http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/insulting-turkishness/
Sooner or later I expect to run into Nobel Prize winner Oran Pamuk on the
Columbia campus, where he is a visiting scholar. (He was also here in that
capacity from 1985 to 1988.) I have yet to meet a single Turk who is a fan
of his novels. I suspect that they resent his pronouncements on Turkish
oppression of national minorities, even though they are by no means
ultranationalists themselves. They probably question his use of Western
platforms since the often serve as outlets of opposition to Turkey being
admitted to the European Union. There is a feeling of being victimized by a
double standard, since the West has been far bloodier than Turkey over the
centuries.
There were obvious political calculations involved in awarding the Nobel
Prize to Pamuk. Pamuk is looked at as a bridge-builder between the West and
the East. He was put on trial in Turkey after telling a Swiss newspaper
last year that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed
during World War I under the Ottoman Turks. Such statements constitute
insulting Turkishness, which is punishable under Article 301 of the
Turkish Penal Code as follows:
1. Public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National
Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six
months and three years.
2. Public denigration of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the
judicial institutions of the State, the military or security structures
shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.
3. In cases where denigration of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish
citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third.
4. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime.
After the case generated terrible publicity for the Turkish government
worldwide, the charges were dropped. Since the ruling Islamic party came to
power in a challenge to the secular nationalist Kemalist establishment that
had been identified historically with such laws and since it was anxious to
build commercial ties to the West (its religious values are wed to
conventional neoliberalism), it had little incentive to see Pamuk behind bars.
Whatever attraction Europe once had for the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP), it might be rapidly evaporating under a new propaganda
offensive from the West against Islam. When the Pope dredged up a
14th-century Christian emperors quote about the Prophet Muhammad bringing
the world only evil and inhuman things, there was bound to be resentment
across the entire Muslim world. But the Pope had already singled out the
Turks as a group beforehand. He warned that admitting Turkey to the
European Union would go against history:
The roots that have formed Europe, that have permitted the formation of
this continent, are those of Christianity. Turkey has always represented
another continent, in permanent contrast with Europe. There were the [old
Ottoman Empire] wars against the Byzantine Empire, the fall of
Constantinople, the Balkan wars, and the threat against Vienna and Austria.
It would be an error to equate the two continents
Turkey is founded upon
Islam
Thus the entry of Turkey into the EU would be anti-historical.
Recently France passed a new law that seemed inspired by Article 301 of the
Turkish penal code. You can now get a year in prison and a 45,000 Euro fine
for denying that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks
after the First World War. The Socialist Party was a driving force behind
the proposed bill. It now joins the 2001 law that officially recognized the
Armenian genocide. There are upwards of 500,000 people of Armenian descent
in France which is organized into a powerful political lobby.
By the evidence of the new documentary Screamers that I saw in a press
screening last night, there are moves afoot to get the American government
to officially recognize the 1915 massacres as a genocide as well.
With backing by the BBC, it profiles System of a Down, a metal-grunge rock
band composed entirely of young Armenian men who are very involved with
this campaign. Their presence and that of survivors of the 1915 massacres
give the film considerable power.
Screamers is practically a concert tour as we see the band playing to
adoring fans around the world as they promote their new two-record set
Mezmerize and Hypnotize. In the song P.L.U.C.K, they obviously refer
to their peoples history:
A whole race Genocide,
Taken away all of our pride,
A whole race Genocide,
Taken away, watch them all fall down.
Revolution, the only solution,
The armed response of an entire nation,
Revolution, the only solution,
Weve taken all your shit, now its time for restitution.
One of the more moving moments of the film involves band member Serj
Tankian visiting his 96 year old grandfather Stepan Hayapan at a nursing
home. Interviews with Haypayan from a few years earlier, when he was in
better health, are scattered throughout the film. He still had vivid
memories of his family being driven from Efkere and left to die in a long
march into the desert. He was the sole survivor.
Unfortunately their contribution is undermined by the presence of Samantha
Powers and Peter Galbraith as commentators. Director Carla Garapedian
decided to make more than a movie calling attention to this historical
injustice. She wanted to prove that it was the mother of all genocides and
that without 1915, there never would have been a Jewish holocaust or other
genocides. There are multiple references to Hitlers dictum that Who
remembers the Armenians? Unfortunately, there are no references to another
of Hitlers inspirations:
Hitlers concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of
genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United
States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And
for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the
efficiency of Americas extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of
the Red Savages who could not be tamed by captivity.
(John Toland, Adolf Hitler, p 802)
Sadly, Garapedians long-time association with BBC must have inured her to
Anglo-American imperialisms bloody past. She apparently sees evil
everywhere in the world except in the British Empire and its Yankee
offspring. She has trained her camera in the past on Taliban cruelty toward
women, Russian troops killing Chechens, cannibalism (alleged) in North
Korea and most recently repression of the student movement in Iran. In
other words, her beat is the axis of evil.
In the press notes, Garapedian poses the question Why do genocides
continue in the 21st century? Her answer: Because those who perpetrated
them the 20th century got away with it. There is another question that
never gets posed in Screamers and which seems far more useful in terms of
avoiding genocide, namely What are the causes of genocide? One must
certainly understand the root of genocide before one prevents them. Rather
than arguing about the need to stop a Hitler before he exterminated the
Jews, it is better to ask why Germany ended up with Hitler in the first
place. That involves an examination of underlying social, political and
economic factors that are never found in Screamers.
The title of the film refers to the act of screaming against genocide,
which supposedly Peter Galbraith and Samantha Powers are first-rate
examples of. With all due respect to Armenian suffering, this strikes me as
arrant nonsense.
As American Ambassador to Croatia from 1993 to 1998, Galbraith was the
quintessential hawk who makes frequent references to the bloody,
internecine battles in Yugoslavia as another example of genocide. Such
hyperbole undercuts the films effectiveness since this designation was
applied solely by the NATO officials bent on war with the Serbs. In an
April 9, 1999 Lars-Erik Nelson Daily News column, holocaust survivor
Menachem Rosensaft, dismissed comparisons between Hitler and Milosevic:
Its total hyperbole to make a political point. It does a disservice to
the memory of the Holocaust, and it also devalues the suffering of the
Albanians if we suggest that to be worthy of our consideration their
suffering has to be on the level of the Holocaust.
This is not to speak of Israels failure to get behind the Armenian cause.
If this Mideast democracy cannot see the connection between Hitler and
the 1915 massacres, then who can? Of course, the failure to make such a
connection might have more to do with the kind of power politics decried by
the film than anything else. Since Turkey is the only country in the region
that recognizes Israel, it has offered a quid pro quo by refusing to
characterize the 1915 events as genocide.
When Galbraith turns his attention to Iraq, the disjunction between
professed ideals and sordid reality is even more extreme. In recounting the
deals made between the first Bush presidency and Saddam Hussein at the
expense of Kurdish rights, Galbraith rues the way in which power politics
once again interfered with acting against genocide. If only the Bush
administration had listened to him and enacted sanctions against Iraq, then
the Kurds would have been spared. One wonders if Galbraith had ever learned
of the death of a half-million children as a consequence of such sanctions
when they were finally imposed.
As bad as Galbraith is, he is a mere piker when compared to Samantha Powers
who ran Harvards Carr Center for Human Rights Policy with arch-imperialist
Michael Ignatieff, a fervent backer of the war in Iraq. According to the
press notes, Powerss 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide demonstrates how all the subsequent
genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries date back to our simple inability
to admit what the Turks did to the Armenians.
In an article dealing with the prowar left, Edward Herman calls attention
to all the massacres that Powers leaves out her book: Vietnam, Indonesia
1965-1966 when a half-million citizens were killed by the US-backed
military, the slaughter of Guatemalan Indians backed by the U.S.-backed
dictator, etc.
Powers gets particularly worked up over the genocide against the Tutsis and
the one allegedly being organized in Darfur (other more neutral observers
hesitate to use the word in the latter case), the only solution to which is
armed intervention. In her lengthy Atlantic Monthly, September 2001
article(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/power.htm) titled Bystanders
to Genocide, there is not a single word that addresses the underlying
cause of the killings that are universally described as genocidal.
Screamers includes grizzly footage of severed heads in Rwanda, but in
keeping with Powerss approach does not say a word about what led to the
mass killing.
But From 1973 to about 1990 Rwanda was relatively peaceful. This had little
to do with the Rwandan people remembering 1915 but much to do with the
generally stable price of coffee and tin.
The same thing is true of Nazi Germany. Without hyperinflation and mass
employment, you dont get Hitler. And without the IMF-induced collapse of
the Yugoslav economy, you dont get the civil wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
From her Olympian redoubt at Harvard, it is all so easy for Samantha
Powers to moralize about mans inhumanity to man. She would be better
advised to dig into the economic history that accompanies mass murder since
this is the key to avoiding it in the future.
Speaking of the Ivory Tower, one should never forget that institutions like
Harvard University were not exactly on the front lines when it came to
confronting Nazism in the 1930s. In an article by Rafael Medoff of the The
David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies that appeared in the October
26 Columbia Spectator, we learn:
Harvard, for example, hosted Nazi Germanys ambassador to the U.S., Hans
Luther, in 1934. Harvard President James Conant gave a red-carpet welcome
to Hitlers foreign press chief, Ernst Putzi Hanfstangl, when he visited
the campus that year (for his 25th class reunion). The student newspaper,
The Harvard Crimson, even urged that Hanfstangl be given an honorary degree
as a mark of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a
friendly country. The university also hosted a visit by Germanys Boston
consul-general, Baron Kurt von Tippelskirch. He took part in a ceremony
honoring Harvard graduates who had died while fighting in the German army
in World War I, and laid a wreath featuring the infamous Nazi swastika.
My own employers actions with respect to the Nazis were equally troubling.
At the invitation of the Columbia University administration, Nazi
ambassador Hans Luther spoke on campus in December 1933. Columbia president
Nicholas Murray Butler also hosted a reception for him. When students
protested, Butler insisted that Luther represented the government of a
friendly people and therefore was entitled to be received
with the
greatest courtesy and respect. Ambassador Luthers speech focused on what
he characterized as Hitlers peaceful intentions.
Columbia also insisted on maintaining friendly relations with
Nazi-controlled German universities.
Somehow I doubt that Harvard or Columbia will ever have to make amends for
such behavior since institutions such as these are much better at telling
the rest of the world how it should live than setting an example themselves.
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