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The reason why the so-called "genocide
scholars" are unqualified to make judgments of history is that almost
none are historians. What do we say about the rare exceptions whose specialty
happens to be history?
Let's review what is expected of a genuine historian:
Historians should love the truth. A historian has a duty to try to write
only the truth. Before historians write they must look at all relevant
sources. They must examine their own prejudices, then do all they can to
insure that those prejudices do not overwhelm the truth. Only then should they
write history. The historians creed must be, "Consider all the sides of
an issue; reject your own prejudices. Only then can you hope to find the
truth."
(For the rest of this excellent description by Prof. Justin McCarthy, a real
historian, tune in to his "The First Shot.")
The typical "genocide scholar" takes to real history as a duck takes
to oil. These agenda-ridden false scholars establish their conclusion first,
and then try to fit the evidence around their thesis. Because their adherence
to the genocide cause (and only selective examples, mind you; the hypocrites
ignore the vast number of inhumanity's historical examples that aren't
"sexy" enough, or when the victims are not, in their minds,
deserving enough) supersedes the truth, it does not matter to the
"genocide scholar" whether the "evidence" comes from a
corrupt source. If the "evidence" affirms what the "genocide
scholar" has determined to be a genocide, then these honesty-challenged
ideologues will welcome such "evidence" with open arms.
All the while, the world thinks of the "genocide scholar" as a noble
pillar of truth, because who will argue that genocide is the worst crime
against humanity? Anyone who is against genocide must be "good."
Just like when the missionaries of the Ottoman Empire broke the Ninth
Commandment (THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBOR)
constantly, but folks accepted their statements as the Gospel Truth, because
clergymen were not supposed to lie.
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Professors
Kurt Johassohn (left) and Frank Chalk |
Our "genocide scholar" for
examination here will be Prof. Frank Chalk, along with a small peek at his
"partner," Kurt Jonassohn. (Retired, 1997; the two hooked up in
1978.) The latter at least may be partly excused for his own ineptitude, since
his specialty, as with many other "genocide scholars," is in the
area of Sociology. That is, Kurt Jonassohn makes no pretensions of being an
expert in History, as does Frank Chalk.
(Mind you, this is not to say Frank Chalk gets everything wrong, historically.
But if his historical chops are as bad as he is on record for exhibiting in
regards to the "Armenian Genocide," then a truth-seeker would be
foolish in accepting his other evaluations, at face value.)
|
Israel
Charny (PBS, "The Armenian Genocide," 2006) |
Frank Chalk is an Associate Professor of History (having
received his doctorate in the University of Wisconsin) in Canada's Concordia
University, and a founding co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide
and Human Rights Studies (MIGS, founded 1986). He has also co-authored, along
with Kurt Jonassohn, the book published in 1990, The History and Sociology
of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. (The duo, while together, has
taught a genocide course since 1980-81.) Professor Chalk has also served as
President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (1999--2001),
a post currently occupied by the famous non-scholar, Israel Charny. Chalk has also lent his
presence to The Zoryan Institute’s Genocide and Human Rights Program, also
in Canada (Toronto).
We can see Frank Chalk is a full-fledged member of the Genocide Club. As an
article in The Canadian-Jewish News (see below) put it, genocides have
constituted his (and Jonassohn's) "academic bread and butter."
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His Partner's Own Ineptitude |
As we've said, Kurt Jonassohn has a sort of excuse. He is only a sociologist, and as such,
is "professionally" unqualified to make judgments of history. But let's have a
taste of Kurt Jonassohn's truly embarrassing level of "scholarship."
In a 1993 paper Kurt
Jonassohn has written, "DEFINING THE PERPETRATOR SEEKING PROOF OF INTENT," here
is how he has established the all-important intent" factor:
A good part of the differing interpretations between the Turkish
government and the Armenians of the events of 1915 hinges on the existence of written
orders for the genocide.(6) While the Armenians produced such documents, the defenders of
the Turkish position have tried to prove them to be forgeries.
His footnote 6 is: Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I
Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide." International Journal
of Middle East Studies, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 1986): 311-360.
This source, of course, is Vahakn Dadrian's
Greatest Embarrassment, the propagandist's effort to pathetically attempt to cast
doubt on the fact that the Andonian works have been forged. Jonassohn's foolish
partisanship is demonstrated by the fact that it isn't only "the
defenders of the Turkish position" that have shown these papers to be the
fakes that they are. Aside from the cold, hard logic it would take for any objective party
to see how phony they are, even the British dismissed them for the 1919-21 Malta Tribunal process, as did the kangaroo
court proceedings of Soghoman Tehlirian's 1921 trial
in Berlin. (And these are far from the only examples; Aram Andonian himself confessed in
1937 that his work “was not a historical one, but rather one aiming at propaganda,"
decisively exposing his sham.) Jonassohn is so married to his cause and club, he is still
trying to make it seem (as do Dadrian and Yves Ternon, the latter a member of Kurt
Jonassohn's genocide institute's "Academic Advisory Board," shedding strong
light on the "scholarly" worth of the institution) that the Andonian forgeries
are genuine. By sinking so low, Kurt Jonassohn has done a fine job in obliterating
whatever credibility he might have.
Kurt Jonassohn seems to be aware of the worthlessness of the Andonian papers to have gone
on to further write: "What sometimes gets lost in this debate
is the great volume of evidence favoring the Armenian position which makes the existence
of written orders quite irrelevant." Here again, Kurt Jonassohn demonstrates
himself to be a sorry scholar par non-excellence. Any real scholar who examines
what Kurt Jonassohn calls "evidence" will be quick to discover that the hearsay,
canards and personal opinions substituting for "evidence" can never take the
place of actual facts. To get an idea, here's a quick rundown of what Prof. Dennis
Papazian has offered as "the
great volume of evidence," as has another
Armenian propagandist.
Putting Chalk on the
Blackboard
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Before we examine what caliber of historian Frank
Chalk represents, let's examine what appears to make him tick. As his retired
colleague, Chalk's Jewish family came from Germany ("Concordia professors
honoured for their work on genocide," The Canadian-Jewish
News, July 13, 2000, Janice Arnold; hereinafter the "CJNews article"),
so his genocide interests began as with most Holocaust-inspired "genocide
scholars." As we learn from "Imagining the Unimaginable" (Concordia
University Magazine, Sept. 2000, Julia Gedeon Matusky; hereinafter the "Concordia
article"):
His first exposure to the effects of genocide came as a
10-year-old living in the Bronx, when his father invited a cousin to live with the
family... He could not understand why for no apparent reason she would break down in
tears. He asked his parents about her crying and they explained that she had lost
her family in Auschwitz. 'Knowing her story sensitized me'."
This is the typical origin of the "genocide scholar." Almost always
Jewish, the trauma of the Holocaust propels them to make a field of study of the
area, usually under the excuse of "preventing future genocides." The
sneaky Armenian genocide proponents understood what a great ally such
genocide-obsessed people could be, as we all know the Holocaust is in a category of
its own. (The Armenians knew criticizing the Holocaust isn't allowed... they
craftily figured, why don't we try to put our "genocide" on the same level, and ride on Holocaust
coattails?) Great Armenian wealth subsidized many of these "genocide
institutes" and other related genocide organizations that began to spring up,
beginning in the 1980s. (For example, the one million dollars reportedly promised by
an Armenian, Set
Momjian [or Seth Moomjian],
to the U.S. Holocaust Museum). The Holocaust specialists, in turn, blindly supported
the Armenian propagandists, perhaps because — as Prof. McCarthy has speculated —
of an irrational fear that delegitimizing the Armenian story may also cast doubt on
the Holocaust.
Regardless of whether an alleged genocide is real or not, much of the interest boils
down to politics, frequently shortchanging the facts. It's a pity such an industry
has been created of "genocide," as adherents are emotional, and the ideas
are faith-based more
than reality-based. it's also a pity the reasonable warning of Robert John (Hovhanes)
(The Reporter, "America's Leading Armenian Newspaper," August 2,
1984) would hardly be heeded:
"The Armenian, the Jew or the African should not damage their development
with a continual conditioning of hate; neither should spurious guilt be vented upon
others. These negative preoccupations and obsessions are obstructing our evolution.”
(Regarding Dr. John's powerful statement, Chalk — in the CJNews article —
addressed the student in his classes ethnically representing the perpetrators would
not be vilified because "We do not demonize any people.
The perpetrators are those who were in power at the time, not a whole group."
While of course he wasn't going to berate a Turkish student in his classroom with
charges that the Turk was responsible for a century-old genocide [that
responsibility has been accepted by Fatma Gocek],
is he blind to the fact that the very essence of the "Armenian Genocide"
rests in perpetuating hatred? Look at the literature; the Turks as a whole are
condemned as subhuman monsters. What happens to the "human rights" of
these descendants of the accused, particularly when the politicized accusations have
yet to be proven?)
In these articles, Chalk alludes to the two "big" genocides or (in the
Armenian case) would-be genocides propelling the genocide industry; the Holocaust,
and the "Armenian Genocide." For example, in the CJNews article, Chalk
points to how his genocide class has attracted others, even though "We had expected most of the students to be Jewish, and maybe a few
Armenians..."
To the credit of both Chalk and Jonassohn, they appear to have made an honest
attempt to get into other historical events which might be defined as genocide,
other than the "Big Political Two." Usually, agenda-ridden "genocide
scholars" are primarily interested in these two, and pay lip service to
runners-up, as Rwanda and Bosnia. But here we have talk of events going far back as
Carthage, and one that was new to me (from the Concordia article):
" ...[T]he people of Melos refused to
pay tribute to Athens, even though Athens warned that not doing so would result in
death. The Athenians could not accept such resistance because it might encourage the
people on other islands to do the same. Therefore, they killed all of the men of
Melos, and enslaved the women and children and dispersed them so they ceased to
exist as a people. 'It makes finding the Venus de Milo on Melos so ironic,' Chalk
notes. 'This great symbol of ancient culture is actually a remnant of a civilization
that perpetrated one of the earliest genocides in recorded history...'"
(What do you know. The Greek root of the word "genocide" then bears
special significance. The idea for annihilation might well have originated with the
Greeks themselves. Note that this was one of history's successful examples,
where the people actually became a memory, essentially wiped out. But let's also
keep in mind that modern Greeks are off the hook, as they bear negligible
resemblance to ancient Greeks.)
(Some 85 years later, Alexander the Great and his Macedonians would use the idea on
the Greeks themselves, when he cleaned out Thebes. [One source claims 6,000
murdered, 30,000 subjected to slavery, city razed.] Away from home, he gave it as
badly to the island people of Tyre [one source claims 7,000 murdered, 30,000
enslaved]; remember, populations weren't that dense in days of antiquity, so these
losses were catastrophic; as comparison, some estimates have it that the total
population of Melos, before their "genocide," was only around 3,000. But
the Greeks can still be proud for their pioneer work in "genocide"...
after all, don't Greeks love to pass off Alexander as a Greek?)
|
Dr.
Frank Chalk n 2004 |
Regardless, it's highly likely these
"peripheral" genocides were mentioned in passing, and it is the "Big
Political Two" that has received the main thrust in Chalk's classrooms, over
the years. Even if Chalk has been more open-minded in paying note to less popular
examples, the question is, has he gone far enough? Has he paid note to the ones
everyone prefers to ignore, because the victims are politically seen in the West as
aggressors, and other aggressors must maintain their political status as the poor,
innocent victims? We'll get back to this critical point later, which blows the lid
off the hateful hypocrisy of the genocide industry; "Genocide Club"
members enjoy pointing to themselves as noble defenders of "human rights,"
but that concept becomes repulsively hollow when they also designate some humans to
be more valuable than others.
The CJNews article informs us, "Their definition of
genocide is broader than that contained in the United Nations Convention. It
includes not only ethnocide but also 'one-sided mass killing' of political and
social groups by a state or authority."
Of course, then we are getting into deeper trouble. By turning a few knobs there and
pulling a few switches here, any conflict can be made to look like a
"genocide." One problem with the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide is that
the definition is already too broad. But if we are going to get into absurd
territory, such as the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)'s
allowance of only one person
needing to be killed in order to define "genocide," then the whole concept
becomes especially meaningless.
Note, however, that Chalk appears to be requiring that the perpetrators need to be a
"state" or an "authority." The latter is troublesome, as the
U.S. regiment that went berserk and one-sidedly massacred hundreds of Vietnemese
civilians in My Lai might also be defined as an "authority." A massacre,
however, is not the same as "genocide."
Yet in the Armenian example, the story is presented as a parallel to the Holocaust.
Here, the Ottoman "state" is accused of behaving in Nazi-like fashion.
Chalk also blames the state, in this example. For instance, in an October 1, 1999 letter Chalk
wrote to a lawyer (by the name of Georges P. Hèbert, hereinafter, the "1999
letter"), Chalk clearly points the finger (we don't know which finger) to
the "rulers of Turkey," after they began "inflicting" their
"horrors" in April 1915. He also signed his name to the April 24, 1998 commemoration (hereinafter, the "1998
commemoration"), which proclaimed: "On April 24,
1915, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic,
premeditated genocide of the Armenian people..."
Therefore, the burden of proof on the associate professor of history rests entirely
on how he proves "intent," not according to his special definition of
genocide, but according to the rules of the 1948 U.N. Convention. (Which also exempts political groups, differing
from Chalk's own definition.) Will he be able to do so?
As we wind up this section examining Chalk's inner makings, the 2000 Concordia
article informs us:
"Chalk, 63, acknowledges that the work occasionally gets
to him. 'Sometimes I cry,' he admits. 'I’m reading a memoir or a book about a
particular set of victims, and the tears are just pouring down onto the pages.' ...
He says, 'I try not to lose my human feeling but to keep my eye on the goal of
improving people’s lives. Therefore, it’s important to remain focused and
analytical.'"
The requirement of a genuine historian is to examine all relevant data in a
dispassionate manner, in order to reach scientific and impartial conclusions.
How well has Frank Chalk succeeded in maintaining his objective focus and analysis?
(In addition to the success of his "goal" in "improving people's
lives"; he has done anything but improve the lives of people he has helped to
unjustly defame.) Or has he allowed himself to become too emotionally involved? In
short, has Frank Chalk allowed his genocide-sensitivity to supersede his duties
as a professional historian?
The way to answer the above question is by analyzing the validity of what Chalk the
Historian has presented as the historical facts.
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One
example of a Chalk "Fact" |
Frank Chalk was part of a talk in which he criticized the role of the press, in failing to set
off alarm bells with impending genocides. "[L]et me just say a
word about reporters and genocide and history," Chalk began, going on to
inform us that New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Walter Duranty "lied knowingly, and with malice and forethought about the famine in
Ukraine in the early 1930’s." In fact, according to Chalk, Duranty got his
Pulitzer Prize for this very dishonest coverage. (Perhaps not unlike this other Pulitzer Prize winning
"genocide scholar.") Chalk then contrasted the lying reporter with "Malcolm Muggerige, who was then writing for the Manchester Guardian [and
who] told the truth," but it was still "Walter
Duranty succeeding in obfuscating an ongoing genocide that starved to death with intent,
to destroy a part of the Ukrainian people, some 4-6 million Ukrainians."
(I confess only the barest knowledge of the Ukrainian episode; Stalin surely was no saint
when it came to the treatment of Soviet folk. But if Chalk is charging the famine had
"intent" behind it, he had better be prepared to back up his statement with more
than his own emotions.)
So it sounds like we had a lying New York Times reporter who succeeded in drowning out the
truthful voice of another reporter.
Chalk then ties this in with how reporters "played a very small
role" in the case of several genocides, and the first example he provides is
"the Armenian genocide of 1915."
This is the kind of sloppiness that serves as an indication regarding Chalk's scholarly
methodology. Armenian propaganda loves to pound over our heads that newspapers reported
the "Armenian Genocide" widely. (For example, Peter Balakian loves to brag that
the New York Times presented 145
"genocide" articles in 1915, alone; the biased and wide scale press coverage is,
in fact, frequently pointed to as "genocidal evidence" by industry adherents.)
In the case of the "Armenian Genocide," the situation was the reverse: it's
not that reporters failed to act as the "trip wires or the signalers" of
genocide; they blindly accepted or even created fraudulent information and helped turn a
nonexistent genocide into a genocide.
Curiously, in the 1999 letter, Chalk had this to say:
"Articles about the killings filled the pages of the American
press, including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune." (He also
confirmed this point in the 1998 commemoration: "The Armenian
Genocide ... was reported regularly in newspapers across the U.S."
Isn't it interesting Chalk directly contradicted himself?
What's more interesting is that Chalk pays note to the fact that a journalist, and one
from the prestigious New York Times at that, would be capable of falsifying the
facts. isn't it possible then, that newspaper reports don't always make for a source of
good history?
Particularly if the historian in Chalk bothered to examine those newspaper reports. Nearly
all of them were derived from second, or third hand sources. This is what we would define
as "hearsay."
According to "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," an Armenian
Genocide propaganda book co-edited by Jay Winter, there was one and only one American
journalist who journeyed into the Ottoman interior in 1915. That reporter was war
correspondent George Schreiner.
George Schreiner's conclusion: No genocide.
So here we had a cavalcade of press articles falsely reporting on how bestial the Turks
were, and how innocent the Armenians were, and nearly all of the reportage was based on
hearsay or propagandistic sources. Newspapers had a field day providing these tales of
atrocity, because their readers ate up such sensationalistic tellings... along with the
fact that the prejudice against Turks was (similar to current times) hot and heavy in
Western societies.
George Schreiner knew the truth, but the censors from his side disallowed him from getting
the truth out. Even German newspapers disallowed the truth, because religious forces
became powerful in Germany. (See link directly above.) What an interesting parallel to
Chalk's example of Malcolm Muggerige, the reporter whose truth got drowned out by the
other reportage that had been falsified.
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Chalk, from his 1999 letter, providing "information on
the relationship between the Armenian people of Turkey and the Turkish Government
since 1915":
The United States would not enter the First World War until
1917 and American diplomats and missionaries, well represented in the cities, towns
and villages of Turkey, were in a good position to observe the lethal events.
Frank Chalk is already showing us what kind of "historian" he is, by
accepting the word of religious fanatics
whose own prayers betrayed their Godly duty in vilifying the Muslim Turks. As for
those diplomats, how many witnessed events firsthand? Almost all simply accepted the
word of missionaries and Armenians. Is it possible these Westerners, planted in an
alien land whose Muslim inhabitants were bloody barbarians (as the Western diplomats
were raised to believe), could have been prejudiced? Few Muslims spoke English and
other foreign languages... the "dragomans" (translators) were nearly
always Armenian. Furthermore, could some of these diplomats have had ulterior motives, such as
wishing to get the USA into the war, or in kicking the Turks out bag and baggage in
order to establish a good Christian civilization? A responsible and truth-seeking
historian must evaluate the validity of the sources, not simply accept their
validity because the sources are in line with a pre-determined conclusion. If a
historian wishes to affirm a pre-determined conclusion, then that person cannot be
called a "historian." A more accurate word to describe such a person would
be "propagandist."
The United States in 1915 was still a neutral power,
pro-Allied in its economic policies and cultural loyalties, to be sure, but
struggling to broker a truce between the Allied powers, on the one hand, and the
Central Powers...
Thanks to relentless propaganda especially since the 19th century, the USA arguably
had the most hostile anti-Turkish attitude, among the other Western powers. If the
USA was struggling to broker a truce, that had nothing to do with regarding the
Ottoman Empire fairly, and to suggest otherwise is to be highly disingenuous. (In
other words, if the USA thought of the Central Powers, they thought strictly of
Germany and Austria-Hungary, and not of the two other second-class citizens
involved.) U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the preacher's son, made his prejudices
clear when he declared, "There ain't going
to be no Turkey."
"It took less than two weeks before the American press
began to describe the planned and systematic destruction of Armenians by
well-coordinated gangs of government-authorized and highly organized killers,
operating in conjunction with the armed forces of Turkey."
Here is an excellent example of what an awfully irresponsible "historian"
Frank Chalk is. A real historian can't make a statement to the effect of
"government-authorized" and "in conjunction with the armed
forces" if there is no factual evidence. If Chalk has accepted the
propagandistic speculations of one such as Vahakn Dadrian, then Chalk has allowed
himself to join the ranks of the propagandists... the kiss of death to any true
scholar.
On 10 July 1915, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau
cabled Washington summarizing the confidential observations of U.S. consular
officials and missionaries all around the country, leaving no doubt that the
slaughter was coordinated by the violently nationalistic Committee of Union and
Progress, which controlled the Government of Turkey.
Yet Morgenthau himself is on record, in a communication to his government in March 1915, of depicting the
Committee of Union and Progress as barely in control of the government. Wouldn't a
true historian (that is, one who has bothered to scratch beneath the surface,
something a propagandist would find counter-productive at best and abhorrent at
worst) then ask, if there were things that went out of control, and if the
government was not fully in control, then could the blame rest elsewhere?
(Particularly if that same government was on record for trying to safeguard the
lives of the Armenians, and for punishing those who committed crimes against the
Armenians?) Morgenthau is also on record for being aware of the military reasons
necessitating the Armenians' relocation. So in fact, did his boss Robert Lansing (U.S. Secretary of State, November 1916):
"I could see that [the
Armenians'] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the
territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations
constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their
homes."
Here is another excellent example of what an
awfully irresponsible "historian" Frank Chalk is. Note that he calls this
relocation policy a "slaughter," paying zero notice to the causes
of Armenian deaths, "malnutrition, pestilence, and community retaliatory
vendettas." (As Bruce Fein worded it.) If the idea was to slaughter the
Armenians, the bulk could not have possibly survived. The very fact that Chalk chose
to cite a conflicted source such as Morgenthau, when (well by the time Chalk had
written his 1999 letter) Morgenthau's own words had already exposed Morgenthau for the liar he was,
does not speak for Chalk's scholarly integrity.
(And to drive that last point home, let's recruit George Schreiner's warning, from
his preface to “The Craft Sinister,” in criticism of Morgenthau, "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.” Schreiner would have been
equally contemptuous of certain "future historian(s)" as Frank Chalk, who
would prefer to pass off such drivel as actual history.)
"Canadian
newspapers, too, published numerous reports on the murder of the Armenian people,
now recognized as the first large genocide of the twentieth century. On 14 April
1916, La Presse published a report from Paris declaring that..."
"Paris"? Would that be the Paris from France, one of the countries hoping
to wipe the Ottoman Empire off the face of the earth, via secret treaties (and later, through
the Sèvres Treaty)? Is that the kind of source a self-respecting
"historian" would point to? Particularly when the source is a newspaper,
which Chalk knows so well can't always substitute for historical fact? (A newspaper
story is only as good as its reporter. Chalk is aware even Pulitzer Prize winning
reporters can falsify the facts.)
On 24 May 1915, the Allies warned Turkish officials that they
would suffer dire consequences for what they called the "new crimes of Turkey
against humanity and civilization."
A most hollow declaration, particularly since one of the Allies, Russia, was killing off Polish and Lithuanian
Jews. (The Allies were exactly like the genocide scholars. They pointed to what they
made out to be an example serving their political purposes, while ignoring one that
was inconvenient — where the victims were completely innocent, in line with the
real definition of genocide.) Once again, would a self-respecting
"historian" point to a declaration issued by enemies with an enormous conflict-of-interest?
Furthermore, did not the Allies seek to punish Ottoman officials (i.e., making good
on their threat) via the "Nuremberg" of World War I, the Malta Tribunal?
No facts were to be found. Every accused was let go at the end of a long process,
lasting 1919-21.
Indeed, courts-martial organized by the new, pro-Allied
Turkish government did get underway following the Allied victory of November 1918,
but seven of the top leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress escaped.
How embarrassing. Only an amateur "historian" would offer such deceptive
wording. The new Ottoman government (and a real historian would also make sure to
use the word "Ottoman"; if Chalk were writing the history of the Soviet
Union, would he point to the "Russian" government? The reason for this
poor terminology is that some genocide scholars hope to establish a connection
between modern Turkey, and the Ottoman regime that was overthrown by Turkey) was
anything but "pro-Allied." (Other than in a "gun pointed to their
heads" way.) The victorious Allies occupied the Ottoman Empire and dictated
terms: "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations
and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh.,"
as Vahakn Dadrian tells us, further
adding, "In part, to accommodate the victorious allies, successive postwar
Turkish governments established courts martial in Istanbul, Turkey." Now, what
self-respecting "historian" would point to such kangaroo courts as
legitimate? It's really embarrassing. Would Chalk argue that had the Nazis
defeated England and held war crimes trials against Churchill and Montgomery, such
courts should be looked upon as legal? Even the British regarded the 1919-20
kangaroo courts as a travesty of
justice, and rejected their findings for the Malta Tribunal.
Note, too, that Chalk is pointing to the escaped seven CUP leaders, already guilty
in his non-analytical mind. I hope the "proof" that Chalk has of their
guilt is not the Andonian forgeries, the
same that his colleague, Kurt Jonassohn, amateurishly
validated. Chalk is simply painting them all with a broad
brush of guilt, and it's awful for him to do so, in pursuit of his agenda. Was
Talat, so personally friendly to the Armenians as Guenter Lewy outlined in The
Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, guilty? Was Jemal
Pasha, who did everything to save Armenians, guilty? Even the worst monsters,
according to Dadrian, Doctors Shakir and Nazim, are bereft of factual evidence to
demonstrate guilt. Of course, these men are dead and can't defend themselves, but
they were at one time not names in a history book, but real human beings. Many have
descendants today. How moral is it to declare that a person is guilty of a
ruinous crime, if one does not have the evidence?
It was the Allies’ desire to build up their anti-Bolshevik
alliance with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the next Turkish leader, which brought a halt
to the process and many of the detained Turkish leaders were released on 21 November
1921 as part of an exchange agreement between the British and Mustafa Kemal.
|
The
HMS Crysanthemum and the HMS Montreal quietly left port with the Turks
released from Malta on October 25, as this press report had it. (The Myth
of Terror)
|
(Our inept "historian" has once again stumbled with the
facts; the accused were back on Turkish soil three weeks before his provided date.
And it wasn't "many" but all who were released, around 59 who were
left from a one-time high of 144.)
Chalk is ineptly blending the 1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo courts with the Malta
Tribunal, in the same manner as Peter Balakian's "The Burning Tigris." (Balakian did so
knowingly and deceptively; we can't be sure, with his level of ineptitude, whether
Chalk knew any better.) What brought the Malta Tribunal to a halt was not an
"anti-Bolshevik alliance." (It was actually the opposite, at this time:
the Soviet Union and Turkey were friendly, and helping each other out.) Among the
Allies, the British still regarded the Turks with great hostility; and the Turks far
from held the Brits in good regard, what with their backing of the murderous
invading Greeks. The British and the Turks actually came dangerously close to war
after the Greeks had been booted out, and a safe haven of the British near Istanbul
was threatened by the Turks. (That is, around a year after Malta had already
been resolved). What ground the Malta Tribunal to a halt was that there was simply
no "genocidal evidence." The British made a last ditch effort by getting
their embassy in Washington to look into the U.S. archives, but the embassy reported
back in July of 1921 that the Yanks' material was basically all useless; there simply was, as
the embassy representative reported, "no concrete facts ... which could
constitute satisfactory incriminating evidence."
It is also true that thousands of Armenians
owed their lives to Turks who had helped them, among them officials who resigned in
protest or were fired because they refused to participate in the deportations and
killings of innocent men, women and children, but the memory of these heroes has
been obliterated from the officially-sanctioned history of Turkey.
A point for Chalk in desisting from going for all-out demonization, Dadrian-style.
Yet, what a true-blue propagandist! As if every Turkish historian who does not abide
by Chalk's genocide thesis is a mindless drone of the state, and would be incapable
of writing history independently, and accurately. The better question is: since such
a pseudo-historian as Chalk has consulted nothing but Armenian propaganda (note the
sources provided in this page to expose Chalk's ineptitude are mostly
Armenian-friendly, and have nothing to do with "Turkish propaganda"), does
he even have a clue regarding what Turkish historians have written? (I'll bet he
hasn't even read Kamuran Gurun's "The Armenian File," the work that Dadrian reported turned around
Bernard Lewis.) Chalk is only and shamefully repeating claims from the Armenian
Genocide Propaganda Apparatus.
Unfortunately, Mustafa Kemal, who was privately very critical
of the authors of the genocide in the previous Turkish government, felt compelled to
defend their actions in public...
If Kemal was critical of the previous administration's officials, it was for reasons
beyond the Armenians. What is this mysterious source exposing Kemal's
"private" criticism? Armenian propaganda points to a fake 1926 interview, but Chalk must
not give this one validity (finally joining the ranks of professional historians,
with this one example), as Chalk specified that Kemal was not critical in public.
Chalk winds up his highly partisan letter by complaining that villages in Turkey
have been getting Turkish names; one wonders if he is in danger of losing his grasp
on reality. Any sovereign nation uses the right to call their property whatever they
want, particularly if the occupants who provided the original names are no longer
around. Is Chalk on a crusade to establish the original Indian names of towns in
Canada and his own native USA? Chalk also points out that "in 1935, pressure was brought to bear upon the minorities to adopt
Turkish sounding surnames." Since there appear to be a good number of
Armenian-Turks with Armenian names that I keep encountering in Turkish newspaper
reports, has Chalk asked himself how successful this "pressure" was? (Many
of the Armenian-Turks who chose Turkish names can't escape the fact that Turkish
ways have been intermingled with Armenians, after centuries of co-existence. Are
there any substantial examples of Turkey trying to eradicate the identity of the
Armenians? If that was Turkey's idea in 1935, there would be no distinctly Armenian
community in Turkey today.)
Chalk keeps proving again and again how much he prefers information from biased and
selective sources, certainly no mark of a genuine, impartial scholar.
|
Nationalist apologists first decide that the Turks are guilty, then look
for evidence that will show they are correct. They are like a man in a closed room
fighting against a stronger enemy. As the enemy advances the man picks up a book, a
lamp, an ashtray, a chair — whatever he can find —and throws it in the vain hope
of stopping the enemy's advance. But the enemy continues on. Eventually the man runs
out of things to throw, and he is beaten. The enemy of the nationalist apologists is
the truth.
Prof. Justin McCarthy |
In a CTV News Net article ("Turkey Recalls Envoys Over Armenian
Genocide," May 8, 2006), yet another mindless "Armenian
Propaganda" repeating piece (with erroneous
"facts" such as, "In 1985, the UN agency listed cases of genocide
in the 20th century, among those 'the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in
1915-1916"), Chalk has been consulted as the "expert"; he tells us:
"There's no doubt that there was the intention to destroy
the Armenian national group in the territory that was known as Turkey in 1915. "
He has no proof of intent, nor has history borne out his claim that Armenians
were destroyed in what was known as the Ottoman Empire (not today's
"Turkey" that is without the Arab lands the Armenians were transported
to).
How could he make a statement like that, in good conscience, without observing
genuine facts? His combination of prejudice and ineptitude is very, very sad.
Perhaps he has become so genocide-sensitive, the facts really don't matter to him.
There were 1.5 million Ottoman-Armenians before the war, based on most
"neutral" (that is, Western, and pro-Armenian) sources. The Ottoman census
was 1.3 million. Arnold Toynbee, one year before he became a Wellington House
propagandist, figured even
less, around a million.
Frank Chalk signed his name to the 1998
commemoration, agreeing with the following: "More than a
million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches. Another million fled into permanent exile."
(We'll leave alone the fact that "starvation," when everyone else was
starving, and "forced death marches," in a region of the country without
mass transportation and where everyone who had to go from Point A to Point B needed to march [even the soldiers],
would constitute "extermination." There is also a gigantic gap between
even the isolated "direct killings" and "extermination." Once
again, think, "My Lai.")
So if we concentrate on the second sentence of what's above, that means Frank Chalk
agrees there were a million survivors.
If we subtract one million from the real population of around 1.5 million (Frank
Chalk, not surprisingly and based on the calculation of what he signed his name to
["more than a million" plus a "million"], prefers to go with the
propagandistic Armenian Patriarch's pre-war figure of 2.1 million, which the
Patriarch actually revised to 1.85 million, privately presented to friends as
Lepsius), we arrive at an Armenian mortality of some half-million. (Not
"more than a million," as Chalk put his name to. Even the Patriarch broke
down his fake 2.1 million figure as such, after war's end: 1,260,000 survivors, and 840,000
dead. Frank Chalk put his integrity on the line for a figure that even went beyond
the Armenian Patriarch.)
So if two-thirds of the Armenians survived, there goes Frank Chalk's amateurish
speculation that the Ottomans had "the intention to
destroy the Armenian national group"; if such were the case, the number
of survivors would have been "zero."
In 1921, according to the propagandistic Armenian Patriarch, nearly half (644,900) of the original Armenian population
still remained in what was left of the Ottoman Empire [much in contradiction with
Chalk's approval of the survivors having "fled into
permanent exile"], especially after they had been given the right to do
so from the lands they were relocated to, at 1918's end. That means if the Turks
(not the Ottomans; by this time, these puppets of the Allies were a practical
non-entity) had "the intention to destroy the Armenian
national group," they were horribly unsuccessful. The Armenians who left
after this point left on their own accord, as greener pastures were opened to them
in sympathetic Christian countries, among other reasons. All Armenians who had left
had the right to return within the next
few years.
If Frank Chalk has shown himself to be one thing, it is this: Frank Chalk is no
historian. No real historian would have allowed himself to ignore such ironclad
facts, deriving mainly from Turk-unfriendly sources.
|
In sum, the
Armenian tragedy of World War I falls miles short of genocide because it pivoted on
Ottoman political-national security calculations, not on racial or religious hatred.
Further, Armenian deaths were not specifically intended, but were the unfortunate
fall-out of malnutrition, pestilence, and community retaliatory vendettas. Indeed, the
Ottoman government prosecuted
more than 1,400 for maltreatment of Armenians. Hitler, in contrast, prosecuted Germans
for refusing to kill, maim, or maltreat Jews.
Bruce Fein, "Differences Are Overwhelming"
(Compare the last sentence with what Chalk told us earlier, that Ottoman officials who refused to follow the
resettlement orders "resigned" or were "fired." If the orders were
really to exterminate, then how could these officials have been let go without
punishment? Would a criminal government that had implemented a "Final
Solution" afford to allow the seeds of disloyalty to spread?) |
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Dr. Chalk
was featured on the cover of Concordia's magazine |
The Concordia article winds up by
informing us: "Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn have attributed four
basic sets of motives to the perpetrators of genocide throughout history."
Let's demonstrate their hypocrisy and even outright racism by filling in their sets with
examples they very likely have never used:
Elimination of a threat: Their example: Carthage. My example: When the Armenians systematically destroyed over half a million of their fellow Ottomans while
trying to establish a "Greater Armenia" in eastern Anatolia.
"...[T]he Armenians... traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian
invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men
to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and
exterminated their population." (Prof. John Dewey)
Economic gain: Their examples: Genghis Khan, New World
Indians. My example: The near-complete liquidation of Azeri
Turks in the Armenia of 1919-20.
"An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic
extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia which
consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic. The memoirs of an
Armenian army officer who participated in and eye-witnessed these atrocities was published
in the U.S. in 1926 with the title 'Men Are
Like That.' Other references abound." ("The Jewish Times," June 21,
1990.)
Creation of terror among surrounding peoples: Their example:
Ancient Greeks (covered above, against the Melos). My example: The 1992 sneak attack on the Karabakh Azeris, backed by
one billion dollars in Russian military aid and some manpower, massacring a good number in
order to cause hundreds of thousands to flee in fright.
"The attackers killed most of the soldiers and volunteers defending the women and
children. They then turned their guns on the terrified refugees. The few survivors later
described what happened: ‘That’s when the real slaughter began,’ said Azer Hajiev,
one of three soldiers to survive. ‘The Armenians just shot and shot. And then they came
in and started carving up people with their bayonets and knives.’" (The Sunday Times, March 1,1992)
Fulfilment of an ideology, theory or belief system: Their
example: "[T]he Armenian genocide in 1915 was aimed at creating a new kind of
Turkish state. Its motive was to eliminate those people who were different from the ideal
type of Turkic citizen." My example: The notions of
Aryan-Armenian racial purity and superiority that were instrumental in the ethnic
cleansing examples above. Anyone not fitting the Christian-Armenian mold had to go,
including (for example, in the case of eastern Anatolia when the victims were fellow
Ottomans) the Jews, Greeks, and even the Armenians who had converted to Islam.
Literally Tzeghagron means "to make a religion of one’s race." Patterned
after the Nazi Youth It was also called Racial Patriots. Nejdeh wrote: "The Racial
Religious believes in his racial blood as a deity. Race above everything and before
everything. Race comes first. Everything is for the race." In the April 10, 1936,
issue of Hairenik Weekly, Nejdeh stated: "Today Germany and Italy are strong because
as a nation they live and breathe in terms of race." From Racial Patriots and
Tzeghagrons, the name of the Dashnag youth group was later changed to Armenian Youth
Federation, or the AYF, as it is currently known." (Arthur Derounian, 1949)
A "modern" example of the above racist ideology manifesting
itself:
One man I met in September, Murat Shukarov, whose mother was an Armenian, maintained
that even individuals who were only a quarter Azerbaijani and are not even Muslims were
driven away in order to "purify" Karabakh of all traces of non-Armenianness.
Shukarov is also now reported dead. ("A Town Betrayed; The Killing Ground in
Karabakh," Thomas Goltz, The Washington Post, March 8, 1992)
Note how Chalk & Jonassohn's example of the "Armenian genocide" has the very
big hole that nearly half of those who were "eliminated" still remained after
the war. That is not an example of "elimination." The Armenians taking over
Karabakh were, by contrast, perhaps 100% successful with their "elimination."
|
Chalk has made sure to work his "bread and
butter" into many international conferences held by his genocide club over the
years. Here is a 2003 example in Ireland; another is the 2002 one he
attended in Spain, organized by the Universidad Complutense-Madrid, including the
notorious Vahakn Dadrian.
This one reported "Some 300 students from universities all over Spain
attended and received academic credit." An excellent way to
"bribe" unsuspecting patsies, in order to lure them in and soak them with
the genocide industry's vile propaganda. (Note that in a more detailed look on the
latter, as reported in armenianreporteronline.com, there were only two
covered besides "The Big Political Two," Cambodia and Rwanda. How much
time these other two got, we don't know... but I have a feeling they weren't the
"popular" ones. There were also two other "tangential" ones,
"The instances of Serbia, and East Timor." Isn't the former normally
referred to as "Bosnia" or "Yugoslavia"?)
Have Chalk and his colleague, Jonassohn, included the above
examples of Armenians as the villains in their book, talks or classes?
How often have they referred to Turks as victims in cases that (particularly with
their wider definition) were genocidal? For example, have they ever seriously
examined the case of the Ottoman Turks? The Balkan Turks? The Cypriot Turks? The Creatan Turks? The Crimean Turks? The Uyghur Turks? The Meskhetian
Turks? (The 1992 "Washington Post" article excerpt from directly above
referred to "75 families of Meshkhetian Turks" who were in Karabakh. One
can bet they are no longer there, or perhaps anywhere.) Other Muslims as Circassians? Chechens? Abhazians? (I'm focusing on Turks and Muslims for a
reason, but the fact is, there are many "Forgotten Genocides" that genocide scholars with their
political agendas will never or rarely go near.)
During the
European war, while people in England were raking up the Ottoman Turks'
nomadic ancestry in order to account for their murder of 600,000 Armenians,
500,000 Turkish-speaking Central Asian nomads of the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy
were being exterminated — also under superior orders — by that
"justest of mankind," the Russian muzhik. Men, women and children
were shot down, or were put to death in a more horrible way by being robbed of
their animals and equipment then being driven forth in winter time to perish
in mountain or desert. A lucky few escaped across the Chinese frontier.
Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, p. 342.
Halide Edib, from whose 1930 book ("Turkey
Faces West") this excerpt finds reference, adds (p. 143):
"Professor Toynbee, in a footnote, admits that the numbers on both sides
are conjectural. I want to add that this is not a solitary instance of Turks
having suffered massacres and atrocities at the hands of other nations. But I
will try as far as possible to avoid details of massacre, though I want just
to add, as a passing remark, that the policy of the western Powers, and more
especially of Russia, in leading the Turks and Armenians to fly at one
another's throats after five long centuries of tolerable existence together,
was really no more advantageous to the Armenians than it was to the Turks. I
have cited the fact elsewhere that General Yudenich started to turn eastern
Anatolia into a Russian colony from which Armenians were excluded — although
Russia's pretext for occupying eastern Turkey was that of creating an Armenian
state."
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Have these hypocrites ever presented Israel as a villain? In the
same manner as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other honorable Jewish
intellectuals who (in a December 4, 1948 letter to The New York Times) pointed to Menachem Begin as a
"fascist" and a "terrorist," and for being involved in a
terrible massacre of innocents that Begin and his Freedom party were proud of,
inviting "all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the
heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin." Of course, this is not an
isolated example of Israeli misbehavior over the years, and we won't get into their
actions over "The Liberty," an American ship that President Lyndon Johnson
ordered a news blackout on. (Not falling under the category of "genocide,"
but still shocking.) What of Ariel Sharon, who set up a secret death squad within
the Israeli Defense Forces, known as "Unit 101," in 1953? Has Ariel Sharon
made it to Clark's book about genocide?
If not, why not? Here's the reason:
These genocide scholars determine the villains and the victims based on a host of
reasons having little to do with truth. They certainly have little to do with actual
history, as we have seen through Frank Chalk's sorry example.
By irresponsibly presenting false information (as we have seen Chalk and Jonassohn
do, at least in regards to the Armenian "Genocide"), in order to uphold
their own agenda, contrary to the righteous reasons they present such as upholding
human rights, or hoping to prevent future genocides, what they are in fact doing is
spreading hatred. Hatred of those they have designated as the villains. When their
villains serve as victims, they go to the other end of the spectrum and purposely
withhold the information, or occasionally give grudging lip service.
So they not only perpetuate the hatred of those who are politically and/or
financially too weak to protect themselves, they also protect the ones who are
politically and financially strong; this latter group is always portrayed as the
victims, taking advantage of the rewards that are bestowed upon a sympathy-seeking
people. This is one of the reasons why the Republic of Armenia, while offering
nothing whatsoever to the United States, has been the largest receiver of U.S. aid,
per capita, after Israel.
Chalk was quoted as stating (in the CJNews article) that "We
have set no scale of virtue or suffering." What he is trying to say is
that all genocide sufferers are, in a sense, equal. He might believe that he is
"genocidally democratic," but he has in fact been making the racist
designation that one people are more worthy than another (by presenting false facts
to bring up one group, and by ignoring real facts to keep down the other group).
Contrary to the image of nobility that such "genocide scholars" as Chalk
and Jonassohn prefer to portray, they are in fact, perpetrators of evil.
Does that mean Frank Chalk is an evil man? In his heart, he must believe in the
"good" that he is doing, the normal course for the faith-based idealist.
There are many indications that he is a kind man, a sensitive man, and a
compassionate man. He is also a highly intelligent man, and he has a Ph.D in
history. It's hard to imagine that he could be so woefully ignorant of the
irrefutable historical facts ripping his Armenian "genocide" thesis to
shreds. So why is he not honorably revising his views, as a professional historian
must, once better facts come along? Is it because he is too prejudiced against
Turks? Is it because he knows he would be blackballed from the genocide industry,
his "academic bread and butter," that the Armenians have helped to
significantly finance? Perhaps he is afraid that he would be compared to David
Irving, the fate that Bernard Lewis has frequently suffered, once Lewis performed
his duty as a professional historian, as better facts came along. That is, perhaps
he fears he will be lynched by the same evil genocide forces he has served so
faithfully.
Your guess would not be worse than mine. But one thing is for certain: by
perpetrating hatred all of these years, he and Jonassohn have certainly not been
serving the Forces of Good.
A few closing comments. In the CJNews article, Chalk was quoted as having said that
his classes do not trivialize the Holocaust (as a response to "Jews often
resist any comparison between the Holocaust and other genocides," as the
article's writer explained). When Chalk presents the Armenian "Genocide"
as a parallel to the Holocaust (with Turks in the Nazis' role), and legitimizes an
unproven genocide in the same breath with an actual one, he is not only trivializing
the Holocaust, he is deeply disrespecting the memory of the millions of Jewish
victims.
In the Concordia article, Chalk was quoted as saying, "We
want them (his students) to feel empathy for the victims, but not to immerse
themselves in what I would call the pornography of cadaver pictures," capping
off with "We want them to think analytically."
TAT readers may have noticed that this site, with the main exception of the Armin Wegner page, has also consciously
avoided plastering pages with pictures of dead Turks, which would be a distraction
from useful knowledge and a cheap way of deriving sympathy. So chalk one up for
Frank Chalk. But why should he care about wanting students to feel empathy? (It is
as if he is on a mission to depict his examples of genocide as a simplified, comic
book version of black hats and white hats. Few are as "clean" as the
Nazi-Jewish example, and many conflicts have victims on both sides of the fence.) If
he were on the level as an educator, his one and only concern should be the
imparting of honest facts. Attempting to alter minds and emotions, particularly
with the usage of false information, is the domain of a propagandist.
The Flip Side of Empathy
Frank Chalk desires his students
to feel empathy for genocide victims. We
are actually going beyond the concept of feeling mere sympathy; in order to
feel empathy, you must identify with (in this case) the victim. You must, in
a sense, BE the victim.
Frank Chalk might desire to evoke empathy, so that people will understand
how bad genocide is, and maybe he thinks such enlightenment will help
prevent future genocides... the noble goal of the genocide scholar,
misquoting George Santanya as a mantra. Yet genocide prevention is a pipe dream, as we have seen
with Rwanda and Bosnia. (The world still ignores the crimes of the Armenians
in Karabakh.) One can have all the laws and the "morals" on the
books one wants, but if a murderer is set upon murdering, there isn't much
anyone can do to prevent it.
(Because genocide scholars are not tuned in to truth, we don't know what
their real motivations are... but the seeking of empathy likely has less to
do with nobility than with politics.)
What's more important is to consider the other side of the coin. If you're
going to be made to feel like a victim, then what goes with that territory
is that you're not going to think highly of your victimizer.
Frank Chalk can offer all the magician's patter he wants, such as not
wishing to vilify the perpetrators, because it was the rulers, and not the
people. He might take such a high road on the surface, but other politically
motivated genocide advocates have no compunction about exploiting racism.
For example, Vahakn Dadrian prefers to tell us "there was massive, popular
participation in the atrocities," and that the "perpetrators
deliberately used blunt instruments, thereby protracting the agony of
dying."
In short, the Flip Side of Empathy (of genocide victims) is HATRED.
By spreading hatred, the genocide scholars are the worst kind of hypocrites,
because they enjoy presenting the illusion that they are all for "human
rights."
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Rod Steiger, IN THE HEAT
OF THE NIGHT, with Poitier |
There is a scene in the 1967
film, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, where Sidney Poitier has crashed in the
house of the sheriff, played by Rod Steiger, a lonely bachelor. During a
bonding session, Steiger reveals the sad shape his life is in. After noting
Poitier's expression, Steiger snaps out of it and declares that he doesn't
need Poitier's pity.
On one hand, this is what we expect in our heroes. The "Gary
Cooper"-style lone sufferer. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that such
is an admirable way to behave, because American culture in particular has a
victim's mentality. Now we look to blame others for everything.
(Crying works in order to get attention, as every baby knows. Silence does
not.)
After the end of the First World War, the policy of Turkey was to sweep
these ugly events under the rug. Not because, as Taner Akcam and Fatma Gocek
insist, that a "genocidal state" hoped to cover up crimes. The
reason was to prevent the Turkish people from feeling hatred against the
murderous and traitorous Armenians and the Greeks.
In contrast, Armenian youth has been systematically corrupted, through
Dashnak-directed parents and churches, with hatred of Turks. One reason why the
Turks are woefully behind in this "genocide" war is because Turks
are indifferent, and Armenians are driven. Hatred serves as a potent driving
and unifying force.
If we have, on one hand, the "boo-hoo, feel sorry for me" type of
people, and on the other hand we have the "strong and silent" type
of people, whose voice is going to wind up getting heard?
More importantly, who winds up as the greater champion of "human
rights"? Those who stress love and brotherhood, or those who stress
hatred, demonization and division?
Halide Edib wrote in "Turkey Faces
West." circa 1930:
The
Armenian massacres not only roused bitter hatred against the Turks
throughout the world, but were used as the basis of war propaganda by the
Allied press. Naturally no one mentioned the Turkish massacres. In a way I
am glad of that, for the
exploitation of a people's sufferings to further a political end is both
cynical and inhuman, and
in the end is even hurtful to the martyred people themselves — theirs
ceases to be a human tragedy. No people in the world, after all, be they
Turkish, Armenian, or Greek, can be indicted as a whole. There is no such
thing as a guilty nation.
|
Going back to Chalk's above statement, if he wants others to think analytically, the
partisan scholar far from presents an inspiring role model to follow. He further
elaborates on this point in the closing passage of the CJNews article:
Chalk is "able to carry on by keeping a professional
detachment from his subject. 'I don't think the work we do is much different from
that of the cancer specialist who is interested in a terrible disease."
Before the sanctimonious Frank Chalk can be thought of as a scientist with
"professional detachment," similar to "the cancer specialist,"
he has a long, long way to go.
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