Genocide: The intent to destroy in while or in part a national, ethical, racial, or religious group.

Intentional Interpretation: Ascribes the causes to a single individual which emphasizes his ideologies and obsessions and pins the guilt entirely on the individual.

Functionalist Interpretation: Stresses the role played by competing state bureaucracies and their conjuncture in shaping the annihilation of European Jewry.

1.) Societal forces supporting human life vs. societal forces moving towards the destruction of life.

a. Cultural Values and Traditions.

b. Structural Processes and Institutions.

c. Human Rights Status.

2.) Key historical, Economic, political, legal, and social events and transitions.

3.) Formation of genocidal fantasy and ideology.

4.) Precipitation factors or context.

5.) Mobilization of means to genocide.

6.) Legitimization and institutionalization of genocide.

7.) Execution of genocide and experience and denying mechanisms.

Armenian Genocide Began: April 24-25, 1915.

Several Hundred Armenian Intellectuals, Political, and Financial Leaders were arrested in Constantinople, Deported, and Murdered in Eastern Anatolia.

The Ottoman soldiers, “applied red-hot irons to his breast, tear off his flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pour boiled butter into the owunds. In some cases the soldiers would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood-evidently in imitation of the Crucifixion, and then, while the sufferer writhed in his agony, they would cry: “Now let your Christ come and help you!”

-Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Plandome, NY.: New Age Publishers, 1975), p.306.

“On the 52nd day they arrived at another village, here the Kurds took from them everything they had, even their shirts and drawers and for five days the whole caravan walked all naked under the scorching sun. For another five days they did not have a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water. They were scorched to death by thirst. Hundreds over thousands fell dead on the way, their tongues were turned to charcoal…On the 70th day, when they reached Halep [Aleppo], 35 women and children were remaining from the 3,000 exiles of Harpoot, 150 women and children from the whole caravan from 18,000.

-United States National Archives, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, 867.4016/225 (Aleppo, October 16, 1915); also reproduced in Armen Hairapetian, “Race Problems’ and the Armenian Genocide: The State Department File,” Armenian Review 37:1 (Spring 1984): 118-119.

“They arrived by the thousands, but the majority leave their bones there…Information obtained on the spot permits me to state that nearly 60,000 Armenians are buried there, carried off by hunger, by privations of all sorts, by dysentery and typhus. As far as the eye can see, there are mounds containing 200 to 300 corpses buried in the ground pele-mele, women, children, and old people belonging to different families and every class. At present nearly 4,500 Armenians are kept between the town of Meskene and the Euphrates. They are but living phantoms. Their superintendents distribute them sparingly and very irregularly a piece of bread. Sometimes three of four days pass when these famished people receive absolutely nothing….The latter [children] fall ravenously upon anything they find: they eat herbs, earth and even excrement.”

-Reported by Auguste Bernau, Aleppo office representative of the Vacuum Oil company of New York, September 21, 1916; see the French version of Arnold J. Toynvee’s Blue Book, Le traitement des Armeniens dans l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: Payot, 1987), pp.517-523.

-Minister of the interior.

Announced that all Armenians living near the war zones would be deported to Syria, and the roads would be stocked in supplies.

“the Porte wanted to take advantage of the world war to thoroughly get rid of its internal enemies, the indigenous Christians, without being disturbed by foreign diplomatic interventions; that is also in the interest of the allies of Turkey, the Germans, because Turkey would in this way be strengthened.”

-A.A., Turkei 183, Band 37, A 19744, June 17, 1915, p.2.

“la question armenienne n’existe plus” –Talat Pasa as recorded by Prince Hohenlohe-Langenburg.

“You have not understood yet what we want: we want to erase the Armenian name.”

-AA. Turkei 183, Band 41, A 2889, January 3, 1916, enclosure BN944 Dated November 8, 1915, p.12.

"Let this be a warning...O Muslims, don't get comfortable! Do not let your blood cool before taking revenge.”

Akçam, Taner (2006), A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, New York: Metropolitan Books, ISBN 0-8050-7932-7.

‘The Turks have already chosen the most pretty from among the children and young girls. They will serve as slaves, if they do not serve ends that are more vile.”

-Gerard Chaliand and Yves Ternn, Le Genocide des Armeniens (Brussels, 1984), p.54

Enver Pasha Special Forces area of the

Ottoman Military.

Main aim was to keep Turkey free of foreign influence.

Played a big part in the Armenian Genocide.

Armenians were considered inferior.

Dhimmi System: Status which identified who were non-muslim subjects of the Empire. They had to pay a poll tax, and an irregular tax.

Oaths were unacceptable in a Muslim court, and no dhimmi could give evidence against a Muslim.

Askeri- (The Military) All those who served the state (Christians were incorporated up until the 16th century.

Reaya- (The Subjects) Both Muslims and Non-Muslims, the peasantry; town and city dwellers; and the nomads.

Both of these were formuluated through the foundation of conquest.

The 16th Century had two important changes:

1.) Full Islamization of the Askeri Class.

2.) Rise within the Askeri Class of a small elite who were called true Ottomans.

Inability to control the Market

Other Problems:

Population Increase

Ideology of its leaders which failed to adapt to growing mercantilism.

State became too top heavy. (Couldn’t support the military)

Principal Affects:

1.) Pan-Islamism (in reaction to Western ideologies)

2.) Deep financial and political crisis which fueled civil violence.

3.) Banality of daily oppression.

“Genocide is too serious and vast a matter to spring up in a vacuum of non definition or non ideology. There is generally a guiding ideology, and before that there is generally a fantasy of power or redemption or salvation through ridding society of a given target people.”

-Israel Charnay

Pan-Turkism: Nationalistic sentiment which emphasized the centrality and superiority of the Turkish culture and people.

“I am Turk, my religion, and my race are mighty.”

-Turkce Siirler Poem

Two Major Changes:

1.) The final defeat of the liberal movement.

2.) Rise of Turkism/ National Economics.

National Economics: Turkism strove to also eliminate foreigners from the entire economy, therefore any division within the state whether that be in the government or labor all had to be genuinely Turkish or it was dismissed.

Merged the teachings of Sufism, which seeks the annihilation of free-will and the individual’s absorbtion in God with Durkheim’s deification of soceity collectivity. Gokalp replaced Durkheim’s concept of society with that of a nation. Which “replaced the belief in God by the belief in the nation: nationalism became a religion.”

-Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism,

p.53-63.

Ottoman military losses abroad, most especially against the Russians.

Allies surrounded Istanbul on April 4, 1915 which was the same day the Genocide officially began.

“the cemiyet [committee] , full of hope for its future, has reached a decision. The Armenians living in Turkey will be destroyed to the last. The government has been given ample authority. As to the organization of the mass murder, the government will provide the necessary explanations to the governors, and to the army commanders…”

-Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide,” p.349. The memoirs were signed by A. Bil., a probable pseudonym for Cemal Ferid, “One of Istanbul’s five Responsible Secretaries.”

“opposition to orders…designed for the defense of the state or the protection of public order’ the military had the ‘authority and obligation to repress it immediately and to crush without mercy every attack and all resistance.”

-Gerard Chaliand and Yves Ternn, Le Genocide des Armeniens (Brussels, 1984), p.47.

“To do whatever is possible to do away with this danger [the Armenians] is a requirement for national security. To take this road may mean to go against the laws of the nation and of humanity. I am ready to pay the consequences [of this evil action] with my life whether I realize my goal or not there will be many who vilify me. I know that, but, in the very distant future, there will appear also those who will understand that I sacrificed myself in the service of my country.”

-Dr. Bahaeddin Sakir

“[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as the central problem of world history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind. Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only… The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.”

Bauer, Yehuda, "The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History", Holocaust: Religious & Philosophical Implications.

"It was the Seljuq Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seljuq_dynastyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manzikerthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium

Treaty of Versailles- Germany acknowledged responsibility for the war, to pay enormous war retributions, and give up its territories world wide. (Nazi’s eventually called this ‘the stab in the back policy’)

The Treaty of Sevres- Dissolved the Ottoman Empire.

Vladimir

Lenin (1870-

1924)

Revolution in Russia

Bolshevik translates into ‘Majority’

They were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social

Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)

Bolshevik Party