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.