“Oh, Khatcher agha, the killers have come.” Those words were spoken to my grandfather, Khatcher Matosian, with a tap on the back so that he would redirect his gaze. He and relatives had been peering from the rooftops of their Armenian village in central Turkey after hearing about the Ottoman government’s orders to deport Armenians from neighboring villages.
The scene from that summer of 1915 continues in my grandfather’s memoirs:
Before sunrise, all Armenians in my grandfather’s village were assembled in a chaotic, mournful caravan and driven out of their ancestral homes forever.
It was but one event in the first genocide of the 20th century, which took place exactly one hundred years ago. By the time it was all over, up to 1.5 million unarmed Armenian children, women, and men perished from wholesale massacres and death marches of unspeakable barbarity. And 25 years later, Adolf Hitler was on record commenting on the ease with which people forget about mass murder: “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Why? And How?
Mass exterminations generally involve two prerequisites: 1) a mandated program by a centralized state power, and 2) a well-coordinated, aggressive propaganda campaign that enlists public support in vilifying the targeted group. It’s also worth noting that war often serves as cover for genocide; the Armenian Genocide took place during the total war conditions of World War I.
Propaganda campaigns to dehumanize the victims are central to virtually every mass killing in history. Generally, the targeted group — in this case, Armenian Christians — is vilified and ostracized by the rest of society. Such messages saturate the media and mobilize the culture until the groupthink emerges and takes on a life of its own. Opposing opinions are easily suppressed under the weight of groupthink.
Once they’ve cultivated an us-versus-them mentality, perpetrators feel justified and enabled to commit acts of violence. This seems to be a human default position to which most people succumb – whether as culprits, victims, or silent bystanders.
Perhaps most fascinating about this phenomenon is how often the perpetrators actually project onto the victims their own intentions. Consider that the Jews in Nazi Germany were exterminated for being a “threat” to the German nation. Likewise, the genocide of up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign in which the Hutus totally demonized the Tutsis, for having wild designs against the Hutus.
Pre-homicidal propaganda campaigns don’t always center on ethnicity or religion. They can be about anything else in identity politics, including class status. In the 1930s, for example, communist dictator Joseph Stalin forced the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union by systematically killing and starving millions of industrious peasants — the “kulak” class – who were labeled “enemies of the people.”
Ottoman Propaganda Against the Armenians
This basic propaganda model — demonizing a targeted group in order to undermine any support for it — was used to sow great distrust of Armenians among their Turkish neighbors and all others of Ottoman society. The Ottoman government considered Armenians a suspect people “in league with the enemy,” in part because there were some Armenians nationalists in the eastern provinces bordering the Russian Empire, as well as Armenians communities established across that border. Thus, as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, Armenians became easy scapegoats. Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha, and Minister of the Navy Jemal Pasha – the infamous “three pashas” – are considered most responsible for laying out and executing the plan to have every Armenian in the Empire disarmed and exterminated. But a propaganda campaign was first necessary to demonize the Armenians and neutralize any support for them.
In 1915, radio was in its infancy and few in Turkey were literate; most government messages of demonization were spread by word of mouth. According to Vahagan Dadrian, an historian of the Armenian genocide, the vilification of the Armenians was spread mainly through sermons by mullahs and by town criers who sprinkled the news about Armenians with words such as “traitors,” “saboteurs,” “spies,” “conspirators,” and “infidels.” Other means included dissemination of photographs of weapons that were labeled to convince Turks that their Armenian neighbors were storing up arms for use in plots to slaughter them. By stirring up distrust and fear of “those people,” a program of genocide can gain at least tacit if not open compliance from the population at large.
But the Real Story is Personal, Not Political
As the granddaughter of genocide survivors, the centennial is particularly poignant for me. I’ve been immersing myself in many accounts of the genocide, and especially my grandfather’s memoirs.
He chronicled the harrowing days of his deportation, and afterwards. He witnessed atrocities, endured beatings, trickery, withstood extreme thirst and hunger, battled diseases and infestations of typhus-carrying lice, and mourned loved ones who died en route with no place of burial. He would also survive the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922. And yet this is a survivor’s “short list.”
My grandfather and his compatriots were spared being sent to the “Auschwitz” of the Armenian massacres. That was a place in the Syrian Desert called Der Zor, which was not a camp at all. Deportees who survived the trek to Der Zor were generally killed on arrival. Bullets were expensive for Turkey during this time of world war, so the killings often involved literal butchery, generally with swords, knives, or axes.
It’s almost impossible for us — from the distance of a century and the comfort of relative wealth and safety — to make sense of such things. The mass deportations, rapes, butchery, and other atrocities foisted on unarmed citizens, particularly women and children, are so base and so devoid of logic, that it’s not easy to believe the perpetrators even understood what they were doing. Such behavior must somehow be driven by an automated cult mentality that becomes triggered in the mind.
So what struck me most profoundly in reading my grandfather’s memoirs – and other accounts of the massacres — were the stories of human friendship and compassion that sometimes punctuated the mayhem. Before the deportations, my grandfather had good friends among his Turkish neighbors. He wrote of others – clergy among them – who maintained friendships with Turkish regional leaders.
According to Grigoris Balakian, a survivor and author of the extraordinary book Armenian Golgotha, there was initially some powerful resistance to the mass killings by several regional Turkish leaders, including the “kind and thoughtful Governor Rashid Pasha” of Kastemouni who adamantly opposed the deportation of his province’s Armenians. However, the Ottoman government would systematically recall and replace such leaders. Bureaucratic machines do have a way of killing any semblance of humanity or kindness.
A Saintly Turkish Woman
But one of the most poignant stories was Balakian’s description of an old, hunchbacked Turkish peasant woman. He writes that she “stood like a statue, sometimes raising her hands to the sky and then striking her knees” as she watched Balakian’s bedraggled caravan pass. She shouted at the top of her lungs:
This solitary Turkish woman’s words of validation and comfort made a deep impression on the caravan. As she screamed curses at the Ittihad government, the police soldiers jeered at her and called her demented.
Such boldness and defiantly expressed empathy is extraordinarily rare in the face of groupthink. Which is why free speech – even by one person — is such a threat to groupthink and the plans of manipulative propagandists.
This Turkish woman also demonstrates that one-on-one human relationships based in goodwill are the true seeds of resistance to evil. Avoiding future atrocities will rely on nurturing and teaching the virtue of speaking truth boldly in the face of evil. Only then can we mine that quality out of as many people as possible.
We seem painfully slow discovering the reality that freedom and friendship are inextricably connected. One story in particular from my grandfather’s memoirs illustrates this fact.
The Turkish Major and the Armenian Priest
By sundown of an intensely hot day, half of my grandfather’s caravan of deportees had barely reached the edge of a town, and were preparing to camp and get some desperately needed water from a small stream. Then, suddenly:
Despite this attack, one member of the caravan, a priest called Der Avak, had the nerve to stand up to the major by imploring him: “Oh, sir Bey, do us a kindness. Let us have a drink of water and let the caravan catch up with us. We won’t stay here. We’ll go on. Please sir, Bey . . . “
Something in Der Avak caught the major’s eye and ear. He asked, “Where are you from?” Der Avak named the village: Seoyutli. The major knew the village and immediately asked after a particular villager: “Tell me then, where is Garabed Keha of Seoyutli? Is he here with you? Quick, I want to see him. Where is Garabed Keha?”
Der Avak was speechless because before he became a priest, he was known to all as Garabed Keha. My grandfather explained: “Sir Bey, you are talking to Garabed Keha. He has become a Papaz.”
The major was astonished and then instantly “transformed from devil to angel,” saying:
The major recalled passing through the village of Seoyutli while on official business years before. He was deathly ill while there, and Garabed Keha cared for him for days. The major said that Der Avak not only brought him back to health, but showed him great hospitality and genuine friendship: “You treated me with the utmost respect.”
At that point Der Avak and the Turkish major sat on a carpet talking warmly while the rest gathered around them.
The major’s first action was to order his own gendarmes to leave the meeting. He then called over the gendarme guards who had accompanied the caravan up to that point, saying: “Let me have the displacement orders for this caravan. Your work is now completed. You can now leave and go to your own stations. The authority for the protection of this caravan from here to Aleppo is now mine . . .”
None in the caravan had known their final destination until the Turkish major told Der Avak that they were headed for Mosul, a place they would never reach across the vast stretches of the Syrian Desert, because they were to go by way of Der Zor.
The major then tore up the old orders and prepared new ones. Then, in a few strokes of the pen, he shifted the entire caravan’s fate from certain death to a new hope:
Separation is the Fuel of Genocide
Through the above miracle — and myriad others — I am here today. One-on-one friendship creates miracles. Whatever the intentions of that Turkish major, he was transformed, at least for one very critical moment, by a life-saving friendship and experience of total trust with another human being. It was a trust that transcended identity politics.
Wherever true friendship flourishes, human beings are not so easily exploited by outside influences. This is exactly why totalitarian programs and regimes have always had a keen interest in the extermination of one-on-one friendship – or any personal relationships they cannot regulate and control.
The politics of genocide is essentially a matter of separating people at the most basic level. Accomplishing this requires a propaganda power game that pits one human being against another. It uses social psychology to cultivate a cult mindset and exploit the universal human fear of being socially isolated.
How does a cult leader or a wife-beater go about controlling their charges? Their first order of business is to isolate the recruit or victim; to separate them from other influences, whether family or friends. Totalitarian nations like North Korea isolate their populations from the outside world, as well as from one another through a culture of total dependence upon the state. Cult leaders like Jim Jones took his People’s Temple to the isolated jungles of Guyana, where in 1978 he was able to order over 900 to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced kool-aid.
Armenians and Turks lived peacefully and hospitably amongst one another in my grandfather’s village. This is more the rule than the exception when people actually get to know one another as human beings. They generally don’t sever these bonds without incident, except under pressure from propaganda campaigns that aim to separate them and breed betrayal and ill will.
How Far We Have to Go
Pope Francis recently triggered outrage from the Turkish government by referring to the Armenian Genocide as what it was — a genocide — and as a crime against humanity. Turkey reacted by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican. Perhaps we should not be surprised that so few countries recognize the slaughter of Armenians as a genocide.
Nor should we be too surprised that fires continue to blaze white hot in a region characterized by a savage dehumanizing of the “other.” In 1990 a memorial complex and church were dedicated there to the Armenian martyrs of Der Zor. In September 2014, that church and memorial was destroyed by ISIS terrorists.
It’s a long road to reconciliation, but the only antidote to poisonous groupthink is to defy the narrative and reach out to others in goodwill, one human being at a time.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist.
