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Dear Honorable Senator Feinstein,
I am a Professor of International Relations, and I received my
educational degrees from American schools, including a B.A., two
Masters and a Doctorate (Syracuse University, 1959).
I devoted three decades of my life, inter alia, to the study of
Armeno-Turkish relations, on which I published no less than eighty
books/booklets. Three of the most recent ones were printed in New
York. They are entitled: (1) Armenian Falsifications (2008), (2) What
Happened to the Ottoman Armenians? (2006), and (3) The British Blue
Books: Vehicles of War Propaganda, 1914-18. I shall do my best to mail
to you a copy of each of the last-mentioned three publications.
You may also be interested in knowing that I am presently on a rather
long speaking tour of the United States that will eventually total no
less than thirty-six public addresses, mostly in various universities
and a few meetings with some US Congress members, or their chief
advisors.
I have in my possession now the draft resolution pertaining to the
Armenians, prepared by a group of members of the House. I have also
seen your reply to Mrs. Nisan Giftgi on the same question.
Both the text, prepared by Mr. Schiff and co-sponsored by some other
House Members, and your private letter, reflect a totally one-sided
and biased approach that omits crucial facts and presents a distorted
picture that has no relation with the actual events in history. I have
no intention to take this opportunity to reply to the inaccurate
assertions, outright exaggerations and scandalous omissions. A proper
response can only be expressed in book form. You may consider that I
have done this in the eighty publications since the early 1980s.
I may underline here that it is the duty of scholarship to question
the validity of a mainstream idea. The idea in this case happens to be
a prejudiced attitude or the equivalent of a "trial" in your Congress,
where you as "prosecutors" and "judges" are trying to pass through a
"verdict", moreover in the name of the American people.
The draft resolution does not take into account any Turkish view. It
does not seem to have taken into any consideration even Armenian
confessions, expressed in memoirs, war histories, series of articles
and official communications, all describing how armed Armenians,
acting as independent units or in the ranks of Turkey's enemies,
killed Turks and other Muslims. Those Armenian and some third party
sources agree that both armed Armenians and their victims had reached
six-digit figures. There exist a host of reliable documents and
acknowledgements to this effect in published works as well as in the
archives of the interested parties. A total disregard of this wealth
of information goes to prove that the US Congress is not the place to
pass a verdict on this topic.
The draft resolution is basically a product of the Armenian ethnic
lobby, well-organized and well-to-do but already facing a complaint
registered with the US Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue
Service, the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate.
I wish to come to your short reply to Mrs. Giftgy, in which you state
the following: "We must remember and recognize this tragedy to ensure
that it never happens again".
Your generalization, which misses the point entirely, is misleading in
ways more than one. It is a rationalization that may comfort you but
actually helps to hide the origins of genocide. Unless you are able to
accept the correct diagnosis of the true source of this brand of
crime, massacres will occur, thanks in part to such incorrect
assessments.
I shall put aside the fact that you are virtually under the arrest of
carefully-selected justifications, with absolutely no mention of
opposing documentation. You have never become a part of scholarly
debate on that issue. For instance, a prominent British source
(Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Dictionary of the First World
War) recorded that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were living in
Turkey in 1914, and that the Armenians "slaughtered an estimated
120,000 non-Armenians while the Turkish Army was preoccupied with
mobilization." It adds that the armed Armenians attacked the Turkish
quarters of the Ottoman city of Van in April 1915, and proclaimed
there a government of their own, seceding in the process this province
from the State. This was the beginning of Armenian massacres, pillage
and rape directed against the non-Armenians.
Notable Armenians (such as the first Prime Minister of independent
Armenia Hovhannes Katchaznouni, K. Serope Papazian), British
functionaries (Captain C.B.Norman, A.G.Hume-Braman, Sidney Whitman)
and men-of-letters (C.F. Dixon-Johnson, Bernard Lewis, Roderic
Daveson, Andrew Mango, Norman Stone), Russian officers (General
Mayevski, Lieutenant-Colonel Tverdo-Khlebov, Captain I.G. Plat,
Dr.Khoreshenov), American academics (Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, William L.
Langer, Stanford J.Shaw, Justin McCarthy, Heath W. Lowry, Edward J.
Erickson, Guenther Lewy), men from legal professions (Samuel A. Weems)
and many others do not share the mainstream opinion about the
"innocence" of the Armenians. You may kindly familiarize yourself with
such sources. Fact-finding in history demands that all relevant parts
of the truth is taken into consideration.
Let me come back to your misleading generalization that you intend to
end genocide by punishing the Turks. I have to underline that genocide
is a product of racism; and racism was born and rose in certain parts
of the Western world. It is an offshoot of a particular level in the
development of the capitalist society; it is the result of an advanced
stage of a certain mode of production. It is like a hand and a glove
with the process of colonial and imperialist exploitation.
One may believe to be "different" from the "other", in terms of
racial, ethnical or religious background. But when this difference is
regarded as innate and unchangeable, and moreover, justifying a sense
of superiority over the other, then, one is confronted with a racist
attitude or a set of beliefs, which also expresses itself in the
practices, institutions and structures which help to justify it.
Racism theorizes about human differences and things badly about
another group. It proposes to establish an order, a permanent group
hierarchy believed to reflect "laws of nature" or even God's
preference. This is what the British, French, German, Spanish, Dutch
and, the Americans have done in various parts of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America.
Racism has two components: difference and power. It originates in the
mind that regards "them" as different from "us", and the difference is
supposed to be permanent and unbridgeable. Government-sanctioned
segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, enslavement and genocide
may follow that racist orientation. White supremacy, Christian
selectivity, and anti-semitism are the result. The Blacks, the
Muslims, and the xxxs were tolerated as long as they stayed in "their
place". In some Western societies, racism was fully worked out,
elaborately implemented, and carried to its extremes.
There is no racism in the Turkish psyche. It has never been a part of
the Turks' social, political, and psychological set-up. They are the
ones who recognized the Orthodox, Armenian, xxxish, Catholic, and
Protestants as separate peoples with the right to worship in their own
way, built their own religious structures, elect their own
representatives and be led by them, go anywhere within the large
confides of the State, indulge in any kind of profession or work, and
eventually join the State administration. This is known, dear Senator,
as the famous "millet" system about which you give no hint of having
accumulated sufficient knowledge. The Turks achieved all that when
Europe was fighting religious wars, when Cromwell was pursuing his
Catholics, the French butchering their Huguenots, and others subduing
the Calvinists.
The Turks recognized the Armenians as a separate community as early as
1461 when the Christian centers virtually excommunicated this
Gregorian people for centuries. Consequently, the Ottoman Foreign
Minister only a year before the outbreak of the First World War was an
Armenian – Gabriel Nouradoungian. Would Hitler appoint a xxx to be his
Minister of Foreign Affairs? Did even the Weimar Republic do that?
Antisemitism, thus, is a disease of the Western societies. Hitler did
not learn anything from the Turks. There was enough racism accumulated
in Germany, Austria, and in some other Western nation-states. They
were the ones who gave to the world racist theoreticians – for
instance, Gobineau in France, Chamberlain in Britain, Nietzche in
Germany, and the Social Darwinists in the United States.
The Turks, on the other hand had saved the whole of European xxxry
from total extinction during the Inquisition in 1492. Turkey was a
place of refuge for all of those running away from Russian autocracy,
the failure of the 1830 and the 1848 Revolutions, the setback of the
progressive political movements in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere and
of course the onslaught of Fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany.
Likewise, the Turks made no contribution to racist theories, but
presented to world civilization the celebrated Renaissance men such as
Sinan the Architect, Yunus Emre the great humanist poet, and Ibni Sina
whose book on medicine was utilized as the basic text book in all
schools of medicine in Europe for 300 consecutive years.
But the Catholic missionaries from France and Protestant missionaries
from the United States came to Ottoman Turkey to "teach" the Gregorian
Armenians that they were "superior" to the Muslim Turks, by virtue of
the fact they happen to be Christians. An American Protestant
missionary (A.W.Williams) and the president of the Armenian Patriotic
Alliance in New York (M.S. Gabriel), in their joint book, printed in
Chicago as late as 1896, or only four years before our entry into the
twentieth century, wrote the following on the Turks: "... the Turk is
not a member of the best human race- the Indo-European, or Arian, like
the Armenians. The Turk does not belong even to the next best of
races, the semitic...the Turk is a wild beast to be caged. [We] beg
pardon of the hounds, hyenas...and all wild beasts for using their
names in simile or metaphor..." It is unfortunate that racist
publications have become the teachers of a number of parliamentarians
and conditioned them, along with the organized and politicized
propaganda of the Armenian pressure groups who are so active in
Washington, D.C.
However, such an assault on the Turks, and their views represents
something like a lynch mob. One should note that such an attitude may
well augur the advent of a new form of a totalitarian society.
You are merely helping the Armenians to redefine their identity as a
group of "victims". In Freudian terms of psychology, this form of
selection is called "the egoism of victimization" that totally
disregards the bloodshed and the trauma that the so-called "victims"
have caused to others. Such a distorted version of events contradicts
what actually happened in history. Throughout the First World War
there was a non stop news coverage in the Western Allied press on the
Armenians. Non of the attacks, destruction, murder, massacre, theft,
pillage, and rape by the Armenians were ever reported. There was even
a law against such reporting, on the basis of "aiding the enemy". In
the meantime, however, the Ottoman Armenians had joined hands with
Turkey's enemies who provided that minority with weapons, ammunition,
military training, uniforms, logistics, lines of communications, and
money.
Self-styled leaders may try to convince themselves and mislead others
that if their selected "scapegoat" is punished, things will be right.
This will never be the case, so long as the actual breeding source of
genocide, which is racism, remains as it is in some Western societies.
Best wishes,
Türkkaya Ataöv
Professor of International Relations
I am a Professor of International Relations, and I received my
educational degrees from American schools, including a B.A., two
Masters and a Doctorate (Syracuse University, 1959).
I devoted three decades of my life, inter alia, to the study of
Armeno-Turkish relations, on which I published no less than eighty
books/booklets. Three of the most recent ones were printed in New
York. They are entitled: (1) Armenian Falsifications (2008), (2) What
Happened to the Ottoman Armenians? (2006), and (3) The British Blue
Books: Vehicles of War Propaganda, 1914-18. I shall do my best to mail
to you a copy of each of the last-mentioned three publications.
You may also be interested in knowing that I am presently on a rather
long speaking tour of the United States that will eventually total no
less than thirty-six public addresses, mostly in various universities
and a few meetings with some US Congress members, or their chief
advisors.
I have in my possession now the draft resolution pertaining to the
Armenians, prepared by a group of members of the House. I have also
seen your reply to Mrs. Nisan Giftgi on the same question.
Both the text, prepared by Mr. Schiff and co-sponsored by some other
House Members, and your private letter, reflect a totally one-sided
and biased approach that omits crucial facts and presents a distorted
picture that has no relation with the actual events in history. I have
no intention to take this opportunity to reply to the inaccurate
assertions, outright exaggerations and scandalous omissions. A proper
response can only be expressed in book form. You may consider that I
have done this in the eighty publications since the early 1980s.
I may underline here that it is the duty of scholarship to question
the validity of a mainstream idea. The idea in this case happens to be
a prejudiced attitude or the equivalent of a "trial" in your Congress,
where you as "prosecutors" and "judges" are trying to pass through a
"verdict", moreover in the name of the American people.
The draft resolution does not take into account any Turkish view. It
does not seem to have taken into any consideration even Armenian
confessions, expressed in memoirs, war histories, series of articles
and official communications, all describing how armed Armenians,
acting as independent units or in the ranks of Turkey's enemies,
killed Turks and other Muslims. Those Armenian and some third party
sources agree that both armed Armenians and their victims had reached
six-digit figures. There exist a host of reliable documents and
acknowledgements to this effect in published works as well as in the
archives of the interested parties. A total disregard of this wealth
of information goes to prove that the US Congress is not the place to
pass a verdict on this topic.
The draft resolution is basically a product of the Armenian ethnic
lobby, well-organized and well-to-do but already facing a complaint
registered with the US Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue
Service, the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate.
I wish to come to your short reply to Mrs. Giftgy, in which you state
the following: "We must remember and recognize this tragedy to ensure
that it never happens again".
Your generalization, which misses the point entirely, is misleading in
ways more than one. It is a rationalization that may comfort you but
actually helps to hide the origins of genocide. Unless you are able to
accept the correct diagnosis of the true source of this brand of
crime, massacres will occur, thanks in part to such incorrect
assessments.
I shall put aside the fact that you are virtually under the arrest of
carefully-selected justifications, with absolutely no mention of
opposing documentation. You have never become a part of scholarly
debate on that issue. For instance, a prominent British source
(Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Dictionary of the First World
War) recorded that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were living in
Turkey in 1914, and that the Armenians "slaughtered an estimated
120,000 non-Armenians while the Turkish Army was preoccupied with
mobilization." It adds that the armed Armenians attacked the Turkish
quarters of the Ottoman city of Van in April 1915, and proclaimed
there a government of their own, seceding in the process this province
from the State. This was the beginning of Armenian massacres, pillage
and rape directed against the non-Armenians.
Notable Armenians (such as the first Prime Minister of independent
Armenia Hovhannes Katchaznouni, K. Serope Papazian), British
functionaries (Captain C.B.Norman, A.G.Hume-Braman, Sidney Whitman)
and men-of-letters (C.F. Dixon-Johnson, Bernard Lewis, Roderic
Daveson, Andrew Mango, Norman Stone), Russian officers (General
Mayevski, Lieutenant-Colonel Tverdo-Khlebov, Captain I.G. Plat,
Dr.Khoreshenov), American academics (Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, William L.
Langer, Stanford J.Shaw, Justin McCarthy, Heath W. Lowry, Edward J.
Erickson, Guenther Lewy), men from legal professions (Samuel A. Weems)
and many others do not share the mainstream opinion about the
"innocence" of the Armenians. You may kindly familiarize yourself with
such sources. Fact-finding in history demands that all relevant parts
of the truth is taken into consideration.
Let me come back to your misleading generalization that you intend to
end genocide by punishing the Turks. I have to underline that genocide
is a product of racism; and racism was born and rose in certain parts
of the Western world. It is an offshoot of a particular level in the
development of the capitalist society; it is the result of an advanced
stage of a certain mode of production. It is like a hand and a glove
with the process of colonial and imperialist exploitation.
One may believe to be "different" from the "other", in terms of
racial, ethnical or religious background. But when this difference is
regarded as innate and unchangeable, and moreover, justifying a sense
of superiority over the other, then, one is confronted with a racist
attitude or a set of beliefs, which also expresses itself in the
practices, institutions and structures which help to justify it.
Racism theorizes about human differences and things badly about
another group. It proposes to establish an order, a permanent group
hierarchy believed to reflect "laws of nature" or even God's
preference. This is what the British, French, German, Spanish, Dutch
and, the Americans have done in various parts of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America.
Racism has two components: difference and power. It originates in the
mind that regards "them" as different from "us", and the difference is
supposed to be permanent and unbridgeable. Government-sanctioned
segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, enslavement and genocide
may follow that racist orientation. White supremacy, Christian
selectivity, and anti-semitism are the result. The Blacks, the
Muslims, and the xxxs were tolerated as long as they stayed in "their
place". In some Western societies, racism was fully worked out,
elaborately implemented, and carried to its extremes.
There is no racism in the Turkish psyche. It has never been a part of
the Turks' social, political, and psychological set-up. They are the
ones who recognized the Orthodox, Armenian, xxxish, Catholic, and
Protestants as separate peoples with the right to worship in their own
way, built their own religious structures, elect their own
representatives and be led by them, go anywhere within the large
confides of the State, indulge in any kind of profession or work, and
eventually join the State administration. This is known, dear Senator,
as the famous "millet" system about which you give no hint of having
accumulated sufficient knowledge. The Turks achieved all that when
Europe was fighting religious wars, when Cromwell was pursuing his
Catholics, the French butchering their Huguenots, and others subduing
the Calvinists.
The Turks recognized the Armenians as a separate community as early as
1461 when the Christian centers virtually excommunicated this
Gregorian people for centuries. Consequently, the Ottoman Foreign
Minister only a year before the outbreak of the First World War was an
Armenian – Gabriel Nouradoungian. Would Hitler appoint a xxx to be his
Minister of Foreign Affairs? Did even the Weimar Republic do that?
Antisemitism, thus, is a disease of the Western societies. Hitler did
not learn anything from the Turks. There was enough racism accumulated
in Germany, Austria, and in some other Western nation-states. They
were the ones who gave to the world racist theoreticians – for
instance, Gobineau in France, Chamberlain in Britain, Nietzche in
Germany, and the Social Darwinists in the United States.
The Turks, on the other hand had saved the whole of European xxxry
from total extinction during the Inquisition in 1492. Turkey was a
place of refuge for all of those running away from Russian autocracy,
the failure of the 1830 and the 1848 Revolutions, the setback of the
progressive political movements in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere and
of course the onslaught of Fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany.
Likewise, the Turks made no contribution to racist theories, but
presented to world civilization the celebrated Renaissance men such as
Sinan the Architect, Yunus Emre the great humanist poet, and Ibni Sina
whose book on medicine was utilized as the basic text book in all
schools of medicine in Europe for 300 consecutive years.
But the Catholic missionaries from France and Protestant missionaries
from the United States came to Ottoman Turkey to "teach" the Gregorian
Armenians that they were "superior" to the Muslim Turks, by virtue of
the fact they happen to be Christians. An American Protestant
missionary (A.W.Williams) and the president of the Armenian Patriotic
Alliance in New York (M.S. Gabriel), in their joint book, printed in
Chicago as late as 1896, or only four years before our entry into the
twentieth century, wrote the following on the Turks: "... the Turk is
not a member of the best human race- the Indo-European, or Arian, like
the Armenians. The Turk does not belong even to the next best of
races, the semitic...the Turk is a wild beast to be caged. [We] beg
pardon of the hounds, hyenas...and all wild beasts for using their
names in simile or metaphor..." It is unfortunate that racist
publications have become the teachers of a number of parliamentarians
and conditioned them, along with the organized and politicized
propaganda of the Armenian pressure groups who are so active in
Washington, D.C.
However, such an assault on the Turks, and their views represents
something like a lynch mob. One should note that such an attitude may
well augur the advent of a new form of a totalitarian society.
You are merely helping the Armenians to redefine their identity as a
group of "victims". In Freudian terms of psychology, this form of
selection is called "the egoism of victimization" that totally
disregards the bloodshed and the trauma that the so-called "victims"
have caused to others. Such a distorted version of events contradicts
what actually happened in history. Throughout the First World War
there was a non stop news coverage in the Western Allied press on the
Armenians. Non of the attacks, destruction, murder, massacre, theft,
pillage, and rape by the Armenians were ever reported. There was even
a law against such reporting, on the basis of "aiding the enemy". In
the meantime, however, the Ottoman Armenians had joined hands with
Turkey's enemies who provided that minority with weapons, ammunition,
military training, uniforms, logistics, lines of communications, and
money.
Self-styled leaders may try to convince themselves and mislead others
that if their selected "scapegoat" is punished, things will be right.
This will never be the case, so long as the actual breeding source of
genocide, which is racism, remains as it is in some Western societies.
Best wishes,
Türkkaya Ataöv
Professor of International Relations
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