 They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else
By Ronald Grigor Suny Published in 2015 518 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book is awful, and I didn’t finish it. It starts off as a fairly standard academic account of the Armenian genocide. However, very quickly, problems start manifesting. First, it commits the crime of jumping around chaotically. The first few chapters haphazardly move from the history of the Ottoman Empire during WW1 to the medieval kingdoms of Armenian Cilicia then back to the early 19th century breakup of the Ottoman Empire. If I hadn’t spent much of the last year studying Ottoman, Byzantine, and Armenian history then I would have found it very hard to follow. However, the gravest crime which ultimately caused me to put the book down was committed several chapters later. Suny engages in what I can only characterize as victim blaming. He says that capitalism is ultimately to blame for the destruction of the Armenian people. He points out that the Armenians were a merchant people, which made them more successful when capitalism arrived in Turkey. As a result of their success, the Muslims found themselves left behind. He describes the genocide as “a class conflict which took on racial overtones.” Although the facts he discusses seem correct, the way he discusses them was absolutely repulsive. I interpreted his writings as subtly implying that the slaughter would have been justified if it had not crossed racial lines, and had been confined to a class conflict. Suny and I see the same facts, but have completely different interpretations. In the context of 20th century genocides, I often see minorities achieve success due to a combination of genetic and social factors. For example the Tutsi, Jews, and Armenians all had high-IQ, productivity driven, and pro-family lifestyles. This allowed them to outcompete their lower IQ, less productive, and less socially conservative peers. Similar patterns can be seen with the non-racialized slaughters of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao. Clever and successful people are persecuted by the dumbed down masses for being economically productive. In my worldview, the Armenians deserve better outcomes than the Turks because they are hardworking. If the tides of history change, and the Armenians become decadent while the Turks become more virtuous, then I would make the case that the Turks should become wealthier. I think that this worldview is fundamentally non-violent, because it sees disparities and hierarchy as natural rather than as problems that need to be corrected. Suny sees the Armenian success as problematic. He implies that if there had been socialism, the genocide wouldn’t have occurred, because the races would have been more equal. The way he made this point felt extremely disrespectful. Unintentionally, this book gave me some insight into some of the left-right conflicts that I saw when I visited Armenia and gathered from speaking to my Armenian friends. Stranger still, Suny is Armenian. This book made me reflect that Armenians with Dashnak sympathies are communists first, and Armenians second. Many communists, whether Jewish, Congolese, Chinese, or Arab often will make decisions that favor other communists rather than their historical ethnic kin. If the Armenians are the capitalists, then the Turks are at least partially justified for wanting to level the playing field. I don’t recommend reading this left-wing rag of a book. Instead, if you want to learn about the Armenian genocide, I would suggest The Great Catastrophe by Thomas de Waal.
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 The Great Catastrophe
By Thomas de Waal Published in February 2015 320 Pages Thibault’s Score: 4/5 Writing about genocide is hard. People hate reading lists of atrocities followed by more atrocities. Further complicating the issue is the fact that the Armenian genocide was two sided. Although more Armenians than Turks were slaughtered; the killing went both ways. Although few people want to study genocide, doing so is a moral imperative - failure to do so is bound to result in more atrocities. Considering the challenges that surround writing about such a contentious topic, Thomas de Waal did a phenomenal job. In 1915, the Ottoman Empire was dragged into World War One. The backwards, outdated Ottoman military stood little chance against the superpowers of Russia and Britain. Worse, the Ottomans had just recently come out of three decades of nonstop war which resulted in the secession of most of the Christian Balkan states and loss of North Africa. The war-weary and tired Ottoman population came to resent the Armenians for many reasons. First, the Armenians were a highly educated and intellectual minority group. Armenians occupied many high level government positions, and many of the wealthiest people in the empire were Armenian. Second, Armenians held strong cultural ties with Europe. Armenians did not dress in traditional Turkish garbs, and instead wore the clothing of Europeans. Finally, many Armenians resented the Turks after centuries of oppression, and had strong sympathies with Russia and Britain. Many Armenians went as far as going into open rebellion against the Ottomans, and massacred small groups of Muslims in contested areas. It is important to note that only a small handful of Armenians rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish solution was to eliminate all non-Turkish populations. Several groups of Christians - namely Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontic Greeks - were marked for extermination. What followed would be the wholesale destruction of 1.5 million Christian civilians. Many reprisal killings against Turks would later follow, with some resulting in massacres and rape of tens of thousands of Turkish civilians. The Armenian genocide itself only accounts for one third of the book. The following two thirds follow the history of the Armenian diaspora in the United States and Europe, and of the Soviet Armenian state. The book ends with a short account of the wars in between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I found the latter half of the book, which explains what happened to the Armenians after the genocide, to be the most fascinating part of the story. First, what shocked me / terrified me is that many Armenians attempted to deny that the genocide had occurred. Many of the direct victims of the killings were traumatized, and preferred to forget the events of 1915 rather than speak about them. Women who were captured and taken as sex slaves or forced brides adopted new Turkish identities and did their best to forget that they were Armenian. Other Armenians were themselves implicated in war crimes or revenge killings, and also chose to forget. Early Armenian attempts at erasing the genocide would later on be used by Turkish nationalists to perpetuate the idea that the genocide had never occurred. Second, the book explains how the term “genocide” came to be applied to what we today call the Armenian genocide. In 1915, the word “genocide” did not yet exist. Instead, people at the time referred to it as “the Great Catastrophe.” The word “genocide” was coined during World War Two by a Polish social scientist Raphael Lemkin commenting on the Holocaust. Lemkin specifically cited several past events which he believed to be genocides in his initial writings about the topic, such as the invasion of Ghenghis Khan, and importantly, the Armenian genocide. Some Armenians began immediately using the word “genocide” after Lemkin created the term. Finally, the coverage of the conflict between the pro-communist and anti-communist Armenian groups was fascinating. Some Armenians saw Russia as the liberator which protected the Armenians against Turkey; others saw it as a second oppressor and the perpetrator of a second genocide. In many ways, this conflict still exists today. The nation of Armenia finds itself uncomfortably wedged in-between two major enemies - Turkey and Azerbaijan. Many believe that, without Russia, Armenia would have already been overrun. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to study Armenian history as a starting point. |
Thibault SerletMost of my articles are book reviews, but I also write about many other topics. Archives
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