Vartan Matiossian
The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide
By Siobhan Nash-Marshall
The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York (Jan. 1, 2018), 256 pp.
ISBN: 978-0824599164; Softcover, $24.95
Denial is not only the last stage of genocide but also the first. One
need merely recall that the diplomatic representatives of the Ottoman
Empire in Geneva and New York were denying the annihilation of Armenians
in real-time, clinging to the arguments of negation and rationalization
that the first denialist pamphlets would go on to compile as early as
1916-1917.
The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide, a recent
book by Siobhan Nash-Marshall, chair of Christian philosophy at
Manhattanville College, makes a case study of Turkish denial of the
Great Crime (Medz Yeghern) as part of a trilogy on the betrayal of philosophy.
That the book is written by a philosopher should not predispose the
layperson. Its approach is as instructional as it is philosophical, and
the book is infused with extensive and learned historical research. The
book’s starting point is familiar to many readers: a somewhat old yet
ageless document of moral bankruptcy—evidence unwittingly provided by
denialism itself—that disclosed the murky alliance between state
sponsorship and academic servility. The reference is to a 1990 letter
addressed by Nüzhet Kandemir, then Turkish Ambassador to the United
States, to professor Robert Jay Lifton of City University of New York.
The missive was extraordinary… and thrice revelatory: The letter itself,
its actual source, and the explanation from the source each disclosed
inner workings of Turkish denialism. As a result of a clerical error,
the letter to Lifton had also included both the initial draft of the
letter, actually crafted by historian Heath Lowry (a star of the
denialist firmament in the 1980s and 1990s), as well as Lowry’s
explanatory cover letter to Kandemir.[1]
Lowry, who also ghostwrote the infamous 1985 letter to the U.S.
Congress signed by 69 Turkish Studies scholars and published in the New York Times and the Washington Post as
an advertisement, produced a string of denialist articles and books and
went to become Princeton University’s first Ottoman and Modern Turkish
professor (1993-2013) in a chair funded by the Turkish government, where
he resumed his field of specialization, Early Ottoman Studies.[2]
In her introduction, professor Nash-Marshall points to the split
between the realm of experience and the realm of thought, as suggested
by Descartes, which led to the rationalist approach of the French
Encyclopedists and that of the German idealists “to remake the world in
the image and likeness of their ideas”—namely, to overturn the world and
reshape it without concern for the destruction of human lives and
cultures (p. xii). This approach, which underlies the failure and the
betrayal of modern philosophy, inspired readers of those philosophers,
like the Young Turks and Hitler, to do the unthinkable: “In all
seriousness, anyone who knows twentieth-century history should realize
that he cannot make sense of the unimaginable amount of blood spilt
throughout it and in most corners of the globe without referring to
philosophers… The twentieth century was the playground of
nineteenth-century philosophy” (p. 27).
After dealing with those issues in Chapter One, the author takes the
bull of denial by the horns in Chapter Two, in which she deals with the
inherent violence of denial as much more than just the reshaping of
history. It is fair to note here that the issue of denial has been
specifically analyzed by various authors (Vigen Guroian, Richard
Hovannisian, Vahakn Dadrian, Marc Nichanian, Marc Mamigonian, Henri
Theriault, etc.), and extensively noted by many others. Thus, either an
account of past analysis or a footnote that listed the main sources on
the subject would have been a welcomed addition.
Nash-Marshall makes an illuminating point when she observes that the
Armenian case is unlike that of post-Holocaust denial in that the
writings of denialists Robert Faurisson or David Irving are not a
constituent part of the genocide they deny occurred (p. 48-50). That is,
they do not contribute to the genocide; they merely feed off of the
intra-genocidal denial that took place during the Shoah itself, when the
Nazis contrived euphemisms such as “Final Solution” for their plans and
“disinfecting showers” for their actions, or the way they disguised
conditions in concentration camps (e.g., Theresienstadt) to deceive
curious outsiders.
However, as she explains in Chapter Three, Ambassador Kandemir (and
his ghostwriter Lowry) in 1990—and by extension any other denialist
before and after them, whether they feed from the original denial or not
(one of the “sins of the fathers”)—have an objective that is directly
related to the project that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)
pursued in 1915 and subsequent years (p. 57-65).
The creation of a homeland only for the Turks, which was the primary
goal of the CUP from 1908 onward, was hampered by the near nonexistence
of a Turkish identity that could serve to create a Turkish nation-state
or buttress the ideology of Turkish superiority and right of dominance.
In Chapter Four, Nash-Marshall extensively draws on the memoirs of that
champion of Turkish feminism and purported progressive Halide Edib
(Adivar), who was actually a close collaborator of the Young Turks and
director of the infamous factory of Turkification that was the orphanage
of Antoura, in Lebanon. In her memoirs, Edib provided extensive textual
information about what Turkish foundational identity was, where the
Turkish homeland would be, and how the CUP would ensure the adoption of
that identity by the inhabitants of the new homeland. Professor
Nash-Marshall offers a penetrating and illuminating deconstruction of
Halide Edib’s memoirs as a key for understanding the subjacent ideology
and purposes of the Ottoman ruling elite (p. 74-100).
The author invokes in Chapter Five what she calls the Greek Principle
(“the inalienable right of an autochthonous [indigenous] people to the
proprietorship of the lands of their forefathers”) (p. 105) that led to
Greek independence in 1822. This principle came about as the result of a
paradigm shift in the sovereignty of peoples in the late 1790s and
early 1800s, and it served as the guiding pattern for the effective
dismantling of the Central Empires (Germany and Austria-Hungary) after
World War I. It undermined imperial land claims, above all the Ottoman
Turkish claims, for they had no “lands of their forefathers” to demand.
The elimination of the word “Armenia” in article 61 of the Treaty of
Berlin (1878) was an early response to that threat (p. 111), followed by
Abdul Hamid II’s widespread prohibition of “Armenia” in print
[including from Ottoman maps] and the rejection of Armenian demands for
reform that echoed the 19th century’s European democratic revolutionary
trends (p. 119-122). And it is not surprising that Ottoman documents in
the late 19th century considered Anatolia (including Western Armenia)
“the crucible of Ottoman power” (p. 123), and justified the Hamidian
massacres (1896-1897) as maintaining the integrity of the state in light
of Armenian “provocations.”
The Young Turk coup d’état of 1908 did not stop the process of
disintegration of the empire after the independence of Greece; that
process had gained momentum in the fourth quarter of the 19th
century, and as a result Ottoman presence in Southeastern Europe and
North Africa was practically wiped out between 1911 and 1913. The
disintegration process was perceived to be poised to engulf the empire’s
Asiatic domains, and the menace to the “Anatolian heartland” (the
current territory of Turkey) seemed more than palpable. The CUP’s
understanding of what the “Great Democratic Revolution” and the Greek
Principle had in store for the fate of that core territory led it to
find a preemptive “final solution” to counter those threats by creating a
“Turkey for the Turks” and exerting the “sovereign right of
self-defense against a revolutionary movement,” as the Ottoman
government claimed in its response to the Allied statement of May 24,
1915 that referred to “crimes against humanity and civilization.”[3]
Chapter Six of The Sins of the Fathers offers a nuanced
account of how the situation evolved in the postwar period, from the
Armistice to the Treaty of Lausanne. It elucidates the impact of Western
political incoherence on the success of the Kemalist movement to attain
the goal of its forerunner, the CUP: to salvage a much larger Turkish
state than the one the Treaty of Sevres had carved out from the Asiatic
territory, and make it practically identical with the boundaries of the
“Anatolian heartland” with the reincorporation of the Armenian
territories that had been wrested by the Russian Empire after the
Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 (p. 161-204).
Once that territorial re-composition had been achieved, the
ideological engineering begun by the Young Turks continued: Mustafa
Kemal tried to “invent an identity that would not just unite the Turks,
and demonstrate that they were not culturally inferior to the Europeans,
but above all ensure that no autochthonous people could threaten their
claims to their lands” (p. 209). That in turn required doing what in
fact was carried out: destroying the rem(a)inders of material culture;
renaming the geographical places that recalled non-Turkish presence in
those lands; dismissing the non-Turkish groups as remnants from the
forgettable dark ages of Turkey; and, as a corollary, denying what had
been perpetrated.
In her Conclusion, professor Nash-Marshall states that Kandemir’s
letter to Lifton was a paradigmatic example of genocidal act—as
intellectual aggression against Armenian collective memory; an echo of
CUP propaganda at the time of the Genocide; and “the product of an act
that aimed to eliminate not just a geno’s past right to
existence, but the foundations of its future existence” (p. 212). Its
underlying reason was the defense of the territorial integrity of a
Turkish state inextricably linked to the seizure of the indigenous
people’s properties, and their very land, both of which constituted the
underpinnings of modern Turkey’s socioeconomic construction—and of the
Turkish state itself.
However, that seizure was not simple confiscation, in that “the CUP
and its successors firmly believed (and believe) that what was once
called Armenia—the Eastern Provinces or six vilayets and
Cilicia—is and can only be Armenia” (p. 220). The lack of links among
origin, history, and geographic location made it impossible for Ottoman
Turks to apply a binding agent between the prospective Turkish homeland
and the peoples who would live on those lands. The solution for that
lack was the destruction of the indigenous peoples, carried out through
the two-fold crime: their physical annihilation, and the erasure of the
remaining traces.
It is not by chance, then, that a 2007 Turkish court ruling against
two Armenian journalists charged with violating provisions of the
notorious Article 301, stated (as quoted by the author), “Talk about
genocide…may lead in future centuries to a questioning of the
sovereignty of rights of the Republic of Turkey over the lands on which
it is claimed these events occurred” (p. 222, italics added). That
conceptualization, the author points out, makes of the annihilation of
1915 rather than “just a historical fact…a present crime that continues
to be perpetrated by every official act with which the Turkish
government denies the truth” (p. 223).
Nash-Marshall returns in her final paragraph to the ideas presented
at the beginning of her work: The subordination of reality to our
thoughts and will turns our actions violent. In the case of the Armenian
Genocide, the actions and policies of the Turks, Soviets, Central
Powers, and Entente, and all the way down to the actors of today, were
and are informed by the imposition of expediency and national interests
over moral commitments: “All do so because they make metaphysics serve
their policy instead of informing it” (p. 226).
The Sins of the Fathers makes
a well-considered and informed case about many issues that seem to have
been overlooked in historical analyses of the Armenian Genocide and its
denial. It does so with refreshing candor and scholarly depth. Above
all, it gives plenty of fodder to rethink many issues of yesterday that
bear enormous weight over what is happening today.
Notes
[1]
The documents were published and analyzed in Roger W. Smith, Eric
Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of
the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spring 1995, 1-22. The article was reprinted in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, Detroit: Wayne Street University Press, 1998, pp. 271-296.
[2]Professor
Nash-Marshall argues in two lengthy footnotes at the beginning of
Chapter One that Lowry reportedly walked back his denialist positions
(pages 2-4). We have not seen any concrete evidence to that effect,
however.
[3] Professor Nash-Marshall has given the date May 29 for the Allied statement, which is inaccurate (p. 147).
"The Armenian Weekly," March 30, 2018
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