(RUDY RUMMEL) Tall Armenian Tale: The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide

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I have repeatedly come across statistics provided by Democide Man, Prof. Rudy Rummel, used by pro-Armenians to point to the monstrousness of the Turks. For example, in one web site, utilizing Rummel's figures:

"Combining these two would make the Turkish democide the 6th worst democide of the 20th century, worse than Cambodia, and behind Axis Japan."

It’s not just the 1915 period with Rummel (or, as the aforementioned "Armenian genocide" site refers to it, "The Young Turk democide 1909-18"). No, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, according to Rummel, engaged in a campaign of “murder by government,” the simple definiton of "democide." (Genocide scholars often enjoy creating new terms, like Israel Charny’s "definitionalism," to give the study of their passion greater weight. Despite the fact that the genocide word has become meaningless and politicized, the meaning the layman still accepts is "murder by government," in the process of systematic extermination. In other words, I’m not sure which is greater: the confusion this word creates, or its redundancy.) The web site continues, citing Rummel:

“The Ataturk democide 1919-23, The Pontian genocide...”

Yes, Rummel has meanly thrown all the Turcophobic propaganda into the works, even the "Nestorian" Assyrians. The Turks murdered them all, to a man.

He doesn’t make any bones about it. In the gallery section of his web site (www.hawaii.edu/powerkills),, the caption of "Room One"'s first photo reads:

"From 1900 to 1923, Turkish dictators murdered about 2,100,000 Armenians."

Estimates of the Ottoman-Armenian population

His statistics cite the bulk as having occurred under the CUP regime and Ataturk's modern Turkey, that is, after 1915. So he outdoes even the Armenians, who usually don’t go beyond 1.5 million these days. Yes, according to Arnold Toynbee’s April 1916 propagandistic "Treatment" report, the Armenian Patriarch himself estimated the pre-war Ottoman population at 2.1 million. (2006 ADDENDUM: Yet even the Patriarch's 12-30-1918 inflated figure of 840,000 dead pales in comparison with Rummel's. 4-07: In addition, the Patriarch's "real" estimate, cited by Lepsius and Christopher Walker, was 1.85 million.) Now, every reasonable person who takes even a surface undertaking of this area is quick to realize the Patriarch’s figures were awfully exaggerated — it was the intention of the Armenians to rule over the "Greater Armenia" they hoped a hoodwinked West would grant them, and it was in their best interest to inflate their numbers. (In 1880, for example, Patriarch Nerses is on record admitting the way he conducted his population study was to count up to 60 Armenians per household.) As comarison, the Ottoman census was 1.3 million, not far from the 1.5 million most "neutral" figures of the period settled upon. ("Neutral" meaning Western, thus pro-Armenian.)

But even if we accept the Patriach’s ballooned number of 2.1 million as accurate, that would mean...

Prof. Rudy Rummel is telling us 2.1 million Armenians were all “murdered.”

That means zero Armenians survived.

That means even the most extremist genocide proponents... as Dadrian, Hovannisian, Balakian, and heavyweights of the unethical "genocide scholar" crowd, who signed their names to this 1998 commemoration stating one million Armenians survived... are wrong.

How could Prof. Rummel be so wildly irresponsible? How could he compromise his credibility with such a distorted, non-factual statement? How could he accuse a whole nation of the most heinous of crimes with no proof, as we shall soon see?

=============

(Rummel does clarify in a letter that the 2.1 million includes those from Armenia and "adjacent territory invaded by the Turks." The latter would be eastern Anatolian territory the Ottomans had held for centuries. [If one takes a look at the eastern Anatolian border before WWI and today, one can see little difference.] So Turkish land the Turks took back doesn’t count, except in an Armenian nationalist’s mind, and the good brunt of the Armenians living in these areas of “Greater Armenia” were occupied mainly by Ottoman-Armenians. Richard Hovannisian, for example, estimated 500,000 Turkish-Armenian refugees at the end of the war in Transcaucasia. [1974's`The Ebb and Flow of the Armenian Minority in the Arab Middle East', Middle East Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1 ].

Let’s take a look at this another way; the Armenian worldwide pre-war population at the time broke down to 1.5 million in the Ottoman Empire, 1 million in Russia, 150,000 in Persia and 250,000 the rest of the world. [C. B. Dixon-Johnson, "The Armenians," 1916, likely derived from the Encyclopedia Brittanica.] That’s a total of about 3 million. If 2.1 million were "murdered" by the Turks, that would have left less than a million worldwide. Yet, the Armenians themselves concede the survival of one million Ottoman-Armenians, strictly from the Ottoman Empire.)

A reader not wishing to be identified informed me he tried to communicate with Prof. Rummel, and sent me copies of the correspondence, that I will feel free to refer to. The fascinating thing is, this reader first contacted the professor in early 2003, and Prof. Rummel wrote back promising to reply, stating the information was important to him. He never did.

In early 2004, the reader wrote again, offering an in-depth analysis of Rummel’s claims, Prof. Rummel was insulted, but promised to study the matter. As his web site is apparently the same, it doesn't seem like he has made an effort to correct his wrongs.

Why is this? When someone points out an error in the TAT site, I immediately make the correction. I don’t want for any false claim to mislead anyone. That is the only honorable thing to do.

At any rate, I'd like to thank the reader for giving me permission to utilize the ideas in his communications. (He mentioned he got a lot of if from the TAT site, so how pleasing this site is coming in handy.) While the reader thought Dr. Rummel a man of integrity, the reader was frustrated the professor blew off the arguments, judging by the preservation of his site's claims. He feels it was fair to give Dr. Rummel two years to come clean, and since he apparently hasn't, it's time to expose his level of scholarship to a wider audience.

Prof. Rummel sounds like a relatively fine fellow. I don’t think he’s as unreasonable as a lot of these other "genocide scholars," like Tessa Hoffmann and Israel Charny. So how could a good person allow such horrible statements such as, “Turkish dictators murdered about 2,100,000 Armenians" to stand?

An indication that Rudolph Rummel is sticking to his guns is evidenced by a January 2004 interview (http://www.aztagdaily.com/interviews/rummel.htm) by Aztag’s Khatchig Mouradian, where the following question was posed: "You say about 2.1 million Armenians were murdered by Turkish regimes, while many scholars put the number somewhere between 1-1.5 million. Can you elaborate...?" Rudolph J. Rummel: "Too many scholars stop their analysis at the end of the Young Turk Regime. But genocide also occurred after that, even involving the Turks (sic) invasion of the new, postwar Armenian state."

Aztag reminds us Rummel is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science in the University of Hawaii. Already we can gather, like most "genocide scholars," he is no historian. We are also told Rummel, according to Rummel’s site, was a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.

Here’s a good reason why; Rummel is quoted in the interview as having said:

"...[D]emocracies have a moral responsibility to intervene and stop massive democide. I would go further, since it is the absolute dictators of the world that are the major source of war and democide, I would rule dictatorship itself a crime against humanity."

Now who could argue with that?

(Although even there, with a caveat; there have been benign dictatorships where the dictator has thought of his people and nation before himself. If there is chaos in a nation, and in the rare case where a dictator dictates wisely, a bloody go at democracy would not necessarily be the better choice for humanity. Furthermore, let's check out some absolute dictators, like the ones in North Korea and Libya. In the last fifty years or so, neither has been involved in war. Meanwhile, the same can’t be said of a major democracy like America.)

But for the most part, it's the words Rudy Rummel speaks that are attractive. He is saying the easy equivalent of, "Child molestation is bad!" Who is going to argue that genocide is really bad? Such "pure hearted goodness" is what makes genocide scholars so adorable. When a lawyer decides to write a book on genocide, the Pulitzer committee gushes and gives her a prize.

It is this veneer of "nobility" that gives the genocide scholar carte blanche to have statements accepted at face value. Just like their "missionary" counterpart from the Ottoman Empire, where their own "nobility" allowed people to accept whatever the missionaries said as the absolute truth. As Prof. McCarthy put it, that was because nobody expected clergymen, seen as highly moral, to lie. Ditto, the genocide scholar.

Yet, while no doubt some genocide scholars know the truth and lie, others — as I hope Prof. Rummel — make horribly untrue statements because they want to believe in the world they’ve created. Regardless of the reason, there can be no excuse to call another a "murderer" without adequate, factual proof. As genocide scholar Henry Huttenbach wrote, "There is no crime without evidence. A genocide cannot be written about in the absence of factual proof." (Not that we need Dr. Huttenbach to conclude that; any moral person knows it is WRONG to make an accusation without proof. Huttenbach, by the way, was yet another hypocritical "genocide scholar" who affirmed the Armenians’ genocide story, the last time I checked.)

Examining Dr. Rummel’s analysis, we can see he read other sources besides "Vahakn Dadrian." He has consulted McCarthy’s works, and importantly, Kamuran Gurun’s "The Armenian File." This is the book the Zoryan Institute claims turned Prof. Bernard Lewis around. Of course; there is no "Turkish propaganda" in the book. The valid sources cited completely expose what lies behind the pro-Armenians’ lies.

How in the world could Prof. Rummel have allowed himself to make such incorrect claims if he has read such a scholarly work, mostly utilizing sources without conflicts-of-interest? Why would Prof. Rummel instead choose biased sources such as Walker, Melson, Boyajian, Morgenthau, Housepian, the missionary Barton and the wartime Toynbee?

We'll leave the speculation to the genocide-obsessed Armenians. They are always quick to come up with discrediting reasons, like the Turkish government pays off scholars, the scholar has a Turkish wife or is a "convicted felon," or anything they can think of. What we’re only interested in are the facts. Yet, it is curious that "genocide scholars" like Prof Rummel are so wholly, completely accepting of the view of Armenian propagandists. Let’s indulge in a little speculation, in Prof. Rummel’s case. In his "Chapter One," he wrote:

During World War II I was a young boy highly influenced by anti-Japanese war propaganda. I saw the Japanese as buck toothed, monkey-like, inscrutable, cruel and devious, and without feeling or sentiment. It was a cultural shock, therefore, to see the Japanese people as they really are while I was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. I found that the Japanese were nothing like my war engendered stereotypes.

Rudolph J. Rummel

I fear while Prof. Rummel might have awakened from his bigotry regarding the Japanese, deep down he is still influenced, as most in the West are, that the Turks were savage barbarians. I'm sure the professor is a gentleman, and this is not to say he has hatred in his heart; no doubt he would see the individual Turk before him as a fellow human being. But it is difficult to rid ourselves of our imprinting.

Arnold Toynbee, for example, admitted in his works that while growing up his mother had influenced him with an anti-Turkish sentiment. After causing his damage as a Wellington House propagandist (the reverberations for which are still felt today, given credence by those such as Rummel), Toynbee reformed, ventured to Turkey, and discovered "They could laugh and cry and love flowers and animals. They could be loving and considerate," as Prof. Rummel wrote about his discoveries of the Japanese people.

Regardless, Toynbee still lay genocidal blame at the feet of the Turks by the end of his years. Turkish friends, such as Statesman Ismet Inonu and "liberal" writer Ahmet Yalman, are on record for declaring, independent of one another, that Toynbee was deeply Christian. No matter how reasonable and "good" Toynbee might have been, these instilled prejudices have a tendency to work subconsciously, and often never go away.

Only Prof. Rummel knows why he has allowed himself to commit such "Rufmord" against the Turks. Whatever the reason, he ought to be aware accusing another of a crime — particularly if the other is a nation, and particularly if the crime is as high as they come (or, as Rummel puts it, "Genocide is horrible, an abomination of our specious, totally unacceptable. It is an obscenity, the evil of our time..") — is no more excusable than if some pharisee accused Prof. Rummel of a ruinous charge without evidence. What would Prof. Rummel say about the character of such an irresponsible party?

In his interview, much to the deep dismay of Armenians, Rudolph Rummel at least does not advocate “reparations.” (This is the kind of partial deviation from the "Cause" that allowed Armenians to withhold the hero-worship for Arnold Toynbee that they have given whole-heartedly to Lord Bryce.) Just as well; the Republic of Armenia is on record for stating they will honor past agreements, as any nation is legally bound to do. (Even though Armenia has been known to violate past promises, by officially referring to eastern Turkey as "Western Armenia," for example.) This right was given up in the Treaty of Gumru/Alexandropol, the terms of which were revealed in a 1955 publication from the Armenian Information Service. John Roy Carlson (Arthur Derounian) wrote: "Highly significant Is Article 8, wherein Dashnags agreed 'to forego their rights to ask for damages . . . as a result of the general war,' thus closing the doors FOREVER to reparations for the enormous destruction of Armenian life and property."

Let’s examine some of the professor’s “facts.”

An Armin Wegner photograph

In his gallery, he has identified a picture, reproduced at right, as
"Here is a young Armenian boy the Turkish dictatorship murdered by starvation"

He justifies this terminology ("murder") when a regime imposes starvation, or if a regime doesn’t attempt to save those starving of policies imposed by the regime. In other words, the age-old propagandist argument that the Armenians who died from famine were killed off on purpose.

Once again, the agenda-ridden "genocide scholar" only looks at conclusions that are comfortable and serving of his or her purposes. There is no attempt to analyze the historical context. (Almost all genocide scholars have no background in history.)

Morgenthau

Let’s see how one of Dr. Rummel's valued sources, Ambassador Morgenthau, addressed this issue by putting the following words into Enver Pasha's mouth (in his "Story" book):

"How can we furnish bread to the Armenians," Enver declared, "when we can't get enough for our own people? I know that they are suffering and that it is quite likely that they cannot get bread at all this coming winter. But we have the utmost difficulty in getting flour and clothing right here in Constantinople."

Let's bear in mind nothing would have happened to the Armenians had they not rebelled in their country's darkest hour. The resettlement decision made sense even to Morgenthau's boss (and part-ghostwriter of the ambassador's "Story" Book), American Secretary of State Robert Lansing; he wrote (November 21 1916, to President Wilson):

"I could see that [the Armenians'] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes."

So had the Armenians remained loyal, many would have died in great numbers of famine and disease regardless. Ambassador Morgenthau wrote in his "Story" Book that thousands of Turks were dying daily of famine, because all the able-bodied men were mobilized into the army, fighting a desperate, multi-front war against world superpowers. Few were left behind to till the fields, Morgenthau told us, and he estimated a quarter of the empire's Turkish population died of starvation, as a result.

Were these Turks similarly "murdered" by their government?

It's one thing to claim starvation policies were willfully imposed. (Highly unethical, if there's no proof.) It's another to ignore the historical context. Another reason for the widespread famine was the British conducted a naval blockade of the empire, preventing goods from coming in. What if the Ottoman government simply COULDN'T feed its people? Why is Prof. Rummel concluding the reasons for these deaths must have been because the Turks were evil?

Richard Hovannisian wrote in his 1967 book that some 150,000 Armenians also died of famine and disease while accompanying the Russian retreats. The Turks were nowhere in sight. Thousands of Armenians died similarly while accompanying the French retreats, at Marash. No doubt these figures are part of the bloated "2.1 million" Armenians Prof. Rummel tells us were all "murdered" by the Turks.

Prof. Rummel concludes the corpse is of an Armenian boy. Most likely it is, as Armin Wegner, the photographer, was obsessed over the Armenians, and didn't shed many tears over the "thousands of Turks dying daily" of similar causes. However, how do we know for certain? Prof. Rummel gives his faith entirely to an Armenian web site, which identifies the photograph as: "1915-1916, corpse of young Armenian boy starved to death, collapsed at doorstep. Location: Ottoman empire, region Syria."

Yet, when queried, The director of the museum where these photographs are housed (Stutgart's Schiller-Nationalmuseum Deutsches Literaturarchiv) had written: "Unfortunately, we do not have any indication regarding when or in what country the Wegner photographs were taken. As a result, the dating, and sites depicted must be determined by whoever uses the photos.''

The Armenian web site uses the photos. The Armenian web site can write anything to identify the photos. And the "scholarly" Rudy Rummel accepts at face value what the Armenian web site has come up with.

The horrifying "Two Heads on Table" shot

To demonstrate how reliable the Armenian web site Prof. Rummel has staked his belief system in is, they identified the popular shot of the "two heads on the table" (widely seen in many Armenian sites, and reproduced at left) as "Turkish soldiers pose proudly with their Armenian victims." However, this very shot was likely taken (as this site explains) in 1905, and the heads were of Bulgarian leaders, beheaded by Serbs in the powder keg that was the Balkans. The message intended was: Good thing the "Law" arrived, preventing more violence from occurring.

Now I don't know for a fact whether the Bulgarian story is true either, but it makes a lot more sense. (This wasn't the era where the cops could ask for copies from the local Fotomat to get their private jollies; such photos were taken for official purposes, and it's doubtful the reason was, ha-ha, look what we did to Armenians.) Regardless, we don't know the stories behind these old photographs. What we do know is that genocide-obsessed Armenians are ethically-challenged, and they have been known to dig up any incriminating evidence, trying to pass it off as "evidence" of Armenian victimhood. "Genocide scholar" Tessa Hofmann has been reported to use the "Mountain of skulls" shot (below) as evidence of the Armenians' tale, only a few years ago... even though it was previously exposed by Prof. Turkkaya Ataov in the 1980s as a Russian painting from 1871-72! (2006 ADDENDUM: Hofmann's dastardly utilization has been confirmed. Her transgression was committed in 1980, indicating the Ataov hoax-busting occurred later. Yet another "genocide scholar" who commits "ethocide.")

Professor Rummel also presents a photo of two bodies as "Two Greeks." The source is a Greek site. Maybe the photo is of two Greeks. Maybe not. Maybe they died of unrelated reasons. Why is Prof. Rummel accepting the word of a partisan site at face value?

Any scholar who terms what he feels comfortable in designation of a crime — when there is no evidence — as "unambiguous" is getting himself in huge trouble. Yet, that is the very word Prof. Rummel uses to describe his various examples of "democide." Genocide scholars have a habit of seeing the world in black and white. If anything, these cases can be hugely ambiguous. The Nazi example is one of the rare exceptions.

For example, I've been of the belief that the Australians committed the one successful example of genocide, the correctly-termed "annihilation" of the Tasmanians. Now here's a case where one of Vahakn Dadrian's favorite words can be applied without trouble, since the only Tasmanian left is the one we see in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. I based this belief on one source that I had read. (And there are some pages on TAT where my previous conclusion may still be encountered.) Now that I'm more genocidally-inclined with the preparation of the TAT site, I have since encountered a different opinion. This source gave sound reasons why the Tasmanian extinction may not have been purposeful. Because truth should be the motivating factor of all honorable people, from this point on, I'm going to try not quickly to label this episode as a "genocide" until I learn more. How funny I should feel that way, because the Tasmanian episode appeared fairly "unambiguous," at one point. These matters are not always cut-and-dried.

This is why those who deal in history must always be ready to "revise" their stance once better information comes along.

Professor Rummel states in Chapter 2 that "intentionality (premeditation) is critical," in the way democide is to be determined. That means it is critical for him to demonstrate "intent," just as the 1948 U.N. Convention requires.

We will see how he has done so. More correctly, how he has not done so. If the British failed to come up with the factual proof in the Malta Tribunal, you can bet the non-historical Prof. Rummel is not going to succeed where the British failed.

Fully immersed in Armenian propaganda, the professor refers to two trials to support his case. He refers to the 1919-20 kangaroo courts of the British-occupied postwar Ottomans, and the shamefully handled Soghoman Tehlirian trial. I don't think Prof. Rummel was even aware of the Malta Tribunal, since Armenian sources don't like to dwell on that one. When they do, they fish out only their selective references to try and discredit it, as Vahakn Dadrian has been famously known to do. His smokescreen explanations, like war weariness and the saving of some eighteen British POWs, are the kind Prof. Rummel would gladly accept at face value, looking at the subjective manner Prof. Rummel has conducted himself.

In his Chapter 5, Prof. Rummel alleges the murderous operation against the Armenians as "full scale," and writes: "In their highest councils Turkish leaders decided to exterminate every Armenian in the country, whether a front-line soldier or pregnant woman, famous professor or high bishop, important businessman or ardent patriot. All 2,000,000 of them."

What do we say about the "scholar" who makes such rash statements without proof? Prof. Rummel ought to bury his head in deep shame.

(Incidentally, in his preceding paragraph, he refers to this 2 million mortality as having taken place strictly "During World War I." Therefore, when he explained his earlier figure of 2.1 million as also including victims from Armenia and Turkish lands the Turks took back, I suppose we can conclude these "victims" amounted to the difference of 100,000. Conclusion: Prof. Rummel is telling us 2 million Armenians died from 1914-1918, which spans the W.W.I period. 2 million from an original population of some 1.5 million... more people than existed.)

(He does break this figure down more exactly in Table 10.1, where the “domestic” total adds up to 1,844,000, but not all of that took place "During World War I." The "foreign" total is 258,000. So why is he sloppily telling us 2 million comprises strictly the W.W.I period... because it sounds more evil than the 1.4 million he tells us elsewhere? By the way, if “democide” means “death by government,” why would “foreign” Armenians be victims of “democide”? Let’s pause and examine this for a second.)

If foreigners aren’t governed by the accused government, couldn't there be another reason for their supposed deaths... like "war"? The professor argues elsewhere cases such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki may also be construed as "democide." He may not be without a point in those extreme examples, where mass numbers of civilians were targeted in a series of quick death blows. On the other hand, should all civilian deaths resulting from war, such as American actions in Afghanistan, be termed genocidal? That would be absurd; obviously the U.S. government had no “intent” to exterminate the Afghan people.

One could find genocide anywhere, if one looks hard enough. For example, Israel Charny called the Chernobyl disaster a genocide. We know of the rickety nature of what was then Soviet nuclear reactors, and in a sense, certainly the Soviets could have done more to increase safety. So here's a case of "democide" where a government doesn’t do enough to protect its people. But where’s the line between an accident, and "intentional murder"? Did the Soviets intend to cause such death and misery for their people? (Not that they haven't been known to do so in their history, but obviously not in this case. The resulting costs of repair were something any nation would have wanted to avoid.)

What if America's Three-Mile-Island episode turned out more disastrous? Would that be a case of the United States government wishing to murder its people? Probably the American installation had better maintenance than the Soviet one. But isn’t it true one can never do enough? Sometimes things just plain go wrong.

In W.W.I, massive numbers of soldiers died of famine and disease. (From Disease alone, as Dr. Turkkaya Ataov has compiled: British: 108,000; French: 179,000; Americans: 60,800; Italians: 85,000; Rumanians: 30,000; from Serbia and Montenegro: 50,000; Russians: 395,000; Germans: 166,000; the Austro-Hungarian Army: 300,000.) The Turkish soldiers suffered the worst; General Harbord believed 600,000. Couldn’t the governments of all these soldiers have done more to prevent these deaths? Sure they could have, by taking away resources from another needed place. Since they made the choices they made, are we to simple-mindedly conclude these governments were all guilty of "democide," or intentional murder by government?

In April 2005, the United States government was the sole dissenter (at 52 to 1) with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The resolutions affected the right to food and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. One could say the USA stands virtually alone in rejecting the validity of economic, societal and cultural rights, among “civilized” nations. Over the long term, lives could conceivably be lost over the U.S. government not doing as much as they could. Would Rudy Rummel tell us then that the U.S. government "murdered" these people?

Prof. Rummel displays his ignorance by ignoring internal (and thus, not propagandistic) Ottoman orders safeguarding the lives and properties of the Armenians. These orders were at times not followed by opportunistic or revengeful local officials, but they prove the Ottomans' hearts were in the right place. In actuality, Armenians from the western region, in cities like Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne, were exempted from the resettlement policy. In addition, Catholic and Protestant Armenians were exempted. The sick and disabled were exempted. Certain workers and their families were exempted. Soldiers and their families, contrary to Dr. Rummel's "front-line soldier" claim were also exempted. (When Armenian soldiers displayed their treachery in mass droves, their weapons were taken away and they were assigned to do labor. Thus, there weren't even that many Armenian soldiers on the front line. Not from the Ottoman side, anyway; plenty were on the front lines of the enemy, after these Armenians had deserted.)

Actual Ottoman telegrams regarding the Armenian resettlement policy:

http://www.ataa.org/ataa/ref/arm_book/chpt1.html
http://www.ataa.org/ataa/ref/arm_book/chpt2_1.html

Prof. Rummel is playing his violin at a furious pace when he gives as an example "pregnant woman." He is being completely unconscionable, outdoing Lloyd George’s "The Turks are a human cancer," with this example: who but the most evil monster would indiscriminately murder a pregnant woman? If the policy were to murder all the women in this "full-scale" operation, there is no way one million from a population of 1.5 million could have survived. In addition, it would have made no sense whatsoever for the Ottomans to have allowed hostile missionaries and other relief organization workers from America to have cared for the Armenians. (One of Rummel's trusted sources, Dr. Roger Smith [assuming this is the same “Smith” credited in Rummel's tables], speculated the reason was to deter the USA from warring against the Ottoman Empire. Yes, these genocide scholars are great at speculation. If only Hitler had remembered this trick, and allowed the USA to care for the Jews at Dachau, during W.W.II.)

Let's get to Prof. Rummel's statistics, what he is best known for. Before doing so, let us bear this quote in mind:

From 1923's "The Turkish Myth" (The Nation): "The age-old charge against the Turks is of course the Armenian massacres. A journalist not long since tabulated the reports of these massacres in recent years and showed that they totaled thirty-five million slain. As the whole Armenian population is known never to have exceeded three million, there is obviously a case of falsification somewhere."

The authors could have been writing about Prof. Rummel.

Prof. Rummel tells us:

"From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians."

Yes. Not a single one from these hopelessly inflated figures ever died of famine, disease, harsh weather, combat. No, they all were "killed."

It is utterly irresponsible of the professor to allude these three "Christian" groups were all genocide victims. There is no consideration whatsoever as to the circumstances of rebellion that accompanied these cases. Let's just say:

Prof. Rummel states 2.1 million Armenians were killed in that time frame. He also attests to the Assyrian (Nestorian) numbers to be relatively small (In his table 10.1, this group is mixed with the others as 107,000 for "domestic," and as 47,000 for "foreign," whatever foreign means in this case... when the Ottomans lost Syria in 1918, they did not engage in further activity in that land). So if we take a rounded-off median of 4 million for his 3,500,000-4,300,000 figures, that would mean there would need to have been almost 2 million Greeks and Assyrians/Nestorians. (The mysterious "other Christians" notwithstanding.)

Many Greeks had already blown town, after Greece pursued her own course of "Death" (25,000) and "Exile" (10,000) of Turks during 1821-30. How in the world can Prof. Rummel explain there were nearly 2 million Greeks left in the Ottoman Empire by this time? (2006 ADDENDUM: A Nov. 1919 report by the British, the ones who wished to wipe the Turkish nation off the earth via Sèvres, accepted a 1914 figure for Ottoman Greeks as 1,240,700 , and estimated the Nov. 1919 population as 1,012,300, a difference of 228,400. Their figures for Armenians also vary greatly from Prof. Rummel's: A pre-war total of 853,450 for fourteen vilayets and sanjaks, and 565,100 by the end of 1919, for a difference of 288,450.)

In Table 10.2, his total for the Greeks is 347,000. With the Assyrians, let's say the total is 400,000. There's a big difference between about 2 million and 400,000.

I can't help but be astounded by the sources he has used for the Greeks, in Table 5.1A. Housepian. (Who, in turn, uses George "The Blight of Asia" Horton as a source. Horton’s the consul who charmingly thought of the Turkish people as the “Anti-Christ.”) Ambassador Morgenthau. The missionary James Barton.

These are what we would call sources with a mind-numbing degree of conflict-of-interest. No serious scholar can refer to them, if a scholar values his credibility.

One just caught my eye under the section, "Turkey's Foreign Genocide of Christians." The source: Wellington House Propagandist Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee's source: "Statement of Rev. William Shedd." This is the kind of "evidence" that any true scholar would have "Shedd."

In Line 245, Rummel points to Christopher Walker's claim of 80,000 Azerbaijanis being killed by the Ottoman Army. We'll get more into the reliability of Armenophile Christopher Walker... but even if there's truth here, which I'd highly doubt as far as "80,000," are we supposed to conclude this was another episode of "democide"? Is everything "murder" in Prof. Rummel's eyes?

"Turkey Enforced Famine in Lebanon/Syria," from "Arab historian George Antonius." (I guess the reason why Rummel pointed out his source’s ethnicity was to tell us how unbiased he would be... maybe because Rummel thinks Arabs and Turks are basically the same Muslim animal. Some might feel an Arab historian referring to deaths of what sounds like fellow Arabs would have greater reason to be biased. ADDENDUM, 4-07: George Antonius (1891-1941) was a Palestinian of Lebanese origin, and, not without significance, a Greek-Orthodox Christian. He was a nationalist, demonstrating Palestine had in fact been promised to the Arabs, and that Britain's policy of promoting a Jewish national home was a betrayal. In other words, it's not unlikely Antonius played a part in the Arab uprising against the Ottomans, which would make him an extremely biased source to turn to. ) The notation tells us there was a blockade of the Levant, primarily by the British. "The Turks commandeered necessary food," you see, winding up with a median of 325,000 dead. This must be murder, because one source tells us so. Correction: Prof. Rummel relies on one other source. A New York Times article from 1916. Yes, Prof. Rummel actually gives us The New York Times, notorious for printing any unsubstantiated "massacre" story during the war years, as a reliable source.

Embarrassing!

Prof. Rummel embarrasses himself further by writing lines straight out of the Armenian propagandists' handbook: "...[S]cholars specializing in the study of Turkey must avoid the (genocide) topic or follow the Turkish official line if they hope to do research in the country."

Prof. Stanford Shaw tells us: the archival house "has been thronged with researchers. Usually several hundred scholars, young and old, Turkish and foreign (including scholars from Armenia and Greece) are studying there at all times. To say that these are a few persons selected by the Turkish government is absurd. The only persons I know to have been excluded from the archives are a very few persons who have abused the employees or who have attempted to steal documents." Since Prof. Shaw’s credibility has been viciously under fire by pro-Armenians, the best way for Prof. Rummel to prove how open the archives are is to approach them himself. It seems there is a way to do so online.

Thinker-Philosopher John Dewey

Prof. Rummel also wholeheartedly repeats the typical Armenian propaganda by dismissing the Turkish "line" regarding communal strife or civil war. If he had only conducted the most basic research he would have discovered this was no "line," but irrefutable history... even confirmed by Armenian leaders such as Boghos Nubar and Hovhannes Katchaznouni. Even confirmed by his own precious New York Times. And there are many unconflicted sources confirming the same, including acclaimed Prof. John Dewey, who wrote in 1928's "The Turkish Tragedy" (The New Republic):

Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population.

Prof. Rummel complains in a footnote:

1. See McCarthy (1983), who in analyzing the change in the Armenian population from before to after WWI manages to avoid any hint that Armenians were killed by the government. McCarthy credits their population loss to war conditions or a civil war they fought with Moslems. See also Shaw and Shaw (1977), who in the three pages they devote to the Armenians allege that only 200,000 of them died, and these from war, famine, and disease in spite of the attempts by Turkish authorities to protect them.

Prof. McCarthy is doing what the responsible historian does; he bases his opinion on the real facts. Of course he's not going to "hint" the Armenians were killed by the government, any more than we wouldn't want anyone's "hint" that we are rapists or pedophiles if there are only reports of hearsay, and no facts.

Is Prof. Rummel trying to "hint" McCarthy and the Shaws are tools of the Turkish government? It's not like they are "making up" Armenian losses from war conditions civil war, famine, and disease; all of these factors are corroborated by sources who would have had no reason to lie. Prof. Rummel should check his copy of "The Armenian File," and point to the sources he believes are a result of "Turkish propaganda." (ADDENDUM, 4-07: In regards to Rummel's ridiculing of the Shaws' mortality figure of "200,000," the Armenians themselves provided "more than 200,000" at 1919's Preliminary Peace Conference, in Paris.)

After the professor correctly reminds us war propaganda cannot be accepted at face value, he then concludes, "I do not doubt that this genocide occurred." Here is what boils down to his proof:

1) Extant communications from a variety of ambassadors and other officials, including those of Italy, the then neutral United States, and Turkey's closest ally Germany, verify and detail a genocide in process.

2) Moreover, contemporary newsmen and correspondents documented aspects of the genocide.

3) Then, two trials were held.

4) Finally, Turkish government telegrams and minutes of meetings held by government leaders establish as well their intent to destroy all the Armenians in Turkey. In my related Death By Government[4] I have quoted selections from this vast collection of documents and need not repeat them here.

It gets to be repetitious to expose these unreliable sources, all with conflicts-of-interest. Briefly:

1) Ambassadors and officials were never on the scene; they relied strictly on the hearsay and canards of missionaries and Armenians. Those in the West, including the Germans (whose diplomatic ranks also are mostly composed of personnel who never directly witnessed anything), were religious and racist bigots raised with the same anti-Turkish prejudice I suspect Prof. Rummel was exposed to. The USA was "neutral" in name only; it was the one western nation exhibiting the greatest hostility toward the Turks.

C.F. Dixon-Johnson's 1916 "The Armenians," a source as legitimate as they come (a Briton daring to deviate during wartime) exposed the claims of the Italian consul, who, according to Lord Bryce, "saw (the Trabzon drownings of 8-10,000 Armenians) done with his own eyes." The account of the same event, as given in the Messagero of Rome, is "entirely different the (Italian) Consul (Signor Corrini) being made to say that the banishment of Armenians under escort and wholesale shootings in the streets continued for a whole month, while there is nothing about the Armenians having been shipped out to sea and drowned en masse in one afternoon."

2) Newspaper reporters tried to outdo one another with atrocity stories, because that's what the public wanted to read. Wellington House illegally ran a branch in the United States, whose reports were accepted wholesale by the unquestioning press. Not all newspapermen wished to deviate from the truth; George Schreiner outlined in his book how the Allied censors wouldn't allow the truthful news through. (Even the German press disallowed these reports; Schreiner’s reason: "The religious societies of Germany had finally managed to present the case of the Armenians to the emperor and had prevailed upon him to interest himself in these fellow Christians.") Henry Wood, the correspondent of the United Press Agency, reported that the Armenians not only were in open revolt but were actually in possession of Van and several other important towns. He related that in Zeitun when the Turkish authorities tried to enlist the young Armenians for military service, the soldiers were attacked and three hundred killed. As C.F. Dixon-Johnson reported in the remarkable 1916 book, "The Armenians," Wood stated:

"It appears obvious that the Turkish authorities, anxious for the safety of their lines of communication, had no other alternative than to order the removal of their rebellious subjects to some place distant from the seat of hostilities, and their internment there. The enforcement of this absolutely necessary precaution led to further risings on the part of the Armenians. The remaining Moslems were almost defenceless, because the regular garrisons were at the front as well as the greater part of the police and able-bodied men. Already infuriated at the reports of the atrocities committed at Van by the insurgents, in fear for their lives and those of their relatives, they were at last driven by the cumulative effect of these events into panic and retaliation and, as invariably happens in such cases, the innocent suffered with the guilty".

If Prof. Rummel desires to get at the truth, it is this rare variety of news report he must pay attention to. Obviously, the Turks had no power to influence Wood from writing such words. We must always consider sources without conflicts-of-interest. (Wood, by the way, was actually used as a source for Lord Bryce's Blue Book. The worst he reported there was that the Turks were heavy-handed in the "deportation" process.)

3) We already covered these false trials. (Rummel cites Prosecutor Dadrian as his source for the 1919 trials, without bothering to consider Dadrian's agenda, or Dadrian's ability to decipher Ottoman Turkish with its subtle nuances, hard to grasp even for the experts... assuming Dadrian approached his translation efforts conscientiously.) It's the Malta Tribunal that is the one to concentrate on; how could any true scholar overlook this one? (Malta never actually went to trial, but its trial preparation was extensive, taking over two years to gather evidence. The British rejected ALL of the "evidence" Rummel is offering us with Points 1, 2 and 3, all of which came before the autumn of 1921, when the Malta process came to a halt.)

4) Footnote "4" takes us to http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM, supposedly exposing the "intent" by "Turkish government telegrams and minutes of meetings." I couldn't find these examples. Let us pray Prof. Rummel did not embarrass himself further by relying on the Andonian telegram forgeries. I guess there can be no other explanation, since there are no telegrams displaying "intent." Dadrian has tried to present a few as suspicious, but that's Dadrian being Dadrian. The genuine communications demonstrate the Ottomans had the safety of the Armenians and their property in mind. As far as those mysterious "minutes of meetings," if they were that incriminating, the British would have jumped on them and have gotten Malta over with in 1919.

Prof. Rummel appears to be aware some of this "evidence" is pure hokum. He writes, "The sheer weight of all this material in English alone, in some ways as diverse and authoritative as that on the Holocaust, is such that the invalidity or falsification of some of it can hardly effect the overall conclusion that a genocide took place." In other words: if everyone is saying the earth is flat, but if some people who are saying it are basing their testimony on obvious nonsense, the earth must still be flat because the consensus of opinion points in that direction. Is this a scholarly way of thinking? If the British rejected ALL of "The sheer weight of all this material," shouldn't that be an indication of the material's overall worthlessness?

Prof. Rummel concludes, "Thus, given all these estimates, the Turks murdered most likely 300,000 to 2,686,000 Armenians, probably 1,404,000 of them." Putting aside his earlier diagnosis that pointed to 2 million "exterminate(d)" Armenians "during WWI," to repeat: if the original population was 1.5 million, and Armenians say 1 million survived, it would be impossible for 1.4 million to have died.

"Armenia, which became temporarily independent during this period, and adjacent areas contained hundreds of thousands who had fled the Young Turk genocide. Within a few years they also had to flee before the genocidal massacres of invading Nationalist forces and their Kurdish-Azerbaijani tribal allies. These refugees died from famine, disease, and exposure--deaths surely the responsibility of the Nationalists."

Gadzooks! Who will save the Christian world from the unholy reign of terror presented by Muslim hordes? It’s getting dangerously close for Prof. Rummel to give religious fanatic George Horton a run for his money.

Hovhannes Katchaznouni, the first prime minister of Armenia, when these events were taking place: "The war with us was inevitable... We had not done all that was necessary for us to have done to evade war. We ought to have used peaceful language with the Turks... When the skirmishes had started the Turks proposed that we meet and confer. We did not do so and defied them. Our army was well fed and well armed and [clothed] but it did not fight. The troops were constantly retreating and deserting their positions; they threw away their arms and dispersed in the villages." So this was a war of the Armenians' making, and the Turkish troops behaved honorably according to hostile foreign witnesses, as will be evidenced shortly. Yet Prof. Rummel's horrible conclusion: the bloodthirsty Turks set upon the poor, innocent Armenians.

If these refugees fled in fear of their lives for what the Nationalists MIGHT do to them… dying en route from the causes mentioned becomes the responsibility of the Nationalists? Is it just me, or is someone trying a little too hard to find genocides everywhere?

According to Prof. Rummel's Table 10.1, the Nationalists knocked off 440,000 "domestic" Armenians, and 175,000 "foreign," along with 264,000 Greeks, between 1918-1923. Wild!

Prof. Rummel's common sense has truly gone on a roamin' holiday. He writes these numbers as if it was the easiest thing in the world to massacre nearly one million people. Particularly within the severe condition the Ottoman Empire found itself in after the war. Ataturk barely pulled the elements together to preserve his devastated nation (starting in 1919, by the way... there were no nationalists to speak of, in 1918), with no food, clothing and weaponry.... he had to look over the shoulder for the British and their puppet Ottomans who were out to get him at every turn... and on top of it all, he was going to engage in a systematic extermination policy?

That is almost as ridiculous as the Ottoman Empire engaging in a systematic extermination policy during 1915-16, while broke, with no resources and manpower to spare, fighting the mightiest world superpowers on every front.

It boggles the mind that someone with Prof. Rummel's obvious intelligence could come up with such an absurd notion. What lies at the bottom of such embarrassingly frozen brain waves?

Since Prof. Rummel loves the bigoted Henry Morgenthau, one wonders why he completely ignores a Morgenthau successor, Admiral Mark Bristol. Let's examine the credibility of these Nationalist massacres by singling out an example where (luckily) Americans were at the scene to provide a good sense of what was happening. These were primarily Americans who were gaga over the Armenians, associated with the Near East Relief organization, regarding the Turkish occupation of the city of Kars on October 30, 1920.

Prof. Rummel has placed his entire confidence on Christopher J. Walker (Armenia: The Survival of a Nation) and Dickran Boyajian (Armenia: The Case for a Forgotten Genocide). Walker presents testimony from Armenians, such as Vratsian ("For three days uninterruptedly the Turks looted, raped and killed, and perpetrated every kind of savagery in the city.") and an "eyewitness," Bablian. Based on these authors' respective accounts, 6,000 to 10,000 Armenians were massacred… as reflected on lines 389 and 390 of Rummel's "Table 5.1A, Turkish Democide" chart.

Walker and Boyajian are men after Prof. Rummel's heart. They all prefer to almost exclusively rely on Armenian sources, at least in the example of Kars. How responsible is that? It's like writing the history of the American Civil War by relying only on accounts of the North, or only of the Confederate South.

The general of the Nationalists, Karabekir, wrote in his autobiography: "My soldiers proved that they were a disciplined, powerful, modern army, and that they possessed remarkable humane feelings. Despite the fact that they had successfully attacked a modern fortress such as Kars, they did not commit the slightest harm against the city's civilian Armenian population."

Naturally, biased genocide scholars NEVER rely on Turkish sources, unless they're the rare damning ones. Never mind through the ages Western travellers have pointed to the honesty of the Turks and the deceitfulness of the Armenians. Examples such as Grattan Geary ("Through Asiatic Turkey"):

"When a Mohammedan gives me his word," said a gentleman who had a long experience of the country, "whether he be a Turk or a Kurd, I can always rely on it. I have never been what is called ' done ' by a Mussulman, although I have had transactions of all kinds with Moslems for years ; but when a native Christian tells me anything, I have cause instinctively to ask myself where the deception lies — in what direction I am going to be tricked. There are exceptions, of course; but if anyone has many dealings with Mussulmans and native Christians in these parts, he will soon learn that the one may be depended on, and the other will almost to a certainty deceive and cheat you if you give him a chance."

Regardless, anti-Turkish bigotry is alive and well, and it is these unethical genocide scholars who greatly help in preserving the image of Turkish dishonesty; this is why they must parrot the Armenians' line that only the Turkish government claims there was no genocide, and any non-Turkish academician who shares the same view must be discredited as a Turkish tool.

At any rate, we can corroborate Karabekir's integrity by the reports of some very anti-Turkish people who happened to be in the neighborhood. Here is what the District Commander of the biased N.E.R. (Near East Relief) stationed at Kars, Edward Fox, wrote in a telegram to Admiral Bristol on October the 31st:

"All the Americans in Kars are well, and the Turkish Army is full of concern for us and accords us all considerations. We have been given permission to continue our activities as before. The Turkish soldiers are well disciplined and there have been no massacres."

Prof. Heath Lowry comments:

The obvious discrepancies between the Walker/Boyajian account and that provided by Kazim Karabekir are illustrative of the type of problem facing the student of Turco-Armenian relations. Graphically conflicting versions of the same events as seen from the perspective of two protagonists. All too often the student of history whose aim is objectivity is forced into choosing one side or the other's uncorroborated version as "fact."

As regards the fall of Kars we are fortunate in having the testimony of some twenty American "neutrals" who were stationed in the city on October 30, 1920. In the employ of the Near East Relief, these Americans were charged with providing care for several thousand Armenian war orphans in the city. They kept in close contact with Admiral Bristol and his intelligence officers. The reports they provided the Admiral relevant to the fall of Kars and its aftermath, together with copies of his own communications sent to Washington are all preserved in the Library of Congress "Bristol Papers" collection. An examination of this material serves two purposes: a) it provides us with an additional scale against which to weigh the conflicting Walker/Boyajian and Karabekir accounts of the city's conquest; and b) it allows us to analyze Richard Hovannisian's oft-repeated charge that Bristol was "a master of manipulation, [who] selected excerpts from reports which would sustain his contentions even in the face of strong counter-evidence."

Lowry further adds:

How then can we account for the fact that those deaths which occurred in the actual fighting, together with some 30 Armenians executed for unspecified crimes after the Turkish occupation of Kars, have been blown up to the proportion of 6,000 massacre victims in Walker's account, 10,000 massacre victims in Boyajian's work, and 80,000 massacre victims in the contemporary telegram sent to the U.S. by Mr. McCallum of the Near East Relief Office in Istanbul?

In the case of Walker and Boyajian the answer is simply poor scholarship. Their failure to utilize the materials preserved in the "Bristol Papers" relevant to the fall of Kars (or for any other event they write about in this period), is inexcusable and suggests that their works should be used with extreme caution.

Prof. Rummel exercises no such caution. Quite the contrary, he embraces the agenda-ridden Walker and Boyajian. Why is this?

Why is Prof. Rummel leaving himself open to charges of shoddy scholarship?

Let’s look at another example of Prof.Rummel’s methodology with the numbers.

Even Peter Balakian, who did a beautiful job in attempting to present the Turks as subhuman monsters in "The Burning Tigris," reported Doughty Wylie as calculating "the death toll may be estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000," regarding 1909 Adana. Kamuran Gurun wrote in The Armenian File: "The Patriarchate gives the number of dead as 21,300 based on the investigation it carried out. The Edirne representative, Babikian Efendi, had prepared a report to be submitted to the Assembly. He gave the number of dead as 21,001 in his report which was not discussed in the Assembly, as he died shortly after. Because the figure given by Jemal Pasha pertains to the time after the trials, it can be accepted that the number of Armenians who died is closer to 17,000 rather than 20,000, as it is possible that some had returned after having fled during the incidents."

Prof. Rummel, on the other hand, utilizing the "impartial" sources such as Walker, Boyajian, Mnatsaganian, Libaridian, Dekmejian, Harbord and Hovannisian, goes with: "As to the 1909 massacres of Armenians in the Cilicia region, particularly Adana, there are … a likely 30,000 killed."

It is a mystery as to why he reveres not only the high end of exaggerated Armenian figures, but frequently chooses to go farther beyond.

He writes:

During the war the British navy blockaded Turkey, including the Turkish Levant. No food was allowed in by sea. The resulting famine in Lebanon and Syria (with consequences shown on lines 208a to 208d) would not have become as deadly as it did had not the Turks commandeered available food supplies and refused to help the starving. As a result they bear the greater responsibility for the famine, which I calculate as probably around 75 percent of the total dead.

What are we to make of these unscientific and biased conclusions, such as "refused to help the starving"? Fact: desperate wartime, with deadly enemies knocking on the gates. Fact: the whole population is in need of food, not just the Armenians. Fact: There is little food. Everybody has to get fed. If the Armenians don't get first priority, how does that become a "refus(al)"?

On the other side of the coin, Prof. Rummel goes out of his way to minimize the massacre figures caused by Armenians as eager as he is to maximize the figures caused by Turks (to his credit, at least he acknowledges Armenians caused mass murder, a fact most hypocritical genocide scholars wouldn't be caught dead admitting). He writes: "Given the other estimates and the overall populations involved, I estimate that from 128,000 to 600,000 Moslem Turks and Kurds were killed. Since this was done by Armenian irregulars serving with Russian forces, I split responsibility for these deaths in Turkey between the Russians and Armenians, and show in Table 5.1A (line 255) the Armenian half--probably 75,000 murdered."

Whereas in previous years the Russians conducted their ethnic cleansing campaigns in conquered Ottoman lands (which surely added to the increasing animosity between the Muslim and Armenian populations, as refugees flooded into the sole safe haven of the Sick Man, ill-prepared to carry them), in WWI Russia largely stayed her hand. (Although some Russian troops were obviously involved in massacres.)

The fact of the matter is that the Russians could not control the Armenians' frenzy for blood. There are many accounts of Russian officers (similar to French officers) who were sickened by the extent of Armenian atrocities, many occurring when Russian forces were reduced to a trickle, with the advent of their revolution back home. The Armenians were unquestionably responsible for the bulk of these slayings, which numbered 518,000 according to documentation by internal Ottoman reports (not meant for public exposure, and only surfacing after years of Armenian genocide onslaught). There is a big difference between 518,000 and 75,000.

Prof. Justin McCarthy outlines common sense reasons as to why the Russians did not have plans for exterminating the Muslim populace in eastern Anatolia, from "The Destruction of Ottoman Erzurum by Armenians":

The worst suffering of Erzurum's Muslims only came once the Russians had left… They left behind a small group of officers and a large number of Armenian soldiers. The Armenians wished to make Erzurum a part of the Greater Armenian they had always dreamed of. They could not do so if Erzurum was more than three-fourths Muslim. They therefore began a policy of murder and forced migration of the Muslims of Erzurum, just as they were doing to the Azeri Turks in Erivan.

There were over 800,000 Muslims in Erzurum in 1912. In such an undefended province… not to mention the other large provinces that were in a similar state of anarchy… how could Prof. Rummel conclude only 75,000 Muslims would have been murdered, by the Armenians?

It's as if Prof. Rummel has made up his mind who the victims were, and who the villains. Why?

Prof. Rummel explains there could not have been such a high number of Turkish losses with; "Had the Armenians indeed massacred even half this number (of 1 to 1.5 million), the Young Turks surely would have given it wide publicity, photographs and all. They had no better way to counter sympathy for the Armenians they were killing. In any case foreign newsmen and diplomats in the country surely would have noted the massacres."

Prof. Rummel must not have an understanding of the level of animosity at play during the period. (Not far from this period.)

The Turks did take photographs of massacre victims, available on the Internet today. (A generation or so ago, they also unearthed many mass graves of murdered Muslims, and the hypocritical "genocide scholar" community has ignored them.) But who were they going to appeal to? What American newspaper would choose to print them? The West had no sympathy for Turks, a situation little different today. This is why for so many years anti-Turkish propaganda prospered… nobody defends the Turks, including Turks.

(C. F. Dixon-Johnson revealingly declares on pg. 49 of his 1916 "The Armenians" that the Turk never deigns to explain his own case while "the pro-Armenians always manage to hold the field, appalling the public by incessant reiteration and exaggeration as to the number of victims, and apparently valuing to its full extent the wisdom of the old Eastern proverb give a lie twenty-four hours start, and it will take a hundred years to overtake it." That's the credo Joseph Goebbels lived by: tell a big enough lie and tell it often, and people will be suckered in.)

In 1922, veteran war-journalist E. Alexander Powell asked Sultan Mohammed Vl how come the Turks don't tell their side of the story; here was the answer:
"If we sent one, your newspapers and periodicals would not publish an article written by a Turk, if they published it, your people would not read it, if they read it, they would not believe it. Even if we sent a qualified person to America, to convey to you in your language, the Turkish point of view, would he find an impartial audience?"

From pp. 32-33 of Powell's book, "The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia": Now I can readily understand and make allowance for the public's errors and misconceptions, for it has had, after all, no means of knowing that it has been systematically deceived, but I can find no excuse for those newspapers which, clinging to a policy of vilifying the Turk, failed to rectify the anti-Turkish charges printed in their columns even when it had been proved to the satisfaction of most fair-minded persons that they were unjustified. A case in point was the burning of Smyrna in September, 1922. There was scarcely a newspaper of importance in the United States that did not editorially lay that outrage at the door of the Turks, without waiting to hear the Turkish version, yet, after it had been attested by American, English, and French eye-witnesses, and by a French commission of inquiry, that the city had been deliberately fired by the Greeks and Armenians in order to prevent it falling into Turkish hands, how many newspapers had the courage to admit that they had done the Turks a grave injustice?

No wonder when Niles and Sutherland were sent in to investigate the situation in eastern Anatolia in 1919, with the purpose of granting relief aid to the Armenians by the American Committee for Near East Relief, they were "most incredulous of these stories" of Armenian atrocities. The two Armenian sympathizers came to "believe (these stories), since the testimony was absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by material evidence." Their report was subsequently suppressed by General Harbord's commission, as it did not provide the kind of information "those in power wished to hear," as Justin McCarthy (who discovered the report, buried in the U.S. archives) speculated. It doesn't take much to put two and two together, and it's naive of anyone to conclude "foreign newsmen and diplomats in the country surely would have noted the massacres."

Prof. Rummel is ethically responsible to revise his views. Especially since Prof. Rummel has accused the Turks of committing a crime he has designated as "an obscenity, the evil of our time..." Prof. Rummel has recklessly written in ways where he has classified every single one of supposedly millions of Armenian and Christian deaths as murders or extermination efforts. He must rid himself of his “Terrible Turk” imprinting, and awaken the impartial scientist within himself. He not only has a scholarly legacy to protect, but he has an ethical responsibility to not commit Rufmord, especially when he can't back up his position by factual evidence.

The accused, flanked by guards; The Green Mile

In the Hollywood movie, “The Green Mile,” the big black giant of that film appeared to be obviously guilty of raping two white girls, as it was easy for many 1930-ish Southerners to regard blacks as somehow less than human. When Warden Tom Hanks began to suspect such a gentle being could not have been the criminal, he visited the convict’s lawyer, played by Gary Sinise. The lawyer pointed to his son’s mutilation by the family dog; just as it was in the nature of the dog to do such a thing, so was it in the nature of the black man.

It is time for genocide scholars like Prof. Rummel to quit behaving like Gary Sinise's character, automatically drawing prejudiced conclusions, without paying note to the genuine evidence. As difficult as it is for one with such deep imprinting to be "swayed," it’s time for these genocide scholars to seriously start questioning the corrupted common wisdom, like Tom Hanks' character.

It is time for genocide scholars to finally realize: all that matters is the truth.

ADDENDUM, Nov. 2006:

Timo Heuer, who calls himself a "Blood Journalist," conducted an "Exalo’s monthy interview" with Dr. Rummel on Heuer's blog site; the following two exchanges (and, oddly, nothing else) were featured:

Heuer: Why [do] the Turks deny the genocide?

Rummel: First it would mean that they might have to pay reparations to the suviving Armenians and their families, or directly to Armenia. And second it is a matter of national pride.

Holdwater: Now that's the "genocide scholar" in Dr. Rummel talking. The implication is that the Turks know they committed a genocide, but they're trying to squirm their way out, and are also in "denial." Wrong. The one and only reason why the Turks "deny" this hoax is for the exact same reason that Dr. Rummel would be screaming his innocence if he were accused of a ruinous crime based on false evidence or hearsay. Next:

Heuer: What are the facts AGAINST a genocide?

Rummel: The Russian Army was posed to invade Eastern Turkey. The Armenian auxiliaries with the Russian Army slaughtered thousands of Muslims when Russia invaded Turkey. And Turkish Armenians fought the Turkish Army from their strongholds in Turkey. All the above is used to argue that Turkey was involved in a civil war with the Armenians, and there was a danger of them giving aid to the invading Russian forces, and thus the Turks had to uproot and disperse to the west Armenians for their own safety and national security. Some died in the process, but unintentionally, so it is claimed.

Holdwater: And here is where Rummel's fairness kicks in. It appears Dr. Rummel is conceding everything that comes before his last sentence as "facts," since that is what the question required him to do. And facts they all are, although the normal "genocide scholar" would go out of his way to conceal or distort them. So if Rummel is aware that Turkish Armenians fought against their nation during wartime, having allied themselves politically with their nation's enemies, out goes the window of one of the requirements of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. Now let's get to his last sentence's "unintentionally" that is "claimed." Well, is it simply "claimed," or is the claim based on historical facts, which would bring the claim out of the realm of the "claim" and into the realm of the "fact"? That is what a genuine scholar would determine. If a genocide scholar says otherwise, then he is not a real scholar, because all of the listed facts can be proven with unconflicted sources... the allies and the Armenians themselves.

Do you get the idea that Dr. Rummel knows he is on extremely shaky ground? But he can't bring himself to be a big enough man to admit he was wrong, because then all of the work he has become famous for would be open to question? But he is still pointing accusatory fingers of "genocide" at the Turks, although his claims still are nowhere near the "fact" category. (Let's see him prove "intent." He cannot do so, not with factual evidence.) Hopefully, Dr. Rummel will find the way out of this genocide trap he has dug himself in, as he faces an extremely serious moral dilemma.