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The Armenian Genocide and an Updated Denial Initiative: A Review Essay
- Genocide Studies and Prevention
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2007
- pp. 173-181
- 10.1353/gsp.2011.0050
- Review
- Additional Information
The Armenian Genocide and an Updated Denial Initiative: A Review Essay Joseph A Kéchichian Guenter Lewy. The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2005. Pp. 384, cloth. $24.95 US. When on 12 October 2006 the French National Assembly approved a bill that made it a crime to deny the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey around the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish leaders lamented the decision as a great disappointment, while several European officials insisted that it was not for the law to write history. That task, however, is compromised when leading historians deny, in Jacques Chirac’s memorable words, a country’s ‘‘dramas and errors.’’1 Because experts are lured to power, sometimes at the expense of their integrity, it behooves those searching for the truth to redouble their efforts. Therefore, the genuine need to identify and correct assertions made by those who wish to deny historical facts is a duty both to history and to the truth itself. Guenter Lewy, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, is the latest researcher attempting to deny the Armenian Genocide.2 Indeed, the inordinate nature of Lewy’s resort to political leverage is such as to render the need for a critical review of this agenda-laden tome even more pressing. As Lewy has declared that ‘‘a book [must] be judged by its content and not by the motive of its author,’’3 this review will attempt such an endeavor. Lewy opines that ‘‘most Armenians . . . do not know Turkish’’ (xi); according to him, therefore, few Armenians may be competent to write on the topic of the Armenian Genocide or to offer critiques of books on the subject. In fact, however, not only do many Armenians know Turkish, some are fluent in the language—including this reviewer.4 The Relocation Assertion Lewy systematic uses and emphasizes the term ‘‘relocation’’ throughout his book; this prejudicial stance is striking, and the theme of relocation truly dominates the text. According to Lewy, Turkish authorities had no intention of liquidating the Armenian population but were merely trying to deport and resettle that population; their blunders and failures in the process caused massive but unintended casualties. To foster this perspective, Lewy relies on several techniques, including pronounced selectivity of data, deflection, distortion, and occasional falsification. We are told, for example, that the American Associated Press correspondent George Abel Schreiner explained the fate of the Armenians as merely the result of ‘‘Turkish ineptness, more than intentional brutality’’ (qtd. 254); Schreiner asks us to believe that it was mere clumsiness that ‘‘was responsible for the hardships the Armenians were subjected to’’ (qtd. 254).5 In a widely read volume published in 1918, however, and based on diary entries written immediately after particular events, Schreiner writes, ‘‘the Armenians are going through hell again . . . [because] the Joseph A Kéchichian, ‘‘The Armenian Genocide and an Updated Denial Initiative: A Review Essay’’. Genocide Studies and Prevention 2, 2 (August 2007): 173–182. 2007 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi: 10.3138/gsp/005 deportations . . . [presented a] shocking phase of barbarity . . . .’’6 Schreiner, who had interviewed both Mehmet Talât Pasha and Ismail Enver Pasha, the two principal architects of the Armenian Genocide, preserved his unedited diaries. Of course, in writing ‘‘again,’’ his point of reference is actually the 1909 Adana massacres, which formed the prelude to the 1915 genocide. Schreiner’s rich text, based on first-hand observations, since he maintained that he personally witnessed horrible acts that he denounced as ‘‘repulsive, loathsome, [that] must cause us to consider whether or not the Turk has a right to rule others.’’ He perceptively asks whether ‘‘a Government that tolerates this [may be] so low, contemptible, a thing that nothing whatever can be said in its favor.’’7 Lewy further quotes Dr. Leopold Gustav Alexander von Hoesch, who compiled German ambassador Wolff-Metternich’s seventy-two-page report of 18 September 1916, which dealt with the Armenian deportations and massacres, as follows: ‘‘The authorities . . . had been unprepared for the deportations and therefore had failed to provide food and protection for the exiles’’ (254). Lewy implies that Constantinople...