Raymond Kevorkian's "The Armenian Genocide" is a truly magnificent,
seminal book, and a work of first-rate scholarship. It's likely this
book will be seen and respected as the Armenian equivalent of Raul
Hilberg's definitive and towering study of the Holocaust, "The
Destruction of the European Jews," a book I read many years ago and was
blown away by. I had the same feelings of awe reading this book as I did
when I read Hilberg's massive 3-volume study. And while the Armenian
Genocide is a subject that I feel I have understood fairly well, I am
stunned by how much I learned reading this book. So this is proving to
be an epic journey of discovery for me, and as painful as the subject
matter is, this book is an amazing achievement in every way.
It
took me three months to finish reading Professor Kevorkian's book. The
fact is, it's a 1,500 page book masquerading as a 1,000 page book (800
pages of texts, 200 pages of footnotes). The font is smaller than one
typically sees in a book, and the pages themselves seem to have smaller
margins and more text than usual. But any way you cut it, Professor
Kevorkian's book is a remarkable achievement in every way. While he has
levels of detail that seem hard to imagine possible (down to the names
of families deported in many communities--and it shocked me that I found
my maternal grandmother's mother's family's name listed as one of the
families that was put on a certain convoy on a specific date), and the
names of the local leaders, organizers, and individuals responsible for
the atrocities and mass murders in many of these same communities), none
of these details obscures the larger story that Kevorkian tells--and he
really tells a story masterfully. Like Raul Hillberg does in his
three-volume Holocaust masterwork, "The Destruction of the European
Jews," Kevorkian tells a story with a clear narrative, and doesn't just
overwhelm you with facts, statistics, and information. I am astonished
at what Professor Kevorkian has achieved with this book. It's a
lifetime's work, and it's magnificent in every way.
More shocking
to me was how much I learned--and I come to this subject fairly well
informed to start with. There were revelations after revelations for me,
and as difficult as the book was to read given its subject matter and
intensity, I never came close to losing interest in it (even as reading
it was a project due to its length, depth, and breadth). Here are just a
few of the things that I learned specifically:
1. I had no idea
that within the Young Turk movement before the Ittihadists took power,
there were two completely different factions within the party with very
different ideas for how to reform Turkey if/when the the Ittihadists
came to power, with one group believing that only de-centralization
would lead to renewal, growth and economic and cultural development,
whereas the other group believed that it was necessary to centralize,
consolidate power, and drive change from the center (and you can guess
which faction won out). It's stunning to contemplate how much different
history would have been had the de-centralists prevailed. This is one of
those rare moments in history where one can see there was a critical
fork in the road, and had the other direction been chosen, so much would
be so different, avoiding all the death, suffering, pain, and loss that
resulted.
2. The deportations were not carried out with the same
murderous ferocity across Turkey. The six Armenian vilayets of Eastern
Turkey (Asia Minor), i.e. historic Armenia, were treated in the most
brutal way possible, and miniscule percentages of the people survived
the death marches. But the deportations of the Armenians from Anatolia
(west of the six vilayets, and not part of historical Armenia) were far
less murderously brutal, though by no means could they be classified as
anything but "brutal." But far larger percentages of the Armenians
deported from Anatolia survived the death marches to the deserts--where
most were later massacred in a second-wave of Turkish genocidal attacks
in 1916.
3. While most communities were rendered defenseless by
the Turks and not in a position to offer resistance (and mostly did
not), in fact, Armenians did fight back on several occasions. We of
course all know of the resistance at Van and Musa Dagh, but scattered
throughout this story are other stories where the Armenians fought back.
While in most situations the outcomes ended in complete disaster for
the Armenians, nonetheless, they fought back as best they were capable
of. This moved me. The Armenian resistance in Urfa was especially
emotional for me, because the Armenians fought back heroically even if
in the end they were still destroyed.
4. There was only one
sanctuary for Armenians in all of Turkey: Dersim. A mountainous area
that the Turks did not control and which was inhabited by nomadic Kurds,
Dersim served as a refuge for massacre survivors who managed their way
to it. I did not read anything that suggested that the Armenians knew
that Dersim would be a safe place for them, although they obviously had
to know it was a region that Turkey did not control. It appears that
many who managed to escape to Dersim survived and were taken in by the
Kurds. The Turks even tried to negotiate with the Kurdish leaders to
give up the Armenians, but the Kurds refused and the Turks could not do
anything about it because they did not control the area--the only part
of Turkey they did not control, and never had.
5. I never
realized the extent to which the Turks tortured their victims before
killing them. It was so hard to read and understand this, because while I
was aware of the brutality of the massacres, the details were shocking.
Grigoris Balakian, in his astonishing book "Armenian Golgotha" (
Armenian Golgotha (Vintage))
gets into it to some degree, but there's far more detail in Professor
Kevorkian's book. And it's not for the squeamish. When you think about
how the Germans murdered the Jews during the Holocaust--methodically,
efficiently, and unemotionally, just simply putting people to death in
the most impersonal and efficient way possible, the Turkish approach was
nearly the opposite. The Turks routinely tortured their victims before
killing them, dismembered them while they were alive, and killed them in
the most brutal ways imaginable that caused the most possible pain
before death. I don't mean to sound naive, but it is just hard for me to
understand how any human beings who KNEW they were going to kill a lot
of other people were capable of doing it in the most painful way
possible for the victims. What is this telling us? Who were these
people?
6. Professor Kevorkian puts forward a theory which is
well argued by the evidence, and it makes sense, but it was something I
had never heard argued before, and it shocked me. We know that many
young Armenian girls (but not young boys) were taken from the
deportation caravans by local families and raised as Turks. Professor
Kevorkian establishes that in fact this was something encouraged by the
authorities. Talaat had a lot of admiration for the Armenians, their
skills, and their capabilities (and there is a quote that Professor
Kevorkian provides in which Talaat admiringly indicates that the
Armenians are more capable than the Turks). While Talaat was
pathologically opposed to an Armenian identity existing within Turkey,
he was hoping to take a small number of Armenians and raise them as
Turks, and ultimately "improving" the Turkish race in this manner--but
only through the introduction of women, not men, because by societal
norms, women were subservient. Talaat was not seeking genetic purity per
se with the elimination of the Armenians (as the Germans were during
the Nazi era), but rather, national purity--there was no room for an
"Armenian" identity, only a Turkish one. But clearly the Ittihadists
were engaged in an experiment of "genetic improvement" of Turks through
incorporation of a limited Armenian gene pool influx, albeit shorn of
its ethnic identity. This is shocking to me.
If it's not already
clear, let me indicate that "The Armenian Genocide" is not for the
casual reader. But if you are interested in the subject matter, and
truly want to understand what happened before, during, and after the
Genocide, I have never read anything better--or anything close to this
good. By any standards, this is a seminal work, and a magnificent
achievement in every respect.
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