Denial

History Betrayed

Tony Taylor

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780522854824
• eBook ISBN: 9780522859072
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Denial is the first book to draw together the ideological and psychological elements involved in historical denial. Tony Taylor surveys major cases in twentieth and twenty-first-century historical denial that illustrate the nature of prejudice and how it relates to techniques of the instigators of denial, including their use of popular media and the Internet.

Among the issues canvassed are denial and the Armenian atrocities as a governmental phenomenon; Holocaust denial in Australia and overseas as a racist phenomenon; Stalinist denial by Marxist historians post 1945 as an ideological phenomenon; Japanese ultranationalist denial from the 1960s to date as a cultural phenomenon; Serbian denial of 1990s Balkan atrocities as an ethnic phenomenon, and others.

At a time when most debates seem to accept the arguments of the deniers at face value the book will focus on the pathology of denial as an abuse of history through wilful distortion of events and eager self-deception. Denial is also now a major online industry: hate/denial/conspiracy sites have proliferated in the past ten years, a development complicated by new technological developments such as blogging, the strategic diversion of readers from apparently legitimate sites to racist sites, and the jamming of mainstream sites with denial messages.Many of those involved in debates about denial take the view that it is a legitimate alternative set of opinions about the past, rather than a politically and/or racially motivated distortion of events. Or, they believe that, notwithstanding the loopy parts, deniers have something valuable to say. Denial challenges that view.

1

UNDER WESTERN EYES

Armenian Massacres and Turkish Denial

It was Friday 19 January 2007, at about two in the afternoon. Campaigning journalist Hrant Dink was leaving the Istanbul office of his Armenian community newspaper Agos. Without warning, gunshots rang out and the Armenian writer fell to the ground. Security cameras recorded images of a young man running away, hastily tucking a pistol into his belt. An eyewitness later told reporters that the fugitive had yelled, ‘I killed the infidel’. Dink had been shot twice in the back of the head, and four shell cases were found at the scene, evidence of a nervously effective amateur assassin. Television news footage later showed Dink’s body lying prone on the footpath, covered with a white sheet.

On hearing of the murder, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan [pronounced Erdo-wan] announced that ‘dark hands’ were behind the assassination, remarking that ‘a bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life’. Almost immediately, the conspiracy theory mills began to grind out their fantasies: Dink had been killed by foreign intelligence agencies wanting to block Turkey’s entry into the European Union; Armenian agents provocateurs were trying to blacken Turkey’s name, according to Turkish ultra-nationalists; it was an inter-Armenian squabble and Dink had been caught in the crossfire. Rumours circulated Istanbul that Nobel Prize–winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who had previously crossed swords both with the authorities and with ultra-nationalists over Turkey’s Armenian question, had quietly and quickly left the country on hearing of Dink’s assassination.

If Pamuk had indeed left Turkey in fear of his life, there was good reason. Following a tip-off, police arrested the assassin, Ogun Samast, a solitary teenage dropout from Trabzon, the Black Sea harbour city in north-eastern Anatolia, heartland of provincial conservative Islam. Samast immediately and unrepentantly confessed, telling police that he did it because he had seen on a CNN website that Dink remarked, ‘I am from Turkey but Turkish blood is dirty’. The lone gunman’s confession then unravelled when it turned out that he was a member of an ultra-nationalist youth group. Further unravelling occurred when it was discovered that Yasin Hayal, a friend of Samast, was a known Islamic extremist. Indeed, back in 2004, Hayal had served eleven months in jail for bombing a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon. And it had been in Trabzon, in the spring of 2006, that a fundamentalist youth, apparently incensed over the worldwide Mohammed cartoon crisis that had begun in Denmark, had shot an Italian priest in the back of the head.

Hayal was arrested, together with five other fundamentalist suspects. He confessed to supplying Samast with a pistol and some money. By this time, the story of a lone, misguided gunman at work had begun to look shaky. It appeared that Hrant Dink, an opponent of extremism, had been killed by a gang of religious fanatics angered by the journalist’s attempts to reconcile Turkish society to the full scale of the Armenian massacres of 1915, which were viewed as genocide by many, but as exaggerated misadventures or even lies by others, particularly those fierce and often violent fundamentalist Turks represented by Hayal.

Notwithstanding the intimidatory act by these extremists, and possibly even because of the assassination, many Istanbul-based Turks protested against the murder by attending Dink’s funeral. An estimated 100 000 Turks, Turkish Armenians and expatriate Armenians either marched to the funeral together or stood in tribute on the footpaths. Dink’s widow, Rakel, speaking before the cortege moved off, said, ‘We are saying goodbye to our brother with a silent walk, without slogans and without asking how a baby became a murderer’. She and Dink’s two adult daughters, Beda and Sera, then released doves as a symbol of peace and as a sign of hope for change.

But some things do not change. As the self-confessed ringleader Hayal was being led into an Istanbul court on the day after the funeral, he shouted a defiant warning towards a cluster of journalists. ‘Orhan Pamuk, be smart, be smart!’ he called out, cautioning the famous author, and everyone else, to stay quiet on the genocide question—or else.

The motivation for killing the journalist was simple enough. Hrant Dink had been attempting to find common ground, but consensual moderates like Dink are even more harmful to an extremist ideology than are opposition activists. So, in some Islamic extremist eyes, he had to be killed. However, the unintended consequence of the murder was a show of harmony, in Istanbul at least. Although the funeral march was meant to be silent, many mourners shouted out slogans, and thousands carried black-and-white placards that read ‘We are all Hrant Dink’ and ‘We are all Armenians’. In this rare and astonishing moment of inter-ethnic solidarity, Prime Minister Erdogan, with one cautious eye on his Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (better known as the AKP), sent out a message that his schedule was too busy for him to attend. His deputy went instead.

The Armenian Massacres

Dink’s murder was shocking but not unexpected. It was yet another incident in a long and violent conflict over the question of Turkish persecution of its Armenian minority, a campaign of Armenian retribution and intimidation as well as Turkish nationalist retaliation that began when World War I ended and continues to this day.

The conflict is based on the bare fact that, at the beginning of 1915, the Turkish Armenian population numbered an estimated 1.75 million and yet, three years later, only 1.1 million Turkish Armenians were still alive. This meant that, during those three years, more than one in three Turkish Armenians were either killed outright or died as a direct result of forced expulsion at the hands of Turkish authorities. As a consequence, during the post-massacre period, the majority of the remaining Turkish Armenian community scattered to the four winds in a global diaspora. Today, the Armenian population of Turkey is calculated at a mere 80 000. In contrast, the Armenian-descended population of France, one of several major destinations for the Armenian diaspora, is estimated at 750 000. These French descendants of the survivors of the massacres represent an influential anti-Turkish minority within the French republic and it is this kind of globalised minority that contributes to an Armenian campaign to remember the obliteration of the Turkish Armenians, to allege a Turkish cover-up and to seek reparation.

The pro-Armenian allegation, in an almost century-long war of words, bullets and bombs, is that, in 1915, the Turkish government instigated a campaign of expulsions that was directly responsible for murdering somewhere between 500 000 and two million Armenians (the figures vary), in a deliberate and pre-meditated campaign of genocide.

There are two counter-claims, and, oddly, they form the basis of one of the few causes that unites Islamic and secular Turkey. First, Islamic Turkish denial is straightforward enough:the Armenians were, and are, liars. What they claim to have happened is a slur on Islamic Turkish honour. In any case, the infidel Armenians massacred Islamic Turks in eastern Anatolia in 1915, so they probably got what they deserved. In this context, the phrase ‘Armenian Massacres’ refers to the killing of Islamic Turks by Armenians, not the other way around. Anyone who espouses the Armenian cause is an enemy of Turkish Islam. Second, secular Turkish denialists argue, in a more nuanced fashion, that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Armenians unfortunately perished during a state-auspiced, wartime deportation of a potentially disloyal population. Armenian fatalities, exaggerated by Christian propagandists (Armenian and others), occurred as a consequence of poor planning, bad weather, lack of food and water, and attacks by Kurds and Circassian bandits, but certainly not because of any systematic government plan. In any case, treacherous Armenians had already massacred Turks in eastern Anatolia, so they probably brought it on themselves. Anyone who espouses the Armenian cause is an enemy of the sanctity of the modern Turkish constitution and the revered memory of Kemal Ataturk.

Armenians in Turkey—and an Enormous Crime

The propaganda work necessary to justify an enormous crime was fully prepared: The Armenians had united with the enemy, revolution was about to break out in Istanbul, they [the Armenians] were going to kill Unionist [government party] leaders, they were going to force open the straits.

Ahmet Refik, Turkish army officer and historian, 1919

In attempting to untangle the thorny problem of what precisely happened to the Turkish Armenians and why so many Turks are in denial, the best place to start is probably with three questions:Who were these Armenians? What were they doing in Turkey? Why did the Turkish government want them expelled?

Turkish Armenians, mainly concentrated in north-eastern Anatolia, formed a substantial Christian minority population within the predominantly Islamic Ottoman, or Turkish, Empire. The Armenians numbered an estimated 1.1 million at the turn of the twentieth century, in a total Anatolian population of just over thirteen million, and their numbers rose to approximately 1.7 million by 1915. As an ethnic group, they were linked with Russian-based Armenians to the north. They were Indo-European in origin, had an ancient culture and a distinct language and were an established Anatolian people, absorbed by the expanding Ottoman Empire and made subject to Islamic rule. Until the mid-1800s, the conditions under which they existed had been more or less oppressive, as were the conditions for all non-Islamic minorities. However, the Ottoman capacity for continuing subjugation of its minorities changed in the nineteenth century, partly as a result of foreign interventions of various kinds and partly because of successful Christian rebellions against Turkish rule.

These foreign interventions, in the form of Capitulations (forced agreements), had begun in a small way in the 1600s, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the once proud Ottoman Empire, humiliatingly labelled the ‘sick man of Europe’, had been all but booted out of its European possessions and was compelled to accept increased interference in its affairs by Britain, France and Russia, chiefly regarding the protection of its Christian minorities: the Greeks, the Serbs and the Armenians.

These European intrusions did not help the Armenian cause at all. A predominantly rural and provincial group with many prosperous merchants in the various regional towns, Armenians were generally resented by Islamic Turks as an exploitative provincial minority with high-profile intellectual and mercantile communities in the national capital of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople). Attempts to protect the Armenians by European outsiders simply increased this resentment. And there was a widespread view that Armenian loyalties turned more towards Christian Russia, and hence against Islamic Turkey, at a time, in 1915, when Turkey and Russia were at war. This hostile opinion was strengthened by the activities of a small number of recklessly violent Armenian separatists, the Hnchak.

This long-standing prejudicial view of the Armenians as a vexatious, separatist ethnic minority, second-class subjects of Turkey but allegedly too smart and too rich for their own good, had been made even more severe by the slow decline in status of the Turkish Empire, which had led to the growth of post-imperial and irreducible (Anatolian) Turkish nationalism. The consequence was that when World War I broke out, in August 1914, the Turkish government (often referred to as the Porte) sided with the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, against the already loathed Triple Entente powers of Britain, France and Russia. With a fiercely chauvinistic Ittihadist (Ittihad ve Terakki, or Young Turks) government in charge, led by the Triumvirate of Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha and Djemal Pasha, Turkish policy was driven by an official strain of Turkish nationalism that saw the war as an opportunity to settle old scores with both internal and external enemies. Moreover, any form of separatism or partition of the residual Anatolian homeland was anathema to the Young Turks.

Accordingly, the disposition of the reforming Turkish Porte was to regard the Armenians as a growing and intractable problem, a problem that was made all the more severe by both the closeness of the Anatolian Armenians to the heartland of the modern, diminished Turkish Empire and their simultaneous closeness to the Russian front. Indeed, Tsarist Armenian officers, acting as recruiters, soon began to cross the border into Turkey to set up insurgent gangs. For the Porte, the provocation was unambiguous and a decisive response was required.

In examining the claims and counter claims surrounding the Armenian question, three aspects of the events of 1915 and 1916 need closer examination. First, there is the question of government intent. That many Armenians died is beyond question, but did they die as part of an intended and comprehensive government-inspired campaign of genocide? Second, if there was intent, was there a state mechanism available to carry out the purpose? Third, allowing for a discussion of intent and state mechanism, can the Armenian massacres be considered as a Holocaust-style atrocity, indeed, the first Holocaust of the twentieth century, a considerable and pointed claim frequently made by supporters of the Armenian position? To deal with these questions, we will examine two features of the Armenian question: first, the role of the government in establishing the deportations and colluding in the massacres, and the nature of the massacres and second, whether or not what happened in Turkey was the first Holocaust of the twentieth century.

Intent to Kill: Countdown to Genocide

Talat said that they had discussed the matter very thoroughly and arrived at a decision to which they would adhere. When I said they would be condemned by the world, he said they would know how to defend themselves; in other words, he does not give a damn.

Henry Morgenthau, US Ambassador, 1915

The main players in the development of the policy of deportation were closely associated with the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), a fiercely nationalist Islamic faction in the Young Turk movement, which operated as a government within a government, as did the Communist Party in Soviet Russia. Three senior CUP members in particular, known later as the Triumvirate, stand accused by the Armenians of being directly involved. They are Enver Pasha, Minister of War;Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior; and Djemal Pasha, Viceroy of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine (although more recent research shows that Djemal may not have been quite so much the villain). The process by which the CUP, as the party of government, and the Triumvirate, as CUP leaders, developed their policy is a complex narrative probably best explained as a series of key events, with a special emphasis on the crucial period of March to May 1915 (bearing in mind that the Turkish cabinet was generally presented with Triumvirate faits accomplis and that the parliament was out of session during these months).

To begin with, during the first winter of World War I (1914–15), it was reported by various observers in Istanbul that anti-Armenian sentiment was so powerful in government circles that massacres were imminent and inevitable. This kind of reprisal against minorities was not unusual in the Turkish Empire, where it was standard practice to carry out the occasional large-scale massacre to subdue dissenters, but there appeared to be something new about government attitudes in 1914, due perhaps to the impact of the war. Turkish sociologist-historian Taner Akcam, admittedly using mainly hearsay or journalistic evidence, describes the change at that stage as atmospheric rather than tangible but suggests that the anti-Armenian feeling was almost palpable, and growing in intensity. Official, as well as popular, attitudes appeared to be moving away from sporadic acts of suppression towards something more systematic. To inflame the situation further, small-scale but brutal Armenian nationalist activity was reported in eastern Anatolia, where it was met by equally cruel government-initiated reprisals against Armenian villagers. This tit-for-tat conflict aggravated already strained relations between Turkish and Armenian communities in the east and gave a perfect pretext for governmental repression of Armenians.

At the same time, the Turkish government, bolstered by its participation in the Central Powers alliance, was pressing on with a grandiose plan for a pan–Turkic Islamic empire that would stretch from the Caucasus to North Africa. This ambition came to a sudden and disastrous halt in early January 1915. The previous month, the Turkish Third Army, led by Triumvirate member Enver Pasha, having adopted an over-optimistic strategy of encirclement, had crossed into Russian territory. The Turks could not have begun a military operation in the Transcaucasus at a worse time, and the poorly equipped Third Army floundered in the snow and ice of the mountainous borderlands. The Turkish troops eventually crossed into Russian Armenia, but it was all to no avail. In January 1915, during and following the battle of Sarikamish, the Turks were all but annihilated by the Russians, who had substantial Armenian help. Some 25 000 Turkish soldiers were lost in the week-long struggle, and an estimated 50 000 to 60 000 fatalities occurred during the Third Army’s retreat across the mountains to Anatolia. This humiliating defeat immediately brought into play CUP-inspired stab-in-the-back accusations against the Armenians, who, it was alleged, were engaged in a murderous conspiracy to subvert Turkish war aims. One of the main proponents of the backstabbing theory was Enver Pasha, whose ambitious and ill-organised campaign had led to the defeat at Sarikamish. Enver, a man unaccustomed to humiliation, returned to Istanbul and began to use the army’s propaganda machinery to attack the Armenians and to deflect attention away from his own shortcomings.

Allowing for the gradual evolution of wartime anti-Armenian policy in Turkey, the defeat at Sarikamish constituted one of the first major turning points in the obliteration of the Turkish Armenians. The defeat and its consequences produced in the CUP leadership a growing belief that the Armenian minority within Turkey’s boundaries formed a strong obstacle to any nationalist and pan-Islamic ambitions for a new, homogeneous Turkish empire. After the battle, the official Turkish attitude to its Armenian population quickly changed from one of harsh oppression to one of deportation, and then to one of annihilation. The CUP Central Committee knew that the Armenians were not just going to fade away; on the contrary, in January 1915, with the war going so badly for Turkey, there was every chance that the Armenians and their Russian co-religionists could soon force a dreaded partition arrangement on the Porte.

The Turkish government moved from mere anti-Armenian propaganda to physical action in February 1915 when, in response to supposed Armenian treachery at Sarikamish, Armenian troops serving in the Turkish army were disarmed and recruited into labour or transport units. In these battalions they later proved to be vulnerable to murderous attacks by fully armed Turkish colleagues.

On 19 February, the war stakes were raised when French and British forces began a shelling campaign to demolish the Turkish forts that overlooked the Dardanelles. The threat of imminent attack from the west was now a reality, and the view from Istanbul was that Turkey was facing a fight on four fronts:France and Britain to the west, Russia to the east, British Mesopotamia to the south—and the Armenians within.

In March, the Entente shelling ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Pathology of Historical Denial
• 1 Under Western Eyes: Armenian Massacres and Turkish Denial
• 2 Frauds and Fanatics: The Pathology of Western Holocaust Denial
• 3 A Culture of Denial: Explaining the Politics of Remembrance in Modern Japan
• 4 British Communism and Two Decades of Denial: From Moscow to Budapest 1956
• 5 Tales of Heartless Denial from the Balkans: Serbian victimhood and Marxist Conspiracy Theories
• 6 Failing the Scholarly Test: Australian Denial and the Art of Pseudohistory
• Coda
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright