The Armenian Genocide: Not An Isolated Episode

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN

(Editor’s Note: April 15 marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Dr. Kalpakgian is a professor emeritus of humanities. His father was a survivor of the genocide of Armenians.)

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During World War I, when the world’s superpowers were engaged in the main arena of battle in Europe, the Ottoman Turks exploited the crisis of the war to pursue their own personal agenda of jihad in eliminating the Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant) Armenians from their land as they pursued their ideology of Pan-Turkism.
Recognized internationally as the Armenian massacres or the first genocide of the 20th century, these unspeakable atrocities annihilated an estimated 1.5 to 2.0 million Armenians — men, women, and children — in the most savage, ruthless, and barbaric form of tortures, starvation, mass executions, and deportations into the deserts of Deir Zor.
This crime against humanity exterminated nearly three-fourths of the Armenians living in Turkey and one-half of all Armenians living at that time in the world. In The Tragedy of a Nation (1918), Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey, explained the diabolical strategy of the Turkish government:
“Now, as four of the Great Powers were at war with them and the two others were their allies, they thought the time opportune to make good the oversight of their ancestors of the fifteenth century. They concluded that, once they had carried out their plan, the Great Powers would find themselves before an accomplished fact and that their crime would be condoned.”
While Turkish propaganda rationalizes that the Armenians were deported or relocated for the purposes of safety during war or claims that the Armenians were threatening revolt or posed a danger to Turkey’s war efforts, these fabrications that give the impression of accidental deaths have never merited credibility from historians.
As an eyewitness of these atrocities, Morgenthau wrote, “Homes were literally uprooted; families were separated; men killed, women and girls violated daily on the way or taken to harems. Children were thrown into rivers or sold to strangers by their mothers to save them from starvation.” The sordid details of cruelty and suffering he observed surpassed “the most beastly and diabolical cruelties ever before perpetrated or imagined in the history of the world.”
The magnitude of the evils perpetrated by the Young Turks in their crusade for nationalism or pan-Turkism established a precedent for other genocides of the 20th century to eliminate foreigners or alien races. Adolf Hitler once asserted, “Who remembers the Armenians?” as justification for his own genocide of non-Aryan peoples.
Professor Irving L. Horowitz in Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (1980) commented that the policies of the Ottoman Empire “bequeathed a policy of genocide on a scale unparalleled in an earlier epoch” and referred to the fate of the Armenians as “the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century” — a model that Hitler’s policies toward the Jews and other nationalities also imitated.
This malicious, premeditated, systematic extermination of the Armenians, the first people to adopt Christianity as a national religion (in AD 301) reflects not only a xenophobic, hate-filled government intent on the destruction of innocent minorities in their country for the sake of absolute power but also reveals the mentality of Islamic jihad against so-called infidels.
When Catholic Archbishop Ignatius Maloyan and his flock were given the choice of renouncing their faith and converting to Islam to save their lives, all of them responded, “We will die, but we will die for Jesus Christ.”
The Most Rev. Michael Khatchadourian, the elderly bishop of Malatia, was imprisoned, burned, and nearly strangled with the chain of his pectoral cross. He was finally hanged after refusing to apostatize and to become Muslim.
Another Armenian Catholic bishop who was martyred for his faith, Andrew Tchelebian, was buried in the sand with only his head above ground and then stoned to death.
As Armenian Catholic Patriarch Peter XVI Batanian writes in The Armenian Tragedy, “They struck down the shepherds in the hope that the sheep would be dispersed, that they would not have the courage to oppose them, that they would dishonor their race and that they would deny their faith. None of these things happened.”
In the month of April 1915, over 200 professors, physicians, lawyers, editors, and other professionals were arrested in Constantinople (Istanbul) and then forced into the desert to starve or suffer execution.
In the entire village of Erzurum that spring, every man chose martyrdom rather than conversion to Islam, and a large band of heroic women chose death by plunging into a gorge near the Euphrates River instead of life at the cost of conversion.
The Armenians — like the Maccabees — died for their faith and paid the price of martyrdom because of their unwavering love of God. The bigotry of the Young Turks and their fanatical hatred of Christians motivated these horrific, heinous crimes.
A Turkish dispatch to Aleppo dated September 15, 1915, reads, “It is necessary to put an end to their existence without regard for women, children, and the sick, using any means of extermination and without giving heed to the feelings of conscience.”
Confident that the crisis of world war in Europe would inhibit foreign interference in the domestic politics of Turkey, the Ottoman government entered World War I with the understanding that its allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, would not intervene in its internal affairs. Baron Hans Wangenheim, the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, echoed the Turkish party line: The deportations were mere precautionary tactics to repel any Armenian revolts.
On April 18, 1915, Wangenheim wrote to his consul in Erzurum, “Avoid all appearance of wishing to protect the Armenians and of making any intervention whatsoever in their favor.” He rationalized, “The Armenians are Turkish subjects and our government will not be able officially to do anything for them.”
Thus the Germans’ indifference to the plight of the persecuted Armenians amounted to “a conspiracy of silence.” The Germans valued upholding their alliance with Turkey more than saving the lives of the innocent victims of jihad. As Edmund Burke’s famous comment explains, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Germany’s complicity in the crimes of its ally by its chilling silence prompted Ambassador Morgenthau’s judgment that “Germany is morally responsible for the crimes committed by her ally, the Turkish government.”
Of all political and religious leaders, Pope Benedict XV protested these atrocities the most passionately and appealed in a letter of September 10, 1915 to the sultan of Turkey to stop these barbarous cruelties inflicted upon the Armenians “subjected, in the vast Ottoman Empire, to indescribable sufferings” — a condemnation that Turkey categorized as false information.
The Pope even sent a special envoy to plead with the Sultan to end this carnage, but the Sultan evaded the moral question and feigned ignorance of the entire problem. The president of the Armenian delegation to the peace conference later honored the Holy Father with “the expression of the homage of the whole Armenian nation” for his tireless solicitude and pleas of mercy and justice for their persecuted people, “martyred because Christian, oppressed because faithful to its traditions, threatened with extermination because capable of constituting a strong barrier against anti-Christian and barbarous invasions.”
When Pope Paul VI canonized the martyrs of Uganda in 1964, Armenian bishops approached the Pope with their plea: “Most Holy Father, we hope that there may soon be a day for our Armenian martyrs.” The Pope replied, “We also wish it with all Our Heart and We pray for that intention.”
During his historic visit to Armenian in 2001 to honor the 1,700th anniversary of the nation’s conversion to Christianity, Pope John Paul II wrote in his apostolic letter, “Martyrdom is a constant feature of your people’s history. Their faith remains inseparably linked to the witness of blood shed for Christ and the Gospel.”
Apart from Pope Benedict XV’s valiant efforts to bring succor to the Armenians and despite appeals from the ambassadors of America and France and other diplomats to end the horrors of genocide, the civilized world reacted with aloof indifference.

Hitler’s Inspiration

As Edward Alexander explains in A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice (1991), Adolf Hitler cited the Armenian genocide as “a model of world apathy toward organized cruelty” to justify his own invasion of Poland in the name of more Lebensraum (living space) for Germans.
Learning his lessons in the systematic extermination of an entire people from the Turks, Hitler exhorted his staff to use the ruthless methods of a Talaat Pasha who ordered the deportation of every Armenian man, woman, and child to the deserts of Mesopotamia. Hitler rejected all opposition to his policies with the reassurance of Turkey’s example: “Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?”
As Alexander comments, “Small wonder that Hitler drew some of his inspiration for his maniacal policies from the Armenian tragedy.”
Reacting to the fact that the Young Turks — Talaat, Jemal, and Enver — who devised the massacres and deportations were never tried in an international court like Nuremberg, Armenian nationalists pursued and assassinated all three of the Turkish leaders. The case of Soghomon Tehlirian, a young man of 18 who witnessed the violence of the atrocities, is a famous example of one Armenian’s desire for retribution because of the failure of the international community to punish Turkey for her crimes against humanity.
One of 100,000 refugees, at the age of 18 he joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (volunteers who used guerrilla warfare against the Turks) after witnessing the extermination of his entire family in Erzinga in 1915. In addition to the tragedy of his own family, he witnessed thousands who had been orphaned: “straggling starved, parched, and half-naked in long caravans over hundreds of miles into the desert,” as Alexander writes.
Determined to find and punish the war criminals responsible for the murder of his family and nation, Tehlirian was haunted by dreams in which his mother pleaded with him to kill Talaat Pasha. Tracking Talaat Pasha, who used the pseudonym of Ali Salih Bey while in Germany, Tehlirian killed him in the streets of Berlin in 1921. Even though the Allies had proclaimed that the Young Turks would suffer punishment for their crimes, Talaat Pasha and his conspirators had found a safe haven in Germany with their ally during the war.
During his trial Tehlirian stated, “I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer.” During the hearings he recited the litany of nightmarish scenes he witnessed: “Several gendarmes dragged his sister off and raped her, while another split his brother’s head with an ax. His mother lay dead, killed, he thought, by a bullet.”
The family home was burned to the ground. His dead mother kept appearing before his eyes, and the corpse cried, “You have seen that Talaat is here and you are totally indifferent? You are no longer my son.”
The jury acquitted Tehlirian on the basis of “temporary insanity” because of the trauma he suffered in witnessing the savage killing of his family and the agony of suffering he saw on a colossal scale.
An article in The New York Times, “Why Talaat’s Assassin Was Acquitted,” presents ten telegrams from Talaat Pasha authorizing the annihilation of the Armenian people in cruel statements like “an end must be put to their existence, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex or to conscientious scruples.”

“Crimes Against Turkishness”

Even though the Armenian genocide remains an indisputable fact of human history documented in the archives of European nations and in the reports of diplomats who witnessed firsthand the massacres, Turkey continues to deny historical evidence and refuses to acknowledge culpability.
Although many survivors of the genocide (including this writer’s father) have provided oral histories and several have written accounts of their excruciating suffering and starvation, modern-day Turkey continues to pretend that the Armenian tragedy never occurred.
As recently as the beginning of the 21st century, an Armenian journalist in Istanbul, Hrant Dink, was sentenced several times to a six-month imprisonment (later suspended) for his commentary and editorials on the Turkish crimes against Armenians in 1915-1918. Dink was accused of violating Article 301 which forbids criticism of the national government — an illegal activity known as “crimes against Turkishness.”
In 2007 Dink was assassinated by a teenage gunman, Ogun Samast, a minor suspected of conspiring in a plot with public officials to silence Dink’s outcries for justice.
Unlike Germany’s war crimes in World War II which were subjected to the Nuremberg trials and resulted in international justice and reparations, Turkey’s atrocities against the Armenians have never been honestly confronted or suffered just consequences.
Even though some Turks like Tewfic Pasha, a member of the Union and Progress Party, stated on June 11, 1919, before the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference, “Far be it from me to cover up these crimes, which were such as to make the human conscience shudder with horror. I shall try even less to minimize the culpability of the actors in this great drama,” the Turkish government has never officially expressed any formal apologies, pleas of forgiveness, or desire for reconciliation.
Making no concessions and rejecting any notion of reparations, Turkey in 2015 remains intransigent in its denials and lies: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. While all European nations have formally acknowledged the historical reality of the Armenian genocide, the United States Congress has not yet passed a resolution recognizing this truth lest America compromise her foreign relations with Turkey and provoke the hostility of a nation whose military bases the United States needs in the Middle East.

A Desensitized World

The Armenian genocide is not an isolated episode in world history. The ideology of pan-Turkism that justified the elimination of minorities for the sake of national interests or religious homogeneity established a precedent for the racist policies of Hitler’s National Socialist Party intent on the preservation of pure Aryan races and the elimination of Jews and Slavic peoples.
Might does not make right, and the end does not justify the means. If something is not morally right, it can never be politically advantageous. One cannot do evil to accomplish good. Silence and indifference in the midst of diabolical evil signals the sin of sloth and moral cowardice.
No amount of propaganda can ever destroy the truth, and all sin — private or public — requires confession, contrition, and reparation. The most genocidal century in all of the world’s history begins with the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians and ends with the genocide of abortion — again the slaughtering of the innocents.
One can only speculate and wonder about what would have happened if moral outrage, foreign intervention, and world opinion intervened to stop the massacres and adopted the attitude of “In principio obstat” (Stop it at the beginning) instead of “the conspiracy of silence” that permitted the atrocities to rage. Hitler could not have boasted, “Who remembers the Armenians?”
And the now desensitized world, accustomed to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” might have recoiled at the sordid reality of abortion, the massacre of 1.5 million babies every year in the United States alone — the atrocity of mothers and fathers paying someone to kill their own flesh and blood in a manner no different than the violence inflicted upon the Armenians.

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Sources

Edward Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice (The Free Press; an Authors Guild Backprint.com Edition: 2000).
Ignatius Peter Batanian, The Armenian Tragedy: An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (TIP. Mariapoli. Grottaferrata Di Roma).
James H. Tashjian, Turkey: Author of Genocide: The Centenary Record of Turkey 1822-1922. (Boston, Mass.: 1965).