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Tall Armenian Tale

 

The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide

 

  Peter Balakian's "The Burning Tigris"  
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TAT's in-depth analysis of Mr. Balakian's "everything but the kitchen sink" testimony to the Armenian "Genocide" continues from:

Part III's Chapter 17 on Henry Morgenthau

which was preceded by

Part I & Part II

 

 
Part III: Chapters 18-22

 

Chapter 18: We learn Leslie Davis became the U.S. consul in Harput at the end of May 1914. He was a thirty-eight year old former attorney, the same profession of his boss, Henry Morgenthau. Many politicians and President Wilson backed his application to the foreign service, indicating the man was well-connected. 

The author has a field day in relating all the horror tales of hearsay reported by Armenians. Alice Muggerditchian Shipley gives us the familiar tale of “nails and toenails" being pulled out. (From the Armenian Film Foundation's J. Michael Hagopian: "Voices from the Lake: A Film About the Secret Genocide." "Secret"??) A passage from perhaps Amb. Morgenthau's most infamous chapter 22 is repeated here, with a ghastly description of how the "Turk Reverts to Ancestral Type." 

J. Michael Hagppian 

The amazing thing about this attempt "to destroy the Armenian race," as Leslie Davis wrote to Morgenthau on June 30, 1915, is that there were so many survivors to these horror stories. 

A Henry Riggs reported (in a work, "Days of Tragedies in Armenia") how the Armenians were taken advantage of as the Armenians were forced to sell their goods at giveaway prices... and that some women were raped by Turks and Kurds. Some Turks, however, “refused to enrich themselves on the misfortune of others." It is easy to imagine many Armenians were taken advantage of, under such circumstances... given the human tendency to peck at a fellow hen, when the pecked hen shows vulnerability. Americans did no less with the Japanese, when the latter were relocated during WWII; many of these families' fortunes were lost. Other people who are driven away don’t even have the chance to sell their assets… as with the 500,000-600,000 Turks massacred by Armenians. (That last example does not condone the injustice suffered by the Armenians; it is simply a reminder there is no perspective in Balakian’s biased book.) 

The 101-year-old Antranig Vartanian vividly testified in a 2001 video interview how he was ordered by gendarmes to go into a barn "where hundreds of Armenians were burned alive" to take their jewelry, and the gendarmes were so delighted with the jewelry the fifteen-year-old had taken from a corpse that had already "been strangled to death outside of the barn," they let him live. 

Uh-huh. 

Kerop Bedoukian reports among other outrages (in "Some of Us Survived") witnessing a woman relieving herself in public, after which Turks arrived "with short sticks... tearing apart every pile of shit," in the hope of finding possibly swallowed gold coins. At least these Turks had more brains than the Turks Balakian himself reported doing the same in his "Black Dog of Fate," where Balakian claimed the Turks used their bare hands. Was Balakian there, to know for certain? No. Does he have a relentless drive to dehumanize Turks every chance he gets? Yes. 

Balakian made a claim earlier in his book that consuls were risking their lives.... I guess what he meant was Davis' efforts to shield Armenians by housing many in the three-story consulate and spacious garden. I take it Balakian would have us believe the fanatical Turks would have had the American diplomat's head on a platter, had they discovered Armenians were being protected." That must have been the danger, since Davis reported, "We could all hear them piously calling upon Allah to bless them in their efforts to kill the hated Christians." Davis' Turkish must have been pretty good by this phase of his service. Otherwise, the translation from the Armenians around him must have sufficed. 

Ending the chapter is a story reminiscent of "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" where Davis holds firm against an attempt by visiting Turkish authorities demanding a statement that taught the consul "something profound about the Turkish determination to exterminate the Armenians while simultaneously trying to cover up the crime." The source was Henry Riggs; did he happen to be in the room? 

Leslie B. Davis

Leslie Davis 

In the next chapter, Balakian goes to town in providing Davis' eyewitness account of corpses that I examined from other sources in the Leslie Davis page

What can be said here? All these horrendous stories of hearsay are by witnesses who would far from be called neutral. Of course, the Armenians suffered... but it's truly disgusting that Peter Balakian provides these anecdotes with the singular purpose of attempting to prove how monstrous the Turks were. No one can doubt the effect such one-sided anecdotes can have on the unwary reader.

 

 

 



Chapter 20 gives us insight as to who Jesse Jackson was: a veteran of the Spanish-American War, becoming a consul in Syria in 1905... and a seasoned diplomat by 1915. "Hundreds of thousands of Armenians passed through Aleppo (where Jackson served during 1915) on their way to the Deir el-Zor desert about a hundred miles southeast, where they died of starvation, torture and massacre." In September 1915, Ambassador Morgenthau painted a different picture in his private diary:  

"Zenop Bezjian, Vekil (representative) of Armenian Protestants, called. Schmavonian (one of Morgenthau’s two Armenian assistants) introduced him; he was his schoolmate. He told me a great deal about conditions [in the interior]. I was surprised to hear him report that Armenians at Zor were fairly well satisfied; that they have already settled down to business and are earning their livings; those were the first ones that were sent away and seem to have gotten there without being massacred. He gave me a list where the various camps are and he thinks that over one half million have been displaced.”

Jackson reported 5,000 emaciated and sick women and children were the only survivors from the Armenian population of Sivas, where "over 300,000 souls" had once lived. Given the description of what happened to the survivors, it would seem medically impossible for any of them to have lived much longer... so if 300,000-600,000 Armenians realistically perished from all causes (some 150,000 having died of starvation while accompanying the Russian retreats, according to a 1967 work by Richard Hovannisian), then we would need to conclude every single one of the "annihilated" Armenians must have come from Sivas.

Let us be reminded of where consuls like J. B. Jackson were coming from: 

Constantinople had once been the centre of eastern Christianity, and there were those who had never got over the loss. Of more immediate concern in the religious life of the Ottoman Empire were the missionaries chasing the souls of the eastern Christians and the European governments which interested themselves in the same communities for reasons of state. The aptly named 'capitulations' were the means by which the powers were able to secure special privileges... Out of this unhealthy state of affairs (as it certainly was from the sultan's viewpoint) developed a situation in which Ottoman Christians as communities or individuals could turn to an outside power to protect them against 'unjust' treatment. European consuls were everywhere and were usually quick to take up these complaints with the (Sublime Porte). [“Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians 1878-1896,” by Jeremy Salt]


While the above passage specifies only European consuls, there was no difference between them and the American consuls. America’s imperialistic goals were obviously at play and, in addition, the Christian American consuls were extremely biased (George Horton serving as an extreme example); the Armenians were perceived as the perpetually persecuted, and the good Christian consuls regarded themselves as their protectors… against this hateful “blight” upon humanity, the Terrible Turks. 

Arthur Tremaine Chester called it on the nose, when he wrote in 1923: “It has been the custom of those who wish to condemn the Turk to give religious intolerance as the cause of all disturbances in Turkey. I have never heard one of these people admit that politics, treachery, or any other similar cause had any connection with them. If an Armenian or Greek is killed, it is always referred to as the massacre of a Christian.” 

We then have a letter describing "the most terrible cruelties inflicted upon the thousands of Christian exiles," by the impartial Reverend F. H. Leslie, who had been made the American consular agent for "the entire district of Urfa." Balakian writes the "American pastor was imprisoned for aiding the Armenians. Already mentally broken down from what he had witnessed, he was now tortured in prison, and he committed suicide." At least we don't get the assertion the minister was murdered directly by the savage Turks, although how Balakian knows whether the missionary was tortured or how he exactly died is anyone's guess. (After all... he was in a Turkish prison. We all know what that means.) 

Jackson wrote to Morgenthau that the "Armenians in Aleppo, and nearby Meskene, Rakka, and Deir-el-Zor were dying by the thousands daily"... which were the exact same words Morgenthau himself used in his ghostwritten work to describe the fate of the Turks (by starvation).  

It is clear by now the author's agenda is to give forth the impression that the Turks were inhuman barbarians at every turn. When we get to the account by Armin Theophil Wegner (whose photographs "comprise the core of the witness images of the genocide"... I have never seen any photograph that made me stop and think there was a government sponsored plan for extermination, like Nazi officials bulldozing hundreds of corpses into pits. Mainly, Wegner's work demonstrated the suffering of people. There were also photos of suffering and emaciated people of Turks and Muslims taken elsewhere in what happened to be the Sick Man on his last legs), the author reports that the German medic was found out through a letter to his mother, describing the condition of the Armenians.  

Balakian then writes Wegner was kicked out of the camp and forced to work in the cholera wards, where he fell seriously ill, and was returned to Germany. In other words, his superiors (were they Turkish?) were so evil, they purposely punished Wegner by sending him to the Siberia of the cholera wards, with the implication that this would work out to be his possible execution??? If he worked as a nurse, would not his responsibility have been to tend to the sick? Do nurses get a choice about treating only less contagious sick people? Doesn't the Hippocrates Oath say something against that? 

Armin Theophil Wegner

Armin Theophil Wegner 

    
And why would there be "cholera wards," anyway? Why would there be any medical care available, whatsoever? Wasn't it the intention of the Turks to "annihilate" the Armenians?  

Let's pursue this line of thought further. On p. 258, Wegner is quoted as saying he had no supplies with which to help the Armenians, since it was "forbidden to help." The implication is clear; it's a genocide, and the Armenians were packed together to be left on their own, to cruelly suffer a slow death. Yet, Jackson begs Morgenthau for $150,000 a month from the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. Why would any goods be allowed to keep the Armenians alive? Wouldn't that fly in the face of the purposeful extermination attempt? (The relief began by fall of 1915, a full year before the relocation process ended; i.e., at a point not even halfway into the "genocide.") 

Unless the people are being used for slave labor (which Wegner’s photographs do not show the slightest evidence of), there is no reason to keep people alive if the intention is to "annihilate" them. This is only common sense.

 

 

 

Peter Balakian at work, Colgate University classroom

The Balakian Dog of Flake

Around p. 260, I'm beginning to wonder if Peter Balakian has even one shred of conscience. He actually has the gall to repeat perhaps the most infamous passage from Ambassador Morgenthau's phony book, the "insurance" tale. Sinking even lower by putting quotation marks around the created statements said to come from Talat Pasha's mouth (courtesy of the ghostwriter of "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story"; because this unconscionable book engaged in such a deceptive practice, should not "Balakian the Historian" know better?), the story goes that Talat asked for a list of Armenians in line for insurance payments because the Armenians are "practically all dead now" anyway. No other story would have made the Minister of the Interior appear to be as bestial, as this one... which was exactly Morgenthau's purpose.

However, the real idea — based on Morgenthau's very own privately written letters and diary, as Heath Lowry exposed — was that the American insurance company wished to send the assets to France, a country the Ottoman Empire was at war with. Talat Pasha had a duty to wish for the money to remain in his country, so that potential claims could be taken care of. Besides, the records indicate a representative of the insurance company was present in the Ottoman Empire, and Talat Pasha did not need to ask Morgenthau for a list of the Armenian policy holders.

Balakian appeared to be the main force in charge of attempting to discredit Professor Heath Lowry a few years ago, based on press articles of the period... where Balakian put his heart into the disgusting smear campaign conducted against the Princeton professor. Regardless of how much Balakian hates Dr. Lowry, now that Balakian is passing himself off as a "historian," there can be no excuse for him to repeat this false story in 2003, when Lowry's "The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" uncovered what was really going on... based on the unethical one-time lawyer's private writings.

Prof. Erich Feigl related a story in "A Myth of Terror" where Prof. Gerard Libaridian attempts to make use of false information (Andonian's forged telegrams) despite knowing the truth. When Feigl finally confronted Libaridian with the fact that these telegrams were fake, the latter spookily replied, "And?" (In other words... what difference does the truth make? The only thing that matters is to obscure the truth as long as the Armenians' identity-affirming "genocide" can be shown to be valid. Peter Balakian could not have chosen a better example with which to demonstrate what a shameless singer of the "Armenian AND? Anthem" he is. Beyond a doubt, he must have read Dr. Lowry's work, and he chose to ignore it. With such a disrespect for the facts, how could anything he has highlighted in his hoax of a book be trusted?

It has been difficult to go through the lies within this propaganda work, but I am so numbed by Peter Balakian's lack of ethics, it's become hard to take any story seriously. He writes of a pro-Armenian German businessman, who compares the people in the refugee camps to the "Hell of Dante." Balakian helpfully suggests even the German (Bernau) "had not seen what Aurora Mardiganian experienced," regarding "the game of swords," played with Armenian girls. You see, the swords were planted in the ground, blade up, and the Turks would ride their horses beside the row of swords carrying a girl "with the intent of... impaling her on a sword." If the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until death. "It was a game, a contest," "the traumatized survivor wrote in her memoir." If each girl was thrown until dead, how did Ms. Mardiganian become a "survivor"? Did the Turks give her popcorn and invite her to be a spectator to this “game”?

RAVISHED ARMENIA

Click for detail

(The heroine of this particular tall tale starred in the Near East Relief's propagandistic production, RAVISHED ARMENIA, co-starring Henry "Holier-than-Thou" Morgenthau. The 1919 film’s poster claimed "four millions" Armenian victims. More on this tale, later.)

"The Turks forced the Jews of the city (Diyarbakir) to gather up the bodies in oxcarts and throw them in the Tigris River." That implies these Jews would have served as genuine eyewitnesses to "the game of swords." Since these Jews were such victims of the "anti-Semitism" of the Turks, and thus owing no loyalty to the savages, has there been a single account from one of these Jewish citizens, supporting this incredible story? After the war and the disintegration of empire that came with it, surely one of these people could have relayed such a memorable tale. After all, just about every single Armenian "survivor" has jumped at the chance to provide a personal account.

Or is it possible this story, like so many others, were figments of a propagandist’s imagination… and they decided to throw in the Jews for good measure, another equally oppressed minority in the land of the monstrous Turks? (I still don’t understand why only the Armenians were singled out for extermination. The “infidel” Jews were non-Muslim, the Jews had money… the Jews were everything the Armenians were, as far as the Armenians’ reasons for their genocide. The only thing the Jews didn’t do was revolt, and commit atrocious crimes against the Muslim populace.)

Regarding whom the Jews were really victimized by, there is nothing in this book such as the following account by Elihu Ben Levi, of Vacaville, California (December 11, 1983, San Francisco Chronicle):

"We have first hand information and evidence of Armenian
atrocities against our people (Jews). Members of our family
witnessed the murder of 148 members of our family near Erzurum, Turkey, by Armenian neighbors, bent on destroying anything and anybody remotely Jewish and/or Muslim."

From Wheatcroft's "The Ottomans": "Kladderadatsch,
30 August 1896, shows that the German attitude
to the Ottoman was not so very different from that
of the other European nations. Once again the Ottomans
impale, stab and kill at will — this time in Crete. The
cartoon mocks the Ottoman claim that this was a civil war."

"In Meskene alone, Bernau reported, there were sixty thousand Armenians buried, and 'as far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses.'" This is a perfect example as to why individual Germans, whose people were the ally of the Turks, cannot be relied upon for their biased, pro-Christian testimony... after having been brainwashed through the years with the image of "The Terrible Turk."

How did Herr Bernau wind up with the 60,000 figure of buried corpses? Did he disinter them, for the purpose of his valuable estimate? For that matter, what happened to these 60,000 corpses? That is an incredibly large number, 60,000.... I think we can safely assume many have still been left behind. Why didn't the British, at Malta, send an excavation party to Meskene to corroborate this story? The British were desperate to prove genocide... this evidence certainly would have provided somewhat convincing. Even today, many of these skeletons must have been left behind... why don't the Armenians and their deep pockets pour their energies into an excavation project?

The desperation of the author shows further with the statement, "Bernau begged Jackson to keep some flow of money coming, even though the Ottoman authorities were trying to halt any and all aid." If such was the case, what in the world could have prevented the Ottoman authorities from succeeding? After all... the authorities were fully in charge, and one could not run such an operation of caring for a huge number of people discreetly. Obviously, this is yet another "exaggeration" from Mr. Peter Balakian. (Or one of the many already created “exaggerations” out there, which Balakian chooses to present as fact.)

ADDENDUM, 9-07:

Two to three years after this 2003 page was prepared, an extensive look at PBS's "The Armenian Genocide" was analyzed on TAT, the propaganda program where Peter Balakian served as co-writer; indeed, in many respects, the show resembled a filmed version of "The Burning Tigris." On the show, Bernau was misrepresented as a disinterested "traveling businessman," and it appears Balakian got the facts wrong; Bernau was no German, but an American working with Consul Jackson. Read further.


 

Chapter 21's "Same Fate" tells us about how all of Morgenthau's consuls were filing similar reports... including Oscar Heizer in Trebizond, W. Peter at Samsoun, Charles E. Allen from "as far west as" Adrianople in Thrace, Edward I. Nathan in Adana and Mersin, and George Horton in Izmir (Smyrna). All received information from missionaries/Armenians, and if George Horton was any indication, all shared Morgenthau's tendency to be bigoted and racist. Horton himself was a religious fanatic who felt comfortable in repeating a cardinal's statement that the Turks were the anti-Christ.

Oscar Heizer (stationed in a "historic Greek" city, where "much of the indigenous Greek population would soon be wiped out as well”; Thea Halo is the Greek reference. In a 2000 book entitled "Not Even My Name," we get the dubious figure of three-quarters of a million Greeks living in their "ancient homeland in Anatolia along the Black Sea" who were "deported or killed." Such is the objective source the out-of-control Balakian is comfortable with) told Morgenthau in July 1915 that the Turks were "very hostile to all outside suggestion and interference in their internal affairs." What country would not be hostile to interference in their internal affairs?

The chapter relates another array of stories the British could not use during the Malta Tribunal as actual evidence, since it's all hearsay. Finally, Balakian quotes from Morgenthau's book again... another made-up interaction between Talat Pasha and Morgenthau. This is the one where we are asked to believe Talat Pasha actually admitted to disposing of three-quarters of the Armenians, and that there are none left at Bitlis, Van and Erzerum. (Not only were there Armenians left in these provinces, they were or soon would  be busily killing Turks; McCarthy’s “The Destruction of Ottoman Erzurum by Armenians”: “One thing is sure: Armenian statements that almost all of the Erzurum Armenians were deported and killed are ridiculous. This is demonstrated by the fact that so many Armenians lived in Erzurum during the Russian occupation. When the Russians departed there were enough Armenians remaining in Erzurum or returning from Russian Armenia to create an army and attempt to run a government. If all the Erzurum Armenians were dead, where did those Armenians come from? It is absurd to think, and no one then or now has asserted, that these were Russian Armenians who had first come to Anatolia in 1916.”)

So Talat Pasha actually admitted to the hopelessly unfriendly Morgenthau (if we are to believe Morgenthau's phony book; in his letters and diary, Morgenthau sounded relatively friendly to the Turkish officials, and they were kind to him, in turn) that out of a pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population ranging from 1 to 1.6 million (based on neutral, Western, and therefore pro-Armenian  sources), seventy-five percent, or from 750,000 to 1,200,000 Armenians, were killed. That would leave from 250,000 to 400,000 Armenians alive. Then how come the Armenians themselves admit 1,000,000 Armenians were left alive after the war, including Mr. Peter Balakian.... judging by a 1998 commemoration he signed his name to? (Disagreeing with the Armenian Patriarch himself, who vouched for 1,260,000 Armenian survivors in 1918.)

Since Balakian has conceded there were one million Armenian survivors, in order for Talat Pasha’s made-up words of having exterminated “three-quarters of the Armenians,” that means there would have needed to be four million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, before the war started!

Peternocchio

 Is Peter Balakian actually expecting us to believe Talat Pasha would have told Morgenthau less than half of the Armenians were left alive? Yes, the lying Morgenthau asked us to believe that, but that was in a different age of anti-Turkish propaganda. How could Peter Balakian, with a straight face, repeat such a ridiculous assertion... in this day and age?

At chapter's end, Balakian also repeats the following made-up exchange: Morgenthau says, "You are making a terrible mistake," to which Talat Pasha replies that he never regrets, even if he does wrong. I think the same question may be posed to Peter Balakian himself, putting himself forever on record this way, tarnishing the truth and whatever little honor the man has. I think the same answer can easily be imagined coming from Peter Balakian's lips. By now, Peternocchio's nose is already the size of a redwood tree.

 


 
Chapter 22 relates the tale of America rolling up her sleeves to help the Armenians. (Shedding not one tear for the no-less-equally devastated Turks.) Missionary James Barton is voted director of the Committee on Armenian Atrocities. "Leading Zionist spokesman Rabbi Stephen Wise" was one of the founding board members... as well as Bishop David Greer and "financier and civic leader Isaac N. Seligman. Balakian writes: Armenians were not allowed to join "in order to maintain its sense of nonpartisan neutrality." "Nonpartisan neutrality"? What a hoot.

James Barton's "Story of Near East Relief" reports a dispatch from an American consul (I guess it doesn't matter who this consul was, since they were all basically rubber stamps of each other) declaring: "The 'authorities' make 'no secret of the fact that their main object is the extermination of the whole Armenian race... The vali admitted quite frankly: "We are determined to get rid, once and for all, of this cancer in our country".' " This dubiously translated quote from an unknown vali (representative) must have proven the genocide, all right.

Ultimately, from 1915 to 1929, what would later become known as the Near East Relief (incorporated by Congress in 1919) would raise over $116,000,000 -- "a sum that would be more than a billion dollars in contemporary terms." Balakian proudly asserts his sympathy-devouring people would receive extraordinary attention from the New York Times: 145 articles on the Armenian massacres in 1915 alone (an article about every two and a half days.) The author, his heart breaking the same attention is not being paid to the Armenians' eternal victimhood these days, sums up by declaring of the Times: "...its desire to present balanced views of current events, the articles on the Armenian massacres carry a special kind of authority."

As prestigious as the New York Times is, wishing will not make these biased articles truer. The American press almost solely relied on British propaganda, as a division of Wellington House was operated on U.S. soil by a Canadian, and the British had cut the German cable to America... further closing alternate sources of news. Additionally, if the Times were so "balanced," where were the articles of Armenians massacring Turks?


TWO FUN "PRESS" FACTS:

1) New York Times Publisher Adolph Ochs was close friends with Henry Morgenthau, according to Balakian's friend, Samantha Power ("A Problem from Hell — America and the Age of Genocide"). Both men were members of New York City's wealthy Jewish elite, going to the same social events... they must have gotten pretty chummy. Not that Ochs would have needed his pal to put up all the genocide news unfit to print, since every other media publication was doing the same... but to the extent of one article about every two and a half days?

2) According to a propagandistic book where Balakian contributed a chapter, "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," there was one and only one American newspaper correspondent who travelled into the Ottoman interior in 1915 to witness events firsthand. Can you imagine? Only ONE American reporter. Can there be a greater indication that these 145 "genocide" articles from the New York Times, and all the many from America's other newspapers were almost exclusively based on hearsay and propaganda? (That reporter's name, by the way: George Schreiner. He's the one who blistered Henry Morgenthau with a late 1918 letter, appalled over the lies of Henry's "Story" book... and he's the one who concluded there was no "genocide."


Such was the intensity of the propaganda, President Hoover is quoted as having said "Armenia is in the front of the American mind... known... only a little less than England."

(Another Hoover quote Balakian chooses not to report is one from Professor Hovannisian's The Republic of Armenia: "[Armenian corruption], if made public, would become the greatest scandal in American charitable history.")

Balakian points out the irony that whereas the Holocaust was not covered in the nation's press that extensively during WWII, "week after week from 1915 on, the New York Times used terms describing what would later be defined as genocide: 'systematic,' 'deliberate,' 'authorized,' 'organized by government,' 'systematic race extermination.;" I'd say the irony is the irresponsibility with which the newspaper used such terms when there was no proof... and presently uses the G-word, although there is still no proof.

All the sources Balakian wishes us to believe ("American and European diplomats and missionaries"... "massacre survivors" ... "neutral [?] bystanders") that served as sources of evidence would be objective, and non-partisan. As an example, Balakian quotes a British MP from an August 1915 Times article as having said, "it is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people." Let us remind Peter Balakian that the British were at WAR with the Ottoman empire, and it served the purposes of the British to make the Turks look like monsters, so that they can more easily justify their long-planned for land-grab scheme... after the war; this is one reason why their infamous propaganda division, Wellington House, focused on the Turks.

Viscount James Bryce

Lord Bryce

Another example Balakian provides slightly less breathlessly than Marilyn Monroe in her rendition of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President": in Oct. 1915, "a Times headline read: 800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED: VISCOUNT BRYCE TELLS HOUSE OF LORDS." Imagine that; Balakian feels comfortable in actually quoting the man who was in charge of Wellington House, James Bryce himself, in this day and age…when Bryce's "Blue Book" has been discredited, having relied upon hearsay and mostly anonymous reports provided by missionaries and Armenians. We know today how grossly inaccurate Bryce's figure of "800,000" was, especially in 1915…. when there was so much more massacring left to be done. (Why, only three years ago, in the British Blue Book, the pre-war Armenian population was recorded as a little over one million. Mr. Balakian himself agrees one million Armenians survived after the war. How could Bryce the propagandist, in all good conscience, have reported 800,000 dead?)

In a September 1915 Times article reporting on Morgenthau's idea of sending 550,000 Armenian massacre survivors to the United States (without mentioning what an awful job the Turks had done with genocide... imagine such an overwhelmingly large number of people escaping the massacres), Balakian writes that the article closed with a "rare moment of Turkish candor": "Turks admit that the Armenian persecution is the first step to get rid of Christians, and that Greeks will come next, Jews are also marked for slaughter or expulsion, American missionaries must also be driven out, for Turkey henceforth is to be for Turks alone."

Number one: it's amazing the Turks allowed such a hostile people as the missionaries access to the Ottoman Empire in the first place, and if the Turks really wanted them out, who believes that would not have been achieved within a week? (Well, a little more than a week; the missionaries owned a lot of properties in the Empire.) Number two: I don’t remember Hitler saying, “First the Jews, then the Gypsies…” And finally, why should we believe a Turk actually said this? Who was the Turk? And even if a Turk actually said this, which I would highly doubt, why should we become convinced this statement reflected actual Turkish policy?

I'm an American, and I can make up any statement about America that a foreign source could use as a source. Whatever is said would be no more than my own opinion, far from an official policy. And that's only assuming if a real Turkish person made the above statement... that "Balakian the Historian" has chosen to give credence to.

Balakian then turns to the Gemans' role. He brings up some German sources such as Consul Scheubner-Richter (who wrote "by July 15 almost all of the Armenians had been expelled from Erserum." You’ve already read earlier how absurd that assertion is, as many Armenians lived in Erzurum during the Russian occupation), and a Protestant group. It's ironic that the history of the Germans and the Turks are not kept in mind, here; these two nations were at war in previous centuries, Christian Germany getting the full blast of anti-Turkish propaganda as the rest of Western Europe. Are all Germans going to rid themselves of their deeply-instilled biases of the Terrible Turk simply because they were thrown together as reluctant wartime bedfellows?

Baron Von Wangenheim

Balakian then treats us to several German reports, which are presented for ridicule purposes. For example, Baron von Wangenheim's (whose name Balakian misspells as Wagenheim) comment that the Turks were justified in what they were doing to the Armenians (which the baron had meant to be taken as the relocation policy, after the Armenians had turned treacherous, not as massacres) is designated as "shocking" (because what is being said is taken as massacre-justification, after the relentless brainwashing campaign in the U.S.) ... even though American Secretary of State Robert Lansing opined the very same, in 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."

German Ambassador count von Bernstorff is reported as saying the Armenian atrocities are "greatly exaggerated," and (unless the author has truly lost his sense of reality), Peter Balakian ironically follows up with the following New York Times headlines: NINE THOUSAND ARMENAINS MASSACRED AND THROWN INTO TIGRIS (Aug. 4, 1915); 600,000 STARVING ON ROAD (Aug. 27, 1915); 1,500,000 ARMENIANS STARVE (Sept. 5, 1915); 500,000 ARMENIANS SAID TO HAVE PERISHED (Sept. 24, 1915); 800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED; 10,000 DROWNED AT ONCE (Oct. 7, 1915)... if we added up the tally of the greatly exaggerating New York Times, I believe we would wind up with more Armenian dead than ever existed.

Incidentally, even Ara Sarafian had issues with the “10,000 drowning” story. Another Armenian “scholar” aggressively disagreed.

No wonder The New York Times couldn't bear to face up to their abominably wretched reporting, and decided to call these events a "genocide" in recent times, as Dennis Papazian revealed in his "Misplaced Credulity." A liar who keeps on lying to preserve the appearance of credibility follows the familiar pattern… compromising his credibility even further down the road, when the lie is ultimately exposed.

Balakian lends forth further evidence of Talat Pasha's evilness by pointing to "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," and citing how Talat Pasha would intercept Morgenthau's cablegrams. Why shouldn't these cables have been intercepted? America, while not officially at war with the Ottoman Empire, was clearly on the side of the enemy camp; America did not defend the Ottoman Empire's interests in the slightest.

Even after Balakian refers to Talat Pasha's "pilfering" of Morgenthau's mail (I think the English instructor ought to realize stealing connotes "the taking away of, without the intention of giving back"), the unscrupulous author then reports "Morgenthau still received the cabled money." I would think if Talat Pasha were truly a "pilferer," he would have intercepted the huge amount of monies the ambassador was receiving.

 

 

 

NEXT:


Chapters 23-25

 

 

  

 

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