Was the Genocide Inevitable?
********************************************
According to Hagop Oshagan, "our revolutionaries lost because they formed only tiny islands in the Ottoman sea." An old-timer once echoes this sentiment to me when he compared the ARF to a frog trying to rape the Ottoman elephant.
When warned by foreign observers as well as high-ranking Armenian bureaucrats within the Ottoman administration against acts of provocation, our revolutionaries’ response was, in effect, "we challenge the sultan to massacre us and risk immediate intervention by the great powers of Europe."
"Some Armenians," writes Philip Mansel in his Constantinople: city of the World’s Desire, "hoped for a massacre in the belief that it would provoke the intervention of the great powers."
In his Mandate for Armenia, James Gidney, by no means an ani-Armenian scholar, concurs: "Armenians bear a part of the blame [for the genocide] for their gullibility in assuming that, because the great powers admired them, the great powers would protect them."
Another pro-Armenian scholar, Christopher Walker, calls this "the single most dangerous illusion that the Armenians entertained." Both the Turks and the Armenian revolutionaries, concludes Mansel (mentioned above) "treated the Armenians as pawns, without regard for human life."
When our own Zarian said, "Our political parties have been of no political use to us," he was probably making the understatement of the millennium.
********************************************
According to Hagop Oshagan, "our revolutionaries lost because they formed only tiny islands in the Ottoman sea." An old-timer once echoes this sentiment to me when he compared the ARF to a frog trying to rape the Ottoman elephant.
When warned by foreign observers as well as high-ranking Armenian bureaucrats within the Ottoman administration against acts of provocation, our revolutionaries’ response was, in effect, "we challenge the sultan to massacre us and risk immediate intervention by the great powers of Europe."
"Some Armenians," writes Philip Mansel in his Constantinople: city of the World’s Desire, "hoped for a massacre in the belief that it would provoke the intervention of the great powers."
In his Mandate for Armenia, James Gidney, by no means an ani-Armenian scholar, concurs: "Armenians bear a part of the blame [for the genocide] for their gullibility in assuming that, because the great powers admired them, the great powers would protect them."
Another pro-Armenian scholar, Christopher Walker, calls this "the single most dangerous illusion that the Armenians entertained." Both the Turks and the Armenian revolutionaries, concludes Mansel (mentioned above) "treated the Armenians as pawns, without regard for human life."
When our own Zarian said, "Our political parties have been of no political use to us," he was probably making the understatement of the millennium.
Comment