text:
Samantha Power's Hell Problem, Part II
When the beginning portion of Samantha Power's first chapter (of her book, "A Problem from Hell") was featured in Power's publisher's site, her level of scholarship needed to be examined. The resulting page, which may be accessed here, was meant to be a "quickie."
However, one of her sources seemed so ridiculous, the original book needed to be consulted. Naturally, once the book was looked at, it cried for further analysis.
Once again, we will be looking at Samantha Power's "ethics" as a scholar, dissecting the rest of her "Armenian Genocide" chapter. (Entitled "Race Murder.") But we're also going to focus on (below) the genocide industry's poster boy, Raphael Lemkin... treated so reverentially by Power's unscrupulous industry. Lastly, we'll take a look (also below) at Power's choice and handling of the other "genocides" in her book.
The book's cover blares: "Nothing less than a masterwork of contemporary journalism... an angry, brilliant, fiercely useful, absolutely essential book." (The New Republic.)
Whew! Do you get the idea The New Republic's reviewer was sold on Power's book?
The first few pages are filled with similarly gushing testimonials. "Agonizingly persuasive," wrote Brian Urquhart, of New York Review of Books. "...(P)articularly good at bringing alive various people who were eyewitnesses to these catastrophes as they were happening," offered Adam Hochschild of The Washington Post. One such "eyewitness" might have been the non-witness Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, whom Power cited extensively in her Armenian chapter.
Columbia Univ. President Lee C. Bollinger
(a member of the Pulitzer Prize board)
presents Samantha Power with the 2003
Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction, a
"distinguished" book "not eligible for
consideration in any other category." She
received $7,500, and the jurors were
Richard Bernstein, New York Times
book critic, Diane Ackerman, and
Patricia Limerick, a "professor of history."
It does not even occur to professional and fair journalists to look over the shoulders of agenda-ridden "genocide scholars" such as Samantha Power. Because people like Power are anti-genocide, they must automatically be considered "good." Historians, too; "This is a serious and compelling work," beamed Yale University's Professor of History, Paul M. Kennedy. (Not to be confused with Stanford University's David M. Kennedy, another historian and professor, who served on the Pulitzer board that awarded Power's prize, along with eighteen others. Dr. David also won a Pulitzer Prize... but now we know how much these are worth.) It does not even occur to these people to scrutinize the value of the sources involved, because they are all on an "anti-genocide" mission. Thus, it becomes a breeze for a propagandistic book such as "A Problem from Hell" to win a Pulitzer Prize. (Prof. Paul Kennedy tarnished his reputation by co-editing the propaganda book, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 ," along with Yale colleague, Jay Winter.)
Many of us have lived through the reportage of such modern genocides as the ones in Bosnia and Rwanda. (Along with many others that might be classified as "genocide," stressing what Power likes to stress, the "in part" part of the 1948 U.N. Convention... but which were not politically worthwhile to dwell upon, in the hypocritical Western world.)
I remember my own outrage while these events were transpiring, particularly in Bosnia. The point of Power's book is that America dragged her feet before doing anything, and that we must all be on greater guard, in order to prevent genocides in the making. That's all very noble, but is it realistic?
Of course it is not. All countries have their own problems, even a great one as the United States, and it will always take time before a country decides to sacrifice their resources, sons and daughters in pursuit of a hazardous cause.
So this contention is very idealistic, but with all idealism, carries great naiveté. It was awful for the USA to wait as long as it did before intervening in Bosnia. (In Rwanda's case, the USA totally ignored the mess, with disastrous memories of Somalia fresh in mind.) As Power's book reminds us, the USA even went beyond its awfulness, by closing the doors on the Bosnians to acquire weaponry. That last decision was inexcusable, but the fact that no country is going to unselfishly jump in to fight injustice is to be expected.
(A related question was raised for Raphael Lemkin by the New York Times' A. M. Rosenthal, on p. 55 of Power's book... regarding whether a genocide convention would actually prevent a Hitler or Stalin from committing mass murder. Lemkin's reasoning was that if a law is on the books, perpetrators will think twice, in time: "Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!")
Another problem lying directly at the root of the genocide industry is what constitutes a genocide? Genocides have become a political animal. People not in favor are free to be demonized, and people who have taken pains to be looked upon sympathetically, or have great political power, sit prettily.
For example, there are terrible, terrible events happening in Darfur, at the time of this writing. Technically, though, is it a "genocide"? Naturally, those who feel they hold the moral high ground can quickly brand an example of inhumanity a "genocide." But even with the broadly written 1948 U.N. Convention, there are rules. The words may be interpreted differently by different people. Facts get thrown by the wayside; agenda-ridden folks or propagandists hope to get mileage out of the emotional value of the word "genocide," cashing in on the Nazi-Jewish prototype.
At the time of this writing, Israel has unleashed massive violence on a segment of the Lebanese populace because (as the surface explanation has it) terrorist groups have captured two Israeli soldiers. Of course, this isn't really genocide. Yet "genocide scholars" are often quick to label other examples where thousands of innocent civilians suffer via the aggressive actions of a state as "genocide."
But Israel is not on the list of "villains," so they get a pass. "Israel has a right to defend itself," we are told. Yet when PKK terrorists cause havoc in Turkey (for example, they have acquired the technology to now kill officers deep inland by remote control, which is far worse than being captured), and Kurds get killed when Turkey responds, we are sometimes told that Turkey is committing a "genocide" on the Kurds. Turkey is prominently on the list of the genocide industry's list of "villains."
It is this vicious double standard that exposes the "genocide scholars" to be the agenda-ridden hypocrites that they are. Those such as Samantha Power are accepted as serving the forces of "good." In fact, by designating the victims and villains, and by frequently distorting the facts, the genocide crowd serves the forces of evil.
They perpetrate racism and hatred against the people they tell you are not worthy. And they turn a blind eye to the ills of the people they tell you are worthier.
Continuing with Samantha Power's "Armenian Genocide" Distortions
We're picking up where we left off with Power's first chapter of "Race Murder," so please consult "Part I" of this series, the link for which is at the top of this page.
Samantha Power makes sure to tell us later in her book that the U.N. Convention is not retroactive. it would have only been fair for her to have paid attention only to what may be called genocides, appearing after the Holocaust.
She ignores a number of other "modern" episodes, such as British actions in the 1950s against the Mau Mau, or East Timor. Yet, she singles out the "Armenian Genocide." She does not say anything about the countless other examples of "Man's Inhumanity Against Man," transpiring throughout history before the Holocaust.
Samantha Power evidently has a beef against Turks.
In fact, as she explores "modern" genocides in her later chapters, she repeatedly brings up the example of the Turks.
She enjoys regarding herself as a "human rights" champion. Yet, by constantly reinforcing the Turks as monsters (to the extent of comparing modern Turks with Nazis, as she essentially did in PBS's "The Armenian Genocide"), we can see her motives are political. In her view, Turks are not equal human beings, and do not deserve consideration during times the Turks have suffered "genocidally."
What can be said about a person who hides behind the veneer of championing human rights, when the person regards some humans to be worthier than others?
"Part I" of this study encompassed basically the first three pages of Power's first chapter. If we devote the same degree of attention for the rest of Power's book, we'll soon be sinking in quicksand, because practically every word she has written comes straight from the annals of Armenian propaganda. So we'll make an effort to shoot for the highlights. (Or lowlights.)
The photo of Armenian children above is featured on p. 4 of Power's book, and Power has written: "Only four of the children survived the Turkish slaughter." Could it have been John Mirak, credited with the photo, who simply made such a claim? Whomever made this claim that would be so exceptionally difficult to verify, is it not awfully irresponsible of our "genocide scholar" to simply accept some agenda-ridden propagandist's "word"? It's highly unethical and disgraceful to make a charge of "slaughter" if there is no proof. Furthermore, is it not just as awful for reviewers and "historians" who have lauded this book to not have their alarm bells go off when they read a caption such as this ? The first question that should have entered the mind of any responsible party would have been, "How do you know?" And yet, they were all accepting of the dubious sources Power has presented... so their unprofessional lack of questioning is hardly surprising.
Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire and publicized the atrocities. The British Foreign Office dug up photographs of the massacre victims and the Armenian refugees in flight. An aggressive, London-based, pro-Armenian lobby helped spur the British press to cover the savagery.9
Footnote 9: "The Friends of Armenia, the Anglo-Armenian Association, and the British Armenia Committee secured meetings with senior British policymakers. Just beginning his scholarly career, British historian Arnold Toynbee joined the British Armenia Committee's propaganda subcommittee and published a pamphlet in 1915 that accused the Ottomans of planning 'nothing less than the extermination of the whole Christian population within the Ottoman frontiers.' Arnold Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), p. 27." (Holdwater: Power also cites the murderously propagandistic "The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16"; the propaganda subcommittee Power refers to above was only in operation in 1920; see Nassibian, p. 49. Power was referring to Wellington House, the propaganda division of his country, erroneously crediting this private pro-Armenian group instead.)
"Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire," which means Britain and France had every reason to show the Ottomans to be wicked beasts, given that Britain and France, along with Russia, were planning to gobble up the Ottoman Empire. This means the last people we want to listen to in order to get at the truth would be "Britain and France." Arnold Toynbee's "scholarly career" took a great unscholarly detour when he agreed to serve as Wellington House war propagandist, which emphasized demonization of the enemy. Toynbee was not proud of this chapter of his career, denouncing the work as "war propaganda." (Pg. 50 of 1922's "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey.")
Arnold Toynbee, as editor of The Bryce Report, the Blue Book of the British (F.O. 371/3404/162647, p. 2), in a memorandum dated 26 September 1919, wrote the following, when the British propaganda services were alarmed about newspaper accounts mentioning the treachery of the Armenians: "To lessen the credit of Armenians is to weaken the anti-Turkish action. It was difficult to eradicate the conviction that the Turk is a noble being always in trouble. This situation will revive this conviction and will harm the prestige not only of Armenians, but of Zionists and Arabs as well. The treatment of Armenians by the Turks is the biggest asset of his Majesty's Government, to solve the Turkish problem in a radical manner, and to have it accepted by the public."
Now where in the world could Britain have "dug up photographs of the massacre victims," since the British were no longer present on Ottoman soil? We keep seeing the same unverified photos of dead people in Armenian genocide web sites, some so underhanded they actually have used verified photos of massacred Turks, in the hands of Armenians. (But what do we expect from our "human rights" champion who writes that only four children from the above photo were "slaughtered," when she has no way of proving it?) Pictures of "Armenian refugees in flight" would be more believable, but are shots of people in wartime panic or suffering supposed to serve as proof that there was a systematic plan to eliminate them?
By pointing to enemies of Turkish people to "prove" her claims, what Samantha Power the Irishwoman is doing is no different than if someone else with an ax to grind against the Irish would do to show how "bad" the Irish are. There are plenty of examples of English sources throughout history who spoke disparagingly of the Irish, particularly during times of conflict. Let's say an agenda-ridden party refers solely to examples of Irish-committed atrocities after 1916, in Ireland's guerilla struggle, and documented by the English. Would it be ethical of anyone to compile a list of such biased sources to demonstrate that the Irish are simply no good? Samantha Power would hate that, but look at what she is doing. The sources she uses to prove her case are nothing less than a travesty.
But some had trouble believing the tales. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, for one, cautioned that Britain lacked "direct knowledge" of massacres. He urged that "the massacres were not all on one side" and warned that denunciation would likely be futile.
Footnote 10: Sir Edward Grey to Sir Francis Bertie, British ambassador to France, May 11, 1915, cited in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 115, 348-349.
So here we have a British man of integrity, brave enough to allow honor to supersede his duty to his country's wartime propaganda, similar to C. F. Dixon-Johnson. But his opinion was shared by only a mere handful; the British Press would insure that almost all the people in Great Britain would accept the savagery of the Terrible Turk as a fact. (Note Grey's message was dated before the relocation, or "genocide," began.) The irony here, of course, is that Grey's information that the Armenians had conducted massacres are presented as a point of ridicule by the agenda-ridden Samantha Power. (Understandable, as she has made not one reference to crimes of Armenians.)
After informing us of the May 24 Entente declaration, Power tells us the Allies were too busy trying to win the war (p. 5), to do much about helping the Armenians... who happened to be revolting against their country at the behest of the Allies. "At the same time the Turks were waging their campaign against the Armenian minority, the German army was using poison gas against the Allies in Belgium. In May 1915 the German army had torpedoed the Lusitania passenger liner, killing 1,200 (including 190 Americans)."12
Footnote 12. Jay Winter, "Under Cover of War: Genocide in the Context of Total War," paper presented at the National Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C., September 28, 2000. Her "May 24" source was The New York Times, and Power elaborated: "Most Europeans identified with the Armenians' suffering because they were fellow Christians. But when the Russians suggested condemning 'crimes against Christianity,' it seemed too parochial, and the phrase 'crimes against humanity and civilization' was chosen instead." Perhaps Russia chose to specify "Christianity" as a means to let Russia off the hook for Russia's crimes against "Judaism" that the hypocritical Allies chose to ignore. One of the reasons to demonize Turks stemmed from the Allies' wish to take the heat off Russia, heat that threatened to steer the USA away from joining the Allies. No mention in Power's book, by the way, of Russia's WWI crimes.
Jay Winter is a full-fledged member of the profitable genocide industry who presided over the propagandistic PBS show, "The Great War." (Even though in that show's book version, Winter contradicted himself, writing the relocation program was "not genocide.") Regardless of how Winter depicted the actions of WWI Germany, it is unconscionable of Power the anti-scholar to present only the view that helps with her agenda. Here, she seems determined, for some odd reason, to show the "Hun" was a beast in its own right. (Perhaps this is her way of getting back at Germany, as she began the "Recognition" part of her chapter with Germany's covering up "Talaat's campaign." Power was wrong on this count, as well.)
Could Power have imagined
she was in the hairy arms of
"The Hun"?
Indeed, there were times Germany behaved miserably during the war, as all nations have a tendency to do during war, but it appears Power is still fully in line with the British propaganda of the period. Germany was using gas, but so were the Allies. (The British reportedly used chemical weapons against the Turks, in the Gallipoli invasion.) Some accounts have it that Germany torpedoed ships with warning at the outset, and changed policy only after the Allies torpedoed without warning. As for the Lusitania, Germany issued a traveller's warning in America that "vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her allies are liable to destruction." One torpedo was fired, but there were two explosions, probably the result of a secret cargo of heavy munitions on the ship. The rules of warfare required that civilian ships were not to carry ammunition. (Britain claimed the second explosion was caused by coal dust igniting.)
"Escaped From
Lusitania" — J. Ayala,
Cuban consul general
of Liverpool, was one
of the fortunate
passengers on the
Lusitania, for he
escaped with his life in
the curious outfit of
clothing in which he is
here photographed."
(The Pinedale
Roundup, Wyoming,
(The Daily Kennebec Journal, on May 28, 1915, offered what must have been the prevailing thought on the warning loophole: "Rattlesnake Gives Warning. [Bath Times] The rattlesnake gives warning too, but he is not regarded as a highly desirable citizen. That is the way the New York World sums up in 15 words all there is to be said about the sinking of the Lusitania.")
.Howard Zinn ("A People's History of the United States," 1980): "It was unrealistic to expect that the Germans should treat the United States as neutral in the war when the U.S. had been shipping great amounts of war materials to Germany's enemies...The United States claimed the Lusitania carried an innocent cargo, and therefore the torpedoing was a monstrous German atrocity. Actually, the Lusitania was heavily armed: it carried 1,248 cases of 3-inch shells, 4,927 boxes of cartridges (1,000 rounds in each box), and 2,000 more cases of small-arms ammunition. Her manifests were falsified to hide this fact, and the British and American governments lied about the cargo."
At least Power did not insist the Germans had bayoneted Belgian babies. (Although she will actually try to legitimize anti-German propaganda later in her book.) Such claims were so awfully invented by British war propagandists, the British apologized to Germany in 1936 for the fabrications in their Blue Books. Since Turks are low men on the totem pole, no similar apology to the Turks was issued for similar lies. In this day and age, propagandists like Samantha Power are still citing British Blue Book references, as Power has done with Toynbee's The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Power next tells us that Wilson had not joined the Entente's May 24 declaration to maintain the neutrality of the USA (does Power have evidence that the USA was even asked to join this declaration?), yet Amb. Henry Morgenthau would emerge as a sort of America's conscience:
In January and February 1915, Morgenthau had begun receiving graphic but fragmentary intelligence from his ten American consuls posted throughout the Ottoman Empire. At first he did not recognize that the atrocities against the Armenians were of a different nature than the wartime violence. He was taken in by Talaat's assurances that uncontrolled elements had simply embarked upon "mob violence" that would soon be contained.13
Footnote 13: The 2000 reprint of "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," mysteriously requiring the services of "Editor" Peter Balakian.
If Talat Pasha explained the violence against Armenians was coming from uncontrolled elements, Talat Pasha was being 100% truthful. If the idea was extermination, after all, the majority of Armenians could not have survived. Power agrees a million survived. The original pre-war population hovered around 1.5 million, and the bulk of those who lost their lives died of famine and disease, the same causes claiming the lives of "thousands" of Turks daily, as Morgenthau had written in his "Story" book. Morgenthau is also on record, as quoted by Vahan Cardashian in an early 1916 letter to Lord Bryce, for agreeing that the "genocide had all but run its course," as even Vahakn Dadrian had put it. [The Armenian Review, Winter 1957, p. 107.] If the idea was "Race Murder," why stop in early 1916, when the majority was still alive and kicking? Morgenthau was also aware central command was weak. When a federal government is not fully in control, the odds for "uncontrolled elements" increase. The odds of a "Final Solution" plan carried out by the central government similarly decrease. Talat Pasha, in fact, sent a "cease and desist" "deportation" directive in August 1915, but needed to keep re-issuing similar orders until 1916... since locals had different ideas, illustrating the weakness of central command. (Guenter Lewy, "The Ottoman Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide.")
Morgenthau had various reasons for wanting the USA to hop aboard the war train. His English-speaking Armenian secretaries had his ear, and Morgenthau developed a racist distaste for matters Turkish. Knocking out the Turks would also quicken the path to a Jewish homeland. (The Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise was a close friend.) The fabrications Morgenthau presented in his "Story" book were at odds with his personal communications. For example, the "intelligence" he received made him fully aware that Armenians were, in fact, rebelling in great numbers. He didn't report the full story, because Morgenthau had an agenda. Morgenthau was not an honest man.
...[B]y July 1915 the ambassador had come around. He had received too many visits from desperate Armenia and trusted missionary sources to remain skeptical. They had sat in his office with tears streaming down their faces, regaling him with terrifying tales. When he compared this testimony to the strikingly similar horrors relayed in the rerouted consular cables, Morgenthau came to an astonishing conclusion. What he called "race murder" was under way.
BINGO! There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the sources for not only Morgenthau but for his gang of consuls. (Among whom, apparently only Leslie Davis took the trouble to have a personal look-see.) Who in their right minds would trust missionaries, whose Godly duty, as evidenced in their prayers, was to vilify the Turks? And it wasn't as though the missionaries served as "eyewitnesses" for massacres. Mostly, they observed suffering people. The missionaries were generally swayed because they listened to teary-eyed Armenians. Too many Armenians , then and now, observe the Dashnak "end justifies the means" principle. Missionaries and Armenians have agendas, and do not serve as valid sources.
Westerners, particularly bigoted Christian westerners, and especially Americans, having grown to be the most hostile thanks to relentless propaganda, were easy prey to "terrifying tales," told by people with "tears streaming down their faces." This is the kind of "evidence" that has condemned an entire nation of "Race Murder": the hearsay of terrifying tales.
The unethical Henry Morgenthau
Power made certain to reproduce Morgenthau's horribly prejudiced "July 10 cable" that he based on the hearsay of Armenians and missionaries with tears streaming down their faces. It is the professional duty of ambassadors to provide factual, honest, and unbiased reporting about the countries where they serve. Morgenthau, however, had his own agenda and prejudices. An Armenian representative had told Morgenthau half a million resettled Armenians were doing relatively well, but that kind of tidbit would only surface in his private entries. As Prof. Lowry summed up, "All comments in Ambassador Morgenthau's Story notwithstanding, as late as September 1915, Morgenthau had not firmly concluded that the Armenians were the subject of an attempted 'extermination' by the Young Turk leadership."
Local witnesses urged him to invoke the moral power of the United States. Otherwise, he was told, "the whole Armenian nation would disappear."15 The ambassador did what he could, continuing to send blistering cables back to Washington and raising the matter at virtually every meeting he held with Talaat. He found his exchanges with the interior minister infuriating.
Again and again, Silly Samantha Power demonstrates what an anti-scholar she is. Heath Lowry's excellent research, "The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," was available (see last link above) by the time Power prepared her propaganda book. Lowry scoured Morgenthau's own diary and letters, and Morgenthau's privately written words served to sink many of his "Story" claims. In actuality, Morgenthau enjoyed a relatively good relationship with Talat and Enver. When Morgenthau said good-bye, in fact, Talat was kind enough to state how sorry he was to see him go, adding, "We feel almost as though you were one of us." (Morgenthau changed the line to a meaner tone, upon the advice of his ex-boss, Secretary of State Robert Lansing.)
Now why would Power present the idea that there was tension between Morgenthau and Talaat, when the ambassador's letters and diaries stated otherwise? Either she did not read the Lowry report, or more likely ignored what she had read, because the truth did not fit in with her propagandistic agenda. She demonstrates anti-scholarship also by referring to "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" (e.g., her footnote 15, above; of 49 total "Race Murder" footnotes, a whopping one-seventh refers to the Story book) as though it were real history. (George Schreiner, perhaps the only American correspondent who travelled into the Ottoman interior in 1915 (see below) and concluded "no genocide," was incensed at Morgenthau's dishonesty, and wrote in his preface to "The Craft Sinister," "It is to be hoped that the future historian will not give too much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors." (That lets Power off the hook somewhat, as she certainly is no "historian.")
What can be said of scholars working on the Armenian 'genocide,' who, in publication after publication, over the past decades quote the outright lies and half truths which permeate Morgenthau's 'Story' without ever questioning even the most blatant of the inconsistencies?
Dr. Heath Lowry
"The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story"
Talaat believed in collective guilt. It was legitimate to punish all Armenians even if only a few refused to disarm or harbored seditious thoughts. "We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty," Talaat told a German reporter. "But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow."17
The fact is, the Armenian community as a whole was disloyal, thanks to fanatical Dashnaks and Hunchaks' successful poisoning of relations. The loyal Armenians were often made fatal examples of, and by this time Armenians were "belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey," as Boghos Nubar put it in his 1919 letter to the Times of London. Leon Surmelian outlined how there was nary a loyal Ottoman-Armenian to be found; captured Russian POWs would even be applauded at times in the streets! The situation wasn't like Japanese-Americans or French Alsatians "deported" in WWII; these groups were completely innocent. By contrast, the terrorist committee men could expect local Armenian villages to feed and otherwise take care of them. The situation was most dire for the Ottoman Empire, attacked by superpowers on multiple fronts. Tolerating thousands of armed Armenian traitors from behind-the-lines would not have been an option for any nation; the traitors needed to be moved out. (It fact, self-defense is the duty of a nation. No less a historian than the Armenian, Borian, reminded us in 1929: "It is obvious that when a mass of ten thousand people revolt against the state behind the military front, the idea of state entails the state rule and statesmen to take responsible precautions to necessary defense.")
Although Power is pointing to Talat's statement (Power's source for footnote 17: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story) as words an obvious criminal would make, the grim circumstances demanded no other recourse. Enver used similar reasoning in Power's favorite historical source. Check out the sensibility.)
Power makes propaganda with her statement that "all" Armenians were punished, but she is blowing her usual hot air:
The Armenians of Istanbul, and the Armenians in the sanjak of Kutahya and the province of Aydin had not been required to emigrate. The Armenians who at the present time are in the sanjak of Izmit and in Bursa, Kastamonu, Ankara, and Konya, are those who had emigrated from these areas, and who have returned. There are many Armenians in the sanjak of Kaiseri, and in Sivas, Kharput, Diyarbekir, and especially in Cicilia and in Istanbul, who have returned, but who are unable to go to their villages. The rest of the Armenians of Erzurum and Bitlis are in Cilicia.
The Armenian Patrirch, elaborating after the late 1918 decree permitting Armenians to return; British Archives, F.O. 371/6556/E.2730/800/44
Instead of hiding his achievements, as later perpetrators would do, Talaat boasted of them. According to Morgenthau, he liked to tell friends,"! have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!"18 (The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians in 1895-1896.) Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York, which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. "They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,"Talaat said. "The Government is the beneficiary now."'9 Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out of Talaat's office.
Armenians rebelled in the mid-1890s, and it is the duty of any nation's leader to put down rebellions. "The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians..." Samantha Power tells us, as if these events existed in a vacuum. Did Abdul Hamid commit a "genocide"? An Armenophile of the period, Richard Davey, served as character witness:
It is impossible to withhold sympathy and respect for a Sultan of such blameless private life as Abdul Ahmed, who works incessantly at what he believes to be the welfare of his people. To accuse him, as I have seen lately, even in respectable English papers, of being a sort of Tackleton who delights in tormenting his Armenian subjects as that worthy did in scrunching crickets, is not only unjust but in preposterously bad taste. In the first place, the Sultan is so free from the spirit oi cruelty which disgraced some of his ancestors, that it is difficult to get him to sign even the death-warrant of a murderer.
And did Silly Samantha Power "preposterously" indulge in further "bad taste" by repeating the propagandistic figure of 200,000? The mortality of the Armenians was more likely one-tenth of that, and no one speaks — as usual — of the thousands of Turks killed by Armenians during the same period. One rebel, Aghasi (or Aghassi), boasted in his diary of killing 20,000 Turks in one battle alone.
Regarding the above Power passage, the lady needs to bow her head in shame. Both anecdotes are from her favorite historical source, Morgenthau's Story book, with invented words placed between quotation marks. If Talat actually stated the first remark (a strange boast that he would make, or that his "friends" would repeat, before the Armenian-friendly American ambassador), about doing more in three months than Abdul Hamid's thirty years, he was not referring to the concept of "extermination," but to distributing Armenians around the empire, in order to reduce their tendency to rebel. (ADDENDUM, Nov. 2006: Cover story from a newspaper in Indiana, The Fort Wayne News, Oct. 7, 1915: "ENVER PASHA'S BOAST OF BLOODY BUTCHERY; Glories in His Ruthless Slaughter of Helpless Christians. EMILY C. WHEELER Makes a Sensational Statement Concerning the Atrocities of the Turks. NEW YORK, Oct.7.— 'It is Enver Pasha's boast that he killed more Armenians in thirty days, than Abdul Hamid did in thirty years. And Abdul Hamid was known as the "great butcher" and the "red sultan".' This statement was made today by Miss Emily C. Wheeler, secretary of the National Armenia and India Relief association, an organization which since 1895 has been active in mission work in Turkish Armenia. Information on which her statement was based was given her by a missionary, an Armenian physician just returned from Turkey.") The worst crime Power commits, however, is in her reproduction of the insurance anecdote. Prof. Lowry has shown that the exchange was pure fiction, the reality being the opposite of what Morgenthau tried to convey.
The New York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915. It helped that Morgenthau and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were old friends. Beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish "massacres," "slaughter," and "atrocities" against the Armenians, relaying accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious authorities, and survivors of mass executions.
Such was an awful stain on the reputation of perhaps America's most prestigious newspaper, a stain that the pro-genocide publication carries to this day. Note the sources relied upon: bigoted religious fanatics, and Armenians. Both groups pursued the policy of showing the Turks to be monsters.
On October 7, 1915, a Times headline blared, "800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED." The article reported Bryce's testimony before the House of Lords... By December the paper's headline read, "MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE."25 The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were "unparalleled in modern times" and that the Turks had set out to achieve "nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people."26
Footnote 26: "500,000 Armenians Said to Have Perished. Washington Asked to Stop Slaughter of Christians by Turks and Kurds," NewYork Times, September 24, 1915, p. 2; "Says Extinction Menaces Armenia; Dr. Gabriel Tells of More Than 450,000 Killed in Recent Massacres," New York Times, September 25, 1915, p. 3. Gabriel was the Armenian (real name: Gabrielian. See Armenian Review, 10:2, summer 1957, p. 66) president of an Armenian organization, and was living in New York City at the time, a propagandist who created numbers (a main source of his was Boghos Nubar, who referred to atrocities that were "without precedent" in his "Nation's Martyrology"; "450,000 Armenians Reported Massacred," Dallas News, 8-25-15. Must have been an example of one of Power's "officials"), unaware that propagandists a century on would still be using him as a valid source.
Samantha Power is demonstrating her lack of morality by showcasing what were purely propagandistic reports. (It was bad enough these hateful fabrications were accepted wholesale in more "innocent" days, but Power is helping them find a whole new audience.) She softens the blow by describing the figures as "estimates," but that is not what the American reader thought, especially when sources included the most trusted Briton in the USA, former Ambassador Bryce. (Bryce headed the Ottoman division of Wellington House, Britain's war propaganda office.) We can see exactly how correct those officials were, with their deduction that the Turks were out for "annihilation."
Witnesses to the terror knew that American readers would have difficulty processing such gruesome horrors, so they scoured history for parallels to events that they believed had already been processed in the public mind. One report said, "The nature and scale of the atrocities dwarf anything perpetrated. . . under Abdul Hamid, whose exploits in this direction now assume an aspect of moderation compared with those of the present Governors of Turkey." Before Adolf Hitler, the standard for European brutality had been set by Abdul Hamid and the Belgian king Leopold, who pillaged the Congo for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27
Footnote 27: "Armenian Officials Murdered by Turks. Confirmation from Cairo of the Wholesale Atrocities That von Bernstorff Belittles," New York Times, September 30, 1915, p. 2.
There were no "witnesses to the terror." People were being relocated, and many were suffering from famine and disease, similar to the 2.5 million other Ottomans racist "human rights" champions prefer to remain invisible. The occasional massacres left few witnesses. The genuine and rare witness took the form of this man.
It is bitterly laugh-provoking for Power to cite only two examples of "genocide" before 1915, and one of them is, naturally, Turkish. One that occurred three years before 1915 took place in Europe proper, when murderous Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Montenegrins chased away 1.5 million Balkan Turks, totaling roughly the entire pre-war Armenian population, and killing 600,000, paralleling the entire Armenian mortality who died mainly from non-violent reasons. Only in the few years prior, we had Albanians (1912-13) getting knocked off by Serbs, Hereros by Germans (1904-07), and Filipinos by Americans (early 1900s). All examples of "European brutality" were set by Europeans, not just Belgium's Leopold. Name a genocide throughout history, you'll find a European nation (or their descendants in America) behind it. How utterly despicable of Samantha Power to make it appear as though the Turks she hates basically "invented" genocide... even when there is no factual evidence proving Turks ever committed a genocide.
Not incidentally, in her continuation of Footnote 27, Power instructs that even though "the Congo population was cut 'by at least half' between 1880 and 1920," and that "some 10 million people died as a result of Leopold's presence," Leopold was still not as bad as Abdul Hamid, because the Belgian king was not aiming at "wiping out one particular ethnic group." You've heard it here, folks; Silly Samantha Power is actually telling us the aim of Abdul Hamid was to exterminate all of the Armenians. Incredible!
Because the Turks continued to block access to the caravans, reporters often speculated on whether their sources were reliable. "The Turkish Government has succeeded in throwing an impenetrable veil over its actions toward all Armenians," a frustrated Associated Press correspondent noted. "Constantinople has for weeks had its daily crop of Armenian rumors. . . . What has happened... is still an unwritten chapter. No newspapermen are allowed to visit the affected districts and reports from these are altogether unreliable. The reticence of the Turkish Government cannot be looked upon as a good sign, however."28
28. "Pleas for Armenia by Germany Futile," New York Times, October 10, 1915. sec. 2,p. 19.
By this time in her chapter, Power has shifted from her reliance upon Morgenthau to citing numerous New York Times reports. And yet she is admitting here that the newspaper reportage was based upon rumors. She is providing what a journalist reported as "altogether unreliable" to substitute for actual history. Is that not absolutely incredible?
The fact appears to be, based on Co-Editor Jay Winter's propaganda book, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," journalists preferred to cover the more glamorous Gallipoli chapter of the war, instead of trekking into the threatening Ottoman interior. There was only one journalist who braved these waters and genuinely eyewitnessed events firsthand, George Schreiner, and his verdict was "no genocide." (He blamed the goings-on not on "intentional brutality," but on "ineptitude.") Furthermore, not all foreigners were barred from accompanying the caravans. Missionary Mary Graffam was permitted to go along on one, which would have been ridiculous if the "intent" was to exterminate. Graffam's verdict at the time of the events (although she sang a different tune in her 1919 memoirs): "no genocide." ("I am not in any way criticizing the government. Most of the higher officials are at their wits end to stop these abuses and carry out the orders which they have received, but this is a flood and it carries all before it.")
Turkish representatives in the United States predictably blurred the picture with denials and defenses. The Turkish consul, Djelal Munif Bey, told the New York Times, "All those who have been killed were of that rebellious element who were caught red-handed or while otherwise committing traitorous acts against the Turkish Government, and not women and children, as some of these fabricated reports would have the Americans believe." But the same representative added that if innocent lives had in fact been lost, that was because in wartime "discrimination is utterly impossible, and it is not alone the offender who suffers the penalty of his act, but also the innocent whom he drags with him. . . . The Armenians have only themselves to blame."29
Footnote 29. "Turkish Official Denies Atrocities," New York Times, October 15,1915, p. 4.
Sorry, Samantha Power. Everything claimed above conforms 100% to the actual history of what went on; Djelal Bey's "all killed were rebels" was referring to those killed directly by government forces. Armenian women and children who were massacred died at the hands of "uncontrolled elements," as Talat Pasha put it above. If the idea was for the government to kill all Armenians, the "genocide" would not have "all but run its course" in 1916, as Dadrian himself vouched for, and the majority of Armenians could not have survived. If there is proof that the Ottoman government was involved, such proof has yet to be found. (Silly Samantha certainly has produced no evidence, simply offering the drivel of Ambassador Morgenthau and the "altogether unreliable" New York Times, based on "rumors.") And were the Armenians to blame? If they Fired the First Shot, they surely were culpable.
"The culpability of Armenians leaves no doubt."
Philippe de Zara, Mustapha Kemal, Dictateur (Paris, 1936)
"Do you believe that any massacres would have taken place if no Armenian revolutionaries had come into the country and incited the Armenian population to rebellion?' I asked Mr. Graves. (British consul, Erzurum.)
'Certainly not,' he replied. 'I do not believe that a single Armenian would have been killed.'"
Sydney Whitman, Turkish Memories (1914), p. 94. The above exchange took place during the mid-1890s (the period where Power dumbly points a finger at Abdul Hamid for intentional extermination), as was a similar account from 1895, entitled "The Armenian Troubles and Where The Responsibility Lies." The same principles apply to the "1915" period. Whomever begins the violence must accept the responsibility for the repercussions. The Turkish consul was entirely correct in concluding, "The Armenians have only themselves to blame." No less an authority than the Armenian Republic's first prime minister practically said as much, in 1923.
The Turks, who had attempted to conduct the massacres secretly, were unhappy about the attention they were getting. In November 1915 Talaat advised the authorities in Aleppo that Morgenthau knew far too much. "It is important that foreigners who are in those parts shall be persuaded that the expulsion of the Armenians is in truth only deportation," Talaat wrote. "It is important that, to save appearances, a show of gentle dealing shall be made for a time, and the usual measures be taken in suitable places." A month later, angry that foreigners had obtained photographs of corpses along the road, Talaat recommended that these corpses be "buried at once," or at least hidden from view.30
In the first part of this look at Samantha Power's Hell Problem, I wondered about a fishy quote Power had utilized. There was, after all, a practical industry of unscrupulous characters, from Morgenthau on down, who put words into Talat Pasha's mouth. Getting the source of that quote (a stupid article written by the genocide-obsessed Julia Pascal) is what made me finally dig up a copy of Power's "Pulitzer Prize winning" book. At the time, I wondered whether the suspicious quote was an Andonian forgery, perhaps?
Well, Samantha Power has done it. She truly has proven herself to be "an idiot."
Her source here is "30. George R. Montgomery...'Why Talaat Pasha's Assassin Was Acquitted,' Current History, July 1921, p. 554," the brunt of which may be accessed at bottom of TAT's "Soghoman Tehlirian's Trial" page. George R. Montgomery was the highly propagandistic director of the Armenian-America Society, not exactly what a genuine scholar would accept as a trustworthy source. Talat's orders to Aleppo were fabricated by Aram Andonian. Indeed, even the 1921 Berlin kangaroo court rejected the Andonian forgeries, but that did not stop the immoral George R. Montgomery from using them in his article for the equally immoral New York Times, which published the article without question.
Morgenthau's pal, Adolph Ochs,
honored on a U.S. postage stamp.
On one hand, we can almost excuse both Montgomery and the New York Times (as Power reported earlier, the Times' publisher, Adolph Ochs, was a close chum of Henry Morgenthau), since they were products of viciously anti-Turkish times, but in our new and enlightened age of Samantha Power's "Human Rights," by what justification can Samantha Power perpetuate these awful lies? Is she really that stupid, being unaware of these discredited documents? Or is she being unethically clever, and using false documentation knowingly, as does Vahakn Dadrian? (For whom the validation of the Andonian documents serves as his greatest embarrassment, assuming Dadrian is capable of embarrassment.) Since Samantha Power is no scholar, we can't explain why she would stoop so low... given the validity of the racist sources she has used as a whole, it is possible she is that dim-witted. Suffice it to say, those who point to the Andonian work operate on the same level as the anti-Semite who points to the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, to demonstrate how "evil" the Jews are.
(To further illustrate the falseness of Talat's words that Samantha Power would ask you to accept as genuine, the reader may look at the diary of a resettled Armenian teen-ager, who was present in Aleppo. See if you can find evidence of Talat's "usual measures.")
Power next touches on the money Morgenthau and others were able to raise for the Armenian cause, and recruits the powerful voice of one of America's greatest presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, who "wondered how anyone could possibly advise neutrality 'between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrongdoers.'"
Roosevelt actually serves as an excellent example to offset Samantha Power's "moral" position, the theme of her book, that we must act fast in order to prevent genocides. The problem of jumping in without knowing the real facts can be a worse crime than not jumping in at all, akin to lynching a man on the spot, on the say-so of the town's mob. The Ottoman Turks did not commit a state-sponsored genocide. All the factual evidence points to the contrary, and all the "evidence" Power is supplying, as can readily be seen, derive from corrupt and conflicted sources. Okay, Roosevelt was a swashbuckling adventurer and "Rough Rider" in his day, a romantic image to be sure, but if his desire to "smash" (as he wrote that he would love to do with both Spain and Turkey; he had his chance to "bully" the former power that was similarly on last legs) was based on his own prejudices, then why should we heed the opinion of Theodore Roosevelt? (Roosevelt was an advocate of the "whites are superior" notion, prevalent during his time period.)
Morgenthau tried to work around America's determined neutrality. In September 1915 he offered to raise $1 million to transport to the United States the Armenians who had escaped the massacres. "Since May," Morgenthau said, "350,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or have died of starvation. There are 550,000 Armenians who could now be sent to America, and we need help to save them." Turkey accepted the proposal, and Morgenthau called upon each of the states in the western United States to raise funds to equip a ship to transport and care for Armenian refugees. He appealed to American self-interest, arguing, "The Armenians are a moral, hard working race, and would make good citizens to settle the less thickly populated parts of the Western States."36 He knew he had to preemptively rebut those who expected Armenian freeloaders. But the Turks, insincere even about helping Armenians leave, blocked the exit of refugees. Morgenthau's plan went nowhere.37
This one is really a dilly. Once again, Samantha Power demonstrates herself to be an "idiot."
The Oct. 3, 1915 Dallas News report
Here is where the reader can tune in, to get a better idea of Morgenthau's million dollar plan. The episode actually serves to demonstrate there could have been no genocide.
At right is a clipping from the Dallas News (thanks to reader Cihan) from Oct. 3, 1915. "TURKS LET ARMENIANS EMIGRATE TO AMERICA — Privilege Granted to Those Who will Become Naturalized Citizens." (A grand policy continued in the USA, even when it comes to convicted Armenian terrorists.)
Washington, Oct. 2 — Turkey has consented to the emigration of all Armenians who actually will become naturalized American citizens on their arrival in this country. Ambassador Morgenthau has arranged with the Turkish government for the free departure of all Armenians for whose intention to become naturalized Americans he can vouch. It is understood Turkey will permit the Armenians to come to the United States, although it will not allow them to take up residence in Europe for fear they will join Turkey's enemies."
(As if coming to America, ballooning the Armenian population to a huge one million or so in less than a century, would have prevented the Armenians from becoming "Turkey's enemies.")
Here is an example among so many others demonstrating the good heart of the Turks. Did this plan move ahead? If not, there could have been reasons... perhaps the required money was not raised. (In the article linked above, we learn Morgenthau really needed $5 million.) (ADDENDUM: Or perhaps the U.S. government, heeding immigration law, balked at admitting such a large number of "professional beggars" — to borrow the phrase of Col. William Haskell — as in an earlier period.) Whatever happened, however, Samantha Power cruelly informs us, "But the Turks, insincere even about helping Armenians leave, blocked the exit of refugees. Morgenthau's plan went nowhere." Even when the Turks do good, Power must show they are bad.
But here's the clincher: Power's source, footnote 37, "Turkey Bars Red Cross," New York Times, October 19,1915, p. 4."
The reader may access this article online at a popular Armenian propaganda site. We can see the topic has nothing to do with Morgenthau's $1 million plan. The article, as the headline sums up, is all about how the Red Cross would not be permitted to travel into the Ottoman Empire, in order to help the Armenians. There is nothing about Armenian immigration to the USA. There is one reference to Morgenthau by article's end: "We find it also difficult at present, almost impossible, in fact, to send supplies to Turkey, everything is in such a fearful condition in Europe. We have notified those that desire to send contributions for Armenian relief that we would transmit them through the American Ambassador at Constantinople, as this seems to be the only method at present of aiding the Armenian population."
The above was written by "Miss Mabel Boardman of the executive staff of the American Red Cross." It was a private letter written to "Dr. M. Simbad Gabriel ... the President of the Armenian General Progressive Association." The latter (an Armenian, as covered above) simply made these private communications available to the New York Times reporter, once again demonstrating how all of these anti-Turkish forces were working together. In the article's conclusion, Dr. Gabriel somehow tied in Miss Boardman's "We can't go" message with proof "in the eyes of all prejudiced persons" (!) of "convincing evidence of the truthfulness of the terrible stories that are coming out of Turkey regarding the persecution, murder, and torturing of the Armenian people." Quite a leap!
Bimbo Scholar: Samantha Power.
Can you imagine that Samantha Power pointed not only to a bare-faced piece of propaganda, but one that had nothing to do with her topic... offered as proof that "insincere" Turks "blocked the exit of refugees"? Does our little "Human Rights" champion have any scruples?
In point of fact, let's take a look at the time the Turks performed the reverse of what this "Red Cross" article told us:
When the USA declared war on Germany, the USA became the nominal enemy of the Ottoman Empire as well. Years beforehand, the missionaries and the more recently arrived members of the Near East Relief could not have been more vicious toward the Turks. In spite of these realities, Talat Pasha promised Ambassador Elkus that he would let these Turk-hostile Christians stay and take care of the Armenians. Perhaps this was the only time in history that a combatant country had given permission to the citizens of another country fighting against its side to stay, feed, clothe, treat, educate and give moral support to the people which it was accused of exterminating. Turkish people, at this time, were starving to death (thousands dying daily from famine, as Morgenthau told us in his "Story" book), but Talat Pasha didn't even lay the condition that the Turks needed to be taken care of, as well. This Turkish leader, whom Samantha Power is blackening the reputation of as another Hitler, demonstrated in this instance that he was an amazing humanitarian. (See Story of Near East Relief: 1915-1930, James L. Barton, 1930).
Not all Red Cross personnel were adherents of propaganda, by the way:
America should feed the half million Turks whose hinterland was willfully demolished by the retreating Greeks, instead of aiding the Greeks and Armenians who are sitting around waiting for America to give them their next meal. The stories of Turk atrocities circulated among American churches are a mess of lies. I believe that the Greeks and not the Turks are barbarians."
Colonel William Haskell, the American Red Cross; returning from a tour of investigation in the Near East. Source: The Turkish Myth, 1923. Here is what the colonel thought of the Armenians, according to Dr. Richard Hovannisian.
Lansing... expressed understanding for Turkey's security concerns."I could see that [the Armenians'] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes," Secretary Lansing wrote in November 1916.41 Morgenthau examined the facts and saw a cold-blooded campaign of annihilation; Lansing processed many of those same facts and saw an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat.
[Secretary of State Robert Lansing to President Woodrow Wilson, November 21, 1916, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1939), p. 42.]
Samantha Power adds in her footnote that "Lansing was aware of the savagery of that deportation." Yes, it was bad. The nation was bankrupt, and did not have sufficient manpower and resources to do the job adequately. (The USA had plenty of both when resettling their Japanese during WWII, and at least there were no massacres. Otherwise, how much more humane were the Americans?) The point is, however, that there was no "intent" for "genocide" on the part of the Ottomans. So of these two perspectives, Morgenthau vs. Lansing, who was correct? Morgenthau was affected by hugely biased Armenians and missionaries, and by his own bigotry. Lansing could see the truth from a distance, with a cooler head. All the factual evidence points to Lansing being right on the money: "an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat." What a pity that Samantha Power, like the rest of her "genocide scholar" ilk, has no use for factual evidence.
More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on Morgenthau's watch. Morgenthau, who had earned a reputation as a loose cannon, did not receive another appointment in the Wilson administration.
Yet on the first page of her chapter, Power had written:
In 1915 Talaat had presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly 1 million Armenians.
Looks like I owe Samantha Power an apology. In "Part I," I had written that she contradicted herself by writing "nearly one million" in her book, and "more than one million" in the joint New York Times letter she had written with Peter Balakian. Now it appears her "nearly" figure related solely to the massacres in 1915.
(But wait a minute. Since Morgenthau scooted away in January 1916, what Power just told us is that "more than one million" died in 1915, whereas before she had written "nearly" for the same year. Unless the difference of "nearly" and "more" transpired in that portion of 1916's January — which could not have been the case — she contradicted herself after all. I now reckon if she adds the Armenians who died in 1916-1923, her total for the "killed" might be three or four million.)
Her Footnote 2:. "Estimates of the number of Armenians who died in 1915-1916 vary widely. Some Turkish historians claim just 200,000 Armenians were killed, mainly in the legitimate suppression of rebellion. See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 315-316. Armenian sources often place the figure at more than 1.5 million; see Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modem History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 114; Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 147. British historian Martin Gilbert estimates that some 600,000 Armenians were killed in massacres committed in Anatolia and an additional 400,000 died as a result of the brutalities and starvation inflicted upon them during the forced deportations from Anatolia into the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia; some 200,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam. See Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 167."
Let's say it once again: the pre-war population of the Ottoman-Armenians hovered around 1.5 million. Samantha Power agrees one million died. 1.5 million minus one million cannot possibly equal "more than one million." The only way such a sum could be possible is if one takes the propagandist pre-war figure of the Armenian Patriarch, 2.1 million. But even the Patriarch offered a different number (1.85 million) elsewhere, and broke down his bloated 2.1 million figure as such: 1,260,000 survivors, 840,000 dead. Even the propagandistic Armenian Patriarch did not go into the stratosphere, regarding the Armenian dead, as has the even more propagandistic Samantha Power.
Prof. Stanford Shaw from the documentary,
THE DESPERATE HOURS. Shaw was
forced to retire from UCLA after constant
harassment by Armenians, directed in large
part by his colleague, Richard Hovannisian.
Stanford J. Shaw is not a "Turkish" historian, as ethics-challenged Silly Sammy states above. Most Turkish and pro-Turkish (i.e., pro-"Truth," in the case of non-Turks) historians agree the mortality ranged between 300,000 to 600,000, so it is misleading for Power to have given "200,000" as the standard example. Kamuran Gurun provided compelling reasons as to why the figure could have approached 300,000. The scholar who went straight down the middle of what both sides had to offer, Prof. Guenter Lewy, settled on slightly over 600,000. When asked as to why these estimates can go as high as 1.5 million, Lewy replied: "Unfortunately many Western scholars and parliamentary bodies simply repeat the Armenian allegations without critical examination as to their veracity."
(ADDENDUM, 4-07: "200,000" as the total Armenian mortality was a figure not restricted solely to "Turkish historians." The Armenians themselves said "more than 200,000" at the 1919 Preliminary Peace Conference, in Paris.)
Here I figured Suny was a little more "reasonable" Armenian propagandist.... did he actually go as high as "more than 1.5 million"? (Wow.) Melson is not to be taken seriously, and neither is Martin Gilbert. ("...[S]ome 200,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam." Brother! It's likely Gilbert's source was Christopher J. Walker's Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. The way Armenian propaganda manages to multiply, not a few cockroaches must be envious.)
(By the way: it is a near certainty that Power, our sorry scholar, did not go anywhere near the work of the Shaws. Allergic as she is to any information opposing her dogma, she simply must have picked up that tidbit as reference provided in a paper by Vahakn Dadrian, or another pro-Armenian propagandist. In a report written by Yuksel Oktay — see link, page bottom — Power claimed at a book signing that she read Shaw's book along with others offering the same perspective, and that her book was the result of seven years of research. If this is the case, she has no excuse for writing the biased and untruthful book she has written.)
In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting "against humanity and civilization."
It is not ethical to call anyone an "executioner" unless the charge has been proven, particularly if the accuser has studied law in an Ivy League university.
This is Samantha's cue to get into the 1919-20 puppet Ottoman kangaroo courts, the findings of which even the British rejected as a travesty of justice. Imagine an occupying power holding a gun to the head of the vanquished, and ordering the vanquished to... let's allow Vahakn Dadrian to tell you what the Allies demanded: "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh."
Conscious of his place in history, Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if "regrettable" features of war, carried out by "uncontrolled elements."
In other words, Power is implying Talat was guilty and the only reason he made sure to write his memoirs was to, in a manner of speaking, "cover his ass." Forget about how natural it is for figures who have played an important historical role to want to make a record of what transpired. Even insignificant megalomaniacs as Henry Morgenthau have been known to write memoirs. Here is a taste of those Talat memoirs. Frankly, his words come across as refreshingly honest. Power provides some of them:
"I confess," he wrote, "that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. . . . Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested." Acknowledging it was the government's duty to prevent and punish "these abuses and atrocities," he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular "discontent," and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. "We did all we could," he claimed, "but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies." Although other countries at war also enacted harsh "preventive measures," he wrote, "the regrettable results were passed over in silence," whereas "the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody's eyes were upon us." Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. "I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces," he wrote, but "the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves."47
There is nothing written in the above that does not conform 100% with historical accuracy or common logic. Take for example, his statement that it is the government's duty to prevent and punish abuses and atrocities. That's absolutely true, and one strong piece of evidence that there could have been no genocide is that the Ottoman authorities did punish those committing crimes against Armenians, over 1,600 such cases, some punished by execution. (A writer for a not-friendly German newspaper was impressed during a "genocide conference" that was avoided by Samantha Power's hypocritical genocide club, although renegade club member Hilmar Kaiser participated.) Naturally, however, during wartime especially, no matter how honorable a government is to "go by the book," there will always be other factors to consider. For example, only one American soldier was tried for the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and his (Lt. Calley's) punishment, before a period of house arrest, was only three days' imprisonment. As a more recent example, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq erupted, only a few scapegoat soldiers were made examples of. Why? Because if the USA had gone all out to prosecute all of its soldiers responsible for "abuses and atrocities," that would be very bad for morale at home. There is still a war that is being fought. (And the war that the Ottomans were fighting was not the kind that Americans are used to, safely away from the homeland. WWI was a war that would determine either life or death for the empire. It finally brought death.)
To avoid further unrest, the Turkish authorities began releasing low-level suspects. The British had grown frustrated by the incompetence and politicization of what they called the "farcical" Turkish judicial system. Fearing none of the suspects in Turkish custody would ever be tried, the British occupation forces shipped many of the arrested war crimes suspects from Turkey to Malta and Mudros, a port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, for eventual international trials. But support for this, too, evaporated.
"Incompetence"? Why, these are the very courts that Vahakn Dadrian loves to tell us were conducted so professionally. The real reason why the British took over is because they decided to conduct the trials in an honorable fashion; there was great pressure from their Muslim subjects in India to do so.
It's unfortunate Power did not footnote the British gentleman who opined these trials were "farcical." These trials were indeed farcical, but not for the reason Power presents. The Ottoman lackeys of the British did all they could to condemn the accused Turks. The reason why these trials were "farcical" is because they were conducted under the directive of an occupying power, without due process in kangaroo court fashion, and were illegal.
Samantha Power provides the usual Armenian propagandistic hogwash regarding why Malta fell apart. (The anti-scholar predictably gets her facts wrong: "In November 1921 Kemal put an end to the promise of an international tribunal by negotiating a prisoner swap." By November 1921, Malta was already over.) The fact is, proven by no less a source than the British archives themselves, that the British were still hard at work trying to dig up the judicial evidence to convict the Turks, even after "Kemal seized twenty-nine British soldiers whose immediate fates Britain privileged above all else," as Power explains as to why Malta was doomed.
The one and only reason why Malta was called off was because the British could not find any real evidence. If the British failed to find the evidence... the British, who were the masterminds behind the Treaty of Sèvres (which Power complains was "denounced as treasonous" by Mustafa Kemal, as if the charge were a frivolous one. This treaty pronounced the death sentence upon the Turkish nation, and when the puppet Ottomans signed it, the act was nothing less than treasonous)... when all the evidence was at their fingertips, including the Ottoman archives which the British had appointed an Armenian to conduct research in, then honorable people can reach only one conclusion: There was no genocide.
Power offers sparse footnotes to support the conclusion of her chapter's "Malta" topic; here is the main thrust (Footnote 48):
Near the close of the twentieth century, the Serb perpetrators of genocide in Bosnia would also evade international sanction by seizing European peacekeepers as hostages in order to stave off NATO air strikes.
Is this woman actually equating the seizure of "neutral" European peacekeepers to Kemal's seizure of actual enemy soldiers who were occupying his country? In retaliation for the wrongful imprisonment of innocent men (naturally, pro-Armenians would choose to regard the Malta detainees as "guilty" [or perhaps as "executioners," as Power herself helpfully put it a few paragraphs ago], but there is a little legal concept required in the form of evidence. Otherwise, it's accepted the accused are innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps Samantha Power was distracted, doodling Swastikas on pictures of Turks, the day they covered that principle at Harvard Law School), Ottoman personnel who were kept in a far-away prison in little better circumstances than those of Guantanamo Bay, Kemal acted justly in giving the British a taste of their own medicine. We can't expect such a partisan as Samantha Power to look at the picture fairly, of course.
And if our anti-scholar had made the effort to conduct responsible research, she would have learned if the British considered anyone as "hostages," it wasn't the British prisoners held by the Turks... but rather, the Turkish prisoners held by the British, in Malta.
Role Model for the Genocide Scholar:
RAPHAEL LEMKIN
It was my intention to cover the rest of the book in more detail, but since I got into exposing Power's lack of scholarship in the chapter regarding the "Armenian Genocide," Samantha Power has tired me to the point of my needing to take a powder. Let's touch on a few highlights.
Given Power's abysmal scholarly methodology, one would have rocks in the head to accept whatever else she has to say at face value. You can simply call me Rockhead now, as I'm going to accept her factoids on Raphael Lemkin. This is the first time I'm learning about Lemkin in detail (Peter Balakian offered a Lemkin statement that frankly, made Lemkin out to be a fool. See Footnote 23 on this page) and I'm not that interested in conducting genuine research concerning the man's life. However, you can be assured Lemkin is like a God in the genocide world, and Power was not going to say anything "bad" about Lemkin. If anything, we are dealing with a whitewashed look, the polar opposite of how Samantha Power has chosen to portray Turks, as the embodiments of evil.
Lemkin is a "twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov" (in descriptions of Lemkin, we must always be told that he was a "Polish Jew"), and he engaged a professor in the topic of the "Armenian Genocide."
Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens," he said. "He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" Lemkin asked. "This is most inconsistent."'
Irony of ironies! While Lemkin had an excellent point in the case of a despot who deliberately murdered multitudes, the fact is, Talat can only be judged as having killed "more than a million" if that annoying little matter as "evidence" can be shown. We don't point to Andonian forgeries as "evidence," as Silly Samantha Power has done. In this regard, we learn that Raphael Lemkin was no different than Samantha Power.
(Lemkin had more of an excuse. He was living in a "Christian" country that mainly provided Armenian propaganda as real history. The biased "Christian" West never bothered to hear the side of the Turks. If one hears only one side, it's very easy to come up with genocides. The situation is little different today, alas, as anti-Turkish prejudice rages on, but in our modern times, Samantha Power had easy access to much more information while Lemkin's chances for perusal were limited. On an ethical level, then, although Lemkin will be getting the criticism he well deserves — for allowing his prejudices to take precedence — we can't compare his lack of ethics with those of our "Human Rights" champion, Samantha Power.)
(And by the way; sadly, history has demonstrated that it was no crime at all for "Tehlirian to kill a man." His example would be demonstrated time and time again, in most trials of the rare Armenian terrorists who would get caught in future years. The degree of anti-Turkish prejudice in the West is simply staggering.)
Lemkin was torn about how to judge Tehlirian's act. On the one hand, Lemkin credited the Armenian with upholding the "moral order of mankind" and drawing the world's attention to the Turkish slaughter. Tehlirian's case had quickly turned into an informal trial of the deceased Talaat for his crimes against the Armenians; the witnesses and written evidence introduced in Tehlirian's defense brought the Ottoman horrors to their fullest light to date. The New York Times wrote that the documents introduced in the trial "established once and for all the fact that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation but annihilation."3 But Lemkin was uncomfortable that Tehlirian, who had been acquitted on the grounds of what today would be called "temporary insanity," had acted as the "self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind."4 Passion, he knew, would often make a travesty of justice. Impunity for mass murderers like Talaat had to end; retribution had to be legalized.
Footnote 3. George R. Montgomery, "Why Talaat's Assassin Was Acquitted," Current History, July 1921, pp. 551-555. Tehlirian lived out his days in California.
Footnote 4. Several years later, in 1926, Lemkin learned that Scholom Schwarzbart, a Jewish tailor orphaned in a pogrom in Ukraine in 1918, shot the Ukrainian minister of war Semion Petliure in Paris. As in the Tehlirian case, the jury found it difficult to acquit or condemn the bereaved assassin. They declared him "insane" and then freed him. After the Schwarzbart trial, Lemkin wrote an article describing the man's act as a "beautiful crime" and deploring the absence of a law banning the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups.
Power has finally provided truth, with her statement: Tehlirian's case had quickly turned into an informal trial of the deceased Talaat for his crimes. The cursory two-day mockery of a trial offered (with the exception of Talat's wife) only witnesses for the defense. Intense partisans having nothing to do with the murder trial, such as Johannes Lepsius and Bishop Balakian, were asked to the witness stand. As for Power's critical declaration, "The New York Times wrote that the documents introduced in the trial 'established once and for all the fact that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation but annihilation,'" note the "George Montgomery" source. These documents were not only not introduced in the trial, but they were the Andonian forgeries. Shame, shame on Samantha Power, for perpetuating these lies.
And isn't Footnote 4 revealing, as far as Lemkin's character, calling the murder of a man "beautiful." I don't know how guilty this Semion Petliure was, but even if he was responsible for the murder of every Jew who died in that pogrom, it's not comforting for Lemkin to have condoned murder. And it does not say much about his respect for law to have only been "uncomfortable" about vigilantism substituting for legal convictions; he should have been outraged that murderers were allowed to get off scot-free, regardless of the alleged criminality of their victims. It was Lemkin's great prejudice and ignorance regarding the Armenian matter (and at least prejudice regarding the Jewish one) that likely allowed him to be very pleased with these acquittals. We expect honorable professionals to rise above their human emotions, but he evidently entertained a kind of hero-worship Power displayed toward Soghoman Tehlirian. (See "Part I," link page top.) Incidentally, Power's words in Footnote 4 do not ring true. The juries in both cases did not find it "difficult to acquit or condemn." They wholeheartedly chose to acquit, and used "temporary insanity" as a loophole.
Lemkin had prepared a law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups. The law hinged on what he called "universal repression," a precursor to what today is called "universal jurisdiction": The instigators and perpetrators of these acts should be punished wherever they were caught, regardless of where the crime was committed, or the criminals' nationality or official status.6 The attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians would become an international crime that could be punished anywhere, like slavery and piracy. The threat of punishment, Lemkin argued, would yield a change in practice.
Did you know that slavery and piracy could be punished anywhere? Maybe piracy, but slavery? Looks like the USA and many other nations have much to answer for. (Since "Nullum Crimen" is not a concept acceptable to genocide and human rights moralists, at least in selective cases.)
What's above has good intentions on the surface, but like the good intentions of communism as Karl Marx had originally envisioned, plays a different hand in the world of reality. (1) "The threat of punishment" has served as no deterrent in genocidal examples since 1948. If a murderer is set on murdering, no law or morals will detract such a criminal. (2) Genocide is a political tool for those who are in power. For example, there was no "attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians." Only partisans with axes to grind have made such conclusions for political gain. What a great excuse for those who don't like the accused: "You committed a genocide," they declare without paying attention to proof, and then genocide becomes a tool, in the hands of what may justly be termed forces of evil. (Daunting as well are those making the accusations having no less blood on their hands. For example, the Armenians are far guiltier, as far as extermination campaigns conducted over the years. When such villains have the sympathy of sanctimonious "do-gooders" as Samantha Power, those such as Power are not going to dare criticize them. Even "good guy" nations such as the United States — the nation Power is impugning for not moving fast enough against genocide — is not innocent of war crimes, some to the extent of Power's definition of "genocide.")
Although Lemkin was Jewish, many of his neighbors were Christian. He was aghast that Nero could feed Christians to the lions and [learned from his mother]... that once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life. As a boy, Lemkin often grilled his mother for details on historical cases of mass slaughter, learning about the sacking of Carthage, the Mongol invasions, and the targeting of the French Huguenots.
Would the Mongols' crimes fall into the category of "genocide"? Or would slaughters committed during invasions be considered a "war crime"? In addition, was Nero such a zero? For example, we've all heard Nero was maniacally playing his fiddle while Rome burned. New evidence indicates Nero was actually pitching in with his fire department to put out the blazes. And the Christians were likely responsible for starting the fire. (Because Christians were writing this history, Nero was perhaps made to look like a murderous madman.) Roman methods of execution such as feeding people to lions or crucifixions were ghastly, but in fairness, we must evaluate these methods with the context of the times. There are always two sides to a story, and it does not say much for Lemkin to have made blanket condemnations based on surface explanations.
The subject of slaughter had an unfortunate personal relevance for him growing up in the Bialystok region of Poland: In 1906 some seventy Jews were murdered and ninety gravely injured in local pogroms. Lemkin had heard that mobs opened the stomachs of their victims and stuffed them with feathers from pillows and comforters in grotesque mutilation rituals. He feared that the myth that Jews liked to grind young Christian boys into matzoh would lead to more killings. Lemkin saw what he later described as "a line of blood" leading from the massacre of the Christians in Rome to the massacre of Jews nearby.7
All the more reason why Lemkin should have been deeply ashamed for simple-mindedly having accused the Turks. Christian anti-Semitism through the ages is a matter of record. The Jews escaped to the tolerant Ottoman Empire as a haven. The Ottoman Empire and Turkey have probably been the greatest historical defenders of Judaism, before the USA took over that role, for less pure-hearted reasons.
He went to work as a local prosecutor and in 1929 began moonlighting on drafting an international law that would commit his government and others to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national, and religious groups. It was this law that the cocksure Lemkin presented to his European legal colleagues in Madrid in 1933. Lemkin felt that both the physical and the cultural existence of groups had to be preserved.
We are getting the picture that "genocide" was becoming an obsession for Raphael Lemkin. Very commendable on the surface — who after all, would argue against it — but how was he to predict that unscrupulous forces would misuse the purity behind the idea, for their own evil ends.
...In August 1939, Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books. He declared: It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state. . . . The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?'16 A week later, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. In 1942 Hitler restored Talaat's ashes to Turkey....
Did "Hitler the Historian" really make that comment about Genghis Khan? (Genghis Khan, of course, never gets a break in Western history, perceived one-dimensionally as a ruthless killer of multitudes and no one cares about whatever functions he served as a "founder of a state." Everything Genghis Khan did was "bad." Kind of like Turkey.) We don't really know what Hitler said in that speech, since only a few people took notes by hand. But we can be almost certain the "Armenians" part was added later for political purposes, and we should not be surprised our anti-scholar should present that statement as though it were a fact. (And what kind of a goofy connection is that, the "Hitler Armenian Quote," followed by sending Talat's remains to Turkey? Is that Power's way of telling us modern Turks are so much like the Nazis, as she blabbered on PBS's "Armenian Genocide" show?)
Lemkin arrives in the USA after suffering hardship as a refugee; "Thanks to a professor at Duke University with whom he had once translated the Polish criminal code into English, Lemkin secured an appointment to the Duke faculty to teach international law... he landed [in the USA] on April 18,1941." Connections are important, like Samantha Power, Peter Balakian, Gail Winston, HarperCollins...
Lemkin next tried to approach President Roosevelt directly. An aide urged him to summarize his proposal in a one-page memo. Lemkin was aghast that he had to "compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death" in one page. But he managed, suggesting that the United States adopt a treaty banning barbarity and urging that the Allies declare the protection of Europe's minorities a central war aim. Several weeks later a courier relayed a message from the president. Roosevelt said he recognized the danger to groups but saw difficulties adopting such a law at the present. He assured Lemkin that the United States would issue a warning to the Nazis and urged patience. Lemkin was livid. "'Patience' is a good word to be used when one expects an appointment, a budgetary allocation or the building of a road," he noted. "But when the rope is already around the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isn't the word 'patience' an insult to reason and nature?"29
On one hand, all too true. I remember feeling the same sentiments during the events in Bosnia. On the other hand, what was he expecting? For the USA to be the world's policeman whenever something goes wrong? There are many considerations involved with the priorities of a nation... it isn't easy to commit to costly and dangerous wars, at the drop of a hat. How many of us individually rush to the needs of desperate others? In future years, had Lemkin lived long enough, would Lemkin have stopped and saved every homeless person he would have seen on the streets of New York City, lying in the cold, and in danger of freezing? This line of thinking is idealistic, which is great, but it's simply not realistic.
He believed a "double murder" was being committed—one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler's extermination campaign but refused to publicize or denounce it.
Rabbi Stephen Wise
We don't need to get into the politics of what was involved at the time... there were Jewish groups that also turned a blind eye to Holocaust happenings. (One who was a hero, according to Power, was Rabbi Stephen Wise, who stated publicly that two million Jews had been murdered. This was in Nov. 1942, when the USA was already at war, and the USA was already underway in efforts to do the Nazis in. Wise was Morgenthau's Zionist chum who championed the Armenians, in order to hasten the Ottomans' death, paving a quicker path to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.) Let's not forget the Holocaust was not steeped in fact while occurring, and the reports were construed as rumors. Thinking with the benefit of hindsight is not a privilege for those experiencing events in real time. (Power elaborates on the "plentiful" intelligence [p. 34], and of course there were powerful clues. Disbelief and anti-Semitism were reasons for ignoring the evil deeds, as Power correctly writes further. However, Power's motif is in admonishing governments and common people for not acting sooner, as genocides are developing or are already in the works. In order to act, the reliable facts need to be in. "Intelligence" is not always reliable, as we were painfully reminded not long ago when we were asked to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.)
Moreover, is the above where Peter Balakian latched onto the notion of "double killing"? (Just wondering; never mind.)
During the Turkish campaign against the Armenians this same propensity for incredulity was evident, but it was even more pronounced in the 1940s because of a backlash against the hyped-up "Belgian atrocities" of World War I. During that war, journalists had faithfully relayed tales of bloodthirsty "Huns" mutilating and raping nuns and dismembering Belgian babies. Indeed, they reported claims that the Germans had erected a "corpse-conversion factory where they bioiled human fat and bones into lubricants and glycerine. In the 1920s and 1930s, the press had debunked many of the Allies' wartime reports of German savagery, yielding a "hangover of skepticism." Although many of these stories were confirmed years later, they were still being discredited at the outbreak of World War II.
The above works on so many levels of irony. Note how Power slyly weaves in the "Armenian Genocide," as she will constantly do throughout the book, giving the idea that the Armenian matter was not just any genocide, but perhaps the mold genocides were made from, even in the case of the Holocaust. But if there is any "incredulity" with her opening statement, it concerns the statement itself. Is she out of her mind? The Western world simply ate up sensational stories from the Orient. Readers were weaned on tales of barbaric Turks slicing open innocent Christians, and readily accepted the preposterous claims. Such is the reason why propagandists as Power feel free to repeat these ugly lies this very day, as anti-Turkish prejudice is still very much alive and well.
As Cyrus Hamlin so correctly opined on anti-Turkish propaganda in the late 19th century, "(This) one-sided and unreliable information (about any people) after a long period of unchallenged time, would create hostility and hatred that would not be easily overcome." Truly, how awfully disingenuous of Samantha Power to give the idea that most Westerners did not swallow the tall Armenian tales!
Then she pulls a fast one, letting us know that World War I propaganda against the Germans did actually fall within the realm of her selective knowledge base. While reading these sentences, my mind immediately travelled to, "You idiot! If you are aware that journalists made up such horror stories about the Germans, why are you accepting 'New York Times' reports on the Armenians as the gospel truth?" As if on cue, Samantha Power then sort of replied to my question by giving the impression that all of those anti-WWI German tales were true, after all..!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she points to a 2001 book called German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, by Horne and Kramer, to confirm that the WWI German horror stories "were confirmed years later." Maybe this is an excellent book and the authors have stumbled onto ground-breaking new evidence (although my alarm bells are already up from the choice of the "Denial" word in the title), but I would not be surprised if this was not a "politically selective" book, much like Power's own "A Problem From Hell." It would serve Power's purpose to affirm the German horror stories, because she must be aware of how vulnerable her claims are regarding the "Armenian Genocide." Simply to affirm her beloved Armenian Genocide, one cannot put it past Power to stamp her approval on any and every claim showing the WWI German horror tales to be true.
In fact Bryce and Toynbee together had written a very similar but shorter book about so-called German Atrocities in Belgium. That book contained the same sort of thing seen in the Armenian Blue Book: "X, Y, and Z" and unknown and fraudulent sources. After the war, the Belgians investigated and found that the book was almost completely lies. The Belgians had wanted it to be true, but they reported their findings accurately. Yet no one has looked into the propaganda directed against the Turks. After all these years, no one has decried this propaganda. If one reads the basic books on the British Propaganda Ministry, and there are quite a few books on the subject, they never discuss the campaign against the Turks, only the Germans. I believe the reason that no one has researched the topic and uncovered the lies told of the Turks is that no one cared. They were just Turks.
Prof Justin McCarthy's Jan. 19, 2001 presentation on British Propaganda. The key to focus on is that the Belgians themselves investigated after the war, and the Belgians had two advantages over the authors of the 2001 book that Power chose to put her entire faith in: The events were fresh enough to have allowed for a proper investigation, and the Belgians were the last people to have covered up for the Germans. Power elaborates that her "Denial" book documents the "brutal German campaign" resulting in "6,500 Belgian and French civilians," challenging "the assumption held for most of the twentieth century that the World War I atrocity reports were hyped." It sounds to me like what the authors did was "hype up" the civilian deaths that come with any war. Sure, the Germans were not angels, and they were furious with the Belgians for fighting back. When Belgian civilians would fire at the Germans, the Germans would hit back, killing innocents as well. These possible "genocide partisans" who wrote the book probably pointed to these civilian deaths and made them out to be "atrocities." (Although it sounds like Power is going farther, lending credence to the atrocity stories about nuns & babies, and the one about making humans into soap.) If this is the case, it is spectacularly awful of Power to attempt to erase the misdeeds of British war propagandists on the basis of one agenda-ridden book.
Melchior Palyi reviewed a 1944 book Lemkin had written entitled Axis Rule over Occupied Europe, and produced a line that resonates with truth: "...The Nazis shamelessly displayed their intentionally planned misdeeds, while the western Allies stumble into illegal practices and cover them with humanitarian or other formula." Brr! What a cutting analogy with the sanctimonious "genocide scholar" who sometimes produces greater evil than the presumed evil-doer on the genocide scholar's holy crusade. (We'll be touching on this powerful point, as we wind up this page.) Palyi went on to write that Lemkin had written a "prosecutor's brief" rather than an "impartial" inquiry. Once again, an on-the-nose observation about the genocide scholar! (Lemkin appears to have made the mold with his dogma.) Power doesn't seem to care for Palyi much, dismissing his words as "false equivalency" (p. 39).
Lemkin was somewhat conflicted about the roots of responsibility and the relative role of individual and collective guilt, theories of accountability that continue to compete today. On the one hand, Lemkin urged the punishment of those individuals responsible for Nazi horrors. On the other, he espoused an early version of the theory, put forth again recently by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, that ascribed guilt not only to the perpetrators of the crimes but to their fellow citizens who failed to stop them and often appeared actively supportive.
I've got the feeling Power is a fan of the latter "theory of accountability." Maybe this is why she appears to hate Turks; she is so strongly a believer of the "Armenian Genocide," to the extent of presenting one false fact after another in a pathetic pursuit of affirmation, she feels that all Turks must be cut from the same Nazi cloth. (As she strongly alluded in the PBS show.) Looks like her hero Lemkin could have been her role model on this count; another reviewer of Lemkin's book (p. 40) "faulted Lemkin's sweeping ascription of blame." By finding "innate viciousness" in the German people, Lemkin was feeding "nazism-in-reverse." This is what we would call the genocide scholar's tendency for racism, folks.
On p. 44, Power allows readers to conclude that 1,765,000 Jews (as believed in Dec. 1944) were gassed and cremated in Auschwitz between April 1942 and April 1944. Yet a former director of Washington's Holocaust Museum (in response to former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess' signed assertion for killing some 2.5 million), Jeshajahu Weinberg, is on record for explaining: "Today historians believe that the total number of inmates who perished in Auschwitz was a million and a half, or even less." (The Holocaust Museum in Washington, 2002, p. 153.) So why is genocide scholar Samantha Power not bothering to correct the higher number, at least with a footnote? In her book, she also refers to the total Jewish mortality as six million, when the Holocaust Museum has settled for a median of 5.25 million. Shouldn't professional "genocide scholars" be aware of these revised figures? Or can it be that they really don't care about the facts? (Perhaps they are afraid of being called "revisionists.")
In 1946, Lemkin showed up in Nuremberg as a (as Power puts in parentheses) "lobbyist" to get "genocide" spotlighted. Roaming in the corridors, a lawyer described Lemkin as "a man in pain." Learning of the death of his parents, he went into "overdrive," bugging the personnel. One lawyer remembers Lemkin as a "disheveled, disoriented refugee less concerned with hanging the Nazi war criminals than with getting genocide included in the tribunal's list of punishable crimes." Power continues: "Most of the prosecutors tried to avoid him, seeing him as a nag or, in Yiddish, a nudnik."
Setting the "holier-than-thou" agenda-driven genocide scholar prototype beautifully. No wonder genocide scholars worship this man.
He then decided to infiltrate the U.N. in late 1946 (emphasis Holdwater's): "Security guards were willing to look the other way when the unaccredited, somewhat fanatical lawyer would turn any empty UN office into his home for the day — 'like a hermit crab.'" Two New York Times reporters "recall the horror of many a correspondent and diplomat when the wild-eyed professor with steel-rimmed glasses and a relentless appetite for rejection began sprinting after them in the corridors saying, 'You and I, we must change the world.'"
"He was always there like a shadow, a presence, floating through the halls and constantly pulling scraps of paper out of his pockets. He was not loved because he was known as a time consumer. If he managed to nab you, you were trapped. Correspondents on deadline used to run from him like mad. But he would run after them, tie flopping in the air, genocide story at the ready."
"Most of the correspondents who bothered to notice Lemkin wondered how he made ends meet... In his rush to persuade delegates to support him, he frequently fainted from hunger. Completely alone in the world and perennially sleepless, he often wandered the streets at night." (p. 52)
I suppose passages of the above were presented to show how charming Lemkin was on one hand, and his dogged persistence was rightly highlighted, as persistence brings results. And so, Lemkin finally succeeded in getting the United Nations to adopt the genocide convention as law. However, the above also displays the role model for genocide scholars to follow, and it's all there: the dogma, the single-mindedness, the sanctimony... it's actually pretty scary.
ADDENDUM, 8-07:
While Lemkin gets the credit for coining the word "genocide," another source claims the Greek word has been around for a very long time. (YENOKHTONIA; albeit, its meaning may not have been quite the same.) If this is the case, Lemkin's credit lies in Anglicizing the word, not inventing it.
Power examines what the Convention's critical "in part" part signifies. A U.S. senator asked (p. 66), "Let us assume there is a group of 200,000. Would that have to mean that you would have to murder 100,001 before a major part would come under the definition?" Lemkin stressed that partial destruction obviously had to be "of such substantial nature that it affects the existence of the group as a group." Looks like the ICTJ's requirement that the perpetrator would need to kill only one person is shown for the absurdity that it is. (The ICTJ, a body of lawyers, agreed there was an "Armenian Genocide" by consulting Armenian propaganda sources, just as Samantha Power.)
One danger for this genocide law to be used for purposes of evil rests with exactly this: lawyers can argue all they desire regarding these fine points, but the layman will always regard a genocide as a "Final Solution," in the Nazi-Jewish mold. This is when the doors are opened to hatred and demonization. Nobody likes to be compared with the Nazis. And Samantha Power, to provide a very handy example (and using the Turks as the perpetrators), is the first to make this Nazi-Turkish juxtaposition. Such a comparison becomes particularly insidious when the case is built politically, with no concern for genuine historical facts.
U.S. lawmakers were concerned that ratification would license critics of the USA to investigate the Indians, segregation in the South, and other matters. Power assures the reader, however, that "Reckoning with American brutality against native peoples was long overdue, but the convention, which was not retroactive, could not be used to press the matter." (p. 67.) Let's keep this thought alive, folks, as we'll be returning to it.
Lemkin himself pooh-poohed the segregation issue: "In the Negro problem the intent is to preserve the group on a different level of existence, but not to destroy it." How do you like that! Lemkin himself just threw a monkey wrench into his own "Armenian Genocide" thesis. If we turn to Ambassador Morgenthau, Samantha Power's favorite source other than the New York Times, we learn from Morgenthau's Aug. 8, 1915 diary entry that "[Talat] said they want to treat the Armenians like we treat the negroes." In other words, what Talat had in mind for the traitorous Armenians was "segregation." (Morgenthau wondered whether Talat meant the "Indians," which is one reason why Power loves Morgenthau so much. They both think so genocidally!)
On p. 68, Power notes that Lemkin, in reference to congressional opposition to his convention, remarked: "If somebody does not like mustard, he will always find a reason why he doesn't like it, after you have convinced him that the previous reason has no validity." Why, shut my mouth! Doesn't that describe perfectly the lack of rationality for pro-genocide people..! Just substitute "the fact that the Turks did not commit genocide" for "mustard." (And if that is too hard to follow, simply substitute "Turks.")
Then we get into the fear of the Soviets; "Because Lemkin recognized that including political groups would split the Legal Committee and doom the law, he, too, had lobbied for their exclusion." (The footnote tells us he also did away with the requirement for "cultural genocide," basically in order to "save a ship.") Power comments that "the exclusion of political groups from the convention made it much harder in the late 1970s to demonstrate that the Khmer Rouge were committing genocide in Cambodia..."
Lemkin did not care for a new 1951 Human Rights Commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, for fear that it would dilute his genocide convention. "As he attacked the human rights treaty and its sponsors, Lemkin found himself mouthing the same arguments as notorious human rights abusers." (P. 74.) Roosevelt herself became a target. As Footnote 39 explains, "In December 1951 she forever earned Lemkin's disdain when a reporter asked her to comment on the charges lodged by the East European expatriate and exile groups in the United States that the Soviet Union was committing genocide. Roosevelt replied casually: 'How could you prove it? I'm not sure you can prove that. Unless you can prove it, there's no use bringing it up.' ... Although Roosevelt had been a frequent critic of Soviet human rights abuses, Lemkin heard her skepticism as a familiar form of denial."
Eleanor Roosevelt, neo-Nazi genocide denier, honored
on a stamp. In 1940 she had written, ""Hate and force
cannot be in just a part of the world without having
an effect on the rest of it"... Words that will go over
the heads of hatred-spreading genocide scholars.
It's kind of funny that not only would Lemkin butt heads with the cause of "human rights" that lay at the heart of his genocide convention, he would actually think of Eleanor Roosevelt.... Eleanor Roosevelt!... as a "denier." Once again, the intolerant and sanctimonious way of the "my way or the highway" genocide scholar.
Power writes that women were attracted to Lemkin but he made no time for them, saying, "I can't afford to fall in love." His genocide agenda superseded all. Reminds me of when Taner Akcam was asked whether he would write his memoirs during a radio interview, and Akcam replied, "I don't have time. I think working on the Genocide is more important..."
Lemkin hoped to write a genocide book, but publishers rejected him, thinking no one would want to read such a work. How times have changed. These days, a non-scholar can write a genocide book, basing one chapter 100% on propaganda, and the book can go on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Power's Choice of Genocides
As Humphrey Bogart kind of said in CASABLANCA, "Of all the gin-ocides in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." Let's see what grabbed Samantha Power's attention:
1) The "Armenian Genocide"
2) Cambodia
3) Iraqi Kurds
4) Bosnia
5) Rwanda
6) Srebrenica
7) Kosovo
It may be argued that the last two are subsets of "Bosnia," definitely in the case of "Srebrenica," as the perpetrator was the same. So, really, Power looked into four genocides that followed her favorite one that began the book.
Of these four: Rwanda. A genocide, without question.
(ADDENDUM, 9-08: Or... was it? That is, did Rwanda fulfill the U.N. Convention's requirements, in particular the exclusion of political groups? It is easy to make genocide conclusions when we've been exclusively fed one politically-motivated version of events, and we don't bother to investigate in cases we are not emotionally involved. Read "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat.")
Is Cambodia really a genocide? Not in the sense that the Khmer Rouge behaved so horrifyingly; it was definitely a "genocide" in the pure and non-technical sense of the word. But other than the bothersome "political" catch (ones who were killed basically couldn't conform well to the mindless new order; Power explained above that the exclusion of political groups made this example difficult to define, but I'm not quite sure how this exclusion was dealt with), what we had was Cambodian vs. Cambodian. Article 2 of the Convention specifies that the victims need to belong to either a national, ethnical, racial or religious group that is presumably different than the corresponding identity of the perpetrator. In that sense, what we have cannot technically be called a "genocide." An Israeli quoted in Power's chapter describes Cambodia as "auto-genocide," and that is precisely what Cambodia boils down to. But in the end, how does the Cambodian example conform to the UN Convention?
If it does not conform, what is Cambodia doing in Power's list? The idea here is not that Cambodia wasn't a genocide... it most certainly was one of the worst cases of systematic and government-directed slaughter in the 20th century. The idea is to emphasize that people can make a "genocide" out of anything, even in the rare clear-cut case that does not abide by the technical definition. Imagine how cases that are far foggier could also be manipulated.
This is the worst thing about "genocide." If someone wants to make a genocide out of a conflict for political gain, it is not so difficult to do. By doing so, one commits a greater wrong, in a sense, by saddling the accused with the charge of a ruinous crime. Given how irrational and dogmatic and faith-based and uncaring-of-historical- facts that "genocide scholars" are, woe to the accused who "denies" the charge. The genocide scholar is holier than the rest of us, and if members of their club decree an event as a "genocide," their conclusion must be accepted as law.
Another Danger of Genocide Politics:
...[W]e must focus solely on... an ideological basis for further "humanitarian intervention" in the future — the Pol Pot atrocities were explicitly used to justify US intervention in Central America in the '80s, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses and endless destruction.
Noam Chomsky, "Atrocities in Cambodia," ChomskyChat Forum
Iraqi Kurds
The Kurds are the darlings of the West, especially because the West hates Turkey, and what a wonderful opportunity to weaken the Turks, by heaping "human rights" abuses. Exactly as Western imperialists did with the Ottoman Empire, by taking the side of the Christian minorities. The idea was to cause the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Today, by insisting on a "Kurdistan," what a great way to break up Turkey. Never mind that the PKK is a terrorist organization; when Turkey responds to PKK attacks, the West must condemn Turkey for being brutal with the Kurds, at times even charging a "genocide" against Kurds.
Samantha Power's duty appears to be to cause harm to Turkey. It would help to create sympathy for Kurds as "genocide victims."
Now, how many among us thought of what happened to Iraqi Kurds as a "genocide"? You can bet few of us have. Given the broad stipulations of the convention, Power can rightly point to the "in part" part and cry genocide. (Even though she would be ignoring hero Lemkin's own rule; "in part" must be substantial enough to endanger the existence of the group, as you have read above, and the still-to-be-confirmed intentional deaths of hundreds by no means threatened the existence of the Iraqi Kurds.) This kind of manipulation, however, further makes the word meaningless. We can point to many conflicts that have occurred in the latter part of the 20th century, and come up with genocides... including the carpet bombing actions of the USA in the Vietnam War, and Soviet actions in their invasion of Afghanistan. We can even cite the invasion of Iraq by the USA.
The reason why Samantha Power has spotlighted the Kurds is political in nature.
There are still legitimate questions pertaining to whether Saddam used chemical weapons. Trust me, I'm not defending a brutal tyrant like Saddam. He was certainly "bad." Yet it's easier to attribute a bad act to a bad man, without being as demanding of proof.
Power keeps going back and forth in her chapter, with examples of whether the people were hit by the poison or not. Her agenda, of course, is to make it seem as though the chemical attacks were a deliberate certainty. With genocide scholars, their conclusions must always be foregone.
The Federation of American Scientists tells us that chemical weapons were used by the Iraqis to counter Iranian human-wave assaults. It was a horrible war crime as far as I'm concerned. But one might argue, wasn't Iran also committing a "genocide" (that is, an "auto-genocide") when it sent waves of their defenseless soldiers to certain death?
"The first chemical attacks by Saddam Hussein against civilian populations included attacks launched by Iraqi aircraft against 20 small villages in 1987. Saddam Hussein's forces reportedly killed hundreds of Iraqi Kurds with chemical agents in the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988. The poison gas attack on Halabja was the largest-scale chemical weapons (CW) attack against a civilian population in modern times. Halabja had a population of about 80,000 people who was predominantly Kurdish and had sympathised with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Troops from the Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) entered Halabja on 15th March 1988, accompanied by Iranian revolutionary guards."
As with the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, Iraqi Kurds were collaborating with the enemy. (An enemy, as with Russia in the Ottoman example, who didn't care for the well-being of the Kurds, and was only using them.) Already, there is a political alliance in play, excluded by the Genocide Convention.
With the above, we get the idea chemical weapons were used in Kurdish villages while the Kurds were with the enemy (Iranian revolutionary guards). This was not "nice" of that nogoodnik Saddam Hussein, but I don't know if it constitutes "genocide."
A Jude Wanniski in a site called What Really Happened (in response to Sandy Berger, who asserted the genocidal gassing on a TV news show) reasonably tells us that using such weapons in wartime is not nearly as serious as "gassing his own people." Wanniski also claims the US Army War College came up empty, regarding real proof.
In a letter to Jesse Helms:
What disturbs me even now, Jesse, is that these meetings occurred after the Senate Foreign Relations committee had accused Iraq of using poison gas against its own people, i.e., the Kurds. Like all other Americans, in recent years I had assumed that what I read in the papers was true about Iraq gassing its own people. Once the war drums again began beating last November, I decided to read up on the history, and found Iraq denied having used gas against its own people. Furthermore, I heard that a Pentagon investigation at the time had also turned up no hard evidence of Saddam gassing his own people.
This is serious stuff, because the US Army War College tells us that 1.4 million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the sanctions, which is 3,000 times more than the number of Kurds who supposedly died of gassing at the hands of Saddam.
Now that's powerful food for thought! In its imposition of sanctions, did the USA commit a "genocide" on the Iraqi people?
An excerpt from the Pentagon report follows:
It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, the Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraqi-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing a great many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack, even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.
So here is the possibility that Iran might have been a "chemical culprit"! The above is followed by:
Thus, in our view, the Congress acted more on the basis of emotionalism than factual information...
And doesn't that have a familiar "genocide scholar" ring to it!
One of the authors of the Pentagon report, Stephen C. Pelletiere, contributed an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times in 2003 called. "A War Crime or an Act of War?"
...[T]he truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington...
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target...
...[A]ccusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
His article ends with:
Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?
A Prof. Cole of Michigan University (hotbed for the "Armenian Genocide") rebutted Pelletiere ("Did Saddam Gas the Kurds?"), calling him "just plain wrong." Documents "from the Iraqi secret police and military were captured by Kurdish rebels from 1991 forward," referring to "Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Kurds, called 'Anfal' (spoils) operations." He added that Iran's use of gas is not supported by "good evidence"; "Since Iran and the Kurds were allies, Iran in any case had no motive to gas thousands of Kurds." (Even when "allies," Iran has no love for Kurds. We can't say Iranians were culprits, but here is a possible motive: knowledge that Iraqis would get the blame.)
"The Kurdish minority of northern Iraq speaks an Indo-European language very different from the Semitic language of Arabic, and has long sought greater autonomy from Baghdad," Cole continues, and it was for this reason Saddam struck with conventional "ethnic cleansing," followed by "39 separate gas attacks against the Kurds" on March 16-17, 1988, killing an estimated 5,000. Cole adds that hydrogen cyanide might have been used, which is possessed by neither Iraq nor Iran. He also states some high Iraqi officials have admitted to the chemical attacks. He gets into the gung-ho spirit of the impending war (his article was written a month-and-a-half before the bombs dropped) at analysis' end with: "World order, human rights and international law are... not served by allowing a genocidal monster to remain in power."
That last line betrays the professor as entering into emotional "Samantha Power" labeling territory, and is not the domain of a cool, dispassionate scientist... revealing his bias, and throwing into question the rest of his claims, claims that he seems to have accepted without question. (Such as a "5,000" mortality; that's a big gap with the "hundreds" we had read earlier.) Maybe these documents are on the level, maybe they are not. The caliber of official admissions made while Saddam was in power sounds suspicious (I can't imagine there would have been much contrition), but it's easier to imagine admissions that might have been made since. I don't know if there have been any, but imagining the possibility, such admissions could easily have been made under pressure. Ottoman officials also made statements during the 1919-20 puppet Ottoman courts, while a good number were in prison. This serves as a complete parallel to The Iraqi Special Tribunal, the creation of an illegal occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein. Yes, I know it's "Saddam Hussein," but the fact is, for at least the first year of his imprisonment, an imprisonment that is no more legal than the detainment of Turks who were thrown into Malta, he was entirely cut off from the outside world, denied the right to meet with friends or lawyers of his choice, and under the care of guards sharing the same mentality as those in charge of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Power ends her emotionally-written chapter with forensic evidence collected by Human Rights Watch in "Iraqi Kurdistan" in 1992-93. There is no question Iraqi Kurds suffered under the brutal hand of Saddam Hussein. Again, however, we are at the mercy of passionate genocide partisans determined to find genocides, as long as their designated victims are on the "approved" list. They will ignore all other considerations that don't fit in with their agendas. Collaborating with the enemy during war certainly fudges the "genocide" issue; such would serve as a political alliance.
In 1992, we had Karabakh. Armenians swept down in a sneak attack, helped by one billion dollars in Russian military might (along with some token Russian manpower), and millions from American taxpayers. The Armenians committed heinous acts of ethnic cleansing, involving mutilations and dismemberment, all in order to frighten away the populace — some 800,000 Azeris, many still living in the squalor of refugee camps — and stealing 16% of Azerbaijan's territory. Even though what occurred wasn't "really" a genocide, this episode fits into Power's definition, stressing the "in part" part. Why do not the "genocidal" crimes of the Armenians make it into Power's hypocritical book?
One of the manipulative and emotional passages in Power's "Iraq" chapter was this: "The horrors of gassing entered the Western imagination back in April 1915, when British soldiers were subjected to what Churchill called the 'hellish poison' of German mustard gas." (P. 205)
Churchill would grow to wonder, however, as to why the other wusses in Britain's War Office displayed a 'squeamishness about the use of gas.' Poison gas was okay in Churchill's book, as long as it was used against "uncivilised tribes.' (Other than the probability of poison gas used against Turks in the Dardanelles invasion Churchill was behind), the uncivilized tribe he had in mind here was the Iraqi Kurds of Kirkuk, rising against British rule in 1920; Churchill gave them a good dose of the "hellish poison."
I have a little bias against the Serbs. Some of them can be pretty kooky, living in 1389, still battling in Kosovo (where the Serbs came under the domination of the Ottomans. Not long before, it was the Serbian Empire that had taken over Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania. You can bet fair Ottoman rule saved these people from the heavy hand of the Serbs, although the Turks will never get the credit for it). The extremists among them share too many characteristics of Orthodox cousins like Greeks and Armenians, considering the hatred of Turks to be patriotic, and making any statement that is expedient, the truth be damned. The prevarications of the Serbian leadership during the break-up of Yugoslavia was a phenomenon most became familiar with. The worst shared characteristic lies with how merciless and murderous they can all be, in ethnic cleansing mode. Turcophobes who have seen these Orthodox brothers in "genocidal" action often forget their bigoted feelings toward Turks and marvel at how much worse these "Christians" could be.
In fact, the Serbo-Montenegrins, once freed from the Turkish yoke, tried to impose upon other nations, be they Catholics or Moslems, a yoke which was much heavier than that of the Turks. "No Turk," wrote Miss Durham in that same book, "ever treated the Armenians worse than did the two Serb peoples treat the Albanians in the name of the Orthodox Church"
From "Albania's Golgotha," Leo Freundlich; the book referred to above must be Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (London, 1920, p. 235), written by Mary Edith Durham, who "spent many years in the Balkans." Aubrey Herbert said of her, "It was only the cruelty of the Serbs that turned her affection into dislike."
Two examples each from other surprised westerners, representing the Greeks & Armenians:
"...According to reports from senior officials, such as the commanders of American warships at Smyrna and the Swedish Consul there, as well as prominent American residents of the city, the Greek Army and Greek officials in Smyrna had been acting in such a manner there as to place them in the same class of 'semi-barbarity' as the Turks." Laurence Evans, United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914-1924, 1965, p. 180; citing June 10, 1919 Westermann memo, Peace Conference files, 867.01/41.
One more: "Greeks killed over five hundred Muslims in acts 'absolutely barbaric' and 'equal to the worst that the Turks have ever done'", according to eyewitness Alexander MacLachlan of International College. Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American policy, 1810-1927.
"...[W]here Armenians advanced and retired with the Russians their retaliatory cruelties unquestionably rivaled the Turks in their inhumanity." Gen. James Harbord, Harbord Commission report
One more: "...[M]any others almost fanatically in favour of the Armenians, became so disgusted by the baseness of their nature as to abandon them with satisfaction to their fate." Mark Sykes, 1904.
And there is little question that if the Bosnian Serbs and Serbs of Serbia had the opportunity, they would have exterminated every last one of the Bosnian Muslims, and probably the Croats, in a case of "religious" and not "ethnic" cleansing. These people were Slavic, after all, even though Serbs and Croats would prefer to highlight their differences. (And the crazies among the Serbs referred to the Muslims as "Turks.")
Yet I am able, for a good part, to keep a lid on my prejudices. While I generally consider what happened in Bosnia a "genocide" (Serb leaders such as Milosevic and Karadzic roused the rabble, no differently than Armenian committee members worked Ottoman-Armenian crowds, along "racial" lines. Those were heartbreaking times, as Bosnian Serbs who had surrounded Sarajevo were taking potshots at innocent civilians, and women were systematically raped, with the knowledge that culturally and religiously, for a woman to be "soiled" among Muslims would be devastating), and the Serbs appeared as the obvious villains, there were times I ran into disturbing accounts that made me wonder. Such as with the photographs of the skeletal "concentration camp" victims... there might have been tricks at work that made the picture not quite what the public was led to believe. (It's not that the bodies of these victims could have been faked, simply that there might have been false manipulation behind the scenes in order to get the West cracking. Which might not have been a bad thing, as anyone who remembers those times is aware the Muslims were up the creek. But a falsehood is a falsehood.)
Knowing what I know about the dirty politics of genocide, I am sometimes uncomfortable about referring to these events as a "genocide." (Even though the shorthand of "genocide" has been difficult to resist in this case; there are pages in the TAT site that are accepting of Bosnia as a genocide.) The main chapter in these sad tragic times that can be labeled a clear-cut genocide, as far as I'm concerned, is Srebrenica.
It's not that the Serbs' villainy is uncertain. Trials at the Hague have spotlighted their awful acts. Here is an example featured on TAT. (But the example is Srebrenica.)
What we're getting at here, is that the clean conclusion of "genocide" is a rarity. And we can't rely on emotional and unscrupulous "genocide scholars" to separate fact from fiction.
To conclude this chapter on Bosnia, and whether it really was a "genocide," let's point to a favorite source of Samantha Power published one day shy of the "Armenian Genocide" celebration. In an intelligently written article entitled "THE BOSNIA CALCULATION: How many have died? Not nearly as many as some would have you think" (George Kenney, The NY Times Magazine, April 23, 1995), we are told, "There can be no minimizing of what the Serbs have done in Bosnia. Their punishment of the Muslims far outweighs any Muslim transgression," which no one (save for some delirious Serbs) can argue with. We are also told, quite reasonably, that "Bosnia isn't the Holocaust or Rwanda; it's Lebanon." The author disputes the commonly provided mortality figure of 200,000, and suggests "25,000 to 60,000 — total from all sides."
"What surprises me is not that the popular figure is so inflated... but that it has been so widely and uncritically accepted." Well, that's "genocide politics," Mr. Kenney. And the fact that whomever controls the information has a monopoly on "genocide."
As far as why the figure of 200,000 provided by the Bosnian Deputy Minister of Information was universally accepted, the author hits it on the nose by writing, "An inert press simply never bothered to learn the origins of the numbers it reported." That is because the Muslims were designated as the victims, and whatever the victim says in genocide politics must be automatically accepted. This serves as the perfect parallel as to why the press mindlessly and infuriatingly prints Armenian genocide claims at face value, such as "More than one million killed."
Toward the article's conclusion, Kenney wrote, "In 1995, lacking the bodies, the charge of Genocide has worn thin. It seems to have almost become sensationalism for its own sake. Apart from any question of the number of fatalities, journalists have begun a hot little debate about how 'objective' coverage of Bosnia has been, about whether it has tended to favor the Muslims."
I don't know about the charge of "genocide" wearing thin, not if we listen to crusaders like Samantha Power. But the rest of that paragraph rings so true, regarding the "Armenian Genocide."
A Bosnian Serb now living in America, Nebojsa Malic, cries about how unrecognized the "genocide" against Serbs during WWII has been. (This raises an interesting point. Why have Armenians and Greeks become the darlings of the West, their claims accepted at face value, but not "Orthodox blood brothers," the Serbs?) It is true, Serbs were victims during WWII, at the hands of the Croats who, like the Armenians, joined ranks with the Fuehrer. (So, in fact, did some Bosnian Muslims.) Serb suffering in the past has no relation to Serb misdeeds during the break-up of Yugoslavia, of course, but this segment of Mr. Malic's article is right on the button:
Contrast ... with reports on Srebrenica, where the deaths of several thousand Bosnian Muslim men (claims range from 7,000 to 10,000) have been termed "genocide" by everyone from the press to the Hague Inquisition. Any attempt to question this judgment, based on numerous factual problems with both the allegations and the evidence offered, is denounced as "genocide denial." But the denial of a real, documented genocide in Croatia is not a problem!
To understand this paradox, it is necessary to understand that "genocide" has become above all a political notion. The mass murder of Jews at the hands of Hitler's Reich has been appropriated by the Empire as an argument in favor of "humanitarian intervention" worldwide (e.g., Bosnia, Kosovo). The mass murder of Serbs at the hands of the Ustasha, with the active involvement of the Catholic Church, does not fit into Empire's carefully crafted and nurtured image of Serbs as evil murderers, and Croats, "Bosnians," and Albanians as their innocent victims. Politically, it is worse than useless: it is harmful.
ADDENDUM, 9-07: "Bragging Rights Dept.": One half year after the above was written, the United Nations' highest court in the Hague, the International Court of Justice, declared in February 2007 that what Serbia and Bosnian Serbs did to the Bosnian Muslims, save for Srebrenica [where only the Bosnian Serbs were blamed for the act of genocide], did not constitute a "genocide." Ladies and gentlemen, please take note: Holdwater is a much more trustworthy voice in genocide matters than your typically agenda-ridden "genocide scholar."
Kosovo is no clear-cut case of "genocide," either.
Power writes, "With every KLA attack on a Serbian official, Serbian reprisals intensified, as Serb gunmen torched whole villages suspected of housing KLA loyalists. In the following year, some 3,000 Albanians were killed and some 300,000 others were expelled from their homes..." (P. 445.)
Now that is all horrible. On the other hand, would the response from a "good guy" nation be so different, when dealing with a "liberation army" of separatists? For example, what is described above is not too different than the heavy-handed actions of Israel we have become familiar with, but look the other way on. Why hasn't Israel made it into a chapter in Samantha Power's book? (That is a rhetorical question.)
Regardless, I'm grateful the Allied forces tweaked Serbia's nose in this episode. At least it served as payback to what Serbia had done to Albanians toward the beginning of the 20th century, in one of the more neglected episodes of "genocide." (The "Golgotha," which may have been one of the "real" first genocides of the 20th century. "Golgotha," by the way, is the same word used by Peter Balakian's lying "holy" relative, in the title of his book, one that persuaded Vahakn Dadrian to go off on his slimy genocide-affirming path.)
The Wrap-Up
Since Samantha Power confirmed that the U.N. Convention does not apply to conflicts of the past, isn't it interesting that she made sure to include only one pre-1948 example in her book, when she could have selected a post 1948 example to supplement her paltry handful of examples. There is good reason why she singled out the Ottoman Empire, or "Turkey," as she makes sure to refer to the regime Turkey had overthrown. (To establish her demonizing connection with modern Turks.)
Her genocide club has participants that live and breathe to demonize Turks, and Samantha Power must also become a full-fledged demonizer, in order to benefit from this profitable club. Like many westerners, she likely had a good dosage of anti-Turkish prejudice to begin with, and this process was not difficult for her to absorb.
But as you have seen, in her "Race Murder" chapter, Power has thrown her ethics out the window; she has chosen to rely on the most corrupt sources, such as Ambassador Morgenthau and the New York Times. She has purposely turned a complete blind eye (save for the 200,000 mortality count of the professors Shaw) to anything that does not come from the land of Armenian propaganda.
The genocide scholar is a political creature, posing as an honorable fact teller. The UN Convention is so broad, practically any conflict can be made to appear as a genocide, particularly if the genocide scholar makes sure to rely exclusively on one side, and a propagandistic side at that. Genocide is now a politicized tool, and those who cry out against the so-called genocides determined by genocide scholars can easily be dismissed with name calling, such as "denier." When an arguer degenerates to getting personal, the arguer is showing a sign that her argument can't be won by genuine facts. The political agenda is all that is important, and it does not matter to the genocide scholar to perpetuate hatred and racism through false "facts."
There is always another side to a story. If you want to find more than one reality, you need to constantly dig the soil until your hands are bloody, as a brave Greek-Cypriot put it. The mission of the genocide scholar is to stifle debate and the truth, if facts get in the way of the genocide scholar's agenda.
The "denier," Eleanor Roosevelt, was on to something. If you can't prove something, don't bother. But the genocide scholar, knowing that "proof" of genocides are often difficult to come by, has no reservation about making the proof up.
The genocide scholar, while appearing as noble and the pursuer of a just cause (as the missionaries who had preceded them, in Turk-vilifying territory), has become an instrument of evil.
Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, has said:
"War of aggression is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
To underline the hypocrisy of the genocide scholars, how often have they seriously gone after the "good guys" of history?
For example: could not the U.S. invasion of Iraq be called a war of aggression? It's great that a creep like Saddam Hussein has been ousted, of course. Hopefully, in time, a better system of government will emerge in Iraq. But at the moment, the outlook is terrifying. Separatist Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites and other ethnic groups are interested only in their personal causes. Islamic terrorists are always waiting in the wings. Time will tell whether U.S. actions will make the situation better or worse for the Iraqis, and probably it will take a long time.
For the moment, as of this writing, some 45,000 Iraqi civilians were killed (the provided link forms calculations from published reports; the total mortality is likely higher. ADDENDUM, 11-06: An A. P. article by Stephen Hurst, "Iraqi official: 150,000 civilians dead": "Iraq's health minister estimated 150,000 civilians have been killed in the war — about three times previously accepted estimates"); as a result of the U.S. action, a war that had nothing to do with "necessity." (The July 23, 2003 "Downing Street Memo" reveals that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Iraq had not attacked the United States nor made any threat to do so. The unprovoked attack on another sovereign nation is a war of aggression.)
These are some 45,000 people who would have remained alive, had the USA not attacked. An April 26, 2003 report prepared by "Members of the Anti-War Spanish Brigade" documents 42 attacks on the Iraqi civilian population, between March 20 and April 5, 2003. It is not meant to be an exhaustive record, the report tells us, but one of the "breadth, systematic nature and severity with respect to the number of civilian victims and material damage caused by Anglo-American attacks." U.S. warplanes also targeted the civilian infrastructure, such as the destruction of the nation's grid, knocking out essential services as sewage and electricity.
Who is going to tell us that certain tragedies outlined in Samantha Power's book were worse than the current tragedy that is largely unspoken? Will it be the "genocide scholar"?
(And I'm not trying to rag on my own country here. Just trying to make a point.)
Lemkin hoped to include "cultural genocide" in his convention. The US military took great care to protect the offices of the oil ministry, but ignored (and perhaps even encouraged; the break-up of Iraq would, after all, serve U.S. interests) the systematic looting of Iraq's museums and government buildings, contributing to the destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage. This was in violation of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the event of Armed Conflict (1954), and Article 53 of Geneva IV, in 1949.
We speak of the gassing of Iraqi Kurds, the specifics of which still need to be verified conclusively, and yet the U.S. forces used VX and other nerve gasses during the Vietnam war. ("Chemical and Biological Weapons Used in Vietnam," Gerard Van der Leun, Earth magazine, April 1972.)
... Millions of (Vietnamese) were fleeing into the slums of Saigon from US saturation bombing of the densely-populated Meking Delta... Americans estimate the deaths in Indochina at about 100,000; journalists sometimes report that figure too; official figures are over 3 million. If we discovered that ordinary Germans estimated Holocaust deaths at a few hundred thousand, there would (properly) be an outcry. Have you heard one here?
... US crimes are off the agenda.
According to a Reuters article written by Stephanie Nebehay, the United Nations' Committee against Torture informed the United States that any secret jails it ran for foreign terrorism suspects, along with the Guantanamo Bay facility, were illegal and should be closed. U.S. policy was found to be in violation of another U.N. Convention, one from 1987 targeting Torture or other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The article also mentioned concerns regarding domestic U.S. jails, "particularly at the use of electro-shock devices, the shackling of women inmates during childbirth and police brutality."
And the following is presented as a flip side to the Serbia-perpetrated "genocides," a people's tribunal that found the USA and NATO guilty of war crimes against Yugoslavia in 1999. I'm not saying their findings are to be taken at face value, because there are obviously a lot of people in the world with a beef against the USA, a nation that — it must never be forgotten — has done much to advance the cause of good in the world. (Of sixteen countries, one of the eleven judges was a Turk: "Cimile Cakir... journalist for newspaper serving Kurdish community and member of Turkish Human Rights Association. Imprisoned four years in Turkey for human rights activity." I'm already flinching. On the other side of the coin is Ramsey Clark, one of the "prosecutors." While Clark is presented mainly as a joke in the U.S. media, the former attorney general is a man I admire, for his courage.)
Among the charges was "NATO forces used the media to spread lies to demonize the Serbs and their leadership in order to prepare public opinion to prepare for war." Others include "the use of illegal weapons, the purposeful choice of civilian targets," and a Roma (Gypsy) representative charged that NATO occupation led to the expulsion of 100,000 Romas.
The entire point is that those with the power control the information. If those in power lack the morality to tell the truth and are in pursuit of dogmatic agendas, what we wind up with is great injustice. "None" of us really knows what is going on, and for us to accept claims by unscrupulous, agenda-ridden forces only serves to make us the slaves of these villainous forces. Forces of villainy, naturally, will do their utmost to present themselves as holding the moral high ground, and it is this belief in their morality that they use to make us believe in them. The real moral: As Dana Andrews instructed us in CURSE OF THE DEMON, honorable truth seekers must always put their prejudices aside, and ask. And then ask again.
Samantha Power — Yet Another Armenian Apologist
THE PURPOSE OF TALL ARMENIAN TALE (TAT)
...Is to expose the mythological "Armenian genocide," from the years 1915-16. A wartime tragedy involving the losses of so many has been turned into a politicized story of "exclusive victimhood," and because of the prevailing prejudice against Turks, along with Turkish indifference, those in the world, particularly in the West, have been quick to accept these terribly defamatory claims involving the worst crime against humanity. Few stop to investigate below the surface that those regarded as the innocent victims, the Armenians, while seeking to establish an independent state, have been the ones to commit systematic ethnic cleansing against those who did not fit into their racial/religious ideal: Muslims, Jews, and even fellow Armenians who had converted to Islam. Criminals as Dro, Antranik, Keri, Armen Garo and Soghoman Tehlirian (the assassin of Talat Pasha, one of the three Young Turk leaders, along with Enver and Jemal) contributed toward the deaths (via massacres, atrocities, and forced deportation) of countless innocents, numbering over half a million. What determines genocide is not the number of casualties or the cruelty of the persecutions, but the intent to destroy a group, the members of which are guilty of nothing beyond being members of that group. The Armenians suffered their fate of resettlement not for their ethnicity, having co-existed and prospered in the Ottoman Empire for centuries, but because they rebelled against their dying Ottoman nation during WWI (World War I); a rebellion that even their leaders of the period, such as Boghos Nubar and Hovhannes Katchaznouni, have admitted. Yet the hypocritical world rarely bothers to look beneath the surface, not only because of anti-Turkish prejudice, but because of Armenian wealth and intimidation tactics. As a result, these libelous lies, sometimes belonging in the category of "genocide studies," have become part of the school curricula of many regions. Armenian scholars such as Vahakn Dadrian, Peter Balakian, Richard Hovannisian, Dennis Papazian and Levon Marashlian have been known to dishonestly present only one side of their story, as long as their genocide becomes affirmed. They have enlisted the help of "genocide scholars," such as Roger Smith, Robert Melson, Samantha Power, and Israel Charny… and particularly those of Turkish extraction, such as Taner Akcam and Fatma Muge Gocek, who justify their alliance with those who actively work to harm the interests of their native country, with the claim that such efforts will help make Turkey more" democratic." On the other side of this coin are genuine scholars who consider all the relevant data, as true scholars have a duty to do, such as Justin McCarthy, Bernard Lewis, Heath Lowry, Erich Feigl and Guenter Lewy. The unscrupulous genocide industry, not having the facts on its side, makes a practice of attacking the messenger instead of the message, vilifying these professors as "deniers" and "agents of the Turkish government." The truth means so little to the pro-genocide believers, some even resort to the forgeries of the Naim-Andonian telegrams or sources based on false evidence, as Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Naturally, there is no end to the hearsay "evidence" of the prejudiced pro-Christian people from the period, including missionaries and Near East Relief representatives, Arnold Toynbee, Lord Bryce, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and so many others. When the rare Westerner opted to look at the issues objectively, such as Admirals Mark Bristol and Colby Chester, they were quick to be branded as "Turcophiles" by the propagandists. The sad thing is, even those who don't consider themselves as bigots are quick to accept the deceptive claims of Armenian propaganda, because deep down people feel the Turks are natural killers and during times when Turks were victims, they do not rate as equal and deserving human beings. This is the main reason why the myth of this genocide has become the common wisdom.