refutations of particular points made by Lewy, but it does draw attention to the continuing effort on the part of Turkey and Turkish apologists to play down or to deny altogether the reality of the first modern genocide.
From a recent reading of Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris“, I was surprised to learn how well-publicised the fate of the Armenians was at the time, with many Western papers, notably the New York Times, carrying almost daily reports of the latest atrocities. Afterwards, though, attempts to bring the leading perpetrators to justice, as happened to the leading Nazis at Nuremberg, were frustrated by Turkish intransigence and realpolitik on the part of the allies, who were eyeing up the Mesopotamian oil fields, and, later, were keen to have Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. So the world forgot. Ninety years later, through all the changes of the political landscape, nothing much has changed.
I’d always thought of Hitler’s remark, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians”, as just a throw-away comment – but of course it wasn’t. He was looking for a historical precedent for the genocide he was planning, and he found it…and he saw that it’d worked. A whole world – one of the earliest Christian civilisations, which had survived for over one and a half millennia spread over Eastern Anatolia, with a large community in Constantinople – was wiped out, and those responsible got away with it. (Oh, they’re restoring one Armenian church at Lake Van, as a tourist attraction. Isn’t that nice?)
The Germans were allies of the Turks during the First World War, helping to overhaul and modernise the Turkish army. Germans were specifically excluded from the anti-Christian jihad that fanned the flames of the Armenian massacres. They must have returned home after the war with some interesting tales to tell. Nearly all the familiar practicalities of the holocaust were prefigured by the Turks, from the nightmare train journeys, and the camps, to the dismissal of local authorities who were insufficiently zealous. And this has a familiar ring:
The Association for the Promotion of Turkish Strength, established in 1913, was dedicated to the military training of the youth so that the nation would become again “a warrior nation” in order to avoid disaster and “the decay of the Turkish race.” ..[T]he War Ministry also sponsored paramilitary youth groups, supplying them with free rifles and ammunition in order to prepare “for the defense of the fatherland.”
The main difference from the Nazi holocaust, apart from the scale, was that the Armenians were killed, on the whole, with considerably more brutality.
Much has been made – notably by Paul Berman – of the influence of Nazism and its Romantic precursors on Muslim thinkers, but the influence has surely not been all one-way.
Postscript: at Secular Blasphemy there’s a link to some photos of the Genocide at the National Archival Service of Norway.
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