They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else
Part 1

2,411 words

Ronald Grigor Suny
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide
Princeton University Press, 2015

The tragically overlooked subject of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and 1916 needs reassessment among racial identitarians everywhere. There are too many lessons in it—and too much slaughter and destruction—to justify relegating it to oblivion. It is a massive topic, one that demands no end of pondering and re-pondering for the sake of all distinct peoples aspiring to self-determination. I was drawn to this topic after reading Franz Werfel’s apocalyptic novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted how 5,000 Armenian villagers defended a mountain fortress against the might of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. This was based on a true story, and turned out to be an minor—yet thrilling—episode in a vast catastrophe which took the lives of 1 to 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians. I wanted to know how such an unspeakable thing could have happened, and why.

Ronald Suny’s They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide, was published in 2015 and commemorates the centennial of what was effectively the eradication of the Armenian diaspora from a region which they had inhabited for millennia. What follows won’t be so much a review of this excellent work but a summary of its most important or dramatic points, as well as an organization of my thoughts about them. Hopefully, this will help provide a foundational understanding of the events as they relate to identitarian and dissident metapolitics moving forward.

From my reading of Suny, there were several primary causes of the genocide, but none more primary than the innate differences in intellect and temperament between Armenians and Turks, which are wholly distinct ethnic groups. The former are a Eurasian Caucasian people speaking an Indo-European language, while the latter make up their own ethnic group and originated in East-Central Asia. Such disparate evolutionary lineages led to great differences between the two populations. Their relatively small numbers and centuries of diaspora status leading up to the 20th century caused the Armenians to be resourceful, talented, linguistically tenacious, and obstinately identitarian, yet passive, obscurantist, and disorganized. While most Armenians by 1915 still lived in a pre-modern state within the six eastern Anatolian vilayets (or provinces) which made up their ancient homeland, urban Armenians became noticeably successful and wealthy as merchants and traders.

Meanwhile, the Turks, after having enjoyed centuries of military success and cultural hegemony as the leading element of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, saw their empire rapidly stripped away from them. This happened first as a result of their wars with Russia in the 1850s and 1870s, and later in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. This was a psychological blow from which the inherently proud, cruel, and overbearing Turk could not easily recover. That their enemies were Christians had much to do with their suspicion and ultimate hatred of Armenians, who were the largest Christian subgroup in Anatolia, the empire’s heartland.

But there were other non-Turkish ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire. Why were the Armenians singled out? Because they had two disadvantages which made them unique. One, they were a diaspora without a country. A “dispersed people,” as Suny describes them. From the 1870s until the First World War, the Ottoman Armenians, known as the Ermeni millet (In Turkish, Armenian people) had no political representation beyond that of Sultan Abdulhamid II, and after him, the Young Turks, who seized control of the Empire in 1908. They were also split across three empires—the Ottoman, the Russian, and the Persian. So they were nowhere near their full strength in Anatolia when the Turks decided to move against them. They also had nowhere to which they could easily emigrate. The Ottoman Greeks on the other hand had Greece, and therefore possessed an escape hatch and political backing that the Armenians did not. Suny reports that on the eve of the First World War 150,000 Greeks were deported more or less safely to their homeland. During the war, another 163,000 fled back to Greece under duress, while nearly 100,000 were forcibly removed to other parts of the empire. Suny flatly claims that the Young Turks made no effort to commit genocide against the Greeks, largely because the Greek government had threatened them with war if they did. The Armenians had no such external protection.

The second disadvantage was the Armenian’s stubborn adherence to Christianity. The Ottoman leadership in the 19th and 20th Centuries saw Islam as the glue which held together their ethnically diverse Muslim subpopulations, which mainly included Arabs, Circassians, and Kurds. Whenever there was strife between Armenians and one of these groups—most often it was the Kurds—the authorities almost always sided against the Armenians regardless of who was in the right. This helped render the Armenians powerless and made it all the more tempting for the semi-nomadic, semi-civilized Kurds to take advantage of them, which happened quite often. Despite its cosmopolitan pretenses, the Ottoman Empire remained a Muslim supremacist entity—especially so in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from wars in the Balkans (known to Turks as Rumelia) were now competing with the Armenians for land and resources. Muslims at this time in history were not in the mood to be generous, and so adjudicating on behalf of the Infidel too often could incite the violent wrath of the people.

Another primary cause of the genocide points to Armenian reactions to what they justly felt were the fast erosion of their civil rights. Of course, their patriarchs and catholicos appealed repeatedly to the Sublime Porte, but this had little effect. So did any attempts at negotiating or caucusing with the Young Turks or other political parties. But what did bear fruit however was appealing to the European powers as fellow Christians. Moved by tales of horrific oppression by Saracen despots, leaders of England, France, Germany, and Russia insisted upon inserting themselves into Ottoman affairs and inspecting things for themselves. And because the Ottoman Empire was so manifestly weak, it could do nothing to stop them. This galled the Turks, from the leadership on down. They began to suspect that the Armenians, who had once been considered their loyal millet, were now provoking their Muslim neighbors and exaggerating their suffering in order to persuade the Europeans to partition the Empire. After the string of defeats they had suffered by the eve of World War One, partition was not an unreasonable fear for the Ottomans to have.

The final primary cause of the genocide can be laid at the feet of the Young Turks themselves, namely, Talat Bey, Enver Bey, and Cemal Bey. Their personal failings, quirks, and limitations had perhaps the most to do with how the genocide played out as a methodical and ruthless government operation.

Suny outlines the antagonists of his drama early on, pointing to how they couldn’t have been more different:

Like other great empires, the Ottoman Empire was a composite state in which the ruling center was distinct from those it ruled. The realm was governed by the imperial dynasty, the Family of Osman (Al I Osman), which based its right to rule on the view that its superiority was natural, divinely ordained, and therefore justified. The imperial paradigm was a system in which the Ottoman sultan, by right of conquest and divine sanction, ruled over subjects of various religions and ethnicities in a structure of inequality and subordination that maintained, reinforced, and even produced difference.

By the mid-19th century this put the Ottomans at odds with the republican, liberal, and Enlightened Europe which was striving towards equality, tolerance, and universalism. It also put the Ottomans at odds with notions of ethnonationalism, which were also percolating in Europe at the time. Non-Muslims had dhimmi status in the Ottoman millet system, which meant that distinct ethnic and religious communities paid for official recognition and tolerance through taxes and loss of political rights. The system worked well until the Tanzimat period starting in 1839. Intrigued by Western ideas, Ottoman elites instilled reforms which brought non-Muslims closer to equality with Muslims under the law. One of the many impacts of Tanzimat was allowing non-Muslim minorities such as the Armenians to flourish economically. This quickly led to their cultural dominance in many urban centers of the Empire, causing great envy and resentment from ordinary Turks who had recently enjoyed state-sanctioned superiority over people they still viewed as outsiders and infidels.

Trouble began with an 1862 revolt in the mountainous town of Zeytun in the southeast corner of Anatolia. This had been considered Armenian territory for centuries, and under the millet system, Ottoman authorities never challenged this. With the equality brought about by Tanzimat, however, the Ottomans settled 30,000 Circassian refugees from the recently concluded Crimean War. When the Armenians resisted, the Ottoman military attacked Armenian towns. Such strife continued until the 1878 conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War, in which the Ottomans lost a good deal of territory in the Balkans. The increased presence of Muslim refugees in Anatolia gave the new sultan Abdulhamid II reason to end the Tanzimat period, and initiate a period of reaction during which the Turkish elite attempted to integrate the antithetical of goals of ethnocentrism and empire, all while nursing a seething distrust of Christians, especially Armenians, which expressed itself with increasing violence and oppression.

The Sultan took more subtle measures as well, such as eliminating all Armenians from the state bureaucracy and shifting provincial borders to safeguard Muslim majorities in every vilayet. I found this passage in particular to be most chilling—chilling for its relevance to identitarian struggles today:

In the last years of the empire, on the eve of World War I, an important British Diplomat, Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice, chief dragoman and first secretary at the British embassy in Istanbul, summed up the sustained process of alienation of Armenian lands. He discerned a long-term Ottoman policy of deracinating the Armenians of the empire by systematically usurping their land. “The Turkish Government,” he wrote, “after the Treaty of Berlin [1878], realizing that a sense of nationality cannot easily live without a peasantry, and if it succeeded in uprooting the Armenian peasantry from the soil and driving them into the towns or out of the country, it would in great part rid itself of the Armenians and the Armenian question, condoned and encouraged Kurdish usurpation of Armenian lands.”

Making matters even more dangerous during the late 19th century was the awakening of an Armenian identity beyond that of religion—and this is remarkable given how intensely religious the Armenians had been throughout the centuries. Armenians began to see themselves instead as an ethnos and resultingly enjoyed a revival of tradition and culture. In the forefront was a renaissance of the Armenian language which kicked off a great deal of literary activity by poets, journalists, scholars, and novelists, many of whom were in thrall of the modernizing ideas flowing out of Europe at that time. Central to this awakening was the rejection of empire and a return to ethnonationalism, as exemplified by the leading Armenian novelist Raffi, whose 1880 novel Khent (The Fool) depicts an Armenian inciting a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire.

Suny states:

The revolutionary nationalists rejected one of the most common and unquestioned views of Armenian history: that the church was the institution that held the Armenians together through their long and troubled passage. In the late 1870s Raffi deployed the newly coined Armenian word azgutyn (nationality) and proclaimed, “The idea of nationality is established not by religion but rather by racial characteristics, among which language occupies the first place, which is and always remains the base for the preservation of the nation.” To the church’s exclusionary idea of Armenianness, Raffi opened the door to fellow ethnics of different religious persuasions: “Whether he is a Catholic, a Protestant or an Apostolic, the Armenian always remains an Armenian on account of the fact that he or she shares the same racial characteristics, speaks with the same language, belongs to the same dohm [clan].”

Such developments appeared in Russia as well, where imperial forces were far less oppressive of Armenians. This was the primary reason why the Armenians of Russia fought so enthusiastically against the Ottomans, and why some Ottoman Armenians looked to the Russians as potential saviors. So when the Turks accused the Armenians of disloyalty, there was some truth in it, despite how only a micro-minority of Ottoman Armenians actually felt this way. This explained why their extremist and revolutionary organizations such as the Hnchacks gave way to the more moderate and socialistic Dashnak party, which was the primary political voice of the Armenian until the genocide. Suny notes however that for most Dashnaks, “socialism remained a rhetorical cover behind which the national struggle was fought.”

Thefts, rapes, and murders of Armenians in their vilayets—mostly by Kurds with tacit support from Istanbul—came to what people thought was a head with the Hamidian Massacres of 1894 and 1896. After having shed much of its territory since its defeat to the Russians in 1878, the Empire was exceedingly insecure and unstable. It had to contend with hundreds of thousands of refugees as well as revolutionary groups from many ethnicities, not just Armenians. According to Suny, “[w]hen ordinary subjects of the sultan refused to give in to exactions by powerful local lords and resisted kidnappings, forced conversions, or seizures of land, these acts were seen as insurrection in the eyes of the state.”

This led to “indiscriminate massacres of largely defenseless people,” which was justified as “prophylactic violence to maintain order and serve as an example to others to forgo rebellion.” Suny gives us plenty of detail and eye-witness accounts regarding the grotesque slaughter which followed. Up to 300,000 Armenians and tens of thousands of other Christians lost their lives in these massacres. This occurred as a direct result of increasingly ethnocentric peoples sharing the same land and resources and adopting what Suny calls “the logic of war,” which interprets any act of aggression by individuals or small groups as reflecting the intentions of an entire people. Suny makes pains to remind his readers that, despite its sickening nature, the Hamidian Massacres did not amount to genocide; rather it was an attempt to restore the second-class citizenship of infidels who quite rightly found the Sublime Porte’s brutal and ham-fisted response to its own decline intolerable. At the time, however, no one could tell the difference, especially the Europeans, who made it their business to save the Armenians. For all their good intentions, however, they may have made everything worse in the end.