June 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:40
3726 The Truth About The Armenian Genocide
An estimated 1.5 million Armenian people were extinguished by the Turkish government ruling the Ottoman Empire in a centrally planned and administered slaughter known as the Armenian Genocide. Under the cloud of World War I, between 1915 and 1918, the mostly Christian Armenian population were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation as they were forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria and marched through the desert to die. Following the end of World War I, the atrocities resumed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenian population was subjected to further violence, slaughter and expulsion. In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.Dr. Rouben Adalian is the Director of the Armenian National Institute and a specialist on the Caucasus and the Middle East. In 1993, Dr. Adalian completed a project to document the Armenian Genocide in the United States National Archives. Armenian National Institute: http://www.armenian-genocide.orgYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I'm here with Dr.
Ruben Adalian.
He is the director of the Armenian National Institute and a specialist on the Caucasus and the Middle East.
In 1993, Dr.
Dr. Adalian completed a project to document the Armenian genocide in the United States National Archives.
Now, you can check out the work that he's done and a lot of associated information at the Armenian National Institute website, which is armenian-genocide.org.
We'll put the links to that below.
Dr. Adalian, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for inviting me.
The first genocide of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide, 1.5 million people, slaughtered in ways that stagger the imagination, I would believe, of even the most sadistic minds still remains a controversy in many areas.
America and Israel and other people still seem to find it geopolitically advantageous.
Two-stage denials of this genocide.
I wonder if you could give people some background because I guess for most people Ottoman is a little square table in their living room but when it was of course at the height of its power as an empire in the 16th century was very dominant and out of the Ottoman Empire came of course the CUP and the genocide and so on.
I wonder if you could give people a little bit of a background of the tensions between the Christians and the Ottomans, the Muslims and how it ended up playing out.
Well, as you point out, in the 16th, 17th century, the Ottoman Empire is a world power.
It dominates the Balkans, the Middle East, right down into North Africa.
By the early 20th century, it's a much shrunken state, still a very large state on the entire Middle East as we know it today.
And still parts of the Balkans were part of the empire.
But this is an empire that is ruled by Turks and the Turks were Muslims.
And by their customs and traditions and form of government, the dominant group naturally disenfranchised the other religious minorities, the Christians and the Jews, were second-class citizens, and their rights were severely limited throughout most of the existence of the Ottoman Empire.
For instance, Christians and Jews could not give testimony in court, which really...
You know, stacked justice or injustice against you, there was no way for anybody to win a case.
And sorry, I just wanted to mention as well, I mean, in conformity with some Muslim doctrines, they were required to pay special taxes and, as you point out, were not subject to the protection of the state in any meaningful way when it came to persons and property.
Quite right.
When the justice system is rigged against you, the standard protections that a citizen enjoys, in this case, were entirely absent.
As you point out, additional taxes were imposed, additional requirements.
There were second-class citizens.
They were free to practice their religion, but that was about the extent of their freedoms.
Otherwise, they were Effectively reduced to being economic actors and not much more.
Obviously they did not serve in the military.
That was reserved for the Muslim population.
All of the government was reserved not just to the Muslim but effectively to the Turkish element.
So it's an empire with a very, very strict hierarchical order and the Christians and the Jews are at the bottom of this hierarchy.
There are other Islamic populations in the Ottoman Empire.
The Arabs are there, Persians, Caucasians, and so on.
But this was a, when a great power, it was a more tolerant regime.
Great statesmen, larger economy.
By the early 20th century, it's under great strain.
The Russian Empire is expanding.
The Balkan nationalities are liberating themselves from Ottoman rule.
And so the attitude of the government towards the Christian and other minorities takes on a whole different dimension and increasingly becomes very racist and begins to categorize specifically the Armenians, the Greeks, the Assyrians, the larger Christian groups as enemies within the state, even though they'd been thoroughly integrated and they were all conquered peoples that never resisted Ottoman rule.
However, they are as well influenced by They wanted to participate in government.
They aspired for equal rights.
And at the end of the day, all of that was denied to them.
The genocide was effectively, as has been made the case over and over again, the brutal answer to the Armenian question.
Question being, what happens to a minority within an empire?
How do they gain equality within an empire that refuses to extend it to them?
Right, right.
Now, even despite the legal system being stacked against them and excessive taxation, the Armenians were relatively prosperous, a relatively prosperous minority, which often tends to provoke tensions in a sort of multicultural mosaic of an empire that never quite got the which often tends to provoke tensions in a sort of multicultural mosaic of an empire that never And so I think that resentment was part of it as well.
But I think a lot of people aren't clear on just how rooted in Christianity the Armenian population was.
If I remember rightly, this is the population that was the largest population to first convert to Christianity, to make it a central part of their identity.
So this was a religious conflict in many ways, of course, because the CUP, who is alleged to have initiated this massacre, this genocide, you know, in the early days, you couldn't even join if you weren't a Muslim.
It's a political movement of Ottoman Muslims for Ottoman Muslims.
And so that seems to be downplayed a little bit with some of the religious tensions that seemed to be driving this conflict.
You covered a lot of ground.
First, you're absolutely right.
The Armenians are the oldest Christian nation on the face of the earth.
Their king adopted Christianity back in 301, and the church has played a very central role in their existence.
When we talk about the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, they're a minority at that point, but they have a 3,000-year history with thousands of years of existence as an independent country.
In the era that we're talking, they are a conquered people, so the equation Takes on a different character, as you well point out.
In terms of the wealth of the Armenians, and that's a superb point to raise when discussing genocide, because not only does it involve the destruction of a population, the demographic destruction, but as well as their economic destruction.
And you're right again in pointing out that the Armenians had accumulated a great deal of wealth.
However, that's an over-broad or an over-generalization to the extent that Most of the Armenian population was actually living in the countryside.
Most of them were ordinary farmers, ordinary businessmen.
The wealth was concentrated in a few of the major cities, primarily the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople.
And as for the CUP, as you refer to it, the Committee of Union and Progress, created by the nationalist or ultra-nationalist Turkish element that ultimately took over the Ottoman government.
In the first decade of the 20th century, ultimately their motto became Turkey for the Turks and effectively for the Turks alone, excluding anybody else.
And that exclusion didn't take form in terms of expulsion and exile.
It literally involved extermination, in the case of the Armenians at the very least, and some of the Greeks and some of the Assyrians.
Right, right.
Now, the history of sort of the political machinations that led up to the initiation of this genocide is complex and detailed, but it seems to me that once the Turks decided to go into the First World War and decided to align themselves with the Germans and so on against the Russians and the British,
there was a A cover for the initiation of this kind of murderous intent.
Because people say, oh, well, in the desperation of the war and so on.
But this doesn't really follow the chronology, right?
The main thrust of the genocide was started in the first year of the war.
And this was years ahead of any of the imminent collapse that occurred near the end of the war.
So when the government gets its martial and information control powers during wartime, it seems like a good time undercover.
Of the darkness and confusion of war to begin this kind of horror.
And that the war was not responsible for it, but was a cover for it seems to me a reasonable way to approach the initiation of this attack.
That's a critically important point that you make.
And it is overlooked.
And you're absolutely correct that the Armenian Genocide occurred at the time where the Ottoman Empire or the CUP government, the Committee of Union Progress, It happens at the start of the war and not towards the end of the war.
The empire is not collapsing at that point.
In fact, it's doing very well in resisting the fronts, whether against the Allied landing at Gallipoli or the Russian front, as you point out.
But the cover of war, it isn't simply a matter of doing things...
Because of the distraction of the war, but because war itself empowers government to do things to its own citizens.
Martial law effectively means there's an unlimited amount of police power that the state can exercise, and nobody, not even its domestic citizenry, is going to be questioning it.
And of course, the argument of security and security along the borders becomes one that can't be argued against either.
One of the debates that went on in the German state, in the German government, when the atrocities began to occur was, Germany is going to be implicated if it did not intercede and do something about this population.
And the argument back was, we're at war, and Turkey is our ally.
How can we interfere with their domestic affair?
And this has been a recurring argument that genocide is a domestic crime, is a domestic affair.
And so international intervention typically is complicated and impeded on account of that argument.
Right, right.
Now the initiation of this, I thought, was very, very instructive.
There were, of course, a night of raids where the leaders of the Armenian groups were arrested, about 200 of them.
But in general, I think?
It's astonishingly easy.
Again, once the male population and the leaders are disarmed or executed or imprisoned, then it seems like the dominoes fall relatively quickly and with little opposition.
You're raising the issue of how genocide is structured.
The popular impression is it's just mayhem, mass murder, a group of people attacking and slaughtering another population.
The fact that our matter is genocide is a state crime.
It is organized by the state, requires the instruments, the administration of the state, and all of the arms and equipment and the manpower that a state has in order to implement something that's so broad and so comprehensive.
It's not easy to identify a specific minority population across a vast geography.
And so there's a method to the madness, and it's very systematic, and it's very effective, and it's been done over and over again.
And the two points that you're Raising here is what happens to leadership and what happens to manpower.
Any genocide typically starts by arresting the men and women that are the spokesmen of the community.
It's effectively removing the head, removing the leadership, removing the capacity in the community to respond to.
And without that capacity to respond, then there's no capacity for resistance.
The same with the men.
They are inducted into the army.
It's wartime.
They're out there serving their state.
They're doing their obligation, meeting their obligation, while their government is entertaining a very different plan, which is their own demise.
They are isolated from their community.
They're in army barracks or they're in the front.
And so, again, they can be pulled away and, as you point out, slaughtered en masse.
So, the Armenian genocide, although it's It started as dated traditionally or as commemorated on April 24th, the year 1915.
It all started months and months earlier, where not only the planning, but the actual removal of the leadership, the actual removal of the men, the able-bodied men from that community had occurred.
So when the deportation started in April, it's easy to remove A million, two million people from their communities, because it's mostly women, children, and older men, and they're going to put up the least amount of resistance during the deportations.
And effectively, the big surprise during the Armenian Genocide is that there even was instances of resistance, but they were very isolated and they did not last very long.
Within a very short time, the million and a half Armenians who perished during the genocide Most of them perished their first few months of the deportations, 1915, 1916.
Better than half the Armenian population is already dead.
Right.
And of course...
They were told, as were the Jews in Germany, they were told that they were being resettled.
You know, one of the ways, of course, if you're told that you're being marched to your death, then you're going to probably grab whatever you can, a saucepan or a rolling pin, and try and fight for freedom.
But of course, you're worn away in increments.
So you're told, well, we're going to resettle you.
There's something wonderful at the end of all of this.
It's just you're not geographically convenient to us and so on.
And it's only then, of course, when you're in the death marches, when you're in the desert, when you have no food and water and you're terminally weakened, that you probably realize the truth, but you're so remote, you have no even handy weaponry, and you're exhausted and worn down by lack of food and water.
At that point, I mean, really all you can do is curl up and die, and this kind of incrementalism is something that we see over and over again in these kinds of mass murders.
Because...
If a population becomes aware of the true intentions of a government, they would resist.
Why would anybody volunteer to be deported?
Why would they obey these kinds of commands?
And so governments have to engage.
Governments that intend to destroy a population have to engage in deception.
They have to cover up the crimes from the very get-go, effectively.
And so, as we point out, Do it in stages.
And entrap the population.
And once they're removed from their homes and they're out in the open, they're just much easier victims, whether it's to starve them or to murder them.
In open ground, there's no way for them to protect themselves.
And again, geography serves the purposes of the state here.
By driving them into the desert, the government doesn't even have To recruit all that many murderers, after all, it still takes other men to kill.
They don't need huge contingents of these murderers to be organized in these butcher battalions, as they used to be called.
Instead, nature will do its damage by starving them and dehydrating them.
And again, very large numbers simply die from exhaustion and then starvation.
And of course, when they were herded into the camps, already weakened by hunger and thirst, you have the usual progression of virulent diseases that go through and wipe out the weakened sections of the population.
Nature and viruses and bacteria can do a lot of the dirty work and reduce the need for the murderous manpower required for this kind of extermination.
Quite so.
The term concentration camps often is a mislabel when there's no healthcare being provided to a population that's been concentrated.
Very quickly, epidemics begin to wipe out people.
And again, by design, while there may have been called concentration centers, there are actually death camps.
This is where people are herded in order to perish again more quickly.
There were quite a number of these camps along the Euphrates, ironically.
There's the river flowing and people can't get to it to get a drink of water, which, again, reveals the brutality of the regime and what they really had in mind.
And it is, again, something that is astonishing when this amount of resources and manpower is devoted to the extermination of a significant portion of the domestic population during a time of wartime.
Because, I mean, the Turks, the Muslims, were experiencing heavy losses, particularly, if I remember rightly, on the Eastern Front, at the same time that they're taking war resources and using it to exterminate parts of the domestic population, which would go against the aims of trying to succeed in a war.
It's part of the irrational hatred that seems to have manifested in this situation.
Genocide itself is a form of warfare, but it's a form of warfare of armed men against an unarmed population.
And it doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of manpower, but it does take resources away and certainly requires the attention of the people implementing this policy.
From the very first day, the interior minister by the name of Talat Bey, who was the architect of the genocide, very likely along with many others, critical leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, daily paid attention to what was going on and supervised the deportations, daily paid attention to what was going on and supervised the deportations, wanted to have reports sent in as to how many were sent out, how many were reaching their
Obviously, all of this language hides in their communications what in reality is going on because there's a big difference between the numbers deported and the numbers arriving.
And that tells him that his policy is being implemented or it's not being implemented as brutally or as thoroughly as he wanted.
In fact, when the numbers are too high at a destination point, he raises objections as to why the process had not been more effective.
It's remarkable the kind of language that's created, the euphemisms that are manufactured by these kinds of mass murderers who Take over a state apparatus and instruct it to commit crimes.
Was the attacks that were generated and sustained by the state, was it against Christians alone?
Because, of course, when you think about the Nazis, yes, they were attacking the Jews, but there were also intellectuals and homosexuals and people who were mentally handicapped and so on.
Was it against Armenian Christians almost exclusively, or was it against non-Muslims, or was there a sort of drive to create an ideological pure state, and anybody who wasn't part of that ideology was expendable?
To what degree was it focused on non-Muslims or Armenian Christians in particular?
The genocide obviously was focused on the Armenians in the main, the Christians in general, but it needs to be pointed out that any radical regime starts out by eliminating its political opposition.
And the Committee of Union and Progress did the same thing that the Bolsheviks did and the Nazis did in any other Extremist regime.
That is by eliminating liberal-minded Turks from the government.
Liberal-minded Ottomans.
And that simply didn't mean putting them out of the government.
It also involved assassination.
Liberal journalists and others.
Turks.
That's to say Muslims.
And it's only when there's no longer that kind of resistance within the government.
Political objection from liberal elements that a radical regime is then free to proceed with even more extreme policies such as Such as genocide.
Now, in the case of this phenomenon of removing Christians, it was broadly implemented.
It did catch in its net the Syrian population that happened to live in areas very proximate to the Armenians, even though they were not necessarily at the start of the process a specific target, but nonetheless, local representatives of the government, specifically the CUP, Who were some of the most violent of the government officials who implemented the genocide.
They didn't make a distinction between Armenians and Assyrians and Chaldeans and others and just swept that entire population along with the Armenians.
It was an opportunity to do as much damage and of course with local officials the incentive of plunder is immense and as you point out these are ancient communities.
They've got some Some certain amount of wealth accumulated and overnight, of course, this wealth is transferred to those who were ready to plunder them.
Eventually, the process expanded to the point where the Greeks got caught in the net as well and the Greeks of Anatolia eventually were expelled and large numbers of them killed.
So that by 1923, when the Ottoman Empire is at an end and the Republic of Turkey, the modern republic, is created, The Anatolian lands from the Aegean to the Caucasus is completely free of Christians.
They're no longer there, even though they were the original indigenous population, Greeks, the Assyrians, the Armenians, and instead it's 99% Turkish and Islamic.
Right.
Ethnic cleansing.
Now there is, of course, some controversy, not particularly in my mind, but certainly in the minds of others.
There's a controversy.
I've actually, and I'm sure you have as well, seen this genocide referred to as a tragedy, which to me is a terrible word and a highly insulting word to the 1.5 million who were butchered.
A tragedy implies no moral will.
A tragedy implies no ill intent.
To me, a tragedy is, oh, I got an illness which I did nothing to cause, or a tree fell on me in the forest.
You know, I mean, that is a tragedy.
And I've seen it referred to as a wide variety of other terms.
The term genocide is hotly contested by some.
I wonder if we could step through the definition of genocide, as is generally accepted, and how it applies in this situation.
Because there's a convention, there's a United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Commission of Genocides.
So the term has legal meaning, and it is therein that the arguments arise.
The convention was adopted in 1948.
The Armenian Genocide is committed in 1915.
It's sort of a silly argument.
The crime did not need to have a name for it not to have been...
A genocide.
And again, the argument whether the convention itself applies, the convention would not necessarily apply, but its meaning certainly applies, and its consequences should apply as well.
Otherwise, there's here a crime committed against an entire population for which there's no international jurisdiction, there's no international forum, there's no international mechanism to address what happened to this population.
Effectively, the injustice remains permanently unaddressed.
And so those who get into all these technicalities and find them rather convenient then step away or find reason to step away from the use of the term genocide and talk of a tragedy.
There's no one who has studied the subject matter would even apply the term.
An accident is a tragedy.
You know, an illness is a tragedy.
An unfortunate death is a tragedy.
But when you're talking about the death of a million and a half people and the destruction of an entire civilization, the end of a culture, 3,000 years of existence wiped away.
And it isn't merely, again, as I point out, the physical illumination.
It's a permanent destruction.
There's no way to recover this society and this society.
It's a portion of humanity.
Well, and of course, if the UN Convention was only adopted in 1948, that was, of course, after the Jewish Holocaust, but I don't think people would have any trouble calling that a genocide, even though it existed prior to the definition.
Quite so.
Again, most of the trial could Trials that were held in Nuremberg and others where the Nazis were eventually and justifiably accused of crimes, there were war crimes.
There were crimes against humanity.
The term genocide plays only a tangential role, but it does prompt for the international community in the post-war years to indeed finally codify the crime itself and do so Quite a large number of countries agreeing that it needs to be adopted.
Now, when it came to the inaction of this genocide, of course, the Muslims, the young Turks in Turkey, they had great control, overwhelming control over communications internally.
And of course, there was a ban on any discussion of any of this sort of stuff internally.
But there were a number of international observers, and I'm thinking in particular the American ambassador, who brought news of this genocide back to the world.
I wonder if you could talk about the reaction of the world as the news began to come out of Turkey about these atrocities.
One of the ironic contrasts between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide is that the Armenian genocide was reported about almost from the very start, whereas the Nazis were more successful in hiding the facts and the details of the Holocaust began to emerge somewhat whereas the Nazis were more successful in hiding the facts and the details of And in fact, world media attention was rather minimal compared to the size of the crimes that were being committed.
Central to notifying the world, and in particular the United States, was indeed this gentleman by the name of Henry Morgenthau who served as US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire stationed in Constantinople.
There's a very simple explanation as to why he was more informed than others, because the United States was a neutral party until 1917 and during World War I, and so had diplomatic representation all across the Ottoman Empire.
There were consuls stationed in key cities, Jerusalem, for example, and elsewhere.
And these folks were eyewitnesses.
They weren't simply collecting reports, but saw what was going on.
And as part of their normal duty report, reported their observations to the ambassador who then in turn sent it on to the State Department in Washington and these reports ended up on the desk of President Wilson.
And the US government decided to actually release some of this information because there was a lot of concern about what was going on and wanted the world to be aware that these crimes were being committed.
It played a very large role in At least at the later end of the process, in generating a mechanism in the United States to send aid to the survivors.
While the news reporting had no effect in slowing down the commission of the crimes or the deportations or anything else of the sort, regrettably, nevertheless, the U.S. response was very quick as soon as the war ended because there were a few hundred thousand survivors across the Syrian desert And the delivery of U.S. aid there and elsewhere in Turkey or Middle East or Russia played a huge role because even the survivors would have starved
and effectively the numbers of victims would have been even larger had not somebody like Ambassador Morgenthau and the American consuls been so conscientious in reporting and creating awareness of this crime.
Effectively, it's the first instance in world history that a genocide is made public.
And it's made public by Americans.
Right.
Now, a lot of the countries where the Armenians fled to have recognized this as a genocide.
Now, Turkey still, as far as I can ascertain, adamantly denies that this genocide took place They say that they were trying to protect this population, which seems a little odd to me.
There are reports that in the marching of the lines of Armenians out into the desert, the government had authorized criminal murderers and so on to attack Armenians.
These convoys with impunity.
And it seems that if you have a giant military protecting a domestic population, I don't think 1.5 million of them are going to end up being killed.
So what is the range of opinion that is going on across the world for the various actors and their own motivations for the denial or affirmation of this genocide?
Other than the Turkish government, there really is no government, perhaps Azerbaijan or including Azerbaijan, That denies the Armenian Genocide.
Turkey as a state wants to take no responsibility for what occurred.
It wasn't a gigantic crime.
There would be considerable implications if they took responsibility for the crimes.
But the rest of the world recognizes the Armenian Genocide and as the centennial approached in 2015, nearly all of the European states went on record formally in their parliaments or otherwise Extending recognition and affirming the historical record.
The United States actually has been, you know, rather good in being aware of the historical events, but has hesitated in coming out and formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
And as you have pointed out, countries like Israel as well, where they freely discuss the Armenian Genocide.
Nobody denies it per se, but it's a question of whether they, as a government, they would formally recognize it because they have interests With Turkey, strategic interests and other interests, and they don't want to see those interests damaged because Turkey plays a critical role in the geopolitics of their interests, of their international interests.
So that's the range that we're looking at in terms of the world's awareness today, rather late, 100 plus years later.
Where the historical record is pretty clear, it's really only one government that denies, whereas other countries that do not deny necessarily nevertheless have reservations about formally.
And is it still a crime?
It was at some point.
Is it still a crime in Turkey to talk about the Armenian genocide?
Because, of course, in some Western countries, it's a crime to deny the Jewish Holocaust.
And it's funny to think, terrifying and tragic to think that in Turkey, it is not the denial of a genocide that is a crime, but the affirmation of a genocide.
Quite right.
That law is still in the books.
It has not been removed.
Technically, it is a crime to raise the matter of the Armenian genocide inside Turkey.
It was being used to prosecute journalists, say, 10 years ago or more.
And it even resulted in the assassination of one Armenian journalist.
Journalist in Turkey by the name of Ferranc Dink, who was the most outspoken of his community on this matter.
But he was outspoken because he was hoping that by speaking about it, the more awareness he created inside Turkey that two peoples could find some way of finding a path towards reconciliation over the matter.
But with his assassination, that avenue or that pathway has become much more difficult and the process has slowed down.
But at the same time, the government has probably itself grown a little more hesitant to impose the terms of that article.
So it's still there.
The risk is there.
But Turkey seems to have much bigger problems, or the people in Turkey have much bigger problems now defending their rights than this one particular article, at the moment at least.
Right.
So let's talk about some of what happened.
Because when we hear of a million and a half deaths, I mean, it's incomprehensible to process how much suffering occurred.
And it is, I think, hard to process, but necessary to look at.
The sadism and cruelty involved in this.
This was not, you know, how they kill cattle, you know, as humanely as possible and so on.
Some of the reports that I've read are, you know, they lined up boys in a village and gouged out their eyes.
There was, of course, mass rapes and murders.
There was torture.
There was all of the bestial savagery of human nature that could be unleashed seemed to have been uncorked.
And the evil genies of our baser nature seemed to flow freely across the landscape.
I could not find any single human cruelty that was not manifested in the destruction of this population.
As witnesses observed, every conceivable crime was committed during the Armenian genocide.
And the dimension of the brutality, the deep-seated hatred that drove people to just do the most abominable acts is well attested to.
And of course, the worth of the cruelties fell upon children and women.
And in the case of the women, the range of crimes to which they were exposed was It was almost limitless.
Not only were they physically and morally abused, large numbers of them were kidnapped and taken into harems.
Effectively, they're now prisoners for a number of years, and some of them stayed and remained for the rest of their lives, unable to free themselves from those circumstances.
So it isn't a one-time atrocity that a woman might be facing, but a long, extended period of Terrible enslavement and whatever ensued thereafter.
Complicated in many instances by the fact that they gave birth to children and they didn't know what to make of these children.
A huge dilemma, especially at the end of the war when some of them were able to free themselves from their captors and still faced the question, well, now what?
Do we abandon our own children, or do we stay here and raise now a family that I didn't really want?
And do I submit to Islam for the rest of my life, or do I go back to my original family and my original faith if I can do so?
So the consequences for women are long-lasting.
Curiously enough, there is now a small group of people in Turkey Who have come forth and identified themselves as descendants of these women.
And so it's a very, very complicated question as to how one views and regards this small band of people in Turkey who are Muslims and yet who identify their Armenian ancestry.
Who do they belong to?
It's an interesting question.
Right, right.
I mean, you have the destruction of your home, your family, your culture, your religion, and you have seen the most awful atrocities, and then you're taken as a sexual slave by your captors.
It is hard to picture a worse passage in a human life.
And the trauma, of course, of this affects generations to come.
And, you know, and I point out, this scenario, this horrific scenario is playing out today.
This Islamic state, the caliphate, That one would hope is indeed in its last throes.
Nevertheless, for these past years has just inflicted the same kind of horrors upon the Yazidi population in specific and many other minorities in northern Iraq and northern Syria.
It's virtually the replay of the Armenian Genocide occurring With the same kind of radical thought, the religious hatred and the abuse of populations, with specifically the enslavement of non-Islamic and Christian or Yazidi women.
The world needs to see these patterns if they are to be avoided.
If history does indeed continue to repeat itself, there's never going to be an end to genocide.
Well, and of course, I think it was in the last year, 90,000 Christians were murdered, largely in Islamic countries.
This kind of religious cleansing, so to speak, is still underway in the world, and the outcry about it remains, to me, significantly muted relative to what is occurring.
Quite right, because if one, again, takes the long view, the Armenian genocide was only to start, of the eventual expulsion of Christian populations from the entire Near East.
There were large numbers, millions of Christians living across that region, in Iraq, in Syria, in Turkey, elsewhere.
And today we're talking of thousands in much shrunken communities with most of their churches and monasteries and other institutions, schools and so forth, devastated, destroyed, non-existent Wiped off the map.
The behavior of ISIS is just within a pattern.
It comes at the end of a century that starts with the Armenian Genocide and seems to me at this point about to conclude with another.
Yeah, I mean, it would be nice if the Pope took a little bit of a break from discussing the perils of global warming and spoke out more passionately about this particular topic, which would seem a little bit closer to the center of Christian faith than some of the other things.
Now, the young Turks, of course, the leaders of the Turkish government who implemented this, We're warned, of course, repeatedly by foreign powers that they would face repercussions, that they would face trials, as the Allies did prevail in the war.
What happened to them?
It's a very, very interesting story of how the response was formulated and crafted to the leaders of the Turkish government implementing this genocide.
What happened to them after the war?
You know, the Allies warned them, as you point out, that there would be consequences to committing more massacres and these crimes against humanity and civilization, as it was called at the time in 1915.
But at the end of the war, they fled the country.
Obviously, they had committed crimes not just against the Armenian people, but against their own nation.
And they knew that the Turkish people themselves would not tolerate their government any further and effectively abandon the country.
Many of them taking refuge in that allied state of theirs in Germany, some elsewhere in Italy or Russia.
But effectively, they were never brought to trial.
The principal leaders were never brought to trial.
The second-tier leaders, some of whom were captured by the allies, were brought to trial.
In domestic courts, in Turkish courts, in Constantinople in 1919-1920.
But again, once the Turkish nationalist regime, the one led by Mustafa Kemal, came to power, these trials were discontinued.
And a mere handful, and less than a handful, of the arch criminals were held responsible for the crimes that they committed.
Effectively, most of the principal Mass criminals got away with their crimes, which left the Armenians seeking vengeance, wondering how in the world they'd ever bring these Turkish leaders to justice.
And a group of men resorted to hunting them down, tracking them down, finding their hiding places, and ultimately assassinating perhaps a half dozen of them as the end of bringing some sort of resolution to the cry for justice for a million and and ultimately assassinating perhaps a half dozen of them as the end of Right.
Now, Now, one of the things that is hard to escape in looking at big picture geopolitical history and even up to the present is if we look at a country like Germany that recognized the atrocities he had committed upon the Jews and other populations one of the things that is hard to escape in looking at big picture geopolitical history and even up to the present is if we look at a country like Germany that
That country, Germany, is undergoing significant trials at the moment and may face significant dislocations in the future in terms of demographics and so on.
I compare that...
Fairly honorable process to the process that was enacted by the Turkish government, which is to deny, obfuscate, and deny and obfuscate some more.
And that country seems to be doing fairly well.
They're invited into NATO. They are respected at bargaining tables.
They don't seem to have that same, you know, it could be said that in Germany, the self-hatred sort of went cancerous, went pathological.
it metastasized intergenerationally to the point where young Germans look at their country and a lot of them feel like there's nothing positive in the history.
And if you look at the nationalism and the pride that remains within Turkey, the flourishing demographics, the growth, the acceptance in the world community, I tell you, I mean, this is a horrible thing to say.
And I don't know how to put it in a way that is not horrible, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Is it a good idea to acknowledge your own genocides?
Does it actually help you in the world stage?
Is it a positive thing?
It's the right thing to do, of course.
But comparing Germany to Turkey, it's hard to make the case that it helps your culture or civilization in the long run, if I look at these two examples.
You make a very, very good case, and it's actually a persuasive case.
It's a disturbing one that there can be this kind of normalization in the international system.
When a state has committed such a huge crime and there are really no consequences for the long term and no responsibility taken by government.
But as one compares the health of German society with Turkish society, there are contrasts that are very visible.
Germany is a stable democracy.
It has a flourishing culture and is not a threat to anyone in Europe or anywhere else.
Whereas Turkish society continues to be troubled and has these continuous turning over of government and at this moment seems on a path where an increasingly autocratic individual has seized the reins of power and democracy is at risk.
While at the same time, Turkey creates a lot of trouble for its neighbors and does...
It creates security issues for all of those countries, whether Greece, Syria, certainly Armenia, a small neighboring country which strangely is under blockade by Turkey.
And so there are differences in the behavior of governments, while at the same time I think you quite rightly point out that there is something quite disturbing.
In allowing the international community to normalize a post-genocide society without bringing it to account for what had occurred within its borders.
Well, I mean, not just you say there's no negative repercussions.
I think I could make the case that there have been rewards, not for the genocide, but rewards for the Turkish government.
They get massive amounts of EU money.
They got a seat at NATO. There is an active consideration to have them give free movement for the Turkish population in the EU. I mean, gosh, it's hard to, you know, if you look at it from a cold geopolitical standpoint, it's hard to make the case that one should circle back and deal with this kind of stuff.
If you look at the various material gains and losses between Turkey and Germany, and it's a horrible repercussion, and I sort of hate to even say it, but it's something that I couldn't stop thinking about when researching this issue.
Well, you know, I think you've put your finger on the sorest point with the Armenian people as to what's happened in the international community.
It's unfortunate that it's not the issue that Turkey receives these rewards or is accepted into international organizations, but that there are no conditions.
At the very least, those conditions should have been insisted upon, and it would have been better for everyone because The long-term consequence is going to be that Turkey feels entitled and licensed to act in a manner that is not consistent with international norms and ultimately that allows it to behave as a rogue state and would continue to create problems where it shouldn't have been able to do so.
But we're not going to be able to solve that problem and this is part of the unfortunate legacy of the Armenian genocide.
It's got wider implications than just what happens to the What is the fate of one single people, one single minority?
Absolutely, and we'll get to that in a moment.
I'm just going to read a little bit here because when researching into this issue, again, it's hard to escape the prominence of the Jewish Holocaust in the minds and hearts of the world versus, to some degree, the absence, to a large degree, the absence of consciousness of the Armenian Holocaust.
And one of the reasons I think that the Armenian Holocaust exists I mean, the survival of the Armenian people in the region owed itself largely, I would say, to foreign intervention, to foreign rescuing, to, as you point out, food aid and so on, to a smaller degree to resistance, although that generally tended to delay rather than stop the slaughters.
But I just read a little paragraph here so people can understand how Just how successful the young Turks' annihilation of the Armenian population was.
We've mentioned a million and a half Armenians murdered at the hands of the Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces.
And through these atrocities, which were intentionally intended to eliminate the Armenians in Turkey, the population of historic Armenia at the eastern extremity of Anatolia was wiped off the map.
With their disappearance, an ancient people which had inhabited the Armenian highlands for 3,000 years lost its historic homeland and was forced into exile and a new diaspora.
The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two dozen countries on all continents of the globe.
Triumphant in its total annihilation of the Armenians and relieved of any obligations to the victims and survivors, the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of dismissing the charge of genocide and denying that the deportations and atrocities had constituted part of a deliberate plan to exterminate the Armenians. the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of dismissing the charge Now, of course, the Jews were already a diaspora without a home and had been for thousands of years prior to the creation of Israel, of course.
So they had some experience on how to survive localized persecutions, which had occurred with depressing regularity throughout the The Middle East, throughout Europe, and other places.
The Armenians were scattered to the wind, were decentralized, and so few of them survived that I think that may be part of the reason why so little is known about it relative to the Jewish Holocaust.
In part, we're talking a population of half a million survivors, and as you say, scattered around the world.
They are stateless people.
They're in foreign lands.
Their primary concern is simply surviving day to day.
And that does indeed play a large role in being able to preserve the historical narrative or simply being lost in the daily news media cycles that overtake everyone's life.
But we should point out as well that in the case of the Armenian genocide, it's a genocide that's localized.
It's confined to the Ottoman Empire, more or less.
It does spill over into the Russian Empire a bit.
But it's restricted to a distinct geography.
Whereas in the case of the Holocaust, and the Holocaust was part of the larger Nazi crimes which involved near destruction of Europe, a lot more people were involved as victims of Nazism.
And so That whole continent, all the countries of that continent, had an interest in bringing the results and the consequences of the Holocaust to world attention.
And so there was a community of interest in addressing the consequences of the Holocaust where that was entirely lacking in the case of the Armenian Genocide.
The United States played some role, but the rest of the world went Quite pretty quickly at the end of the war about what to do with the Armenians and what to do with the Turkish government.
As we talk, of course, about Hitler and Nazism, there is a quote which shows up again and again in my readings of this, and I'll read this for people who aren't aware of it, and then we'll talk about the history of Hitler and the young Turks and some of the leaders.
So Hitler, of course, as he starts to expand, said...
I've issued the command, and I'll have anyone who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death, mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language.
Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need, who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.
And that seems to me one of the great prices paid by the world's silence on the destruction of the Armenians that it gave, to some degree, carte blanche to Hitler to feel that as the young Turks, to some degree, got away with it, as the world ignored it or covered it up or issued blasé press releases, that he as the world ignored it or covered it up or issued blasé press releases, that he was given license to continue this hellish work of genocide because people
And that, to me, seems one of the great prices that maybe, as you point out, existentially or emotionally, Turkey is still paying for today.
The Hitler quote is critical in understanding, in Hitler's attitude, as well as many other Germans, in understanding why they committed the Holocaust, because so many German officials, whether military or otherwise, didn't.
diplomatic especially, were aware, because Imperial Germany was allied with the Ottoman Empire, And had a very large representation, military representation and diplomatic representation in the Ottoman Empire, and so they observed.
Much as the American consuls were observing and reacting in a certain way, in horror, the German military and the German diplomatic officials were reacting in a very different way, because as allies of the Ottomans, effectively they gave them cover.
This information flows into Germany, and at the end of the war, the information does get out to the public.
But in the case of Hitler himself personally, was acquainted with one of the German consuls, a fellow named Erwin Scherpner-Riegler, who was stationed in the Ottoman Empire and joins him and the Nazi Party afterwards.
And so there is this, at the very least, if not general knowledge by Hitler of what happened to the Armenians.
He probably heard from his good friend what exactly transpired in Germany.
During World War I while he was serving there and watching the extermination of the Armenians and clearly drawing the lesson that you point out that there are no consequences to acting brutally against vulnerable populations.
The relationship of the two was so close that during the Munich Putsch that Hitler tried to stage, Schubner-Richter was literally walking with him arm in arm down the street as they attempted to throw The local government and therein he fell, he took a bullet to ours, Hitler ended up going to jail, and of course subsequently wrote his book and embarked on his long-term destructive political career.
The knowledge within German officialdom, whether those in the diplomatic service, even the fellow who became foreign minister of Germany and served under Hitler, I had been a young secretary in the German embassy.
So the extent of German official knowledge of what happened to the Armenians was massive and clearly understood for the lack of consequences.
And so when another radical regime, in this case an extremely radical one, such as the Nazis in Germany take over, the lessons from history to them are easy and within reach.
And so there were consequences to the Armenian Genocide, and they were widespread, at least in the first half of the 20th century.
It seems the psychological principle occurs geopolitically as well as personally, that that which we deny, we repeat.
Now, there are, of course, people who say, well, you know, it's such a long time ago now, although, of course, it really was only, I mean, the detail end of it was less than 20 years before the start of the Holocaust, so it's not that far back in time relative to the Holocaust.
But there are people who say, oh, it's so far back in time.
It's so long ago.
What does it really matter now?
I wonder, Dr.
Adalian, if you could take the time to tell people why it matters so much and why it is important to circle back and why it is important to get people to understand why it's so important that we recognize what happened.
I mean, the people are dead now who made it happen, but there are still so many lessons to be learned to prevent anything like this from happening again in the future.
The biggest problem is the crime and genocide itself.
It continues to repeat itself, whether it's Cambodia, whether it's Darfur.
This phenomenon of mass murder by an organized, systematic murder of peoples, despite the genocide convention, is, I think, very, very disturbing.
And there has to be a way to bring an end to it and to understand what What human behavior has been like across the 20th century into the 21st and how it starts with the Armenian Genocide, I think, gives us some tools for looking at it.
And this is what scholars do and analysts have done.
And they actually have a very good grasp of how a genocide unfolds and how a genocide can actually be prevented.
It is a preventable crime.
And that's one lesson that has to be drawn from it.
The other is what happens in Turkey?
What happens to a society that does commit a crime and chooses to ignore it?
And many, interestingly enough, in Turkey, many intellectuals and scholars argue that the flaws in their system, the problems with their society, their inability to create a stable democratic society, and this continuous persecution of minorities in their country, constantly looking for new internal enemies, It's part of the legacy of the Armenian Genocide.
If a state does not purge itself of this mentality that once the psychology is ingrained, then coming generations continue to face the same problem.
And lastly, the case of the Armenians.
They are now a people, or part of them were people without a homeland anymore.
They had lived in one place for 3,000 years.
Now they're dispersed across the rest of the world.
What's their destiny?
What happens to people when there is no rectification, where there's no restitution, no reparation, no restoration?
And where do they go from here?
There has to be a space where these two people can reconcile, a place where they can start talking to one another.
A whole lot is made that they had lived together in prior centuries and subsequently forgot how to do so, but that's not quite Quite historical reality as we discussed, but they have to think about the future.
There is an Armenia on the map.
It happens to border on Turkey.
The two countries don't have working relations and they need to figure that one out.
And given the size difference, it would seem to me that Turkey holds all the cards in this case and could act responsibly and should act responsibly.
It can take steps to rectify The damage from the past and do something about it.
It's just this constant reluctance, perpetuating reluctance to address any dimension of the Armenian genocide is really not helpful in any shape or form.
Yeah, and I wonder if it is perhaps the Christian focus on free will, the Christian focus on taking ownership of your moral crimes and the need to seek forgiveness of those you have wronged, that has had some conditioning on how the West approaches its own state crimes versus other cultures in other countries.
I really, really want to thank you for your time, Dr.
Adalia, and I really wanted to remind people and to encourage people, learn about this.
It's not that long ago, and the effects are still with us, and when crimes are buried, oftentimes it is to, in some ways, perhaps even subconsciously grease the way for future crimes.
These bodies need to be exhumed, so to speak, mentally.
These crimes need to be examined.
And as a great resource for learning about this, Dr. Adalian's website at the Armenian National Institute website at armenian-genocide.org.
Thank you so much for, of course, the immense amount of time and labor that you have done yourself and directed and others in bringing these materials to a central place.
I wish you the very best in continuing to get the word out there, and I really appreciate your time today.
