Announcement

**winoman** · 05-17-2005, 11:46 AM

Very familiar - the gobbling of our neo-Turks on this board epitomizes these denialist maxims...

Why Might Intellectuals Engage in the Denial of Known Genocides?

By:Roger W. Smith College of William and Mary Williamsburg, Virginia
Eric Markusen Southwest State University Marshall, Minnesota
Robert Jay LiftonThe City University of New York

There are several possible motivations for denial of genocide, and these can be complex. The motivations to which we would call attention include: self-serving ideology, bigotry, intellectual confusion, careerism, identification with power, and a particular conception of knowledge. It seems unlikely,however, that denial rests only on one of these motivations; moreover, the particular combinations of motivations may vary with individuals. Also, what prompts denial may vary with different examples of genocide: anti-Zionism, forexample, may help explain denial of the Holocaust, but in terms of its content tells us nothing about why the Armenian genocide has been denied. On the otherhand, if we focus not on the content of the motivation, but on its form (ideology) and goals (political and psychological purposes), then themotivations for denial in these two cases may have more in common than appearat first glance.

Ideology, Bigotry and the Denial of the Holocaust

Scholars who have analyzed deniers of the Holocaust have concluded that they are primarily motivated by ideology. Thus, Vidal-Naquet, in his examination of Faurisson and other French "revisionists," asserts that "all revisionists are resolute anti-Zionists." [39] Similarly, on the basis of her even more comprehensive survey of Holocaust deniers, Lipstadt concludes that "it is clear that deniers have no interest in scholarship or reason. Most are antisemites or bigots." [40]These answers are no doubt correct, but they are incomplete. It may be that all revisionists are anti-Zionists, but there are surely anti-Zionists (some of them Jewish) who do not deny the reality of the Holocaust. Similarly, there are people who are highly antisemitic, but are well aware that the Holocausttook place.

Intellectual Confusion, Rationalization

Clues to the thinking of academics who question the reality of the Armeniangenocide have been provided by Israel Charny and his colleague Daphna Fromer,who sent questionnaires to sixty-nine scholars who signed an advertisementwhich, in the words of Charny and Fromer, "questioned insidiously the evidenceof the Armenian genocide" and appeared in several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. [41] In analyzing the comments of the seventeen scholars who provided "active responses" to their mailing, Charny and Fromer discerned a number of "thinking defense-mechanisms" that enabled the scholars to engage in "the denial of genocide." These mechanisms includedwhat the authors term "scientificism in the service of denial," i.e., the claim that not enough empirical evidence is available to justify an unequivocal position on the reality of the genocide; and "definitionalism,"i.e., acknowledging deaths, but denying that they were the result of "genocide," thus shifting responsibility for the genocide away from the Turkish government and trivializing the killing of over a million Armenians as the inadvertent result of famine, war, and disease. Whether anyone is led into denial by such reasoning is an open question, but such thinking does serve to make denial easier thereafter, while, at the same time, it preserves the appearance of objectivity.

Careerism, Power, Knowledge

"Careerism" is a complicated phenomenon, but for our purposes we would identify two (non-exclusive) forms that it may take: one that is oriented more toward material goals, and one that involves more the satisfactions that go with power. Both share the "thoughtlessness" that Hannah Arendt saw as the essence of the "banality of evils": an imaginative blindness that prevents one from reflecting upon the consequences of one's actions. [42] But elsewhere Arendt also speaks of a "willed evil," and the second type of careerism is not far removed from this: not simply the obliviousness to hurt, but the infliction of hurt. [43]Intellectuals who engage in the denial of genocide may be motivated in part by either type of careerism, or by both. The more insidious form, however, is thesecond type of careerism. Here material rewards are important, but more so,the opportunity for certain psychological and social satisfactions: a sense of importance, of status, of being in control, all of which can come through identification with power, something we believe we have shown in the memorandum we have analyzed. The price for intellect in the service of denial, however, is a particular conception of knowledge, one in which knowledge not only serves the ends of those in power, but is defined by power. But to define truth in terms of power is to reveal the bankruptcy, irrationality, and above all, danger, of the whole enterprise of denial of genocide. Inherent in such a view of knowledge is both a deep-seated nihilism and an urge to tyranny.

Concluding Comments: Scholars and Truth

Scholarship is, or should be, a quest for truth. What scholars write and say in that quest matters a great deal. Directly or indirectly, our words contribute to a shared consciousness -- to the constellation of beliefs that a society forms in connection with issues of any kind. Scholars' contributions to that shared consciousness become especially important in relation to a society's struggles with large, disturbing, and threatening historical events. Nowhere is scholarly research and commentary more significant than in connection with genocide. Here the scope of mass murder and the depth of its moral violation defy understanding and arouse every kind of confusion, whether in the form of diffuse passions or resistance to painful evidence. Careful scholarly evaluation can hardly eliminate these confusions, but it can diminish them in favor of reasoned interpretation and the channeling of passion into constructive policy. Generally speaking, the extremity of human harm brought about by genocide raises the stakes of scholarly commentary. Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message, in effect, is: murderers did not really murder; victims were not really killed; mass murder requires no confrontation, noreflection, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate human crime. More than that, they encourage -- indeed invite -- a repetition of that crimefrom virtually any source in the immediate or distant future. By closing their minds to truth, that is, such scholars contribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides.Those of us who wish to be true to our scholarly calling have a clear obligation here. We must first expose this form of denial. At the same time we must ourselves bear witness to historical truths -- to the full narrative of mass murder and human suffering. To be witnessing professionals in this way requires that we take in grim details so that we can tell the story with accuracy and insight. It is a task to which we must bring both heart and mind, an approach that combines advocacy and detachment. We require sufficient detachment to maintain rigorous intellectual standards in evaluating evidence and drawing conclusions. At the same time our moral advocacy should require us to open ourselves to suffering as a way of taking a stand against cruelty and killing, whatever its source.

**winoman** · 05-17-2005, 12:29 PM

My excerpts from a review of: Hilsenraths Other Genocide by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Hilsenrath approaches the extermination of the Armenian people with the sensitivity of someone who witnessed genocide perpetrated against his own people. He is conversant with every Holocaust and genocide discourse and has studied the patterns of dissimulating the crime before, during, and after it is committed.

His work is based on solid research of historical material, both Armenian and Turkish, and the study of Armenian society and culture, as well as first-hand knowledge of the scene of the crime. The Armenian genocide discourse is more marginalized, in even more immediate danger of being silenced than is the Jewish Holocaust discourse. The Turkish authorities used World War I to conceal the murders much in the way the Germans used World War II to obscure theirs.

D ickran Kouymjian calls the Turkish genocide of the Armenians one of the most systematic genocides of all times with geopolitical and chauvinistic "root causes." He explains that the Turkish government went to great lengths to efface all trace of Armenian civilization on the historical homeland; thus it consistently changed the names of towns, villages and hamlets in the eastern provinces in the late 1950s, as evidenced by the Turkish census of 1959-1960 .... Roughly 90% of the names of historical Armenia have been changed; only the major cities - Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, etc. - have been spared. As Turkish historians continue to revise the past, newer generations of Armenians will be hard pressed to find the localities inhabited by their ancestors. He states, as Hilsenrath suggests as well, that in contemporary "Turkish-occupied Armenia there are no Armenians, except for dissimulated ones of uncertain number." Willful destruction of Armenian churches, civil buildings, and homes by fire or explosives was encouraged during the period of the massacres from 1915 to 1922. Even thereafter, monuments were destroyed by dynamite, artillery, and neglect. Armenian churches were converted into mosques, prisons, stables, farms, and museums, not maintained at all, or demolished for road construction. Other monuments were neutralized by effacing Armenian inscriptions, or they were reattributed to Turkish architects. Similar techniques of dissimulation caused Jewish monuments in Germany and Austria virtually to disappear-synagogues were left in ruins and eventually torn down. Others were transformed into secular buildings.

To this day, German revisionists take the stand of the turn-of-the century colonialists who, seeking compensation for the lack of German colonies in Africa and Asia, promoted the idea of German hegemony in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Such studies support the Turkish crypto-fascist anti- Armenian propaganda rationalizing simultaneously why Armenians deserve to be persecuted and denying that any massacres took place. Invariably the victims are blamed for the injustice they suffered. Such texts differ only in their specifics from the arguments that appear in neo-conservative Holocaust revisionism.

...the point of view of the culturally dominant majority...stereotypes...the Armenians as traitors, a dangerous people of inferior race multiplying like rats, Russian infiltrators - in other words, the same images Nazi propaganda employed to berate the Jews. Thus, Mudir Bey claims that "the Armenians are a people of conniving merchants. The Turk acting in good faith is at their mercy." This use of the generalizing singular is also typical of Nazi texts.

By introducing the perspective of common folk, Hilsenrath exposes the concealed interests of the privileged and powerful. Although the Turkish beggar is aware of the anti-Armenian doctrine, he and his partner are unequivocally motivated by greed to disregard the value of human life. Poverty generated their malice. Lust is another important factor in the killing and maiming of human beings. Hilsenrath insists on unveiling this rarely discussed source of cruelty men exhibit toward men, women, and children. Characterizing violent sadism as specifically male behavior, he associates it with power and male sexuality.

Wartan's interrogation consists of mindless, repetitive questioning - the goal is not to extort a secret, but to confirm a plot for Mudir Bey. Torture, oral rape by the Saptieh, threats, and intimidation are the methods in this "educational" process of brainwashing, whose aim is total submission. Sexuality, particularly homosexuality (verbally disavowed yet factually blatant), is associated with the sphere of the bathhouse and the locker room, and is shown to be a part of everyday military life.

...the Turks commit homosexual acts without defining them as such.

On various levels Hilsenrath is concerned with constructions of history. By exposing the state investigation against Wartan Khatisian as a sham, he exposes the history as fiction. Wartan is proven guilty because Mddir Bey needs someone to be guilty for a crime he has invented. Wartan's conviction provides an excuse to exterminate the Armenians, the primary goal of Mddir Bey and his government. However, the crime and the supposed criminal seem ludicrous even to the friends of Turkey. To avoid international embarrassment, the matter is dropped. Hilsenrath implies that many such apparently authentic historical proofs are generated by manipulation and coercion.

This is sufficient evidence for Mudir Bey to hold Wartan and his entire people responsible for World War I. Against this satire, any defamatory political discourse can be measured, also antisemitism. Implicitly Hilsenrath addresses the problems of both Armenians and Jews as members of nations without an army and without a homeland.

The parallels between Jews and Armenians also become clear through the prejudice exhibited against Armenian customs and clothing...This attitude corresponds to the prejudice against Jewish groups such as the Hasidim. The Armenian customs cited are reminiscent of Jewish ones.

Just as Mudir Bey tries to blame World War I on Khatisian and the Armenians, German circles -particularly those around Ludendorff blamed Jewish conspirators for Germany's defeat. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler and his collaborators blamed all the ills of the world on the Jews. Both in Turkey and in Germany, a lost war became the impetus for genocide.

By mentioning Mudir Bey's theory about an Armenian world conspiracy alongside a supposed Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hilsenrath closes the circle; being accused as conspirators, as evil personified, is specific to neither Armenians nor Jews-it is the fate of any minority under an autocratic government backed by a fanaticized population. The massacres of the Armenians and the Holocaust are not an Armenian or a Jewish problem respectively, although the dominating cultures invented terms such as the "Jewish Question" or the "Armenian Question." They are the problem of the persecutors. The perpetrators invent these problems; they have it in their power to solve them. Hilsenrath introduces the pseudoscientific racist discourse by a German anthropologist at the turn of the century, who speculates about an ancient, racially superior native population in contemporary Turkey.

This episode encapsulates the essence of racist ideology: objectification and extermination of the "other"...

In keeping with his conviction that people know what they do and why they do it, he disallows such phenomena as repression and sublimation. Hilsenrath leaves no escape from direct and personal responsibility. Causality is rejected with regard to not only psychology but also history. Genocide is shown to be an end in itself. While its proponents are plotting with the tools of reason and logic, they are not rational people.

Hilsenrath's portrayal of the persecuted group differs from texts that paint the victims of genocide as exceptionally good people, and their culture as superior to that of their killers. Such idealization occurs occasionally in Holocaust texts by German mainstream writers and is generally achieved in two ways. While some authors do not critically examine and correct traditional stereotypes but reassess them as positive, others create unrealistic, often female Jewish protagonists, products of their own fantasies. Such works are flawed by the assumption that genocide is wrong because it destroys morally good people. In Hilsenrath, neither Turkish nor Armenian society, neither Turkish nor Armenian individuals are exemplary, not even universally desirable.

What calls for compassion with the Armenians is their suffering, as well as the absence of an Armenian army and a fanatic Armenian ideology. Compared to the Turks, the Armenians are portrayed as politically naive and disorganized. Turkish society, on the other hand, is distorted by chauvinism and delusions of grandeur.

Otherwise, the Armenians are not depicted as qualitatively different from the Turks, since this would imply a kind of reverse racism on the part of the narrator. However, it is suggested that such racism governs world opinion. The hesitation abroad to send assistance to the Armenians was caused by political considerations rather than ignorance or disbelief of the massacres. Every effort was made to discredit sources informing about the Armenian tragedy, even Henry Morgenthau, because he happened to be Jewish and American. While Turkish antiArmenian propaganda, for instance, about the riots at Van, was blatantly one-sided, foreign commissions and politicians chose to accept it on face value because of their economic interests in the former Ottoman territories. Once again, the parallels with the Holocaust are striking: the international rejection of information about the atrocities committed by the Germans. Economic interests held by nations and individuals overrode moral concerns.

With great irony, Hilsenrath describes different approaches to the business of enriching oneself through the misfortunes of one's neighbors. While the masses go looting without restraint, the public officials requisition the leftovers.

Being Armenian is not defined in exclusively ethnic terms, but as a condition that results from life, from being treated as Armenian, from having developed the sensitivities of an Armenian. These are produced by the experiences of insecurity, oppression, fear, a mixture of compliance and rebellion, the precarious balance of self-assertion and assimilation. Such assimilation ironically had its peak during the early phase of the Young Turkish government that preceded the genocide. Again, the parallel with the German Jewish situation is obvious: in the twentieth century, the German Jews had become almost indistinguishable from non-Jewish Germans.

Ironically, in both genocides the atrocities were initiated by nations which, because of their geographic locations, had come to be considered outposts of Western civilization...And thus it was not the feared barbarians (Kurds play a similar role in Armenian lore as do the Cossacks in Jewish lore), but Turks and Germans, who planned and perpetrated the most heinous crimes of the twentieth century. Hilsenrath's cultural criticism attacks the commonly held idea that westernization and technology are a manifestation of human progress.

The cycle of oppression and persecution exposed in Hilsenrath's novel is enough to set the readers' heads spinning.

Hilsenrath's Marchen vom letzten Gedanken is a powerful artistic statement against all forms of oppression. In addition to racism and nationalist arrogance, Hilsenrath isolates inequality, poverty, and ignorance, but above all, dishonesty, as factors contributing to genocide. The dynamics of oppression and submission are present in all enclaves of society and thus difficult to combat, although Hilsenrath argues that to avoid further genocides they must be eradicated. Wars and genocides will continue as long as relationships are arrangements between exploiters and exploited, be it between males and females, males and weaker males, adults and children, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, majority and minority. Until this point in history, the stronger have not been able to resist taking advantage of the weaker, to refrain from unnecessary violence and killing. Hilsenrath confronts his readers with what seems the ultimate temptation in the human realm: domination and elimination of the defenseless, destroying life gratuitously.

The perpetrators of genocide also have to live in the impoverished world they created, disfiguring themselves by their lies and rationalizations.

**winoman** · 05-17-2005, 12:32 PM

Some interesting notes from the previous review

Vierbdcher, Armenian 1915, p. 80: "The Turks not only murdered but also robbed the Armenians in 1915. The value of the stolen cash and valuables amounted to many hundred million gold marks. Of this stolen money, the Turks transferred 100 million gold marks to Berlin as gold guarantee for their currency."

R. Hrair Dekmejian, "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies," in Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 87-88, mentions striking parallels between the republic of the Young Turks and Nazi Germany, including details such as the mechanics of genocide, cattle-car transports followed by death marches and concentration camps. Both in the Ottoman and German cases the raison detre to perform genocide was embedded in the official justification ideologies espoused by the respective political entities, i.e., Pan-Turanism and National Socialism. Ideologies that not only condone but specifically prescribe genocidal "solutions" are reflective of serious social discontinuities. He points out that both the Turkish and German societies were experi- encing traumas leading to "a pervasive crisis in identity among Turks and Germans." The differences in both cases were, according to Dekmejian, the result of the developmental disparities between the Ottoman Empire and Nazi Germany. While the Jews in Germany were perceived as a racial and economic threat, the Armenians in Turkey were seen as an economic and political danger (p. 94).

Recent apologetic publications (often Turkish) list in detail presumed Armenian rebellions while classifying genocide as an act of war, thus imitating the denial of the Holocaust by German revisionists. See Halil Kemal Tdrkozu, Armenian Atrocity: According to Ottoman and Russian Documents (Ankara, 1986), published by the Institute for the Study of Turkish Culture; and Kamuran Giiriin, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (London, Nicosia, Istanbul, 1986).

D ickran Kouymjian, "The Destruction of Armenian Historical Monuments as a Continuation of the Turkish Policy of Genocide," in Crime of Silence, p. 173.

Erich Feigl, A Myth of Terror: Armenian Extremism. Its Causes and Its Historical Context (Freilassing and Salzburg, 1986) is such a revisionist publication. It abounds with misleading details. A photo supposedly illustrating the presumed "expansionist campaign into Anatolia" by the Armenians in 1919 is even in color, probably from a film (pp. 106 et al.). The work follows the standard Turkish argumentation that denies the genocide. According to Feigl, the death marches into the deserts and the concentration camps of Mesopotamia were a part of a legitimate relocation program (see map inside cover). While the Armenians are denounced as terrorists who made genocidal attempts on the Turkish majority, the Moslems are portrayed as culturally superior victims (pp. 88ff.). Feigl compares the Armenians to the Nazis (pp. 78-79) and proclaims all and any Armenian documentation as forgery. Vidal-Naquet, "By Way of a Preface," p. 4, summarizes this type of argument: "There has not been a genocide of the Armenians; this genocide was fully justified; the Armenians massacred themselves; it was they who massacred the Turks." Playing on greed and materialist jealousy, Feigl includes photos of luxurious buildings to drive home the point that Armenians were prosperous and thus guilty of a world conspiracy, as is repeatedly insinuated, for instance, when Armenian-American as well as Armenian-Russian relations are slanderously exposed. Feigl's book contains passages that vilify Armenians as a group. He cites instances of contemporary Armenian "terrorism" out of context to justify the Turkish massacres retroactively. He goes so far as to deny the existence of an Armenian people and an Armenian identity. He describes Armenians as allies of the Soviet Union ("Armenian terrorism is, willingly or unwillingly, still today offering its services to Russian superpower politics," p. 72), as Marxists (p. 69), and as "rebels" (p. 73), who ultimately brought upon themselves their demise (pp. 74f.). He dismisses scholarship contradicting his findings, suggesting that authors expressing pro-Armenian points of view do so out of fear of becoming the targets of Armenian terrorism (pp. 6 et al.).

**winoman** · 05-17-2005, 12:54 PM

Turkish arguments and my counter-response

I'm not new to this BTW - this is my response to a similar gaggle of gobbling Turks who invaded an Armenian forum I was on from over 5 years ago:

Your arguments are bankrupt and unsupportable. They are the result of force fed Turkish propaganda and are not based on fact. If all of what you claim is true then Armenians would rule Anatolia today and the Turks would be absent. Of course we can see that this is not the case. I have assembled some first hand information to refute your claims.

You and your Turkish Masters say: �The Ottoman Empire entered that war on the side of Central Powers. At this point Imperial Russian forces began to invade Eastern Turkey.�

The TRUTH: Turkey invaded the Caucuses (after first attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea) to realize Enver Pasha�s aim to unite the Turkick peoples under the Pan-Turk banner. They horribly miscalculated and many many Turks died mostly from inadequate protection against the elements and poor supply. This is a well known campaign and your twisting of the truth in your first statement is indicative of how you distort and reverse the facts in the rest of your outrageous (and patently false) chronology.

"It is apparent from the statements of Minister of Finance Djavid Bey, and the written records of the Fifth Committee of Parliament� that the Executive of the Ittihad and Terakki Party had taken decisive and audacious steps involving the fate of the nation and the country, that it declared war on its own without even consulting the Council of Ministers and obtaining that body's consent, something which it found to be unnecessary � although even the kings cannot arbitrarily declare war.� And (from the post war Military Tribunal: �it is obvious that the responsible representatives of the Ittihad and Terakki had, even before the declaration of war, organized bandit bands in Trebizond which entered Russian territory and committed acts of aggression.�

You and your Turkish Masters say: ��this invasion was spearheaded by some 150,000 Armenian volunteers from Turkey and the Transcaucasus� and ��time some 40,000 to 60,000 Armenians from Eastern Turkey had formed "guerrilla" bands, and were attacking the Turkish army from the rear, while wreaking havoc throughout the region.�

The TRUTH: There were few Otttoman Turkish volunteers fighting against the Turks prior to their families being massacred. In fact, Armenians distinguished themselves earlier in the Balkan war in Bulgaria fighting in the Ottoman Army. At the outbreak of WWI Armenians were separated from the army and formed into slave labor battalions to work on the Berlin to Baghdad railroad and other similar projects � most of these men died from the deplorable conditions. I am sure that some managed to escape and I think they would not be too eager to rejoin the Ottoman Army even if they could have. You vastly distort and overestimate Armenian 5th column activity behind Turkish lines. In fact there were only a handful of isolated instances such as Van where Armenians rose up in defense against the Turks who had already begun to slaughter Armenians in the surrounding countryside.

According to historian Arnold Toynbee:

"A decree went forth that all Armenians should be disarmed. The Armenians in the Army were drafted out of the fighting ranks, re-formed into special labor battalions, and set to work throwing up fortifications and constructing roads. The disarming of the civil population was left to the local authorities, and in every administrative center a reign of terror began"

You and your Turkish Masters say: �After some hesitation, the Ottoman Government decided to relocate the Armenian communities of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Anatolia in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, which at that time, were Ottoman provinces.�

The TRUTH: There was no hesitation whatsoever. Historian David Fromkin reports: �German officers stationed there (in Van) agreed that THE AREA WAS QUIET UNTIL THE DEPORTATIONS BEGAN." A Turk Minister of Interior (after Talat) - Mustafa Arif stated: "Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones. Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did "

Report by an Eye-Witness, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas.

In April 1915 I was quartered at Erzeroum. An order came from Constantinople that Armenians inhabiting the frontier towns and village be deported to the interior. It was said then that this was only a precautional measure.

U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morganthau, who witnessed much of the genocide wrote: "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for
these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole
race; they understood this well, and, in their conversation with me, they
made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."

DR. MARTIN NIEPAGE (A German eyewitness at Aleppo): �After I had informed myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to exterminate the whole nation. �

The military Tribunal convened by the Ottomans after the war concluded :
" On the evidence of the trial which has taken place before this Military Court, it is obvious that the massacres which took place in the Kaza of Boghazlayan (Ankara), the Sanjak of Yozgat, and the Vilayet of Trebizond, were organized and perpetrated by the leaders of the Ittihad and Terakki Party. And

"After the revolution it had been deemed necessary to declare martial law, which the Party did � but without cessation, indefinitely. They enlisted the mob, the rabble, collectively to assail the Sublime Porte. They assassinated Nazim, the Minister of War, and his chief Aide, and they proceeded to overthrow the Cabinet of Kiamil Pasha, establishing a Cabinet of the Ittihad and Terakki. They summarily dismissed the experienced and honorable members of the Cabinet and replaced them with persons who belonged to the Party. There arrived a moment when people sought again the days of the tyrant. Everyone began to protest the rampant arbitrariness and tyranny.
"There was even more to it. They created an even greater atmosphere of harassment of the non-Islamic elements of the land, the Armenians in particular, who had hoped, from our precious Constitution, for justice and peace. These people now understood that they had been victimised by hypocrisy, and they assumed the posture of awaiting that opportune moment when they would be able to realize their former national aspirations. And the cause of all this were the Ittihadists themselves. They even raised national and racial issues among the Moslems of the land, they promoted divisiveness and conflict and jeopardized Ottoman unity. All this has been established by the intensive studies and examinations done of the matter as they appear in the charge of the Attorney General.

You and your Turkish Masters say: �The minutes of the Ottoman cabinet show that the relocation of the Armenians was not to be punitive; that those moved were allowed to take everything they could carry, and that rent would be paid according to stipulated procedures for any real property that was being vacated.�

The TRUTH:

Toynbee reports:

"In the north-western districts of the frontier zone the semblance of deportation was preserved, but the exiles � women and children as well as men � were invariably massacred in cold blood after a few days on the road"

"..deportation was merely a cloak for immediate massacre"

"It was a deliberate, systematic attempt to eradicate the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman Empire, and it has certainly met with a very large measure of success"

Professor Raphael Lemkin (who first coined the term �Genocide� reports: �� in August, 1914, the Young Turk government began to release murderers and other confirmed criminals from prisons throughout Asia Minor and placed them in the Special Organization (Teshkileti Mahsusa) for the express purpose of ending the "Armenian Question" by annihilating the Armenians. Whole villages were massacred outright in the fall and winter of 1914-1915 in the eastern provinces.� During his effort to obtain ratification of the Genocide Convention, Lemkin repeatedly cited the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust as prototypes of the crimes of genocide.

You and your Turkish Masters say: �The implementation of this decree turned out to be a tragedy because the relocation of a large mass of people proved beyond the logistical capabilities of the dying Ottoman Empire.�

The TRUTH: Enver Pasha claims that at no time were Turkish forces (who committed atrocities) not under his control. Additionally, the Turks managed to successfully relocate Balkan and Crimean refugees into areas where formerly Armenians lived without problem.

You and your Turkish Masters say: �intercommunal warfare�

The TRUTH: Just not true � The Armenians were a largely disarmed populace that was basically at the mercy of the Turks. If the Armenians were in fact openly warring with the Turks and doing the things you profess the Germans & Austrians would have reported it to gain sympathy � instead they report:

According to Vice Marshall Pomiankowski. Austro-Hungary 's military plenipotentiary, who throughout the war was attached to Ottoman General Headquarters: �the Young Turk regime first liquidated the able-bodied Armenian men "in order to render defenseless the rest of the population" which, according to him, paved the ground for "their annihilation."�

Count Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. German Vice-Consul at Erzerum:
"I have conducted a series of conversations with competent and influential Turkish personalities, and these are my impressions: A large segment of the Ittihadist Young Turk party maintains the viewpoint that the Turkish empire should be based only on the principle of Islam and Pan-Turkism. Its non-Muslim and non-Turkish inhabitants should either be forcibly islamized, or otherwise they ought to be DESTROYED. These gentlemen believe that the time is propitious for the realization of this PLAN. The first item on this agenda concerns the LIQUIDATION OF THE ARMENIANS. Ittihad will dangle before the eyes of the allies the specter of an ALLEGED REVOLUTION prepared by the Armenian Dashnak party. Moreover. local incidents of social unrest and acts of Armenian self-defense will deliberately be provoked and inflated and will be used as pretexts to effect the deportations. Once en route however, the convoys will be attacked and EXTERMINATED by brigands, and in part by gendarmes, who will be instigated for that purpose by Ittihad."

Taner Akgam

��the lack of historical consciousness in Turkish society. I would characterize amnesia as a social disease in Turkey. The inability to remember refers not only to the period of World War I but also to incidents from the 1860s and 1870s that have long since been forgotten.�

**winoman** · 05-17-2005, 01:18 PM

Related

Stanley Cohen, Professor of Criminology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem:

"The nearest successful example [of "collective denial"] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded by not referring to the massacres in the United Nations, ignoring memorial ceremonies, and surrendering to Turkish pressure in NATO and other strategic arenas of cooperation."

Yet what should have also been mentioned is that, along with our century's first genocide, the depopulation of Greek Orthodox and Assyrian Christians from Asia Minor was part and parcel of Turkey's policy of eliminating its Christian minorities. The extermination of more than 300,000 Pontian Greeks in the Black Sea region was carried out roughly within the same time frame as the Armenian Genocide and through the use of similar methods.

According to U.S. Consul George Horton, up to 200,000 Armenian and Greek Christians in Smyrna (now renamed Izmir) were killed in 1922 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's troops occupied and burned down this once cosmopolitan city. Metropolitan Chrysostomos, the spiritual leader of Smyrna's Orthodox Christians, refused to abandon his flock, was seized by Turkish troops while conducting religious services in the city's cathedral, and was dismembered in the streets by a Turkish mob.

Over one million more Greeks were ethnically cleansed from Turkey under Ataturk's regime. During the 1950's and 60's, modern-day Kristallnachts in the form of anti-Greek pogroms led to the exodus of the remaining 200,000 Greek Orthodox from Istanbul and marked the final death-blow to Constantinopolean Hellenism, one of the world's oldest and most distinguished historic Christian communities. The Aegean islands of Imbros and Tenedos were likewise depopulated of their predominantly Greek inhabitants. The Assyrians, also an ancient Christian community of Asia Minor, encountered a similar fate having been extinguished from their ancestral homeland in eastern Turkey by massacres, forced conversions, and ethnic cleansing campaigns.

On November 26, 1979, the New York Times wrote: "[a]ccording to the most recent statistics, the Christian population in Turkey has diminished from 4,500,000 at the beginning of this century to just about 150,000. Of those, the Greeks are no more than 7,000. Yet, in 1923 they were as many as 1.2 million".

This same deeply ingrained ethic of reflexive denial that has led Turkish apologists to deny past and present horrors - from the Armenian Genocide earlier this century to the ethnic cleansing of up to three million Kurds from southeastern Turkey today - pervades every aspect of Turkey's self-evaluation and continues to stunt its moral and spiritual growth.

**CatWoman** · 05-17-2005, 02:08 PM

This should be a fun game to play... evey post they make, we can name the method they used from the above list!

**nunechka** · 05-17-2005, 02:49 PM

good one catwoman

AND

many many good ones winoman... this is very interesting... this will go forever in my memory bank...

**winoman** · 05-18-2005, 09:09 AM

I came accross this "deniers top 10" that I developed back in 2001

Deniers top 10-
Multiple Choice:

1) Quite an imagination - all fabricated (this "story" and all other "so-called" eyewitness accounts) - everyone is jealous of the great Turkish people and wishes to see them brought down...all efforts of every other nation of the world are focused solely on bringing down Turkey - everyone is against us.

2) he was being paid by the word (by the American war-time Anti-Turk Propaganda machine). Thus greed motivated these fabricated stories. The Armenians provided gold and silver, dachas, luxury yachts, scholarships for their children - all so that they would say what the Armenians told them to say. Armenians also threatened foreign leaders with death if they did not support the Armenian cause.

3) All made up - forged (at some later dated then back dated and faked) by Armenians or their sympathizers - he wasn't really there - but in some cushy office somewhere and relied on blasphemous and untrustworthy reports from local Armenians (all Dashak agents out to get the Turks). The obvious use of "oral history" and "folklore" is a sure giveaway...

4) Those were really Turks (who were being killed by Armenians) and the guys in the fezs' on horseback with the scimitars were Armenian nationalists dressed up to look like Turks to fool everyone. The truth is that the Turks were killed by militant Armenians (with their racist Pan-Armenian doctrine and desire to control all of Anatolia for themselves) and Turkey today is populated by Armenians who call themselves Turks to fool everyone. Armenians killed all Turks in Anatolia - brutally emptied it of Turks completely - and through use of sympathetic newspaper reports and in the name of Christian solidarity and anti-Turks sentiment managed to reverse the blame

5) All justified - these people dared insult the Sultan! some of them may have even spit on the flag - and you know that Turks cannot stand for that - or for any disrespect! Armenians should have known that and known what was coming to them - thus they have no right to complain now.

6) Armenians are just traitors and backstabbers by nature - so who really cares that horrid crimes were committed against their women, children & old people...they had it coming to them anyway! How dare they ask for tax relief - when the Sultan had a war going on!

7) Some Armenian killed a Turk (at some point back in history) before all of this started - thus they are all guilty and deserve severe punishment (as a group) - much like the current Republic of Turkey threatening Armenia and Armenians in Turkey for the (perceived anti-Turk) actions of the French and Americans who are controlled by their Armenian constituencies...(if one in the "group" is guilty - they are all guilty)

8) He was a Christian (or a Jew) and wished to portray Muslims in a bad light - thus exaggerated the conditions - actually the "deportees" were well cared for - often the gendarmes coaxed the Kurds from surrounding villages to give up their homes for the night and fix their Armenian visitors a good meal etc as a show of brotherly hospitality - and those damned Armenians would still complain! How dare they - they should have all been killed quick - why waste anything on them anyway - (and if we really wanted to kill them - why march them about all over the place like tourists or something)...I mean they are not part of the "master race"...the German had the right idea...

9)The Russians did it. The Turks cared for their Armenian guests just like brothers and would never allow harm to come to them. The Russians resented that the Turks were moving the Armenians out of harms way (and were getting good propoganda value out of these benevolent actions) - and chose to kill them all - and frame the Turks for it...You see - Armenians should have never trusted the Russians...

10) all of the above - but mostly this stuff has all been fabricated as part of some ancient slanderous plot by Armenians who are just resentful after having lost Anatolia to the Seljuks back in the 11th century or so and they have been plotting their revenge ever since...(failing to understand how the Turks have reformed and that the Ottoman Sultans existed only to serve the greater welfare of all the Ottoman people who were one big happy family)...and if we Turks wanted to kill Armenians we would have done it ages ago - why wait for wartime - when the price of bullets and scimitars was at an all time high - etc

Announcement

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

Templates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide

Templates for Gross Denial of a Known Genocide

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment