The Zoryan Institute (and we can recognize Zoryan director Dadrian's voice behind what's being said; practically all is a product of Dadrian's research, under the misleading methodology stated above. Dadrian and Zoryan will thus be used interchangeably in the analysis that follows) prepared a 1999 piece entitled: "The Key Distortions and Falsehoods in the Denial of the Armenian Genocide. (A Response to the Memorandum of the Turkish Ambassador)." The essay may be found at Zoryan.org's site.

ADDENDUM, 11-07: Zoryan might have pulled this uncredited page from its site, although it has been reproduced on several other Armenian web sites. Dadrian's authorship, I see, has been confirmed elsewhere. The "23 page analysis" analyzed below was prepared as a "swift response" to counter the "eleven pages of genocide denial and false allegations against the Armenians" by the Turkish ambassador. (Should "Armenian genocide claims" be synonymous with "Armenians"?) It appears a congressman, New Jersey's Steven Rothman, gave "an invitation... to analyze a letter the Turkish Ambassador in Washington sent to every member of Congress," countering the claims of a genocide resolution of the time, Resolution 155. (If it was anything like the utterly dishonest claims of the 2007 resolution, and of course it was, then it sure needed much clarification.) Dadrian's propaganda was immediately "distributed to all Congressmen," and Dadrian later expanded this work into a 92 page book ("Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification"), which the Zoryan Institute is peddling for sale.

The drama began when the Armenians once again attempted to legislate their alleged genocide by using the politicians who are in their pockets, and by exploiting the abundance of their propaganda near-unilaterally presented for a century and longer. Congressmen already not solidly in the corner of the Armenians are not historians. The information about this tragic historical episode comes mainly from the Armenians. They have aligned themselves with "genocide scholars," who mindlessly or purposely accept the Armenian claims just as one-sidedly, but when there are those like Elie Wiesel among them, few are going to stop and scratch beneath the surface.

Whenever there is a voice emerging contrary to this religiously-held genocide view, Dadrian has done an excellent job in coming to the fore, bombarding the listener with his endless compilation of confusing facts and figures, in an attempt to distract from what really happened: The Armenians rebelled, continuing a policy that had been growing over the prior forty years in particular, and they were relocated; not everything went smootly, and every death resulting must dishonestly be presented as cold-blooded murder... even though everyone else was dropping like flies for the same reasons: famine, disease, harsh weather, combat, as well as massacres.

The object of Zoryan/Dadrian's attack: "The Turkish government, through its ambassador in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to all Congressmen, dated May 27, 1999, which included an eleven-page report titled 'An Objective Look At H.Res.155'."

 

Professor Richard Falk

   Richard Falk, squarely in the corner of the Dadrians and genocide scholars, has been established to consider strictly the pro-Armenian view, although he might have loosened up in recent years. His quote, "Slowly, yet with increasing authoritativeness, the reality of the Turkish genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people has come to be accepted as established, incontrovertible fact," is true only to the extent that the "genocide" has come to be accepted as the fact. But this perception has nothing to do with historical reality, an area that is not a specialty of the law professor. (The "genocide scholar" with a background in history is a rare breed. Exceptions, like Prof. Henry Huttenbach, who consider only one side of this story, seem to have forgotten what being a "historian" means.) The fact that a lot of people have mindlessly come to one conclusion, helpless against the onslaught of one-sided propaganda and helped by their own ingrained prejudices, does not constitute historical reality.

Another partisan who only considers one side of the story, David Matas, has embarrassingly shown his ignorance by stating: "Because the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were not prosecuted, the Nazi-organized Holocaust against the Jews became possible. There is a direct linkage between the failure to prosecute the crimes against humanity before World War II and their commission during World War II."

The British, French and Russians announced in May 1915 that the perpetrators of Armenian massacres would be punished after the war. They were not interested in the Armenians as much as justifying their divvying up of Ottoman lands, established through secret treaties. Regardless, the British had to make do on this promise, and also hope to justify their relentless war propaganda, portraying the Turks as inhuman monsters. They leaned on the puppet Ottoman government to come up with culprits (or else, they warned, it would have been curtains at the Peace Conference, as Dadrian himself has revealed), but when these false 1919 courts didn't do the trick to the satisfactory extent, the British took the best of the Ottoman "villains" and holed them up in Malta for nearly two-and-a-half years. (Ironically, saving them from a worse fate, as history would bear; the 1919 kangaroo courts were intent on retribution.) The British learned their own propaganda was unusable, and so was everything else available to that point, the bulk of which forming the basis of genocidal evidence today. Every Turk was freed.

So it's not that the "perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were not prosecuted," it's the alleged perpertrators COULD NOT be prosecuted. To their credit, the British came around to the thinking that genuine judicial evidence is what was needed. Where is Matas' honor, to come up with his own conclusions, without such evidence? Would he appreciate it if he were haphazardly accused of a ruinous crime? Would he not "deny" such baseless accusations?

Matas also shows his ignorance and blatant prejudice when he lays the blame for the Holocaust on the doorstep of the Armenian tragedy. Without explaining this "direct linkage" (I guess he is thinking of the "Hitler Quote" that even the rare Armenian scholar has concluded was a fabrication; see Hitler section below), he doesn't think about all the many episodes of potential systematic extermination that came before the "First Holocaust of the 20th century" (another false pro-Armenian claim). The Serbs tried to knock off the Albanians in 1912-3, in part of the "Balkan Wars" theater that claimed the lives of many thousands of civilian Turks/Muslims. The Germans tried to do the same with the Hereros [Africans] in 1904-07, and the Americans with the Filipinos at the turn of the last century. We won't mention the Turks/Muslims who were habitually the victims of systematic extermination efforts of Orthodox nations since the 1821 Greek War of Independence.

Another mindless and irresponsible party who only looks at what she wants to believe, Katherine Bischopi, is quoted as saying: "The future of Holocaust denial may be foreshadowed by the persistent denial of the Armenian genocide." "May be" is right. This is only an opinion. Opinions, aside from outright falsifications and forgeries on the side of the pro-Armenians, are all they have going for them. What's missing is "proof." Bischopi should be ashamed of herself for cheapening the fate of the Holocaust Jews by comparing their lot with an unproved genocide. Never mind the "Rufmord" — murder of reputation — she is committing against the honor of the Turks.

 After peppering us with these useless opinions, of which there is no shortage, Zoryan/Dadrian then tackles the crux of the Turkish ambassador's Memorandum.

"What follows is an effort to examine with as little bias as possible the objections and sets of allegations put forward in a lengthy Memorandum by the ambassador, and to demonstrate the spurious character of some of them, and the untenable nature of most of them," we are told. As little bias as possible! When one overlooks the historical reality and only focuses on random bits and pieces, that is nothing but bias.

"It is as if none of them had been effectively rebutted and discredited by eighty years of research and publication by scholars not identified with Armenian interests." The very job of extremist genocide-obsessed Armenians is to discredit. These people don't come from the perspective of truth, as illustrated by Prof. Libaridian's response to Prof. Feigl regarding the Andonian forgeries, or what I have come to call the "Armenian AND? Anthem." One can come up with weasely ways to discredit anything, and these Armenians are professionals at the game, with poster boy Vahan Cardashian (the one who founded what led to ANCA) laying significant “modern era” groundwork. These Armenians know they can't succeed against genuine, impartial historical facts, so their only ethically-challenged strategy is to try and discredit. And they are very effective; Zoryan/Dadrian are a master in creating doubt. They have done a very good job with this paper. Having "effectively rebutted and discredited" has nothing to do with TRUTH, however. Let's see what they have wrought.

The Allegation of "Inter-Communal Clashes"

 This I find the most disgusting deception from those like Dadrian. "There was no Armenian Rebellion" they tell us. Of course; this truth goes squarely against the face of their big lie, that innocent Christian Armenians ... for no reason (except for made up theories like pan-Turanism and Muslims hating Christians), in the depths of desperation fighting a multi-front war against superpowers, with no resources and manpower to spare, would suddenly engage in the gigantean task of eliminating their precious resource, the Armenians, who made the economic wheels turn in the bankrupt empire. Moreover, the Ottomans would spend the equivalent of today's millions of dollars to finance the operation, when the money was desperately needed elsewhere.

"[T]he Armenians, an impotent defenseless minority," Dadrian tells us. The Armenians were the wealthy ones, quite often potently in charge of the industries. They had armed themselves to the teeth in years past, in accordance with Hunchak/Dashnak decrees, including sophisticated weaponry like their Mausers. They were treacherously waiting for the opportunity to strike, when their nation — where the ingrates had prospered for so many centuries — was at its weakest, during war. Days after war was declared, the wildly pro-Armenian New York Times (which would freely print any horror story prepared by the [British propaganda division] Wellington House branch operating illegally on U.S. soil) gave us: “ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS; Besieging Van — Others operating in Turkish Army's Rear,” on November 7, 1914.

The Armenian soldiers deserted in droves to the enemy, taking their weapons with them... which is what led to the disarming of the ones still remaining in the Ottoman army. [Dadrian and his ilk have turned this move into a way to kill off all Armenian men.]

"On August 3, 1914, i.e. three months before Turkey precipitated the war with Russia, all able-bodied Armenian men in the 20-45 age categories, and later in sequences those in the 18-20 and 45-60 categories, were conscripted in the Ottoman army," is what Dadrian tells us. Yes, of course, the Armenians were called to serve in the defense of their country, like all other able-bodied men in the empire were called. (This is why Morgenthau estimated one quarter of the Turkish population died of hunger, because few were left to till the fields.) But most of these traitors went off to Russia to join the Czarist Armenian army of 150,000, the number Boghos Nubar presented in his 1919 Times of London letter, attempting to prove to the Peace Conference that the Armenians were “belligerents de facto.” (“...[S]ince they indignantly refused to side with Turkey,” Nubar added. Of course he’s referring to the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.) Ottoman-Armenians also treacherously joined the other 50,000, according to Nubar, who largely fought as a “fifth column," "operating in Turkish Army's Rear," as the New York Times reported.

ADDENDUM, 11-07: Nubar's total estimate of 200,000 included the Armenians from Russia as well, and not all served in the Trans-caucasian fronts; an estimated 100,000 came from the Ottoman Empire, either by crossing the border to join the Russians, or by staying behind and serving mainly as guerilla units. Armenians from other nations were usually recent transplants from their Ottoman home, as with this example. This Ottoman vs. Russian Armenian issue is given a good look below.

Boghos Nubar, 1919 Times of London letter

As World War I threatened and the Ottoman Army mobilized, Armenians who should have served their country instead took the side of the Russians. The Ottoman Army reported: "From Armenians with conscription obligations those in towns and villages East of the Hopa-Erzurum-Hinis-Van line did not comply with the call to enlist but have proceeded East to the border to join the organization in Russia." The effect of this is obvious: If the young Armenian males of the "zone of desertion" had served in the Army, they would have provided more than 50,000 troops. If they had served, there might never have been a Sarikamis defeat.

Prof. Justin McCarthy, March 24, 2005 speech

The Redundancy of the Argument of Armenian Rebelliousness

 I don't have a copy of the Turkish ambassador's statement, but whomever prepared the Memorandum evidently came up with examples of uprising, and Dadrian hopes to diffuse their truth by writing, "The four instances of uprising were not only isolated, local, and disconnected incidents but, above all, they were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation and thereby avert annihilation. Being strictly defensive undertakings..."

How could they be called "defensive" when we could see from the New York Times report the Armenians were ready and waiting to strike at the outbreak of war? Why are we even attempting to prove the irrefutable fact that the Armenians rebelled, even when their leaders are on record, admitting it? (Quick answer: the Dadrian ilk have little honor, and they have the ears of the prejudiced, ignorant masses.)

The sequence of events was "Armenians stabbed their nation in the back with a force of many thosands according to an Armenian leader," and not "Turks tried to exterminate Armenians and poor, innocent Armenians tried to defend themselves." No, the Turks had their hands full with trying to defend their desperate nation from mighty enemies, particularly Russia, whose policies were to ethnically cleanse conquered regions of Muslims and drive the rest into exile. Since the Ottoman Empire was the last stop, and there was no other land to get exiled into, every Turk knew what lay in store for them if the Russians crashed through the gates. Who would have had the energy or the ability to divert precious resources for extermination of Armenians at this critical juncture, even if the Ottomans were of the mind to do so?

Naturally, the Turkish ambassador's statement couldn't go on and on about all of the Armenian rebellions and gave four examples. These rebellions were far from "isolated, local, and disconnected," as Dadrian deceptively informs us. For example, an internal March 4, 1915 telegram from the Mahmudi district of Van investigated tortures and massacres conducted by the Armenians. after the "kaza was taken back." Killed in Merheku village: 55. Raped and killed: 4. Killed in village of Ishtuju: 11. Among those raped still alive: 5. Wounded: 5. (1/2, KLS520, File 2024, F.11-1) There are a series of telegrams documented in "The Armenian File" (along with Internet sites; here’s a page on TAT) and anyone can see the rebellion was well organized by the Dashnaks and Hunchaks. Anyone who says otherwise, particularly one who has researched the matter as deeply as Dadrian, truly suffers from a total lack of ethics.

I'll bet at least some of the "four" incidents the ambassador's statement referred to took place before the end of May 1915, as the March 4 example presented above. May was when the relocation order was signed. Yet, Dadrian tells us these uprising instances "were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation." (Deportation is the wrong word to use, of course, as that means banishment outside a country's borders.) How could these desperate Armenians have tried to resist "deportation" if the "deportation" wasn't yet even decided upon? Were these Armenians psychic?

 We've already seen how Armenians had rebelled in Van on November of 1914, days after Russia declared war. There were a series of rebellions all over the empire, and Van kept having its share. On April 24, the governor sent the following telegram to the Ministry of the Interior:

"Until now approximately 4,000 insurgent Armenians have been brought to the region from the vicinity. The rebels are engaged in highway robbery, attack the neighbouring villages and burn them. It is impossible to prevent this. Now many women and children are left homeless. It is not possible nor suitable to relocate them in tribal villages in the vicinity. Would it be convenient to begin sending them to the western provinces?"

Komitas

(Let's all keep in mind the Van governor did not write the above in the hopes of fooling those of us who are studying the matter in the 21st century; his telegram was intended solely for the eyes of the central government.) So here's the interesting situation: it's not the "deportation" of the Armenians that is being thought of in the Armenians' celebrated "date of doom." (As we all know, April 24 is the date 235 Armenian ringleaders were arrested in Istanbul as a result of the rebellions most of these leaders had a hand in planning. Armenian propaganda tells us they were all killed the same day, but even Peter Balakian told us differently in his "Burning Tigris," citing a few survivors. There were others he didn't mention, like the Armenian musician Komitas/Gomidas Vartabed [1869-1935, a.k.a. Soghomon Soghomonian, before his church-proclaimed "rebirth"] who was released after only two weeks' imprisonment in Cankaya Prison, heading off for Paris in the years ahead.) No, it's the Muslims who are being thought of as needing to be "deported"! And "deported" they were, as accounted in “The Armenian Uprising in Van Through the Eyes of Eyewitnesses.”

It was because of the prevalent rebellion of the Armenians that Enver Pasha began to think of a solution. Before the treacherous Armenians helped to deliver Van into the hands of the invading Russians, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief sent the following telegram to Talat Pasha on May 2, 1915:

Around lake Van, and in specific areas known by the Governor of Van, Armenians are constantly gathered and prepared to continue their insurrection. I am convinced that these Armenians who have gathered must be removed from these areas, and that the rebellion's nest must be destroyed. According to the information provided by the 3rd Army Command, the Russians brought the Muslims within their borders into our country under wretched and miserable conditions, on 20 April 1915. In order to respond to this, as well as to reach the goal I have stated above, it is necessary to either send these Armenians and their families to Russia, or to disperse them within Anatolia. I request that the most suitable of these two alternatives be chosen and carried out. If there is no inconvenience I would prefer that the families of the rebels and the population of the region in rebellion are sent outside our borders and that the Muslim community brought into our borders from abroad are relocated to their place.

His preferred idea was to truly "deport" the traitors outside the country's borders,  just like the Russians were doing with their innocent Muslims. But the Ottomans did not do that. They knew not all of the Armenians were guilty. They decided on the more humane course of getting them out of the war zone. Given the desperation and lack of preparation and proper resources, not everything went according to plan. But it is up to the reader to determine which was the lesser of two evils. If the WWII Americans had pushed their Japanese into Mexico with the shirts on their backs, as Russia was doing with its Muslim population, and as the Armenians did with the nearly one million Karabagh Armenians in 1992, many of whom are still languishing in refugee centers, would that have been the better thing to do? (Keep in mind that famine and disease, the main causes of death for the relocated Armenians, were no less in force across the border. In 1967, Richard Hovannisian wrote 150,000-odd Armenians died for these reasons while accompanying the Russian retreats, and outlined later conditions in another work, prompting Sam Weems to conclude, "The real Armenian genocide was caused by the Armenian peoples' 'own dictator leaders.'" [Hovannisian: "In 1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5. It was verily a land of death"].)

The Charge of Armenian Treachery

 

Dadrian/Zoryan makes a lot of points in this section. Let's tackle them all.

Dadrian: "Reference is made to 'the Ottoman Armenians' violent political alliance with the Russian forces.' One is prompted to ask, 'what alliance' and 'by which Ottoman Armenians?'" He attempts to demonstrate Ottoman-Armenian loyalty by claiming "the Dashnaktzoutiun, as early as August 1914, publicly declared their allegiance to the Ottoman state and vowed as citizens of the state to fight for the defense of the country," and also that the Patriarch told the Armenians to, in effect, be good.

Is he serious? Does Dadrian expect us to take the word of these two parties, the terrorist Dashnaks and the often untruthful Patriarch? We don't look at what they said, but what they did.

Who were the Dashnaks? K.S. Papazian, 1934's Patriotism Perverted: "The purpose of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak) is to achieve political and economic freedom in Turkish Armenia by means of rebellion. Terrorism has, from the beginning, been adopted by the Dashnak Committee..." Do terrorists have honor? If a terrorist can bring himself to kill innocent civilians, why would Dadrian expect such immoral people to tell the truth? (Truth is far from a priority for Dadrian; perhaps he identifies with the Dashnaks. It is a fact many Armenians hero-worship their terrorists.)

Papazian continues:

"In August 1914 the young Turks asked the Dashnag Convention, then in session in Erzurum, to carry out their old agreement of 1907, and start an uprising among the Armenians of the Caucasus against the Russian government. The Dashnagtzoutune refused to do this, and gave assurance that in the event of war between Russia and Turkey, they would support Turkey as loyal citizens. On the other hand, they could not be held responsible for the Russian Armenians. . . . The fact remains, however, that the leaders of the Turkish-Armenian section of the Dashnagtzoutune did not carry out their promise of loyalty to the Turkish cause when the Turks entered the war... Prudence was thrown to the winds; even the decision of their own convention of Erzurum was forgotten and a call was sent for Armenian volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasus front."

There you have it, in the words of an Armenian historian, writing before genocide had been overtly politicized. Exposing Dadrian/Zoryan for his blatant lie.

(It was at this conference, not incidentally, that the Armenians were promised actual autonomy... if only they would have done their duty as loyal Ottomans. Instead, the Armenians went with their country's mortal enemy, known to double-cross them many times in the past, and prepared to do so again.)

The first prime minister of Armenia, and primary Dashnak leader in the position to know, Hovhannes Katchaznouni, concurred: "In spite of the decision taken a few weeks before at the General Committee in Erzurum {the same August 1914 event discussed above}, the Dashnagtzoutune actively helped the organization of the aforementioned groups, and especially arming them, against Turkey. . . . In the fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer groups were formed and fought against the Turks."

Dadrian/Zoryan claims the very opposite: "...the leaders of the (Dashnaks) did all they could to stop the Armenian volunteer movement that was gaining momentum in the adjoining Russian Trans-Caucasus, but failed." No source is offered. It is simply unbelievable, the lengths that Dadrian/Zoryan will go to... isn't it? Imagine his expecting us to accept that the Dashnaks were loyal Ottoman citizens.

What of the loyal and trustworthy Patriarch?

In an August 5, 1914 letter, the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin wrote to Vorontsov-Dachkov, the Governor-General of the Caucasus: "Based on the information I have received from the Istanbul Patriachate and the Armenian Assembly..." displaying close cooperation with the Patriarch. The Catholicos was speaking on behalf of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire when he further wrote, "I request from Your Highness that you present to His Majesty the Emperor, the devotion of his faithful subjects on my behalf and on behalf of my congregation in Russia, the sincere loyalty and attachment of the Armenians of Turkey, and at the same time that you defend to the Czar the hopes of the Armenians of Turkey."

Vorontsov-Dachkov's replied on Sept. 2: "I wish that the actions of the Armenians here, as well as those on the other side of the border, be now in accordance with my instructions. I request that you use your authority over your congregation, and ensure that our Armenians and those who reside in the border regions implement the duties and services which I will ask them to carry out in the future, in the event of a Russo-Turkish war, as in the situation of Turkey today."

Kamuran Gurun wrote in “The Armenian File”: "The text of these letters was included in Gr[egory] Tchalkouchian's work entitled The Red Book which was published in Armenian in Paris in 1919. The second letter, in particular, indicates clearly the kind of instructions the Armenians of Turkey would be given in the event of a war."

Gurun provides another source:

"Turkish Armenians living in Marseilles held a large meeting on 5 August 1914, and drew up a declaration which was published in various newspapers." (Bearing Aram Turabian's signature):

The Russian Armenians, in the ranks of the Muscovite army, will do their duty, to revenge the insult made on our brothers' corpses; as for us, the Armenians under the domination of Turkey, no Armenian rifle must be turned towards the friends and allies of France, our second land. Turkey is mobilizing, she calls us on active service, without telling us against whom. Against Russia? Surely not! We shall not go and fight against our own brothers of Caucasus, against the Balkan States, for which we have nothing but sympathy, never! ...
Armenians, Turkey calls you to fight without telling you against whom: join as volunteers the ranks of the French Army and of her allies, to help destroy the army of Wilhelm II, whose railway is built on the corpses of our 300,000 brothers..."

You can see even though these Armenians may technically now be "French-Armenians," they refer to Turkish-Armenians as "us." Of course! Practically all of these Armenians came from the Ottoman Empire.

And it didn't matter whose flag they fought under. We know from the testimony of Russian and French officers the Armenians under their command fought as Armenians, completely out of control, as they wreaked their havoc against the Muslim population in territories they occupied. This is what Armenians have done since olden times, as Tacitus, the Roman historian, recorded in his Annalum Liber: "The Armenians change their position relating to Rome and the Persian Empire, sometimes supporting one and sometimes the other ... they are a strange people." This is what many Armenians did in Georgia, when Armenia attacked Georgia in 1918; they forgot they were "Georgian-Armenians," and betrayed their country. (Georgia responded by "deporting" some of them, according to Hovannisian's "The Republic of Armenia.")

Richard Hovannisian, "Armenia on the Road to Independence," p. 42

The Utter Fiction of the Claim of "Relocation"

 

In a slimy attempt to try and present the picture of the relocation policy being a cover-up for extermination, Dadrian/Zoryan gives us the biased opinions of American personnel in the Ottoman Empire. Someone like Special Agent Lewis Einstein, far from the action in Istanbul's American Embassy, could only rely on the massive propaganda reports being supplied by Morgenthau's bigoted consuls and Wellington House (Britain's propaganda division which Morgenthau, as the representative of a neutral nation, unethically shared information with) which the U.S. press heartily ate up. One of those biased consuls was Leslie Davis, employing Armenian right hands just like Morgenthau employed a few, and Dadrian provides Davis' "Slaughterhouse Province" as evidence. Davis apparently saw a number of corpses which does not prove systematic extermination, in the whole of an empire that served as a graveyard. His report to the State Department of "how huge clusters of Armenian deportee convoys on their way to Mesopotamia were rerouted to Harput 'only to be butchered in this province" was the kind of "evidence" even the British could not make use of when the British Ambassador in Washington studied the best of such horror stories in the U.S. archives, upon preparation for the Malta Tribunal. The reason: the hearsay of sympathetic missionaries and Armenians does not constitute judicial evidence. We are also told "The candid testimony of a Turkish general with military jurisdiction over the Mesopotamia regions in question ... emphatically declared that 'there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees'."

That last one is true. The bankrupt "Sick Man" needing to implement this program in a hurry as a response to wave after wave of Armenian rebellious actions did not perform this task adequately... for which the Ottoman government surely bears responsibility. But it was a life and death situation. Consider our modern times, and America's actions in Iraq (recent at the time of this writing). America had all the time in the world to plan properly for the operation, since there was no emergency reason to invade a nation bearing no connection to 9/11. America is also a very rich nation. Yet, poor planning spelled disasters that could have been avoided; like the killing of a significant portion of Iraqi culture, by not taking necessary steps against the looting of a national museum. War sometimes is just not fair. If the Armenians want to cry, that's an option. But in fairness, if the revolutionary committees undertook treacherous actions, and if the Armenian community as a whole listened to them (most by choice, some by force)... that is, if the Armenians declared war... then who is to blame?

"Disloyal Ottoman Armenians killed 1.1 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews"

 

Zoryan/Dadrian is correct to protest. Whomever put the statement of the Turkish ambassador together should be ashamed about claiming 1.1 million Muslims killed, if that is what was written. I don't have information on the number of Jews killed by the Armenians, but 100,000 is obviously exaggerated as well. That doesn't take away from the fact Jews were among those killed in the Armenians' bloodlust for racial purification, in lands they hoped to control, and gain a plurality. Even Greeks in Trabzon were killed by Armenians.

The question is, were these errors purposeful, or repeated because the writer believed in them? I hope it was not the former. The truthful, non-Armenian version of events cannot afford to have its credibility questioned, and those making claims should be very careful. This doesn't even scratch the surface of the myriad of Armenian prevarications, a good many of which have already been exposed in this one paper. Regardless, every time I run across a false fact from the side I believe in, I get upset.

518,000 is the number I believe at this point, as far as the Muslims killed by Armenians, with Russian help; this is the number documented by internal Ottoman reports, not meant for propagandistic exposure. "1.1 million" is off by more than 50%, which is pretty bad. (This is actually around the figure for the loss of all Muslim Ottomans from the eastern areas, dying from all causes.) But it's not as bad as the 1.5 million toll most Armenians claim of their numbers. Of the half million or so Armenians who lost their lives from all causes combined, nobody knows exactly the number who died of massacres. In 1977, Le Figaro estimated 15,000 from all deprivations of the marches, not just massacres. That's only 1% of the figure Armenians would have us typically believe.

But Zoryan/Dadrian shouldn't cry too loudly in outrage. Don't Armenians, when they're squeezed into the corner when confronted with their nonsensical numerical claims, wind up saying, "Numbers don't matter; it was genocide!"

 

The Legal and Political Import of the May 24, 1915 Declaration of the Allies (The Entente Powers)

 

Dadrian/Zoryan’s weaseling reaches new heights in this section. Verily, he protests the fact that the Allied declaration to punish the Ottomans after the war was meant as wartime propaganda. However, it was these very same allies who had been conspiring in an Ottoman land grab scheme via secret treaties during the war, and were jockeying in position for years beforehand. Russia had already been calling Istanbul “Czargrad,” for example. The fact that the Allies quickly disposed of the Armenians after war’s end, once the Armenians had served their purpose, also indicates the sincerity of their motives. It must also be borne in mind that Britain attempted to punish the perpetrators not so much to live up to this 1915 declaration as to justify their own hysterical war propaganda; this was the Malta Tribunal. No evidence could be found to convict these “perpetrators” despite over two years of searching desperately in the Ottoman archives the British had full control over, with Armenians in charge, and the archives of their own country, the archives of France that the French were obligated to turn up evidence from, and the archives of the United States.

As for that war propaganda, Dadrian attempts to knock out David Fromkin’s conclusion that "the British official accounts" were “untruthful propaganda.” But Fromkin is far from the only voice with such conclusions. Wellington House was in the business of falsifying the facts, and even a surface examination of their methods can demonstrate the motives of Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee were to make their enemies look as ferocious as possible. When the mainly unnamed sources of the Blue Book are examined (even if they are named, as Ara Sarafian claims to have documented in a reprint edition), anyone can determine the hearsay accounts of missionaries, Armenians, Armenian newspapers in America, and biased consuls all have conflicts of interest. Indeed, the British themselves couldn’t use any of these accounts as valid evidence in their own Malta Tribunal.

Toynbee himself denounced his work as propaganda after the war on pg. 50 of 1922's “The Western Question in Greece and Turkey.”

Alarmed by reports of Armenians’ massacres of Muslims, Toynbee wrote on Sept. 26, 1919: "To lessen the credit of Armenians is to weaken the anti-Turkish action. It was difficult to eradicate the conviction that the Turk is a noble being always in trouble... The treatment of Armenians by the Turks is the biggest asset of his Majesty’s Government, to solve the Turkish problem in a radical manner, and to have it accepted by the public." Later in life, in his 1969 work “Experiences,” Dadrian points out with glee that Toynbee had a change of heart again, writing the Ottoman government made a “largely successful attempt to exterminate” the Armenians. This would be the same “Ottoman institution (that) came perhaps as near as anything in real life could to realizing the ideal of Plato’s Republic,” which Toynbee had also written.

Perhaps all of those fake missionary horror stories he was immersed in as a young man had a delayed effect on his elderly mind. Perhaps he attempted to justify the one stain on his record as a historian, when he compromised his ideals by working for a propaganda division. Perhaps he was too diehard a Christian, as his later pals Ismet Inonu and liberal writer Yalman observed, and deep down couldn't accept the Turks were not the monsters he was raised to believe. Whatever the reasons, it’s not Toynbee the ex-propagandist’s opinion that matters. What counts is the work itself. When one examines the wartime blue books, the blue books that Britain apologized to Germany for in 1936 (for stories such as bayoneting Belgian babies), one can see the distortion of truth on nearly every page. In the very 1916 work Dadrian cites, Toynbee wrote — for example — that there was no Armenian rebellion. Toynbee was a propagandist after Dadrian’s heart. Nearly a century later, Dadrian would still like you to believe the very same.

The seriousness of the May 24, 1915 declaration may also be determined on the basis of new discoveries in the British Archives: "Lloyd George was impressed by the intelligence Zaharoff was able to glean from Abdul Kerim about relations between the Central Powers, and seemed ready to contemplate a payment of $25 million to buy Turkey out of the war." [Keith Hamilton Historian, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Caillard to Zaharoff, 30 Aug 1918.] That carries the implication of a pardon for any alleged war crimes. (Otherwise, how would Enver Pasha, for whom the bribe was targeted, take the offer seriously?) Even the Turk-hating British leader, Lloyd George, didn't give priority to the May 24, 1915 threat; if he truly believed the Turks behaved so monstrously, how could he have even contemplated such a gesture?

As far as Dadrian’s "Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources" attesting to the Young Turk regime’s complicity, there’s not one among them conclusively serving as evidence. What Dadrian’s hard work to find only damning statements boils down to is He said this, and another said that. Dadrian is trying to capitalize on the fact that the Germans and Austrians were Ottoman allies, and the surface impression that they would not have lied. But the religious and racist prejudices instilled in Germans and Austrians superseded all else, even their wartime feelings of loyalty. (As American George Schreiner gave an excellent idea of when he tried to get the truth out through the German press when his side’s censors refused.) The testimony of French and Russian officers is an entirely different tale. The French and the Russians were raised to have positive feelings toward the Armenians, when they had to choose between Armenians and subhuman Muslims. We can then trust implicitly their many accountse of Armenian savagery against the Muslims.

 

The Juxtaposition and Equating of Armenian Losses with Turkish Warfare Losses

 

In this section, Dadrian attempts to minimize the rare even-handedness General Harbord demonstrated with his acknowledgment of the dreadful Turkish losses ("Not over 20 percent of the Turkish peasants who went to war have returned...Six hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone...”) to Harbord’s testimony corroborating Dadrian’s genocide. ("the wholesale attempt on the [Armenian] race..."Testimony is universal that the massacres have always been ordered from Constantinople.")

Well, we know just where we can put that “testimony”; there are plenty of opinions supporting that “testimony,” but, unfortunately, no evidence whatsoever.

General Harbord

The problem with General Harbord is that while he seemed generally on the level, he came from a very pro-Christian slant, as he exhibited with his writings (“In the old family Bible, the name Armenia...” from Oct. 19, 1919, the U.S. archives’ 66th Congress); and he also had an agenda. Consequently, his report is anti-Muslim, since he mostly used as evidence what he was told by Armenians rather than conducting a fully independent American fact-finding mission (assigned by Preacher’s son, Pres. Woodrow "There ain't going to be no Turkey" Wilson, while considering a mandate for Armenia.) The Harbord reports misrepresented, for example, the findings of Niles and Sutherland, likely because, as Professor Justin McCarthy speculated, "One cannot help but believe that their evidence was not what those in power wished to hear."

One therefore must take with a grain of salt the claims of biased parties. (Even Harbord’s rare “pro-Turkish” claims are doubtful; 600,000 Turkish soldiers probably could not have died from typhus alone.)

Dadrian gives as source a June 1920 International Conciliation report from New York, regarding: "the official reports of the Turkish Government show 1,100,000 as having been deported," and Harbord’s estimate of Armenian dead as "about 800,000." Since the Ottoman census had on record only 1.3 million Armenians (and the successive Ottoman government had to respect that figure), we know 1.1 million couldn’t have been relocated, because Hovannisian himself reported 500,000 Ottoman-Armenians went to Russia/Transcaucasia on their own accord along with 50,000 to Iran, among those who were not subjected to or escaped being relocated. (In addition to the 200,000 or so exempted in the western region of the empire.)

The reports of an enemy occupied puppet Ottoman government cannot be trusted. If Harbord’s estimate of Armenian dead was 800,000, it surpassed what Armenians themselves told him, when they lobbied the general in 1919. Harbord wrote (66th Congress, 2nd session, Doc. 281): “The massacres of 1915-16 totaled some 600,000 of whom no less than 500,000 came from within the borders of the newly proposed state. Probably an equal number were deported from the same area.” So the Armenians told Harbord 600,000 were killed, and another 500,000 were “deported,” coming close to the actual count of Anatolia’s some 1 million Armenians.

The Conviction of Top Young Turk Leaders by the Turkish Military Tribunal

 

Dadrain/Zoryan decries the Memorandum’s assertion that none of these leaders "were convicted of organizing and executing massacres against the Armenian people." The fact of the matter is that these trials, with political retribution the main goal (although the Turks were certainly and nervously on the look-out for massacre culprits, since Britain warned the consequences would otherwise be most harsh during the Peace Conference), encompassed more than the “genocide.” Offenses ranged from violations of military order as minor as leaving a post without permission. Indeed, everyone knows the primary CUP leaders were sentenced to death in absentia. (Although the Turkish Memorandum was apparently mistaken if it wrote the "Tribunal did not convict Dr. Behaeddin Shakir and Cemal Azmi.") The question is whether these two leaders were found guilty for the Armenian massacres, or for more than the Armenian massacres. Dadrian tells us they were, but Dadrian plays fast and loose with facts, as he demonstrated with the fudging of British archival words in the Malta Tribunal, above. It is Dadrian who likely translated these Takvimi Vekayi reports that he presents as the source, and I’d prefer to reserve judgment until someone trustworthy can take a look at them. Ottoman Turkish in particular requires a deft hand to translate; one nuance can throw the whole meaning off.

 

Did the Ottoman Authorities Really Punish the Perpetrators of the Massacres of the Armenians During the War?

 

Here Dadrian will attempt to show the punishments during the war were half-hearted at best, and he has a few weasel facts to throw our way. He begins by complaining Gurun’s book allowed Bernard Lewis to change his views and revise “his earlier recognition of the Armenian genocide which he had seen fit to characterize as a "holocaust." In other words, Lewis is an accursed revisionist, even though it is the duty of the honest historian to revise as better information comes along. Any honest historian who studies Gurun’s impeccable “The Armenian File,” citing reliable sources, would have his or her mind changed as well.

(Meanwhile, it’s okay for a Deborah Lipstadt to proclaim the Armenian episode was not a genocide in her early work, only to go on and sign the awful 1998 commemoration stating very much the reverse. Of course, genocide scholars must acknowledge the Armenians’ story, otherwise they would be restricted access to their exclusive club. Regardless, I haven’t heard anyone label Lipstadt a “revisionist.”)

“Indeed, why would a government organize a mass murder and then turn around and punish some of the actual perpetrators?” Dadrian presents as his set-up. Here is how he attempts to discredit: The ones who were executed were put out of the way because they might “spill the beans” (as Dadrian/Zoryan puts it) about the criminal purposes of the administration. Kind of like the way the Mafia whacks anyone who might come back and finger them. A delightful parallel for those such as Dadrian who are giddy to have you believe the Turks are all criminally minded. To prove his case, of those executed (which might have numbered sixty two, as "An Unjust Trial" put it; but I'd prefer confirmation), he centers on the story of Major Ahmed and Lieutenant Halil, both of whom Dadrian calls “part of the Special Organization's killer squads.” Like a Mafia don, Talat Pasha is quoted as saying of the latter, “His liquidation in any case is necessary. Otherwise he will prove very harmful at a later date.” The source, or one of the two sources, is “Yakin Tarihin Üç Büyük Adam (The three great men from the recent past),” by Ziya Akir.

My Turkish is poor, but even I know the correct translation would be, “Three Great Men from Recent History.” Not much difference between the words “past” and “history”? The point is, if this is the kind of sloppiness Dadrian is comfortable with in his translations, nobody should take his word on his translations at face value. For example, is “liquidation” the real word Talat Pasha used? For a “scholar” who likes to use incriminating words like “annihilation” at every turn, I wouldn’t be surprised if the meaning was entirely different. If Talat Pasha is going to revert to his executioner’s role Franz Werfel made famous in “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” (the book that made Dadrian crack up as a young man), how could the title of this source book have referred to Talat Pasha (assuming he is one of the three in question) as a great man?

Even if this story contains truth, that the Ottoman authorities purposely wanted to murder their own “brigands” for some reason (if the reason was because they massacred Armenians and the bosses were afraid they would “spill the beans,” surely there were more than two killers needed to murder 1.5 million Armenians. Why were the rest who would “spill the beans” let loose? [And what of the countless other personnel not involved directly with the killings but who had to be acquainted with the dirty details of a massive extermination program, similar to the Nazi officer assigned to collect the loot of incoming concentration camp Jews? Couldn’t any of them have “spilled the beans”?] The amazing smoke-and-mirror theories Dadrian comes up with..!), how patently dishonest to make the examples of these two represent the rest who were executed.

For example, in his footnote, Dadrian explains:

“It should be recognized in this respect that not only IVth Army Commander Cemal in Syria and Palestine, but also IIId Army Commander Vehib Pasha in eastern Turkey, despite their strong ties to the Ittihad Party, refused to embrace the secret genocidal agenda of the party's top leadership and whenever they could they tried to resist and discourage the attendant massacres. In 1916, for example, Vehib court-martialed and hanged a gendarmery commander and his accomplice for organizing the massacre of some 2,000 disarmed Armenian labor battalion soldiers. He subsequently issued a proclamation threatening similar swift retribution against any and all who might be tempted to attack and harm the Armenians in the process of being deported. Ariamard (Istanbul), December 10, 1918. Cemal Pasha acted similarly. In 1916, for example, he executed a gendarmery officer on charges of rape and assault.”

So in other words, some of the criminals who were executed deserved it, but most were assassins who “knew too much regarding the lethal secret operations conducted against the victim population” who would have “spilled the beans.” Now imagine this: “Good” German General Rommel discovers what is going on at a concentration camp. He takes it upon himself to conduct a court-martial of the camp’s SS, and hangs a few.

Is this a conceivable scenario? What would Hitler’s reaction have been? Similarly, if Commanders Vehib and Cemal butted in with "party boss" Talat Pasha’s supposed secret orders, and monkeyed around with the systematic extermination plan, how long would they have lasted?

(ADDENDUM, 11-07: The 1919-20 kangaroo courts sentenced Cemal Pasha to death, in a supreme demonstration of how invalid these courts were.)

For a further study of these 2,000 soldiers, here is where to go, including a look at what happened when Armenians slaughtered an equal number of Turkish soldiers... as related by an Armenian army officer. (When Dadrian tells this story elsewhere, by the way, the number goes up to a whopping "2,500.")

 

Hitler, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials and the Armenian Genocide

 

Here Dadrian attempts to prove the truthfulness of the “Hitler Quote.” Of course; if this quote is successfully discredited, what would “Armenian genocide” newspaper articles and TV shows have left, when they try to list the “evidence”? Besides, taking the word of the infamously immoral dictator is critical in establishing the all-important connection to the Holocaust.

Dadrian slimes off: “Hitler is reported to have included in his list the case of ‘the extermination of the Armenians,’ among the mass murders in history that he perceived to have been successful operations.” The key word: “reported.”

The source: “Edouard Calic, Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler. ... 1971.” Already the precious Hitler Quote is endangered since refusing to be admitted at Nuremberg; the officers of the WWII tribunal realized something was fishy. The Armenian genocide obsession gains rebirth in 1965, with a 50th anniversary remembrance. With the renewed interest, we are offered mysteriously “confidential” interviews that hadn’t been uncovered in the quarter-century past, despite the Hitler-mania from many historical quarters. (Perhaps the Andonian-like “Hitler Diaries” forger got the idea from this 1971 work.) Two years after the book is released, an elderly Armenian (related above) who had betrayed his Ottoman homeland as a teenager (by joining the Russians) shoots two Turkish diplomats in California, starting off a new wave of Armenian terrorism.

Dadrian/Zoryan points to Prof. Gerard Weinberg, whom I presented in the TAT site as the only evidence that made me wonder. But not long ago, a reader informed me of a letter Dr. Robert John wrote back at the New York Times (the two were having a little spar), and based on John’s words, I don’t think as highly of Weinberg’s “evidence.” John is the rare Armenian historian who dares to buck the tide, at least with the all-important Hitler Quote.

Dadrian then offers some genocide scholar blather in the form of M. Cherif Bassiouni, who: “links the mass murder of the Armenians ‘now commonly referred to as genocide [and which] remained unpunished,’ to the calamity of World War II.”

What a perfect example of why we should never take the word of ignorant genocide scholars. (1) Hitler didn’t need the example of the Armenians to inspire his Final Solution; his nation had already engaged in systematic extermination in 1904-07 with the Hereros, one of the real “first Holocausts of the 20th century,” among others; the reader is advised to consult Nick's excellent essay examining Hitler's genuine genocidal influences (2) Even if Hitler got influenced, particularly since he was living in Berlin during the Tehlirian trial (where the murderer was allowed to go free), who was to blame? The Ottomans, who were accused of this hoax, or the shrill voices of the West (in Hitler’s country, Vicar Lepsius wasted no opportunity to scream his “Armenian massacres” stories) mindlessly making slanderous accusations with extreme prejudice and no real facts? (3) It is not lawful for an accused to be tried twice for the same crime. By stating the Ottomans “remained unpunished,” Bassiouni obviously never heard of the Malta Tribunal (or listens exclusively to the Dadrians who claim the trial process was non-existent), where the accused were all released.

David Matas perhaps is not off the mark when Dadrian quotes him as saying, "Nothing emboldens a criminal so much as the knowledge he can get away with the crime.” No wonder 1992 Armenia felt free to use the same “Death & Exile” Orthodox technique that served so well in the past, when they massacred innocent Azeri civilians, scaring off nearly a million, to take over Karabakh. That’s because the world didn’t care about the 518,000 non-Armenian Ottomans the Armenians savagely murdered, with Russian help. (Following the precedent of their killer forefathers, the Russians helped also with Karabakh.)

Probably the only conclusive reference that Hitler has been known to make about the Armenians was from a December 12,1942 speech where he called the Armenians "unreliable" (UNZUVERLASSIG) and "dangerous" (GEFAHRLICH).

 

The Relevance and Significance of the U.S. Archives

 

Unlike the Entente Powers, Dadrian explains, the USA had the advantage of having a network of consuls throughout, and “this fact renders the American archives highly relevant for the thorough study of Armenian deportations and massacres."

That might have been true if we didn’t already learn these archives were the last-ditch hope to prosecute the Turks at Malta, but none of the hearsay proved usable. So embarrassing was the caliber of this “evidence,” the State Department only agreed to let the British make use of it under the condition the source not be identified. Even in the reports that made mention of two Ottoman officials, the British ambassador commented:

“...[E]ven in these cases the accounts given were confined to the personal opinions of the writers; no concrete facts being given which could constitute satisfactory incriminating evidence.”

That sums up the value of the consular and missionary testimony of the U.S. archives. Aside from outright fabrications, the brunt boiled down to “facts” obtained second hand, and “opinions.”
Whatever Dadrian tries to weasel into our hearts and minds is then meaningless. But let’s see what he has come up with. Before we do that, however...

Let’s examine the attitude of the USA. Even though the USA excluded the Ottomans from their list of foes when the USA finally entered the war (keeping in mind the safety of the vast properties of the missionaries), the anti-Turkish propaganda in the USA exceeded those even in the Entente nations. As Gurun wrote:

Without any doubt the USA was the country where anti-Ottoman views were most prevalent in that period. The information sent by the Protestant American missionaries in Turkey from the 1890s onward, and the attitude of the press has poisoned public opinion in the United States with regard to the Turkish people to such an extent that a member of that race is seldom thought or spoken of in this country otherwise than as the "unspeakable" ... Nor was the government itself impartial in its opinion and attitude concerning the present or the future of the Ottoman state.... When Woodrow Wilson was considering the appointment of ambassadors shortly after his election in 1912, Colonel House suggested Henry Morgenthau as Ambassador to Turkey; Wilson replied, "There ain't going to be no Turkey," to which House rejoined, 'Then let him go look for it.' (“United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914-1924,” 1965)

(The preacher’s son President hated the Ottoman Empire so much, he evidently already had in mind to do what he could do extinguish it. That speaks volumes. No wonder Wilson turned the other cheek with the “self-determination” part of his Fourteen Points after the war, with his carving up intentions of the eastern provinces, giving these territories as a gift to the Armenians.)

It was in this atmosphere that most U.S. consuls entered this alien land, with religious and racist bigotry bursting through their pores, a hatred reinforced through their frequent contact with the only fellow Americans nearby, the missionaries. These are the representatives Dadrian would have us believe entertained a “prism of neutrality.” If any representative would show even a glimmer of neutrality, as with Admiral Bristol a few years later, his character would be subjected to vicious attack as a “pro-Turk.” (ADDENDUM: See also Hovannisian's smear treatment of another objective American officer, Lt. Dunn.) “Neutrality” was defined (as Dadrian is defining it now) by those Turcophobes such as consuls J. B. Jackson and George (“The Blight of Asia”) Horton, the latter of whom felt comfortable with equating the Turks with the anti-Christ.

“[I]t is as if the stories of the Armenian genocide are just an array of falsehoods maliciously fabricated by the representatives of the U.S. government who, in reckless disregard of the mandates of their official duties, deliberately misinformed and misled their superiors in Washington.” There isn’t much in this paper where Dadrian managed to present the truth, but at least he got something right. Let’s keep in mind these falsehoods were spoon-fed to the consuls by missionaries and Armenians. The consuls never eyewitnessed any massacres; Leslie Davis wrote he saw corpses, in a land littered by corpses.

 

In 1915, The New York Times printed this story:

 CRITICISES MR. MORGENTHAU

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

London Times Correspondent Says He Wasted Energy on Zionists

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
LONDON, Friday, Oct. 8,--The Times published a long account from a correspondent, of the American massacres in which he says:

"Attempts of the American Ambassador to procure some alleviation of the lot of the Armenians have thus far proved unsuccessful. Mr. Morgenthau, in the opinion of good observers, has wasted too much diplomatic energy on behalf of the Zionists of Palestine, who were in no danger of massacre, to have any force to spare.

 

Henry Morgenthau

   The clue is with one of the New York Times articles accusing Morgenthau of caring more for the Jews. As we learned in “The Burning Tigris,” although author Balakian ingenuously asserted Morgenthau was not a Zionist, the ambassador was under the spell of über-Zionist and hysterical pro-Armenian activist Rabbi Stephen Wise. The ungrateful idea was to knock out history’s greatest pre-USA protector of Judaism, to clear the path for a Jewish homeland... a homeland that could not have gotten started without the Ottomans’ allowance for its roots, in the first place. America’s entry into the war would have guaranteed the defeat of the Sick Man of Europe.

Abram Elkus -- separated at birth?

 Morgenthau’s pre-Bristol successors surely were not going to make radical changes in Morgenthau’s “Hate the Turk” policy, as the bigoted consular network was already well entrenched. The immediate temporary fill-in, U.S. Chargé Hoffman Philip, was likely under the same influences, if he worked under Morgenthau’s wing. We don’t know of the motivations of the official next ambassador, Abram Elkus (who visually appears to have been “separated at birth” with Morgenthau); but he obviously didn’t have the courage or fairness of Admiral Bristol, to look at the picture evenly.

Dadrian accuses Lowry of pointing to the “few ailing trees — the purported flaws of Morgenthau's book — thereby ignoring the robustness of the forest — the fundamental truth about the extermination of the Ottoman Armenian population.” Is the prosecutor-professor living in a dream world? The forest in its entirety is a black one, with “slander after slander,” as Lowry puts it. The fact that Henry Morgenthau emerges as such an unscrupulous, dishonest character is all we need to know to decide on the worth of this phony book. If he lies constantly, nothing he says can be taken seriously. Perhaps Dadrian cannot understand this concept, since he is another pea in Morgenthau’s deceptive pod. However, the reader can turn to Lowry’s analysis, using as evidence Morgenthau’s own words, and decide.

As an example, Dadrian complains that Morgenthau’s parting words with Talat aren’t evidenced in Morgenthau’s private entries. (Talat says, "We are through with [the Armenians]." Of course, being “through” means the Armenians have been moved out, and the rebellion danger they presented has been averted... in other words, the problem has been solved. However way Morgenthau’s Armenian translator explained this word, assuming Talat actually said such a thing, and whatever other word Morgenthau overlooked to go for a more sinister meaning in the writing of his propagandistic book, Talat surely would not have told Morgenthau that the Armenians were all killed off... even if that were the case.)

With glee, Dadrian points to another account where Talat makes a similar statement to Bernstorff, who happens to be the German ambassador. ('What on earth do you want? The question is settled, there are no more Armenians.') Yet another Christian-sympathizing  German, Bernstoff had no idea what was really taking place, like his American ambassadorial counterpart; As George Schreiner wrote in his preface to “The Craft Sinister,” "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.” One future “historian” is Vahakn Dadrian, although we have seen time and again that the sociologist is anything but a historian. A real historian does not cover up the parts that don’t serve his agenda.

One perfect example of Dadrian’s lack of morals is his complete overlooking of Schreiner as the rare, genuine eyewitness of the Armenian convoys. In his book, Schreiner flatly stated there was no extermination policy, and the tragedies that resulted occurred from Ottoman “ineptness.” Dadrian does not like Schreiner’s indictment of Morgenthau, so what does Dadrian do? He presents us with select passages from Schreiner’s books pointing to the suffering of the Armenians.

Genuinely neutral Western eyewitness H.J. Pravitz also recounted terrible Armenian suffering in his own report, but his truth was that there was no extermination policy. ("I have seen dying and dead along the roads — but among hundreds of thousands there must, of course, occur casualties. I have seen childrens' corpses, shredded to pieces by jackals, and pitiful individuals stretch their bony arms with piercing screams of "ekmek" [bread]. But I have never seen direct Turkish assaults against the ones hit by destiny.") Schreiner was the ONLY (yes! The ONLY) American field reporter who witnessed the Ottoman interior in 1915 (Pg. 297, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915"), and he observed terrible suffering. But suffering does not equal genocide; Schreiner's honest testimony that the aim was relocation and not liquidation is one that cannot be ignored.

Forget about the fact that no Turk denies the Armenians suffered, and quite a few died of massacres; even if 1% of 1.5 million as “Le Figaro” figured (from massacres and other deprivations of the marches), that would still be 15,000 too much. If we go with Dadrian’s forest analogy, it is the Armenian prosecutor who neglects the whole, and concentrates on the trees that suit him. Here, the overlying whole from Schreiner is that there was no genocide. How could Dadrian be so wholly devoid of ethics as to try and cover that up?

 

 

As with “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the Armenian pods have made excellent strides in infiltrating practically every corner of western (and other) societies. The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, for example, claimed a pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population of 1.5 million, the fair norm among “neutral” parties. In 1953, this figure skyrocketed to over 2.5 million. The writer was an Armenian.

National Geographic Magazine came up with a 2004 article on Armenia, where the false 1.5 million mortality claim was repeated., along with other propagandistic claims. An editor of Armenian origin is on the magazine's editorial staff.

Now I’m very proud of the Library of Congress; the Library of Congress should be my nation’s harbinger of truth. So imagine my surprise when I discovered the web site of the Library of Congress repeating the familiar Armenian propaganda:

“...(T)he Ottoman government ordered large-scale roundups, deportations, and systematic torture and murder of Armenians...”

“...Prewar population of about 3 million Armenians...” (That number keeps going up and up!)

“...By 1917 fewer than 200,000 Armenians remained in Turkey...”

"1895: Massacre of 300,000 Armenian subjects by Ottoman Turks."

The Library of Congress has become a hotbed for the worst of Armenian propaganda.

With a little investigation, I learned the man in charge of the appropriate department (the Middle East Division) was one of the pod people, a Dr. Levon Avdoyan. A letter to the head librarian, James Billington, predictably produced no response. Pod people have a tendency to create other pod people.

Billington is so simpatico with the Armenians that he actually besmirched the Library of Congress's good name by co-sponsoring a Sept. 2000 "Armenian Genocide Conference" with... the impossibly partial Armenian National Institute! (This led to the propaganda book, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," edited by pro-genocider Jay Winter. Billington's daughter, Susan Billington Harper, contributed a chapter on a missionary.)

This is the Library of Congress. Anyone pointing to the Library of Congress can expect no second guessing of the information provided there. (Indeed, that’s how I learned about the information; I read a letter from an Armenian saying, SEE! That’s what the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS says. Just like when the missionaries and consuls got their notes together in WWI and their claims substantiated one another. Just like the Armenians and their genocide scholar allies point to each other today. The sinister effect results in what seems to be an overwhelming consensus.

And Vahakn Dadrian wants you to go to these sources to find out the truth. It’s a sad day when one can’t even go to the Library of Congress to let the truth emerge.

To borrow Dadrian's smart-aleck words, the French essayist Montaigne once observed:

no one is exempt from talking nonsense;
the misfortune is to do it solemnly.
- Essays v. III, i.