From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] Fisk on Armenia: : A reign of terror history has chosen to neglect
The Independent - Oct 12, 2007 http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3052373.ece A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect By Robert Fisk The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941. Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed. Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen. In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians -- including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli -- have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people - their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me. There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appear to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in what is now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html?th&emc=th The Trivial Pursuit By BOB HERBERT Published: October 13, 2007 Yesterday began with the gratifying news that Al Gore, derided by George H.W. Bush as the "Ozone Man," had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The first thing media types wanted to know was whether this would prompt Mr. Gore to elbow his way into the presidential campaign. That's like asking someone who's recovered from a heart attack if he plans to resume smoking. Mr. Gore, who won an Academy Award for his documentary on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," and an Emmy for his cable TV network, Current, knows better than anyone else how toxic and downright idiotic presidential politics has become. He may be one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, talented men in America and remarkably well-equipped to lead the nation, but it's Mr. Bush's less-than-curious, less-than-distinguished son, George W., who is president. There are all kinds of ironies wrapped up in the title of Mr. Gore's latest book, "The Assault on Reason." When I heard that Mr. Gore had won the Nobel, my thoughts wandered to the younger Mr. Bush and to Rudolph Giuliani, who is leading the current field of Republican presidential candidates. Mr. Bush came to mind because, for all of the obvious vulnerabilities he exhibited in 2000, it was not him but Mr. Gore who was mocked unmercifully by the national media. And the mockery had nothing to do with the former vice president's positions on important policy issues. He was mocked because of his personality. In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds. Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent. We've paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn't seem to know up from down. He's hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He's blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt. I could go on. Mr. Gore actually polled the most votes in 2000, but he was criticized for not having whipped Mr. Bush decisively enough to have avoided the madness in Florida. Mr. Gore knows the system is in trouble, and not just because of the way he lost in 2000. The last time I spoke to him, a few months ago, he said: "Having served in the White House with the Gingrich Congress, and having watched the best of intentions so often turned into small changes ballyhooed as revolutionary, sometimes having no lasting mark, I really do believe that fixing the dynamic of democracy is an urgent task." That's just the kind of thoughtful comment that can't get a real hearing in our sound-bite politics. The result is that reality, untidy and complex, is almost always trumped by well-crafted phoniness. Which brings us to Mr. Giuliani. The entire basis for this former mayor's candidacy is his contention that he is some kind of expert, a veritable guru, on matters related to terrorism. "I understand terrorism," he says, "in a way that is equal to or exceeds anyone else." And yet in the two most important decisions he has made with regard to terror, he has miserably failed. Mr. Giuliani foolishly insisted, against expert advice, on placing New York City's state-of-the-art emergency command center on the 27th floor of a 47-story building that was known to be a terror target and that was destroyed in the World Trade Center attack. And he pushed hard for the corrupt and grotesquely underqualified Bernard Kerik to be appointed to the top antiterror post in the Bush administration, secretary of homeland security. In an episode that humiliated the president, the nomination had to be scrapped after boatloads of damaging information began to emerge about Mr. Kerik. (He has since pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and remains under federal investigation.) But Mr. Giuliani, who shares with Mr. Bush a Manichaean view of the world and an aggressive, authoritarian temperament, remains not just a viable candidate, but the G.O.P. front-runner. Al Gore is a serious man confronted by a political system that is not open to a serious exploration of important, complex issues. He knows it. "What politics has become," he said, with a laugh and a tinge of regret, "requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply." *** AuCTION featuring Robbie Conal, Barbara Kruger, Artemio Rodriguez and More.. Celebrate the Art of Resistance pARTy AuCTION Saturday, October 13 6:30pm Union Station, 800 North Alameda Downtown L.A. CSPG's 2007 Silent Auction will include selected vintage and contemporary posters from the CSPG Archve and original works from the following artists: Barbara Kruger Robbie Conal Milton Glaser Sheila Pinkel Mark Vallen Artemio Rodriguez Michael Amescua Frank Romero Sharon Romero Kay Brown Guillermo Bert Poli Marichal Don Newton Channa Horwitz Mariona Barkus Karen Fiorito John Carr Susan Moss and many more! Honoring Rudy Acuña, Barbara & Douglas Hadsell, & Barbara Kruger The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) invites you to celebrate 18 years of using art to inspire social change at the historic Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles. There will be a fantastic dinner, entertainment, great company, a dynamic poster presentation, and a unique auction of vintage posters and original artworks. Please join CSPG and emcee Richard Montoya from Culture Clash, as we honor these outstanding individuals: - Rudy Acuña, activist historian, will receive Historian of the Lions Award. Award to be presented by Angela Sanbrano. - Barbara Hadsell, civil rights attorney, and Douglas Hadsell, history professor, will receive the Culture of Liberation Award. Award to be presented by the Torment of Roses. - Barbara Kruger, feminist artist, will receive the Art of Resistance Award. Award to be presented by Robbie Conal. CSPG is an educational and research archive that collects, preserves, documents, and circulates domestic and international political posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change. With more than 60,000 domestic and international graphics, CSPG has the largest collection of post-World War II political graphics in the country. Through traveling and online exhibitions, presentations, and publications, CSPG is reclaiming the power of art to inspire people to action. Visit our website www.politicalgraphics.org to find digital exhibitions, descriptions of traveling exhibitions, online shopping, and more. If you need more information, contact Mary Sutton or Katy Robinson at 323.653.4662. We look forward to seeing you on October 13! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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