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One of the countless gullible and/or bigoted
suckers who got taken by pro-Armenian claims was criminologist-scholar Richard
R. Korn. We've all seen detective shows where the investigator looks at every
little clue before arriving at conclusions regarding who the killer is. By the
way Dr. Korn examined the story behind the Armenian "Genocide," it
is shocking that he might have been recognized as an expert in the criminology
field. He only took the word of the accuser, and he conducted no independent
research whatsoever. (So it would appear — unless his prejudices were so
thick, he dismissed the counter-evidence out of hand. That would have made him
worse than simply incompetent.)
The following analyzes Dr. Korn's rubber stamp
"Armenian" conclusions from his article, "Turkey's Genocidal
Crime and Silence — Mass-Murder of the Armenian People"; the piece
was written for the Institute for the Study of Genocide (at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Genocide-gaga Helen Fein
has been the executive director since 1987... she's one of the two
"genocide scholars" who threatened “to publicize Microsoft's
censorship,” when Microsoft wanted to remove Helen's favorite G-word from
her Armenian "genocide" entry written for Encarta. Microsoft backed
down, and the episode was unethically publicized anyway..!)
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Dr.
Richard Korn (1923-2002) |
ADDENDUM: Further reading revealed Korn was technically
a professor in the Sociology Department at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice... so while my analysis below (written earlier) refers to him as a
criminologist (which is what I read elsewhere; for example, once he had taught
at Berkeley's School of Criminology) looks like his real claim to fame was in
sociology — just like Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akcam, and so many
other pseudo-historian Armenian "genocide" fanciers. (Korn's
criminology experience was mainly in the area of penal reform.) He actually
co-founded the Institute for the Study of Genocide in 1984, with
Simon Wiesenthal.
Prof. Korn seems like he was a pretty good fellow
overall, compassionate over the rights of people not always regarded as equal
human beings, like the Japanese during his days of fighting in WWII, and
American blacks. As a card-carrying liberal, the one "less equal human
group" he saved his venom for... in typical liberal fashion... was the Turks. (I, Holdwater, feel more at home with liberal thought...
although hypocrisy must be pointed out wherever encountered.)
Korn's article may be read at http://www.cwis.org/fwj/21/tgc.html
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All we need to do is look at Dr. Korn's reference section to see how
one-sided this so-called scholar was. A real scholar would take a balanced approach,
consulting diverse sources, and not simply partisan ones.
Richard Korn had a Ph.D. Now we know the value of that; it's admirable for anyone to work
hard enough to earn an advanced degree. But the advanced degree in itself does not prove
either how smart or how fair a person can be.
The problem with these emotional "genocide scholars" is that most do not have
their training in history. Korn, as mentioned, was a criminologist.
Look at the way he gets his tainted facts wrong.
"Under the supervision of the central government, between 800,000 and 1,200,000
Armenians were murdered."
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Estimates of
the Ottoman-Armenian population |
There is no proof the central government was involved. And an
average of one million Armenians couldn't have died if one million survived (as
Armenians say), and the pre-war population ranged from 1-1.6 million, according to the
bulk of non-Armenian sources. (And some even Armenian.)
All the Armenians who died were not "murdered." How naive and silly of the late
Dr. Korn to have thought so. The bulk died from the same reasons that claimed their fellow
Turks: famine, disease, bad weather, and combat. Ambassador Morgenthau wrote "thousands
were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition; I believe that the
empire has lost a quarter of its Turkish population since the war started,"
because every man was needed at the fronts to contain the desperate country from
invasion... and few farmers could be spared.
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Genocidal Proof!
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Did I say there was no
proof? Perhaps I spoke too soon... Dr. Korn gives us a Talat Pasha telegram. ("...The
Government will regard the feeding of such [Armenian] children or any attempt to
prolong their lives as an act entirely opposed to its purpose, since it considers
the survival of these children as detrimental.")
Yes, the poor "scholar" actually gave credence to the forgeries of Aram Andonian. Is that the kind of
painstaking attention he paid while engaging in criminal study, to accept evidence
at face value?
Another forged telegram, as pictured above,
had Talat Pasha say: "Kill every Armenian woman, child and man without
concern for anything." Some fools believed in these faked documents all the
way back in 1920, but how could any fool believe in them during contemporary times?
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| "Witnesses"
Who Never Witnessed |
Korn cited the typical "witnesses, including foreign
observers and diplomats." None of these people witnessed anything, except dead
bodies. Dead bodies covered the landscape of the dying empire, and do not prove a
genocide. HOW did these dead bodies become dead... that should be the critical question
asked of any good criminologist. Did they die of famine or disease? If they were
massacred, who massacred them? Ottoman troops? Or Kurds, Arab bandits, or individual
Turks... many who were out for revenge, for what the Armenians had done to their families?
The "foreign observers" were mostly missionaries,
out of their minds with anti-Turkish prejudice. The same could be said for most of the
diplomats, bred with the notion that the Turks were less than human. Some had a
propagandistic agenda, like Henry Morgenthau and his consuls... looking to get the USA
into the war.
He unintelligently tells us the Allies promised to punish the perpetrators, but "In
the sordid horse-trading which followed the allied victory, none of these promises were
carried out." Of course... how could he have heard of the Malta Tribunal, the "Nuremberg" of
WWI? The presumptuous scholar only considered pro-Armenian sources. Fact is, the British
tried desperately to convict the 144 Turks they had imprisoned for over two years. They
couldn't find any evidence, even with all the Ottoman documents available to them in
Allied-occupied Istanbul.. and they had to let every Turk go free, for lack of evidence.
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Turkey Strongarms the
World
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Korn gives us only one side of the story of the 1982
Israeli conference, alluding to Turkish pressure to ban the Armenians. Now, what
kind of power could Turkey have possibly had to influence Israel, especially before
the days of the two countries' current alliance? It was the Israelis who were troubled
by the Armenians, and that's why their participation was limited. This was during
the heated days of Armenian terrorism, when groups like ASALA were killing people
right and left.
Korn was appalled at the idea that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights
removed a paragraph on the fake genocide, once the Turks and others objected. (The
others being Pakistan, Italy, France, Tunisia and the United States. Is Turkey such
an all powerful country that it could influence nations such as these? Especially in
1971?)
If the paragraph tarnishes the honor of a nation by making a terrible accusation for
which there is no proof... did Dr. Korn think the accused party would have had no
right to insist on its removal? Anyone would think that goes against one of the
basic grains of criminology.
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| Hitler
once again the Armenians' great moral witness |
Dr. Korn actually goes on to repeat the words Hitler likely never said that is
reproduced in just about every Armenian "genocide" article. Embarrassing.
We are naively reminded "The Armenian murders were soon to be emulated. By
1933 the Soviet Union had liquidated between 5 and 15 million people in the
Ukraine." By the word "emulated," it appears the amateurishly
jumping-at-conclusions criminologist preferred for his reader to believe the Soviets
were inspired by the Turks' awful example. Did the biased "scholar" bother
to look into the 5 million Turks/Muslims who were expulsed by Tsarist Russia and the
5.5 million who were slaughtered... well before and including the WWI years? A good
criminologist should study events of the past, in order to come up with studied
conclusions.
He really shows his ignorance when he writes, "Up to the time of Turkey's
genocidal crimes against Armenians, the lower limit of state-perpetrated atrocity
was defined by occasional massacres and pogroms." Incredible.
What about the crimes of his own nation, the United States? Perhaps from 200,000 to
500,000 Filipino civilians (not soldiers) were wiped out when the USA was occupying
the Philippines, a few years before "1915." (In all likelihood, making
this episode the first genocide of the 20th century... negating the claim
pro-Armenians love to put forth as their "genocide" being the first.) Many
Filipinos believe up to a million of their people were murdered.
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"KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN"
All you say about the Philippines, the conflict there between the Americans,
military and civil, and the pig headedness of the military and their habits of setting
"bulldogs to catch rabbits" is immensely cheering to me, because it is
precisely what we are doing in South Africa. --Rudyard Kipling
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And look at this utterly simplistic and shameless conclusion:
"It was Turkey's acts of genocide which made the Holocaust thinkable and morally
possible."
Quite the contrary, the Germans had already been on record before 1915 with their tendency
to mass murder. Another "genocide of the 20th century" that preceded 1915 was
when German colonialists rubbed out perhaps 70% of the Herero people, in southwest Africa.
WHICH GENOCIDE INSPIRED THE GREEKS?
When George Horton, Christian
missionary in Smyrna and a Turcophobe of no small distinction (author of “The Blight of Asia”), asked a Greek
about reports of wholesale massacres carried out by Greeks against Turks in
Western Anatolia during 1921-22, the answer that he got was that Greek actions
were modeled after the punitive expeditions carried out by U.S. forces in the
Philippines between 1899-1905. (Horton,
George “The Blight of Asia” 1926. reprint Sterndale Classics, London. 2003. p
60.)
Nick's essay, "Telling a Good Story"
If the "Armenian
Genocide" inspired the Holocaust as Dr. Korn ridiculously asserts, why didn't
it inspire the Greeks? Particularly since the "Armenian Genocide" was so
much fresher in memory and close to the Greeks' part of the world, in 1921?
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Korn then attempts to give credence to a 1984 "Tribunal" where the jury
consisted of characters such as Richard Hovannisian, Gerald Libaridian, Christopher
Walker, Tessa Hoffman and several Armenian survivors. I'm sure Judge Roy Bean would have
been envious with the objectivity demonstrated by that particular "court."
Unfortunately, misled and prejudiced people like the late Richard Korn are the rule in
this debate, stemming from the pro-Armenian perspective. And not the exception.
He will forever remain on record with his embarrassingly simplistic and defamatory
observations, once the world comes to accept the real truth of this equation. The truth
always has a way of prevailing.
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