Category Archive

I don’t want to cause Ron Paul any extra grief, but I would note that Ron Paul stated his opposition to Lincoln and the War on national television just a few weeks ago and gave a reasonable answer when he was asked about this.  Among other things, he said:

How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years?  I mean, the hatred and all that existed.  So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. 

Those who would like to defend the Unionist cause should ask themselves: “Is there any other conflict where I would view the invading, aggressive party driven by ideology and, among a few, religious fanaticism as the obviously right side?”  The story of the War is that it was tragic, in that it was between two flawed peoples (as all peoples are more or less flawed) who warred against one another to the ultimate detriment of both.  Moreover, unlike in classical tragedies where the hero is destined to suffer, that conflict was avoidable. 

Nowadays, it is possible for some modern historians to see the massacres in the Vendee as a French-on-French ideological “genocide” of sorts, but it seems that we are still a surprisingly long way from coming to terms with our destructive revolutionary experience in the mid-19th century. 

By destroying the states’ right to secession, Abraham Lincoln opened the door to the kind of unconstrained, despotic, arrogant government we have today, something the framers of the Constitution could not have possibly imagined. States should again challenge Washington’s unconstitutional acts through nullification. ~Walter Williams, c. 1998

Via J.H. Huebert

Roger Cohen makes a correction to a previous column of his that I criticised:

I wrote last week of the Tudor-Stuart alternation; I meant succession.

For a Byzantine angle on Huckabee’s remark about Mormon beliefs (”Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”), I would note that the belief in the fraternity of Jesus and the devil has some loose similarities with the beliefs ascribed to the Bogomils, who allegedly taught something similar about Satan and Michael.  Aside from these associations, there is a more fundamental problem that this belief contradicts the understanding of Christ as the only-begotten (monogenes) Son, co-unoriginate with the Father.     

Update: In the “Huckabee is not running a sectarian campaign” file, you can add his apology to Romney for these entirely innocent remarks.

Appearing on National Public Radio’s light-hearted quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me,” which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — and she didn’t know what it was.

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’ ” ~The Washington Post

Via Isaac Chotiner

Not exactly the best messenger for delivering warnings about Iran’s nuclear program and the dangers of WWIII breaking out, is she?  It’s enough to make you miss Tony Snow.

Audio here.

P.S.  She said later, “I feel like I’m in school everyday.”  I’m sure that’s true. 

The United States needs a new beginning. It cannot lie in the Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties, nor in the macho militarism of Republicans who see war without end. It has to involve a fresh face that will reconcile the country with itself and the world, get over divisions — internal and external — and speak with honesty about American glory and shame. ~Roger Cohen

All right, Roger Cohen likes Obama, but what is this business about the “Tudor-Stuart alternation” of dynasties?  Isn’t Roger Cohen from Britain?  Wouldn’t he know that the Tudors and Stuarts did not alternate?  Apparently not.  One followed the other, and the latter came to power over both Scotland and England because there was no heir for the former (i.e., the Tudors–apologies for any confusion).  The Bushes and Clintons are nothing like the Tudors and Stuarts in this or in any other way.  Whatever else you might say about Cohen’s column, its historical parallels could use some work. 

Turkey’s strategic interests are much more dependent on good relations with the United States than vice versa. If we tolerate Turkey’s blackmail, we actually weaken our position in the strategic relationship and embolden others in the region to blackmail us. ~Roxanne Makasdjian

This is pretty much my view of the matter as well.

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. ~Robert Fisk

It is still a little strange to find myself agreeing with Robert Fisk as often as I have in recent years, but on the subject of the Armenian genocide he has been absolutely right.  Fisk makes many of the points that I did in my column on the genocide last month (10/22 issue).  We have all heard the arguments claiming that “no one denies” that what happened to the Armenians was genocide (I have heard another one of these today), when there is a small industry dedicated to just this kind of denial and our government evidently cowers in fear of them.  Some people, who have gotten their history from some of the denialist historians, come to the debate misinformed and so react very strongly against charges of denialism, since they think (erroneously) there is some legitimate doubt about what happened.  There really isn’t.  Some who are better-informed, but apparently still unaware of the denialists, think it is redundant to say yet again what they believe everyone already acknowledges.  Yet the absurdity of the situation is clear: if “no one” denied the genocide, there would be no controversy over acknowledging it as genocide, since no one would have any stake in preventing recognition.  Clearly, some interested parties are very intent on preventing that recognition, or else there should scarcely have been much attention paid to a House non-binding resolution. 

Speaking of the Turkish threats against our supply lines, Fisk correctly notes: “In the real world, this is called blackmail…”  Exactly so.  And the administration yielded to it without hesitation.    

The main goal is to entirely eradicate European mechanisms of power transfer in Russia and to consolidate the Byzantine model of succession. ~ Sergei Kovalev

Really?  The “Byzantine model”?  Putin wants to create a system in which the previous ruler is either blinded or exiled to a monastery following debilitating civil war?  That was, as often as not, the “Byzantine model” for succession, since there wasn’t actually a “Byzantine model” for succession to the throne.  (Only in the last three centuries was there regularly a reasonably stable hereditary dynasty, which still didn’t necessarily stop the civil wars and assassinations, but simply limited it to members of the same family.)  It was in this respect much like the old Roman system, where contingents of the army rose up around a general or rival claimant and then knocked off the emperor to put their leader in his place.  In fact, I am positive that Putin does not want to institute such a system, since it means that his prime minister will be forced to have him blinded and tonsured in a little over a year.  The system Kovalev is actually describing is actually very unlike the way transfers of power were handled in Byzantium: the transfer promises to be peaceful and ratified by a formal popular vote.  There will be, I expect, no palace coups, no poisonings and no tongue-slitting.

Yes, I know Kovalev is just using Byzantine in the pejorative, ill-informed way that modern people often do–they use it to describe whatever it is they don’t like about another country or, in the case of some modern Russians, whatever they don’t like about their own.  Do you see how Kovalev uses it?  It is the opposite of European, the antithesis of the way things are supposed to be.  Along with the “Mongol yoke” thesis, the Byzantine role in creating modern Russian political culture is another preferred cop-out for explaining why Russian politics has been the way it has.  To refer to what is happening in modern Russia as a revival of Byzantine political practices would be like describing the schemes of Hu Jintao with references to the Tang dynasty.  We would all, I think, see the transparent silliness of that.

P.S. The article reached this silly claim about Byzantine models by trying to tell us about the deep and ancient servility bred into the Russian people (a trait, we are supposed to believe, that none of their Slavic and Baltic neighbours shares), which is the classic Westerniser’s complaint about why Russians don’t like people like him.  The truth is that mass democracy will favour candidates who can provide, or be perceived as providing, security and some measure of stability, because these are the political goods that most people expect from government above all else. 

My column sums up my views on the current debate, but I did have one more thing to say on the subject of the Armenian genocide.  This was brought to mind as I reviewing part of Bruce Clark’s Twice A Stranger this morning before lecturing on the Megali Idea.  Clark has written a fine book on the population exchanges following Lausanne.  In it he has a few sentences about the genocide on page 9:

In one of the most ghastly chapters of modern history, the entire Armenian population in most parts of Anatolia was deported southwards and at least 600,000 died as a result.  To this day, bitter arguments rage between the Turkish government, its defenders and critics over the cause of these deaths.  Were they the result of a deliberate policy of mass killing, or, so to speak, negligence?  A few courageous Turkish historians have argued for the absurdity of the latter position. [bold mine-DL]

And, of course, that is an absurd position, but it is one that you will see Ankara’s apologists use.

There has been a good deal of discussion of my rather angry rebuke to this City Journal piece, which made me wonder whether I had misread what the author was saying.  So I went back to the original piece to find that it said things like this:

In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the Rhine and the Neva as on the Potomac and the Thames.

Really?  As readily on the Neva as on the Potomac?  That must be why the history of Russian liberalism is so long and robust.  Oh, that’s right, this is absurd.  But it is the heart of Beran’s entire thesis: in 1861, America, Germany and Russia were all heading in a liberalising direction, but then something supposedly happened that contradicted or interrupted this. 

Beran wrote:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, and in America, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a new philosophy of coercion.

The “philosophy of coercion” was based, he says, in paternalism and “militant nationalism,” which, of course, Abraham Lincoln, German liberals and Russian Tsars did not espouse.  No, wait, that’s also untrue.  All of them espoused both to one degree or another.  (Militant nationalism was not the monopoly of 19th century liberals, but they promoted it very actively.)  If the liberals and reformers Beran champions likewise espoused paternalist and militant nationalist doctrines, what does that do to his entire bizarre reading of history?  I think it demolishes it entirely. 

First of all, many of his claims are simply wrong or so one-sided that they cannot be taken seriously.  Privilege did not “rise up” in Russia.  As for paternalism, German and Austrian liberals were very keen on rationalising and organising society according to their principles.  Once in power, they represented a small political elite that sought to institute universal reforms and were hostile to the particular and local institutions of different regions of their states.  Their paternalism was often anticlerical in nature, which hardly makes it less coercive or elitist.  These liberals were strongly nationalistic and became more so as they came to identify the German national cause with their own political doctrine, while they associated other nations (especially Slavic nations) with forces of reaction.  Hence their alliance with Bismarck.  If there were Southerners who wanted to expand into the Caribbean, it wasn’t out of a belief in the equality of nations or a lack of nationalism that kept Northerners from supporting those goals.  Indeed, once the “threat” of expanding slavery had been eliminated, it would be Northerners, particularly Northeasterners, who would become very keen on expanding political and economic power in the Caribbean and Latin America and beyond.  Our colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean were not “slave colonies,” but they were still subjugated against the will of the inhabitants and our rule over them justified in terms of racial and cultural supremacy. 

The likelihood of slavery taking hold in the free states was extremely remote, and the spectre of this takeover was a kind of “it’s them or us” propaganda.  While acknowledging that the claims appear vastly exaggerated in retrospect, Beran takes Lincoln’s rhetoric about “returning despotism” at face value, yet the same language of opposing tyranny and despotism being employed against Lincoln by Southerners naturally receives no attention.  It spoils the myth of noble champions of freedom fighting sinister forces of paternalism.  As Beran tells it, you might be forgiven for thinking that the South was filled with Metternich clones instead of Jeffersonians who  spoke of “the consent of the governed” and invoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.  The point is not to swap the roles in the myth around, but to challenge the sort of awful thinking that tries to reduce historical complexity into a simple morality play or ideological object lesson. 

Beran writes:

The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of a Caribbean slave empire. Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Such a nation would have had little reason to resist Bismarck’s Second Reich, Hitler’s third one, or Russia’s Bolshevik empire.

That is the real point of this awful article.  The South had to be beaten so that we could fight the Nazis and become an anticommunist superpower.  In reality, the United States had no reason to “resist” Bismarck’s Second Reich, since we properly had no quarrel with Germany great enough to justify our entry into WWI, and regardless of how the war propaganda portrayed it we did not become involved primarily for ideological reasons.  The actual reason for fighting Hitler’s Germany was a desire to intervene on behalf of Britain and the German declaration of war against America–it was not really that liberalism compelled us to intervene.  His entire interpretation relies on the assumption that it was only the triumph of a liberal philosophy over a ”coercive” one that made it possible to “resist” the Germans and Soviets, as if fighting against other major powers required liberal ideology.

Furthermore, Beran believes that it would not have been enough to allow the South to go its own way, since they would have sided with the “bad guys”:

The historical probabilities would have been no less grim had Lincoln, after initiating his revolution, failed to preserve the U.S. as a unitary free state. The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

As I have already said, this is not simply silly but it is also a terrible counterfactual.  The South had strong economic ties with Britain and France, and was broadly sympathetic to Jeffersonian political philosophy.  They had no strong cultural or ideological affinities with Wilhelmine Germany.  Besides being uninterested in intervening in European conflicts, as most Americans were through WWI and the interwar period, independent Southerners would have had little reason to ally with Wilhelmine Germany.  Beran shows here that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the pre-WWI American mind, and doesn’t understand American foreign policy before WWI.  Neither does he understand that alliances were not made in this period (or, for that matter, in most periods) on the basis of ideological similarity or solidarity (the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 ought to be proof enough), but are based in the strategic interests of the states involved. 

Incidentally, in my view, it would have been an equally grave error for an independent Southern republic to become entangled in European conflicts just as it was an error for the U.S. to become so entangled, but there would have been nothing uniquely undesirable or sinister in allying with the Germans rather than with the Entente.  If there had been such an alliance, it would not have been on the basis of ideological affinity in any case, but on the basis of shared interests.   

Three cheers for decent historians:

A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.

Stuart Reid at The Spectator’s Coffee House blog is making sense:

Any depiction of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history.

He is also even more hard-core than I am:

What a pity the Armada failed.

Reid and Cardini and I are not alone in our objections to the film:

The Catholic News Service, which is run by the United States Bishops Conference, said: “With the single exception of Mary, Queen of Scots, all the Catholics in the film are twisted, embittered intriguers.”

And even then their depiction of Mary Stuart isn’t exactly flattering.

Thanks to my Scene colleague Nick Desai, I have come across the most remarkable and simultaneously unspeakable article.  There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Gerson articles and then there’s this, which is in a class all by itself.  It has practically every lazy assumption and misguided polemical trope that you’ve ever encountered.  There is, naturally, Lincoln-worship involved, and a hefty dose of Teutonophobia, which are the usual prerequisites for truly execrable historical analysis.  I am almost overwhelmed by its breathtaking awfulness, but I will try to make a few points.  Let’s start at the beginning:

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

Spot the nonsense.  It isn’t hard.  By March 1861, several states had seceded from the Union in protest against this “revolutionary” policy, and rather than being “poised to carry all before them,” according to Lincoln 1861 was the year in which free institutions were supposedly on the verge of being subverted and wiped from the face of the earth.  It was so endangered, in fact, because of the dangerous principle that voluntary Union was actually voluntary, which Lincoln made sure would not stand.  There was certainly a coercive reaction to the idea of the voluntary Union, and it was the so-called Unionists who did the coercing.  The “war to save the Union” was, of course, the assassination of the very principle that made it a Union. 

Lincoln was wrong, as he often was, but from the perspective of Mr. Beran 1861 seems an unusually poor year to mark the impending triumph of what he calls “free institutions.”  In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs was realised by the order of an autocrat.  A Christian, humane and decent-minded autocrat, probably the finest Russian ruler of the century, but an autocrat.  Free institutions?  In any meaningful sense, they did not yet exist in Russia.  Indeed, one might observe with some irony how much more easily an autocracy embraced a policy of emancipation than did a democracy, which might tell us something about democracy’s flaws, but no matter.  Meanwhile, in Germany the liberals became the allies of the Junkers, the Prussian “caste” to which Bismarck belonged, and Bismarck was himself the champion of a combination of liberal nationalism (down with all the reactionary Reichsfeinde and no Canossarepublik, he said) and nationalist and anti-socialist social legislation.  Those champions of “free constitutional principles” were the architects and leading cheerleaders of the Kulturkampf against German Catholics.  In this, German liberals exhibited precisely the same hostility that many American Catholics perceived in the Red Republicans, so called by Orestes Brownson and others because of the clear similarities with European liberal revolutionaries.  It is not surprising that many German exiles who had fled the suppression of the ‘48 revolution were sympathetic to the principles of the GOP.  By the way, none of this appears to me to be a compliment to Lincoln.

Beran isn’t done:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. 

Egads, reaction!  There is something truly strange about trying to associate the Republican Party with something other than privilege.  As a party, it represented (and Lincoln represented), and to some considerable extent still represents, the interests of corporations and finance, just as the Whigs had represented commercial and mercantile interests before them.  The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong.  The latter won, and it replaced one kind of hierarchy and stratification with another while brutally centralising power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Someone will need to explain to me how this represents the victory of ”free institutions,” since I have a funny idea that arbitrary, coercive government is not really compatible with “free institutions.”

It gets even funnier:

The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

It should be painfully obvious, but it was in Republican Party-dominated regions of the country where the uniform public school first appeared, and it was among Republican progressives at the turn of the century that you found some of the greatest advocates of regulation of business.  If there were paternalists in the post-War period, they were very often Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln.  Certainly, Southern aristocrats also accepted paternalistic ideas, but the Red Republicans wished to be paternalists for everyone in the country.

And again:

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich [bold mine-DL]. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

It was the Republicans who preached American nationalism over against federal and decentralist principles, and it was Republicans who waged a war of unification–not unlike Bismarck, actually–to enforce that nationalism.  (Note that the “Danish, French and Polish provinces” in question were filled mostly with German-speaking Germans.)  It was, again, the Republicans who most forthrightly stated America’s imperial and civilising mission to “inferior” peoples, and who launched our imperialist wars in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  But don’t let that get in the way of a good story.  The Pan-Slavists were a force in Russian politics, and their objectives were shared by no less than that reformer, Tsar Aleksandr II, who waged war on behalf of the Slavs of the Balkans during the 1875-78 crisis. 

Speaking of imperialism, Beran writes:

Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism.    

But, again, it was the esteemed Party of Lincoln where imperialists and progressives espousing such views very often found their home.  The devastation and ruination of the South and the elimination of slavery did nothing to stymy any of these things, but rather allowed them to prosper.  Lincoln’s political heirs embraced most, if not all, of them and promoted them.  It was in the name of both racial and cultural superiority that Americans sought to provide “uplift” for our “brown brothers” in the Philippines (minus those who died because of the war, naturally).

Then comes the ultimate idiocy:

The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

It is amusing to consider that the one counterfactual author who has done the most to play around with the ideas of “what if the South won?”, Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist by training!), comes to the exact opposite conclusion and held, I think correctly, that an independent CSA would have allied itself, to the extent that it was willing to go against the Jeffersonian grain against entangling alliances, with Britain and France.  Britain and France had been interested, for economic and strategic reasons, to see the Confederacy succeed, and had the South won it is easy to see the Confederacy having become, if anything, a strong supporter of either Britain or France in foreign policy.  It was the Unionists who were very cosy with the Prussian military during the War, and the Republicans who best represented the politics of Bismarck and the National Liberals on the American scene.  The Confederates were, however, heirs of the heritage of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were continentalists, and had a tradition of distrusting the British.  It is likely they would have pursued a strategy of influence and occasional expansion in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but the odds of their linking arms with the Germans are very poor indeed.  The Yankees always had more in common with the Germans culturally and politically than did the Southrons.  However, since I am not a stupid Teutonophobe, I do not hold this against the Yankees.  I am not so desperate to vindicate the Confederate position, as Mr. Beran clearly is desperate to glorify Lincoln, that I feel compelled to vilify the political evolution of other nations and then randomly link that history with American historical figures that I dislike.   

Cross-posted at The American Scene

And on yet another level, that issue highlights the way the West, including the U.S., has been preoccupied with the killing of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by mostly Muslim Turks and Kurds. ~Leon Hadar

Certainly, there has been some attention drawn to the genocide in the West over the last 90 years, though the attention tended to be greatest when it was happening and has since settled into the background or vanished from collective memory.  But preoccupied?  The West has been anything but preoccupied with the Armenian genocide.  But for active lobbying by Armenians, scarcely anyone would give it a second thought.

Something very strange has happened.  Christopher Hitchens writes about the Armenian genocide resolution and actually makes sense:

If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth).

This has generally been my view since the debate heated up again this autumn.  I have more to say along these lines in my next column in TAC.

I have no excuse.  There were warnings that the Elizabeth sequel was terrible, but I made the mistake of seeing for myself.  This is a perfect example of why movie reviewers are necessary.  You really should take Chris Orr’s word for it: it’s bad!  If anyone is tempted to go see it, just don’t.

When it isn’t painfully boring (which is most of the film), it’s sappy, and when it isn’t sappy it veers into some weird fusion of Patriot-esque speechmaking and retrojected values of liberal tolerance.  As Orr noted, the dialogue is often unpardonably lame.  At one point Elizabeth even gives a little talk on the evils of the Inquisition and England as the bastion of liberty of conscience and thought.  Since pretty much no one today likes the Inquisition, this is an easy way to make her the sympathetic champion of Freedom (her appearance before the assembled English soldiers does have a bit of the Gibsonian “they may take our lives…” element in it), but pretends as if “liberty of conscience” were some universal principle here rather than an invocation of Protestant polemic.  

The director, Shekhar Kumar, has stayed strangely faithful to the original Elizabeth’s studious reproduction of Protestant and English nationalist historiography on film.  Indeed, in the sequel Kumar has ratcheted up the anti-Catholicism of the first movie.  You could just as easily call this Black Legend: The Movie or The Catholics Are Coming To Get You.   

The portrayal of Philip, were it done to an American or British historical figure, would throw certain people into fits of hysteria.  The treatment of Mary Stuart was hardly any better.  The take-home message seemed to be: “The dagoes and Scots are trying to take away your freedom, so you have to kill them.”     Since English historians have long wanted to ignore the fact that Philip II was also briefly Philip I of England, it would hardly bother many to show Philip, as the movie shows him, as some sort of decrepit, superstitious eunuch who is afraid of the sunlight and talks to himself, or whatever it was we were supposed to conclude about him.

This was also the king who sent a significant portion of the fleet that won at Lepanto over the Ottomans, and who was probably among the most accomplished, albeit flawed, monarchs of the early modern period.  Naturally, Elizabeth’s apologists and myth-makers have always had to tear him down to make their heroine appear more important than she was.  This movie is just one of the more recent and execrable efforts along these lines.   

The opening “historical” introduction manages to ignore completely the contemporary Dutch rebels, whose resistance to Philip’s rule was the reason for Philip’s wars in northwestern Europe.  “Only England stands against him,” the writers pompously tell us.  The Dutch role in defeating the Armada is also ignored.  The Golden Age is the English version of Fred Thompson bombast: England stands alone for freedom!  Never mind that the Dutch kept fighting and dying against the Spanish for another two decades after the Armada was defeated and that Spain’s bankruptcy was related to its constant continental warfare against France to protect the Milan road.  We mustn’t diminish the reputation of the most overrated monarch in English history. 

P.S. Even Mike Potemra agrees on the anti-Catholicism of the movie, so it must be pretty obvious.

St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’ catalogue just arrived, and it includes Andrew Louth’s forthcoming book in SVS’ “The Church in History” series, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071.  Fr. Andrew’s book will be available as of Nov. 15.  If it is as good as the two other volumes in the series that I have, Meyendorff’s Imperial Unity and Papadakis’ The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, we should all be in for a treat.

There is a very long, but fairly interesting New Republic book review article on the modern state of classical music, its popularity (or lack of it) and classical music’s apologists.  There’s a lot to it, but this part struck me as especially worthwhile:

The morally charged dichotomization of surface and depth is a romantic trope that–as the musicologist Holly Watkins has shown–goes back at least as far as the writings of Hoffmann. Between Hoffmann and Wagner, however, the metaphor of depth had been claimed by German writers as a national trait; and just as nationalism underwent its general transformation from a modernizing and liberalizing discourse into a belligerent and regressive one in the later nineteenth century, so the notion of spiritual depth had been turned into a weapon of national and racial aggrandizement in Wagner’s hands.

I remember Prof. Lukacs remarking in Democracy and Populism, I believe it was, on this tendency that he identified in German thinkers to ascribe superior value and truth in terms of such ”depth.”  However, I would challenge the idea that nationalism really underwent a transformation over the course of the nineteenth century, when the heart of romantic nationalist myths is the idea of an enduring essence or character that the nationalist scholar or artist claims to be able to define and interpret.  You often hear this–the “good” nationalism of the liberal revolutionaries turned into the “bad” nationalism of a Bismarck and so forth, but the “good” nationalism was almost always intent on unification (which usually involved war) and expansionistic (because it was liberal and therefore eager to spread the revolution and, on a less high-minded note, to open new markets for ”the nation”).  In the mid and late nineteenth century nationalists, many of whom remained political liberals throughout Europe well into the twentieth century, were even more likely to engage in warfare to “redeem” the “lost” territories and countrymen still living under foreign rule.  Nationalism was belligerent in no small part because it was liberalising and modernising.  The strange thing is that we still credit the early nationalists’ self-justifications for their enthusiasm for conflict, when we are quite willing to criticise their later heirs.  We imagine a transformation and a difference where there was neither. 

Used in an exclusionary way, as Wagner does in the citation given by Taruskin or as, say, Zambelios did when addressing Western folklorists who threatened to interpret Greek identity and culture in a way that contradicted his classicising impulses, this essentialism means that only those who truly belong to the nation can understand it or participate in its cultural life.  This rhetoric of depth and essence is, in fact, an appeal to abstraction and an actually very superficial, limited grasp on culture and is used as a means of shrinking cultural participation and production down to the confines of a national dogma. 

Nationalism was always belligerent, warring against the political status quo, against legitimate governments that “denied” national unification, often enough against the Church, and against the past of the nationalists’ own people(s) and country/countries.  It was the bane of the civilised world for most of the nineteenth century and for all of the twentieth, and it was fundamentally the same thing.  

It is, of course, history that has often suffered most violently at the hands of nationalist redactors, and nationalist theories of history are almost by definition “regressive,” so to speak, in that they are almost all defined in terms of a golden age, an age of decline, and the age of palingenesis, which, in theory, is simply the recovery of the supposed golden age (whose character is suitably re-imagined to match whatever suits the liberal nationalist fantasy about his own virtues).  On this point, for example, I have happened to see an English-language textbook on Romanian history sponsored by a Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi that treats the period of the Danubian Principalities as one in which “the Greeks” are merely an annoying, troublemaking intrusion that the Romanians were well rid of, and the enormously productive and active life of the Greco-Romanian culture of the Principalities receives little or no attention.  This is a travesty of a fairly impressive period in Romanian history.  (Of course, it was part of the pre-independence period, and therefore not to be credited with as much importance.)  Bucharest and Iasi were shining examples of an international cultural Hellenism in the early modern period, and the educated elites of the Balkans referred to themselves as Hellenes as a statement of their cultivation and status, taking a name that had no particular ethnic connotations for them, and embracing Greek language and literature much as the educated in western and central Europe used Latin.  Pre-Phanariot rulers cultivated at their courts an idea of a revived Byzantium, understood as a Christian empire and not along the strictly ethnic and irredentist lines of the Megali Idea.  Much or all of this is expurgated out of the history of the Romanians in question.           

I gave up on the dreadful Florida GOP debate before they ever got to foreign policy, but apparently Tom Tancredo had the nerve to attack the genocide resolution at one point.  Nothing new there, you might think, except that Tancredo was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill.  He very quickly abandoned it once it became controversial.  Quoth Tancredo:

We can’t continue to go back to the dust bin of history to condemn actions by empires that no longer even exist.

It seems to me that this is what we do all the time.  We pore over the “dust bin” and dwell on the crimes of the Nazis and Soviets, and repeatedly, endlessly talk about those crimes and compare our present-day enemies with the perpetrators of these crimes.  Earlier this year, the President went to the Holocaust Museum and condemned the actions of an empire that no longer exists.  American politicians condemn the evils of Soviet communism as a matter of course, and are not concerned that this might hurt relations with the Russians.  Of course, there is usually an assumption that post-Soviet Russia is in significant ways still quite different from the old Soviet Union, which means that criticism of the latter need not extend to the modern successor state of the criminal regime. 

Yesterday I said in another post:

I suspect, but I cannot definitely prove, that another element is a weird, unseemly desire to keep the Nazis in the public imagination as the fons et origo of genocidal killing (which would also have to conveniently ignore the genocide of the Ukrainians) to sustain the mythology surrounding the entire WWII period.

Part of my point here was to make the point that the mythology about WWII to some extent requires holding up the Nazis as uniquely and especially evil in some unprecedented way.  They must remain the ultimate villains to better reinforce the memory of WWII as the ‘Good War’.  Part of the novelty and uniqueness of Nazi evil, according to President Bush’s own description, is that the Nazis allegedly introduced state-planned genocide:

Yet in places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald, the world saw something new and terrible: the state-sanctioned extermination of a people — carried out with a chilling industrial efficiency of a so-called modern nation.

To argue that there was actually a precedent and a previous state-sanctioned, organised and planned extermination of a people is effectively to deny the newness and uniqueness of the Nazis’ crimes.  To acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide, then, endangers a key part of a certain narrative about WWII, because it means that there had already been something similar in nature to the Nazis’ genocidal killing.  For some bizarre reason, there really does seem to be a need on the part of Armenian genocide deniers to resist acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was the “first genocide of the 20th century,” which would at the very least make the Holocaust the second, as if some special or superior status were attached to being the first one.  The distinction is obviously chronological, not moral.  Later genocides do not matter less because they came after others, nor are earlier ones more significant.  However, the debate over this resolution seems to take it for granted that some are more important than others and some are more worthy of commemoration than others. 

The San Francisco Chronicle sullies its op-ed page with more of Bruce Fein’s denialist prattle.  Armenians in the Republic are taking a keen interest in the resolution’s fate.  Jay Tolson in U.S. News and World Report makes the obvious, but necessary point:

The question is whether Turkey will ever enter a debate in which the consensus of scholars holds that the killings and mass deportations of Armenians did indeed constitute a genocide. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the historical record on the Armenian genocide is “unambiguous”: In the years approaching World War I, a new breed of Ottoman officials, the Young Turks, heirs to two centuries of imperial decline, saw themselves as the defenders of the Turkish remnant state in the Anatolian core of the empire. Embracing an ultranationalist and supposedly secular ideology, Young Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress pointedly excluded non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians, from their vision of Turkish purity. The outbreak of war allowed these leaders to paint all Armenians as pro-Russian fifth columnists (which only a small number were) and undertake organized and widespread massacres and deportations that led to further deaths from starvation and disease.

The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. ~Cal Thomas

Via Sullivan

That must be why the White House said, “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  It doesn’t take a genius to come up with the formulation, “Yes, it was a genocide organised by a state that no longer exists, but this resolution is badly timed, provocative and strains an important alliance in wartime.”  That is not the White House’s position.  In fact, that is a fairly rare position in this debate–it is a view held, shockingly enough, by none other than Charles Krauthammer.  Meanwhile, the White House is taking the Ahmadinejad “we need more research” view of the question.  We call Ahmadinejad’s maneuver the tactic of a Holocaust denier.  The same standard should apply to the administration.

Returning to Lerner for another response, I will try to explain how flawed the article is.  As an earlier commenter has noted, Lerner has already tried to stack the deck rhetorically by making a comparison between an exterminationist party and ideological movement and an entire nation:

We must do it, Armenian genocide proponents [sic] tell us, because the Armenian tragedy was the original Holocaust: Armenians in World War I were like the Jews in World War II; Turks in 1915 were like the Germans in the 1940s. Thus, the only moral choice is to condemn the Turks, as we condemned the Nazis.

In fact, it was not “the Turks” who filled the role of genocidaires during WWI, but leaders and members of the CUP, Kurdish irregulars and some Ottoman soldiers.  To make blanket statements about “the Turks” is to go down Goldhagen’s road of collective guilt and engage in precisely the kind of reckless identitarian vilification that, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn has argued in another context, leads to the dehumanisation of an entire people and thus makes it easier to wage campaigns of annihilation against them.  Lerner has phrased things in such a way as to endorse Ankara’s portrayal of the efforts to recognise the genocide.  In this view, it is not just a recognition of crimes committed by agents within the Ottoman government and military, but an indictment of the entire Turkish nation.  If that was what we were talking about, I would also have to object to it, but it isn’t.  “The Turks” as a whole were not responsible, just as “the Turks” today are not responsible for what was done in those years, but it was rather specific groups of Turkish nationalists and Kurdish tribesmen who were responsible for what happened.  So, right away, Lerner clouds the issue by inaccurately describing the terms of the debate.

Lerner says:

The only enemies at home [in Germany in WWII] were the Jews, and they were never a real threat. They were scapegoats, not objective enemies, and they were being methodically eliminated, without exception, in all German-controlled territory.

The implication is that all Armenians in eastern Anatolia were an “objective enemy,” because there were some Armenians who raised rebellions or fought with the Russians, which somehow makes the genocidal campaign against the civilian Armenian population of eastern Anatolia less than genocidal.  In Lerner’s world, it’s only genocide if there are literally no members of the targeted population engaged in subversive or rebellious activity.  In framing things this way, Lerner has already conceded the morality of collective punishment of civilian populations in retaliation for the activities of guerrillas.  Presumably, as she sees it, there was also no genocide attempted against the Serbian population under German-Croat occupation, either, because “the Serbs” were an “objective enemy” engaged in resistance.  For Lerner, deliberate exterminationist campaigns are something other than genocide when they take place in a war zone, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of the way most people understand the term.  Organised killing of a particular group of civilians bound by ethnic and religious ties is not genocide for Lerner if it comes as a “punishment” for the rebellion of a minority of the population.  It’s certainly a different kind of view, but it certainly isn’t moral.

She then obscures the issue by describing the Dardanelles campaign thus:

Fighting there was fierce, and continued until January 1916, but, on this front, there were relatively few civilian casualties, and no massacres.

There were relatively few civilian casualties because the front was largely static and confined to the narrow strips of land near Gallipoli.  There were no massacres because the Ottoman forces had their hands quite full with British and ANZAC forces.  There was also no sizeable Armenian population in the immediate vicinity of the Dardanelles, which makes the comparison seem almost pointless.

While Lerner acknowledges that Armenians fought on the Ottoman side, being subject to the general mobilisation conscription, she does not mention that Armenians in Ottoman units were disarmed after the Ottoman defeat at Sarikamis.  They were then executed. 

Of the aftermath of Sarikamis, Akcam writes on p. 143-44:

The defeat at Sarikamis was a turning point in the treatment of the Armenians, especially those in the army and labor batallions, who were no longer mistreated but frequently murdered.  In many regions, propaganda claimed that the Armenians had stabbed the Turks in the back.  Enver Pasha himself attempted to attribute the defeat to Armenian treachery, and referred to Armenians as a “threat.”….the first measure taken after the Sarikamis disaster was the order sent to army units on 25 February 1915, instructing them to disarm all Armenian soldiers….Reports followed, claiming that the annihilation of Armenians serving in the army had begun. 

Akcam writes more on page 144:

German missionary Jakob Kunzler, who worked with the medical personnel at the Urfa missionary hospital, recounts that the Armenians taken into the labor batallions were killed in March 1915, and that, “mostly knives were used, because the ammunition was needed for the foreign enemy.”  Something similar was related by Ambassador Morgenthau:

In almost all cases, the procedure was the same.  Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village.  Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp.  Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes.  In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’ sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.

Other eyewitness accounts by foreigners serving in the area corroborate the fact that the murder of the labor batallions began only after the defeat at Sarikamis.

Sounds an awful lot like scapegoating to me. 

She also has nothing to say about the leading Armenians of Constantinople who were arrested on April 24, 1915 and subsequently executed.  She has nothing to say about these episodes because these would all point to an organised campaign of extermination.  In the end, Lerner cites the presence of Armenians fighting for the Russians (many of whom hailed from Russian Armenia all along, since the country was, as it has often been, divided between different empires) as if their possessing the same ethnicity gave the CUP or anyone else license to slaughter other, entirely unrelated Armenians.   

The only thing that Lerner can credibly claim is that the situations of the Armenians and Jews were very different.  The differences do not prove that there was no genocide, but only shows that genocide can take place under a number of different circumstances. 

Akcam has a passage on page 126 that happens to address the thrust of Lerner’s article directly:

It was not a coincidence that the Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster and was contemporaneous with the empire’s struggle at Gallipoli.  As a rule, the acceleration of the process of a country’s decline and partition helps to strengthen a sense of desperation and “fighting with one’s back to the wall.”  As the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, those who have failed to prevent the collapse become more hostile and aggressive.  When the crisis deepens, they resort to increasingly barbaric means, and come to believe “that only an absolute lack of mercy would allow one to avoid this loss of power and honor.”  A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its situation.

Update: Just to make another thing clear, there were also deportations of Armenians from western Anatolia and Thrace following the deportations from eastern Anatolia.  Those who would like to cast this as an eastern front wartime measure and leave it at that have no way to account for this. 

And why on earth should these public bodies lecture historians as to what they should be saying? ~Norman Stone

This is a standard line that I have heard a lot of these past few days.  Never have you encountered so many new passionate defenders of the independence of professional historians as in the last couple of weeks–the concern is truly touching.  Very clearly, Stone has never read the text of the resolution in question, or he would know that it has absolutely nothing to do with lecturing historians. 

The invocation of what we magical historians do bothers me most when someone talks about a matter “best left to historians” as another way of saying, “Let’s please stop talking about this subject publicly and leave it to those ghastly academics to worry about.”  Huckabee has done it before when it comes to debating the merits of the beginnings of the Iraq war (”it’s a question for historians to decide”), and it has now become the favourite refrain of the denialist.  Naturally, the denialist is not interested in proper historical research, nor does he care about interference with that research by “public bodies.”  The denialist complains about “political” interference with research when official bodies recognise the blatantly obvious, but will just as readily denounce as hopelessly biased any research that comes to conclusions that he dislikes.   

No one says that governments are “lecturing” historians when they commemorate the Holocaust or V-E Day or the Armistice or any other major historical event.  Governments commemorate things all the time, lending a certain sanction or authority to this or that reading of history.  As the Turkish government has shown, governments can use this power for distorting and corrupt ends.  That does not mean that we cease all commemorations and public acknowledgements of the past, but that we strive to be scrupulous in how we remember the past.  Certainly governments should not interfere with academics or dictate to them what they ought to say–that is fundamental.  That’s yet another reason to draw attention to the offically sanctioned denialism of the Republic of Turkey.  It is rather amazing to me how so many Westerners became so exercised over the threatened free speech rights of the people at Jyllands-Posten, but have suddenly lost all interest in free speech when it comes to Turkish academics and writers.  Many Westerners were put off by the idea that Muslims should apply the standards of their religion to everyone else and demand that others abide by those standards, but when it comes to abiding by the revisionist propaganda coming from Ankara they are more sanguine.        

It is not the government’s official approval or recognition, to address a concern my colleague James has raised, that adds any truth or significance to the event, and the historical reality would be the same whether or not it was ever officially acknowledged.  The genocide happened, whether or not Ankara and its small army of American and other lackeys will ever accept that reality.  But what we choose to commemorate and acknowledge does reflect on the kind of government one has and the kind of historical memory the citizens of a country have.  Refusal to commemorate and use the proper names for things also reflects on us. 

To cast the current (almost certainly now dead) resolution as a lecture to historians, as Stone does, is especially galling, since the main (indeed technically the only) intended audience of the resolution is the President, who is as much of an historian as I am a jet pilot.  The resolution is entitled: “Calling upon the President to ensure the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian genocide and for other purposes.”

Were the resolution to pass, not one historian would be obliged to do anything.  No historians will have been lectured by a public body.  Most historians of the subject, who already acknowledge the genocide, will be unfazed by the terrible burden of a non-binding resolution.  The only historians who would be troubled are those who have, for whatever reason, chosen to deny the genocidal nature of the events.  In any case, they have not yet been persuaded by evidence or conscience to recognise and speak the truth–a vote by the House of Representatives will not weigh heavily on them, either.

Stone invokes Lewy, whose arguments are pretty effectively undermined here, while ignoring the work that directly contradicts that of Lewy.  The Inside Higher Ed refers to a future Akcam work that will reportedly make the case even more clear.  From the article:

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no evidence, “I laugh at them,” Akçam said, because the documents he has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even more. “There is no scholarly debate on this topic,” he said. 

P.S.  Note to Cohen: the text of the resolution itself includes mention of Lemkin’s views on the Armenian genocide.

The Economist covers the resolution in an editorial and discusses Turkish-Armenian relations in an article.  Naturally, I don’t agree with the editorial, but I’ve already said plenty on that subject for now.  The article is a good overview of the state of affairs in Turkey.

Via Massie, I see that Fallows wrote:

The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn’t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what’s right. But it’s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey’s current government and people 90 years late.

Er, so it’s willfully self-indulgent to stand up for what’s right?  What do you call it when you permit those in the wrong to prevail?  Virtuous self-sacrifice?  As the last couple of weeks has made quite clear, it isn’t just “many Turks” who deny the genocide, but a small army of water-carrying American apologists as well.  Is it “self-indulgent” to try to defeat willing collaborators in genocide denial?       

There is something deeper wrong with Fallows’ response.  He is not alone in making this kind of argument, so this isn’t aimed just at him.  There is the idea that unless you simultaneously condemn every act of genocide or anything that might reasonably be defined as genocide in the history of the world, you really shouldn’t say anything about one particular genocide.  This is a very strange view to take.  Rather than strengthening the case against recognition and drawing attention to the particular genocide, it simply reminds us of how many such exterminationist campaigns most people never give a second thought.  It reminds us how lopsided and arbitrary our commemoration of past genocides has been up till now, and underscores how poor and limited our historical memory is.  There is something particularly strange about those who actually know about these other slaughters and wish to cite them as reasons for not acknowledging this or that genocide.  They might cry, “What about the Ukrainians?”  But should it ever come time to commemorate the Holodomor, they will turn around and cry, after having belittled the Armenian genocide resolution and the history that it represents, “What about the Armenians?” 

The odd thing is that this push to recognise and acknowledge an historical event requires very little of a nation.  Americans are not being called on to intervene in someone else’s conflict, nor are we being asked to take sides in complex, little-understood struggles on the other side of the world.  The only costs that we might incur derive from the threats of a putative ally.  Americans are being asked to acknowledge, through their representatives, the basic and obvious truth about a terrible, state-organised act of terror and violence against innocent people, and in response their representatives are being intimidated with invocations of the importance of this so-called ally in the “war on terror.”  The absurdity of it is plain for all to see.         

The liars are out in force these days.  Does National Review really want to be known as a venue for genocide deniers? 

She seems to think that a people cannot be made into a scapegoat when things at home are going badly, but only when they are going relatively well.  This is a very unique understanding of what scapegoating is.  It is rather stunning that so many hacks and amateurs can confidently deny what honest scholars of genocide studies and history affirm.  As for those who “excel” at propaganda, Ms. Lerner does not need to look very far, since her article is a classic example of that very thing. 

P.S. Incidentally, it is articles just like this one that confirm my view that passage of the resolution is highly desirable.  Every day that this resolution is blocked is another small victory for these genocide deniers.  Whenever someone argues that the resolution is redundant or “gratuitous” because no one questions that the Armenians experienced a genocidal campaign against them, I will simply point to this article and others like it to show that denialism is flourishing. 

Like Cohen’s shambles of a column the other day, Lerner’s article insists on defining what genocide is based on its identity with the circumstances of the Holocaust.  Since no other genocide in modern history has ever been identical to the Holocaust, this style of argument implicitly denies all the other acknowledged genocides of the 20th century by emphasising dissimilarity of circumstances.  Lerner’s article is a blatant example of “blaming the victim,” pinning the blame for the actions of a relative few revolutionaries on an entire population.  And of course the trials of guilty officers were conducted by the non-CUP elements of the Ottoman government, yet Lerner uses these trials as exculpatory evidence to the advantage of the CUP leadership. 

I don’t know how many times one needs to say this: there was a deliberate and organised campaign of extermination authored by the leaders of the CUP and carried out in a series of massacres and death marches on their orders.  As Akcam has shown, the CUP leaders would send our duelling sets of orders, with one set ordering humane and decent treatment of the deportees and the other ordering their annihilation.  These are obviously war crimes–that much hardly anyone will seriously dispute–and they very clearly meet all but the most peculiar definitions of genocide.  It’s not clear to me what could actually motivate someone to engage in Lerner’s morally abhorrent contortions. 

Here is a good Telegraph review of A Shameful Act.

Denialism is alive and well on the Web.  Here is a specimen of the type, complete with references to Kevorkian and “crafty” Armenians.  Naturally, this brave character does not publish his name–nor would I if I were in the business of spewing filth.

Mr. Krikorian is correct when he says:

First of all, it is simply inarguable that the Ottoman Empire tried to eradicate the Armenian people under the cover of World War I.

Why then do so many prominent Americans keep arguing against it, hedging their statements or tying themselves into knots to trivialise the events?  Of course, it is, or rather ought to be, inarguable, but so long as Ankara’s apologists are able to retain any credibility and cast doubt on the matter there will be a continuing “debate.”

He’s also right when he says:

Our policy toward modern Turkey should have nothing whatsoever to do with acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. But caving to Turkish pressure never to use “Armenian” and “genocide” in the same sentence is what has given the current resolution its impetus.

Critics are right that Congress has no business weighing in on historical controversies. But there is no controversy here [bold mine-DL]. This isn’t even a matter of the polite fictions necessary to international diplomacy. Denying the Armenian Genocide is simply a lie, and a lie propagated at the behest of a foreign power. It’s unworthy of us.

Amen to that.

“They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ ” he said. “That’s very attractive on campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story.” While Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it is important to expose “the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument.”

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the period — based on unprecedented access to Ottoman archives — provides even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians [bold mine-DL]. This new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of those who committed the genocide — which counters the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies too much on the views of Armenian survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey. ~Inside Higher Ed

Via Cliopatria

Well, there goes any respect I might have had for Bruce Fein (who works, it should be noted, for the Turkish Coalition of America, founded in that august, ancient time of February 2007):

Like Benito Mussolini, Armenians believe truth is an assertion at the head of a figurative bayonet.

Yes, don’t you see–the Armenians are deceitful and treacherous.  You can’t trust them.  Sound familiar?  Note that any similarly gross overgeneralisation about another group of people would be met with fierce denunciations from all sides.  The upshot of Fein’s article is that lots and lots of Turks died in the same period (true), there were atrocities carried out by Armenians in eastern Anatolia (also true) and there have been many Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish targets in the 20th century (true again).  The purpose of the article, of course, is to make light of the genocide and to equate the organising massacring and death march of over a million civilians by their own government (it is, of course, the intent and organised extermination, not the number, that ultimately matters) with the devastating consequences of near-total war between sovereign governments.  Sounds curiously like arguments that go something like, “Lots and lots of Germans died fighting in WWII, so state-run genocide isn’t that big of a deal.” 

My favourite bit is the accusation of religious bigotry (that would be bigotry against the Muslims, you see), the praise of the notorious genocide denier Shaw for his “academic courage,” and the immediate invocation of none other than Bernard Lewis.  Of course, it was in no small part religious bigotry and supremacism on the part of the perpetrators that fueled the genocide, as Akcam has made clear, and I suspect that it has been the fact that the Turks are Muslim and the Armenians Christian that has kept the genocide from being more widely publicised and recognised for what it was.   

Update: The Turkish Coalition of America takes mendacity to all new lows.  Consider this description of H. Res. 106:

[it] targets Turkish history and heritage, hurts US-Turkish relations and the US national interest.

Impressive how they hardly ever mention anything about the substance of the resolution.  That might make the “Turkish history and heritage” bit a little too hard for some folks to swallow.  This “Action Alert” section is also quite hilarious in a depressing, sickening way:

Sadly, our voice has mostly been absent in this debate.

If you believe that, they have a bridge in Istanbul to sell you. 

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday night, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war. ~The New York Times

Here’s a true champion of the moral high ground:

“We simply cannot allow the grievances of the past, as real as they may be, to in any way derail our efforts to prevent further atrocities for future history books,” said Representative Wally Herger, Republican of California.

That’s a good one.  Acknowledging genocide is now just a matter of ”grievances of the past.”  This is what people are reduced to saying.  What else can they possibly say?   

Rep. Sherman, a resolution supporter, took the words right out of my mouth:

Since when has it become fashionable for friends to threaten friends?

Alex Massie is right on the mark again:

But of course Lemkin himself deliberately cited the suffering of the Armenians when he first wrote about genocide. He didn’t seem to share Mr Cohen’s belief that there is only one kind of genocide.

I appreciate Mr. Massie picking up on this point.  After all, if someone confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust had been looking for precedents of coordinated state extermination of its own population the Armenian genocide would have been an obvious example in the 1940s.   

What strikes me as so strange about all this is that virtually no one in the Washington political or media establishment has ever applied this same level of skepticism to talk about genocide in Darfur, to say nothing of the much more dubious case of Kosovo.  I expect that I will look in vain for Cohen’s citations of Lemkin from the spring of 1999.  All that needed to be said in 1999 was the word “Balkan” and suddenly everyone who was anyone was convinced that genocide was about to happen again (not that any of the people who wanted to “crush Serb skulls” ever gave a second thought to the genocide of Serbs during WWII at the hands of the forerunners of our good friends and allies in Zagreb). 

Pundits and pols are very free with the word when the regime being accused is one that they don’t much like, which is why I have tended to be very skeptical about people who describe something as genocide in the present.  It has frequently become a one-sided and tendentious political weapon that seems to be deployed for other reasons.  Yet in this case, when the evidence is clear, the government responsible is long gone and all that is being asked of anyone is to recognise the obvious, everyone becomes terribly anxious and reticent.     

Massie also notes a ridiculous Hiatt op-ed:

Then there’s Fred Hiatt, the WaPo’s editorial page editor  who thinks the resolution should be spiked because, well, modern Armenia isn’t properly democratic. Or something like that.

I had seen Hiatt’s op-ed, and my first response was simply to move on to something else.  Then it occurred to me that Hiatt’s column quite unintentionally helps explain why the resolution is necessary.  Hiatt’s argument, such as it is, is that the Armenian Diaspora could have used their time and resources for much better purposes than lobbying for this resolution.  Think of what all that money and attention could for Armenia, Hiatt exulted!  Armenia is a poor and corrupt state with a dysfunctional government, and the Diaspora could work to change that. 

Not that Fred Hiatt has ever, to my knowledge, given a fig for what happened to the Republic of Armenia, mind you, but his tiresome lecture did make me think of something important.  It was, as some of us will remember, Hrant Dink’s argument that the Diasporans should stop fixating on the genocide and work to build a better Armenia.  Dink, a great man, argued that the preoccupation with the genocide would become “poison in the blood” for the people who continued to focus on it so intently.  Dink was actually arguing for the Armenians to move on and try to build a better future for the independent Armenian state that Armenians finally did have–the very thing that Hiatt has suddenly discovered as the right answer–and for his wise counsel he was indicted by the Turkish government for “insulting Turkishness.”  How could that be?  Well, his remarks about “poison in the blood” were taken entirely out of context and turned into an attack on Turks.  When he was talking about poison, according to the government, he was referring to Turks.  This was a malicious and obvious lie, as the government there must have known, but the hysteria in the press that the charges generated led in short order to Dink’s assassination by a Turkish nationalist. 

Dink was right–the genocide should not be an all-consuming passion, and Armenians should work to improve Armenia.  For his efforts to de-emphasise the focus on the genocide (while also insisting on the reality of the genocide), he was prosecuted and then murdered.  His son has since been indicted under the same charge and sentenced to a year in prison.  That is the government for whom the apologists are carrying water. 

Yet here is another reason why recognition of the genocide is important–without widespread recognition and pressure on Ankara to acknowledge the reality of the genocide, the Diasporans will never be able to let go and start the necessary work of building up Armenia.  Not, of course, that Turkey has had any interest in aiding the improvement or reform of Armenia, since they have kept the border sealed in solidarity with the Azeris.  The poverty, corruption and bad government of the Republic have more than a little to do with that situation, which Washington tacitly endorses with its alliances with Turkey and Azerbaijan.  Hiatt has quite unwittingly helped the argument for the resolution, by making clear that Armenia’s development depends in part on the Diasporans’ being able to turn their attention to other things besides this.

Richard Cohen started out all right, but then goes into the ditch:

Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word “genocide,” a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. If that is the standard — and it need not be — then what happened in the collapsing Ottoman Empire was something short of genocide. It was plenty bad — maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many of them outright murdered — but not all Armenians everywhere in what was then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial Armenian communities in Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were largely spared.

Not every Tutsi in Rwanda was “affected,” either, but we don’t quibble about that.  Of course, the Armenian elite in Constantinople was not spared, and tens of thousands of members of the Armenian community in Smyrna was massacred when Kemal’s forces took the city in 1922.  Frankly, this line of argument is a bit like saying, “Well, since there were some Jews left at the end of the war, it wasn’t that bad.”

Cohen is trying hard to reach moral equivalency:

Among them were the Armenians, an ancient people who had been among the first to adopt Christianity. By the end of the 19th century, they were engaged in guerrilla activity.

How nice it must be to sit back and talk about what “they,” the Armenians, all did.  Some Armenians were involved in guerrilla activity, but virtually the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was “punished.”  The actions of a relative few neither explain nor justify the murderous response of the CUP.

Cohen says:

Within Turkey, Armenians were feared as a fifth column.

Set aside the obnoxious dismissal of the Armenians’ reputation as the “loyal millet.”  Unlike many members of the Rum millet, the Arme