Lessons of the Armenian Genocide

This year, 2015, is the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Although the Turkish government still denies it, and millions of Americans remain unaware of it, in its dying gasp the Ottoman Empire, forerunner of modern Turkey, slaughtered more than one million innocent, legally disarmed Armenians—a subculture of Christians who lived within the empire. This atrocity, an attempt to systematically murder an entire people or ethnic group, preceded the genocide of the National Socialists and set the template for it. Indeed, the very word “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin in reference to the Armenian horror.

The history of this abomination is worth recounting for two reasons: first, to remember the innocent Armenian victims; and second, to draw from it what lessons we can. The Armenian massacre, the product mainly of racist nationalism and religious zealotry, set a grim precedent for such horrors to follow and offers a horrific reminder of what happens when a culture falls into such irrationality.

The scale of the Armenian genocide is massive. Estimates of the murder count vary widely, but even by the most conservative accounting, a minimum of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—men, women, children, infants—were butchered by the most savagely primitive methods imaginable. Renowned English historian Arnold Toynbee suggests roughly 600,000 murders.¹ Political scientist Robert Melson (among others) argues that the actual figure was around one million.² Rudolph Rummel, an American political scientist who coined the term democide—the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder—devoted his career to studying such horrors. He writes: “The size and speed of the [ruling] Young Turks’ ethnic cleansing are unparalleled. . . . They alone most likely murdered no fewer than 300,000 and most probably around 1,400,000—nearly 70 percent—of their Armenians . . . in one year.”³ Emphasizing the enormity of the crime, Rummel points out that Hitler’s National Socialist regime slaughtered roughly 38 percent of the Jewish population over a span of five years.

To comprehend this horror, we need to see the place of the Armenian population in the centuries-old Ottoman Empire.

Armenia is located in the Caucasus region, a mountainous strip of land between the Black and Caspian Seas, connecting Europe and Asia. Today, it is an autonomous nation bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran to the south. Historically, Armenia was the first nation to officially embrace Christianity, which it did in 301 AD. In early modern times, Armenia was conquered by the rival Ottoman and Persian Empires and militarily dominated by one or the other over the ensuing centuries. By the mid-19th century, most of western Armenia remained under Ottoman rule—and millions of Armenians, living in their ancestral homeland, clung to their Christian faith despite being a small minority in a vast Islamic empire.

“In the Ottoman Empire, which by the seventeenth century pressed to the gates of Vienna, the Armenians were included in a multinational and multireligious realm, but as a Christian minority they had to endure official discrimination and second-class citizenship,” notes historian Richard Hovannisian.⁴ Among other legally enforced prejudices, they were made to pay special taxes, barred from bearing arms, and forbidden to submit legal testimony. Nevertheless, “despite their second-class status, most Armenians lived in relative peace so long as the Ottoman Empire was strong and expanding.”⁵ Indeed, while other Christian minorities sought their independence from the empire, Armenian leaders swore fealty to it, earning from various sultans the sobriquet of “their faithful community.”⁶

Armenians’ status began to change in the second half of the 19th century. Winds of independence from long-standing Turkish domination swept through Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Western Europe, strengthened by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, at times supported such independence movements, as did the Russians.

Over time, the once-mighty Ottoman Empire dissolved into relative weakness, as, one by one, Greece, Rumania, Serbia, and Bulgaria wrested free from Turkish control. Diminished by such losses, wracked by internal conflict, and vitiated by an absence of commitment to reason and science, the Turkish Empire eventually came to be widely known as “the sick man of Europe.”

For half a millennium the Mediterranean had been an “Ottoman lake,” and Turkish armies had subjugated most of Eastern Europe and threatened the West, twice laying siege to Vienna. This massive Islamic power had long dominated its Christian enemies, but no longer. By the late-19th century, it was besieged by Christian nations on all sides—Greece to the west, Bulgaria and Serbia to the north, Russia to the east, and the British Empire and its invincible battle fleet everywhere.

At this point, the Armenians occupied swaths of Anatolia, geographically known as Asia Minor, the westernmost protuberance of the Asian landmass, which was the Turkish homeland and the heart of the Ottoman Empire. But the Armenians were still substantially oppressed; understandably, some leaders began seeking reform, liberalization, and greater autonomy. Related, the European powers, Britain, France, and Russia—eventually to ally as the Triple Entente—sought by diplomatic means to pressure the sultan into more humane treatment of his Armenian subjects, including protection from murderous assault wrought periodically by savage anti-Christian mobs and tribes within the empire.

The Turks construed such Armenian agitation and European pressure as an effort intended ultimately to eviscerate the Turkish homeland, to form a Christian nation, or, at the very least, an autonomous or semiautonomous Christian state in the midst of what they regarded as Turkey’s geographic heartland. The sultan, Abdul Hamid II, known as the “Red Sultan” for the copious amount of innocent blood he spilled, stated:

By taking away Greece and Rumania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state. The loss of Bulgaria, Serbia . . . has deprived us of our hands, and now by means of this Armenian agitation, they want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight against it with all the strength we possess.⁷

The Turks would soon react savagely.

By the 1890s, with the Red Sultan’s encouragement, many Turks had come to regard Armenians as “an internal extension of external enemies.”⁸ Abdul Hamid II was, at least to a degree, a practicing Muslim; many of his subjects were fanatically so. To the Islamic mind-set, one method of protecting the fracturing multinational empire was to reunify it religiously—as an Islamic state. To this end, its leading Christian community—the Armenians—had to be, if not annihilated, brutally suppressed, and its aspiration to increased autonomy utterly quashed. For this purpose, the Red Sultan “gathered around him experts from a number of diverse Muslim communities; he reduced the number of Christians at the higher level and increased the number of Muslims. . . . By arming Muslim groups he . . . gave the impression that the state was on their side.”⁹

In the early 1890s, the sultan organized what became known as the “Hamidian Regiments”—a quasi-official militia that in reality was a collection of brigands, murderers, and thugs, largely Kurdish, entirely Islamic, armed by the state and given the sultan’s approval to assail and plunder Armenians. When Armenians defended themselves, unmitigated violence ensued, and the Red Sultan lived up to his bloody name, using the Hamidian Regiments and other local Muslims to massacre Armenians. Hamid’s “goal was for Muslims to look upon attacks against Christians as the fulfillment of a religious duty.”¹⁰

The worst of these slaughters occurred between 1894 and 1896, when between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were murdered.¹¹ And the slaughters continued into the 20th century. In 1909, for example, more than 20,000 Armenians were slain at Adana on the fertile Cilician plain—a massacre sometimes referred to as “the Cilician Vespers.”¹² But the murderous rampages reached a crescendo beginning in 1915. A few years earlier, in 1908, the so-called Young Turks had overthrown the Red Sultan, established the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) and a constitutional republic, replete with a democratically elected parliament and civil and religious liberties. But this liberty was tragically short lived. A conservative countercoup followed, led by military officers and theology students who sought to reestablish an Islamic state under the sultan’s authority. The Young Turks crushed this countercoup and, shortly thereafter, a second one. Then they consolidated power, “declared a state of siege and suspended constitutional rights,”¹³ and, despite their earlier pretensions to freedom, proceeded to brutally suppress minorities seeking increased autonomy.

In the early 20th century, when the Young Turks seized and consolidated power in the years before World War I, the centuries-old Ottoman Empire was on the verge of collapse. “Of profound significance for the Armenians,” writes political scientist Robert Melson, “was the fact that the loss of the European provinces, in effect, destroyed the multinational and multireligious character of the Ottoman Empire.”¹⁴ By the early decades of the 20th century, leading Turkish intellectuals and politicians condemned the old multicultural, multireligious empire, regarding it as a severe handicap. They held that the country’s strength lay in its “Turkishness,” in a purity of race and culture—and that such strength had been diluted and vitiated by establishment of a polyglot empire composed of mongrel elements. For them, the great restrengthening of the Turks consisted in excising the discordant components. Now, the nationalists held, the country could become truly and fully Turkish.

Ominously, by this time the CUP had discarded all liberal pretensions and agreed with the nationalists. They desired a Turkey unified into a state of one people, one language, one religion, one culture. The Armenians—differing in ancestry, history, religion, language, and culture—did not fit the nationalist mold. They were an affront to it. And, the nationalists concluded, the Armenians living in Turkey’s geographic heartland had to go.

But go where? The nationalists envisioned a vast Turkish nation stretching from the Mediterranean deep into the heartland of Central Asia, including the historic homeland of the Armenians in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian Seas. If the Armenians were not welcome in Turkey, and if Turkey extended eastward through traditional Armenia deep into Asia, then there was no geographic locale to which they could go. The Turkish leaders decided, therefore, that the Armenians would go to a mass grave.

To individualists, this is horrific. But Turkish nationalists were not individualists. They construed themselves—and Turks in general—not fundamentally as individual human beings with separate identities, distinct thoughts, and personal values, but as a homogeneous people belonging to a single unified nation, apart and distinct from other tribes. The Armenians, then, were not individual human beings. They were indistinguishable members of a competing tribe wrongfully occupying land that belonged properly and exclusively to the Turkish nation.

Turkish nationalists were thoroughgoing collectivists, revering the group above and before the individual. Specifically, they were ethnicity worshippers; they believed that the distinctive characteristics of the group—including intellectual, cultural, and moral characteristics—are biologically transmitted from common ancestors. To such collectivists, a person is who he is not because of his chosen thoughts and volitional actions—but because of the ethnic group into which he was born.

In addition, given that the Armenians tended to be more industrious and prosperous than their Muslim neighbors, the Turks were envious; this envy, and its concomitant desire to seize the wealth that the Armenians had produced, further motivated the Turks to destroy them. The pretext here was—as, throughout history, it has often been with assaults on Jews and other hard-working groups prospering in foreign cultures—that the wealthy Armenians were exploiters who had grown rich at the expense of Turkish Muslims.

But religious hatred—as well as ethnic, tribal differences—lay at the heart of the genocide. This was not true of its planners—the Young Turks were largely atheists—but of the hordes of everyday Muslim citizens, whether Kurds or Turks, who zealously put into practice the CUP’s murderous plans. “In all this, religion was only instrumental. Being ‘practically all atheists,’ the Young Turks only used Islam to incite the Moslem masses against Turkey’s Armenians.”¹⁵

And incite they did. Islamic mobs “dashed the little children against the rocks before the eyes of their mothers while shouting ‘Allah, Allah.’”¹⁶ The CUP ostensibly “deported” the Armenians to the empire’s eastern provinces. In reality, the government knew “that the great majority would never reach their destination and that those who did would either die of thirst or starvation or be murdered by ‘wild Mohammedan desert tribes.’”¹⁷ The government even opened the prisons “and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus every caravan [of Armenian deportees] had a continuous battle for existence . . . with the Moslem inhabitants.”¹⁸ Of the few Armenians who survived, most were attractive women forcibly converted to Islam and married off to Muslim men, and their children who were seized from them and raised as Muslims in Islamic orphanages.¹⁹ Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, writing of the Turks’ treatment of its Christian Greek citizens, stated: “The Turks attempted to force the Greek subjects to become Mohammedans; Greek girls, just like Armenian girls, were stolen and taken to Turkish harems and Greek boys were kidnapped and placed in Moslem households.”²⁰

Ethnic collectivism and religious hatred combined with envy—in effect, the racism of the Nazis melded with the class warfare of the Communists—constituted a seething fireball of destructive fury.

World War I gave the Turkish nationalists the opportunity they craved; for now, the Armenians’ European protectors—Britain, France, and Russia—were antagonists on the battlefield, with no diplomatic relations, no Turkish presence, and no influence on governmental policy. They were no longer trading partners or potential allies to be placated; they were now foes to be defeated.

Further, during World War I the government of the Turks’ main European ally, Germany, looked the other way—or even actively approved—as the CUP slaughtered Armenians. Reports from German diplomats, military personnel, and missionaries to their government regarding the Turkish atrocities were suppressed by the German regime. For example, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, vice consul in Erzurum (and later a member of the Nazi Party and close confidant of Hitler) wrote in a July 1915 report that CUP members “frankly admit that the ultimate objective of the actions against the Armenians is complete annihilation. The utterance ‘after the war, not a single Armenian shall remain in Turkey’ belongs, word for word, to one of the prominent [Unionist] individuals.”²¹

Indeed, Scheubner-Richter reported to German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that, based on conversations with Turkish officials, “he was given to understand that a majority of the Young Turk[s] want to rectify a great mistake of their ancestors. Turkey a long time ago should have been purged of its non-Muslim population either through forcible conversion . . . or, failing in this method, through annihilation.”²²

Germany exerted none of its considerable influence to provide succor to innocent Armenian victims.²³ Roger Smith, a professor at William and Mary College, writes: “There is no suggestion . . . that Germany was unable to restrain Turkey; rather, there is clear evidence that [to avoid alienating a valued wartime ally] it was unwilling to do so. . . .”²⁴

When British forces failed to breach the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara) in March 1915, the CUP was unrestrained. The British had retreated, and the Germans looked the other way. Henry Morgenthau wrote:

The practical effect of the event [the withdrawal of the Allied fleet from the Dardanelles], was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all the world excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia . . . which for a century had held a restraining hand over the Ottoman Empire, had finally lost all power to influence or control. . . . New Turkey, freed from European tutelage, celebrated its national rebirth by murdering not far from a million of its own subjects.²⁵

On the pretext that it needed armaments for the war effort, the Turkish regime disarmed the civilian population, secretly returning weapons to Turks but keeping them from Armenians.²⁶ Tens of thousands of Armenian men were drafted into the army, forced into unarmed labor battalions, used as slaves, and then summarily executed. The Turks thereby murdered most of the fit Armenian men and deprived Armenian civilian communities—limited now to women, children, and elderly males—of their most able protectors. Morgenthau summarized, “[T]hroughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.”²⁷

Turkish authorities also arrested thousands of leading Armenian intellectuals and public figures in April 1915, murdering most of them. Vahakn Dadrian wrote: “This unrest culminated in the Interior Ministry order of April 24, 1915 authorizing the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders. . . . Thousands of Armenians were seized and incarcerated; in Istanbul alone in a matter of weeks 2,345 such leaders were arrested only to be executed subsequently in large part.”²⁸

With the Armenian civilian populace now intellectually and militarily defenseless, the CUP began the “deportation” of Armenians to the interior of Asia Minor—deportations ostensibly meant to resettle the Armenians but in fact designed to annihilate them.

As already described, the Turkish regime emptied its prisons of brigands and murderers, granting amnesty to violent thugs on condition they would waylay the caravans of deported Armenian civilians—primarily now women, children, and the elderly—and wreak mass murder. The government also encouraged primitive Kurdish tribesmen—Islamic and often bitterly anti-Christian—to do the same. Under orders, the Turkish soldiers and police officers “guarding” the deportees looked the other way, abandoned the caravans, or joined in the attacks on them.

The result was that during the spring and summer months of 1915, as the caravans crept through rugged mountains or desolate terrain, savage marauders swept upon them. These attackers repeatedly raped countless women and carried off some to be ravished as concubines and forcibly converted to Islam. Other helpless Armenian victims were stripped naked, plundered of their last possessions, thrown off bridges or into deep ravines, drowned in swiftly flowing rivers, or—in thousands of cases—hacked to pieces with hatchets, axes, and pitchforks. Thousands of mutilated bodies were left unburied by the roadside to be devoured by beasts.²⁹

Those who survived the deportations were abandoned at Der Zor in the Syrian desert, where most either were massacred or died from starvation, lack of medical care, or exposure.³⁰

In 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau wrote of these events:

Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.³¹

At the time Morgenthau wrote those words, he was no doubt correct. Horrifically, genocides that followed entailed episodes equally horrible and even more massive. In many ways the Armenian genocide set the stage for those to follow; Hitler himself explicitly referenced the Armenian genocide as a model for his own horrific crimes.³²

Tragically, many people today are unaware of the Armenian genocide. The main reason is that the Turkish government denies that there ever was a campaign to massacre the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population, claiming instead that the Armenians rebelled and died in warfare. Turkey became a valued NATO ally during and after the Cold War; consequently, the American and other Western governments, placing considerations of international power politics above and before moral principles, placated their Turkish “allies” by publicly endorsing the Turks’ sanitized, fantasy version of history.

Incredibly, the Israeli regime, the government of a nation founded in part by Holocaust survivors, also impelled by considerations of realpolitik, willingly participates in the vicious fraud that is the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide.

But to take the declaration “Never Again” seriously, we must remember the innocent victims of the Armenian genocide—and learn its grisly lesson. The Turks held a caveman’s view that human society is composed of warring ethnic groups or tribes, that moral value or disvalue is bestowed by ethnic membership, that individual members of a rival or disfavored tribe hold no value regardless of their intellectual achievement or moral stature, and that such “ethnic inferiors” or “tribal enemies” may be mercilessly and ceaselessly massacred.

What human beings around the globe can do to honor both the innocent Armenian dead and other guiltless victims of such barbarism is to repudiate the collectivist premise inherent in all forms of racism and tribalism; to recognize that human beings are individuals, unique and unrepeatable—that ethnic membership is morally irrelevant; and to advocate the individual’s unqualified and inalienable right to his own life, regardless of the ethnic group, nation, or tribe into which he happens to be born. If—and only if—we recognize this fundamental human right can we ensure that such atrocities as the Armenian genocide are never repeated.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), and, most recently, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020).

View all articles by Andrew Bernstein →