The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Genocides 1/2
David Davidian
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| THE CONVERGENT ASPECTS OF THE ARMENIAN AND JEWISH CASES OF GENOCIDE. |
| A REINTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF HOLOCAUST |
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From: _HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES_, Vol 3, No. 2 pages 151-169, 1988.
Published in association with the
United States Holocaust Memorlal Council and
Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes'
Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem
Editor-in-Chief: YEHUDA BAUER
Associate Editor: HARRY JAMES CARGAS
Chairman of the Editorial Board: ELIE WIESEL
THE CONVERGENT ASPECTS OF THE ARMENIAN AND
JEWISH CASES OF GENOCIDE. A REINTERPRETATION
OF THE CONCEPT OF HOLOCAUST
VAHAKN N. DADRIAN
State University of New York, Geneseo
Abstract --Every victimized group feels itself and its experience to be
unique. For both Armenians and Jews, the sense of uniqueness begins with the
origins of their nationhood, which are largely religious in nature. Each
people has tenaciously clung to its religion and nationhood in the face of
centuries of being victimized minorities existing outside the 'universe of
obligation of the dominant group. Both peoples suffered a genocide whose
perpetrators' intent was a 'final solution', and qualitatively, if not
quantitatively, the two genocides are similar. Still, what is not necessarily
objectively unique in each genocide is subjectively so in the eyes of the
victims.
Mass murder is by nature a traumatic and unique experience for any group of
survivors. Such trauma is bound to insinuate itself into the collective psyche
of the nation. Arguably, the trauma for the victims is not only extraordinary
but also defies replication. Conceptions and beliefs of unique victims are
often generated in such a frame of mind. If an experience is 'unique', does it
follow that the recipient of that experience is or becomes unique also?
As a rule, experiences in individual life are acquired in ways which are more
or less consistent with one's basic characteristics and life-goals; as such
they are the functions of one's personality. In other words, barring
accidental and random occurrences, life experiences tend to correspond to
one's own propensities and drives entailing such experiences. Therefore, the
issue is not experience as such but capacity for certain experiences. When
extrapolating to group life and intergroup relations, it may be observed that
in the case of the Armenians and the Jews, the experience of persecution is
not entirely accidental. Certain features keynoting the national temper of
these two peoples need to be taken into account when attempting to explain
their common experience of victimization. This need is even more accented in
the light of the fact that both peoples are prone to consider their experience
of genocide as 'unique', and concomitantly themselves as 'unique' victims,
with the Jews commanding greater attention in this respect.
The specific question to be addressed pertains, therefore, to the development
of historical events in which and through which Armenian and Jewish national
self-images were forged, and consequently influenced the relations of these
peoples with the rest of the world.
THE RELIGIOUS INGREDIENTS OF JEWISH AND ARMENIAN SELF-IMAGES
OF UNIQUENESS
The self-image of uniqueness is not merely a product of subjective inventions
or exaggerations. The objective history of the persecution of both peoples has
specific milestones by virtue of which these two peoples became prime
candidates for victimization. In the process they attained national
distinction which implied, if not warranted, a measure of uniqueness. Though
religious in character, these milestones have evolved into standards and
emblems of national identification, entwined with the religious ingredients.
For the Jews, it is their heritage of Moses as the divinely protected and
guided redeemer from bondage and giver of the Law, including the Ten
Commandments, criminal codes and liturgical prescriptions. He became their
divinely inspired signpost of the Promised Land. The Jewish sense of distinct
nationhood is predicated upon this legacy, and is expressed in the ethos that
the Jews have a special relationship to and with God.
The Armenians embraced Christianity as a state religion around 300 A.D.
anticipating by some 20 years the Roman Emperor Constantine's official
adoption of it, thus becoming 'the first Christian nation'. The continuous
recitation of this fact by the Armenians as a mark of primacy and distinction
is testimony to the evolutionary process through which religious consciousness
was harnessed to generate national consciousness. Two related developments
provided impetus to the cultivation of this consciousness: (1 ) the subsequent
spread of Islam in and around Armenia through invasions, reducing Armenia to a
small and highly vulnerable island of Christianity in a hostile sea of
militant Moslem conquerors; and (2) the rejection in the fifth century by the
fledgling Armenian Church of the orthodox creed of Chalcedon that postulated a
dual nature for Christ, i.e. divine and human, thus injecting an element of
distinction between the two. By favoring at the Council of Duween (506 A.D.)
the doctrine of monophysites without actually embracing monophysitism, the
Armenians enunciated their belief in 'one nature united in the Incarnate Word'
(meeavorial mee punutioun), thereby alienating both the Roman and Greek
Churches which declared them heretics, given to schism. Eventually, especially
during the three decades preceding World War I when Russian Orthodoxy and
nationalism went hand in hand, the Armenians also alienated the Tsarist
regimes by their refusal to convert to Orthodoxy. This drive for autonomy was
equally tenacious against the Latin church during the Crusades. The awareness
that a submergence into any of these creeds, at the expense of their national
identity, could have spared them untold miseries through the two millennia of
Christianity imparted a special significance to the ensuing persecutions. The
unyielding adherence to the dogmas and traditions of the Armenian Apostolic
Church made them special in a narrow and ethnocentric sense, at the same time
antagonizing the power-wielders of three Christian empires capable of
protecting and supporting them. The fate of Armenia was more or less sealed as
the ensuing isolation of the Armenian church from the rest of Christendom
helped bring about the political isolation of Armenia. This penchant for
'stiff-necked'-ness was even more pronounced in relation to the invading
Seljuks, Mongols Tartars, Persians and Ottomans. The Islamic exertions of
these invaders compounded the problem of Armenian vulnerability by making it
two-dimensional, i.e. inside Christendom and outside it, in relation to Islam
in the region.
The traditional Armenian belief of a singular relationship between Armenia and
Christ is comparable to the Jewish belief of a special relationship between
God and the Jews. This Armenian belief has three major components.
1. Relying on historical accounts and biblical passages (John 1: 43-51 and 14
22-24) the Armenians trace the autocephalic rudiments of their church to the
apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus, thereby claiming a direct lineage to Christ
involving the periods of 6068, and 43-66 A.D., respectively. These early
stirrings for Christianity are mentioned by Tertullian, the third-century
Roman theologian, who refers to 'people of the name of Christ' when discussing
Armenia.
2. The assertion that Christ himself established the Armenian Church is traced
to Agathangelus, which in Greek means the kind, angelic harbinger, and is
probably the pen-name of an originally Roman author who, having moved to
Armenia in the third century, in the fourth century had become the first
Armenian historiographer. His History of Armenia, written in Greek, is the
oldest treatise on that subject. His claim of having served as the secretary
of King Turdat III is corroborated by subsequent Armenian historiographers.
Turdat is the king who promulgated Christianity in Armenia as a state
religion, following his ascent to the throne ca 287 A.D. In his chapter on the
'History of the Conversion of Armenia by Gregory the Illuminator',
Agathangelus maintains that Christ, surrounded by the angelic host, had
appeared to Gregory in a vision, revealing both the place and plan of the
church. The erection in 301-303 A.D. of the cathedral church in Vagharshabad,
then the capital of Armenia, was an act of enormous significance in Armenian
history, as it served to sanctify this reported apparition which in Armenian
is called Etchmiadzin, meaning 'the Only-Begotten descended'. Throughout
history, Etchmiadzin, with some interruptions, remained the seat of the
Armenian Holy See, the Catholicate, whose occupant, the Supreme Patriarch of
All Armenians, continues to symbolize the tribulations and redemptive hopes of
Armenia. Today it is part of Soviet Armenia, and is only some 18 km away from
Yerevan, the latter's capital.
3. The adoption of Christianity in Armenia coincided with the martyrdom of the 32
women who, escaping the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman Emperor
Diocletian (245-313), took refuge in pagan Armenia where, due to their
evangelizing, they were put to death in 301. According to Agathangelus, Christ
was carrying a golden hammer in His hand when He appeared to Gregory in a
vision. Four crosses of light also appeared, three of them marking the sites
where the shrines of the three leaders of the 32 martyrs, Hurupsime, Gayane
and Mariane, were to be erected, with the fourth, the tallest, indicating
the site of the cathedral. This episode was preceded by the consecutive
martyrdom in the period ca 60-62 A.D. of the apostles Thaddeus, Bartholomew
and two disciples. The latter's burial grounds and the memorials erected for
all of these martyrs in historic Armenia punctuate the incidence of martyrdom
as a primordial hallmark of Armenian Christianity, and its corollary, Armenian
nationhood. [1]
The analogy may be extended to the notion of a special relationship to God
entertained in different respects and degrees by both peoples. Notwithstanding
some disputes, the Armenian tradition, supported by biblical accounts (Genesis
8:4), has forged the belief that Mt. Ararat is the land of Armenia. The main
reliance here is the Bible (Kings II 19: 37; Isaiah 37: 38; Jeremiah 51: 27),
with the prophet Jeremiah specifically mentioning in this respect 'the kingdom
of Ararat'. The citation from Genesis referred to above states that 'the ark
of Noah rested upon the mountain of Ararat'. Commenting on this legend the
British poet Byron observed: 'If the Scriptures are rightly understood, it was
in Armenia that Paradise was placed. . . It was in Armenia that the flood
first abated, and the dove alighted . . . But the satraps of Persia and the
pachas of Turkey have alike desolated the region where God created man in his
own image.[2] The significance of all this is the interpretation attached to
it, namely, that God bestowed a special favor on the inhabitants of ancient
Armenia who were allowed to witness and survive the punitive deluge associated
with Noah's Ark. On the other hand, the Jews, by aspiring to become the
instruments for the kingdom of God, pioneered in monotheism and attuned their
piety to their central belief which rested on the anticipation of the
Messianic return.[3]
What emerges from this constellation of lores and creeds is a picture
highlighting the rudiments of national-ethnic image formation, with each of
these two ancient peoples motivated to view themselves as a focus of divine
attention.
THE PARALLELS IN MUTUAL ROLE PERCEPTIONS
The principal channel for the formation of Jewish and Armenian self-images was
not so much religion as such but rather institutionalized religion, namely,
the synagogue and the Armenian church, respectively. Institutionalization,
however, means a measure of social control through some degree of social
integration effected by a given institutional hierarchy. The enduring minority
status of both peoples throughout centuries imparted to the agents of social
control, rabbis and priests, extraordinary scope and leverage. Indeed the
Jewish rabbis and Armenian clergymen uniquely combined the task of serving God
with that of serving their more or less disfranchised flocks. Transcending the
roles of theologians and preachers, they assumed the roles of teachers,
administrators and communal leaders. In the process, they became pillars of
ethnocentrism through which the synagogue and the church functioned as
crucibles of national-ethnic identification and tenacious survival.
Given their experience of exclusion and discrimination in socio-political
systems in which they were relegated to a minority status, both peoples
developed skills in economic areas from which they were not barred. Their
development of business acumen was largely a by-product of these imposed and
institutionalized constraints, and often served as a tool for survival in
times of peril. However, the visibility of these commercial successes,
combined with a measure of ethnocentrism regarding their meaning and uses,
also helped create negative stereotypes, especially in Europe and Russia. The
Armenians, the Jews, and often the Greeks, are portrayed in these stereotypes
as wily merchants bent on outfoxing each other in business deals.
The persecution and ordeals implicit in these survivals have been mutually
recognized by a host of Jewish and Armenian leaders as signposts of a commonly
shared distinction. A few illustrations may be in order. Irked by the ongoing
Tsarist persecution of the Jews in and around Russia, Al Miassnigian, a close
associate of Lenin and architect of the Bolshevik military victories in the
1918-1920 Civil War, declared in 1913:
'the Jews represent among us an element suffering from legal disabilities
and inequities. They have for a long time borne the painful yoke of
persecution. There is no corner on earth where one cannot hear their cries;
there is no fist which might not be directed against their face. The
persecutions of the Jews constitute an endless, eloquent and tortuous
martyrdom. I wonder if any other race could survive all the obstacles and
agonies to which the people of Israel has been subjected and is still being
subjected.' [4]
Some two decades earlier, Arminius Vambery, the Jewish Orientalist, expressed
a similar view about the Armenians. He was reacting to the massacres of Abdul
Hamid. the Red Sultan', whom Vambery had managed to befriend. As a token of
that friendship Hamid called him 'Resit Efendi' to lend him, Vambery, an
Islamic identity. Describing the conditions of the Armenians as 'extremely
desperate' and their dispersion as their Achilles Heel, Vambery said:
'If we disregard the destruction of Jerusalem, the history of the Jews pales
before the bitter struggle and ordeals which the Armenians in the course of
their three thousand year history had to endure . . . Under such
circumstances, is it not remarkable that this people did not entirely
perish and that today there are still close to three million Armenians?'[5]
The parallel comments of two Jewish political leaders of the World War I era
are likewise noteworthy. One of them, the celebrated Anglo-Jewish writer
Israel Zangwill, in an article entitled 'The Majesty of Armenia', wrote: 'I
bow before this higher majesty of sorrow. I take the crown of thorns from
Israel's head and I place it upon Armenia's.' [6] After denouncing the World
War I massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, Nahum Sokolow, a foremost
Zionist diplomat, noted: 'If the Armenians are not . . . the majority of the
population in their own country, we know why they are not . . . We have
competed with the Armenians in martyrdom.'[7] Another prominent Jew, Luigi
Luzatti, one-time Prime Minister of Italy (1910-1911), pleaded Armenia's cause
in a 1922 message to British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon, who was then
negotiating the Lausanne Peace Treaty with the Turks. Luzatti recalled
'the unprecedented sufferings and the ruinations which Armenia . . . the
"protomartyr" of humanity, suffered before, during and after the war'.[8]
There were numerous other prominent Jews who spoke out on behalf of Armenia
and Armenians in the aftermath of the genocide. [9]
Although Armenian support of Jewish causes has been limited, there are a
number of outstanding cases. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is the elaborate
defense prepared by Krikor Zohrab for the Paris Jewish committee defending
Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Zohrab was then a young lawyer who later became
Professor of International Law at the law school in Istanbul and a member of
the Ottoman Parliament (1908-1915). Zohrab's defense of the persecuted, the
underdog, was evident in his outspoken parliamentary defense of the interests
of the minorities in Turkey, especially the Armenians, Macedonians and Jews.
He wrote the Dreyfus brief at the time when the Abdul Hamid massacres (1894-
1896) were gaining momentum, endangering the lives of his own Armenian people
throughout the Ottoman Empire. Despite his parliamentary immunity, Zohrab was
arrested under false pretenses, and without formal charges or trial was killed
in the summer of 1915 by two officers of the Special Organization, which was
the principal instrument in the World War I Armenian genocide. [10]
Other contributions to Jewish causes involved support for Theodor Herzl and
the Zionist movement in negotiations with Sultan Hamid. In his diary entry for
10 March 1899, Herzl refers to Undersecretary of State Artin Pasa as 'a new
source of help' for the Zionist cause. Herzl's memorandum offering Jewish
financial assistance to the Ottoman government in return for support for
Zionist colonization in Palestine was submitted to Artin Pasa himself. Herzl's
diaries also refer to a helpful Armenian identified only as 'N'. This seems to
have been Kapriel Noradunkian, who was Legal Counselor in the Ottoman Foreign
Affairs Ministry (1881-1908), and later Foreign Minister (1912). Herzl saw him
as 'very favorably disposed' to the Zionist cause.[11] Another Armenian who
actively aided Zionism in World War I was James A. Malcolm, a British citizen,
who helped Chaim Weizmann persuade the British government to support the
Zionist cause.[12]
The only recorded Armenian assistance to any group of Jews during World War II
was by the Armenian church in Paris. It issued an unknown number of false
identification papers to Jews, identifying them as Armenians.[13] Finally,
reference also may be made to ancient history when, according to the Greek
historian Xenophon, 'the right arm of Cyrus the Great was the gallant Armenian
prince Tigranes, by whose help the great Babylon was conquered, and the Jews
were liberated from the 70 years' captivity in the year 536 B.C.' [14]
The mutuality of these roles and their common perceptions is rather a random
phenomenon in the history of both peoples, however. Due to geo-political
factors and the asymmetrical dispersion of Armenians and Jews, no tradition
of Armeno-Jewish relationships could evolve. The mutual affinities, to the
extent they have existed, are mere products of historical accidents.
Notwithstanding, they are exceedingly relevant for the study and understanding
of the phenomenon of sustained persecution from the perspective of the
victims. By comparing oneself with other victims, a victim does not only
establish a certain bond of identity but also underscores the commonality
rather than the uniqueness of the phenomenon of victimization.
The reactions to the Armenian holocaust of a young Jewish intelligence
operative, Absalom Feinberg, who served as liaison for the small espionage
unit NILI (an acronym for a Biblical phrase meaning 'The Eternal of Israel
will not fail'), address this problem of commonality. These reactions are
among the most significant eyewitness accounts of the Armenian genocide ever
recorded by a Jew. The unit was formed by the offspring of the first
generation of Zionist pioneers shortly after the outbreak of World War I, to
'shake off the Ottoman yoke' through the gathering and conveyance to the
British High Command in Cairo of military information. In his 22 November 1915
report, written in French and devoted to the details of that genocide,
Feinberg wrote to Lieutenant C. Z. Wooley, at Port Said:
'I have no more teeth left to gnash. Who is going to be the next victim? On
my way to Jerusalem, I have traversed my country on this holiest earth, and
I keep asking myself if we are living in the year 1915, or in the times of
Titus or Nebuchadnezzar. I, as a Jew, have forgotten that I was Jewish (and
it is very difficult to be oblivious to this 'privilege'), and I have asked
myself if I had the right to cry solely over the sorrows of my nation, and
wondered if Jeremiah would not have shed tears over the Armenians also ...
while a few Turkish hyenas boast of the charnel-house they have created ...
Alas! The torment of being impotent and without arms.' [15]
The testimony of Sarah Aaronsohn, the mastermind of NILI operations against
the Turkish war effort on the Palestine front, is even more telling. After
having witnessed harrowing scenes of atrocity on her trip from Istanbul to
Jaffa, she warned, 'How terrible the Turks are! If we don't succeed in getting
free from them in time, they are quite capable of doing to us what they did to
the Armenians. Will the Jews be next?' [16]
JEWISH SCHOLARS AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
The first Jewish scholar to refer to the Armenian experience as genocide was
Raphael Lemkin, [17] who coined that term (not necessarily for the first time)
[18] and was instrumental in the adoption by the United Nations of the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Robert
Kempner, another Jew, indicated that he was 'inspired' by the 1921 Berlin
trial proceedings [19] during which the Turkish massacres against the
Armenians came to the fore of public attention as Sogomon Tehlirian, charged
with the murder of Talat, the architect of the Armenian genocide, was
acquitted by the Criminal Court. Kempner later served as Chief of Division,
responsible for preparing the cases against the principal Nazis at Nuremberg,
[20] where he acted as Assistant to Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel
for the United States. Another Jewish author, concurrent with the efforts of
Lemkin, explicitly traced the origin of modern genocide to the World War I
massacres against the Armenians. [21] A leader of Zionism in Germany, Richard
Lichtheim, who represented it in the capital of the Ottoman Empire during the
1914-1917 war years, had extensive dealings with the executioners of the
Armenian people. Commenting on 'the terrible Armenian massacres of World War I
[which] claimed over one million victims', he referred in his study of the
rise and growth of the Zionist movement to 'the liquidation of a bothersome
minority [which] was the first instance of a systematic persecution in modern
history, resembling Hitler's . . . crusade of destruction against the Jews'
[22].
The evaluation by a host of noted contemporary Jewish scholars of the Armenian
genocide essentially revolves around two levels of consideration connoting the
interconnectedness of the Armenian and Jewish cases. These levels refer to the
principles of precedence and comparability. An additional level of link is
provided by the sociological juxtaposition of historical minority status of
both peoples as the essential ingredient of vulnerability affording lethal
victimization. Leo Kuper focuses on 'the link between these two genocides as
flowing from the role of the Armenians and Jews as hostages to the fortunes of
their host societies and thus available for sacrifice in times of crisis'. He
then defines the Armenian genocide as 'the precursor' of the subsequent Jewish
instance [23]. Helen Fein, along the same lines, observes: 'For over a
millennium preceding their annihilation, both Jews and Armenians had been
decreed by the dominant group that was to perpetrate the crime to be outside
the sanctified universe of obligation [24].
When discussing the Tsarist pogroms against the Jews, Richard Rubenstein
refers to 'an eerie parallel' between these pogroms and the Abdul Hamid era
massacres (1894-1897) against an 'elite minority. the Armenians. . . [even
though] by comparison, the Russian pogroms against the Jews . . . were far
less deadly'. As Rubenstein points out, the Ittihadist attempt to homogenize
Turkey is presaged in this episode of Tsarist crimes at the turn of the
century. This formula of a 'solution' to the nationality problem is reportedly
outlined by Pobedonostzef with respect to the Russian Jews as follows: 'One
third will die, one third will leave the country, and the last third will be
completely assimilated within the surrounding population.' Using the
historical perspective Rubenstein traces the beginnings and escalation of 'the
modern travail of the Armenians [to] almost the same moment as that of the
Jews, namely, 1876, the year of the accession of Sultan Abdul Hamid to the
throne of the Ottoman Empire'. Rubenstein then concludes, saying: 'Holocaust
can better be understood as the culmination of a historic movement', at the
same time singling out 'the sociological parallels between their [the Jews']
situation and that of the Armenians' [25].
This theme of a 'parallel' appears in the writing of Yehuda Bauer, another
noted Jewish scholar in whose works the principles of precedence and
comparability are convergent_ He states: 'The massacre of the Armenian people
in Turkish Anatolia parallels the Holocaust . . . the mass destruction of the
Armenian people during World War I . . . foreshadows the Holocaust [26].
In a recent essay, Bauer again cites the Armenian genocide as offering the
closest parallels to the Jewish Holocaust . . . On this continuum of murderous
behavior, the Armenian massacres would figure nearest to the Holocaust.' Yet,
Bauer is also convinced that there is a feature to the Holocaust which
separates it from the Armenian case, making it 'unique'. The Turkish
perpetrators were driven by 'a wild chauvinism which has at least some
realistic background in national movements [italics in original]. The Turks
never planned the murder of Armenians outside of Turkey', whereas the Jews
became the victims of 'a plan for the total physical annihilation of a people,
everywhere one finds them . . . This indeed is unique: it never happened
before, but it is not unique in the sense that once it has happened it could
happen again . . . What made the Holocaust unique, I think, is the motivation
of the murderers [27].
However persuasive on the surface, there are several problems with this
interpretation. Apart from the fact that it is largely elusive both to the
actor and to outsiders (one is not always certain about specific reasons of
conduct in this or that way), motivation cannot be reduced to a single common
denominator in initiatives that: (1) are evolutionary, involving stages of
development; (2) are multi-layered, comprising actors engaged in such
disparate tasks as informal decision-making, formal authorization,
organization, supervision and execution of a scheme; (3) have adjunct or
subsidiary objectives such as victory in an anticipated, planned or actual
war; (4) are replete with benefits on levels not identified with their
manifest thrust, e.g. loot through robbery and plunder in relation to mass
murder; and (5) are interactional in their dynamics, requiring adaptive
behavior vis-a-vis emergent responses (or lack of them) to the initiatives.
These arguments should not be difficult to illustrate. There is general
agreement, for example, that the Nazi Final Solution initially had economic
and demographic content, i.e. confiscation of accumulated Jewish wealth and
expulsion through emigration. The lethal violence of the Holocaust proved to
be an afterthought emerging from the complex web of interactions involving the
Jews in England and the United States, the perceived attitudes of the
governments of these countries concerning the plight of the Jews and the
subsequent Nazi reassessment of the extent of the vulnerability of the Jews
under their control, and the evolving phases of the war. The Armenian case
evolved in genocidal dimensions primarily due to: (1) the gradually perceived
absence of effective interference from without; (2) the tacit support of a
powerful ally, Imperial Germany; and (3) the reconfirmation in Turkish minds
of the vulnerability of the Armenians as a target for destruction through mass
murder. As in the case of the Nazis, the Young Turk Ittihadist leadership was
quite irreligious, if not atheistic. But the lower levels of the bureaucracy
and the religious hierarchy in the provinces, with very few exceptions,
endorsed and assisted in the destruction processes through invocations of the
tenets of Islam and concomitant attacks on Christianity. Furthermore, the
participation of the mobs in mass murder, not uncommon in violent inter-group
conflagrations, can hardly be explained in terms of genocidal drives. More
often than not the primary urge is plunder and pillage; the intent to kill is
here subsidiary to the overriding motive of robbery. The participation in the
Armenian genocide of large segments of the population exemplifies this
relationship between motive and intent.
Given these considerations, intent emerges as the most viable criterion for
the definition and evaluation of genocide. Whereas motives denote initial
conditions susceptible to developmental change, intent has terminal
significance. Its presence and scope can be inferred mainly from concrete
results together producing the genocide, inasmuch as it is a mere state of
mind initially and therefore intangible. Such consequences are essentially the
direct and indirect results of the way mass murder is conceived, organized
and administered, keynoting a corresponding type of intended genocide.
As to the argument that the Turks never planned the murder of Armenians
outside of Turkey, it is true to the extent that there was no Armenian
dispersion comparable to the Jewish, and Turkey was neither geopolitical nor
militarily comparable to Germany in terms of continental expansion and
hegemony. However, in their summer 1918 march into Transcaucasia, where
Russian Armenia is located, the Turks extended their genocidal attempts
against the Armenian population. In a series of cables from Tiflis, German
Generals von Lossow and Kress von Kressenstein warned their superiors in
Istanbul and Berlin that the Turks were bent on exterminating (Ausrottung) the
Russian segment of the Armenian population as well [28]. Finally, Interior
Minister and subsequently Grand Vizier Talat provided, in an exchange with
U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau, the rationale for the comprehensive destruction of
the Armenians. 'The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so
intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don't, they will plan
their revenge' [29].
Like Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz cites both 'the uniqueness of the fate the Jews
experienced', which 'stands alone in the annals of human murderousness . . .'
and the parallels, through which 'the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in
their extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of the European
Jews . . . The once unthinkable 'Armenian solution" became, in our time, the
achievable "Final Solution", the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the
European Jews' [30].
Israel Charny interprets the Armenian instance as 'a dress rehearsal for the
Holocaust' [31]. Historian Gerd Korman takes the Roosevelt Administration to
task for ignoring the lessons of the Armenian case of World War I when
confronting 'the kind of bestial behavior' the Nazis displayed against the
Jews [32]. The following two gentile scholars' views are noteworthy in this
respect. Roger W. Smith states that 'Hitler extracted his own lessons from the
forgotten slaughter of the Armenians' [33]. Terrence Des Pres invokes Hitler's
1939 statement, citing the obliviousness of the world to the Armenian
disaster, to stress Hitler's method of emulating genocidal destruction [34].
Perhaps the most poignant analysis of the problem is provided by the Israeli
historian Bat Ye'or in her scholarly treatment of the fate of non-Muslim
nationalities and minorities subjugated by the Ottoman Turks. After
introducing the concept of 'the Armenian genocide' as having 'served as a
model for the genocide of the Jews carried out some thirty years later', she
details the specifics of the emulation:
'The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, were present at
the attempt to liquidate a whole people that was striving for its freedom.
They saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or
gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes, or
led in interminable convoys toward their place of execution, forced to dig
their graves, or abandoned in the desert, or, again, sold as slaves to Arab
tribes and compelled to accept Islam. After the sultan's proclamation of
jihad on 1 ( [sic] 11 ) November 1914, the governments of Germany and
Austria-Hungary knew that the local Muslim populations in Anatolia,
Armenia, Iraq and Syria actively participated in the 'final solution' of
the Armenian people. They saw the paralysis of the European governments
confronted with a slaughter that was reported in the world's newspapers and
known to all. This history lesson was remembered one generation later, when
Hitler planned a genocide with all the technological refinements and
efficiency of modern times. One can point to similarities in the behavior
of the victims, the murderers, and those who were passive spectators. It is
worth recalling the convoys of docile Armenians deluded by the pretext that
they were being transported to a temporary change of residence, when in
fact they were being taken to their place of execution. Victims were
selected for various purposes--for immediate death or slavery, for ransom,
or for prostitution--before finally being killed. Children were used as a
form of target practice. All of this shows the similarity in the collective
behavior of peoples when historical circumstances repeat themselves' [35].
A notable exception to these views juxtaposing the Armenian and Jewish cases
is the perspective of Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim, who denies the
plausibility of any comparison. According to him, the Jewish experience does
not bear comparison with any other genocide, not on account of 'uniqueness',
which term Fackenheim rejects since unique', and its counterpart 'universal',
are inadequate in that 'they either diminish the Holocaust to a passing
episode or dilute it into another example of man's inhumanity to man'. His
definition revolves around an axis whose poles are labeled 'persistence of
history' and 'transmutation of history' [36].
Addressing the same problem and describing the Jews and the Armenians as
common victims of the 'Holocaust', Irving Louis Horowitz resists what he
considers to be a penchant for 'separatist orientations . . . a belief in
chosenness . . . parochial [attitudes that are] self-defeating. He applies
the term holocaust to other victims of genocide such as Ugandans and
Cambodians, declaring: 'It is correct to say that the Holocaust is not over
and done with . . . because there are other peoples victimized by the very
model created by the Turkish and Nazi genocides,' to each of which he ascribes
'specific and peculiar characteristics'. To Horowitz, the argument 'unique vs.
universal [is] a bizarre struggle over language [a form of] divisive squabbles
about whose holocaust is real or whose genocide is worse . . . a grim reminder
of how easy it is for victims to challenge each other, and how difficult it is
to forge common links against victimizers' [37].
Finally, reference should be made to the political scientist Roger W. Smith
who not only criticizes 'the theological argument that insists on uniqueness
[which] rests on a darkened vision of the Jews as a chosen people', but warns
the Jews of the implications for them of the current trend of 'denying [the
Armenian] genocide by acknowledging the Holocaust'. Referring to Turkish
tactics of showing moral sensitivity by recognizing the Holocaust, of
appealing to Jewish self-interest, and of issuing veiled threats when pressed
hard, the author declares:
'The tactic of appealing to moral sentiment, self-interest and fear has not
been without some effect, but it is one, of course, that Jews above all
should see through. To give in to threat only makes one more vulnerable the
next time, if not to Turkey, to another government or faction that will
have its own demands. With greater solidarity between peoples, much of the
genocide that has occurred could have been prevented. And as a Jew one
might well be suspicious of overtures by a government that is engaged in
the massive falsification of history while the Holocaust itself is being
subjected to major distortions and, among the fringe element of
revisionists', its very existence is denied' [38].
...next is Part 2
--
David Davidian d...@urartu.sdpa.org "It has been ever thus in all things, son,
SDPA Center for Regional Studies Whatever we thrash we give to the wind,
P.O. Box 382761 We too have been blown by the world's wind
Cambridge, MA 02238 The chaff is gone but the grain remains."