WHEN TRUTH OFFENDS HONOUR
Mark Abley
Toronto Star
Oct 23 2007
Canada
One of the stupidest trends in Canadian education has been the decline
in history teaching. History is a regular victim when school boards
and education departments decide that glossy topics like "information
technology" outweigh the past.
The trend is unfortunate for many reasons. One of them is this: We
can’t understand the contemporary world without some grasp of what
formed it and deformed it.
Consider the uproar about a resolution now before the U.S. Congress,
defining the Turkish killings of Armenians between 1915 and 1923 as
"genocide." To Turkey’s rulers, and most of its people, the idea is
an outrage – an offence against national honour.
Those events happened so long ago that few eyewitnesses remain. One
of the oldest survivors, Arousiag Aghazarian, died in Montreal last
month at the age of 104. Throughout her adult life she was haunted
by the memory of a girl’s decapitated head in a pile of body parts,
ribbons still attached to her ponytail.
Nearly all Armenians are convinced that their people’s destruction
was carefully planned. Before the atrocities, 2 million of them
lived in the Ottoman Empire (the precursor to modern-day Turkey);
about 500,000 survived.
Turkey, however, insists that the killings took place on a much smaller
scale. It notes that most occurred in wartime, when the Ottomans were
battling Russia; they saw Armenians as an internal enemy.
The rhetoric on both sides is heated. But the Armenians’ evidence
is strong. "I am confident that the whole history of the human race
contains no such horrible episode as this," wrote Henry Morgenthau,
the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. "The great massacres and
persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to
the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
Empty rhetoric? Not if you read what Turkey’s allies were privately
saying. Richard von Kuhlmann, Germany’s foreign minister in 1917,
deplored "the large-scale destruction of the Armenians" and warned
that "this policy of extermination will for a long time stain the
Turkish name."
Some Turks were prepared to admit responsibility. Gen. Mehmet Vehib, a
celebrated army commander, wrote in 1919: "The massacre and destruction
of the Armenians and the plunder and pillage of their goods were the
results of decisions reached by the Central Committee (of Turkey’s
ruling party)."
So why the endless genocide denial by Vehib’s successors – a denial
that continues to affect how events unfold in the Middle East today?
History is not a bare list of dates and events; history also
involves story and psychology. For Turks to admit what many of their
grandparents and great-grandparents did would be to acknowledge the
most shameful act any people can commit. Small wonder the admission
sticks in their throat.
A much smaller admission sticks in ours. From the day its new building
opened in 2005, the Canadian War Museum was attacked by veterans’
groups who charged that its display concerning the carpet-bombing of
German cities during World War II had reproachful overtones.
The veterans finally won. Two weeks ago, the museum changed the
display’s wording – even though its previous label was factually
correct. Viewers are now told: "Allied aircrew conducted this gruelling
offensive with great courage against heavy odds."
That’s not the point. Or rather, it shouldn’t be. As history makes
clear, Allied bombs killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people
for very dubious military reasons. But we don’t like an offence to
our national honour.
And so, like the Turks, we sometimes close our eyes to the truth.
From: Baghdasarian