Theriault: Post-Denial Denial
by Henry Theriault
April 30, 2012
The Armenian Weekly Magazine
April 2012
In 2012, we might wonder what the point of engaging denial yet again
could be. The best thinking on the Armenian Genocide has moved far
beyond it, to the question of reparations; the genocide’s gendered
dimensions, including the sexual violence and slavery of Armenian
women and girls; attention to the micro and meso levels of
perpetration, particularly the complex and varied role of regional1;
and the expansion of theorization of the genocidal process to include
Assyrians and Greeks.2Why does denial persist at all? Is it just the
atavistic stubbornness of some segment of Turkey’s political and
military institutions? Is it an embedded prejudice widespread in the
Turkish population, especially its growing external component in North
America and Europe, a prejudice that continues even in progressive
circles and despite much rhetoric to the contrary? Is it a reassertion
of genocidal hatred, a mocking of the victims, a refusal to give up
the thrill of power and domination that comes from knowing your group
has the absolute power of life and death over not just some set of
individuals, but entire and ancient peoples? Have denial’s proponents,
especially academics in the United States, so boxed themselves into an
untenable corner, so deeply compromised themselves in their public
advocacy for an odious and duplicitous attack on basic human rights
and decency, that their only hope for psychological, material, and
status self-preservation is in preserving the lie? Is it the
all-too-common genocidal state version of corporate greed and
self-interest that subjects all human relations and social commitments
to the drive for pure profit, that is, the refusal to give up one iota
of the immense material gains from the genocide in land and wealth
that endure today as the foundation of the growing Turkish economy?
Has denial simply become a habit that those promoting it are just too
rigid and lazy to break, a pseudo-religious faith making sense of a
complex and changing world without meaningful thought and challenge,
even an addiction with its own self-destructive pleasures? Or have its
purveyors, its perpetrators, learned from Armenians themselves, who
could easily have given up at any point during the past 89 years,
stopped fighting tooth and nail to preserve a damned identity that
gave no hope or solace to those marked by it, that the refusal to
accept the inevitable undercuts and fractures the inevitable?
Itzkowitz pioneered a vulgar postmodern relativist denial that melted
all material historical facts into purely linguistic narratives all of
equal status because all are equally constructs. Armenians had their
narrative and Turks theirs. `Truth’ disappeared into multiplicitous
ambiguity, and all discussions of mass violence in the present became
mutual military conflict, and in the past mutual rhetorical conflict.
Regardless, engaging denial in 2012 is an intellect- and
soul-deadening chore, a distraction from the real intellectual and
political work that lies ahead for those Armenians and Turks looking
forward to a new shared universe in which the Ottoman-Turkish
genocidal process has been addressed through a reparative process that
reestablishes, in however muted a manner, the long-term viability of
its victim groups, and establishes this genocide’s lessons learned,
for instance, for the struggle against the contemporary trafficking of
women and children for sexual and other slavery and the epidemic of
violence against women globally. We’re still dealing with denial in
2012. But I guess there are those who still argue adamantly that the
earth is flat, cigarettes don’t cause cancer, the earth’s climate is
not getting warmer due to human pollution, and dinosaurs are a myth or
lived only after the earth was created 6,000 years ago.
While the tremendous material resources’a benefit of the massive
wealth expropriation of the genocide itself’that Turkey and its allies
in the political and corporate realms are able to pour into denial
mean that the effort can be extended indefinitely on multiple fronts,
including public relations/lobbying and academic, given the growing
fracture over denial in Turkey itself coupled with the increasing
boldness of states such as France in their refusal to give in to
political and economic blackmail, legal cases have become the
rearguard venue of choice for deniers. The irony, of course, is not
lost on those who notice that the Turkish government and its allies
continue to parrot the nonsensical insistence that the Armenian
Genocide should not be a political or moral issue but should be left
entirely to historians at precisely the same historical moment as some
proponents of denialist positions take the issue right out of academia
and place it squarely in the legal system with lawsuits meant to
promote the teaching of discredited denialist material on websites and
to prevent denialist editorializing and `scholarship’ from being
accurately labeled as such. It is not the effectiveness of this new
dimension of the campaign against truth and healing that should give
us pause, as its only success came as the result of the legal and
political ineptitude and moral cowardice of the Southern Poverty Law
Center, which instead of taking the heat and consequences itself of
its amateurish public statements about Guenter Lewy, simply heaped on
the victim group of genocide yet more calumny by retreating completely
from its challenge to denial and even promoting and praising Lewy in
order to save itself from a lawsuit. When push comes to shove, the
line of least resistance is always to sacrifice or harm the victims
again. What should draw our attention is the attempt to enforce
relativism on the issue, to require that the `second side of the
story’ be legalistically stapled to the true one side of the story so
that the latter can never be uttered without its parasitic other
clinging to and sucking the life out of it.
This new legalism has a crucial parallel, which has as yet not been
commented upon by even the most sophisticated discussants of the
Armenian Genocide. Ten years ago those very few of us present in the
public discourse on the Armenian Genocide who insisted that
reparations, and not denial, is the central issue, were met with
public dismissal and academic rejection, where our work was taken up
at all and not simply ignored. We have continued to make our
arguments, and one by one academics, religious leaders, and Armenians,
as well as many outside the Armenian community, including U.S.
legislators, have shifted their views or come to appreciate the
importance of reparations where they had not considered it before.
But, if one thing should be learned from Etienne Balibar,3 it is that
steps forward, particularly in regard to oppression, quite often lead
to new veiled forms of the same basic oppressive forces rather than a
meaningful supersession of oppression. And so it is with the new
attention on reparations, which has replicated among those’even in the
Armenian community’who recognize the Armenian Genocide (including some
who do not use the term but recognize an unlabeled `that which
inflicted great harm on the Armenians’) an emerging structural
dichotomy that mirrors the tension between truth and denial itself.
The problem is not a function of falsification versus truth, as denial
has never been about truth and falsity, but about power and the
prevention of rectification of the impacts of and ethical accounting
for the genocide. Those who believe that establishment of the truth is
the telos of human rights advocacy for Armenian Genocide victims
misunderstand entirely what is at stake in any case of genocide,
perhaps because they confuse the putative goal of academic research
(production of `truth’) with the complex political and ethical terrain
in which this research is rightly situated. Denial can be abandoned at
precisely the point at which some new means of resistance to
rectification can be engaged more effectively, relative to the current
successes or failings of denial. Even if it were true that denial as a
state-driven political campaign would cease with the end to the
possibility of any material or symbolic reparations (and as the
opening paragraph suggests, it might not be), that does not mean that
the end of denial can only come in this way. The tension at the core
of denial can morph into another debate or struggle, which will be all
the more effective because so much focus has been placed on ending
denial as the key to resolving the Armenian Genocide.
The commitment to denial described in the introductory paragraph
suggests deep psycho-social roots that go beyond expediency. The
triumph of the Turkish state has been to structure Turkish national
identity itself in two key ways. First, it has forced that group
identity to be central to individual personal identity’explaining the
former’s more bizarre and dramatically ironic manifestations, such as
the voting of Kemal Ataturk as the greatest in just about every
category of a turn-of-the-century Time Magazine poll’and, second, it
has made that identity frail and rigid. This is interesting in itself:
The Turkish elites have driven the development of a national identity
that is (intentionally?) insecure while making individual wellbeing
dependent on national self-esteem, in order to bind individuals to the
state seen as the only capable defense of that national identity.
Denial is one method used to preserve that psycho-social complex in
the face of political advocacy toward rectification of the damage (in
its more primitive stage, a simple quest by the victim group to gain
widespread acceptance of the truth), but it is merely a method, not
the foundational problem, in the way that biological race theories are
one form of racism but not essential to racism, with a generic racism
existing at a deeper level and fueling a variation of forms. New forms
of racism emerge, though we can modify Balibar to hold that the old
forms do not simply disappear, but that over time more and more kinds
of racism aggregate and become options that impose a comprehensive and
even hermetically sealed context in which no matter what resistance
and facts are met, there is always another way for racism to function
that is not susceptible to that resistance’or the particular ethical
commitments of this or that individual. While we can see a temporal
progression of forms, this is not a linear but an additive history, a
packrat historical trajectory in which no oppressive method that has
had success in the past is ever really abandoned.
Is there a new tension, a new form, in addition to denial? We are
actually seeing the third such emergence. The first was manifested in
the tension over whether the term `genocide’ should be used to
characterize the `events of 1915.’ For those Turks and others for whom
denial of the facts on the ground of widespread government-sponsored
killing of Armenians grossly disproportionate to any putative cause
became intellectually or morally impossible’for this they deserve some
credit’but who could not face the full reality of history, a
compromise position became recognition of the violence against
Armenians’if not its fully systematic nature’coupled with a claim that
`genocide’ should not be applied to that violence. The reasons
included the mistaken notion that the concept of genocide did not
emerge until after the Armenian Genocide, so it would be historically
essentialist to apply it `retroactively’ (conveniently ignoring what
is now widely know, that in coining the term in 1943 as well as
creating the concept at least a decade earlier, Raphael Lemkin had the
genocide of Christians in the Ottoman Empire fully in mind as a major
example); the vulgar postmodernist claim that a unifying term such as
`genocide’ suppressed the complex and polyvalent details of the
`events [note the fracturing plural] of 1915′; and that, regardless of
whether the term is technically correct, its use would alienate the
general Turkish population by offending their sensibilities by
characterizing some of their national predecessors as genocidaires.
Others and I have exposed the logical fallacies and imperial mentality
underlying such approaches, and there is no space here to revisit
them. The relevant focus here is, rather, the shift that this turn
from outright denial to mischaracterization represented. As denial
became untenable for individuals and to an extent for Turkey in
general, a rearguard action ensued that saved the refusal to admit
genocide by admitting lower-level violence.
Among some Turks, a second shift paralleled or followed the
terminological refusal. The fault line here was between one or more of
(1) recognition, conflict-resolving dialogue, or apology and (2) a
genuine process of repair. Denial could be set aside and even genocide
admitted so long as the immediate next step was the resolution of
tensions between Turks and Armenians and a supersession of the
genocide issue. My forthcoming article in the Armenian Review’s
special issue on reparations covers aspects of this issue in detail;
here, what is important to notice is the way this shift at once leaves
denial or misrepresentation behind at the same time as it resists
meaningful and respectful resolution of the Armenian Genocide issue.
But even this dichotomy has not been stable, and some of its
proponents have retreated further, accepting that repairs must be
made. The latest fault line cuts through the notion of `repair’
itself, as what has long been proposed as group repair is facilely
misrepresented as individual repair. This dichotomy is present among
Armenians, who engage the suffering and material losses of direct
family members’sometimes even possessing title deeds’at the same time
as they are by communal losses of land, institutions, cultural
viability, identify, etc. Both forms of repair address some of the
present harms of the genocide, but it is group repair that is the
tremendously more significant and necessary for the long-term
viability of Armenian identity and statehood. Once more, the issue of
why has been covered elsewhere, for instance in the draft report of
the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group.4 The key point here is
that individual reparations do not even address the genocide as
genocide. They remedy specific thefts of businesses, lands, etc., in
exactly the same way that they would if the thefts had been the result
of individual thievery, fraud, or other criminality. Individual
reparations are not reparations for genocide, but for some particular
loss. While in reality each such loss was part of the overall impact
of the genocide, treating the losses as individual dissolves the fact
of the genocide itself.5
In this way, the conflating of individual and group reparations
entails a conceptual confusion that is the hallmark of denial in its
more advanced forms. If explicit denial began as a confrontational
disavowal of the facts of history and their proper characterization,
it later became not only a demonstration of power over the victim
group(s)6 and the perpetrator group’s general population (see above),
but also a method of befuddling those outside the victim and
perpetrator groups. The function of denial, beyond the dominational
(sadistic or imperial) thrills it provides its purveyors within and
outside the Turkish people, is the conditioning of the global
population to experience intellectual confusion at the mere mention of
the Armenian Genocide.
The triumph of deniers has been to present the production of this
confusion as the activity of the scientific critical thinking that is
meant to overcome such confusion.7 The most obvious is Descartes’
method of critical doubting, by which he subjected classes of beliefs,
up to and including mathematical facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, to various
philosophical doubts about their certainty. Descartes’ method, of
course, was the beginning point of a powerful philosophical
progression in which Descartes built up extensive and comprehensive
layers of certainty. Deniers, however, stop at the end of Meditation
1, and mistake `critical thinking’ for the mere introduction of
logical doubt regarding all assertions of fact. They fail to
understand that Descartes’ process of destructive doubting, of tearing
down belief systems, was the prelude to and had value only as the
occasion for a much richer constructive project of knowledge
production. By disconnecting the negative or destructive phase of
Descartes’ project from the constructive, deniers can situate
themselves within the legacy of Cartesian critical thought without
following it out to its logical extension. In other words, they simply
raise logical doubts, typically not reasonable, against any and all
factual claims, no matter how well supported, and remain at that
point.
This false Cartesianism has a certain half-life. While it can and
presumably will be used indefinitely, over time it becomes less and
less effective as information about the Armenian Genocide becomes more
widely disseminated and available. As the factual basis becomes more
established and assumed, the general population becomes less and less
vulnerable to the attempts to confuse them through manipulative misuse
of critical thinking principles. Doubt about empirical facts depends
to a significant degree on ignorance of the comprehensiveness and
internal consistency of the relevant empirical facts.
But since the 1990’s and the work of Norman Itzkowitz,8 a new approach
to confusion has also been evident. Itzkowitz pioneered a vulgar
postmodern relativist denial that melted all material historical facts
into purely linguistic narratives all of equal status because all are
equally constructs. Armenians had their narrative and Turks theirs.
`Truth’ disappeared into multiplicitous ambiguity, and all discussions
of mass violence in the present became mutual military conflict, and
in the past mutual rhetorical conflict. While this is resonant with
some lesser strains of postmodernism, it grossly oversimplifies the
complex views of the relationship between text/language and
materiality characteristic of such figures as Foucault and Deleuze.
What is more, in its relativizing use of the concept of the
`other”another term characteristic of postmodern discourse but
actually with its origins in the earlier and politically unambiguous
existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon’to mean any asserted
difference between groups, it loses the core of the notion as a
question of power relations: The `other’ is properly that population
whom the dominant exclude, demean, etc. Yet, in current discourse on
Armenian-Turkish relations, the term is applied in both directions, as
if Armenians are in the position to exclude or demean the Turkish
state and society in a manner that has any demonstrable effects or
approaches even partially the devastating impact of Turkish
otherization of Armenians.
Similarly for `trauma,’ which has become a vague and empty term as it
spills out of the pens of many discussants of Turkish-Armenian
relations. Following Itzkowitz and his co-author Vamik Volkan,
`trauma’ has been stripped of its proper clinical meaning as a
specific, deep psychological reaction to destructive events, with
serious psychological symptoms that can compromise the sufferer’s
basic functioning, including such things as physical and mental
hypervigilance, flashbacks, panic attacks, and so on. In discourse on
genocide and particularly perpetrator-victim relations, the term is
misused to designate lingering dislike or discomfort about some aspect
of reality or intergroup relations one finds unpleasant or against
one’s interests. The dissolution of the meaning of trauma undermines
its clinical importance and reservation for those who have genuinely
suffered, as opposed to those who might feel aggrieved because they
are no longer a dominant empire or find unpleasant being faced with
negative aspects of their past and the way that past affects
conditions today.9
Postmodern philosophy tends not to be system-building, but rather aims
at undercutting claims of unity, essence, and the like. In this sense,
it might appear to be an advanced version of the same destructive
first movement of Descartes, and it is often treated that way, for
instance by Halil Berktay.10 But political postmodernism, as opposed
to the lightweight popularized derivative versions that permeate
academia and popular culture today, contains within its very
destabilization of key facets of modernity attempts to grapple with
the results of that destructive process and, if not to build
replacement systems, then to fashion some means of living a meaningful
existence. The conceptual confusion introduced by decontextualized
applications of postmodernism is more difficult to counter than the
perversion of Cartesian doubt, as inherent in postmodern work is the
uncertain struggle to overcome the loss of the possibility of unity,
essence, certainty, etc. As its reductive conceptual framework becomes
entrenched in academic study of conflict, violence, and oppression, it
becomes a powerful tool because it undercuts the possibility of truth
(there is no `truth,’ only narratives, each as valid as the next), so
that defeat of this kind of denial automatically leads nowhere, means
nothing. This misapplication is a kind of metadenial that prevents
even the possibility of establishing the veracity of a genocide. It is
an end to direct or explicit denial precisely because it renders it
unnecessary. By seizing control of the mental framework through which
its victims think, it wins the battle no matter what path of analysis
they take.
And this threatens to be the case, as well, regarding reparations. As
the term is stretched to designate any kind of provision by some
element of a perpetrator group of any material satisfaction to the
victim group, the connection between what is given and the true damage
done by genocide is obscured and confused. The issue is looked at from
the perspective of the current status quo and its projection forward,
in which no reparations would be made. From this perspective any
provision is a positive step. When the issue is considered within full
view the extensive harms still impacting the victim group, including
its very possibility of long-term viability as a cohesive entity,
however, the connection between profound harm and extensive necessary
remedy is clear. If in decades past the very framework through which
the events of the genocide were engaged undermined proper
understanding of those events, today the very framework through which
the ultimate resolution of the `Armenian Question’ is considered
threatens a similar undermining.
The foregoing suggests that the standard dichotomy between denial and
non-denial is misleading. Since denial itself has been designated as
such, this discrete binary dualistic11 split has been assumed without
critical evaluation. This has resulted in an either/or exclusive
categorization of individuals treating the Armenian Genocide’and
similarly other genocides’as either deniers or not. But denial and
truth are poles of a continuum, and the positions discussed above
represent different points on that continuum. The enforced either/or
has meant that some responsible scholars genuinely trying to
understand the issues at stake have been reduced into the denialist
category, while some scholars presenting problematic views that stray
from the range of accurate possible characterizations of genocide have
been put into the truth category and the problems thus shielded from
critique. Lest this approach be seen to exonerate any of the resistant
positions discussed in this article, it must be emphasized that
avoidance of the term genocide remains far from the positive pole.
What is more, the denial-truth continuum itself has given way to a
cognitive correlate continuum between full impunity for genocide and
full repair. If truth is the most that can be attained in terms of
knowledge of the genocide, full repair is the most that can be
achieved regarding the genocide itself. Both the
recognition/dialogue/apology models and the individual reparations
models, while not at the extreme of impunity for the genocide, are
still far from the full repair pole.
Notes
1. See especially UÄ?ur Ã`mit Ã`ngör, `Confiscation & Colonization: The
Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property,’ in the Armenian Weekly
magazine, April 2011: 6-13.
2. Hannibal Travis, `On the Original Understanding of Genocide,’
Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 30-55 at 31.
3. In `Is There a `Neo-Racism’?’ in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,
eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner
(London: Verson, 1991), 17-28, Balibar argues that the defeat of
biologically based racist ideologies did not mean an end to racism,
but racism itself morphed into a new form or forms that were not
susceptible to the criticisms leveled rightly against biological
racism. Indeed, even the term `race’ seems to have dropped out, as
codes such as `immigrants’ make acceptable treatment that if it were
explicitly racially based would not be tolerated. The net result is
still extremely harmful to the victims of racism, but the form their
oppression takes is different from earlier forms.
4. The members of the group are Alfred de Zayas, Jermaine McCalpin,
Ara Papian, and myself.
5. As I argued in `Reparational Efforts for Lost Armenian Properties,’
presented at `The Armenian Genocide: From Recognition to
Compensation,’ Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, Antelias, Lebanon,
Feb. 23-25, 2012, on Feb. 25.
6. See Israel W. Charny, `A Contribution to the Psychology of Denial
of Genocide,’ in Genocide & Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian
Experience, special issue of Journal of Armenian Studies 4, 1-2
(1992): 289-306.
7. See Theriault, `Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the
State and Future of Genocide Scholarship,’ Genocide Studies and
Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 123-144 at 133.
8. For the analysis of Itzkowitz’s denial methods as discussed here,
see Theriault, `Universal Social Theory and the Denial of Genocide:
Norman Itzkowitz Revisited,’ Journal of Genocide Research 3, 2 (2001):
241-56.
9. The analysis in this and the preceding paragraph is based on
Theriault, `Against the Grain’: 129-132.
10. See Theriault, `Post-Genocide Imperial Domination,’ in Controversy
and Debate, special Armenian Genocide insert of the Armenian Weekly,
April 24, 2007: 6-8.
11. See Anne Waters, `Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary
Dualism,’ in American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2004): 97-115.