( senator at feinstein.senate.gov )
Sent: March 27, 2009
Dear Honorable Senator Feinstein,
I am a Professor of International Relations, and I received my educational degrees from American schools, including a B.A., two Masters and a Doctorate (Syracuse University, 1959).
I devoted three decades of my life, inter alia, to the study of Armeno-Turkish relations, on which I published no less than eighty books/booklets. Three of the most recent ones were printed in New York. They are entitled: (1) Armenian Falsifications (2008), (2) What Happened to the Ottoman Armenians? (2006), and (3) The British Blue Books: Vehicles of War Propaganda, 1914-18. I shall do my best to mail to you a copy of each of the last-mentioned three publications.
You may also be interested in knowing that I am presently on a rather long speaking tour of the United States that will eventually total no less than thirty-six public addresses, mostly in various universities and a few meetings with some US Congress members, or their chief advisors.
I have in my possession now the draft resolution pertaining to the Armenians, prepared by a group of members of the House. I have also seen your reply to Mrs. Nisan Giftgi on the same question.
Both the text, prepared by Mr. Schiff and co-sponsored by some other House Members, and your private letter, reflect a totally one-sided and biased approach that omits crucial facts and presents a distorted picture that has no relation with the actual events in history. I have no intention to take this opportunity to reply to the inaccurate assertions, outright exaggerations and scandalous omissions. A proper response can only be expressed in book form. You may consider that I have done this in the eighty publications since the early 1980s.
I may underline here that it is the duty of scholarship to question the validity of a mainstream idea. The idea in this case happens to be a prejudiced attitude or the equivalent of a “trial” in your Congress, where you as “prosecutors” and “judges” are trying to pass through a “verdict”, moreover in the name of the American people.
The draft resolution does not take into account any Turkish view. It does not seem to have taken into any consideration even Armenian confessions, expressed in memoirs, war histories, series of articles and official communications, all describing how armed Armenians, acting as independent units or in the ranks of Turkey’s enemies, killed Turks and other Muslims. Those Armenian and some third party sources agree that both armed Armenians and their victims had reached six-digit figures. There exist a host of reliable documents and acknowledgements to this effect in published works as well as in the archives of the interested parties. A total disregard of this wealth of information goes to prove that the US Congress is not the place to pass a verdict on this topic.
The draft resolution is basically a product of the Armenian ethnic lobby, well-organized and well-to-do but already facing a complaint registered with the US Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate.
I wish to come to your short reply to Mrs. Giftgy, in which you state the following: “We must remember and recognize this tragedy to ensure that it never happens again”.
Your generalization, which misses the point entirely, is misleading in ways more than one. It is a rationalization that may comfort you but actually helps to hide the origins of genocide. Unless you are able to accept the correct diagnosis of the true source of this brand of crime, massacres will occur, thanks in part to such incorrect assessments.
I shall put aside the fact that you are virtually under the arrest of carefully-selected justifications, with absolutely no mention of opposing documentation. You have never become a part of scholarly debate on that issue. For instance, a prominent British source (Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Dictionary of the First World War) recorded that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were living in Turkey in 1914, and that the Armenians “slaughtered an estimated 120,000 non-Armenians while the Turkish Army was preoccupied with mobilization.” It adds that the armed Armenians attacked the Turkish quarters of the Ottoman city of Van in April 1915, and proclaimed there a government of their own, seceding in the process this province from the State. This was the beginning of Armenian massacres, pillage and rape directed against the non-Armenians.
Notable Armenians (such as the first Prime Minister of independent Armenia Hovhannes Katchaznouni, K. Serope Papazian), British functionaries (Captain C.B.Norman, A.G.Hume-Braman, Sidney Whitman) and men-of-letters (C.F. Dixon-Johnson, Bernard Lewis, Roderic Daveson, Andrew Mango, Norman Stone), Russian officers (General Mayevski, Lieutenant-Colonel Tverdo-Khlebov, Captain I.G. Plat, Dr.Khoreshenov), American academics (Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, William L. Langer, Stanford J.Shaw, Justin McCarthy, Heath W. Lowry, Edward J. Erickson, Guenther Lewy), men from legal professions (Samuel A. Weems) and many others do not share the mainstream opinion about the “innocence” of the Armenians. You may kindly familiarize yourself with such sources. Fact-finding in history demands that all relevant parts of the truth is taken into consideration.
Let me come back to your misleading generalization that you intend to end genocide by punishing the Turks. I have to underline that genocide is a product of racism; and racism was born and rose in certain parts of the Western world. It is an offshoot of a particular level in the development of the capitalist society; it is the result of an advanced stage of a certain mode of production. It is like a hand and a glove with the process of colonial and imperialist exploitation.
One may believe to be “different” from the “other”, in terms of racial, ethnical or religious background. But when this difference is regarded as innate and unchangeable, and moreover, justifying a sense of superiority over the other, then, one is confronted with a racist attitude or a set of beliefs, which also expresses itself in the practices, institutions and structures which help to justify it. Racism theorizes about human differences and things badly about another group. It proposes to establish an order, a permanent group hierarchy believed to reflect “laws of nature” or even God’s preference. This is what the British, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and, the Americans have done in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Racism has two components: difference and power. It originates in the mind that regards “them” as different from “us”, and the difference is supposed to be permanent and unbridgeable. Government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, enslavement and genocide may follow that racist orientation. White supremacy, Christian selectivity, and anti-semitism are the result. The Blacks, the Muslims, and the Jews were tolerated as long as they stayed in “their place”. In some Western societies, racism was fully worked out, elaborately implemented, and carried to its extremes.
There is no racism in the Turkish psyche. It has never been a part of the Turks’ social, political, and psychological set-up. They are the ones who recognized the Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestants as separate peoples with the right to worship in their own way, built their own religious structures, elect their own representatives and be led by them, go anywhere within the large confides of the State, indulge in any kind of profession or work, and eventually join the State administration. This is known, dear Senator, as the famous “millet” system about which you give no hint of having accumulated sufficient knowledge. The Turks achieved all that when Europe was fighting religious wars, when Cromwell was pursuing his Catholics, the French butchering their Huguenots, and others subduing the Calvinists.
The Turks recognized the Armenians as a separate community as early as 1461 when the Christian centers virtually excommunicated this Gregorian people for centuries. Consequently, the Ottoman Foreign Minister only a year before the outbreak of the First World War was an Armenian – Gabriel Nouradoungian. Would Hitler appoint a Jew to be his Minister of Foreign Affairs? Did even the Weimar Republic do that? Antisemitism, thus, is a disease of the Western societies. Hitler did not learn anything from the Turks. There was enough racism accumulated in Germany, Austria, and in some other Western nation-states. They were the ones who gave to the world racist theoreticians – for instance, Gobineau in France, Chamberlain in Britain, Nietzche in Germany, and the Social Darwinists in the United States.
The Turks, on the other hand had saved the whole of European Jewry from total extinction during the Inquisition in 1492. Turkey was a place of refuge for all of those running away from Russian autocracy, the failure of the 1830 and the 1848 Revolutions, the setback of the progressive political movements in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere and of course the onslaught of Fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany. Likewise, the Turks made no contribution to racist theories, but presented to world civilization the celebrated Renaissance men such as Sinan the Architect, Yunus Emre the great humanist poet, and Ibni Sina whose book on medicine was utilized as the basic text book in all schools of medicine in Europe for 300 consecutive years.
But the Catholic missionaries from France and Protestant missionaries from the United States came to Ottoman Turkey to “teach” the Gregorian Armenians that they were “superior” to the Muslim Turks, by virtue of the fact they happen to be Christians. An American Protestant missionary (A.W.Williams) and the president of the Armenian Patriotic Alliance in New York (M.S. Gabriel), in their joint book, printed in Chicago as late as 1896, or only four years before our entry into the twentieth century, wrote the following on the Turks: “… the Turk is not a member of the best human race- the Indo-European, or Arian, like the Armenians. The Turk does not belong even to the next best of races, the semitic…the Turk is a wild beast to be caged. [We] beg pardon of the hounds, hyenas…and all wild beasts for using their names in simile or metaphor…” It is unfortunate that racist publications have become the teachers of a number of parliamentarians and conditioned them, along with the organized and politicized propaganda of the Armenian pressure groups who are so active in Washington, D.C.
However, such an assault on the Turks, and their views represents something like a lynch mob. One should note that such an attitude may well augur the advent of a new form of a totalitarian society.
You are merely helping the Armenians to redefine their identity as a group of “victims”. In Freudian terms of psychology, this form of selection is called “the egoism of victimization” that totally disregards the bloodshed and the trauma that the so-called “victims” have caused to others. Such a distorted version of events contradicts what actually happened in history. Throughout the First World War there was a non stop news coverage in the Western Allied press on the Armenians. Non of the attacks, destruction, murder, massacre, theft, pillage, and rape by the Armenians were ever reported. There was even a law against such reporting, on the basis of “aiding the enemy”. In the meantime, however, the Ottoman Armenians had joined hands with Turkey’s enemies who provided that minority with weapons, ammunition, military training, uniforms, logistics, lines of communications, and money.
Self-styled leaders may try to convince themselves and mislead others that if their selected “scapegoat” is punished, things will be right. This will never be the case, so long as the actual breeding source of genocide, which is racism, remains as it is in some Western societies.
Best wishes,
Türkkaya Ataöv
Professor of International Relations
Prof. Turkkaya Ataov is the Trukish Forum Advisory Board Member
Turkey ‘Hawk’ Touted As Obama’s Man For Europe By Stefanos Evripidou, Cyprus Mail, Cyprus, March 28 2009
THE US Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave President Barack Obama’s next ‘man in Europe’ a grilling over his apparent ‘pro-Turkish’ stance during his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
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