A genuine Ottoman historian, naturally also vilified by those such as Dadrian, explains the real state of affairs:

Why rely on Ottoman archival accounts to write history? Because they are the sort of solid data that is the basis of all good history. The Ottomans did not write propaganda for today's media. The reports of Ottoman soldiers and officials were not political documents or public relations exercises. They were secret internal reports in which responsible men relayed what they believed to be true to their government. They might sometimes have been mistaken, but they were never liars. There is no record of deliberate deception in Ottoman documents. Compare this to the dismal history of Armenian Nationalist deceptions: fake statistics on population, fake statements attributed to Mustafa Kemal, fake telegrams of Talat Pasa, fake reports in a Blue Book, misuse of court records and, worst of all, no mention of Turks who were killed by Armenians..(Dr. Justin McCarthy at the Turkish Grand National Assembly, March 24, 2005)

Prof. McCarthy elaborates further, in his brilliant essay, “The First Shot”:

There are ways to tell if a historian has been true to his craft. All important sources of information must be studied: A book on American history that does not draw upon American sources and only uses sources written in French cannot be accurate history. All important facts must be considered: a book on the history of the Germans and the Jews that does not mention the death of the Jews in the Holocaust cannot be true.

Uncomfortable facts, facts that disagree with one's preconceptions and prejudices must be considered, not avoided or ignored: Any book on the history of the Turks and the Armenians that does not include the history of the Turks who were killed by Armenians cannot be the truth. This is obvious. It should be so obvious that it need not be said. But we know it must be said, because so many have forgotten the rules of honest history.

And isn’t Dadrian the primary example. He may be somewhat off the hook, of course, because Dadrian’s degree is in sociology, not history. Unfortunately, many have come to perceive this “renowned scholar” as the kind of historian who is true to his craft. Quite the contrary, Dadrian disregards the history of the Turks in the pursuit of his propaganda, unless they are the choice bits damning the Turks that his one-sided research has made sure to uncover. Dadrian, unfortunately, too often comes across as a poster boy for those who do not practice the rules of honest history.

Dadrian gets off to a bad start by quoting from the highly propagandistic materials, Arnold Toynbee’s “Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” (“gigantic crime”), and Henry Morgenthau’s “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” (“murder of a nation,” a most curious conclusion since there were enough unmurdered Armenians to give birth to their own nation, thanks in no small part to the Ottoman Empire itself. See “Treaty of Baku”). Toynbee was a member of Wellington House, Britain’s war propaganda division; Morgenthau hoped to get the USA involved to more quickly kill off the ailing empire, mainly in order to carve a quicker path toward a Jewish homeland. Dadrian ought to be ashamed by pointing to these two as legitimate and truthful parties; Morgenthau and Toynbee's boss, Bryce, shared propagandistic information between themselves to further their common goal.

Dadrian gears up toward his discrediting campaign by writing:

“(Erickson) candidly... admits that he has confronted the problem by proceeding from ‘the Turkish side of the hill,’ thereby relying, almost entirely, ‘on Turkish sources.’ In fact, the book is suffused, indeed saturated, with references drawn from "Turkish source material."

As we have already seen, that largely does not pertain to when Armenians were involved. Regardless, let us examine the inanity behind those words.

Consider: Westerners by and large were religious and racist bigots, regarding the Turkish heathens as half human savages. It was the rare Westerner who had an objective knowledge of events, in wars where the Ottoman Empire was involved. OF COURSE in order to gain knowledge on the ins and outs of what happened, ‘the Turkish side of the hill’ needs to be considered. As McCarthy alluded, imagine, for example writing a book on American history by not consulting American sources.

But this is the established prejudice against the Turks that the weasely Dadrian is banking on. Thanks to his efforts, and to the efforts of many others like him, Turks are designated as criminals, and whatever Turks say (unless they affirm the “genocide”) cannot be trusted.

This is a highly racist view, and one that Vahakn Dadrian too happily subscribes to. “Therein lies the Achilles' heel” of this book is Dadrian’s exclamation.

Here’s the idea: Erickson had to lie in bed with these criminal, deceptive Turks in order to get hold of this information. [...“(Erickson’s) reliance, by choice, which is inextricably entwined with seemingly pronounced affinities and a companion partisanship for Turkey and Turkish interests.”] The implication is that Erickson either naively accepted everything that he was fed (meaning that he is a very poor scholar, lacking the necessary critical and cognitive skills), or that he permitted himself to knowingly present falsified facts, so as not to bite the hand that fed him.

Absolutely shameless.

Dadrian tsk-tsks the fact that “as an American officer on duty in NATO Headquarters in Turkey in the early 1990's, Erickson ended up cultivating many personal friendships, foremost among which was his friendship with then Chief of the Turkish General Staff, General Hüseyin Kivrikoglu, from whom he ‘received VIP treatment...’"

Lt. Col. Edward  J. Erickson previously served in the Gunner Battalion  during Operations Desert and Storm

Erickson made friends with those half-human Turks? Totally unacceptable. And the fact that these friends were from the military is really unforgivable, because everyone knows Turkish military men are completely devoid of honor. Dadrian helpfully attempts to mold our minds: “the main animus in the entrenched Turkish culture of denial relative to the historical fact of the Armenian genocide comes from the Turkish military establishment, especially the Turkish General Staff.”

I had no idea part of the military’s duties was to engage in historical propaganda; I thought the fall guy would have been the Turkish historical society, and all Turkish historians, who are all too willing to lie through their teeth at the behest of their criminal government.

Who would have thought Erickson’s NATO colleague was thinking, “Why don’t we fool this unassuming American patsy into writing a propaganda book for us?” And what was in it for Erickson, exactly? Did his highly specialized (and out of the price range for most, at $68) book, concentrating on a topic most Americans wouldn’t care much about, climb the best-selling charts? (Which is the only scenario where book authors have a chance of cashing in. That is, Erickson’s take was far from going to set him up for retirement, in all likelihood.) Even in cases where books make money, except when authors have established clout, book publishers have it so set up that the ones who become rich are the publishers.

No. Erickson wrote his book not in an attempt to get rich. This book, and others that he has written, were produced as a labor of love: Erickson’s love for historical truth. (With his military background, and the knowledge he gained by finding himself in Turkish society, he probably became fascinated with Ottoman military tactics, and must have recognized there is a huge niche to be filled. Since pro-Armenians love to say all that Turks are good for is making war, how odd that there have been practically no Western works analyzing this neglected area.)

Erickson's motivation must not be that different than Dadrian's, when Dadrian writes his books; his, too, is a labor of "love" (although unfortunately, he has an altogether different set of rules regarding the pursuit of truth). Dadrian’s genocide books have a far greater built in audience, with all the obsessed Armenians that propelled Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris” briefly to the top of the best seller list. So Dadrian is probably making money, with the collective royalties of the many works he has had published, through the years. But even in Dadrian’s case, I’d doubt that he is raking it in.

We all know the expression, “Every Man Has His Price.” Most “men” are not going to compromise their honest values for a little pocket change; the take would need to be sky-high. It’s tiresome for pro-Armenian propagandists to level this charge at every academician they seek to discredit. This is how the ethically-challenged Israel Charny successfully helped enable neutral academicians out of the debate. (Charny charged that because a few of them received grants from two Turkish organizations, implying that because anything “Turkish” must be controlled from Turkey’s Stalinist system, the professors were paid agents of the sinister Turkish government. Do these people have any scruples, whatsoever?)

Dadrian attempts to build his case by reminding us of the “necessity to use non-Turkish sources.” As if Erickson has avoided doing so; earlier, we read about his reference to “numerous neutral observers,” and he even brings up a favorite Dadrian source later in the chapter, the Venezuelan, Rafael De Nogales; only one of the many such sources used in the book. After Dadrian shoots himself in the foot again with the statement, “none of the data provided by the archives of any of the Entente powers, the wartime enemies of the Ottoman Empire, can be viewed as entirely impeccable,” a quote of his I’ll be sure to remember, what Dadrian is hoping to do is to sell us on how valid the Ottoman Turks’ allies, the Germans, were.

It is important to keep in mind that the Germans, by and large, did not harbor the same feelings of camaraderie that they felt, in comparison, to another ally among the Central Powers, the Austrians. Only around three years prior to WWI, the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Ottomans... to give an idea of how “friendly” the Germans and Austrians felt, as opposed to the comparatively warmer feelings “big brother” Russia generally felt toward Russia's allies, the Armenians. (Even though Russia would keep on using and abusing them.) Many a Western observer felt that if the Germans won, the Turks would be no more than a German colony. One of the theories bandied about was that the “extermination” of Armenians was a German plan, so that Germans wouldn’t need to deal with the disruptive Armenians when they moved in to colonize Ottoman lands. (Not to say these theories are credible; the point is, Germany was no real friend of the Turks.)

A British POW may have stated it best when he wrote, in “Turkey in Travail,” that:

“The Germans treated the Turks with high contempt, and more than one told me how glad he was to meet another white man in this ‘native’ country.”

Can the reader imagine how the laid-back ways of the “a la Turcas” must have come across to the Prussian-disciplined, no-nonsense, often arrogant Germans? OF COURSE there were going to be opinions from some of these Germans, combined with their inherent “Christian” bigotry, looking down their noses at the primitive Turks.

Dadrian, in his famous, weasely “cherry-picking” style has surely done a good job in compiling these critical observations: “Several high ranking German officers, members of the German Military Mission to Turkey, almost uniformly complained during and after the war, about the indolence and laxness with which the former went about preparing maps, compiling statistics, and, above all, preparing reports.” Dadrian is setting the stage for his wishing to make you believe that whatever came from the hand of these half-humans must have been totally unreliable.

Dadrian presents as witness: “Colonel Felix Guse, for example, bitterly complained that ‘The Turks knew only poorly their country, on top of that the possibility of getting reliable statistical figures (zuverlässige statistische Zahlen) was out of the question.’"

It’s possible Col. Guse came across a few Turkish knuckleheads; knuckleheads exist in every army. But one can smell this German officer’s sense of superiority, with these words. Regardless, this only serves as an example of one man’s opinion, and to dismiss all Turkish record-keeping as being figments of the writers’ imaginations is another indication of Dadrian’s delving into the dangerous area of racial inadequacy. If the Turks were so lost in the woods, maintaining an empire for six centuries would have proved to be an impossibility.

Dadrian then points to a faulty map leading to two Turkish battalions mistakenly fighting each other for four hours as an example of Turkish incompetence. Death by “friendly fire” is a common occurrence in all military histories, even modern ones. It’s tragic and unfortunate, but it happens. There was a highly dramatic episode, for example, from 1926's “Men Are Like That,” when Ohanus Appressian described how the Russian division he was in erroneously went at another, with heavy casualties.

  Dadrian’s use of Guse’s views raises several problems. First, if Guse’s testimony is not to be trusted when he says that there was a “prepared uprising” because he had no independent sources of information, he should also not be considered a reliable source when he allegedly says that there was no planned uprising. Second, and more seriously, Guse nowhere states that there was no planned insurrection. Dadrian cites as his source Guse’s 1925 article (quoted earlier), but Guse there maintains the opposite of what Dadrian makes him say—he affirms that there was indeed a large rebellion. Dadrian does not put Guse’s words into quotation marks, but by falsely attributing an opinion to a source, even when not citing it verbatim, he once again commits a serious violation of scholarly ethics.

Vahakn Dadrian is busted. The unscrupulous propagandist’s purpose is to serve his genocide agenda, and not truth. It remains to be seen how many other Dadrian assertions have been “made up,” with Dadrian secure that no one in academia, in a genocide-friendly world (particularly since the real academicians have been frightened away by the below-the-belt smear tactics of the pro-Armenians), has been looking over Dadrian’s shoulder.

After establishing the villainy of the sinister Turkish government and their penchant for telling lies, and the stooge status of the American author, Dadrian goes to town:

The chapter on the Armenians is dotted with numerous citations from the documents taken from the repositories of the Turkish General Staff Archives. With hardly any exercise of a modicum of caution, Erickson rather mechanically picks up and relays to the reader a whole array of allegations and accusations against the Armenians that are very general and that lack any slightest specificity. He writes, for example, that the Armenians were "actively hostile, were heavily armed, were belligerent and were actively engaged in open rebellion" and which word rebellion he capitalized by referring to in as the "Armenian Rebellion" (pp. 80, 90, 101, 103). If one disregards the four insurrections that were highly local, last minute defensive improvisations by desperate people facing imminent destruction, there was no general rebellion at all. Four German ambassadors on duty in wartime Turkey in their numerous reports to Berlin denied any such rebellion.[x] Nor were the insurgents "belligerent" in the sense used by Erickson, or were they "heavily armed". In all four cases, the insurgents, totally surrounded and equipped only with the barest stocks of ammunition, weapons, and provisions, had chosen to wage a hopeless defense against a heavily armed professional army and die fighting rather than be deported to the slaughterhouse.

(Footnote “x” offers Ambassador Wolff-Metternich as one of two examples, the other being Wangenheim. Wolff-Metternich wrote “in a comprehensive seventy-two-page report” — as if volume is indicative of quality — that “the few local uprisings in the summer and fall of 1915 were defensive acts to resist deportation.” There was a whole series of uprisings and disturbances beginning immediately after war was declared [see here], and continuing up to the decision to relocate, the first sign of which was this May 2, 1915 telegram. If Wolff-Metternich actually believed episodes like Musa Dagh were exercises in “self-defense” rather than traitorous service in the war effort, we can ascertain what a Christian-sympathizing partisan he must have been. It was about such people sitting in their ivory towers, making poor judgments based on biased reports of hearsay, that George Schreiner had written (mainly regarding Ambassador Morgenthau, and referring to books): "It is to be hoped that the future historian will not give too much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors.”)

Dadrian’s argument worked well at the time of Arnold Toynbee’s 1916 report for Wellington House, but the propagandist-professor truly has gall to try and get away with the assertion that there has been no Armenian rebellion... in the face of voluminous evidence having nothing to do with Turkish sources. (And Erickson, as we’ve already covered, does not exclusively use Turkish sources; in reference to Armenians especially, the Turkish sources needed to be backed up by Western ones.)

There is a range of Western sources attesting to the “belligerence” of the Armenians. (“Belligerent,” by the way, was the very word used by Armenian leader Boghos Nubar, in describing Armenian behavior in WWII: “the Armenians have been belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey.”) There is no question Ottoman-Armenians were heavily armed, financed partly by their allies in war, the Russians. Armenian fighting had nothing to do with “self-defense,” as Prosecutor Dadrian is unforgivably insisting upon. Ottoman-Armenians went on the attack the moment the Russians declared war.

One of the three books that microwaved Dadrian’s brain, allowing him to embark on his genocide-affirming life’s work, was Leon Surmelian’s “I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen.” From beginning to end, the reader learned the Armenian community was in league with their nation’s enemies. Since Dadrian read this book and especially since this book made such a huge imprint on his mind, how could he now tell us, with a straight face, that the Armenians’ being "actively hostile” would be nothing more than “allegations”?

Re-reading Edward Erickson’s chapter, I’m once again wholly impressed by the historian’s fine research and style. The kinds of facts Dadrian would like you to dismiss are as such: “In the spring of 1914 the Turks intercepted letters from Armenian committees expressing concern over these developments. Other letters sent by the Tasnak Committee requested weapons from the Russians. In July 1914, the Ottoman Consulate in Kars intercepted a telegram outlining the smuggling of four hundred rifles into the Eliskirt valley.” If this information came from internal Turkish reports, it only makes sense; nobody else in the war theater would have been in the position to compile such facts. (Although there has been foreign back-up even with many of these cases. For example, see bottom of this page.) How silly of Dadrian to expect historians to disregard these reports, because a couple of contemptuous German officers looked down their high noses at the backward Turks.... as if every one of these reports were to be flights of fancy. (Pertinent question: Assuming they were not deranged, what would have been in it for the Turks to have made these stories up? Other than humiliation, once the stories were verified to be untrue, as with the case of those who made up “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”?)

Dadrian steps in once more to “insulting” territory:

However, it is incumbent upon a researcher, intent on engaging in a historical interpretation or analysis of a complex topic not to be swayed by such elements of plausibility but apply instead a measure of critical scrutiny — unless such a researcher is hostage to certain restrictive prejudices or has some extraneous agendas of his own. The evident absence of such a mode of scrutiny apparently prompted the author to readily embrace from the Turkish archive holdings all these assertions with respect to which even some independent Turkish historians use the derisive epithet "official history" (resmi tarih). Inevitably, such a posture led to a whole string of errors undermining the value of the book.[xii]

(Footnote xii provides a series of examples where Dadrian points out Erickson’s “glaring errors,” and there could have been a few. It is the tactic of the genocide vultures to point out occasional slip-ups to demonstrate how unqualified the side targeted for smearing really is. Dadrian begins with: “When citing those historians who have disputed the Armenian genocide ‘as a matter of historical fact,’ the name of Jay Winter... has been juxtaposed along with the two most notable deniers of that genocide, namely, Stanford Shaw... and Bernard Lewis... The fact is, however, that Jay Winter is in the forefront of those historians who... recognize that historical fact...” Is that why Jay Winter wrote these “denialist” words, even while he was a full-fledged member of the genocide club?)

So what we can determine thus far, aside from the interesting fact that all of this was taking place before the “genocide” began on April 24, is that:

[1] The message came from the governor. Dadrian appears to have taken the liberty to speculate that “the military commander of the Special Organization contingent of Sivas province” had “input,” but we don’t know the military source of this information. The Special Organization [S.O.] was the country’s combination of secret service and special forces, kind of like the CIA and the Delta Force in one package. The S. O. is Dadrian’s convenient “Gestapo fall guy” that he has put in the role of the SS, in charge of his “genocide.” Even though there is no proof of this. So it serves Dadrian’s purpose to implicate the S. O. while he has a chance, even though the fact that the S. O. was behind this particular information cannot be verified.

[2] Whomever provided this intelligence to the governor, and the governor who provided this information to the central government, had nothing to gain by throwing a “spin” on the truth. They were dealing with very harsh realities, regarding violent insurgents who were fighting against their endangered Ottoman nation. This was not the time to make up fairy tale stories.

[3] The information was provided by Armenian suspects themselves.

(It is possible these figures might have been exaggerated, since this has been the Armenians’ stock-in-trade. For example, the rebel behind the 1895 Zeitun rebellion, Aghasi, wrote in his diary of the loss of 125 Armenians, and 20,000 Turks.)

ADDENDUM, 8-07: The original document may now be examined on this page. Another point to bear in mind is that organization for rebellion had been in the works for many months, dating back to before the war began. In other words, the 30,000 number spoken of did not take place overnight, and it is entirely possible for such a number to have been reached, over a span of one half year or longer.

After informing us that all the Armenian men were conscripted, Dadrian asks, “How is it conceivable that the remaining Armenians, consisting almost entirely of destitute women, children, and old men, full of anxieties and fears about the likelihood of new wartime massacres, would dare to contemplate, let alone mount in fact a general guerrilla campaign..?”

If he can cut out the melodrama, Dadrian would be the first to realize that just because the government issued an order, it does not mean the orders were complied with. If that were the case, no further orders stopping the “deportations” would have been necessary, and all the orders safeguarding the Armenians and their property would have been obeyed.

(Talat’s first command to halt the resettlement process was August, 1915. His orders were not always followed, prompting more orders, lending credence to missionary Mary Graffam’s observation, "I am not in any way criticizing the government. Most of the higher officials are at their wits end to stop these abuses and carry out the orders which they have received, but this is a flood and it carries all before it." She would go on to “revise” her views in later years, in the protection of her agenda, apparently not too unlike Jay Winter.)

It is a fact that Armenian men disobeyed the conscription orders en masse. It obviously was not the “destitute women, children, and old men” who were behind these rebellion plans, but the masses of Armenian men who went off to the mountains to hide, or who trekked to Russian territory (as did, for example, Soghoman Tehlirian, the assassin of Talat Pasha. While 17-years-old, he went to Russia from Erzurum. So did his brother Missak. Neither had knowledge of the other embarking on the same treacherous path, which speaks volumes about how widespread the betrayal by young Armenian men must have been.) The children were not off the hook entirely; in major Ottoman cities, including Sivas, the committees forced Armenian males 13 and over to join either as soldiers or party functionaries. (This information is similarly based on confessions by Armenians. If you can’t trust the word of an Armenian, whom can you trust?)

"They [the Dashnaks] quarter themselves on Christian villages, live on the best to be had, exact contributions to their funds, and make the younger women and girls submit to their will. Those who incur their displeasure are murdered in cold blood."

FO 424/196, British Consul Elliot to Currie, Tabreez, May 5, 1898 By 1914-15, the Dashnaks held near-absolute sway over most Armenian villages.

It was precisely because of this supportive network that the Armenian community had to be moved out, where they couldn’t do their mischief, away from the war zone. (Sivas wasn’t in the war zone, since Russia never got as far as Sivas. But there was war in Sivas, nevertheless; the guerilla warfare of the Armenian rebels.)

The Armenians do the agitating, and when the unpleasant consequences follow, they make up stories of “genocide.” Unscrupulous soldiers for their cause, like the “renowned scholar” Vahakn Dadrian, is only too happy to pick up his deceitful pen, proving mightier than the A.R.F. dagger.

Dadrian next reminds us once again that Germans like Guse and Admiral Büchsel thought of the Turks as being in la-la land, unable to distinguish between fact and fancy, concluding: “Amending, or tampering with the text of documents is depicted here as part of Oriental culture.” Someone please remind Dadrian that Armenians are also a product of that Oriental culture. (So THAT explains it!)

Vahakn Dadrian

“In his seemingly strong penchant for glorifying the Turkish Army,” Dadrian complains of Erickson, because Erickson simply is not as critical of the Turkish army as Dadrian (for example, Erickson did not travel down the path of “all Turks are liars.” That spells glorification, I’d say); our “renowned scholar” then moves on to prove army segments planned and executed “the wartime annihilation of the bulk of the [Ottoman] Armenians.”

The Armenian Patriarch disagreed; by December 1918, after the smoke cleared, the Armenian Delegation presented official figures stating 1,260,000 of the Patriarch’s 2.1 million pre-war count were alive and well, still within the borders of what was left of the Ottoman-Armenians. That was the real “bulk,” as inflated as these figures were. (And certainly a good number of Armenians were living elsewhere, by this time.) Of the Patriarch’s remainder who lost their lives, 840,000, most died of reasons having nothing to do with “annihilation” (i.e. outright murder), but of the same reasons resulting in the bulk of deaths of 2.5 million fellow Ottomans. (i.e., famine, disease, exposure, combat.)

Dadrian informs us wartime Turkish army commander Ahmet Izzet Pasha pointed to General Mahmud Kamil as the “one who ‘proposed and demanded’ (teklif ve talep) the wholesale deportation of the Armenians of the region of Erzurum.”

Note while Dadrian provides the Turkish translation for “proposed and demanded," he foregoes the same for the word, “deportation.” Most likely, the Arab word “tehjir” was used, which means 'changing one's location'; the Armenians were moved about the country, and not out of the country. "Deportation" has the nastier connotation of exile, and that's Dadrian's subjective translation at work.

More importantly, it’s quite a stretch to go from relocation to “annihilation.” Yes, it is a fact the Armenians were subjected to relocation for being “belligerents de facto,” as Boghos Nubar tidily summed up. Yes, it is also a fact that when resettlement became policy, some people had to be in charge. What is not a fact is that because people were relocated, we should mindlessly assume that meant a genocide.

“According to another wartime Turkish general, Kâmil was appointed to that post through the direct intervention of the three principal authors of the Armenian genocide, i.e., MD's Sakir and Nazim, and CUP's chief ideological guru, Ziya Gölkap.[xvi] Kâmil had thus abruptly displaced and replaced the newly appointed Vehip Pasa who regained that post only in 1916 when the genocide had all but run its course.” (ADDENDUM: Dadrian gets more specific a few paragraphs below, as to his genocide's main "completion": February 1916.)

So Kamil was overseeing the policy of relocation, which was not a crime. Sakir and Nazim are the designated bad boys of Dadrian’s genocide, although for those of us who would like to give the concept of “evidence” a little priority, the genocide itself is not proven. If there is no genocide, we can’t justly point fingers at people, if there is nothing beyond hearsay to convict them. Sakir, for example, raised two Armenian boys. Try getting Der Fuehrer to do that with a couple of Jewish youngsters.

But Dadrian is really hitting below the belt by grouping Ziya Golkap as the kingpin of Dadrian’s alleged crime. Who was Ziya Gokalp? He was a sociologist, like Vahakn Dadrian. Unlike Dadrian, who seeks to encourage pride in Armenian culture by instilling hatred upon a common enemy, Ziya Gokalp sought to encourage pride in Turkish culture by accentuating the positive, what with all the non-Turkish nationalist movements that were sinking his nation into oblivion. He was not doing so at the expense of others, regardless of how furiously those like Dadrian enjoy pushing “pan-Turanism” theories. As Guenter Lewy informs us in his book, Gokalp’s pan-Turanism was a cultural idea, and not an expansionist one. Historian James Reid wrote "What Wagner was to Hitler, Gokalp was to Enver Pasha." Gotthard Jaschke interpreted Turanism in an unpolitical manner, writing that fantasies of a large empire "ran counter to his entire inner cause."

Gokalp was among those arrested and interned at Malta. The British sought desperately to find the evidence to convict him and his fellow inmates, but having more stringent requirements than Vahakn Dadrian, came up woefully short. (Dadrian, of course, has vastly different ideas on Malta.) No evidence, no trial, no conviction. Hard to decipher by those of us whose morality is in short supply, but the rest of us can agree that a man is innocent until proven guilty.

It’s really shameful for Vahakn Dadrian to try and make someone out to be another Heinrich Himmler, just on Dadrian’s say-so. Where is Jiminy Cricket, when you need him? Somebody’s conscience is in severe disrepair.

At any rate, Dadrian is trying to prove the military was “complicit” in the Armenians’ “annihilation,” even though “annihilation” means to have made disappear without a trace, like what happened to the Tasmanian people; even the Armenian Patriarch’s 1918 records tell us what a miserable choice of word that is to use, on Mr. Dadrian’s part.

Dadrian failed with this second example. Once again, he demonstrated that Kamil was assigned to oversee the relocation operation. Relocation is not genocide.

Even if these telegrams were real (which would mean such orders were written down — sometimes genocide advocates try to deflate the need for hard evidence by claiming Hitler never signed genocide documents either — how is it possible that not a single such document can be proven to have existed?), it does not prove a centrally-directed policy of genocide. As Dadrian himself enjoys pointing out, Vehip Pasha tried and hanged a couple of perpetrators who took it upon themselves to commit mass murder with Armenians under their command. Individual massacres do not equal genocide. (ADDENDUM, Jan. 2007: In his 2003 paper cited above, Dadrian actually described these renegade, Lt. Calley-like massacrers as "genocidists.")

This would similarly describe Consul Scheubner-Richter’s report that Halil Pasha "had ordered the massacre of his Armenian.battalions and had massacred the Armenian population falling under his control.”

Where are those Germans who accused the Turks of making things up, when you need them? Scheubner-Richter was not part of the Oriental culture, but he certainly had a tendency to put a “spin” on things. For example, he wrote, “The Armenians of Turkey for all practical purposes have been exterminated.” As we’ve seen, even the Armenian Patriarch was in disagreement with that foolish conclusion. Scheubner-Richter also wrote: "by July 15 (1915) almost all of the Armenians had been expelled from Erserum." Yet, many Armenians lived in Erzurum during the Russian occupation that was to follow. (And Morgenthau himself stated large numbers of Armenians remained in almost every city, in the March 1916 letter cited above.) Like other Christian-sympathizing Western consuls, Scheubner-Richter is not a reliable source. It’s possible, like Lt. Calley of My Lai, that Halil was a loose cannon, and committed slaughters with no directive from the central government. After all, many Ottomans were angry with their treacherous Armenians. Dadrian backs up the assertion with something far more compelling, a “confession” by Halil himself:

Halil not only admits but almost prides himself on having destroyed 300,000 Armenians: "[I]t can be more or less, I didn't count."

I’m reminded of how Prof. Lewy pointed out Dadrian’s having set up Guse as an unreliable witness, but when it suited Dadrian’s purpose, Guse suddenly became reliable. (Even though Dadrian misinformed on what Guse had actually said.)

Similarly, isn’t it funny how after Dadrian went to such pains to tell us lying is second nature to Turks, in order to have us reject Ottoman reports firsthand, suddenly, a few select Ottoman Turks have become the beacons of truth?

Like 1895’s Armenian rebel Aghasi, who obviously bragged with the killing of 20,000 Turks, there could have been Turks who came to despise the Armenians for having stabbed their nation in the back. Halil (and another officer Dadrian later provides as an example, a General Ali Ihsan Sabis who “proudly” declared that he "killed the Armenians with his own hands"; this latter example does not tell us which Armenians he was talking about. Were they defenseless civilians, or the Armenian rebels, of whom there were many thousands behind the lines, fighting a guerilla war? Making this critical distinction unfortunately wouldn’t make a difference to Dadrian) might have harbored such feelings of disgust, that he could have exaggerated. We’ll get to that, in a moment.

A page taking issue with Washington’s Holocaust Museum offers interesting information on how “On May 14, 1946, Rudolf Hoess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, signed a declaration stating that during his tenure in office, 2 million Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz and another 500,000 killed in other ways.”

A former director of the museum, being criticized on this page, is quoted as explaining: “Today historians believe that the total number of inmates who perished in Auschwitz was a million and a half, or even less. Obviously, Hoess, who wrote the affidavit in a prison cell in Nuremberg, gave an estimate not based on statistical research. However, it was a historic fact that he wrote this admission of guilt of his own free will.”

How is it possible that Hoess went over by a million? The site’s writer accuses the director of not being straight, citing “an orthodox Holocaust historian”; it appears Hoess was beaten by his captors, to extract a confession. (Not far from how the Ottomans who were accused in the 1919-20 courts also made their own unreliable statements! They might not have been tortured, but they were under heavy duress to say anything and everything to save their necks. They knew the new Ottoman administration was out for retribution, under a “fixed” trial system.)

We’re also told: “In fact, Hoess’s numbers derive from the fantastic figure of four million dead for Auschwitz that a Soviet ‘war crimes’ investigation commission issued on May 6, 1945, nearly a year before Hoess was captured (March 11, 1946).” The implication is, Hoess himself might have been influenced by "officially reported" erroneous information. Let us consider Halil's memoirs (Bitmeyen Savas, which I am on the look-out for, to see which parts Dadrian might have taken out of context) was released in 1972, well over half a century after the events; who knows how or why the old man came up with this "300,000" figure, by his “own free will.” Regardless, we can see by the Hoess example (yet another non-Oriental German official putting a "spin" on matters!) that even when the key player of an event is doing the reporting, they can be wildly off.

What we do know is that some 500,000-600,000 Armenians were killed in total. (Pre-war population, according to most neutral estimates: 1.5 million. Armenians like Dadrian concede: one million survivors. Even the Patriarch agrees. His 1,260,000 alive in 1918 was theoretically verifiable (as wrong as it was), while the dead of 840,000 dead was based on guesswork. (One could theoretically count the living; the dead were all over, and could not be counted.) These figures came from a pre-war total of an inflated 2.1 million. (1,260,000 + 840,000.) Yet Lepsius swore, under oath, in Tehlirian’s 1921 trial, that the Patriarch told him the pre-war estimate was 1,850,000. That is a difference of 250,000 with 2.1 million. Subtract this 250,000 from the 840,000 mortality figure, and we wind up with 500,000-600,000 Armenians killed in total.

Richard Hovannisian tells us some 150,000 Armenians died of famine and disease while accompanying the Russian retreats. So that leaves 350,000 to 400,000 dead from causes we can only guess at.

So are we going to credit Halil Pasha with having murdered practically every single Armenian who died in the “genocide”? He must have been like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie, “The Terminator.”

Outside Reading:

 

"Defeat in Detail"

 

Edward Erickson also wrote the excellent "Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913," detailing every campaign at the level of the Ottoman army corps. For more of this terrific author and historian, here is a page entitled, "Turkey Prepares for War,
1913-1914," which was written for Relevance, the Quarterly Journal of the Great War Society:

worldwar1.com/neareast/ta.htm