The New Deal reconsidered: The Holocaust crisis

Another important corrective to the hazy nostalgia in which the FDR years were later enveloped is a look at the reaction, or failure of reaction, of the US to the Holocaust. As David Wyman recounts in his essential book on the subject, the nature and scope of the genocide were known in the US by late 1942. For fear of appearing "pro-Jewish," the War and State Departments, respectively, refused and blocked any action to stop it. Until his death, FDR was indifferent to both the genocide itself and the refugees in flight from it. The State Department, under the influence of the British Foreign Office, was also hostile to Zionism and declined to press for Jewish refugees to be allowed into Palestine. The contrast with Churchill is striking. Once he knew of it, he spoke publicly about the genocide and devised schemes for getting weapons to resistance movements in continental Europe. His complaint about Anglo-Jewry was its timidity and lack of organization. In spite of his courageous and public statements and actions in connection with the Holocaust, there were sharp limits on how far he push the rest of the British government on the issue. But there was no question where he stood.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. FDR's presidency, and especially his landslide victory in 1936, cemented the love affair of American Jews with the Democratic party. There have been periods of erosion of that affair (Eisenhower in 1956, Nixon in 1972, and Reagan in 1984, all received close to half of the American Jewish vote), but never a real prospect of dissolution. Although anti-discrimination laws before the late 1950s were more limited in scope, applying only to government, the influence of the New Deal's public hiring practices, and later their application through much of the US economy during the war, essentially started the modern civil rights era. The 1930s was not only the most isolationist decade in US history, it was the most nativist, a period of strong intergroup tensions and bigotry. The Depression itself, of course, was the largest single cause. But the message emanating from Germany also exerted a distinct influence. American Jews looked to FDR as "King of the Jews," the "good czar" who would protect them. American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise and Sam Rosenman acted as American versions of "court Jews" familiar from Europe.

And it was "court Jew" politics that failed in the war years. This influential establishment of lay and rabbinical leaders, allied with FDR, were determined to maintain the palace-intrigue approach to Jewish issues. Far from being a help, they seriously harmed Jewish self-interest in those years: for all their backroom dealings, they came up empty on antisemitism, Zionism, or rescuing European Jews.

Eventually, a new, more American type of "bottom-up" politics emerged in response to the Holocaust. Its emergence was too late for most of Europe's Jews. But it led to a stunning breakthrough for America's. After the end of the war, it became clear that, for all his greatness as a leader, FDR and his "court Jews" were the ultimate obstacles to progress on these issues. While he repeatedly used popular anti-semitism as an excuse for inaction, the circumstances of the war itself rapidly changed American opinion, and FDR was left behind by change he himself had helped to instigate. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's plan to rescue Jewish refugees was largely drawn up by non-Jews. Former president Herbert Hoover, who first made his name leading war relief efforts during and after the First World War, offered to head up a refugee commission. It did form but failed to accomplish much, because of State Department and White House resistance. Even the State Department itself, once the war was over, relented enough to negotiate a settlement of refugee property claims with the Swiss government.*

A critical mass of Jewish groups finally gave up on palace intrigue, organizing and protesting publicly in 1943 and 1944, making Zionism and the rescue of Europe's remaining Jews broadly accepted, nonpartisan issues. By the 1944 election, both parties endorsed this platform, and within a few years, rapid political change led to dramatic changes in American acceptance of Jews and the start of the sharp decline in antisemitism that marked the postwar decades. This decisive change occurred in a space of a few years. Contrast with the 1940 election, where in spite of the bipartisan support for intervention in the war, America First and important isolationist leaders like Lindbergh made discreet but effective use of social prejudice against Jews to bolster their case. The America we live in now was made in those few short years by people (some of them returning from the war) who abandoned the 1930s politics of fear. Given FDR's opposition to Zionism and his stubborn refusal to do anything about the genocide in Europe, it's almost a miracle.**
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* Contrary to mythology pushed by the media in the 1990s, Switzerland had instituted the secret, numbered bank account system in the 1930s so that people fleeing Germany could move their assets to a safe place. It was generally less antisemitic than the rest of Europe and, in spite of the fact that much of its population was German-speaking, never fell for Hitler's Aryan vision. But most of the owners of the financial assets moved to Swiss banks perished, and several billions (in present dollars) were left unclaimed at the end of the war.

** Kenneth Levin's The Oslo Syndrome retraces Wyman's history in abbreviated form, then relates it to the return of Jewish self-ghettoization in the 1990s. Except that in a liberal democracy, self-ghettoization means self-defeat. "Court Jew" politics and palace intrigue don't work. While Clinton, unlike FDR, was not personally prejudiced against Jews, the political failure was similar, the Oslo "peace process" being the most damaging result.

Gun control and Jewish values

We've said it before here: one of the strangest features of American Jewish politics is its embarrassment about self-interest. I don't exactly mean its liberalism. Any religious minority in a liberal democracy finds itself exceptionally in tune with the need for safeguarding religious and other civil freedoms.

What I do mean is the frequent inability to say the obvious, steer clear of political correctness, and think about the things Kavanna wrote about a few days ago here about the right of self-defense. Although there are nuances in how far people can go and avoid taking the law into their hands, it's not a hard-to-understand principle. But ever since the breakdown of liberalism in the 1960s, gun control (banning guns, actually) has become another one of those quixotic causes that liberals have taken up as a vehicle for self-flagellation. It's not as if there's strong evidence that it works: law-abiding people obey gun control laws, and criminals don't. Countries with gun control laws do not have consistently lower rates of violent crime. But such rational considerations obstruct our view of the motives of gun control advocates: it's about guilt and becoming helpless in order to assuage that guilt. It sometimes results in pretty astounding rationalizing, such as quoting the Ten Commandments (which forbid murder, not self-defense) in debates over the issue. Judaism is not about turning the other check, BTW: that's a different religion.

There are many self-identified liberal causes (like gay marriage) that stand or fall on their own merits. The problem with American Jewish politics is taking over those causes and trying to make "Jewish values" out of them. What results is sometimes misguided and often distorted. Although it's based on obligations, not rights, Jewish law has always recognized a right of self-defense. (See this lucid discussion, which uses the classical exegesis of the 11th century commentator Rashi. He carefully distinguishes self-defense from both murder and judicial punishment and limits the use of deadly force to deadly situations.) Although I don't own a firearm myself, it's perfectly understandable to me why people without reliable police protection would want to be able to protect themselves. In the US, that includes people living in rural areas, but also residents of inner cities. It doesn't mean everyone has to own a gun or even know how to use one. The days of a citizen militia are long past.

The real source of the distorted thinking is the hundreds of years of diaspora Jewish vulnerability and belief in the "good czar." Actually, a lot of modern Jewish politics can be understood this way. Only under oppressive and discriminatory rule by Christians and Muslims were Jews gradually disarmed and reduced to helplessness. We all know how that ended.

It's best to look at the situation in Israel, where personal firearms are not unusual. The Israeli approach - gun ownership common, but highly regulated - is probably the closest thing to real "Jewish values" on this question. Of course, there's a larger context: guns don't kill people; people kill people. And that is why there is so much in Jewish tradition about keeping the negative side of human nature in check. Someone might decide to use force against someone else, and that someone else might need to defend himself. But violence foreseen and prevented is better than violence acted out - the "Jewish way" in the fullest sense.

Noble savagery and white guilt

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Not that Rousseau didn't write some pretty dumb things, e.g., in The Social Contract - see here.
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Some time between the fall of Napoleon and the First World War arose a mentality - in some cases, a full-blown ideology - rightly called "white supremacy." In Europe, it was a never-completely-respectable by-product of the immense lead in knowledge, technology, and social organization that opened up between the West and the rest of the world in the 19th century. While a side effect of the fact of progress, it also sat uneasily with the West's belief in progress and a better future. In the Americas, the mentality was a by-product of the white colonists' earlier destruction of native ways of life and the colonial institution of slavery. While the abolition of slavery marked a first large step away from white supremacy, as a social attitude, abolition in some ways heightened the sense of a gap between white Europeans and others.

Then came the First World War and, even more emphatically, the Second. Some time between the end of the earlier conflict and the end of the latter, "white supremacy" collapsed. It had never been congruent with the West's more "official" thought-systems (Christianity and liberal Enlightenment) anyway. Great 19th century dissidents, like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Mark Twain, had questioned the confusion of moral and political with economic and technical progress.* The physical and, even more, the moral destruction wrought by the major 20th century conflicts badly damaged the sense of automatic progress that the West had come to believe before 1914. While civilization had made possible life in numbers and quality unimaginable a few hundred years ago, the most advanced forms of progress before 1945 were still available to only a minority of citizens. And technical and organizational progress had, almost without anyone noticing, created means of destruction also unimaginable a few centuries ago.

Suddenly, progress and civilization no longer seemed all that. Perhaps, it seemed to some, just "skin-color privilege" anyway. Thus was born white guilt. Strangely, the origins of white guilt had little to do directly with the legacy of slavery or racism, or the decimation of non-European peoples by European colonialism and diseases. It started as an internal crisis of confidence, haunted by the sense that modern history had ended badly.

Most of the resulting agonizing hasn't done white people much good. It has also not done much good for non-white peoples once at the margins of white society but, since 1945, increasingly integrated into modern life. Black author Shelby Steele has written a short but magnificent book on how white guilt has twisted the promise of civil rights, weighing it down with undeserved and often unacknowledged baggage that prevents everyone - whites for their reasons, black for theirs - from understanding the society they live in and how it might be improved. You can find brief summaries of his argument here and here.

Steele explains how racial oppression works and why "black rage" didn't start until after the civil rights movement was nearly finished. The oppressed usually don't feel rage until and unless they're almost free. When the parameters of society change in such a big way, then it becomes okay for the about-to-be-freed to be angry. The strange result is that, in Steele's view, whites had moral authority on questions of race when they were acting as oppressors; only when they stopped did they lose it. From a rational point of view, this makes no sense. It can only be explained if you accept some additional assumptions stolen into the discussion some time between the mid-60s and the 80s, that period when modern liberalism came unglued: all white people are racist, and only white people can be racist. Neither is true, but such assumptions explain why the promise of racial integration, palpable in the 1950s and early 60s, went sour and why later progress, while real, has also been harder than it should have been. What got in the way was identity politics.

While identity is not irrational, identity politics is. It asks politics and politicians to do what they cannot. In the case of groups emerging from oppression, it is an understandable but blind and self-defeating response to a negative past. What it produces is demagogues and racists (like the white supremacists of the defeated South, a Farrakhan, or Hitler, the pseudo-messiah of the humiliated post-1918 Germans) and white liberal pandering, like political correctness.

But the larger irrationality and injustice of identity politics is living in a self-imposed mental slum, hemmed in by knee-jerk, defensive attitudes. For parasitic "identity" demagogues, the point is divide and rule. The way you divide and rule is to chop up voters as a whole into rigidly defined groups and brainwash them into feeling that they're helpless victims. Then they'll keep voting for you. They'll also fail to make connections with people outside their group and thus reinforce their isolation. Does this sound familiar? It also supports stunningly low political standards. Black voters, for example, simply hold black leaders to a low bar. Guaranteed Congressional seats just make it worse: it means some second- or third-rate black politicians will definitely hold office for as long as they want. But it also guarantees they will go no further. Black leaders with biracial appeal find their options very limited.** Obama is exciting, in part, because he doesn't fit this pattern. He had to run state-wide to become an Illinois senator and get white, as well as black, votes. Barack Obama successfully escaped America's "race reservation" system and electrified the nation in the process. Somehow, he slipped through the cracks.

The justice of the civil rights movement was and is beyond question. But the concept of white guilt makes no sense. It strikes me as a shamefaced cousin of white supremacy, exchanging superiority-by-virtue-of-skin-color for unearned-guilt-by-virtue-of-skin-color. Also lurking around this subject is the toxic concept of the "noble savage."† (The Left is incomprehensible without reference to "noble savagery," unearned guilt, and self-hatred - secularizations of familiar Christian concepts.) Civilization is defined, not by race, but by values and institutions - rules, essentially - and civilization is definitely better than non-civilization. The concept of "race," a nineteenth-century pseudoscientific idea of questionable pedigree, needs a hard look. Older definitions of civilization were based on religion or, to put it in more neutral terms, institutions and rules. These definitions are historically much sounder than the race concept.

Underlying "noble savagery" is a feeling that certain people are more pristine, closer to the Earth, or have groovy rhythm - or something. Such thinking is ridiculously patronizing, but it or something like it is widespread among self-loathing white liberals. In their view, civilization itself is a crime, which makes problematic their use of "progressive" as a self-description. Of course, much - maybe most - of this self-loathing has non-political roots. It just seeks political expression and justification in its advanced stages.

Primitive peoples in the state of nature are what they are: in more ways than one, humanity in the buff, showing the full range of what primordial humanity can be. In civilization, people have strong disincentives to violence and strong incentives to be constructive, very different from the lawlessness of a tribal world. Tribes are free as collective units, but not as individuals - they're bound by powerful tribal custom. Only modern civilizations have reconciled individual freedom with civilization, by replacing the alienation of power and sacrifice of personal freedom required in traditional civilizations with civilization based on rational self-interest and common consent - the social contract, in essence, embodied in the rule of law. A free society is necessarily a lawful society, not an anarchy.

In truth, "noble savages" don't exist and have never existed. But the noble savage doctrine in the hands of civilized people imagining themselves to be or desperately searching for those noble savages has been, with no competitor, the most fatal and destructive delusion in history. It's at the core of the lethal radicalisms of the last century, and it's responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in its genocides and dictatorships, and in the Second World War. The noble savage notion, played with by civilized men and women, is an invisible poison.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's an interesting review of Steele's book.
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* Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers, like the American founders, were much less confused about this than their successors. They were hopeful about progress, but also knew it wasn't magic. And they had few illusions about human nature.

** This pattern is in no way unique to blacks, but part of a larger phenomenon of powerful special interest groups that organize around government-bestowed special status. Once granted, it's rarely taken away, because no politician is powerful enough. The larger public good is lost because of the aggressively reactionary stance of these narrow interest groups and their leaders.

† Actually, Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" was not so wildly off, and he did recognize the basic problem of pre-state societies, which is their inability to control violence. In this, his view is not so different from Hobbes. His concept of "savage" was "noble," but not the romantic, quasi-pacifist, tree-hugging silliness often implicit in late 20th century concepts. It was apparently Diderot, one of the key figures of the French Enlightenment and editor of the influential and widely-read Encyclopédie (1751-80), who put the notion into its Romantic form.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews: A final word

Someone left a lengthy comment on my first posting on Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian genocide, and I responded in the comments section. The larger issues raised by this history are worth returning to, briefly. I've reposed my response below, slightly edited. Apparently, this reader didn't read my second posting, which would have clarified some things he missed.

My response explains the wrongness of the such views and alludes to the reasons why people hold them. Denial of the bare facts is rare today; instead, there's a lot of dancing around the facts and refusal to label them honestly. Rationalizations based on the Ottoman-Russian war are equally flimsy and irrelevant; they fall into the same scapegoating that the Young Turks themselves engaged in at the time. Their "Armenian problem" preceded the outbreak of war in 1914 by decades. But my response also gets deeper into historical detail than most readers will want; and even greater detail is available in the works of Fromkin, Power, and Florence, among other places. Up here, let me just cut to the chase and answer the question of why this sad history is important today.

There are some broad issues of critical importance that the Armenian genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman empire touch on and illuminate: the incompatibility of empire and modernity; the crisis that every modernizing empire has faced with the rise of chauvinistic and racist movements (like pan-Turkism), often confused with nationalism. Countries with strong Christian-liberal-enlightenment traditions were able to keep these forces at bay or marginalize them - plus they had the alternative of liberal and democratic nationalism, a powerful basis for rejecting racist and class-warfare ideologies. Eurasia's great empires could not; while they all went through liberalizing and reformist phases in the 18th and 19th centuries, these forces were shallow and short-lived, expressed as brief episodes of "enlightened despotism." Both czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey entered their final, post-liberal phases in the late 19th century, while Germany and Austria-Hungary didn't feel the full impact of such trends until after 1918. The whole subject - empire, nations, modernity, self-rule versus autocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and theocracy - deserves and will get a posting of its own. I'll just say again: Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic of Turkey, understood these points very well, better than rationalizers of the Young Turks and Ottomans do today. All of the Ottoman minorities - even those, like the Jews, who did well for much of the empire's history - came around to this view by 1918. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 played a large role in their change of view.

For us today, there is a weirder irony. Contrary to what Libby says, few Armenians (at least none that I know) "wallow" in this history. (There's no business here like Shoah business :) This is a far more crucial issue precisely for modern Turkey itself, a basic question that touches on just how modern it is, and how ready it is to join Europe. It's an unavoidable bridge the Turks will have to cross if they are to join. Imagine if Germany were still having fundamental difficulties facing the Nazi period. Obviously, Jews would be outraged. But forget about that for the moment: What would Germany's neighbors think? Would NATO or the EU have ever have been possible, or the Cold War come to an end, with such a fundamental and ominous question mark hanging in the air? This issue is not about Armenians, Jews, or Israel: it's about Turkey.

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This is my response to the commenter at the first posting.

[snip]

What you're doing is what a lot of Ottoman-Young Turk apologists do, which is to essentially admit the Armenian massacre of World War One, then rationalize by playing with words, teasing readers with a seductive historical amnesia, or tell Jews in particular that they did well under the Ottomans or that modern Turkey is a good ally of Israel. I didn't compare the Armenian genocide directly to the Holocaust. In certain respects - its Teutonic thoroughness, the irrational paranoia of antisemitism - the Holocaust was unique. But by that standard, the Holocaust would be the only genocide in the book, and that's certainly not right either. I also don't want to stoop to genocide card-trading: you know, I'll swap your Holocaust for two genocides and 20 pogroms, hold the mustard.

As I wrote, the most damning evidence on the genocide was precisely the reaction of the German, Austrian, and American ambassadors, allied to Turkey or neutral. All three diplomatic missions quickly concluded in 1915 that the Young Turks (Enver and Talaat) were trying to exterminate the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire. Enver and Djemal admitted as much to the Germans. That's genocide, period.

Nor was there any military reason for extermination. While apologists try to claim the Ottoman Armenians were rebelling, there's no evidence of such rebellion. The real reason was that Turkey's offensive against Russia in the winter of 1915 was a disastrous failure, and the Young Turks needed someone to blame. The Armenians had already been such targets in the past, and they were near the Russo-Turkish border. So they were convenient scapegoats for [terrible bungling]. Outside the universe of rationalizers and apologists (like Toynbee), historians and observers at the time understood that the Young Turks' program in 1915-17 was continuous with past Ottoman behavior toward their Christian minority subjects - it was NOT about winning the war with Russia. If wiping out the Armenians was so critical to the Turkish war effort, why did the German and Austrian ambassadors protest it? After all, they had a large stake in Turkish success against Russia.

Nor is it true that the Christian minorities "flourished" under the Ottomans, at least not in the Empire's last century. Much of it was in steep long-term decline in any case. But the Ottomans' contradictory efforts to liberalize and modernize their empire, while still keeping the dhimmis in some kind of subordinate status, created an impossible situation, one that could only be resolved in one of three ways: convert all Ottoman subjects into equal citizens (which ran against Islamic law and Turkish dominance), relinquish Turkish rule over the dhimmis (which is what ended up happening), or genocide. This problem was not unique to the Ottomans. Next door, the Russian empire went through a similar cycle, during the same period, and for similar reasons: liberalization and reform earlier in the 19th century, followed by violent reaction (pogroms etc.) aimed at preserving the older imperial-feudal-theocratic structure before it disintegrated. These governments in part created this dilemma by their earlier efforts at reform. The Ottoman Christian subjects suffered in the last couple generations before the war because either granting them full rights or accepting their growing demands for independence would mean the end of the Ottoman empire as traditionally constituted. Once the Ottoman authorities accepted this, they began (in the 1890s, a decade after the pogroms started in Russia) a series of anti-Christian massacres. Something similar happened in German-speaking lands, but not until after 1918. Until then, Germany and Austro-Hungary retained many liberal features.

The reason Jews did so well for so long under the Ottomans was that, being small in number and having no state or political power, they were not a threat. While Enver and Talaat were anti-Christian, they were not anti-Jewish. But the Jews just came late to nationalism, and the Ottomans didn't get the chance before 1918 to persecute them on a large scale. BTW, Djemal did understand this; while not anti-Christian, he did start persecution of Jews during the war. By 1918, almost all the Jews in the empire wanted an Allied victory - among other things, they had seen what happened to the Armenians. [The Jews of Palestine also suffered greatly under wartime Young Turk rule.]

Finally, I don't want to sound as if I'm being mindlessly anti-Turkish. I've been to Turkey and find a lot to admire about it. Ataturk was a great man, for his military brilliance and his political acumen. Everyone chatters about his master stroke of making Turkey a secular republic, abolishing the caliphate/sultanate. (The Sultan was already a prisoner of his own government in any case, before the war.) What people should admire at least as much is that Kemal also understood that Turkey could not become a modern republic unless it abandoned its rule over non-Turkish and non-Muslim subjects. Unlike the Young Turk triumvirate, Ataturk was a great military commander, one with real victories under his belt - and no need to commit genocide to achieve them.

It's more clear in my second posting, but I'll spell it out: why does the modern Turkish republic feel the need to rationalize for what the collapsing Ottoman Empire did? After all, modern Germany is constituted by a very different political regime from the Nazis or even the Kaisers (not that I want to equate the two). This is what baffles a lot of foreign observers otherwise sympathetic toward, and admiring of, modern Turkey.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews II

It would better if Turkey had continued its pre-1990s attitude of ambiguity towards the Ottoman empire and its final decades as "the sick man of Europe." That would at least make a good starting point towards recognition of what the wartime Ottoman government attempted and partly succeeded in doing, and why.

But that was not to be. In the last 15 years, Kemalism has suffered not only attacks from the outside (from the Islamic forces that deny nationalism, secularism, and republicanism), but also from an internal identity crisis. Instead of reaffirming Ataturk's basic commitment of Turkey toward a European future, Turkey's secular elites have fallen into a powerful Ottoman nostalgia, lamenting the empire's final days as a vanished golden era of Turkish power. It is not Kemalism that is the problem, but the abandonment of it. Turkey's elites are now in the grips of a romantic swoon - like Gone with the Wind - with the usual highly selective historical memory.

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What about the Kurds? The Kurds are a Muslim, but Indo-European, people who speak a language closely related to Farsi (Persian). They live mainly in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq, a tip of Syria, part of Iran, and a large chunk of mountainous eastern Anatolia. They have never had a unified state, although they have produced famous Muslim leaders such as Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1187.

The Kurds were vaguely promised a homeland of some sort after 1918. But the facts on ground defeated them. Iran remained independent and neutral. The largest group of Kurds, in eastern Anatolia, came under the rule of the new Turkish republic, and in a strange status, as Muslims but not Turks. The second-largest group of Kurds, centered around Mosul and Kirkuk, were reluctantly herded by Britain, the new Mandatory power under the League of Nations, into what became Iraq. The Kurds of Turkey have suffered from second-class status ever since. The Kurds of Iraq, in recent decades, suffered not just from second-class status, but savage persecution under Saddam, including chemical gassing toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s.*

The more radical Kurds in Turkey formed a Marxist-oriented guerilla movement (the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK) that started to revolt against the Turkish state in the 1970s. After the Cold War ended, the PKK lost its old sponsor (the Soviets) and needed a new one. There is circumstantial, but strong, evidence that this new sponsor is - no surprise - Iran. The recent PKK incursions into Turkey (clearly modeled on Hizbollah's attack on northern Israel in June 2006) are designed to provoke Turkey into invading northern Iraq the same way that Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006. In this view, which is probably right, Tehran has an opportunity to create a new international crisis, not only for the US, but to divert attention from its nuclear weapons program - not that different from the Cartoon Jihad of early 2006.

The Turkish Kurds still have grievances, although the post-Cold War period did see a large improvement for them. They were allowed some degree of linguistic and cultural autonomy, although not self-government. That liberalization has petered out, because it ran into more and more resistance from Turkish elites and ordinary Turks in the street.

One final twist: the Kurds and the Armenians hate each other.

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What to do? Look at the Israeli attitude. At a human level, free of official obligations, everyone in Israel knows what happened to the Armenians: you merely have to walk around the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem and talk to descendants of survivors. It's a ritual Israelis know well in another context. The newspapers certainly have no difficulty talking about it. But the Israeli ambassadors have a tougher job. Turkey is a key ally of Israel, while the present country of Armenia has formed a strange alliance with Syria and Iran. So on a official level, Israeli governments maintain a careful ambiguity whenever this issue comes up.

Successive American governments have to do the same: Turkey is a key ally in the Middle East and a member of NATO. The US officially backs Turkey's membership in the European Union. Hence the manifesto from the Secretaries of State and Defense. This in spite of the fact that, over the last 15 years, Turkey has developed some nasty new strains of anti-Americanism and antisemitism and is facing apparently insuperable obstacles to its full membership in the EU.

But that doesn't mean people can't know what they know on an everyday level, even if they oppose something as in-your-face as the recent Congressional resolution. There are other ways to work on this problem without turning it into diplomatic high explosive. David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, explains:

From my experience in tackling difficult relationships, I believe that engagement, not avoidance, is the best strategy. In a perfect world, Armenian and Turkish historians would sit together and review the archival material, debate differences, and seek a common understanding of the past. To date, that hasn’t happened in any meaningful way. I continue to hope that it will. It should. We at AJC have offered our services, if needed, to help facilitate such an encounter. Ninety years of distance ought to allow for the creation of a “safe” space to consider contested issues.

Two important Turkish writers, the novelist Orhan Pamuk and the historian Taner Akcam, have written and spoken at length about the Ottoman empire's final agony and what happened to its Armenians; both now face official prosecution and freelance death-threats for their pains. And it's important to recognize that the problem, while exacerbated by the Iraq war, is not American: Turkey's strange drift and regression result from an internal crisis. The Armenian genocide of 1915-17 is a fact; acknowledgment by Turkey of that fact won't happen unless the more basic crisis of Turkish national identity is constructively resolved. Otherwise, Congressional resolutions will mean nothing. The ruling Justice and Development Party, suspected by many of being crypto-Islamist, is a better bet here than the bankrupt Kemalist elite. Although supporting the JDP involves some risks, better a moderate religious party committed to democracy than decayed imperial stench and a heavy whiff of fascism.

Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, one of the few Armenians left in Turkey, was assassinated earlier this year by a pan-Turkish fanatic. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands, mostly Turks. He once said he'd rather live in a democratic Turkey that had a hard time admitting the truth about the Armenian genocide, than in an autocratic Turkey that pushed some kind of "official line" on the subject, even if it happened to be the truth.

What Dink was saying was that "official history," like "official science," is a dangerous business. History, like science, works from the bottom up, not from the top down. To acknowledge facts on an individual level is one thing; to manufacture history like a political platform is a dead-end. It serves neither historical truth, nor the dead, nor the living.**

POSTSCRIPT: The national ADL's position has always been to avoid the word "genocide" in discussing the Ottoman Armenians and try to avoid the subject altogether. The New England ADL, facing criticism from local Jewish, Armenian, and human-rights groups, rejected the view of the national ADL, which then fired its New England regional director. (The Boston area has a significant Armenian diaspora, partly from those who fled the Ottomans during and after the Great War.) Eventually, the national ADL changed its view somewhat, but only under intense pressure.

The ADL's national director, Abe Foxman, later complained bitterly about what he viewed as the mistaken "idealism" of other Jewish groups, their refusal to play realpolitik. Undoubtedly, Foxman has a point, and he seems to view himself as the only adult in the room, so to speak. Some have tried to portray this as a conflict between promoting "interests" versus promoting "values." And really, given that choice, who wants to be on the side of "values" - politics is about interests, not values, right?

But the deeper issue here does involve Jewish interests. A world in which genocide is practiced, then ignored and denied - and the ignoring and the denial are essential to the practice - is a dangerous world for Jews, any ethnic or religious minority, and anyone who cares about freedom and human life. As the AJC's David Harris put it,

... as the issue once again heats up in the United States, it’s important to be clear. In a book entitled Holocaust Denial, published by the American Jewish Committee in 1993, the author, Kenneth Stern, an AJC staff expert on the subject, noted: “That the Armenian genocide is now considered a topic for debate, or as something to be discounted as old history, does not bode well for those who would oppose Holocaust denial.”

He was right. Picture a day when a muscle-flexing Iran or Saudi Arabia seeks to make denial of the Holocaust a condition of doing business with other countries. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t.

We have many interests as a Jewish people. Protecting historical truth ought to be right up there near the top of the list.

Final thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

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References

Some standard references in English in print today on the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, and World War One. Fromkin and Power make extensive use of contemporary and pre-war documents, both published and unpublished, which are not lacking on these topics.

~ Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (1929; supplementary volume to The World Crisis: 1911-1918), covers the period 1918-24 in connection to British policy and the Anglo-Greek war against the Turks in great detail. He includes the unforgettable story of how a monkey's bite killed the King of Greece and many more besides. Churchill was both a participant in and an important historian of these events. It covers much else as well, such as the Russian Civil War and the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars of the same post-1918 period.

~ Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). Published the week Italy and Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, this monumental treatment of the Balkans and modern Yugoslavia is the greatest English-language work of contemporary history of the last century. Along the way, West is detailed and damning about the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, their final decades of rapacity and oppression, and the huge mess they left behind when they imploded. Her book has had no equal since, but Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is a fitting sequel, paying repeated tribute to its model, and, like West's book, informs its readers of far-off places of which they knew nothing.

~ David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989), covers the period 1912-1924, with the greater Middle East (including Turkey and Central Asia) as the geographic frame. Best recent one-volume treatment; indispensable.

~ Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), covers the major genocides of the last century, from the Armenians in the First World War to Kosovo in the late 1990s; also indispensable.

~ Accounts devoted to the Armenian genocide itself include the books of Graber, Melson, and Balakian. There is also the once-famous novel of Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), still worth reading and still shocking.

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* This episode is also covered in Power's book.

Even the Arabs, Muslim but not Turkish, got a nationalist movement in World War One, although ironically, they were the last Ottoman group to do so - undoubtedly because they were Muslim and the majority and thus had the least incentive to revolt.

** Bush complained recently, in connection with the Congressional resolution, that he can't be put into the position of sorting through the Ottoman empire's history. It's hard not to sympathize - that's too much homework for anyone. Clinton had Yugoslavia, and Bush lept half-blindfolded into Iraq. One leftover Ottoman mess per presidency is enough.

Armenians, Turks, Israelis, and Jews I

Maybe I should have blogged this earlier ... and added the Kurds as a fifth to the list. Suddenly, it's blown up in our faces.

The recent uproar over the ADL's flip-flop on the Armenian genocide was a hot topic in the Israeli newspapers when I was in Israel at the end of the summer. All of them - left, right, religious, secular - found the flip-flop bizarre. What happened to the Ottoman Armenians during World War One is common knowledge, and genocide-denial is not a business Israelis or Jews should want to get into. But that was just the beginning.

More recently, the US Congress considered a non-binding resolution endorsing the facts of what happened and labeling it genocide. The resolution has triggered an internal political and external diplomatic crisis for Turkey. Congress had passed earlier resolutions about this, going back to the 1980s, but they were not as emphatic and didn't use the word "genocide."

But it's not just a change in Congressional resolutions. A lot has changed since then in Turkey, and the resolution could not have come at a worse time for Turkish politics or US-Turkish relations. That's why the resolution was opposed by President Bush, former Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr., and by all currently living Secretaries of State.

Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has drifted farther and farther away from its secular-republican ideology of Kemalism, formulated by the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal. Also known as Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), he organized both critical Great War victories for Turkey: the defeat of the 1915 Anglo-French landings at Gallipoli and of the Anglo-Greek offensive of 1920-22.* While the Ottoman empire's fragments became the pieces later assembled into the modern Middle East, Ataturk retrenched in Anatolia and regenerated Turkey as a national republic, free of its old imperial superstructure. When the Greek-Turkish war ended in 1922, over a million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia, where they had lived since the days of Homer; almost a million Turks were counterexpelled from mainland Greece into Turkey. Alas, no one ever said nation-building would be pretty - but it's not half as ugly as empire collapse.

Ever since, Turkey has been a secular-nationalist republic protected its military. Everyone's heard of the Islamist Refah (or Welfare) Party that arose in the early 1990s and how it was prevented from taking power by the Turkey military. While radical and pan-Islamic thought has gained a foothold in Turkey in the last generation, and Turkey's ruling secular elites have been in a state of corruption and decline for decades, many Turks (not just the army) are devoted to Ataturk's ideal and now view it as their passport to EU membership and becoming a truly Western country.

The Refah party re-established itself as the Justice and Development Party, without an overt Islamic component, and went on to win successive later victories in Turkish elections. They currently run Turkey's elected civilian government. But something else has happened that is less known in the West, something directly related to the present crisis.

The attitude of Kemal and his followers toward the Armenians and the events of 1915-17 was ambiguous. The Turks consistently distanced themselves from Ottoman persecution of Christian minorities (which went on repeatedly all through the empire's final century: Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, as well as Armenians), while simultaneously denying that the massacre of Armenians in 1915-17 was a deliberate attempt at extermination. Ataturk's military government even prosecuted a few of the final Ottoman government's high offficials for war crimes in 1919-20. The general attitude was that what the Ottoman government did in its final death throes had nothing to do with the modern Turkish republic that arose from the ruins.

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Why did the massacre happen? Did it happen? For the bare facts of the case, consult Samantha Power's classic history of 20th century genocide, "A Problem From Hell:" America in the Age of Genocide. The first chapter of her book covers this, the first of the 20th century's great "race-murders," as US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr., labeled it while it was happening: about 800,000 to a million Armenians dead. The word "genocide" was coined in the 1940s, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer struggling to capture the intent and the act in a single word that could be written into laws and treaties that would ban it. Power accepts Lemkin's narrow but unconditional definition: a deliberate attempt, successful or not, to exterminate a national, ethnic, or religious group. It doesn't include fuzzier notions of "imperialism," "cultural genocide," and so on: it's nothing but plain physical extermination. Lemkin struggled with this concept before Hitler's planned and largely completed genocide of European and Middle Eastern Jews; Lemkin was thinking of the Armenians when he did so, not the future fate of his own people.**

To understand why the massacre happened, it's better to turn to David Fromkin's comprehensive The Peace to End All Peace, the most useful modern book covering the end of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the modern Middle East. Fromkin treats the "greater Middle East," which includes Turkey and Central Asia. This larger perspective is essential to understanding the Ottoman empire, why it collapsed, and what happened when it collapsed.

The modern Middle East is often traced, not back to 1918, but to 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, which at that time was loosely attached to the Ottoman empire. His intent was to make Egypt modern, by force, in the same way that the French revolutionary armies were marching all over Europe under the banner of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. Napoleon was defeated by the British, and Egypt passed into the control of reforming local rulers such as Muhammad Ali. The Ottomans themselves later adopted such reformist approaches, much like the "enlightened despots" of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the same period. To some extent, they were forced to do so by the system of capitulations that European powers had forced on the Turks, by which European powers became protectors of Ottoman minorities and which was widely resented in the empire. The Ottoman realm included Turkish Muslims, but also non-Turkish Arabs, as well as a confusing array of Christian minorities and Jews. These latter were the dhimmis, the subordinated and second-class groups that were tolerated under Islamic law with large legal and political disabilities. The Ottoman empire did not have citizens in any case, but subjects - an important distinction.

The Ottoman reformers attempted to remake their empire into a modern, secular, and liberal polity, but collided with basic realities that eventually defeated them. The largely illiterate rural population, along with urban religious leaders, was firmly attached the institution of dhimma, with women, slaves, and infidels viewed as subordinate groups, while all Muslim males were theoretically equal. Furthermore, the secular-national concept itself was explosive in the Ottoman context, because, setting religious status aside, the empire contained numerous conquered non-Turkish peoples whose interpretation of Enlightenment ideas naturally led toward national independence and self-rule. It did not naturally lead toward equal citizenship under Ottoman rule, which turned out to be an oxymoron anyway: subjects and dhimmis in the end could not become citizens. Thus, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks, later extending to the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Armenians, and finally the Jews (who came late to the nationalism party), the Ottoman ethno-religious minorities demanded and in most cases, with the backing of various European powers and later the United States, got their independence - but not without a price.†

That price was strong suspicion and eventual persecution by Ottoman authorities. While the Serbs and Greeks, with British backing, won their independence during the Napoleonic era, groups attempting to assert their rights later were savagely massacred by the last generation of Ottoman governments, when they lurched from reform toward violent reaction. The final ruling faction in Istanbul, the "Young Turks" of the 1908 revolution (Committee for Union and Progress), failed in their last reform attempts. Turkish elites were then led to a new solution to their minorities problem - extermination. Under the sway of a super-national, racial idea (pan-Turkism), the government that led Turkey into alliance with Germany in 1914 looked forward to a new, wholly Turkish empire that would encompass the Turkic peoples of central Asia (the "stans" familiar to us today). What would happen to the non-Turkish minorities was up for debate. Some thought they should be killed; others, that they should be kicked out; still others, that Turks should relinquish rule over them. The similarity to the super-national racial idea of pan-Germanism is not accidental: that idea was the seed of the Nazi movement, which, contrary to myth, was not a nationalist movement, but a pan-European racial movement dedicated to the destruction of the European nation-state system and its replacement by a purified racial empire. In this Aryan-surpemacist empire, "inferior races" would be expelled, enslaved, or eliminated. What's critical to understand is that, before Nazism, this "pan" racial idea had an earlier instance in the final days of the Ottoman empire.

While the entire apparatus of Ottoman rule was not redirected toward exterminating the Armenians, it was the policy of part of the wartime Ottoman government, as Ottoman leaders admitted to their German allies once the massacres were underway. The Ottoman Armenians had cousins across the border in Russia, Turkey's historic enemy. (There was no independent Armenia then; Russian Armenia was ruled by the Czar.) Those Armenians were fervently pro-Russian, and the Ottoman government had reason to suspect the loyalty of its Armenians. The Russians and the Russian Armenians tried to set up an independent Armenian government when they conquered part of Turkey. But the Ottoman Armenians remained resolutely non-political and did not rise to the bait. Contemporary accounts - from then-neutral Americans and from Austrian and German observers stationed in Turkey to help their ally - show rare unanimity on the situation in Ottoman Armenia in 1915: it was quiet.

Some (including many in Turkey) try to use the Russian attempts to get the Ottoman Armenians to rebel as a rationale for the massacre. And if the Turks had merely interred or expelled the Armenians, it would be easier to rationalize. But to see that motive as the basis for the forced deportation and starvation that ensued in 1915-17 is to miss the point. The Ottoman government wasn't just trying to prevent an Armenian "fifth column." It was left by 19th century Ottoman reformers with an impossible dilemma and found a dazzling modern solution - genocide. The war just accelerated the genocidal tendency of Ottoman minorities policy already latent in the preceding generation; the genocide was not a strategy for Turkey to defeat Russia, anymore than the Holocaust was a strategy for Germany to defeat its enemies 30 years later. In both cases, genocide was a goal in its own right.

It also marked a large break in the nature of governmental persecution of minorities - one that shifted from the millennial focus on religion to the apparently "scientific" basis of race. The technological and organizational powers available to the modern state had opened up new vistas of mass murder unavailable and unimaginable to previous eras. The lesson was not lost, especially on Hitler.
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* This is a reminder that, while World War One ended on November 11, 1918 in the West, in the East, with regards to Russia and Turkey, it didn't really end until 1922, after the Russian Civil War, and after Ataturk drove the Greeks out of Anatolia and established the Turkish Republic. Along the way, he abolished the Ottoman caliphate and renounced Ottoman claims over the defunct empire. The 1922 settlement was formalized by the Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1919, that had been far more favorable to both the Christian minorities and the European victors.

Among other things, the earlier, harsher Treaty of Sèvres required the Ataturk government to try the Young Turks responsible for the Armenian atrocity - which it did. Several were even executed. The Armenian massacre left a strong impression among the Allied governments that Turkey could not be trusted with rule of non-Muslim minorities or even non-Turkish Muslim Arabs.

** Power's own book is, in part, a contemporary continuation the original human rights movement in the 19th century. Its main early manifestation was abolitionism, and Americans tend not to be familiar with its later development - under the influence of Christian missionaries in the Middle East and Africa - into the immediate ancestor of the "human rights lobby." It is the fruit of a characteristic liberal-Protestant and Anglo-American ethos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, exemplified by such figures as Lincoln, Gladstone, Lloyd-George, and Wilson. More recent examples - such as Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush - mark the later decay of this tradition.

† The entire relevant chapter from Churchill's memoir, The Aftermath, is worth reading (chapter 18, "The Greek Tragedy"), as Churchill was a contemporary observer, helped to instigate the failed Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, and tried to correct the pro-Ottoman apologetics already then spreading in the 1920s that attempted to rationalize the Armenian massacre. Enemies in the Great War, Britain and Ottoman Turkey had been allies in the nineteenth century, and, in 1914, a significant residue of support for Turkey remained in Britain, especially in the Conservative Party. OTOH, the Liberals, led earlier by Gladstone, had been a thorn in the side of the Ottomans as they launched a final wave of massacres against their Christian subjects in the 1890s.

The first major English-language apologist for the Ottomans was British historian Arnold Toynbee, who was also an antisemite. Toynbee claimed that the Armenian massacre was merely wartime Allied propaganda. While it is true that the Allies made effective use of the Armenian massacre in their propaganda, the distrust and horror of Ottoman minorities policy was real and deeply-rooted, and for good reasons. The most damning evidence on the massacre is precisely the records of the German and Austrian missions in Istanbul, not publicly available until after 1918. The ambassadors were convinced by mid-1915 that the Young Turk government meant to exterminate the Ottoman-ruled Armenians. Without guidance from Berlin or Vienna on the issue, they protested verbally but made only feeble attempts to stop it and publicly rationalize for their ally. Individual Germans and Austrians did undertake some attempts to save the surviving Armenians.

Churchill's First World War memoirs are not read much here in the US. They're far more relevant to what we're seeing now - in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan - than his better-known Second World War memoirs.

Not what you thought

I'll let the Wall Street Journal do the talking:

Every Monday night at 10 o'clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic's state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

The program has an undercurrent of very mixed messages regarding Jews, Judaism, and Israel. (They're still struggling with the fact that Zionism is not imperialism, just a nationalism.) It also has a funny allusion to Descartes and his skeptical "I think, therefore I am - but I'm not sure about anything else" line. In the context of Iran's theocracy, that has a clear implication.*

You can watch part of the first episode here. It's in Farsi, but has English subtitles.

POSTSCRIPT: For more about Iran, read the irrepressible Michael Totten again. His work is getting more exposure in the conventional media, which is a Good Thing.

A somewhat different point of view is provided by Abbas Milani, professor at Stanford and Hoover Institution fellow. A counterforce strike against Iran might yet prove necessary. But no one should be under any illusions that it has any other purpose than just that. It can't lead by itself to political change. Counterviolence can stop or prevent violence. It cannot produce constructive change by itself. Other forces have to be at work.
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* Not that there are no sources of religious doubt and philosophical skepticism in Iranian history. Just read Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, written about nine hundred years ago, but banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The West has a long history of such things, but surely no monopoly.

Holocaust in mind

Today is Yom HaShoah, remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust.

In December, a very large, previously restricted archive of Holocaust-related material was opened to the public, at the German town of Bad Arolsen. It was collected by the Red Cross at the end of the war from materials captured by Allied forces or turned over by German officials. It contains over 50 million pages of documents on all aspects of the Nazi genocide, including, but not limited to, its six million Jewish victims. It covers others subjected to enslavement and mass murder as well - certain Slavic nations (Poles and Serbs), Russian POWs, and Gypsies, among others. The mechanics of genocide are preserved with unnerving and sometimes bizarre thoroughness.

In December, the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes carried this 13-minute segment on the archive. The main article is here.