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What is distinctive about the Armenian Genocide?

What is distinctive about the Armenian Genocide?

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 pm by Jane the Actuary

What is distinctive about the Armenian Genocide? 2015-04-27T12:00:20-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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[what follows is incomplete; I’m working through trying to put the Armenian Genocide into context. Comments welcomed!]

Earlier today, via Twitter, journalist Nicholas Kristof had this to say,

Obama is wrong on 2 counts to describe Armenian slaughter as first mass atrocity of 20th century. 1st, it was genocide, not just atrocity.

Second, first mass atrocity in 20th century was probably the earlier slaughter of civilians in Philippines in Philippine-American war.

which is interesting to chew on.

Kristof is referring to this carefully-crafted statement by the White House:

This year we mark the centennial of the Meds Yeghern, the first mass atrocity of the 20th Century. Beginning in 1915, the Armenian people of the Ottoman Empire were deported, massacred, and marched to their deaths. Their culture and heritage in their ancient homeland were erased. Amid horrific violence that saw suffering on all sides, one and a half million Armenians perished.

Note the fact that Obama uses the term “mass atrocity” rather than Genocide in order to avoid a diplomatic row with Turkey. (Though — hey — what’s the worst that can happen? Will Turkey really be so rash as to cease cooperating — to the extent that they do, anyway, in the first place — with U.S. efforts with respect to Syria/Iraq/ISIS?)

So is Kristof trying to make a larger point, or just being pedantic on this? Clearly, there’s not anything exceptional, in the larger scheme of things, in being the first X of the 20th century, whether it’s the first mass atrocity or the first epidemic or the first war or some other “first.”

With respect to the Philippine-American War, yes, it’s true that from 1899 to 1902, the United States killed about 250,000 Filipino men, women, and children, both combatants and noncombatants, in its ultimately successful battle to pacify the population during an insurgency. I pulled off my bookshelf the book Flyboys by James Bradley, which chronicles the fate of American pilots held as P.O.W.s by the Japanese (spoiler alert: they died) but with a lot of background and context, including a couple pages on this specifically. Massacres of entire villages, killing disarmed prisoners, even concentration camps: it’s all there.

But, of course, it’s silly to say that there’s some special significance to this by it being at the dawn of the 20th century. With respect to actions the United States has taken, its behavior towards the multitude of American Indian tribes, between outright massacres, forcing them onto reservations ever-dwindling in size and fertility of the land, and attempts to destroy their culture, between slaughtering bison and, later, banning Indian languages at boarding schools, is clearly more genocidal in character and motivation. After all, once the Philippines was declared “pacified” the killing ended.

And, of course, we can look back further in time, or geographically across the globe: people have been killing each other since Cato declared Carthago delenda est, and, indeed, well before then. It was simply the norm that victors killed or enslaved those they defeated.

So what makes the Armenian Genocide more worthy of being recognized and commemorated? In part, the scope — the raw numbers of people killed combined with the ethnic-cleansing motivation. But also, so far as I can tell, this was a turning point, perhaps alongside World War I and maybe the Geneva Conventions. According to the same Wikipedia article I read yesterday, there was at the time international awareness and anger at Turkey’s actions, and the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief was formed to aid Armenian orphans. (Recall that the United States was officially neutral until 1917.) Did the Turks simply, at this time, in this place, perpetrate their massacre against a “civilized” people and in a time when the “civilized world” had shifted from treating such actions as just a part of war and a part of life, to criminal misconduct? Are the Turks just “unlucky” in their timing?

But are we holding Turkey to a higher standard than, say, Russia, with respect to the Holodomor, or Japan, with respect to atrocities in China and elsewhere? I don’t know.

Turkey wants to be treated as a modern, civilized country. They’re a part of NATO. Heck, for quite a while they asked very nicely to be admitted to the EU, though I believe they’ve abandoned that quest. And civilized countries acknowledge the unsavory elements of their past. They don’t insist on weasel words like “both sides did it” or “technically, the word ‘Genocide’ didn’t exist at the time.” And they certainly don’t insist that all other nations accede to their demand to avoid the “G-word.”

Update:

In a nutshell, what I’ve been reading recently is a claim that the West’s failure to oppose the Armenian Genocide emboldenedHitler. The key quote, after speaking in August 1939 of his intention to destroy the Polish people, is this:

Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?

But — and I’d have to brush up on my history to really discuss the full context — here’s what wikipedia has to say:

On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers, Britain, France, and Russia, jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing “a crime against humanity”. An excerpt from this joint statement reads:

In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.[5]

And this was only partway into Turkey’s massacres and deportations of Armenians.

Subsequently, again, according to Wikipedia, after World War I ended, the Allies did indeed court-martial those Turks who, at the highest levels, were deemed responsible for both the Armenian Genocide, as well as massacres of Greeks, but the prosecutions were ultimately not successful as there was at the time no legal framework under which to prosecute them.

Was Hitler correct that no one in 1939 “speaks of” the Armenian Genocide? I suppose it depends on how you want to interpret this. But it certainly doesn’t seem correct to say that the West was wholly indifferent.

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