Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet

1. To Acquaint America with Ravished Armenia

• 2 1 in september 1896, The Ram’s Horn, a religious magazine from Chicago , published a political cartoon entitled “Tears, Idle Tears!” (Figure 1). The drawing depicts a swarthy Muslim, indicated by the crescent atop his turban, standing over a pale, fallen woman, identified by a nearby banner as Armenia. In his hand, the attacker holds a dagger poised to plunge into the prostrate figure. Meanwhile, an anthropomorphic globe, clad in military gear, sheds tears at the violence before him, bemoaning, “Oh!! This is aw-ful! Ain’t it?” The cartoon refers to the Hamidian massacres, the slaughter of Armenians that took place in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896 and a culmination of violence spurred by anxiety over reforms and an effort to maintain a pan-Islamic Ottoman Empire, dubbed the “Sick man of Europe.” While otherwise straightforward in its use of caricature and anthropomorphization to refer to world events, the cartoon is striking for its depiction of global witnessing. Here, a world watches distant events, has its sentiments aroused, and bemoans the horror it encounters—horror that had been made familiar to the average reader through prior reports and illustrations. At the same time, a legend functioning as greater conscience scolds the audience for the idleness of the emotion alone. What are these tears compared to a world that is clearly capable of acting (it is in military gear) and observing action before the dagger sinks to finish the job? Tropes of Orientalism dramatize the scenario , enhancing the claims of unjust and outrageous suffering, and producing a narrative of the massacres complete with cast of characters: the villain, the victim, and the possible savior. This image speaks to the concerns of this chapter: the global witnessing facilitated by a variety of early media. The media technologies enabled broadcast and networking at an unprecedented rate, while mediating T O A C Q U A I N T A M E R I C A W I T H R A V I S H E D A R M E N I A 1 01 Chapter 1_Torchin 9/10/2012 1:36 PM Page 21 strategies transformed information—the reports from overseas—into knowledge, and more importantly actionable knowledge. In other words, how were these images and accounts of distant atrocities made comprehensible and how did they encourage the audience to political or social response? The present-day understanding of the Armenian genocide as forgotten overlooks how widely reported it was at the time, an aspect realized in this cartoon’s global witness. From the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96, to the genocide in 1915, to the conditions of privation, homelessness , and expulsion that continued into the 1920s, the Armenian crises were widely reported. Articles in newspapers and magazines, diplomats’ letters, missionary reports, and refugee testimonial performance attracted significant attention, contributed to international political debates, and facilitated massive transnational relief efforts, or what Peter Balakian calls “the first international human rights movement in American history.”1 2 2 • T O A C Q U A I N T A M E R I C A W I T H R A V I S H E D A R M E N I A Figure 1.“Tears, Idle Tears.” Image courtesy of The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota. 01 Chapter 1_Torchin 9/10/2012 1:36 PM Page 22 Technological advances in photography and publishing united images with the dramatic testimonies. Sketches and photographs accompanied the reports in weekly magazines while editorial cartoons offered commentary . Relief organizations used both photographs and sketches in their posters and pamphlets. The turn of the twentieth century also saw the rise of film as mass entertainment and a source of information when the Lumière brothers presented actual footage from every continent, giving “audiences an unprecedented sense of seeing the world.”2 The Americanbased Near East Relief sought to harness the potential of these new media in their campaign to raise both awareness and funds. To best understand the relationship among visual media, global witnessing , and the production of response, I combine analyses of aesthetic, formal , and genre properties of the texts with the social scaffolding developed around the texts designed to enhance meaning and animate action. I focus on the publicity activity of Near East Relief (NER), placing it in the wider context of reportage and response to the Armenian...