KeghartA bird's-eye-view
By Khatchatur I. Pilikian, London, 24 April 2013
Whenever and wherever it happened, and still happens, genocide is always premeditated, conceptualized and its execution meticulously organized at the highest governmental levels.
Significantly, genocide execution has frequently demanded the umbrella of a major historic turbulence.
During centuries of colonial expansions and endemic wars, genocide and slavery were the necessary masts of the pirating strategy for land and raw material conquest. All colonial powers were engaged in it. World opinion, still in its infancy, was no more than a feeble gesture.
The imperialism of the 20th century made a world war somehow the ‘prerequisite’ for any attempt at implementing the execution of genocide as a ‘final solution’. World opinion was starting to bite. The UN was founded and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ had finally a name—Genocide, and an international tribunal (Nuremberg) was set to condemn and punish its perpetrators.
But after the Second World War another epochal turbulence, the full-fledged Cold War, ‘acted’ as a ‘shock absorbent’ for horrendous genocides.
Towards the end of the 20th century and beginning the 21st, the Cold War finally melted away in the heat of the arrogance of globalization, while genocide persists to remain on the threshold of rampant conflicts in all corners of the world.
A bird's-eye-view
By Khatchatur I. Pilikian, London, 24 April 2013
Whenever and wherever it happened, and still happens, genocide is always premeditated, conceptualized and its execution meticulously organized at the highest governmental levels.
Significantly, genocide execution has frequently demanded the umbrella of a major historic turbulence.
During centuries of colonial expansions and endemic wars, genocide and slavery were the necessary masts of the pirating strategy for land and raw material conquest. All colonial powers were engaged in it. World opinion, still in its infancy, was no more than a feeble gesture.
The imperialism of the 20th century made a world war somehow the ‘prerequisite’ for any attempt at implementing the execution of genocide as a ‘final solution’. World opinion was starting to bite. The UN was founded and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ had finally a name—Genocide, and an international tribunal (Nuremberg) was set to condemn and punish its perpetrators.
But after the Second World War another epochal turbulence, the full-fledged Cold War, ‘acted’ as a ‘shock absorbent’ for horrendous genocides.
Towards the end of the 20th century and beginning the 21st, the Cold War finally melted away in the heat of the arrogance of globalization, while genocide persists to remain on the threshold of rampant conflicts in all corners of the world.
The new world turbulence is now labeled the Long War, the latest neo-con synonym for War on Terror.
Wars were not causes but excuses for genocides.
In the case of the Genocide of the Armenians, the crucial vicious acts were already initiated and were being executed before the Ottoman Turkey's declaration of war on Nov. 5, 1914.
In a nutshell, the Armenian tragedy did not start because of the WWI in 1915–as the Ottoman Young Turk government, and then all subsequent Turkish governments, were and are still keen to link. Hence their claim of the 'betrayal' of the Armenians. And even, alas, our in memoriam of April 24, 1915, took the date of the rounding up of Armenian intellectuals as the 'starting' point of our magnum tragedy, thus unwittingly, albeit apparently ‘yielding’ to the criminal excuse. Here are the stages of that man’s inhumanity to man before 1915.
- PRELIMANARY IMPLEMENTATIONS
“If we nurtured snakes in our midst in Europe, we should not repeat the same folly in Asiatic Tajkastan [Turkey]. […]Thus, we must eliminate, leave behind no traces of that Armenian nation. And to accomplish this task, we are lacking in nothing; […]We can declare a religious war–waged against a nation that has no arms, no army, and no defender, whereas, in contrast, we have one of the greatest and richest states of the world as our comrade-in-arms and the guardian of our Asian world.” Kâmil Pasha (1838-1912), the grand vizier or the prime minister of the Ottoman Empire–Sultan Abdul Hamid’s prime minister four times over.
During 1894-1896 at Sassun, Van, Zeitun and Diarbekir, 300,000 Armenians were massacred and 3,000 villages were burned. “It is already proven that the pillage and the massacres of Sassun is the deliberately organized act of the Sublime Porte, an act planned meticulously and executed mercilessly…” Prof. Em. Dillon (1854-1933), the Irish linguist and journalist.
B) PREPARATORY/TACTICAL EXECUTIONS
The massacres at Adana in Cilicia of April 1909 resulted in 30,000 Armenian deaths.
“This massacre was more terrible than those in the days of Abdul Hamid . . . Those Armenians who had succeeded in escaping the first carnage are now destroyed. Adana has become a veritable inferno.” Helen Davenport Gibbons, an eyewitness of the Adana massacres.
On July 27, 1914, the government of the Young Turks started conscripting Armenians, before the First World War broke out, to deplete the Armenian nation of its able-bodied male population who were herded into “Amele Tabourou”(labor battalions), eventually to make them to dig their own mass graves.
On August 2, 1914, the Young Turks decided to create, out of its “Teshkilati Makhsusa” (special formations), a new structure to deal with ‘interior matters’, to start and implement their proto-Nazi party conference decisions.
On August 6, 1914, a secret agreement between Turkey and Germany promised Caucasus (including Eastern/Russian Armenia) to Turkey.
Before Ottoman Turkey’s declaration of war on the Entente Powers (November 5) and until December 1914, 200,000 Armenian civilians, mostly women, the elderly and children already were uprooted and slain, not counting the imminent tragedy, mentioned above, prepared for the 300,000 conscripted Armenian male population. Few thousand Armenians had managed to flee to Russian-occupied Eastern Armenia. Many of them served in the volunteer regiments of the Tsar fighting in Western so called Turkish Armenia. An estimated 300,000 Armenians fought along with the Entente Powers in Europe and the Middle East, including Palestine–a classic example of cannon fodder of 600,000 Armenians offering their lives and country for the imperialist appetites of the Entente and Central Powers.
The First World War set the stage for the Final Solution.
C) STRATEGIC EXECUTIONS / FINAL SOLUTION
“It is imperative that the Armenian people be completely exterminated; that not even one single Armenian be
left on our soil; that the name, Armenian, be obliterated. We are now at war; there is no more auspicious occasion than this; this country must be purged of all non-Turk elements”. Nazim Bey Selanikly (1870-1926), the executive secretary of the Young Turks Central Board, early in 1915, during a Central Board meeting presided over by comrade-brother Talaat:
Starting on April 24, 1915 and until mid-May, the Armenian civilian population was depleted of its intellectuals; 196 writers, 575 musicians, 336 doctors, 176 teachers and college professors, 160 lawyers, 62 architects, 64 actors…all arrested, deported, disappearing for good.
On June 15, 1915, twenty prominent members of the Armenian Social Democratic Henchakist Party were hanged in the Bayazit Square of Istanbul. The Henchakist stood in opposition to the Ittihadists. That was a mortal sin.
The culminating act of the genocidal scheme was thus set in motion: the elderly, women and children, nearly the entire Armenian population of Asia Minor was ordered out, southward towards the deserts of Northern Syria.
Vandalism, rape, extortion, sadistic torture, starvation, murderous raids were daily occurrence.
The rest is…the scream of humanity at its most infernal.
When genocides, torture, poverty and wars are justified as “human nature” or as historical and economic necessary evil, and even as historical inevitability of the so-called clashing of civilizations, their silence acquires an obscene eloquence in support of inhumanity– sheer barbarism of total terror.
April 24, 2013, London
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http://norkhosq.net/2013/04/25/three-stages-of-mans-inhumanity-to-man/
Nor Or Weekly (Altadena, CA 91001) – V. 91, NO. 18 Thursday May 2, 2013. Page 9
http://socialisthistory.wordpress.com/May 3, 2013 THREE STAGES OF MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN
Keghart
Keghart
