it.

As for those Armenians who did see something wrong but said nothing, they lost the opportunity to stand up for themselves by defending a fellow Armenian from denigration. As Aristotle tells us, developing virtues in practice is a matter of training oneself through habit to act appropriately. These Armenians reinforced the habit of accepting ill-treatment, making it yet harder the next time the situation calls for them to stand up for their dignity.

Both sets of audience members saw again and helped ensure for the future that, when a Turkish individual assumes his/her power and acts on that power, even to become angry and derisive, the �proper� Armenian response is to become ever more appeasing and deferential.

Fighting centuries of internalized oppression built through institutionalized subjugation in the millet system and driven as deeply as possible by genocide is a difficult task. I recall some years ago organizing with another Armenian a panel on genocide at a local university. We included presentations on the Holocaust, Nanjing Massacre and Armenian Genocide. In the days before the event, we found out that the many posters put up around campus to advertise the event had been torn down. We assumed, based on numerous past experiences and the fact that this was not usual for other events on this campus, that Turkish deniers had done this, but of course we had no proof. What is more, the other Armenian and I did not even react to the news; we just accepted it as what usually happens when one tries to publicize an event involving the Armenian Genocide. But those from the school�s Holocaust Center, which was sponsoring the program, had not internalized years of denialist abuse and saw what happened as an outrage that demanded serious action, including possible criminal justice measures. This was the first time that I realized how much my own perspective on Turkish-Armenian relations had been skewed by denial, and ever since I have worked to counter this skewing. Even if it is unfair that I have been burdened by Turkish domination with the writing of this piece and dealing with the backlash that will come against it, this article is my next step in that process.

Armenian readers, what will yours be?

Author�s Note: In addition to Marilyn Frye�s The Politics of Reality, my understanding of the Turkish-Armenian domination relation is informed by Franz Fanon�s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, Bell Hooks� Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Robert Ackermann�s Heterogeneities: Race, Gender, Nation, Class, and State. Fanon�s and Hooks� work provided important stylistic models for the rhetorical approach of �An Uppity Armenian.� The discussion of �white liberal� racism in various parts of Feminist Theory and the �Benign Racism� chapter of Heterogeneities has especially influenced my understanding of progressive Turkish imperialism. My appreciation of the morphing capacity of Turkish imperial domination of Armenians owes much to Etienne Balibar�s discussion of �neo-racism� in his and Immanuel Wallerstein�s Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.

**Joseph** · 04-27-2007, 05:55 AM

Ayse Gunaysu

An Ever-Lasting Punishment for Us All in Turkey

By Ayse Gunaysu

It has been 92 years since April 24, 1915, since the knock on the door of Krikor Zohrab�s home and those of Komitas, Siamanto, Taniel Varoujan and more than 300 Armenian intellectuals, deputies, writers, musicians and priests�in other words those who represented the best qualities of the Armenian people. The knock on the door was the signal of the first genocide of the 20th century, the annihilation of an entire civilization that would have been, if history had proceeded along a different course, one of the cornerstones�in fact creators�of a democratic, truly multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural Turkey, rich in soul, enlightened in mind, and unreservedly open to the best that the human legacy can offer. History proceeded the other way around, however, and honored not the righteous but the strongest. Not only were one of the most progressive, most enlightened people in the world wiped off their homeland, together with any physical manifestations of its age-old existence, but those who were left behind, the Muslim inhabitants of Asia Minor, were condemned to a long-lasting punishment. Since that night, the night of April 23-24, 1915, the descendants of the guilty and the bystanders and all who were left behind have never known what it is like to live in a truly democratic country, where the flag, the territory and the state are not more valuable than human life. They have never known what it is like to co-exist with people of other identities without overt-covert humiliations, prejudices and hostilities. They have never known what it is like to live under the rule of a state that does not subordinate everything to the interests of its continuity, its alleged �survival.� The immeasurable wealth usurped brought no richness, nor did it generate any prosperity or well-being.

The punishment was not only political, economic or social, but also moral. Those left behind have never been part of a collective identity that knows what it is like to weep and to pray after their fellow countrymen who they once shared a life with. And they have thus never had the chance to achieve a spiritual and moral elevation of this kind. The darkest depths of human nature that enable one to see what one would like to see and to know what one would like to know, combined with a successful official strategy of disinformation, create a society trapped in a world of oblivion and ignorance where basic values are turned upside down and criminal acts are praised as acts of patriotism.

As for living in a world of oblivion and ignorance, the missing parts can�t simply be replaced with the relevant pieces of knowledge, or by merely learning the facts, because the lack of this kind of knowledge generates, generation after generation, an inability of sharing the suffering of the other and of dissociating oneself from the attributed collective identity. By distorting the facts, the state apparatus distorts the system of values, convictions, and ability to reason and to draw conclusions.

Many dissidents in Turkey, including myself, discovered late that we were unaware of our ignorance, that we didn�t even know that we didn�t know. It is not a gap that can be bridged simply by reading and learning more. It has caused a delay in our intellectual and emotional capacities to truly grasp all aspects of the loss.

Ninety-two years after April 24, there seems to be no real hope for improvement in Turkey, at least not in the short to medium term. Improvement can not be measured by economic indicators such as inflation figures, direct foreign investment inflow, or annual economic growth, nor sociological indicators such as the increasing use of mobile telephones. It refers, instead, to the flourishing of a culture of true democracy. There is no hope in the near future because the spirit of April 24 and the elements of this spirit still prevails in Turkey: first, the concept of an omnipotent state ruling over all civil and human rights, a concept widely accepted and enthusiastically supported by the general public; secondly the dominance of violence both as a manner of government and as a popular culture of living, thirdly militarism not only a key component of the regime but also as a common psyche shared by the great majority of the society; and last but not least, a never weakening Turkish nationalism engraved in the tiniest cells of the society and the ruling apparatus.

Justice and reconciliation, therefore, will remain a distant aspiration until the entire society begins to transform and not just the ruling elite. It is wishful thinking that Turkey will soon confront the truth of April 24 because of the vicious circle that is in operation and in full force: Without democratization, a confrontation is out of the question; and without such a confrontation, no democracy can prevail. So we, the Turkish dissidents, will have to face the fact that every April 24, for many years to come, we will voice our call for the recognition of the Genocide not out of any optimism or hope for immediate improvement but out of a moral obligation and responsibility we must carry as humans.

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