‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’
It’s a line typically attributed to Josef Stalin, an accomplished veteran of mass homicide, though it probably predates him by decades. The words are nonetheless true. The mind can only grasp so much suffering. The bigger the crime against humanity, the quicker it becomes a mere number – and the more unreal the personal savagery behind it seems.
Ninety years after Stalin’s murderous Holodomor famine in Ukraine, eighty years after Auschwitz, and with dozens of “little” genocides and ethnic and religious wars since, we’ve just about lost our ability to be outraged at anything. We’re accustomed to inhumanity on a grand scale. But it wasn’t always so. The modern taste for mass murder had a beginning. It began in Turkey just over a century ago. To this day, it remains one of the great, unrepented crimes of history.
By the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had reached a state of advanced decay. Politically, it was a junior player in the struggle for regional dominance among the French, British, Germans, and Russians. A corrupt sultanate stymied reform and ruined imperial finances. In the Balkans, once-conquered Christian peoples were winning their independence. Even among imperial loyalists, the need for reform became obvious.
Amid this ferment, the place of Christians within the empire became more and more tenuous. Islamic law tolerated Christians and allowed them a certain degree of autonomy. But the price was a culture of permanent discrimination. This took the form of special taxes, arbitrary violence, humiliating dress and behavior codes, and exclusion from political power. Christians also endured the devshirme, or “boy collection,” in which Ottoman officials would routinely take male children from their families, convert them to Islam, and force them into military or civil service.
Armenians made up one of the empire’s largest Christian communities. In the 1890s, their towns spread across the Anatolian plain, the heartland of the modern Turkish state. They had lived there for centuries, long before the arrival of the Turks. Ancient Armenia became the first formally Christian nation in the early fourth century. The Armenian King Levon II was a friend of Richard the Lionhearted, and like Richard, a Crusader.
Medieval Armenia had strong links to Christian Europe until they were cut by its Muslim conquest in 1375. With the arrival of American Protestant missionaries and the rise of Orthodox Russia’s regional power in the 19th century, contact with the outside world became more common but also more dangerous for the empire’s Christian minorities.
Prince Levon (the future King Levon II) by Toros Roslin, c. 1250 [Matenadaran (Institute of Ancient Manuscripts), Yerevan, Armenia]
By the 1890s, alarmed by growing unrest and pressure for political reform among his Armenian subjects, the mentally unstable Sultan Abdul Hamid II decided to deal with the “Armenian Question” directly. In 1894-95, he encouraged the massacre of 100,000 Armenians and allowed another 100,000 to starve. Anti-Armenian violence continued for years, even after the establishment of a constitutional government. It ended in the brutal Adana massacre in 1909, in which an entire city was torched, including churches and schools filled with Christian children. But even this was just a prelude to the state’s planned and sponsored extermination program that killed more than 1 million Armenians in 1915.
Additional massacres in 1920 and 1922 murdered tens of thousands more. Many thousands of others converted to Islam to save the lives of their families. Turkish authorities deliberately set out to destroy the Armenian people and wipe away any memory of their presence. Erasing the cultural artifacts of Armenians – their churches, monasteries, and monuments – continues in the Turkish countryside even today.
While political and ethnic resentments fed the genocide, it also had a religious dimension with a deep current of anti-Christian hatred. Muslim leaders encouraged the violence, calling for jihad “against infidels and enemies of the faith.”
The scholar Peter Balakian noted some years ago that “Muslim clerics played a perpetual role in the massacring of Armenians; imams and softas [Islamic theological students] would often rally the mob by chanting prayers; and mosques were often used as places to mobilize crowds, especially during Friday prayers. Christians were murdered in the name of Allah. . .[and] massacring Armenians [was] seen as a commonplace occurrence sanctioned by Islam as well as the government.”
We’re left with two lessons.
First, Turkey has never admitted guilt for the Armenian genocide. Even today, in the face of overwhelming evidence, it spends significant time and resources denying that the mass murder ever happened. Turkey is the classic case of a nation confident in its lies, its mass-murder denial, and its rewriting of history. Harassment of the country’s tiny remaining Christian minorities continues on a daily basis.
Second, for forty years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States championed the Armenian cause with financial support for refugees and public outrage at the murders. But as American interests in the Middle East grew, U.S. policymakers dumped the Armenians and courted the Turks. That arrangement continues to this day. As a result, we now have the bizarre spectacle of a mid-level (and increasingly ambiguous) ally – Turkey – bullying a superpower to ignore its own human rights policies and to downplay a grotesque crime against humanity.
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is marked every April 24 in modern Armenia itself and throughout the Armenian diaspora globally. But too many millions of otherwise faithful and committed Christians remain unaware of the catastrophe inflicted on believers very much like themselves.
The Jewish people have never allowed the world to forget the Holocaust, and in their vigilance, they’ve served and defended the humanity of us all. Forgetting the Armenian genocide is a luxury that none of us can afford, because the cost is our souls.