A new documentary namely "The Armenian Genocide"

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A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate

TV Review
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: April 17, 2006
It is impossible to debate a subject like genocide without giving offense. PBS is supposed to give offense responsibly.


Forum: Television
And that was the idea behind a panel discussion that PBS planned to show after tonight's broadcast of "The Armenian Genocide," a documentary about the extermination of more than one million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress.

The protesters complained that the panel of four experts, moderated by Scott Simon, host of "Weekend Edition Saturday" on NPR, included two scholars who defend the Turkish government's claim that a genocide never took place. The outrage over their inclusion was an indication of how passionately Armenians feel about the issue; they have battled for decades to draw attention to the genocide.

But the fact that so many stations caved is a measure of something else: PBS's growing vulnerability to pressure and, perhaps accordingly, the erosion of viewers' trust in public television.

The camera lends legitimacy, but as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's performance on Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" famously showed, it also can undermine credibility. Panel discussions in particular give people with outlandish views a hearing — and also an opportunity to expose the flaws in their arguments.

That is certainly the case with the discussion program "Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues." It turns out that there is only one articulate voice arguing that Armenians died not in a genocide but in a civil war between Christians and Muslims — that of Justin A. McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. His Turkish counterpart, Omer Turan, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, tries ardently to back him up, but his English is not good enough to make a dent. And the two other experts, Peter Balakian, a humanities professor at Colgate University, and Taner Akcam, a visiting professor of history at the University of Minnesota and a well-known defender of human rights in Turkey, lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy's points apart.

Mr. Balakian, who is one of the experts cited in the documentary, gets the last word. "If we are going to pretend that a stateless Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil war," Mr. Balakian says, "we're living in the realm of the absurd."

Tone and appearance on television can be as persuasive as talk. Mr. McCarthy mostly sounds condescending and defensive, while Mr. Balakian is smooth and keeps his cool.

"The Armenian Genocide " which was made by Andrew Goldberg in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting, does not ignore the Turkish government's denial, or its repression of dissidents in Turkey who try to expound another point of view. One of the film's merits is that it tries to explain both the circumstances that led to the atrocities of 1915 and the reasons why Turkish officials are still so determined to keep that period unexplored. "There is a feeling that Turkey would be putting itself permanently in the company of Adolf Hitler," Samantha Power, the author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," says. "That same stain would envelop Turkey as it seeks, of course, to be a major player on the international stage."

Several of the experts in the film, including Turkish scholars, argue that because Turkey is seeking admission to the European Union, its leaders will eventually have to bend to international will and acknowledge responsibility. But official Turkish denial remains fierce, and intellectuals and even well-known writers like Orhan Pamuk can still be brought to trial for mentioning the treatment of Armenians and Kurds.

The documentary, which is partly narrated by Julianna Margulies, Ed Harris and others, includes rare clips of Turkish scholars acknowledging the anti-Armenian campaign as genocide as well as Turkish villagers recounting their ancestors' stories about participating in the killings. "They caught Armenians and put them in a barn and burned them," a man in a town in eastern Turkey says to an interviewer. There are also shots of ordinary Turks who insist their ancestors were incapable of that level of barbarity.

Mostly, however, the film painstakingly makes the case that a genocide did take place, relying on archival photographs, victims' memoirs and the horrified first-hand accounts of diplomats, missionaries and reporters. The forced deportations and killings did not take place unnoticed — public figures like Theodore Roosevelt and H. L. Mencken spoke out about the horrors. In 1915, The New York Times published 145 stories about the systematic slaughter of Armenians.

Even after World War II, the fate of Turkey's Armenian population was high on the list of crimes against humanity. The film includes a clip from a 1949 CBS interview with Raphael Lemkin, a law professor who in 1943 coined the term genocide. "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times," he tells the CBS commentator Quincy Howe. "First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action."

The documentary honors the victims of the Armenian genocide and also pays tribute to dissidents in Turkey who are brave enough to speak out despite government censorship. And that makes it all the odder that so many public television stations here censored the follow-up program as soon as a few lobby groups complained.

The Armenian Genocide

PBS, tonight at 10 Eastern and Pacific times; 9 p.m., Central time.

Written, directed and produced by Andrew Goldberg. Produced by Two Cats Productions in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Narrated by Julianna Margulies, Ed Harris, Natalie Portman, Laura Linney and Orlando Bloom.





Two Cats Productions
A scene from "The Armenian Genocide" on PBS; a follow-up panel will not be shown on many PBS stations.

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Hitting a nerve

Monday, April 17, 2006
"The Armenian Genocide" arrives on PBS tonight (10 p.m., Channel 13) preceded by a wave of controversy. The public broadcaster is accused of nothing less than a form of holocaust denial.

Some back story first. This documentary recounts the extermination of 1 million Armenians in eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire. The systemic nature of the extermination, which has been confirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, is taken as a given by this documentary. The program also points out that the Turks killed another 200,000 people in historic Armenia and Constantinople (now Istanbul).

PBS ran afoul of Armenian-Americans by adding a post-screening panel discussion that included two scholars who said that not all of the victims died as a direct result of Turkish violence -- that a percentage of them were lost to disease, starvation and other causes that affected all of Turkish society, not just Armenians.

This genocidal caveat was considered a slap in the face to Armenian-American groups, who argued that most legitimate scholars agree that the mass deaths qualified as genocide, and that PBS would follow a documentary about the World War II genocide against the Jews with a panel that tried to qualify or explain away the horror.

PBS responded that the panel wasn't meant to cast doubt on the "genocide" label -- that it was just an attempt to explore a contentious issue and be as inclusive as possible -- but this has only inflamed Armenian outrage. (There's even a petition circulating online that condemns the panel discussion.)

It's unfortunate that PBS blundered into this morass in the first place, because the documentary is a serious, literate and ultimately heartbreaking work -- a historical primer on an event few Americans even know about. (For a dramatic take on the same subject, rent "Ararat," by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian director of Armenian heritage.)

Moving through the end of the 19th century, the documentary explains how things just kept getting worse for the Armenians, a people who existed peacefully within the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire despite having adopted Christianity as the state religion back during Roman times.

As historians point out, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire designated individual non-Muslim peoples -- Greeks, Armenians, Jews -- as "infidels." But for practical reasons, he still tried to stay out of their business as much as possible. The empire's subjects were given the limited ability to rule themselves as long as they paid their taxes, obeyed the Sultan's rules and didn't try to rebel.

'Discriminatory, unequal, hierarchical," the University of Chicago professor Ron Suny tells the filmmakers. "But if you obeyed, you could get along, and Armenians did rather well for centuries, actually."

Then Armenians began agitating not necessarily for equal rights, but simply to have their unequal treatment explained and justified. This led to increasingly brutal government crackdowns, and eventually to a Turk-centric re-education campaign, carried out by a radical new Otttoman government run by religious and political extremists. Genocide soon followed.
Armenians contend that the Turks tried to exterminate them to suppress an Armenian uprising and destroy any chance that the Armenians might give aid to an invading Russian army. The Turkish government continues to deny that Armenian deaths were anything other than an unfortunate byproduct of national misery.

Most legitimate historians favor the former interpretation, and the documentary says so. Given the intelligence and precision of this documentary -- whose main fault is brevity -- it's depressing that PBS managed to turn it into a rallying cry for the oppressed, more perhaps through ignorance than malice. And the network's attempts to fix the situation only made it worse.

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1145248807144520.xml&coll=1

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It Was The Bomb!

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AMazing!!! If anyone missed it...I don't know what to say, unless someone copied that number at the end, or someone recorded it...It was something that every Armenian needs to see, so that our strong faith is made stronger and that all Turks will finally see...That the Armenian Genocide did occur and that by not recognizing it today, you are continuing the orders of Talaat!

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I happenedto be in L.A. and decided to see the free screening of it at the Egyptian.Very slick fast moving profesionaly done a little too short for me of course being familiar with the content that covered a lot.

The most impressive part for me was when the first denialist appeared on the screen (Halacaoglu) there was a shocking silence in the audiance they held their breath seemed like eternity audience comprised of young and old Armenian and non.What happened next was what reinstilled in me the faith I have in young people.Amidst that silence young people started to laugh in face of the denials and spontanously more denials came the louder the laughter was because the reality in that moment of shock was seen most clearly by our youngens they saw very fast and very clearly the absurdity of Turkish denial in contrast to the background.That reaction made it all worthwhile for me.Some times we get in the battle with denialist too deep where we miss the absurdity of their position.

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http://foreignexchange.tv/?q=node/135&PHPSESSID=a619ce74f1ff3d9f4a0028d3e8ba4717

Featured VideoArmenian Genocide



Windows Media

Real Video

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Does anyone have more than just that featured???

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There you go guys

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5250680282487722945&q=Armenian&pl=true

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Exploring A Current Event: An Interview with Andrew Goldberg

Exploring A Current Event: An Interview with
Andrew Goldberg



By Khatchig Mouradian

March 23, 2006



On April 17, 2006, PBS will air a powerful documentary, titled “The Armenian Genocide,” which deals with the massacres and deportations of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The documentary, written, directed and produced by Emmy Award-winning producer Andrew Goldberg, features interviews with leading genocide scholars and is narrated by Julianna Margulies as well as Ed Harris, Natalie Portman, Laura Linney and Orlando Bloom, among others.

Filmed in the US, France, Germany, Belgium, Syria, and Turkey, the one-hour documentary also features discussions with Kurdish and Turkish citizens in modern-day Turkey.

Andrew Goldberg of Two Cats Productions (www.twocatstv.com) has produced and directed documentaries, news segments and long-form programming for PBS, NBC, E!, Inside Edition, ABC News and many others. His documentaries include “Armenians, A Story of Survival” (2001) and “A Yiddish World Remembered” (2002).

The following phone interview was conducted on March 10, 2006.




Khatchig Mouradian -Why did you decide to make a documentary on the Armenian genocide?

Andrew Goldberg- The Armenian Genocide is one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century. Every time there is an attempt to raise this issue, there are those who try to stop the discussion. I wanted to get this important subject discussed. I am glad we succeeded.



KM- The title of the documentary is enough to make the Turkish government and other genocide deniers try to stop the discussion this time around as well, even without bothering to see the documentary, isn’t it?

AG- As I have previously stated, I did not use the title “The Armenian Genocide” to be provocative. However, if you don’t use the word “genocide,” you are enabling denial. It’s not that we must use the word “genocide”; it’s only that we cannot allow people to stop us from using the word. The term “genocide” did not exist for years, but the mass killings of the Armenians were denied back then as well. We could call it anything and the people who want to stop the truth would still deny it. We are using the term “genocide” because it’s the only word in the current language to properly describe this event. The mass murder of the Armenian people has been denied for nearly a hundred years; I won’t be a part of that denial no matter what.



KM- The documentary also gives an opportunity to deniers of the Armenian genocide to express their views and tell what they consider to be “the other side” of the story. What is your comment on that?

AG- Denial can be looked at, but it must be looked at in a controlled, quarantined situation. If you quarantine denial, contextualize it, and explain to people that what they now are seeing is denial, then you are shielded from the virus of denial and it doesn’t cause damage. While we do present in the film the points of view of deniers, I wouldn’t call it “the other side,” because there is no other side. People do not understand just how committed the denialists are to distorting the story. People need to understand the monster. That’s why we chose to show what they had to say.



KM- In the documentary, columnist and retired Turkish diplomat Gunduz Aktan says, “The Turkish people firmly believe that what happened to the Armenian people was not genocide.” Tell us about your impressions of how the Turkish people approach the Armenian issue.

AG – First of all, they approach it differently on camera than they do off camera. I’ll give you an example not related to the genocide. If you speak to the Hamshen, they will say to you, “We are Armenians,” but when you point the camera at them, they say “We are Turkish.” Turkey is not a nation of free speech, although it may present itself as such. Therefore, there’s a double dialogue in Turkey. There’s a dialogue that you see presented publicly, and then there’s a dialogue behind closed doors. There is an increasing number of people in Turkey who do believe it was genocide; however, they would not say this publicly.



KM- The main challenge of addressing a historical event by film would be making it related to the here and now. Was this the case with “The Armenian genocide”?

AG- I believe that this is an event that started 91 years ago and is not over. Denial is the final stage of genocide. Therefore, it’s a current event. Besides, we address many contemporary issues in the film, such as the recent ruling in Turkey that they would teach the students that there was no genocide. This is incredible; believing is one thing, but teaching it in the state curriculum is another thing. We did not take on news issues like Orhan Pamuk because you don’t know how they are going to turn out and when they turn out one way or another, the film immediately becomes old. This documentary is not a news piece; it’s a piece that has to have some shelf-life. This is more of an issue piece than a news piece.



KM- Tell us a bit of this all-star cast of narrators.

AG- I worked with Aleen Keshishian who is a wonderful and extremely accomplished Talent Manager in Hollywood. We worked together in picking the narrators, and every one of them donated their services. Every single one of them did it for free, because they cared deeply about the cause. We have a wonderful cast of talented people and we are very proud of them.



KM- What is the message that you want to convey to the public with “The Armenian genocide”?

AD- What happened to the Armenians is one of the most inhumane acts in the history of the human race. The victims of that event and their children have never been acknowledged and affirmed, and it is important that we, as non-Armenians and Armenians, affirm and acknowledge this tragedy, and send a clear message to those attempting to deny this tragedy that we will not allow their position to make progress into this international conversation.

http://www.aztagdaily.com/interviews/goldberg.htm