“And now, as Christians and Europeans, we must stand by and watch in silence, and even cajole the sultan! What a shame! For all of us!”. Words of Kaiser Wilhelm II commenting not only on the carnage of Armenians (anticipation of the genocide) which between 1894 and 1896 claimed two or three hundred thousand victims, but also on the political and diplomatic cover which the Turks benefited from on the part of Germany (but also of others) and on which William himself was in disagreement with his government. For the German Empire it was a matter of “Realpolitik” (= political realism): one shouldn’t disturb an ally, at the cost of relieving him of an immense massacre of women and children. If that of 1894-’96 was already an unspeakable horror, the consequences in the following decades proved to be even worse.
A volume by the German historian Stefan Ihrig is in the library, Justify the Genocide. Germany, Armenians and Jews from Bismarck to Hitler, edited by Antonia Arslan. The book identifies a line of continuity between the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1918 and its impunity (“the original sin of the 20th century”) and the subsequent horrors, including the Jewish Holocaust, which Adolf Hitler carried out, by his explicit admission, even in light of the disinterest shown by the West for the fate of the Armenians, and with the certainty that a corresponding atrocity against the Jews would be remitted. Ihrig analyzes the German attitude to the Armenian question in particular, but the scope of his analyzes is more general: it is the whole of the West that for a hundred years has turned away in order not to see, has minimized or has denied the Genocide, and according to the author at the root of the problem is precisely the so-called “Realpolitik”, which often turns into a caricature of Realpolitik: crimes are forgiven thinking thus of avoiding worse troubles, and instead the criminals feel authorized to do worse and worse.
It may seem that the West has learned its lesson, at least on the specific point concerning the Armenians, given that the Pope, the European Union and, most recently, Biden’s America have recognized the historical reality of the Genocide; but it is legitimate to ask whether this new awareness is real, in the light (for example) of Western disinterest and inaction in the Nagorno-Karabakh affair; let me be clear, a possible intervention would not necessarily mean that we must take the side of the Armenians against the Azeris and Turks, absolutely not, on the contrary, everyone’s wrongs and rights should be weighed and discussed, but it would be appropriate to discuss them, rather than simply ignoring what is happening .
Then the question arises of who can throw the first stone: from the extermination of the Red Indians to the trafficking of blacks, the whole history of Western imperialism is studded with crimes, not to mention the Jewish Holocaust. However, the Armenian Genocide has a peculiarity: while millions of books are printed on the Red Indians, the black trafficking and imperialism in America and Europe, films and TV programs are made, textbooks are written and courses are held at the university, and the same happens for the Holocaust in Germany, in Turkey whoever talks about the Armenian Genocide goes to jail. Turkish public opinion itself is the victim, forced by law to be uninformed and unaware of its national history.
As Roman history teaches us, the Armenians were already living in Anatolia thousands of years before the first Turkish tribes arrived on the peninsula. Then, suddenly, during the First World War the Armenians disappeared. How come? According to the denial vulgate, there was no Genocide, but only a certain (limited) number of deaths in combat both among the Turks and among the Armenians. And how then did the Armenians appear? It is not known; in denialist books you read phrases like “they moved”.
According to Ihrig’s documented analysis, the link between the two Armenian and Jewish genocides is direct. Already long before Hitler, the racist Germans assimilated Armenians to Jews (negatively); and after the 1914-1918 war, nationalist propaganda in Germany indicated (positively) Turkey as a sort of “parallel Germany”: the two nations, allies in the Great War, had been defeated not only and not so much (it was said) by armed forces of the Entente, as much as from an alleged “stab in the back”, which in the German case was attributed to the Jews and in the Turkish case by the Armenians. In the 1920s, the Nazis became enthusiastic about the national revival led by Kemal Atatürk, and considered the elimination of unwelcome ethnic minorities as necessary for the rebirth of Turkey and as an example to be imitated in Germany.
The parallel between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish one was also well perceived by the Jews who, after Hitler’s seizure of power, suffered Nazi persecution. The novel The Forty Days of Mussa Dagh, on a famous episode of armed self-defense by Armenians against a Turkish attack, was widely read in the Jewish ghettos, and when it seemed that Rommel’s Afrika Korps was about to break through in Egypt and reach as far as Palestine, the Jews who lived on the lands of future state of Israel prepared an armed defense on Mount Carmel and called it “Plan Masada” (in reference to Jewish history) but alternatively also “Plan Mussa Dagh”. Two stories and two parallel struggles.
https://www.breakinglatest.news/entertainment/armenians-and-jews-two-parallel-genocides/
