Black Dog of Fate

If the Holocaust was a hoax, why not the Armenian catastrophe
also? If Anne Frank’s diary was faked, who is to say that certain
documents signed by Talaat Pasha weren’t forged as well? . . .
The Turkish attack on truth exemplifies the new governing narrative,
the one in which truth is fugitive.

I LIVE IN THE CHENANGO VALLEY OF MADISON COUNTY, WEST OF Cooperstown, where James Fenimore Cooper once described the surface of a lake as glimmer glass, and east of the Finger Lakes, which are gouged out of glacial rock. The hills are soft in central New York, but there is nothing quaint about the silver and white silos, the flaking red barns, and the congregations of black-faced white heifers. It’s a terrain of hard economies, a landscape of work. Route 20 is a two-lane highway, like old Route 66, and it runs four miles north of my house in Hamilton, cutting through towns and villages from Albany to Buffalo. Sagging Italianates, half-painted ladies, antique shops, diners and restaurants with faded neon signs mark the roadsides of even the smallest towns such as Bridgewater, East Springfield, Bouckville.

The April landscape is tawny. Corn stubble, hay-colored grass, muddy ruts bleeding through the snow. Red kernels on the trees barely visible. The thermometer rises to 70, drops to 10. There’s frost on the windshield. From my window by the phone, pellets of hail assault the red tin roof of the side porch. Then rain and the smell of thawing, and in the afternoon the arms and legs remember July. Back to snow flurries at dusk. A month of false starts. The heart is a back tire spinning in mud.

I remember the phone call because it was my daughter’s first birthday, and she was holding on to furniture as she made her way around the living room. Her hair was long and silky and fine and the color of Moroccan olives, like the hair of the Balakians of Constantinople and Tokat. Over the static of the cordless phone came broken phrases of Armenian English. A voice was asking if Dr. Balakian would agree to be part of the seventieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, the traditional day of commemoration. It was to be held at Times Square.

Ever since Sad Days of Light had come out, I was getting invitations to read my poems. Not just at universities but at churches, town halls, human rights seminars, and genocide conferences. It came as a surprise, because I hadn’t set out to write a book of social value or an “Armenian” book. I had little affection for nationalism, and I had been raised so outside of Armenian ethnic life that my life had become a hunt to find out about the past. I found myself pulled by the catastrophe that had happened to Armenia and to my family, and by the universal, moral issues the Genocide represented. And so I had written a book of poems about things I could lay claim to. Armenia had become an Atlantis to my imagination. Lost Armenia, where my family had lived only seventy years ago. Armenia, whose misfortune had helped to define modernity, as Michael Arlen noted, because “the harnessing of modern technology for mass murder began with the genocide of the Armenians” and was the source of “the bloody river linking the great murderous events of our century.”

I had come to believe that a poet had something in common with the Japanese violin maker who worked for fifty years to create his delicate wooden instrument. When a buyer came into his shop, fell in love with the instrument, and offered the violin maker more money than he had ever been offered, the violin maker smiled and said, “This violin is for my great-grandchild; it can’t be played for fifty years.” Perhaps the past had to settle for a while before music could be made of it.

I had come to feel the significance of Armenia for its sheer duration on the planet, and that duration in a place that we in the West thought of as the cradle of civilization. The Tigris River flowed past my grandmother’s house in Diarbekir. No doubt she had bathed in it. Her horse had lapped water from it. Her family had done laundry in it. Sumerians, Chaldeans, Hittites, Cappadocians, Babylonians were names in textbooks, but Armenia was still on the map. The most eastern and oldest Christian nation in the world.

A damp wind and bright sun in late April. I was squinting in the noon glare. We sat in folding chairs on a plywood platform. There were mikes, cameras on tripods, video equipment from a TV station. The façades of buildings were familiar. The running lights of the Sony clock, the digital fragments of news wrapped around a skyscraper, a huge bottle of Coke on a red sign. An American flag. Fuji Film. The letters carouseled around me. A movie marquee, eye-level ahead, The Killing Fields.

Times Square was cordoned off by light-blue sawhorses monogrammed NYPD. Policemen on large blindered horses moved slowly around them, creating a strange pageantry. I was introduced to my fellow speakers. Ambassador Morgenthau’s grandson, Henry Morgenthau, III, Senator Al D’Amato, Elizabeth Holtzman, the Democrat who had lost to D’Amato in the Reagan landslide of 1980. I took a chair between Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, the novelist and historian, and a slight, Asian man named Dith Prahn, whose story of surviving Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, The Killing Fields, I had seen only days before.

As Times Square filled with people, Marjorie leaned over to say, “The Turks have come.” I looked again at the light-blue sawhorses and the mounted cops on horses and realized that security had been tightened. Various Turkish organizations had come to protest our civic act of mourning. I sat watching, the rage I didn’t want to feel coming at me.

In recent years claims have been made by some Armenians in Europe, America, and elsewhere that the Armenians suffered terrible misrule in the Ottoman Empire. Such claims are absurd.

Armenians were deported because they were a security threat and were massacring Muslims but great care was taken by the Ottoman government to prevent the Armenians from being harmed during these deportations. Thus orders were issued that: “when Armenians are transferred to their places of settlement and are on the road, their comfort is assured and their lives and property protected; that after their arrival . . . Their food should be paid for out of Refugees Appropriations; that property and land should be distributed to them in accordance with their previous financial situation.”

Carefully coached by their Armenian nationalist interviewers, these aged Armenians relate tales of horror which supposedly took place some 66 years ago in such detail as to astonish the imagination, considering that most of them already are aged eighty or more. Subjected to years of Armenian nationalist propaganda as well as the coaching of their interviewers, there is little doubt that their statements are of no use whatever for historical research.

Due to a variety of reasons, far more Turks than Armenians—about 3 million Turks—died in the same war. Very few of these fell dead on the battlefront. Consequently, one cannot conclude that the Armenians suffered any more terribly or that the Ottoman government attempted to exterminate them.

There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before or during World War I. No genocide was planned or ordered by the Ottoman government and no genocide was carried out.

My ancestors had been driven off the earth they had lived on for 2,500 years, had been killed one by one, and the things they had built with care over centuries of tradition had been confiscated or destroyed, and now the grandchildren of those Turkish people were stalking the United States in order to prevent Armenians from telling their story. The perpetrators trying to silence the victims and their descendants. I stuffed the Turkish pamphlet in my briefcase.

From the time I’d learned about the Armenian Genocide until the previous year, I had known nothing about the Turkish government’s campaign to silence the story of its crime against Armenia. But after Sad Days of Light came out, the New York State Department of Education asked me to be an adviser for a textbook on twentieth-century genocide that would be used in public schools. Not long after I and a group of scholars had begun putting together the chapter on the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish Embassy got wind of the project and began harassing the Department of Education, insisting that “this genocide business” was invented by Armenians, and if the chapter were included it would hurt U.S.-Turkish relations.

I traveled to Albany several times that fall, and sat in overheated offices imploring state bureaucrats, who were horrified by the Turkish assault, to hold firm on the chapter. The Turkish contingent was threatening to call President Reagan. Letters went back and forth. The Education Department grew increasingly befuddled. Before it was over, the Turkish government had succeeded in forcing changes to the textbook. One day, feeling the bile thicken, I called Elie Wiesel and filled him in on the mess in Albany, and he said, “I’ve talked to the President of Turkey about this. I said to him: ‘Why can’t you admit what you did to the Armenians? It would help your society. It would cleanse you of your guilt. You would gain something in the eyes of the world.’”

Wiesel told me his own Turkish story. In 1982, he was to chair a genocide symposium in Tel Aviv, where a group of scholars were giving papers on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. It was a well-publicized event and was organized by Israel Charny, a distinguished Holocaust scholar and director of the Institute on Holocaust and Genocide. Shortly before the symposium was to convene, the Turkish government informed the Israeli government that if the conference included the Armenian Genocide, it would “threaten the lives and livelihood of Jews in Turkey.” Wiesel decided he could not participate. The blackmail had worked, and the conference went on without Elie Wiesel and a majority of the scheduled Jewish participants. Papers on the Armenian Genocide were presented, but the conference lost its wind.

Perhaps the Turkish government’s ability to poison American institutions for the purpose of covering up the truth began in the United States in 1934, when the Turkish ambassador, Munir Ertegun, filed a protest with the U.S. State Department because MGM had bought the film rights to Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which had been published in Germany in 1933. This novel about the Armenians of Musa Dagh, who had made a heroic resistance against great odds to stave off the Turkish invasion of their mountain town in 1915, was the first popular novel about the Genocide. In it, Werfel expressed a sense of apocalyptic foreboding about the fate of the Jews. A Jew himself, he fled the Nazis in 1938, three years after Hitler banned The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, to the delight of the Turkish government.

If the film were released, the Turkish ambassador asserted, it would be taken as a hostile act on the part of the United States toward Turkey and would result in a Turkish ban on all U.S. films. After more than a year of exchanges between the two governments, the State Department acquiesced to Turkey’s demand, MGM dropped the project, and the film was never made. This was 1935. How much did FDR’s State Department know about what Hitler was doing to the Jews of Europe, and how much did it care? Why did the State Department care so little about artistic freedom? Why was MGM willing to go along? How ironic that on August 22, 1939, eight days before Hitler invaded Poland, he said to his inner circle, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

As a cultural mosaic, Anatolia has been a source of many modern societies. If Turkey’s leaders had not tried to prohibit and destroy other languages and other cultures than those of the Turkish people, Anatolia would still be a fountainhead of civilization. Instead we are a country half-famished, its creative power draining away. The sole reason for this is that cancer of humanity: racism.

Not long after my experience in Albany, I was invited to join the writers’ organization, PEN, and in the first Pen Newsletter I received there was a feature story by Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter about a trip they took to Turkey in 1985 on behalf of PEN International. Miller and Pinter were representing the literary world in its concern about censorship and human rights violations in Turkey. There was widespread concern in Europe and the United States about the imprisonment, torture, and execution of writers and journalists, and Amnesty International had defined “torture in Turkey” as an international problem.

Miller and Pinter quickly discovered that Turkish society “exists in a permanent state of McCarthyism,” as Miller wrote. They reported that the entire directorship of the Turkish Peace Party, which comprised most of the country’s intellectual elite, had been arrested and sentenced to long prison terms for opposing NATO missile bases in Turkey and sponsoring a commemoration of the Marxist poet Nazim Hikmet. After the trials, the lawyers who defended the Peace Party were themselves arrested and tried, and their careers subsequently ruined. Numerous painters, theater directors, and writers were in jail for making “subversive” art. Almost twenty percent of the country’s academics—that is, about 2,000 professors—had been sacked or had resigned; about 7,000 teenagers and young adults—mostly students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four—were in jail for being “terrorists.” Miller defined censorship in Turkey as “total,” and both playwrights soon became recipients of this total repression. When it became clear why they had come to Turkey, they were smeared in the press and were declined interviews; their press conference, held at the Journalists’ Association, was officially banned and a formal investigation was launched into their visit. They quickly left the country. When the New York Times reported in March 1996 that Turkey led the world in imprisoned journalists, ahead of China and Syria, who then could be surprised?

It has become clear to me that Turkey not only is a culture of severe human rights abuses but a place devoid of any mechanisms of critical self-evaluation. The aftermath of the Armenian Genocide is one example. In Turkish schools everyone is taught that in 1915, Armenians were traitors who attacked and killed Turks and deserved everything they got. There is no mention of Armenia, not on maps, in encyclopedias, in tourist pamphlets, or guidebooks, let alone in the telling of the history of Anatolia. A Turkish writer for the Encyclopedia Britannica had been sent to prison for letting the word Armenia appear on a map of ancient Anatolia. Tour guides and travel literature have expunged the word Armenia from their narratives. Armenian churches and buildings—many of them among the important and beautiful ancient structures in Anatolia—are not acknowledged as Armenian. Recently I checked a Fodor’s guide to Turkey to find that the description of the great ruined Armenian city of Ani did not mention the word Armenian. When the permanent exhibit of the ancient Near East opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the word Armenia was removed from its historic place on the map. The chairman of the museum’s board at that time was a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey. All this was a continuation of the genocidal program to wipe out Armenia.

I sat in Times Square thinking how important it is to have grown up in a society that believes in the ceaseless process of critical evaluation, a cornerstone of democracy. To contemplate Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide is to contemplate a society that has no conscience, no understanding of its own history, let alone collective memory. In the wind of late April, words issued from the mouths of public officials and people of conscience. I watched the police trot on horseback around the light-blue sawhorses, wishing I hadn’t come.

When it was my turn, I stood at the mike distracted by rage, staring at a blur of people. As I looked at the front rows where proud survivors sat attentive and well dressed, some holding up posters that read “Remember 1915,” I read a short poem from my book, and then I was planning to sit down, but I didn’t. I stood there for a few seconds and began speaking again.

“Seventy years ago, my grandmother was put on a death march with her two infant daughters. And so was every other Armenian living in their homeland in Anatolia. Innocent, unarmed, stateless people. More than a million of them, women and children alone. And today I have to stand here while Turkish people pass out propaganda which claims there was no genocide committed against the Armenians, that Armenians were responsible for their deaths, that Armenians had it coming to them anyway. What happened to the Armenians exceeds the UN’s definition of genocide tenfold.

“After all that has happened we are forced to live with this kind of obscenity. The message the Turkish government sends us and the world is: We will say anything to absolve ourselves of this crime. We have no conscience. We just want to silence the victims and their descendants. I am asking good and decent American citizens to say no to Turkish attempts to cover up the Armenian Genocide.”

Knowledge is no longer honored for its utopian promise, but valued for the services it furnishes. A striking illustration comes from the conflict surrounding Turkey’s determined effort to deny that the Armenian genocide of 1915 took place. And our own government, furthermore, sees fit to be involved. . . . Until recently the facts of the Armenian genocide were beyond dispute . . . our own official archives are thick with first-hand evidence, but now we are hearing that there are two sides to the story, and we are being told that we must hear what the Turkish government has to say. This is turning intellectual debate into a gimmick for the use of the powerful.

The issue was power, and Turkey certainly had more of it than Armenia, which until 1991 had no nation-state. Turkey had been a cold war ally and NATO partner, and used its power to coerce the U.S. government on Armenian Genocide issues. “What does it mean when a client-state like Turkey can persuade a superpower like the United States to abandon its earlier stance toward the genocide of 1915?” Des Pres asks.

Des Pres was right, for it had come to this: By the 1980s, the Turkish government was able to prevent the U.S. Congress from passing a bill commemorating the seventieth and, later, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. A simple commemorative bill that would have had historical roots in President Wilson’s U.S foreign policy, which was dedicated to saving Armenia and restoring its homeland for a modern republic. A bill that would have echoed the American public’s sentiment after 1918, when it sent over 20 million dollars for relief to the Armenian refugees and survivors.

In 1984, when the first genocide resolution came before the U.S. House and Senate, the Turkish government threatened to close down U.S. military bases in Turkey, built with millions of U.S. dollars, and to terminate defense contracts with U.S. firms. President Reagan, who earlier that year went to Bitburg, Germany, to pay homage to dead German S.S. officers—and in doing so conflated the elite killing corps with its victims—had no difficulty acquiescing to Turkish demands. In 1989, when Senate minority leader Bob Dole proposed a bill to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey enlisted Senator Robert Byrd to fight for the Turkish denial. Once again “intellectual debate was turned into a gimmick,” and the bill lost by twelve votes. What would happen if such a scenario were to have unfolded against a Holocaust commemorative bill?

Des Pres also notes that certain historians at major American universities have been receiving substantial funding from the Turkish government to support the “other side of the story” to help Turkey deny the Genocide. If scholars can be funded by “governments to shore up the official claims of nation-states,” Des Pres writes, “knowledge is no longer the mind’s ground of judgment but a commodity for hire.”

Scholars for hire. Careerism and cynicism in the academy. I now was learning that there existed a small but barbaric paper trail in academe that involved Turkey’s attempt to cover up the Genocide. It’s hard to say exactly where and when it began, but it became evident at some point in the 1960s, after the well-publicized fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

In 1962, Bernard Lewis, the well-known historian of Turkey and longtime professor at Princeton, described in his book The Emergence of Modern Turkey what happened to Armenia as “a holocaust that took the lives of 1.5 million people,” but sometime after that he changed his mind. What happened to Professor Lewis after 1962? Soon thereafter, his Princeton colleague, Norman Itzkowitz, began berating what he called the “alleged” genocide of the Armenians. What was going on at Princeton? Were there ties between the Near East Studies Department and the State Department? Had cold war policies infiltrated the academy this deeply? In the 1970s, Stanford Shaw at UCLA pushed the denial of the Armenian Genocide to a new level by writing that “the Armenians were to be protected and cared for until they returned to their homes after the war.”

The paper trail of denial extends to the present. Most recently, the case of Heath Lowry has drawn national attention. Lowry is a man with a Ph.D. in Ottoman studies who went to Turkey in the 1970s and worked for a research institute in Istanbul and lectured at Bosphorus University. He returned to the United States in 1986 to become the director of the Institute for Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C., an organization set up by the Turkish government ostensibly to promote Turkish culture in the United States. Lowry wrote articles and op-ed columns to deny the Genocide, lobbied in Congress to defeat successive Armenian Genocide commemoration bills, organized an advertisement for major newspapers signed by some Turkish people and some scholars in Turkish studies denying the Genocide, and published a ninety-page booklet in Istanbul that attempted to discredit Ambassador Morgenthau’s Genocide memoir. Indeed, Lowry was a man devoted to demonizing the victims and helping the perpetrator government absolve itself of responsibility.

When Robert Jay Lifton’s 1986 book The Nazi Doctors caught his attention, Lowry attacked Lifton’s book because he mentioned the Armenian Genocide. Although The Nazi Doctors is about how physicians in the Third Reich embraced Hitler’s program of mass murder, Lifton mentions the Armenian Genocide several times, and in particular, the role of Turkish physicians in the extermination policy. After reading The Nazi Doctors, Lowry wrote a long memorandum to the Turkish ambassador pointing out how dangerous Lifton’s book was:

Our problem is less with Lifton than it is with the works upon which he relies. Lifton is simply the end of the chain, that is, from now on we will see all works on the genocide of the Jews, including references such as those made by Lifton, on the basis of the works of Dadrian, Fein, Kuper, Hovannisian, et al. Though this point has been repeatedly stressed both in writing and verbally to Ankara, we have not yet seen as much as a single article by any scholar responding to DADRIAN.... On the chance that you still wish to respond in writing to Lifton, I have drafted the following letter.

The Turkish ambassador sent the letter, ghostwritten by Lowry, to Professor Lifton. However, when Robert Lifton opened the envelope from the Turkish Embassy he found a surprise. It contained not only the letter signed by the Turkish ambassador attempting to intimidate Lifton for referring to the Armenian Genocide, but also inadvertently enclosed were Lowry’s long memorandum to the Turkish ambassador and Lowry’s ghostwritten letter for the ambassador to send to Lifton.

And the plot thickened. By 1994, Lowry had been given the Ataturk, a chair in Turkish Studies at Princeton, one of several new Turkish Studies chairs funded by the Turkish government at major American universities—chairs that the Institute of Turkish Studies had been involved in setting up. Could a man who never held a full-time academic teaching job attain a chair at Princeton? A man who hadn’t written one scholarly book published by a mainstream trade or university press?

In the meantime, Lifton and genocide scholars Roger Smith and Eric Markusen were at work on an article entitled “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide.” The article appeared in the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the spring of 1995, with facsimile reproductions of the Lowry- Turkish ambassador documents, and exposed and analyzed Turkey’s denial, Lowry’s role, and the ethical issues involved with Princeton and other universities that might take such funding from Turkey.

Immoral as it is that the perpetrator government cannot come to terms with the Genocide, it is more difficult to understand how it could come to the United States and corrupt American institutions on a moral issue like this one. The story of the Turkish government’s attack on Lifton’s scholarship and Princeton’s role as a colluder has given genocide and Holocaust denial a new and awful meaning. When I read “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” that spring, it was as if eight decades of Turkish denial had come full circle. I thought that from this unveiling of corruption, something meaningful could come. I felt that Lifton’s courage and moral vigilance were a civic statement about the dimensions of corrupt foreign power in American higher education. He had addressed the anguish that Armenians had lived with for decades, and it hit me where I had been living since the rally at Times Square.

In the weeks that followed I drafted a petition called “Taking a Stand Against the Turkish Government’s Denial of the Armenian Genocide and Scholarly Corruption in the Academy,” a plain-language document that outlined the Turkish government’s denial campaign, including the Lowry episode, and called for an end to that government’s coercion and corruption, especially in American institutions. Within a month the petition had been signed by over a hundred distinguished writers and scholars, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer, David Brion Davis, David Riesman, and Deborah Lipstadt. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a prominent article, “Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship,” and the New York Times ran a half-page story, “Princeton Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government.” The story had become public, the process of news coverage had begun, and the petition had become a document of conscience and witness in its own way. I was happy, too, that Auntie Anna was calling with suggestions of potential petition signers.