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The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide

 

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THE GREAT WAR, presented by PBS in 1996 was a sneaky program, regarding the "Genocide." There were several "stories" in each chapter, and the "Genocide" one began with coverage of the Gallipoli episode. The Turks were presented fairly, and it was refreshing. That was the first chapter, and since the Turks were the Low Men on the Totem Pole during World War I, I figured that would be it regarding mention of the Turks in this series covering World War I. The series concentrated almost wholly on what was going on between the Germans on one side and the British/French and later Americans on the other... with some Russia added, here and there.

 

Armin Theophil Wegner's shot of crying Armenian girl and friends

Armin Theophil Wegner's shot was used to identify the
"Genocide" chapter in The Great War.

So while watching this first episode, feeling good that FOR ONCE America's Public Broadcasting System did not jump down the Turks' throats, the title card for the last episode came up.... with Armin Theophil Wegner's ubiquitous shot of the little girl crying identifying the segment, called "Genocide." I was so lulled, I actually thought, genocide? There was a genocide in World War I? In the next few seconds, I realized which genocide they were referring to... of COURSE. THAT "genocide"!

I could picture what was going through the minds of the producers, mainly Blaine Baggett: if we put in the one segment involving the Turks not showing them in a bad light... the Gallipoli one... in the same episode with the GENOCIDE one... we won't be accused of being unfair, and coming down hard on the Turks.

I was really incensed about this low down tactic, and this terribly unfair and one-sided depiction of events, so customary of PBS' Armenian programming. The show was produced in the Los Angeles/Californian arm of the network, the land of milk and honey for Armenian-Americans.

 

 
An Armenian's Reaction

From an Armenian web site, here is how Harut Sassounian, of the  California Courier Publisher, rejoiced:



If you watched the PBS documentary on World War I, you will probably agree with me that it was a masterpiece. The inclusion of the Armenian Genocide in such a major documentary brought the Armenian tragedy out of its obscurity and showcased it on the center stage of one of the defining moments of world history. In eight minutes, the producers were able to present the Turkish attempt of race extermination with powerful still and film footage, maps, eyewitness accounts of survivors and foreign diplomats, scholarly narration, and haunting background music. The producers did not mince words. They clearly identified the perpetrator as Turkey. They called the crime, "the first genocide of the 20th century . . .a brutal plan of mass murder," and "ethnic-cleansing." They stated that both major wars of the 20th century "were marked by genocide," thereby clearly drawing a parallel between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust. They referred to the infamous Hitler statement, "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"

At the end, when the narrator pointed out that "to this day, the Turkish government denies the genocide," the viewers could only feel disgust and horror at the Turks' shameful misrepresentation. This documentary marks a turning point in our long effort s to bring international recognition to the Armenian Genocide. This will also be the beginning of the end of Turkish lies and distortions. I have transcribed below the segment on the Armenian Genocide:...

 

Had I discovered Mr. Sassounian's article on the Internet earlier, it would have saved me the trouble of transcribing the segment. I will go with my transcription, not because Mr. Sassounian did not do an accurate job, but I took it from the first word to the last. (Besides, this way I won't feel all my time had gone completely to waste.) .

I love it when Armenians claim their "genocide" is so obscure. Naturally, since the "genocide" constitutes such a major part of the Armenians' "raison d'etre," nothing would please them more than if the "genocide" were referred to all the time... in every published article and every TV show. However, the Armenian "Genocide" is firmly established in the minds of Westerners, after nearly a century of a non-stop barrage of reminders; there are many, many, many genocides that are truly obscure, like the genocide of the Tatars begun with Catherine the Great and ending with Stalin, or the genocide that actually succeeded, that of the Tasmanians; the Armenian "Genocide" is anything but obscure.

Map of "Turkey" poised against Russia

Why is The Ottoman Empire called "Turkey,"? Persia
is not called by its present-day name, "Iran." Arabia
is also not identified as "Saudi Arabia."

Mr. Sassounian is quite correct. "The producers did not mince words. They clearly identified the perpetrator as Turkey." Indeed. That was the whole IDEA. In fact, their accusatory agenda was so obvious, they even marked the map on their program as "Turkey," rather than the "Ottoman Empire," attempting to form a link between the alleged crimes of the past regime with the present day republic.

 

  What the Program Said, and Holdwater's Comments


 

NARRATOR:

In Turkey in the year of 1915, war had two faces. One was the heroic stand at Gallipoli. The other, a brutal plan of mass murder.
In Northeastern Turkey, hundreds of thousands of civilians were to die. The war was the excuse. Ethnic cleansing of Christian Armenians out of the lands controlled by Islamic Turkey was the true intention.

Professor JAY WINTER:

Istanbul (?), during the days of the Ottoman Empire

Istanbul (?), during the days of the Ottoman Empire 

The presence in the northeast of the country of a thriving cultured and relatively wealthy community of Armenians was a difficulty to Turks long before the First World War. It became a political and strategic threat when the war broke out because of the place of Armenians in the Russian Empire. However, most Armenians, two million of them living in the Turkish Empire, were no threat whatsoever.

In many ways, it shows that the old idea that war is politics by other means is outdated in the 20th century. War is hatred by other means. And in this case, hatred means extermination. The First World War was the biggest war ever to date. The Second World War was bigger still. It's not accident on my mind that both of them were marked by genocide. This is the logic of the brutalization of total war.


I'm going to have some things to say about Professor Jay Winter, after we get through the show's content. Already, we can see the producer and his cohorts have accepted the "Genocide" as fact, claiming from the outset that there was a "brutal plan of mass murder." Of course, if there were such a plan, there must be cold, objective, hard evidence, the lack of which prevented the British from convicting any of the Ottoman officials held for the Malta Tribunal not only of genocide, but of ANY war crimes. But, hold on. We'll get to what the program offers as "evidence," step-by-step.

An Armenian Family

An Armenian Family 

So the professor is singing the same song about the Armenians  in the country's northeast (described as "relatively wealthy"; the key word is "relatively." These Armenians, relative to the Armenians in the west of the country, were NOT wealthy. Maybe they were generally wealthier than their fellow Ottoman Muslim citizens, but the implication that these relatively poor Armenians were targeted for their wealth becomes bunk when we keep in mind their richer cousins in the western region were mostly exempt from the relocarion policy)  targeted by the Turks for extermination for "strategic" reasons... which has truth, since the Armenians were colluding with the Russian invader... and for "political" reasons, implying it was the Turks' intention to cleanse the land of non-Turks, which is bunk. Why were the other non-Turks of the land, like the Jews, unaffected? If the professor meant the Christian vs. Muslim issue as "political," another standard argument of the pro-Armenians, why were the Catholic and Protestant Armenians excluded from the relocation orders? (Last time I checked, Catholics and Protestants were Christians.) Yet another Armenian explanation for the Turks wishing to exterminate the Armenians, in the Armenians' desperate search for a motive — any motive — was that the Turks were looking for a scapegoat, as angered as they were for having the empire diminish in the previous century. In other words the Turks had a hissy fit. Even if extermination were the aim, a period of desperate wartime struggle would have been the most inopportune time to get rid of such a valuable resource as the Armenians, who largely made the economic wheels turn.

How about looking at the one motive that makes sense? The ONLY reason the Armenians were relocated was because they were revolting! That is, in the sense that the Armenians betrayed their nation, acting as a fifth column behind the Ottoman lines. The United States Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, said in November of 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."


NARRATOR:

Only hours after the first allied soldiers stepped onto the beaches of Gallipoli, two hundred Armenian leaders were rounded up and executed. The Turks then began ridding themselves of entire communities; men, women and children were marched off into the desert.

VOICE:

The Turkish government had said that the men in prison would be released and allowed to go with their families. Some were simple enough to believe this and to think they would be allowed to settle down in some other place where they would begin life all over again.

Here we go with the same baseless charges, and the same unfair overlooking of the impartial, cold facts. The fact of the matter is, the Young Turks gave the Armenians every warning not to side with the enemy, as the Armenians historically had a knack for, since the 19th Century. When the evidence was clearly in that the Armenians would once again stab their nation in the back, as their revolutionary leaders instructed in a 1914 call to arms, somebody had to be found guilty. Who were the ones leading the Armenians? Was it the janitors and dishwashers among them? No. It would have had to be the "Armenian leaders," wouldn't it? These two hundred Armenian leaders, then... were they all so innocent, as the program implies?

Regarding the naive Armenians who simple-mindedly believed what "The Turkish Government Said"... let's see now. The Armenian Patriarch gave statistics to both the British and to the American president of Robert College (in Istanbul) in February of 1921, claiming the Armenian survivors in the Ottoman Empire were around one million. (The Partiarch also presented a document to the British specifying 625,000 Armenians were within the borders of what was left of the Ottoman Empire after the war, just before the Sevres Treaty. Hundreds of thousands were refugees in other nations, 500,000 in Transcaucasia alone, by Richard Hovannisian's count.) If over half a dozen neutral census figures came up with a median total population of Armenians of 1,300,000, it would seem a LOT of Armenians indeed did survive, and their government WAS telling the truth. Even if the Armenian casualties amounted to twice the remainder from the above computation (at 600,000, a number Holdwater accepts), did all of these people die of atrocities? Or could some of them died in the same way that their fellow Ottoman Muslims died, of famine and disease? (in addition to dying as treacherous combatants?) Even the Armenian guru, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, claimed in his ghostwritten book that thousands of Turks were dying daily. That's DAILY, assuming the ambassador was telling the truth (which is a big assumption, I'll admit.)

NARRATOR:

Leslie Davis

Leslie Davis 

Leslie Davis, the American consul in the remote eastern province of Harput had heard rumors of crimes committed by Turkish soldiers and marauding bands. To see for himself he hired a guide and by horseback (went) into the desert.

“Greater misery could not be imagined. The dead and the dying are everywhere. Two or three small children may be seen weeping over the body of their dead mother. Other children are lying curled upon the ground dead or in convulsions. One sees dead bodies now in all directions and on every road. The whole country is one vast slaughterhouse.”

A "concentration camp"?

A "concentration camp"? 

Let's get a few things straight. Nobody is denying Armenians did not suffer from the relocations. They were poorly defended by attacking bands that were mostly out for blood feuds, in retaliation for their own that the Armenians had massacred. Not all the gendarmes were lowlifes, as the Armenians claim.... some gave up their lives in the Armenians' defense. However, every quality man was needed at the front to defend the nation from the invading Russians and the backstabbing Armenians (not to mention other fronts, among four or five in the resource-depleted, bankrupt nation, such as Gallipoli -- also aided by Armenians). The pool of men these gendarmes were selected from were poor, and the Armenians were victimized by some who were assigned to protect them, as well. (Some of whom were tried and executed by the Ottomans in 1915! A greater number than twenty was no doubt tried and punished in less extreme ways. Did Hitler punish a single SS man during the Holocaust, for mistreating a Jew?) No doubt the Armenians suffered, and there were massacres. Massacres that would never have occurred if their leaders had not fired the first shot and betrayed their nation in their nation's darkest hour for survival.

However, massacres do NOT a government-sponsored genocide make. Was the American government guilty of a systematic plan to exterminate the Vietnamese people when one of their officers went bonkers and slaughtered the residents of My Lai?

What kind of a man was Leslie Davis, anyway? Information on him is sparse, but I dug up enough details from Armenian web sites that casts serious doubts on his character. Many U.S. Consuls, such as George Horton were equally racist as their boss, Ambassador Henry "Holier-than-Thou" Morgenthau. These consuls accepted wholesale the lies provided for them by Armenians (many of which were in their employ, including Leslie Davis) and the heartbreakingly unscrupulous missionaries, who were duty-bound by their pledges to God to be honorable. Why did Leslie Davis come up with the EXACT same casualty figures that he independently conducted as an "eyewitness," that a missionary lady came up with when she independently conducted her own "eyewitness" count? That would have been IMPOSSIBLE, given the extremely difficult circumstances. Read more about Mr. Davis, and judge how reliable his testimony is.

The deplorable scenario Mr. Davis described above could well have been on the money; nobody is denying the Armenians suffered horribly. However, people dying from famine and disease, as we can gather from the description, does not have anything to do with a "slaughterhouse," where people are deliberately murdered. Was food intentionally withheld from the Armenians, in an attempt to make them die slowly? If this was the evil intentioin, we must bear in mind two factors. How could so many Armenians have survived, if the idea was to kill them off? And how could Leslie Davis, a hostile foreign agent, have been permitted to eyewitness the suffering of the Armenians, if the idea was to exterminate them through starvation? Most convincingly, weren't the Turks dying of the same reasons in large numbers? Ambassador Morgenthau estimated an entire quarter of the Turkish population died from famine in his "Story" book, and a U.S. Consul wrote in his memoirs: "Since the beginning of the war even bread is almost unobtainable." That consul was Leslie Davis himself. ("The Slaughterhouse Province," P.38.).

By the way, if the country was one vast slaughterhouse as Davis wrote in his testimony above, why were the children spared? That doesn't make sense. If there's going to be a massacre, I can't understand why everyone was not massacred. That's the way the Armenians did it.... they did not spare the Turkish children.

Davis’s reports were not the only ones. Other eyewitnesses also complained of the killings. One was a young medic in the German army, Armin Wegner. Against orders smuggling in his camera, he visited a refuge camp filled with survivors.

Armin Theophil Wegner 

Armin Theophil Wegner 

“In the last few days I have taken numerous photographs under penalty of death. I do not doubt for a moment that I am committing an act of treason. And yet, I am inspired by the knowledge that I have helped these poor people in some small way.”

What Armin Wegner captured in these photos was a visual record of the first genocide of the 20th century.

“Hunger, death, despair… shout at me from all sides. I was seized by the terror and hurried out of the camp, my heart pounding. I was overcome by dizziness as if earth were collapsing on both sides of me, into an abyss.”

Armin Theophil Wegner sure wrote poetically, did he not? Just like many of these accounts of suffering Armenians that are written poetically... by Armenians! Yes, his writing style is markedly different than the cold, matter-of-fact style of a Leslie Davis, provided previously.

Regardless of Mr. Wegner's ethnicity (is "Theophil" a German name?), what do his photographs prove? Like Leslie Davis, Wegner, too, is another Armenian "Big Gun," presented on the side of the evidence for genocide, within the "The Armenians, A Story of Survival " PBS program. The photographic examples on both programs show suffering people, of whom there were many throughout the empire. The Ottoman Muslims were not cavorting about swimming pools with cigars in their mouths. (Remember they, too, were dying.... by the thousands.... daily... according to Ambassador Morgenthau.) There is one photo in the lot from THE GREAT WAR that is the most incriminating.... a pile of skulls. Since the photo's quality was so different from the other Wegner photos shown on the program, I suspect it came from another source. Even if it did not, was this photo documented? The director of the German museum, (Stutgart's Schiller-Nationalmuseum Deutsches Literaturarchiv) where the Wegner photo originals are housed, said:

“Unfortunately, we do not have any indication regarding when or in what country the Wegner photographs were taken. As a result, the dating, and sites depicted must be determined by whoever uses the photos.’’ 

This means those skulls could have belonged to anyone. Unlikely such a fraud could not have been perpetrated by the Armenians? Then you're not familiar with the long line of Armenian forgeries and falsifications.

Suffering Armenians. At least they're alive. 

Even if the skulls were Armenian skulls... does that prove a genocide, as defined by the U.N. Convention of 1948? Think again.... massacres by themselves do not prove a government-sponsored policy of extermination.

Please go to Armin Wegner's page on TAT to find out more (the details on the German museum director are here), and to see the photographs used in THE GREAT WAR, including the small pile of skulls... and determine for yourself whether these undocumented photographs are a visual record of a genocide, or a record of suffering and dead people that singled out only one segment of the entire population... during a period of strife, famine and disease that did not discriminate among its victims.


Professor JAY WINTER:

In many ways, it shows that the old idea that war is politics by other means is outdated in the 20th Century. War is hatred by other means. And in this case, hatred means extermination.

The first world war was the biggest war ever, to date. The second world war was bigger still. It’s no accident in my mind that both of these were marked by genocide. It is the logic of brutalization of total war.

NARRATOR:

A few found a way to tell what had happened to them. One Armenian woman smuggled out a message in a shoe. ‘I seize the opportunity of bringing to your ear the cry of agony which goes out from the survivors of this terrible crisis through which we are passing. They are exterminating our nation(s). Perhaps this will be the last cry from Armenia that you will hear.’

To this day, the Turkish government denies the genocide. Estimates vary as to how many Armenians died. Some cite the figure of half a million. Others, one million. Whatever the number, the Armenian genocide was one of the darkest chapters of the Great War.

Not a pretty time for anyone. 

Not a pretty time for anyone. 

In years to come, Armin Wegner would send a letter to Adolf Hitler in defense of the Jewish people. It was a plea which fell on deaf ears. For Hitler had learned a completely different lesson. He told his inner circle: ‘Who remembers the Armenia massacres today.’


"The last cry from Armenia that you will hear"? How wrong that poetically-writing Armenian woman was. Sympathy-seeking Armenians are crying louder than ever... like forks scraping a blackboard.

 It's not just the Turkish government that "denies" the "genocide"... impartial scholars do, as well. That is, those who are still brave to speak the truth, after being targeted for character assassination or just plain assassination by some of the more fanatical Armenians. What a dishonest program. The producer really did the services of the many fine, talented people who worked on this program a great injustice by making the decision to support what must have been the views of his California Armenian friends. When just one segment is filled with such propagandistic materials, doubt is cast on the seaworthiness of the entire ship... the whole "Great War" series now becomes untrustworthy, its credibility impaired.

Naturally, the biggest gun of the Armenian "Genocide" is the alleged Hitler Quote. If it wasn't for the services of the Armenians' fellow Aryan, I don't know if there would be ANY "proof" of the "Genocide."

The last segment of this chapter accompanying the show was a real cheap shot. It was illustrated with these photographs:

Armenians by railway car, meant to evoke the cattle car imagery of the Holocaust

Armenians by railway car, meant to evoke the cattle car imagery of the Holocaust

Regardless of whether the people shown in these photos were actually the relocating Armenians on their way to their new homes or just arbitrary shots of Ottomans using the trains (look at those trains... made of wood. The bankrupt nation likely bought the cheapest train cars available, in the years before the First World War, and I doubt any of the citizens traveled sitting in the plush seats we know from Amtrak or the Eurail system), the connection is clear: the Armenians were inhumanely being transported in cattle cars, like their Jewish counterparts of the Holocaust. (I've never seen W.W.II Jews allowed to open the doors of their train cars and sit around in such a relaxed fashion.)

The railway system in the destitute land was very limited; this is why many Armenians had to travel at least part of the way by marching, where whatever cruelties occurred, occurred. As Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester wrote in "Turkey Reinterpreted" (The New York Times Current History, March 1922): The Turkish Government. ordered the Armenians deported from the districts they menaced That they did not have railways and other means of transportation was not their fault, and the deportation had to be carried out on foot. Had this been a period of time beyond relatively un-modern 1915, and there was a fuller railway system, the Armenians could not have been as open to attack. Which brings to mind, if the Turks' evil plan was to kill the Armenians not through outright massacres but by deliberately subjecting them to the harsh conditions of a march... why did the Turks allow any Armenians to board any trains? The sooner they began their death-march, the more easily could the planned genocide have succeeded. Ladies and gentlemen, the case for the Armenian "Genocide" simply does not add up, no matter how you look at it.

Here is a report by a U.S. Consul that paints a picture of how the Armenians were transported by train... from the Leslie Davis page.

 

Jay Winter wrote that it was NOT GENOCIDE

I didn't check this firsthand, but I had no reason to suspect the following was untrue (of course, I could be wrong): on pg. 148 of the accompanying book for the series ("The Great War," Penguin Books, 1996), Professor Jay Winter  acknowledged that there was no genocide! If anyone has this book, a confirmation would be welcomed.


ADDENDUM 2005

This book appears widely available throughout the nation's library system, and I had a chance to check out page 148 of "The Great War":

"It is unlikely that a precise order to exterminate every single Armenian came down from the ruling Turkish triumvirate of Tallat [sic] Bey, Minister of the Interior, Enver Pasha, Minister of War, and Djemal Pasha, Minister of the Navy. The responsibility of these men for collective deportation is clear; but deportation — a time-honoured strategy in nineteenth-century Turkey — while tantamount to death for the old, the weak and the infirm, was not genocide."

The blame, Winter wrote, rested with "corrupt and incompefent elements of the army." And he is absolutely correct, there were elements in the army that committed criminal actions against Armenians. However, how highly irresponsible to conclude that such amounted to "genocide." In war, it is a given that some soldiers act irresponsibly, committing atrocities and war crimes; in fact, this inescapable part of war constitutes unfortunately the nature of war. (In other words: war is not "nice.") When American troops took it upon themselves to gun down hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, it would be quite a stretch to characterize the event as the intent to exterminate all Vietnamese.

How many of these "bad" Ottoman soldiers directly massacred Armenians, and how many Armenians died from famine and disease? The vast majority fell nto the latter category, the same causes that snuffed out the lives of everyone in the ailing Empire, without discrimination.

Let's not forget there were also gendarmes who lost their lives protecting Armenians. The main perpetrators of murder were lawless bandits. Some killed because they were "bad." Many, however, were out for revenge for what the Armenians had done to their families. British Col. Wooley reported the Armenians had killed from 300,000 to 400,000 Kurds, very much in line with the Ottoman documentation pointing to the deaths of over half-a-million Ottomans at the hands of the Armenians (and some Russians).

That was the real extermination policy, and nobody talks about it because Muslim lives don't count in prejudiced Western minds. The acts of violence committed by lawless bandits and some renegade soldiers can not be termed "genocide." The lives these criminals haphazardly took could not have amounted to "a brutal plan of mass murder," as Jay Wnter irresponsibly stated in the TV program. Such a brutal plan could only work if the government were involved, and the government was NOT involved, according to Jay Winter in his book.

The rest of the book makes sure to drive home the "genocide" point in a major way. From the index, there are 12 pages on "Turkey" (Prof. Winter makes sure to call the country "Turkey" and not the Ottoman Empire. I suppose the "historian" must also call Russia by the name of "The Soviet Union." He is attempting to propagandistically link the previous regime with today's Turkey... as he made clear in the T.V. show's closing statements), many of which is just a passing reference. But there are 10 pages on the "genocide," and the professor lays it on thick; his main "evidence" is the testimony of the awful Turcophobe, Lepsius. (The German religious fanatic was nowhere near the scene; he relied on reports provided by Armenians and missionaries, shared to a significant degree by another who had it in for the Turks, Ambassador Morgenthau.)

The producer, Blaine Baggett, hailed from California, which is Armenian country. Perhaps some forces at work (What C. F. Dixon-Johnson called "The Invisible Hand") decided this program would present an excellent opportunity to push Armenian propaganda under the guise of "history." The PBS program made a big impact, added some important notches to Jay Winter's belt, and in the interim he has succeeded in getting out of England and settling into the prestigious Ivy League quarters of Yale University. Certainly the topic of "genocide" can work wonders with the careers of some people.

 

By this time, in 1996, I was not active in countering anti-Turkish injustices in the American media (like the typically apathetic Turkish-American), but THE GREAT WAR infuriated me in its blatant one-sided agenda to incriminate the Turks, and spurred me into action; I made certain to find the names and addresses of key people.

 

One of the Letters Sent:


 February 11, 1997


Joanna Cherensky
Program Information
PBS
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, VA 22314

Dear Ms. Cherensky,

Did you run across this week’s news item of the high school student who wrote to the SAT board, challenging the accuracy of one of their answers? (Reported in, among others, Time Magazine.)

What if the SAT Board looked into this matter and, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, stubbornly stuck to their guns? Do you think that would have been the right thing to do?

I thank you for your response to my letter concerning The Great War series, but because the content of your response blindly disregarded everything in the materials I provided Mr. Duggan with, I feel it would have been better if you sent no response at all.

More Armenian victims from THE GREAT WAR

More Armenian victims from THE GREAT WAR 

You say the series was exhaustively researched and compiled, and there was evidence of that in the series as a whole. As far as your claim that “internationally recognized and accepted scholarship” was used: are you sure about that? (Pertaining to the “Genocide” segment, anyway.) I mean, really sure? And what about the overwhelming evidence of accepted scholarship I provided Mr. Duggan with, in the form of the copy of my letter to Jay Winter?

When one point-of-view is unilaterally used, to the exclusion of all others, don’t you think there’s something fishy? And wouldn’t that cast suspicion to the credibility of the rest of the information in the series?

After the series aired, the only source of information provided in The Great War website was from an Armenian author; that doesn’t seem very even-handed to me. Even the co-author of the series, Jay Winter, acknowledges in his book, “The Great War” (Penguin Books, 1996) that there was no genocide! (Page 148).

I know you’re merely a cog in the PBS wheel, and I’ve also learned the uselessness of writing letters to PBS, because they’re obviously not seriously considered. I’m simply writing you as one human being to another; it was improper to shoot off a “form letter” type response, saying, in effect, “we don’t care how much evidence to the contrary we get from unbiased scholars and historians — we’re going to stand by our TV show no matter what.” At least show a little pretense in caring, and making an effort to look into the truthfulness of the situation.

 

 

 

Professor with an agenda?

There are, of course, so many professors like Jay Winter who blindly and unthinkingly obey the irresistible melodies of The Armenian AND? Anthem. What is so troubling that when there is an example of a professor who believes in the alternate view, he is quick to be branded a tool of the Turks, as happened to Dr. Heath Lowry during a two-year smear campaign orchestrated against him, largely by Peter Balakian (friend of several pro-Armenian PBS shows). The difference is, Dr. Lowry reaches his conclusions through meticulous and open-minded study and does not ignore the voluminous impartial evidence against the case for Genocide. (Read some of his works that have been presented here on the TAT site, and judge the man for his research.) A professor like Jay Winter, based on the "evidence" provided on the GREAT WAR series that was co-written by him (for the "genocide" segment) has no real facts to back up his genocidal claims with, and other "facts" have clearly been distorted. So why aren't American authors like Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut up in arms against professors like Jay Winter who might be influenced by their private agendas, as these authors were against Heath Lowry? Such critics' racist and ignorant patterns of thought become readily apparent, and the double-standard is truly stomach-churning.

 

 

 Other Biased, Armenian Butt-Kissing PBS Shows:


The Armenians, a Story of: Survival (2002)

An Armenian Journey (1988)

The Forgotten Genocide (1983)

 

 

  

 

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