"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).
Showing posts with label Armenian Genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Armenian Genocide. Show all posts
For a lecture I was to give in Europe in June (now postponed until next year for obvious reasons), I was asked to focus on the role of traumatic memory in the life of Eastern Christians, individually and ecclesially. As I had a chance to explore some of the clinical research, it fast became apparent, based on dozens of studies with diverse populations around the world, that trans-generational transmission of trauma is real, often affecting at least the third generation (ie., grandchildren of the original victims).
In this light, it is striking to read that the scholar Roderic Ai Camp, the grandson of an Armenian genocide survivor named John Minassian, has written a foreword to his grandfather's Surviving the Forgotten Genocide: An Armenian Memoir(Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 288pp.
This book, published at the end of March is, the publisher tells us,
A rare and poignant testimony of a survivor of the Armenian genocide.
The twentieth century was an era of genocide, which started with the Turkish destruction of more than one million Armenian men, women, and children—a modern process of total, violent erasure that began in 1895 and exploded under the cover of the First World War. John Minassian lived through this as a young man, witnessing the murder of his kin, concealing his identity as an orphan and laborer in Syria, and eventually immigrating to the United States to start his life anew. A rare testimony of a survivor of the Armenian genocide, one of just a handful of accounts in English, Minassian’s memoir is breathtaking in its vivid portraits of Armenian life and culture and poignant in its sensitive recollections of the many people who harmed and helped him. As well as a searing testimony, his memoir documents the wartime policies and behavior of Ottoman officials and their collaborators; the roles played by foreign armies and American missionaries; and the ultimate collapse of the empire. The author’s journey, and his powerful story of perseverance, despair, and survival, will resonate with readers today.
What compels Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey? Based on historical narrative, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire and then, later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then how can we believe that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians? Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to find the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront it and come to terms. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.
One of the things research into trauma has uncovered is the multi-generational nature of the suffering, and the fact that at least to the third generation after the original event one can find major post-traumatic disorders afflicting a wide number of people. This has been shown to be the case with the Holocaust and with the first massive genocide of the last century, the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915. A new book situates that genocide in a particular context--that of American foreign policy--with obvious implications even down to our own day: Charlie Laderman,Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), 300pp.
About this book the publisher tells us this:
The destruction of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire was an unprecedented tragedy. Even amidst the horrors of the First World War, Theodore Roosevelt insisted that it was the greatest crime of the conflict. The wartime mass killing of approximately one million Armenian Christians was the culmination of a series of massacres that Winston Churchill would later recall had roused publics on both sides of the Atlantic and inspired fervent appeals to save the Armenians.
Sharing the Burden explains how the Armenian struggle for survival became so entangled with the debate over the international role of the United States as it rose to world power status in the early twentieth century. In doing so, Charlie Laderman provides a fresh perspective on the role of humanitarian intervention in US foreign policy, Anglo-American relations, and the emergence of a new world order after World War I. The United States' responsibility to protect the Armenians was a central preoccupation of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both American and British leaders proposed an Anglo-American alliance to take joint responsibilities for the Middle East and envisioned a US intervention to secure an independent Armenia as key to the new League of Nations. The Armenian question illustrates how policymakers, missionaries, and the public grappled for the first time with atrocities on this scale. It also reveals the values that animated American society during this pivotal period in the nation's foreign relations.
Deepening understanding of the Anglo-American special relationship and its role in reforming global order, Sharing the Burden illuminates the possibilities, limitations, and continued dilemmas of humanitarian intervention in international politics.
With the tender ministrations of Turkey in other countries and against other ethnic groups again in global headlines, this book, released just this year, could hardly be more timely as a reminder of very recent atrocities against Easter Christians: The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi (Harvard University Press, 2019), 672pp.
This book, the publisher tells us, is
A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities.
Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.
The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.
Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.
Every semester when we talk about the Armenian (and Assyrian and Greek) genocide of 1915, my students are first fascinated and then appalled by the politics of its historiography, especially since 2007 and the murder of Hrant Dink. A newly published paperback edition of a book that first appeared in 2015 helps us appreciate the never-ending nature of this complex controversy: Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide(Oxford UP, 2018), 328pp.| 2 maps; 22 photographs.
About this book the publisher tells us this:
The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was the greatest atrocity of World War I. Around one million Armenians were killed, and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still a live and divisive issue that mobilizes Armenians across the world, shapes the identity and politics of modern Turkey, and has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians for years.
In Great Catastrophe, the eminent scholar and reporter Thomas de Waal looks at the aftermath and politics of the Armenian Genocide and tells the story of recent efforts by courageous Armenians, Kurds, and Turks to come to terms with the disaster as Turkey enters a new post-Kemalist era. The story of what happened to the Armenians in 1915-16 is well-known. Here we are told the "history of the history" and the lesser-known story of what happened to Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in the century that followed. De Waal relates how different generations tackled the issue of the "Great Catastrophe" from the 1920s until the failure of the Protocols signed by independent Armenia and Turkey in 2010. Quarrels between diaspora Armenians supporting and opposing the Soviet Union broke into violence and culminated with the murder of an archbishop in 1933. The devising of the word "genocide," the growth of modern identity politics, and the 50th anniversary of the massacres re-energized a new generation of Armenians. In Turkey the issue was initially forgotten, only to return to the political agenda in the context of the Cold War and an outbreak of Armenian terrorism. More recently, Turkey has started to confront its taboos. In an astonishing revival of oral history, the descendants of tens of thousands of "Islamized Armenians," who have been in the shadows since 1915, have begun to reemerge and reclaim their identities.
Drawing on archival sources, reportage and moving personal stories, de Waal tells the full story of Armenian-Turkish relations since the Genocide in all its extraordinary twists and turns. He looks behind the propaganda to examine the realities of a terrible historical crime and the divisive "politics of genocide" it produced. The book throws light not only on our understanding of Armenian-Turkish relations but also of how mass atrocities and historical tragedies shape contemporary politics.
In 2015 I gave several lectures on the centenary of the genocidal massacres of Eastern Christians at Ottoman hands. The best-known of these is of course the Armenian Genocide, about which a considerable number of books has emerged over the last quarter-century. But during my lecture I noted that two other captive Eastern Christian populations--Greeks and Assyrians--were also slaughtered in huge numbers. The Assyrian massacres have started very recently to receive some attention, as I noted here. But details about the Greek slaughter have largely been confined to a tiny handful of scholarly articles or passing reference in the occasional book--until now.
About this book we are told this by the publisher:
During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion's tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.
I recently noted yet another publication devoted to the long-term psychological effects of the Armenian Genocide. And then Herder and Herder, now published by Crossroad, sent me their newest catalogue in which we find a book released this year: The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocideby Siobhan Nash-Marshall (Crossroad, 2018), 256pp.
About this book the publisher tells us the following:
We hear much talk today about post-truth. Journalists and intellectuals describe it as a shocking new phenomenon caused by recent electoral campaigns. They point to contemporary political statements as horrendous post-truths. Nothing is more misleading. ‘Historical engineering’ is not a new phenomenon. Nor are the events to which journalists point as exemplary instances of ‘post-truth’ particularly poignant. ‘Historical engineering’ is the intellectual twin of ‘social engineering’ and has been taking place on increasingly large scales since the dawn of the modern world. It is a consequence of the premises, methods, and ambitions of modern philosophy. This book is the first part of a trilogy – The Betrayal of Philosophy – that concerns the roots of the post-truth phenomenon. Its intent is to provide the philosophical world with a phantasm in which it can see not just the what of ‘historical engineering,’ but the why: to show the flaws of modern philosophy itself. The phantasm regards the most successful modern project of historical and social engineering: the Armenian Genocide. It includes both Turkey’s ‘historical engineering’ – its official policy of genocide negation – and the massive late Ottoman project of social and territorial engineering which led to the murder of the first Christian nation: Armenia.
To my mind one of the most important and far-reaching insights Freud first helped us to understand, and many analysts--as well as other psychologists, sociologists, historians, and churchmen--have deepened in the years after Freud (and in particular after the Holocaust) is the long-lasting nature of major trauma, and the very real ways in which something of those traumatic memories will shape later generations who did not experience the trauma directly.
In this instance, Eastern Christians have first-hand experience, starting in 1915 (though, of course, actually much earlier, given a centuries-long trail of blood and tears among Armenian Christians, subject to periodic mass slaughters under the Ottomans) with the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides. The first of these was the largest, and has attracted a good deal of attention in the last two decades. Now that a century and more has passed, and all survivors are dead, the memories and effects of the genocide are not, as a new book reminds us: Anthonie Holslag, The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 291pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:
This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities. Taking a dual approach to answer this question, Anthonie Holslag studies the cultural expression of violence during the genocidal process itself, and in the aftermath for the victims. By using this approach, this book allows us to see comparatively how genocide in diasporic communities in the Netherlands, London and the US is encapsulated in an historic narrative. It paints a picture of the complexity of genocidal violence itself, but also in its transgenerational and non-spatial consequences, raising new questions of how violence can be perpetuated or interlocked with the discourse and narratives of the victims, and how the violence can be relived.
Almost five years ago now, I noted that we were gearing up for the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, which was already in 2013 occasioning a steady publication of new books, which only accelerated in the following year. For general histories, see the link at the top. For a specifically theological analysis of the war, I noted here Philip Jenkins' surprising, almost shocking, book on the war as a holy war.
And now, as this interesting photo array at The Atlanticreminds me, we are coming upon the centenary of the end of the war.
The war may have ended nearly a century ago now, but as the always-fascinating Cambridge historian David Reynolds has shown, that war has had very long shadows. Eastern Christians are aware of that only too well, living in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its genocides against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians.
As we come to the centenary of the end of the war, and then to the abysmal legacy of the peace conference afterwards, I draw your attention once more to a splendid book by the Anglo-Canadian historian (and great grand-daughter of David Lloyd George) Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World.
This book tells a complicated story with great insight and panache. She allows the major characters--especially Clemenceau, George, and Wilson--to come alive alongside an equally fascinating set of other leaders in Paris--e.g., the Greek prime minister Venizelos, various minor Romanian royals, and others. And the sarcastic comments made by Clemenceau against George and Wilson are revealing and hilarious in about equal measure--and far from undeserved. It is a fascinating history sure to delight.
Over the last three years, as I have been reading (and re-reading) in a lot of the literature around historical memory, and the psychoanalysis of trauma, it has become clear that an emerging theme in both bodies of literature is an awareness of how trauma does not die when those who endured it do. It can often live on unconsciously in subsequent generations. Several of the articles of scholarly clinicians such as Jeffrey Prager have been helpful to me here; and so too several articles and books of Vamik Volkan have also been very illuminating.
In this light, then, it should not surprise us that while all those who would have experienced the Armenian Genocide first-hand are now dead, that event lives on in the descendants of those who survived the horrors of 1915. A new book takes us into this world: The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Araratby Anthonie Holslag (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 287pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:
This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities. Taking a dual approach to answer this question, Anthonie Holslag studies the cultural expression of violence during the genocidal process itself, and in the aftermath for the victims. By using this approach, this book allows us to see comparatively how genocide in diasporic communities in the Netherlands, London and the US is encapsulated in an historic narrative. It paints a picture of the complexity of genocidal violence itself, but also in its transgenerational and non-spatial consequences, raising new questions of how violence can be perpetuated or interlocked with the discourse and narratives of the victims, and how the violence can be relived.
Every November, in teaching my course on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam, we come to the dolorous history of Armenia, including of course the genocide of 1915. In our discussions, I discuss with students how it became necessary in the 20th century to coin a new term to describe a new form of evil and destruction, a term that comes to us from the life and work of Raphael Lemkin, to whom I have drawn attention in the past as books about him continue to appear.
Two more recent studies have appeared to examine further the legacy of Lemkin in coining that term including, first, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 320pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:
Raphaël Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the word "genocide" in the winter of 1942 and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime, setting his sights on reimagining human rights institutions and humanitarian law after World War II. After the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin slipped into obscurity, and within a few short years many of the same governments that had agreed to outlaw genocide and draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights tried to undermine these principles.
This intellectual biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists and human rights figures sheds new light on the origins of the concept and word "genocide," contextualizing Lemkin's intellectual development in interwar Poland and exploring the evolving connection between his philosophical writings, juridical works, and politics over the following decades. The book presents Lemkin's childhood experience of anti-Jewish violence in imperial Russia; his youthful arguments to expand the laws of war to protect people from their own governments; his early scholarship on Soviet criminal law and nationalities violence; his work in the 1930s to advance a rights-based approach to international law; his efforts in the 1940s to outlaw genocide; and his forays in the 1950s into a social-scientific and historical study of genocide, which he left unfinished.
Revealing what the word "genocide" meant to people in the wake of World War II—as the USSR and Western powers sought to undermine the Genocide Convention at the UN, while delegations from small states and former colonies became the strongest supporters of Lemkin's law—Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide examines how the meaning of genocide changed over the decades and highlights the relevance of Lemkin's thought to our own time.
The second book, from the same publisher and appearing a month after the one above, is by Berel Lang, Genocide: The Act as Idea (U Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 224pp.
About this book we are told:
The term "genocide"—"group killing"—which first appeared in Raphael Lemkin's 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, had by 1948 established itself in international law through the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since then the charge of genocide has been both widely applied but also contested. In Genocide: The Act as Idea, Berel Lang examines and illuminates the concept of genocide, at once articulating difficulties in its definition and proposing solutions to them. In his analysis, Lang explores the relation of genocide to group identity, individual and corporate moral responsibility, the concept of individual and group intentions, and the concept of evil more generally. The idea of genocide, Lang argues, represents a notable advance in the history of political and ethical thought which proposed alternatives to it, like "crimes against humanity," fail to take into account.
I noted its appearance in 2013, but only recently had a chance to read it myself. It is an odd book in some ways, reflecting an odd life too abruptly ended after enduring what I could only regard has terribly shabby treatment. That life is portrayed in this book: Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., (Yale UP, 2013), 328pp.
It seems to be the fate of some men that their enormously important contributions to intellectual history and human civilization are not recognized until after their deaths, when our ability to repay debts to them is obviated. Such was the case with Lemkin, to whom Eastern Christians--notably beginning with the Armenians in 1915, but including also Assyrian Christians (also in 1915), Ukrainians (1932-33 in the Holodomor), and others--owe a very great deal indeed. Beginning with the Armenians, they and other Eastern Christians have been on the front-lines of some of the worst mass atrocities of the last century. But it was only in the aftermath of the Holocaust that the term "genocide" was coined, and the story of how that came to be is told in part by the man who came up with that term in this newly published autobiography:
About this book we are told:
Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin
lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered
international law and redefined the world’s understanding of group
rights. He invented the concept and word “genocide” and propelled the
idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in
ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a
life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law,
and—not least—an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the
first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small
farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi
Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence
as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal
law.
We have studied much about the mentality of those who perpetrate
genocide but know little about that of the man who named the crime and
did most to combat it. Raphael Lemkin was one of the great
intellectual heroes of the 20th century. In this stirring memoir Lemkin
tells us how he combined his experiences as a Polish-Jewish survivor of
the Nazis, a legal scholar, and a passionate defender of human rights to
articulate a concept that has been all too crucial in our time. Doing
that required him to undergo a profound extension of his personal
identity that could enable him to apply his ethical imagination to the
entire human species. Donna-Lee Frieze has performed a
remarkable scholarly task in rescuing a manuscript that might otherwise
have been lost, and in meticulously preparing it for a wide reading
audience. We encounter a man who, whatever his vulnerabilities and
defeats, persists doggedly, courageously, and at considerable personal
cost, in a lifelong mission to give international legal status to
resisting the most extreme expression of human evil. The entire story is
strangely hopeful.
Totally Unofficial is a unique and compelling memoir of the
twentieth century. Lemkin’s blend of narrative strategies gives voice,
shape, and scope to his remarkable life and large achievement—an
achievement that has come to define something essential about our age
and the urgency of human rights. In writing about his tireless lifelong
efforts to make genocide a crime in international law, Lemkin shows us a
rich and textured world, from his flight from Nazi occupied Poland,
through northern Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan to the United
States, and then to corridors of international political process in
Paris, Geneva, and at the U.N. This is essential reading. Donna Frieze
has done a remarkable job unearthing it from the archives and bringing
it to the world.
It is a very cogently written study that begins in the late 19th century, but is of course largely concentrated on the First World War, though with considerable attention paid to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.
Parts of the book revisit well-trod territory for those who have some background in the history of the Great War--e.g., the chapter on the Allied attempt to invade by the Dardanelles and the related Gallipoli campaigns in 1915.
Parts of the book also show the great (and relatively underwhelming and only partially successful) attempts made by the Young Turks and their German patrons to arouse Muslim hatred against the Entente Powers by repeated calls for jihad, a term with which, alas, we have only become ever more familiar in the last hundred years. In the case of British India, this campaign produced almost no uprisings, so loyal were Indian subjects to the king-emperor George V. In most other places, it aroused only minimal attention for a variety of reasons. In all places, it seems, it was recognized by Arabs, Turks, Germans, and Brits alike as a political tool to be trotted out when convenient and retired when necessary. It does not seem to have had quite the same purchase as it does today in the hands of some (e.g., ISIS). Once again one sees the ease with which all parties--Muslim and non-Muslim alike--are able to use Islamic terminology, concepts, and practices as ideological tools in the service of empires and would-be nation-states.
The chapters on the Arab Revolt, which began 100 years ago this past June, are very interesting to watch the intrigue between Britain and the Hashemite tribes of Arabia. This gives rise to plots between Arabs and Brits against the Ottoman Turks; between Arabs and the Turks against the British; between the British and the French (e.g., the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement) against the Arabs; and then between the British, French, and Russians against the Turks and possibly with the Arabs onside, but clearly in a dependent role. Fascinating too is the sudden creation of a "king" in the Arab world in the person of Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, who gave himself the regal title and status. Most monarchies tend to be shabby (if disguised) ramshackle affairs of sordid origins, but this one is especially déshabillé.
There is also a very well done chapter on the Armenian Genocide which also gives considerable attention to the slaughter of the Assyrian Christians at the same time--to say nothing of the campaign to drive the Greeks out of western Anatolia. For those who want to understand the genocide in its wider context, this book does a very good job. But for those who want the genocide summed up without reading any number of the many lengthy studies of it, this book's chapter does a good job in conveying the details succinctly without sparing the reader some of the details of the horrors faced--horrors that stagger one to this very day.
Rogan's treatment of the slaughter of Armenian Christians draws considerably on a first-hand eye-witness report, Armenian Golgotha, one of the first ever written, by Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest who barely survived, and who was forced to witness the genocide in all its manifold horrors
Pope Francis was recently in Armenia, and as John Allen's article argues, the "politics of memory," on which I have been commenting rather a lot around here lately, was a significant part of the visit. Memory shapes identity, which in turn shapes present politics, albeit often in an unstable way as memory is itself not stable but subject to all kinds of uses and abuses.
What happened to Armenian memory and identity, and so to its politics, as it struggled to recover from the genocide of 1915? Such is the question at the heart of a new book: Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stamford UP, 2016), 240pp.
About this book we are told:
Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekcioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions.
Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekcioglu gives voice to the community's most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenianess sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles.
As I noted last year and the year before, 2015 marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, about which studies continue to pour forth from various publishers. I have a unit on Armenia which I cover every year in my course on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam, and we watch, inter alia, a documentary about the assassination of Hrant Dink, showing the power of traumatic memories even a century afterwards. A new study on those deadly memories has recently been published: Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2015), 416pp.
About this book we are told:
The assassination of the author Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, a high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks soon re-awakened to their Armenian heritage, reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamised and Turkified, and the suffering their families endured to keep their stories secret. There was public debate around Armenian property confiscated by the Turkish state and the extermination of the minorities. At last the silence had been broken.
Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands -- a process to which the international community turned a blind eye. The price for this amnesia was, Vicken Cheterian argues, "a century of genocide." Turkish intellectuals acknowledge the price society must pay collectively to forget such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities -- like the Kurds today -- nor have an open and democratic society without addressing the original sin on which the state was founded: the Armenian Genocide.
The harrowing story of a Methodist Minister
and a principled American naval officer who helped rescue more than
250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians—a
tale of bravery, morality, and politics, published to coincide with the
genocide’s centennial.
The year was 1922: World War I had just
come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a
YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal
city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the
east in Turkey’s interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled
over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his
Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a
million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate
attempt to escape his troops. Turkish soldiers proceeded to burn the
city and rape and kill countless Christian refugees. Unwilling to leave
with the other American civilians and determined to get Armenians and
Greeks out of the doomed city, Jennings worked tirelessly to feed and
transport the thousands of people gathered at the city’s Quay.
With
the help of the brilliant naval officer and Kentucky gentleman Halsey
Powell, and a handful of others, Jennings commandeered a fleet of
unoccupied Greek ships and was able to evacuate a quarter million
innocent people—an amazing humanitarian act that has been lost to
history, until now. Before the horrible events in Turkey were complete,
Jennings had helped rescue a million people.
By turns harrowing and inspiring, The Great Fire
uses eyewitness accounts, documents, and survivor narratives to bring
this episode—extraordinary for its brutality as well as its heroism—to
life.
Advancing Genocide Studies follows in the footsteps of the editor’s earlier volume, Pioneers of Genocide Studies.
Here a new generation of scholars presents personal essays that reveal
their motivation to study genocide, the passion that drives them to
continue its study, their primary scholarly interests and efforts, and
their perspective on the field as it currently stands.
The
contributors come from diverse backgrounds, numerous different nations
and various disciplines: Kjell Anderson (The Netherlands, criminology);
Yair Auron (Israel, history and education); Taner Akcam (Turkey and
United States, history and sociology); Alexander Alvarez (United States,
criminology); Gerry Caplan (Canada, history); Craig Etcheson (United
States, international relations); Maureen Hiebert (Canada, political
science); Adam Jones (Canada, political science); Henry Theriault
(United States, philosophy); Samuel Totten (United States, history and
political science); and Ugor Ungor (The Netherlands, history and
sociology).
All the contributors are well known in the field of
genocide studies, and all have made important contributions to this
area. Variously, they have done important theoretical work, produced new
findings vis-à-vis old cases of genocide, and are pursuing new issues
and topics within the field of genocide studies. Many have worked “on
the ground“ and bring a sense of immediacy to various crises.
I recently discussed the Armenian Genocide in my class on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam. And lo and behold the very next week Pope Francis acknowledged what every other sane and serious person on the planet knows, viz., that it was an organized, systematic slaughter of the Armenians both qua Armenians and also as Christians: thus a genocide. The Turkish government, of course, did not cover themselves in glory in their response to the pope, a response as risible as that given by the Turkish MP interviewed in this documentary (at 16:31), which I showed to my students:
As I have noted on here several times over the last two years, 2014 marked the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, and now in April 2015 we are marking the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. (The New Yorker has a long and fascinating article on the genocide, which you may read here.)
Numerous books have recently been published--discussed below--and several more are set for release later this year, including Alan Whitehorn's The Armenian Genocide: A Century of Remembrance and Denial (Praeger, 2015), 325pp. About this book we are told by the publisher:
A century after the devastating mass killing of the Ottoman Armenians
during the Armenian Genocide—considered one of the first genocides of
the 20th century—this catastrophe continues to raise important and
troubling issues, particularly given the Turkish state's ongoing denial.
Indeed, much of the continuing instability and conflict in the Caucasus
is rooted in the Armenian Genocide. Drawing upon diverse academic
disciplines and written by a single author who is a leading expert on
the subject, The Armenian Genocide: A Century of Remembrance and Denial
explores the profound short- and long-term impacts of the 1915 Armenian
Genocide. The chapters document how this genocide created a scattered
and traumatized Armenian Diaspora and imposed major stresses upon the
tiny and vulnerable landlocked Armenian state. The book addresses
difficult topics such as the challenge of the "double death" of the
victims as a result of the ongoing Turkish state denial. This volume
provides an analysis of the Armenian Genocide from several analytical
perspectives, thereby giving readers a more comprehensive understanding
of this enormously important subject.
About the Armenian genocide--accompanied by an equally devastating, though far less well known, simultaneous slaughter of Pontic Greeks and Assyrian Christians, and later Aegean Greek Christians also--we have seen a number of recent books, and later in 2015 will see several more. (For those desirous of some background at the conceptual and biographical level of "genocide" and the terms origins in the work of Raphael Lemkin, see here.)
The most controversial question that is still being asked about the
First World War - was there an Armenian genocide? - will come to a head
on 24 April 2015, when Armenians worldwide will commemorate its
centenary and Turkey will deny that it took place, claiming that the
deaths of over half of the Armenian race were justified. This has
become a vital international issue. Twenty national parliaments in
democratic countries have voted to recognise the genocide, but Britain
and the USA continue to equivocate for fear of alienating their NATO
ally. Geoffrey Robertson QC condemns this hypocrisy, and in An
Inconvenient Genocide he proves beyond reasonable doubt that the
horrific events in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitute the crime
against humanity that is today known as genocide. He explains how
democracies can deal with genocide denial without infringing free
speech, and makes a major contribution to understanding and preventing
this worst of all crimes. His renowned powers of advocacy are on full
display as he condemns all those - from Sri Lanka to the Sudan, from Old
Anatolia to modern Syria and Iraq - who try to justify the mass murder
of children and civilians in the name of military necessity or religious
fervour.
While much of the international community regards the forced deportation
of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately
800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish
state still officially denies it.
In Denial of Violence,
Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To
capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Göçek undertook
a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to
2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and
newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered, historical
process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural
elements of collective violence and situated modernity on one side, and
the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events on
the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages: (i)
the initial imperial denial of the origins of the collective violence
committed against the Armenians commenced in 1789 and continued until
1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a
decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early republican denial of the actors of
violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (iv) the late republican
denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974
and continues today.
Denial of Violence develops a
novel theoretical, historical and methodological framework to
understanding what happened and why the denial of collective violence
against Armenians still persists within Turkish state and society.
Then in December we saw published a work by Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2014), 312pp. (This links to the Kindle version. The hardback is forthcoming in February.) About this book we are told:
The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was
the greatest atrocity of World War I. Around one million Armenians were
killed, and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it
is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still a live and divisive issue that
mobilizes Armenians across the world, shapes the identity and politics
of modern Turkey, and has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians for
years.
In Great Catastrophe, the eminent scholar and
reporter Thomas de Waal looks at the aftermath and politics of the
Armenian Genocide and tells the story of recent efforts by courageous
Armenians, Kurds, and Turks to come to terms with the disaster as Turkey
enters a new post-Kemalist era. The story of what happened to the
Armenians in 1915-16 is well-known. Here we are told the "history of the
history" and the lesser-known story of what happened to Armenians,
Kurds, and Turks in the century that followed. De Waal relates how
different generations tackled the issue of the "Great Catastrophe" from
the 1920s until the failure of the Protocols signed by independent
Armenia and Turkey in 2010. Quarrels between diaspora Armenians
supporting and opposing the Soviet Union broke into violence and
culminated with the murder of an archbishop in 1933. The devising of the
word "genocide," the growth of modern identity politics, and the 50th
anniversary of the massacres re-energized a new generation of Armenians.
In Turkey the issue was initially forgotten, only to return to the
political agenda in the context of the Cold War and an outbreak of
Armenian terrorism. More recently, Turkey has started to confront its
taboos. In an astonishing revival of oral history, the descendants of
tens of thousands of "Islamized Armenians," who have been in the shadows
since 1915, have begun to reemerge and reclaim their identities.
Drawing
on archival sources, reportage and moving personal stories, de Waal
tells the full story of Armenian-Turkish relations since the Genocide in
all its extraordinary twists and turns. He looks behind the propaganda
to examine the realities of a terrible historical crime and the divisive
"politics of genocide" it produced. The book throws light not only on
our understanding of Armenian-Turkish relations but also of how mass
atrocities and historical tragedies shape contemporary politics.
Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book
that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and
secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who
organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate
the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of
Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their
murdered families, friends, and compatriots.
This book includes a
large collection of previously unpublished letters that show the
strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian,
who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on
the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis;
Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved
with Nemesis.
The author tells a story that has been either
hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims’
narratives. This is the story of those who attempted to seek justice for
the victims and the effect this effort had on them and on their
families. The book shows how the narratives of resistance and trauma can
play out in the next generation and how resistance can promote
resilience. Little has been written about Operation Nemesis. As we
approach the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it is
time.
The Armenian Genocide has often been
considered a template for subsequent genocides and is one of the first
genocides of the 20th century. As such, it holds crucial historical
significance, and it is critically important that today's students
understand this case study of inhumanity. This book provides a
much-needed, long-overdue reference volume on the Armenian Genocide. It
begins with seven introductory analytical essays that provide a broad
overview of the Armenian Genocide and then presents individual entries, a
historical timeline, and a selection of documents.
This
essential reference work covers all aspects of the Armenian Genocide,
including the causes, phases, and consequences. It explores political
and historical perspectives as well as the cultural aspects. The
carefully selected collection of perspective essays will inspire
critical thinking and provide readers with insight into some of the most
controversial and significant issues of the Armenian Genocide.
Similarly, the primary source documents are prefaced by thoughtful
introductions that will provide the necessary context to help students
understand the significance of the material.
Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many
relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy
soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a
forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part
of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian
population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to
convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the
march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his household. Aram
spent four long years living as a slave, servant and shepherd among
Kurdish tribes, slowly gaining his captors’ trust. He grew from a boy to
a man in these years and his narrative offers readers a remarkable
coming of age story as well as a valuable eyewitness to history. Haigaz
was able to escape to the United States in 1921.
There are, I know, further books in the works so stay tuned on here for details of some of them.
Last month, on Remembrance Day, I gave a lecture on the several massacres of Eastern Christians during the First World War. The Armenian genocide is the best known of them, but they were comparable slaughters of Pontic Greeks, Assyrian Christians, Aegean Greeks, and others, not least when the war ended and the forced population exchanges began in 1922/23 with the destruction of Smyrna. Though the 1915 genocide of Armenians has been increasingly well publicized and studied, many do not realize that 1915 did not fall from the sky one day like a new idea. Mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottomans had a long history, a history still controversial today in Turkey itself, where denial of a genocide as such is still official policy. Why is it still denied? A recent book attempts to shed light on this question: Fatma Muge Gocek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (Oxford UP, 2014), 684pp.
About this book we are told:
While much of the international community regards the forced deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish state still officially denies it.
In Denial of Violence, Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Göçek undertook a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to 2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered, historical process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural elements of collective violence and situated modernity on one side, and the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events on the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages: (i) the initial imperial denial of the origins of the collective violence committed against the Armenians commenced in 1789 and continued until 1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early republican denial of the actors of violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (iv) the late republican denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974 and continues today.
develops a novel theoretical, historical and methodological framework to understanding what happened and why the denial of collective violence against Armenians still persists within Turkish state and society.
In this centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, I'm giving a lecture on Remembrance Day in November on massacres of Eastern Christians during that war, beginning with the best known, viz., the Armenian Genocide, but covering also the attacks on Assyrian and Greek Christians, inter alia--to say nothing of what transpired in Russia thanks to the war and the Bolshevik revolution.
Armenian Christianity Today examines contemporary religious life and the
social, political, and cultural functions of religion in the
post-Soviet Republic of Armenia and in the Armenian Diaspora worldwide.
Scholars from a range of countries and disciplines explore current
trends and everyday religiosity, particularly within the Armenian
Apostolic Church (AAC), and amongst Armenian Catholics, Protestants and
vernacular religions. Themes examined include: Armenian grass-roots
religiosity; the changing forms of regular worship and devotion; various
types of congregational life; and the dynamics of social composition of
both the clergy and lay believers. Exploring through the lens of
Armenia, this book considers wider implications of "postsecular" trends
in the role of global religion.
Last summer, I noted even then the forthcoming flood of books on the centenary of the Great War, which we will observe this August. I have since had a chance to read several of them, and another one arrived in the mail only last night to my delight; I will write about it in due course.
But there are anniversaries within anniversaries, and so next year we will commemorate the centenary of the Armenian genocide, about which, as noted earlier, numerous solid studies have been published in the last decade. To start off the centenary year, Transaction Publishers will, in January 2015, publish a related study on a little-known aspect of the aftermath of the genocide: Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis (Transaction, 2015), 363pp.
About this book we are told:
Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book
that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and
secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who
organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate
the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of
Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their
murdered families, friends, and compatriots.
This book includes a
large collection of previously unpublished letters that show the
strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian,
who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on
the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis;
Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved
with Nemesis.
The author tells a story that has been either
hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims’
narratives. This is the story of those who attempted to seek justice for
the victims and the effect this effort had on them and on their
families. Little has been written about Operation Nemesis. As we
approach the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it is
time.
