Category: Authors

From Genocide Recognition To Reclaiming Church Properties

The Armenian-American community took a major step last week to reverse the consequences of the Armenian Genocide and end the Turkish government’s long-standing policy of erasing all traces of Armenian civilization from present-day Turkey.

Going beyond mere acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide, some members of Congress have introduced a new resolution that urges “the Republic of Turkey to safeguard its Christian heritage and to return confiscated church properties.”

The sweeping House Resolution 306 calls on the Government of Turkey to:

“1) end all forms of religious discrimination;

2) allow the rightful church and lay owners of Christian church properties, without hindrance or restriction, to organize and administer prayer services, religious education, clerical training, appointments, and succession, religious community gatherings, social services, including ministry to the needs of the poor and infirm, and other religious activities;

3) return to their rightful owners all Christian churches and other places of worship, monasteries, schools, hospitals, monuments, relics, holy sites, and other religious properties, including movable properties, such as artwork, manuscripts, vestments, vessels, and other artifacts; and

4) allow the rightful Christian church and lay owners of Christian church properties, without hindrance or restriction, to preserve, reconstruct, and repair, as they see fit, all Christian churches and other places of worship, monasteries, schools, hospitals, monuments, relics, holy sites, and other religious properties within Turkey.”

This bipartisan resolution, sponsored by Cong. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Cong. Howard Berman (D-CA), was immediately endorsed by 30 of their House colleagues, 10 of them Republicans. This is a good start, as Republicans constitute the majority in the House and their support is crucial for the successful passage of the resolution. Significantly, Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a long-time opponent of the Armenian Genocide resolution, was one of the first supporters of the resolution regarding the return of church properties.

It is not surprising that this resolution has such broad support, as it is hard to imagine that any member of Congress, the State Department or the Obama administration would oppose returning a religious building back to its proper owners. By contemporary societal standards, no one would accept the conversion of a church into a mosque or vice versa. Turkey’s devout leaders, as good Muslims, would be the first to acknowledge and uphold the sanctity of houses of worship.

Beyond building a strong bipartisan coalition in Congress, practically all religious denominations in America, be they Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish or Muslim, would support such a resolution. All ethnic groups, such as Latinos, Greek-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-American, Arab-Americans, Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Assyrian-Americans would also lend their support to this resolution.

The Armenian National Committee of America noted that the resolution intends “to highlight, confront, and eventually reverse decades of official Turkish policy of destroying Christian church properties, desecrating holy sites, discriminating against Christian communities, and denying of the right of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Pontians, Arameans (Syriacs), and others to practice their faith in freedom.”

The right to religious freedom is not simply an internal Turkish issue. This right is protected by many international agreements, including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to which Turkey is a signatory. Turkey continues to violate Articles 41 and 42 of the Lausanne Treaty which obligate it to provide funding and facilities to non-Muslim minorities for educational, religious, and charitable purposes, and to protect their religious establishments. Regrettably, the House resolution makes no mention of these violations and Turkey’s obligations under the Lausanne Treaty.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which issues an annual report documenting violations of religious rights around the world, has placed Turkey on its “Watch List,” for the third year in a row. The Commission has found that “the Turkish government continues to impose serious limitations on freedom of religion or belief, thereby threatening the continued vitality and survival of minority religious communities in Turkey.” The Turkish government also “continues to intervene in the internal governance and education of religious communities and to confiscate places of worship.”

In recent years, the House and Senate passed several resolutions calling on Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, Lithuania, Romania, and Vietnam to protect houses of worship and return wrongfully confiscated properties belonging to religious minorities. In line with these resolutions, the House of Representatives should adopt Resolution 306, calling on the Turkish government to respect the right of worship for all Christian minorities and return to them their expropriated churches and other religious properties.

June 22, 2011

Sassounian’s column of June 16, 2011

Why Pass an Armenian Genocide

Resolution for the Third Time?

By Harut Sassounian

Publisher, The California Courier

A new Armenian Genocide resolution is being introduced in the House of Representatives this week.

The first question is why Congress is being asked to pass a genocide resolution for the third time? As is well known, the House of Representatives twice adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, in 1975 and 1984. What would Armenians gain by adopting the resolution for the third time? And if it passes this year, would another attempt be made to pass it again for the fourth time next year?

Some may be under the mistaken impression that such resolutions would help Armenians obtain restitution from Turkey for their confiscated lands and stolen possessions. This is simply not true. Commemorative resolutions express “the sense” of Congress and do not have the force of law. Furthermore, if these resolutions had any real benefits, Armenians would have taken advantage of them during the decades since their adoption!

On the positive side, the passage of these resolutions have ethical, psychological, and political dimensions. Morality dictates that the mass murder of an entire nation not be forgotten or ignored. Yet, it is the Turkish government’s continued denial of the Armenian Genocide that compels Armenians to present such resolutions to Congress year after year. Regrettably, successive U.S. administrations also share the blame in this sordid affair by aiding and abetting the Turkish denialists, and playing unethical word games with the extermination of 1.5 million innocent men, women and children.

The psychological advantage of passing such a resolution is the satisfaction received by descendants of genocide victims when their loss and pain are acknowledged by the legislature of the world’s greatest democracy.

The political raucous, whenever an Armenian Genocide resolution is introduced in Congress, is due to the Turkish government’s scandalous behavior. Dozens of commemorative resolutions on a variety of issues are adopted by the U.S. Congress each year, yet not a single one makes the news. Because Turkish leaders create such mayhem by making threats against the United States, dispatching high-level delegations to Washington, hiring powerful lobbying firms, and spending valuable political capital, they end up making millions of people aware of the facts of the Armenian Genocide. While the Turkish intent is to cover up the mass murder of Armenians almost a century ago, their berserk reaction inadvertently succeeds in publicizing to the whole world the dastardly crimes committed by their forefathers.

Hopefully, the Turkish government would once again resort to its normal bullying tactics, thereby attracting the attention of the international community to the Armenian Genocide issue. The newly introduced resolution can only benefit from such Turkish-generated publicity, since the Republican-dominated House is not likely to act on it anytime soon, not that the more sympathetic Democrats had a greater degree of enthusiasm to bring it to a vote late last year, when they were in power!

Certainly, Turkish officials could be even more helpful should they create unexpected crises with the United States, thus forcing the hand of both the Democratic administration and Republican House leadership to support the genocide resolution. Meanwhile, the Armenian-American community would keep the issue alive and ready to be triggered at the opportune moment, causing the Turkish side to spend millions of dollars in on-going lobbying efforts!

Such an opportunity may come later this month with a possible bloody confrontation between the second Turkish “humanitarian” flotilla and Israel’s Navy, which could trigger the ire of U.S. and Israeli leaders, compelling them to put the pending Genocide resolutions to a vote in their respective legislatures. While Armenians would resent seeing the genocide issue used as a political football, they may not have much of a choice, since they have been just as offended when the resolution was not being adopted for all the wrong reasons!

Going beyond the genocide issue, Armenian-Americans may introduce several other resolutions in Congress this year involving Armenian-Turkish relations:

— Urging Turkey to return the expropriated Armenian churches to the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul, allowing them to function as churches, not museums, mosques, or touristic sites;

— Honoring the distinguished jurist Raphael Lemkin who coined the term genocide, influenced by the mass murder of Armenians in 1915;

— Advocating the lifting of the blockade of Armenia imposed by Turkey and Azerbaijan; and

— Supporting the protection of human rights of all minorities in Turkey (Alevis, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and Kurds).

With the upcoming congressional and presidential elections, and unexpected developments in the Eastern Mediterranean, we may be facing a hectic and chaotic political season. It is critical for Armenian-Americans and their supporters to remain well informed, active, and committed to the pursuit of Armenian interests.

June 18, 2011

Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

Claire Berlinski

Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

Istanbul’s history deserves preservation, but at what cost to development?

Anyone who has ever sat in one of Istanbul’s endless traffic jams, listening to a taxi driver blast his horn and curse the son-of-a-donkey unloading a moving van in front of him, will agree that the city’s transportation system leaves much to be desired. City planners meant to solve this problem when they began construction of a $4 billion subway tunnel beneath the Bosporus. Then, to the planners’ horror, the project’s engineers discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius. Known to archaeologists only from ancient texts, the port had been sleeping peacefully since the fourth century ad—directly underneath the site of the proposed main transit station in Yenikapı.

The tunnel-digging halted, entailing untold millions in economic losses, and the artifact-digging began. An army of archaeologists descended upon the pit, working around the clock to preserve the ancient jetties and docks, while Istanbul’s traffic grew yet more snarled. Newspapers reported that Metin Gokcay, the dig’s chief archaeologist, was “rejecting all talk of deadlines.” It’s not difficult to imagine the hand-wringing that those words must have prompted among budget planners.

The planners no doubt considered throwing themselves into the Bosporus when the excavation then unearthed something even better—or worse, depending on your perspective—underneath those remains: 8,000-year-old human clothes, urns, ashes, and utensils. These artifacts stunned historians and forced them to revisit their understanding of the city’s age and origins. The discovery posed a fresh moral problem, too: excavating the top layer might damage the one above it—or vice versa. So the decision was no longer, “Should we conserve these remains?” It was, “Which remains should we conserve?”

The subway project, originally scheduled to be finished in May 2010, is now at least six years behind schedule. The route has been changed 11 times in response to new findings, driving everyone concerned to the brink of madness. The government is desperate to finish the project but well aware that the world is watching. No one wants to be known to future generations as the destroyer of 8,000 years’ worth of civilization.

Decisions like this are made on a smaller scale every day in every neighborhood of Istanbul. Istanbul’s population—by some estimates, as high as 20 million—has more than tripled since 1980, enlarged by decades of migration from Turkey’s poor rural regions. The city desperately needs better roads, subways, and housing. Its infrastructure is archaic, a problem illustrated in 2009 when flash floods gushed across the city’s arterial roads, killing scores. The catastrophe was widely ascribed to inadequate infrastructure, shoddy construction, and poor urban planning.

But building the city’s future will assuredly destroy its past. Thriving human settlements existed here thousands of years before the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. If you look under the ground around Istanbul’s Golden Horn, it’s almost impossible not to find something archaeologically significant. Developers covet these sites today for precisely the geographic features—for example, natural ports—that made them equally desirable long ago. The more economically attractive the location, the more likely it is to have significant remains, and the more likely it is that someone will have an economic motivation to make those remains disappear.

Government-backed developers, for example, were determined to expand the Four Seasons Hotel in Sultanhamet, even though it sat atop relics from the Palatium Magnum built by Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century ad. Dogged local investigative journalism and the threat of international opprobrium put a halt to those plans. On the other side of the Golden Horn, when it became obvious that the construction of the Swiss and the Conrad Hotels in Beşiktaş would destroy significant archaeological artifacts, the local government objected, pointing to Turkey’s laws on historic preservation. The developers went over their heads to Ankara and appealed to the laws on promoting tourism. Parliament decided that Turkey needed foreign direct investment, and the tourism laws prevailed. There was an irony in the decision, of course: Istanbul’s heritage is precisely what attracts tourists. Then again, if there are no hotels, there’s nowhere for tourists to stay.

There is no way to resolve the tension between letting this megacity develop economically and protecting its priceless archaeological treasures. Obviously, you can’t turn an entire city into a museum where no new construction is allowed. According to some archaeologists, that’s exactly what you’d have to do to protect Turkish historic artifacts—leave them all in the ground, untouched, since even careful excavation might destroy them. But Turkey is not a wealthy country. It’s hard to feel morally confident in saying that Turkish citizens need Neolithic hairbrushes more than they need houses, factories, ports, dams, mines, and roads—especially when they’re dying in flash floods.

So something has to be destroyed. But who decides which part of the city’s past is most important? Legally, Turkey’s monument board has the authority to decide what to save: in principle, if more than 60 percent of a neighborhood is more than 100 years old, it cannot be touched without the board’s permission. The board deals daily with a massive number of requests and decisions, but it has neither the time nor the resources to ensure that its decisions are upheld. For example, it reviews all plans for development in sensitive areas. The plans then get sent to municipal government offices for approval—but often, the plans submitted to the board are different from the ones that go to the local government, and the board is none the wiser.

Further, the process of evaluating a preservation claim is often slow and bureaucratic. Sara Nur Yildiz, a historian at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, recalls noticing a distinctive earthen mound at the edge of a construction site in her upscale neighborhood in Cihangir. She suspected immediately that it was an archaeologically significant well. “I told them to stop digging,” she says, “but they ignored me.” She filed a petition with the monument board. Ultimately, the board agreed with her and halted the construction. But by the time the board finished studying the case and relaying its verdict to the workers, half of the structure had been demolished.

In general, Ottoman Empire relics fare better than Byzantine ruins. In the minds of certain officials, the latter sound a bit too much like Greek ruins, which aren’t, after all, part of their history. Archaeologists associated with TAY—the Archaeological Settlements of Turkey Project—have compiled inventories of priceless endangered sites. They report a “persistent and intense threat” to Byzantine remains throughout the city from the construction of roads and modern housing. The Edirnekapı and Topkapı sections of the historic city walls, they lament, vanished during the construction of Adnan Menderes Boulevard and Millet Street. Another problem: there is “almost no coordination,” say archaeologists with TAY, between the government departments charged with preserving cultural heritage and those responsible for public works.

Many academics have worked to draw up conservation plans for the city. So has UNESCO. But they don’t have the power to enforce them. UNESCO, claiming that the Turkish government has disregarded its reports, has threatened to embarrass Istanbul by putting its cultural treasures on its endangered list. But on the historic peninsula, rates of return on investment in development are among the highest in the world—exceeded only by those in Moscow. For developers, the amount of money at stake is phantasmagoric. They’re willing to spend a lot to make legal and political obstacles go away. Archaeologists can’t compete.

So come visit now, while it’s all still here.

Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul.

June 15, 2011
The Strangeness of Turkey–Two Views

We at Discovery have a couple of friends who know Turkey well, though each in a different way. Usually these days Mustafa Akyol, a columnist in Istanbul, and Claire Berlinski, an American writer living there, disagree about Turkish policy, culture and foreign policy. But both have well-considered perspectives worth knowing. Mustafa is author of a forthcoming book on the reform path Islam might take (Mustafa, of course, is Muslim). He is irenic, pro-Western and cautious, but also very hopeful for the future of his country.

Claire, on the other hand, has both the insights and the limitations that come from the perspective of an outsider. A sympathetic, generally secular Jew, Claire has spent five years in Turkey and renders an excellent assist to her fellow Americans to understand a society that operates in a less linear, sequential manner than their own.

Turks are given to conspiracy theories about many things and their policies often don’t make sense in Western terms.

Nonetheless, as Claire observes in a fine interview that Michael Totten has conducted with her for Pajamas Media, Americans need to work harder at comprehending Turkey and to work harder explaining our own values to the Turks. Right now, she points out, the Turks are fighting a small civil war with Kurdish rebels and incurring many casualties, but this is hardly mentioned in the Western media. Turkey’s government is pursuing a wholly implausible policy of comity with Iran, even though Iran surely will upset Turkey greatly when the Iranians build their atomic bombs. And the Turkish government, having promoted the flotilla that tried to overcome the Israelis and enter the Gaza Strip, may want to hold back a second flotilla–which is forming–but presently seem unable to do so.

If any of this reminds you of the confusion that afflicted the Ottoman Empire in its final years, you wouldn’t be far off. The difference is that the Ottomans were in material decline at the time, while Turkey is thriving economically today. The country could be a bulwark of reasonable accommodation between Islam and the West. In any event, Claire warns, do not confuse Turkey with either Iranian or Arab lands.

On that and some other points, Mustafa Akyol would agree. Generally, Mustafa (who, like Claire, is well known to us at Discovery Institute) approves of the current political leadership of Turkey. His patriotic emotion running high, he even supported the first flotilla. But he lately has begun to see flaws in the current regime. It is hard for a liberal like Mustafa, for example, to countenance the arrest of dissident journalists or to credit the exaggerated claims the government has made about its domestic opponents.

One thing both writers would agree on (in addition to mutual personal regard) is that–in addition to all our other concerns–Americans need to learn more about Turkey. Our relations with that country are important in themselves, but they also have serious resonance elsewhere in the region. They need us, we need them. If there ever is to be peace in that part of the world, Turkey will have to be part of it.

via Discovery News – The Strangeness of Turkey–Two Views.

June 8, 2011
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FASCIST

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FASCIST

“Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”

William L. Shirer

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Numbed in their abjectitude,

The only moving thing

The eye of the young boy

Who would never be an artist.

I

I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down…This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weakness, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison gas.

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 43-44.

II

No one can accuse him [Hitler] of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 81.

III

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolph Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37% of the popular vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 185.

IV

In the four years since the 1928 elections, the Nazis had won some thirteen million new votes. Yet the majority that would sweep the party into power still eluded Hitler. He had won only 37% of the total vote. The majority of the Germans were still against him.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 166.

V

Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries—in France, in England, in the United States—had proved to be the backbone of democracy.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 186.

VI

It [the Republic] had, as we have seen, allowed the Army to maintain a state within a state, the businessmen and bankers to make large profits, the Junkers to keep their uneconomic estates by means of government loans that were never repaid and seldom used to improve the land. Yet this generosity had won neither gratitude nor their loyalty to the Republic. With a narrowness, a prejudice, a blindness which in retrospect seem inconceivable to this chronicler, they hammered away at the foundations of the Republic until, in alliance with Hitler, they brought it down.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 186.

VII

When Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, he could look back on a year of achievement without parallel in German history. Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and “coordinated” under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people. For all these accomplishments and for his resolute action in foreign affairs, which took Germany out of the concert of nations at Geneva, and proclaimed German insistence on being treated as an equal among the great powers, he was backed, as the autumn plebiscite and election had shown, by the overwhelming majority of the German people.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 213.

VIII

Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule, where the fictitious quality of everyday reality makes propaganda largely superfluous.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 245.

Hitler lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit. On the day following the fire, February 28 [1933], he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the protection of the People and the State” suspending seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that: Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 194.

IX

The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plausible the propagandistic claim of the movement that the institution [concentration camps] exists for asocial elements.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 448.

The purpose of the concentration camps was not only to punish enemies of the regime but by their very existence to terrorize the people and deter them from even contemplating any resistance to Nazi rule.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 271.

From the very first weeks of 1933, when the massive and arbitrary arrests, beating and murders by those in power began, Germany under National Socialism ceased to be a society based on law. “Hitler is the law!” the legal lights of Nazi Germany proudly proclaimed, and Goering emphasized it when he told the Prussian prosecutors on July 12, 1934, that “the law and the will of the Fuehrer are one.” It was true.

Ibid., 268.

X

Journalistic circles in particular like to describe the press as a great power in the state. As a matter of fact, its importance really is immense. It cannot be overestimated, for the press really continues education in adulthood.

Its readers, by and large, can be divided into three groups:

First, into those who believe everything they read;

Second, into those who have ceased to believe anything;

Third, into the minds which critically examine what they read, and judge accordingly.

Numerically, the first group is by far the largest. It consists of the great mass of the people and consequently represents the simplest-minded part of the nation. It cannot be listed in terms of profession, but at most in general degrees of intelligence. To it belong all those who have been neither born nor trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white.

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 240-241.

XI

General Augusto Pinochet raped, tortured, murdered, robbed, and lied.

He violated the constitution he had pledged to respect. He was the strongman of a dictatorship that tortured and murdered thousands of Chileans. He sent tanks into the streets to discourage the curiosity of those who wanted to investigate his crimes. And he lied every time he opened his mouth to talk about these things.

Once the dictatorship was over, Pinochet stayed on as head of the army. And in 1998, when he was to retire, he stepped onto the country’s civilian stage. As I write these lines, he has, by his own order, become a senator for life. Protest has erupted in the streets, but the buoyant general, deaf to anything but the military hymn praising his achievements, proceeds to take his seat in the Senate. He has plenty of reason to turn a deaf ear: after all, the day of the 1973 coup d’état that ended Chile’s democracy, September 11, was celebrated as a national holiday for a quarter of a century, and September 11 is still the name of one of downtown Santiago’s main thoroughfares.

Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 193.

XII

Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation. Let no one have illusions! National Socialism has set out to purge the German Reich and our people of all those influences threatening its existence and character…With the opening of this exhibition has come the end of artistic lunacy and with it the artistic pollution of our people.

Adolph Ziegler, President, Reich Chamber of Art, 18 July 1937

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 244.

At one period in the mid-thirties the hissing of German films became so common that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warning against “treasonable behavior on the part of the cinema audiences.” Likewise the radio programs were so roundly criticized that the president of the Radio Chamber, one Horst Dressler-Andress declared that such carping was “an insult to German culture” and would not be tolerated.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 247.

XIII

Do not interrupt. I will not tolerate interruption. I am an old man. My voice tires. Gentlemen, I appeal to your sense of justice, your notorious sense of justice. Hear me out. Consider my third point. Which is that you have exaggerated. Grossly. Hysterically. That you have made me some kind of mad devil, the quintessence of evil, hell embodied. When I was, in truth, only a man of my time. Oh inspired, I will grant you, with a certain—how shall I put it?—nose for the supreme political possibility. A master of human moods, perhaps, but a man of my time.

Average, if you will. Had it been otherwise, had I been the singular demon of your rhetorical fantasies, how then could millions of ordinary men and women have found in me the mirror, the plain mirror of their needs and appetites? And it was, I will allow you that, an ugly time. But I did not create its ugliness, and I was not the worst. Far from it. How many wretched little men of the forest did your Belgian friends murder outright or leave to starvation and syphilis when they raped the Congo? Answer me that, gentlemen. Or must I remind you? Some twenty million. That picnic was under way when I was newborn. What was Rotterdam or Coventry compared with Dresden and Hiroshima? I do not come out worst in that black game of numbers. Did I invent the camps? Ask of the Boers. But let us be serious. Who was it that broke the Reich? To whom did you hand over millions, tens of millions of men and women from Prague to the Baltic? Set them like a bowl of milk before an insatiable cat? I was a man of murderous time, but a small man compared with him. You think of me as a satanic liar. Very well. Do not take my word for it. Choose what sainted , unimpeachable witness you will. The holy writer, the great bearded one who came out of Russia and preached to the world. It is sometime ago. My memory aches. The man of the Archipelago. Yes, that word sticks in the mind. What did he say? That Stalin had slaughtered thirty million. That he had perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich. My boys used their fists and whips. I won’t deny it. The time stank of hunger and blood. But when a man spat out the truth they would stop their fun. Stalin’s torturers worked for the pleasure of the thing. To make men befoul themselves, to obtain confessions which are lies, insanities, obscene jokes. The truth only made them more bestial. It is not I who assert these things: it is your own survivors, your historians, the sage of the Gulag. Who, then, was the greater destroyer, whose blood lust was the more implacable? Stalin’s or mine? […] Our terrors were a village carnival compared with his. Our camps covered absurd acres; he had strung wire and death pits around a continent. Who survived among those who had fought with him, brought him to power, executed his will? Not one. He smashed their bones to the last splinter. When my fall came, my good companions were alive, fat, scuttling for safety or recompense, cavorting toward you with their contritions and their memoirs. How many Jews did Stalin kill—your savior, your ally Stalin? Answer me that. Had he not died when he did, there would not have been one of you left alive between Berlin and Vladivostok. Yet Stalin died in bed, and the world stood hushed beside the tiger’s rest.

George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., 167-169.

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: A Harvest Book, 1985.

Galeano, Eduardo. Upside Down. New York: Picador, 1998.

Hitler, Adolph. Mein Kampf. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

Steiner, George. The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

June 8, 2011
$Turkish President to infract Neutrality…$

Turkish President to infract Neutrality…

$Turkish President to infract Neutrality… 8$ As you all know, in parliamentary systems of government, the Presidents, as Head of State, stand for the state, which charges them the obligation to reflect neutrality, no matter whether they are from a political party out of the parliament. In Turkey, additionally, the President is supposed to stand for the republic and, thus, the “people of Turkey”, which enforces him to be neutral as an ethical and moral task.

The mentioned neutrality that should supposedly be considered by Presidents is of a greater importance especially in times of elections. Although the neutrality in state issues could not be properly observed throughout his presidency which is evident in the activities that he has carried out in his office so far: The immediate and absolute ratification of the government decrees and draft bills, the way of appointing university rectors, the expressions absolutely in line with those of government etc., one expected a clear attitude of neutrality from the President at least in the course of the general elections. This he pretended to show by declaring that he would not make official state visits within Turkey until the end of the elections. This can be taken to be an appreciable attitude; however, in his official visit in Poland, he transgressed the rule of neutrality more than once.

When he was asked about the questions concerning the “freedom of thought” and “freedom of press” in Turkey by referring to the journalists and authors under arrest, he reacted just like a judge saying: “those people were not arrested due to their writings, but due to what they have done as the members of illegal terrorist organizations”. It is a pity that Turkish President could clearly explain his prejudices about uncompleted case in which nobody is either guilty or innocent yet, as the universal rule of “presumption of innocence” envisages. This saying conspicuously showed the prejudices in background coated by the pretensions of so-called neutrality.
A second infraction of neutrality was in the course of the interview with the journalists, in which President Gul claimed to know that some MPs were threatened by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) not to participate in elections of President in the parliament in 2007. Although the ones, claimed to do that denied the allegations, the agenda-setting mechanism of the power functions very well. It is another pity that Turkish politics
was thought to need to be interfered at the level of President, when we are five days away from the general elections. I think the subjects of the story are consoling themselves by saying “anything goes in politics”.

While saying these all, President Gul should have considered the peace and the safety of the election-process in Turkey which is psychologically a necessity with the sense of duty. Therefore I wish for President Gul to be more neutral, to reflect the will of the whole people regardless of any social cleavage and division. It is an ethical responsibility while standing for the “people”.

I expect the elections will bring people more hope and not more despair… I hope people will decide in its own favour…
Edgar ŞAR

Edgar.Sar@PolitikaDergisi.com

June 8, 2011