Murder(ing) People
Genocidal Policy Within 20th Century
Description, Analysis, and Prevention
Armenocide, Serbocide, Holocaust
As Basic Genocidal Events During the World Wars
Dr.habil.
Richard Albrecht, PhD.
Mary-Parseghian-Gedächtnis-Bibliothek
D.53902
Bad Münstereifel (Wiesenhaus)
Murder(ing) People
Genocidal Policy Within 20th Century – Description, Analysis, and Prevention:
Armenocide, Serbocide, Holocaust As Basic Genocidal Events During the World
Wars*)
Richard Albrecht
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power
(Eric Hoffer)
In science, ideology tends to corrupt; absolute
ideology absolutely
(Robert A. Nisbet)
Nothing but a memory is productive which does not only
remember
what happened but also what still is to be done
(Ernst Bloch)
In this smart piece the author, an
experienced German social psychologist, and political scientist, tries to sum
up the very content of his own approach to genocide, genocidal action,
genocidal policy, and genocidal mentality as a general pattern which was worked
out, at first, in his inaugural lecture February 1st, 1989 (Albrecht 1989), and
which the author recently published in his books on Genocide and Armenocide
when discussing comparative and theoretical aspects of genocidal policy within
20th century (Albrecht 2006); the third volume of the authors
trilogy on genocidal policy within 20th century (“Genozidpolitik
im 20. Jahrhundert”), presenting the first scholarly verification of the
notorious speech Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), as chancellor of the German Reich
and Führer of the German people, delivered to his Supreme Commanders at
Obersalzberg, on August 22nd, 1939 was published actually: the key
sentence can be valued as a sort of “genocidal connection” between Armenocide
and Holocaust:
„Who [the fuck] is, after all,
today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?“[1]
Needlessness to state that the
author, who, as a scholar of genocide[2], recently published a short piece
summing up the second genocide during World War II - named Serbocide[3]
- is by no means one of that dubious guys self-naming ´genocide scholar´ but, in
fact, either ouvert or covert, proclaiming such cloudy issues like hierarchies
of the three genocidal victim-groups during the two World Wars – the Ottoman
Armenians (1915/16), the European Jews, and the Serbs in “Satellite Croatia”
(1941/45) which the author looks upon as the three basic genocidal events
during the two World Wars.
Whenever
looking on genocide politically, the author feels that the best anti-genocidal
perspective in fact is an anti-fascist and anti-racialist one – although
whenever looked upon the genocidal phenomenon as a scholar that cannot be
regarded as a vital essential condition or conditio sine qua non:
according to the dialectics of general and special features of the genocidal
field and its sufficient condition(s), empirical details, and random aspects, a
society must neither be classified as a ´fascist´ one to be regarded as a
´genocidal´ society: the Italian society between the World Wars indeed was a
´fascist´ but by no means a genocidal one like the South African, which
basically was a racial one (like some of the Southern US-states were at that
time). Any genocidal society is a racial one but non vice versa: not any
racialist society is a genocidal or a fascist one. Moreover, the German society
since 1933 soon became both a fascist and a racial societal basic
structure causing another Great War (like in 1914) which also belongs to the
historical context in which both the very genocidal crimes committed in Ottoman
Turkey (1915/16) during the First and in Satellite Croatia (1941/45) during the
Second World War – another feature which demonstrates the very meaning of the
event Great or World War within 20th century either caused by a
genocidal regime like the German or actively using the given occasion (in the
meaning of opportunity structure/s) either by Young Turk or by Ustase
leadership in 1915 and 1941 under the umbrella of the German Reich as the most
powerful ally.
I take the liberty – if I may – and address me
scholarly readers, she or he, that I will, for reasons, not name what happened
in 1915 “the Armenian Genocide” as “the terrible Holocaust” (Bernard Lewis) with about one and half a
million Ottoman Armenians exterminated – “unquestionable the greatest crime of
the First World War” Hirschfeld/Gaspar 1929: 510), and the ultimate human crime
genocide. For I know, of course, that not only in the so called ´scientific
community´ this terrible slang-version is more and more used instead of what
must be precisely indicated, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica does in her
latest CD-Rom version (2004²), “the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915”.
Insofar I agree to distinguished genocidal scholars like Irving Louis Horowitz
and Vahakn N. Dadrian when talking about the “Turkish Genocide” and the
“Genocide against the Armenians”. Moreover, I feel that as rubbish as moronic
talk - “Armenian Genocide” - is, indeed, not only as confusing as cretinous but
also a sort of complete reversal – and perverse reversal, too –
in the very sense of Umwertung aller Werte (Friedrich Nietzsche) under
most relevant moral, intellectual, political, historical, and linguistic
aspects, declaring victims for perpetrators, and perpetrators for victims. I am
not sure but do hope that, three generations later, the linguistic reversal as
expressed in that false metaphor “Armenian Genocide” neither mirrors nor
expresses the victory of the former genocidal violators as another final
solution ... I may also remind me readership of three facts of life the German
poetical playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) had worked out in other
contexts: (i) whenever injustice happens too often it will not become justice
because it happens very often; (ii) in the last instance the truth cannot be
suppressed but must be publicly repeated again and again even after it had been
once recognized as the very truth; (iii) within the intellectual field
democracy indeed means transforming the small circle of connoisseurs towards
the large circle of connoisseurs – a ´sociological experience´ which should
never be forgotten by any genocidal scholar whenever engaged in preventing
genocidal action/s, too, for a basic virtuality must be taken into
consideration: “Human actions are not destined be the very facts but by the
perceptions of the facts acting humans have got.” (Alexander v. Humboldt)
Finally, I will by no means apologize for
the very fact that the following scholarly piece is neither composed nor
written due to the Zeitgeist which
(to quote a German ´classic´ literary figure) is, as spirit of the age, more or
less mirrowing the very ideology of the masters race (Goethe: Faust I: 577-579)
but is partisan in the sense of saving life-policy (Albrecht 1989) which
basically means the very contrary of genocidal or taking-life-policy (Irving L.
Horowitz). Whoever expects an attitude like that one I have recently named the
„wikipedianization of knowledge and
cognition“ (Albrecht 2008: 13) claiming the overwhelming NPOV („Neutral
Point of View“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV) may,
please, use that postmodern „open source“ encyclopaedia called wikipedia. For what I am still standing, and working, for as a
scholar is that dedicated anti-genocidal perspective disposing, of once and for
all, every point of origin for genocide and, consequently and in the last
instance, any genocidal research work, too (Albrecht 2006: Armenozid, 3).
*
I. Genocide is
not only mass killing and killing masses as traditionally well-known like
massacres, mass atrocities, pogroms, riots, and slaughter, but ´modern´ serial
killing, strategically planned and organized, not only of masses but of peoples
as entire populations for racial, religious, ethnic, political, and even
ideological reasons: neither traditional massacres and atrocities nor
well-known mass slaughters, pogroms, and riots, and also not only
administrative murder of masses (as a conventional measure applied by absolute
rulership, dictatorship, tyranny, colonialism etc. before World War I.), but of
people. After World War I. traditional „administrative mass-murder” (Al.
Carthill) became modern „administrative mass-murder as organised by a state” (Hannah
Arendt) which later on was described as “policy of extermination” (Majorie
Housepian), and as „organized state murder” (Helen Fein), and defined as
„structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state
bureaucratic apparatus” (Irving Louis Horowitz), indeed, as an outstanding
„crime against mankind and civilisation as planned and organized by a state”
(Richard Albrecht)[4], “the blackest page in history” (H.A. Gibbons). Insofar
any genocidal action may include “ethnic cleansing“ and its violent methods of
ejection, expulsion, and displacement, as applied by the perpetrators – but
genocidal policy has got a pecularity (Albrecht 2006: Völkermord[en], 124-125)
demonstrating that genocide is more than “ethnic cleansing”, “demographical engineering”,
“homogenisation of population” as accompanied by massacres to fulfil a specific
policy to “systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the
basis of religious, ethnic or national origin.” (Petrovic 1994)
II. Needlessly
to stress that not only these but all the pieces on genocide worked out and
published by the author within the last two decades are lead by a central
principle according to a grounded problem of any research work on genocide
which the author himself once named, in summer 1989, the urgent „development of
an early warning system against genocidal tendencies” („Entwicklung eines
Frühwarnsystems gegen Völkermordtendenzen. Pilotstudie
zu einem unbearbeiteten Grundproblem einer kultur-, sozial- und
politikwissenschaftlichen Friedensforschung“ 1989, 2 p., not printed [in
German]). Given this setting,
the author emphasizes the very meaning of a basic ´historical memory´ (Jorgé
Semprún) which inevitably also includes „what still is to be done” (Ernst
Bloch) as one of the central presuppositions and conditio sine qua non
for preventing genocide.
III. According to me own research work on
genocide as the most destructive event in the history of mankind and
state-sponsored ´crime against humanity and civilisation´ (as published in
1989) I take the liberty - if I may - and quote the basic definition of
genocide as worked out by Raphael Lemkin:
„In this respect genocide is a
new technique of occupation, aimed at winning the peace even though the war
itself is lost.” (Lemkin 1944: chp. XI: Genocide, 81)
Following this concept means that
within 20th century there do exist until now three outstanding
events, two of them well-documented as genocides and crimes against humanity
and civilisation: ´Armenocide´ (1915/18) and ´Holocaust´ (1941/45), the third,
´Serbocide´ (1941/45), still under-documented. Any specific silence as
practised by German historians traditionally and actually until the first
´colonial genocide´ in German South West Africa (GSWA), 1904-07, is also a relevant
subject: this „smart genocide” (Micha Brumlik) started when the German
representative declared the native ethnic group (Nama) no longer as subjects of
His Majesty, The German Kaiser William II (v. Trotha, October 2nd, 1904):
„The Herero people is no longer
subject of the German crown. They have murdered and stolen […] The Herero
people has to leave this country. If the Herero people will not follow this
order, I will force the Herero people by using my Great Fire Gun.” (Bley
1968, 204)
This specific command, which indeed
did exist, and its consequences, and very meanings express of what can be
regarded as ´genocidal mentality´ due to the mainstream of German colonial and
imperial ideology before
IV. The mass murdering of about
one and half a million Armenians (fifteen hundred thousand humans) in the
Ottoman/Turkish State 1915-1922 was „the first planned and organized genocide
within 20th century” (Edgar Hilsenrath). Without studying this outstanding
destructive event as the most nasty crime a state can ever commit any scholarly
understanding of genocide is hardly possibly. Finally, the Armenocide (in
German: Armenozid) was, in fact, not only an outstanding crime but also
the „essential prototype of genocide in the 20th century” (Irving L. Horowitz)
applying modern techniques, too. The former (West) German Chancellor, Dr.
Helmut Kohl, stressed, in April 1987, the very argument his ghost-writer at
that time, Dr. Klaus Hildebrandt, gave according to the uniqueness of the
Holocaust, his instrumental modernity and economic efficiency, following Hannah
Arendts consideration on the Holocaust as state-sponsored killing:
„The
crime of the Holocaust named genocide is indeed unique within human history whenever
looking on the cold inhuman planning and its lethal efficiency”.
Meanwhile
there does exist a translation of relevant documents of the Turkish post-War
military trials into German, and also into American English. In 1919, the
Stambul Trial condemned to death 17 Young Turk politicians - one of them the
prominent CUP-leader Talaat Pasha, the former Ministry of the Interior
(1913-1918) and a principle architect of the first genocide within the 20th
century - as responsible for the destruction of the Armenian people as „organised
by a united state-power”. Moreover, the genocidal actions followed the official
order as given against „persons acting against the Ottoman government at war
times” (Akcam 2004, 178)
The
Ottoman Ministry of the Interior and member of the most powerful triumvirat,
Talaat Pasha, declared, in August 1915, that the ”Armenian Question” does
not exist any longer (Lepsius 1919, 146):
„La question arménienne n´existe plus.“
In so far Talaat followed Abdul
Hamid II who was as the absolute ruler until the Young Turks overtook political
power in 1908 responsible for two well-know atrocities against and massacres of
Armenians in 1895/96 and in 1903/04. This man publicly stated in 1896 [The Nation,
14th January, 1897]:
„The way to get rid of the
Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians“
The interview
Talaat gave in 1916, two decades later, expresses the specific modernity of the
first genocide within 20th century. In his statement the most prominent
CUP-leader publicly declared on „the Armenian question” (Morgenthau 1918, p.
336)[5]
„We have been reproached for
making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that
was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today
might be guilty tomorrow”
To quote a legitimate US-scholar
(of religious history) commenting the Talaat-interview (Rubinstein 1983, 19):
„The
Armenians were slaughtered not for what they did but for what the Turks
suspected some of them might do in the future.”
What
Talaat expressed in 1916 when he stresses „that those who were innocent today
might be guilty tomorrow” anticipates possible developments, created (what
Hannah Arendt later on identified as) ´the objective enemy´ (Arendt 1989, 654),
and expresses the modern scientific idea of latent potentiality (as
worked out by theoretical physics, especially the ´quantum theory´). As the
author mentioned when looking on relevant documents according to the Croatian
genocide of the Serbs living in the Ustase state 1941/45 (Albrecht 2006, Völkermord[en]:
71-93), the principal concept of ´the objective enemy´ was also graphically
applied by the murderous perpetrators and Croatian elitist political figures as
a sort of “lumpen-intelligentia” (Yehuda Bauer): on November 26, 1941, the Croatian
government ordered that repressive
measures are to be applied against those “unwanted persons who might threaten
the very achievements of the Croatian Ustase Movement for liberation.” (quoted
in ibid: 89) Given this setting, the concept “objective enemy” as, at first,
scholarly sketched by Hannah Arendt (1951) might serve as a relevant key feature
for scholars whenever analysing ´modern´ genocide under comparative aspects and
perspectives (Albrecht 1989).
V. The
intellectual political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German emigré
to the United States of America (USA) in the Second World War, sketched her
basic concept of “the objective enemy” (“objektiver Gegner”) as part of her
´diagnosis of our time´ at the beginning of the 1950´s. Every totalitarian
regime applies an ideology due to that leading figure which the author filtered
out of the fascist “juridical” writings highly powerful German politicians like
Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) and Werner Best (1903-1989) did when stigmatizing
humans publicly naming as the “objective enemy” and the very “people´s enemy” –
“an everlasting enemy” of the German people: “the very enemy of the racial,
cultural, and spiritual being, and substance, of our people.” (Heydrich 1936:
121-123) Moreover, it is one of the main tasks of the totalitarian political
police within the nationalsozialistische Führerstaat as a specific
institution “which is thoroughly, and permanently, monitoring the body of the
German people, which is timely detecting every symptom of illness, and her
destructive germs, and which is eliminating all of it totally by applying
effective methods” – “ferretting out and monitoring the enemies of the state
for disposing them of at the right moment – that is the preventive-police task
of a political police.” (Best 1936: 125-128)
Of course those “preventive-police task” does mean the
complete reversal of any rule of law and her leading principles – “nullum
crimen sine lege“ [no crime without law], “nulla poena sine lege”
[without law no punishment], and “nulla poena sine culpa” [no punishment
without guiltiness] – which basically guarantees not only the presumption of
innocence – nobody who is accused has to establish the innocence of the
defendant in general – but also “fair trial” especially. According to the
political system of historical Stalinism in the 1930´s, Susanne Leonhard
(1895-1984), in the end of 1918 a founding mother of the authentic Communist
Party in Germany (SPARTAKUSBUND), who became, as an emigré to the USSR, a
political prisoner from 1935 to 1948, later remembered the way the secret
police oppressed its “presumptive enemies” (Leonhard 1959):
“There was no individual guiltiness at all – on the
contrary: any individual ´crime´ was constructed lateron to that end that the
individual ´case´ could be classified under the given category of political suspect
persons […] That the secret police will arrest somebody because this person
belonged to a specific group whose members are looked upon as potential rebels
by the government was a specific insight” – the author added – “which most of
us unfortunately realised much more later.”
VI. The very ´modernity´ of the Genocide
against the Armenians 1915/16 is also expressed within the forms of genocidal
actions Ottoman Turks really did. Mass killing as serial killing was organised
in an highly efficient manner due to the logic of economic efficiency whenever
executing the genocidal business. When during World War II. in Europe
gas-chambers were economically the most efficient instrument of mass-killing
Jews – mass-killing Armenians during
„As
the Turks themselves boasted they were more economical since they did not involve
the waste of powder and shell.”
In
a specific way the most destructive event during the First World War, the
„administrative holocaust” (Winston Churchill) called Armenocide, which began
in April 24th, 1915, in Constantinople as the first „modern“ genocide within
20th century, expresses, although until now not mentioned at all, what the
encyclia „Evangelium vitae“, eighty years later, emphasised as the very „value
and inviolability of human life“ in general, when characterising any „culture
of death“, whenever „taken as a whole“, as the result of a policy of „the
strong“ against the weak who have no
choice but to submit“ (Ioannes Paulus PP. II [Carol Woytila, 1920-2005]:
Evangelium vitae To the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women religious
lay, Faithful and all People of Good Will, on the Value and Inviolability of
Human Life [March 25th, 1995]), cpt. 19).
VII. In June 2005, the German Federal
Parliament („Bundestag”) made up her mind and decided a modest critique of the
Turkish denial of what happened but neither used the expression „genocide” nor
„Armenocide”. Like all governments of the Turkish Republic since 1923 when at
first a sort of culture of impunity was legally created within ´New Turkey´,
the current one denies not only any Turkish Genocide but also continues that as
official as rubbish talk on „tragic events during the war”. Moreover, and as
far as I know, a chequered group, politically unified under the umbrella that
an Turkish Genocide in 1915/16 is the very fiction of a so-called plot or
conspiracy of the world-wide Armenian community, when organising her „March
Towards Berlin” where the official Turkish community hold a demonstration on
March 18th, 2006, the day Talaat died of an assassination an
Armenian student executed, 85 years ago (in Berlin, 1921), demanding that the
German Federal Parliaments (for one voice) declaration is to cancel
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: February 4th, 2006, 39). Obviously
these daisy bones do not at all know that Kemal Pasha („Atatürk”), the founding
father of the
VIII. One
of the central topics of any profound definition of genocide within 20th century
as crimen magnum and ultimate human crime is not only
the very fact the taking-lives-actor is a state but also that any destructive
acts like expelling, prosecuting, and killing people are undertaken by a the
state as the most powerful national institution executed after a central
governmental plan. Although is was not the main task of the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in 1945-46, this international court which was
often, and not only by the victims, scorned as the winners tribunal, in fact
did a great juristic job when, in the general field of war of aggression,
proofed, and verified, the central plan of the Nazi figures when attacking
Poland on September 1st, 1939, as a sort of conspiracy against
peace.
Moreover, not
only a central plan guiding the action/s undertaken is basically required, but
at least one command, expressing the destructive will of the Führer and
his intension to kill an entire social group, collective, or people, for
ethnic, religious, political, economic, or ideological reasons structurally belongs to any ´modern´
genocidal business, too.
When looking
on the Armenocide, at first glance a central plan for the total annihilation of
the Ottoman Armenians during World War I seems to exist: the Andonian
documents, published, as evidence of ´The Great Crime´, in Armenian language
under the title Medz Vojeeru (1921), as well as in French (Documents officiels
concernant les massacres arméniens, 1920) and in English (The Memoirs of Naim
Bey, 1920). Some sixty years later, one of the leading scientific experts, the
US-scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian, in 1986, discussed the documents as authentic
telegrams send out by the CUP-leader and central figure within the ruling
political elite, the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior, Talat Pasha, in 1915, to
instruct his followers within the state bureaucracy in the very province how to
handle their genocidal business in an efficient manner. To sum up basic results of current legitimate scholarly
works (as recently published in “Genocide Studies & Prevention”, vol. 1
[2006], No. 2, pp. i-iv; 93-226) very briefly - there cannot be any doubt about
the fact that it was Talat Bey (1872-1921), 1913-1917 Home Secretary of the
Interior of the late Ottoman State who applied the Young-Turks-motto “Only a
Dead Armenian is a Good Armenian” and ordered, commanded, and instructed
the genocidal actions against the Ottoman Armenian by sending various telegrams
to his followers down in the very provinces of the Ottoman Reich. According to genocidal research,
the existence of a central plan whenever expressed in orders, or commands,
written down is, in fact, as conditio sine qua non, not one of various
sufficient conditions, but a necessary condition and insofar essential
according to any scientific definition of genocide as such, it is by no means
surprising that ´the other side´, above all representatives of the Turkish
state, her political elite, and her relevant institutions[6] do not accept this
perspective but declare these documents either at best as “Armenian fiction”
(Orel; Yuca 1986) or at worst as “forgeries” (Ataöv 1984; 1986).
For until now no
scholar has ever seen the original telegrams send out by Talat from Constantinople
in Osmanian language (Osmanli)[7] it is not at all possible either for falsifying
or for verifying: this is, indeed, a heavy problem not only due to any
scholarly work but also opening the road to denial the Armenocide in general,
classifying what happened either as tragic war-events with mutual perpetrators
and victims on both sides or as an effective “Armenian fiction” particularly
created by the world-wide Armenian community plotting against Turkey and the
Turks.
Be it as it
ever may be: first of all for nearly fifty years a central command, or order,
by Adolf Hitler as a necessary condition for recognizing, and accepting, the
historical fact of the Holocaust as the destruction of the entire European
Jewry during World War II with between five and six million humans as empirical
victims has, until now, never scholarly been disputed. Moreover, until now a
written source of evidence produced by Hitler himself could not be found, and
it is, indeed, doubtable whether such a document exist at all. Christian
Gerlach, at that time a German student of the Holocaust, read, however, as the
first historian at all, in 1996/97, two well-known diaries of politically
relevant figures within the German genocidal elite thoroughly, and this enabled
him to work out the meaning of a secret speech Hitler gave, on December 12th,
1941, above all to some of his high-ranked party functionaries proclaiming the
annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe as his basic “political decision”
(Gerlach 1997; 2001³).
The second
argument lies not in the field of comparative genocidal research like the first
one but has to do with the situation of official Ottoman documents and its
highly selective use. Nevertheless another student of genocide in general, and
of the Armenocide 1915/16 especially, found out when investigating the
relationship between the very political centre as represented by the Ottoman
Ministry of the Interior in Constantinople, and his close CUP-follower Dr.
Mehmed Resid, in March 25th, 1915, freshly established as the new
regional governor in Anatolian town Diyarbekir.
Presenting an excellent scholarly
piece when describing what another investigator called the “cumulative
radicalization” within the murderous Armenocidal process itself (Bloxham 2003),
the Dutch junior scholar Ugur Ü. Üngör (2006) not only identifies more than a
dozen official Ottoman documents, most of them produced by Talat and send to
his vicegerent in Diyarbekir (and to the provinces of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, and
others, too), but also analyses the various steps on the road to Armenocide
identifying both the second half of March, 1915, as the crucial date leading to
a certain ´point of no return´. Finally, after having looked on the special
archive in Istanbul (“Başbakanlık
Osmanlı Arşivi“ [Ottoman Archives under the Prime
Ministry]) which has got more than hundred millions of files[8], Üngör presents
the command as given by Talat on May 23rd, 1915, to all the provinces
when ordering “the wholesale deportations of all Armenians to Deyr-ul Zor, starting
with the northeastern provinces.”[9]
This official Ottoman document (as
to be found in the Ottoman Archives under BOA, DH.SFR, and not within the
central register BOA, MV) is, as Üngör points out, until now “the single
instance in which the empire-wide nature of the deportations is reflected in
one order at the most central level.” (Üngör 2006, 187; 195, note 131) In the
very meaning of quod-erad-demonstrandum, and even when comparing to the
situation according to the Holocaust in 1941 without any written order from the
very top, any dispute on “the Andonian documents” indeed is a yesterday
discussion (in spite of the fact that the Talat telegrams at first were mentioned
from H.A. Gibbons [1916], 19-23).
In his outlook
U.Ü. Üngör reminds us on the public declaration of the three Entente powers
dated May, 24th, 1915, condemning “these new crimes of Turkey
against humanity and civilization”, promising that “all members of the Ottoman
government and those of her agents who are implicated in such massacres […]
will hold personally responsible.” Having realized their projective fate, “the
CUP leaders, especially Talat, panicked”, creating immediately, for covering
the beginning genocide, an emergency decree on the deportations as a sort of
pseudo-law (May 29th, 1915). Later on , in 1916 and 1917, two
ideological pamphlets above all to be distributed among the diplomats at Pera([10],
[11]), were produced in French, denying that Armenocide had well-started, using
pseudo-arguments picked up by all post-Ottoman true-believers and fanatics,
either militant Kemalists or not, till nowadays.
IX. Whenever
scholarly looking on what could be named Serbocide (“killing Serbes”) as a
specific way of mass killing during World War II as planned and organized
serial killing by the political leadership of “Satellite Croatia” (1941-1945)
which started in summer 1941 it is clear that this was not only mass slaughter
at hardcore-level of cruelty but, in fact, and strictu sensu, another
genocide with about one million victims within nearly four years. What might
appear, at the first glance, as Balkan atrocities - or just another balkanized
massacre happening – was, in fact, the murder of that part of the Serbs as a
people living, in 1941, as citizen in the newly created Croatian state (about
1,5 million humans at all belonged to that ethnic, religious, and cultural
minority). Remembering the very historical context of that specific genocidal
syndrome, above all (i) German military occupation of the Balkan and the crimes
committed by these armed forces, (ii) specific genocidal actions run by SS and
Wehrmacht against Balkan jews, and the Gypsy, and (iii) the graphic, and
active, support the fascist powers Germany, and Italy, gave to the Croatian
Ustase movement - the Croatian genocidal elite figures Jehuda Bauer stigmatized
as “lumpen” intellectuals lead by a fanatic race ideology with “the Serb” as
the deadly enemy caught their chance and overtook not only the state power but
realized the very opportunity and deprived, persecuted, and murdered the bulk
of the members of the Serbian people living within that newly established
Croatian state - all of what happened
under the eyes of the Third Reich as the most relevant protective power the
Ustase state has got. In the end about 100.000 Serbs fled outside the country,
250.000 were forced to become members of the Roman catholic church, and 750.000
were killed within the country.
It is a matter of fact that this
genocide within 20th century is, until now, under-documented
whenever compared with the Holocaust and the Armenocide. Moreover, there do
exist a lot of still unsolved problems to be discussed by further scholarly
work, e.g. the role of the religious ideologies and the catholic church,
priest, clergyman, and the meaning of often barbarian forms of (serial) killing
humans with streams of blood like butchery in a slaughterhouse whenever killing
the slaughter cattle. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the facts (although
daisy bones and true believers like Ustase ideologists deny). Finally, from a
comparative perspective, any genocidal scholar cannot overlook the common
features according to Armenocide and Holocaust: first of all the vital role of
the Croatian Ustase state (NDH) itself as well as the very application of a
destructive racial ideology named “the objective enemy” (Hannah Arendt) leading
to this third European genocide within 20th century under Balkan
circumstances, started, and undertaken, at the same time of the Holocaust,
expressing the equal fascist, racial, annihilating, destructive, and deadly
mentality of the genocidalists.
X. Whereas Raphael Lemkin (1944)
discussed both the historical situation/s -the World War/s- and the destructive
bio-political dimensions of mass slaughter and serial killing a people for
religious, ethnic, and ideological reasons, which is effective over
generations, Hannah Arendt worked out the specific role the state apparatus
played whenever the holocaust (1941-1945) is discussed as a specific form of
„mass murder“ planned and organized by a state (thus being himself subject of a
capital crime). Giving this setting, I will take another special feature of any
genocide, as emphasized by Irving Louis Horowitz (1980), seriously: The very
crime later named genocide implies, from the standpoint of any relevant concept
due to ´sociology of killing´, the basic feature of mass killings as serial
killing not only masses but a defined social group, an entire people, like the
Armenians (1915-1918) during the First World War, the Serbs living in that
separate Ustase state founded in 1941, and the European Jews (1941-1945),
during the Second World War. Whenever looking on both well-documented genocidal
events during the World Wars within 20th century through the eyes of an
experienced social scientist like Irving Horowitz, there is good reason to
argue that the „Armenocide“ (meanwhile discussed as such within the scholarly
community) was not only historically the first modern genocide within 20th
century but also the first, and prior, most outstanding destructive genocidal
event anticipating a specific new quality of lethal policy (which was defined
later on, e.g. by Hannah Arendt, as totalitarianism). Consequently, the
„Armenocide“ as „the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century“
(Irving L. Horowitz) and its genocidal totalitarianism, will be the most relevant
matter of future scholarly work on modern genocide within 20th century, its
political sociology, and its social mentality.
XI. The very secret of any
anti-genocidal ´saving-lives´-policy is and means to break down a basically
destructive process before mass killing and murdering people is regarded as a
legitimate method for solving societal problems in the way totalitarian regimes
do, using the state apparatus as a bureaucratic organised administrative
machinery for mass murder producing an empirical „double-bind”-situation
(Gregory Bateson) whenever giving the victims, whatsoever they will do or not
do, not at all a chance to escape, likely to atrocities, riots, pogroms, mass
slaughters, and massacres as pre-totalitarian methods: traditionally those who
did submit and/or revoke could survive and survived, e.g. as religious
convertites.
The most prominent Nazi-ideologist
of the Third Reich, later on as "Reichsminister für die besetzten
Ostgebiete" since July 17, 1941, the most responsible political figure for
occupied Eastern territories - Alfred Rosenberg – crossed, in autumn 1941, the
Rubicon of the perpetrators, when, after a personal meeting with SS-leader
Heinrich Himmler (November 18, 1941), commanding "die biologische
Ausmerzung des gesamten Judentums in Europa" [„the biological elimination
of the entire European Jewry"] as an imperative necessity of any as racial
as fascist „eliminationist antisemitism” (Daniel J. Godhagen). At the Main
Nuremberg Trial 1945-46, NS-Reichsminister Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) - both
as an ideologist the very creator of "racial hate" and a radical
practitioner of what could be, as a specific manner of genocidal
totalitarianism, named genocidal fascism or fascist genocidality - was accused
because of (i) "participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the
accomplishment of crime against peace", (ii) "planning, initiating
and waging wars of aggression and other crime against peace", (iii)
"war crimes", and (iv) "crimes against humanity", found
guilty in all four topics, condemned to death, and was, consequently, executed
October 16th, 1946.
Plainly spoken, this point of no
return, allowing, and managing, the Holocaust as well as the Armenocide and the
Serbocide - all of them ultimate breakdowns of any humanity and civilization
under the shadow and the umbrella of two World Wars - is better never – and
never again - to be reached.
XII. If it is not only true, but
moreover the very truth, and finally nothing but the only truth that genocidal
action/s and genocide policy is a matter of not only one generation, but of
several generations according to both sides of the genocidal coin –perpetrators
and victims – it is, by no means as “the last scene of all, that ends this
strange and eventful history” (William Shakespeare) but as an integrative part
incorporated in the genocidal process itself of extraordinary relevancy how
humans born later (“die Nachgeborenen” [Bertolt Brecht]) are coping with the
most destructive societal event of mankind, especially under the perspective of
preventing that specific collective mass murder.
Decades before
Elie Wiesel publicly mentioned “the holocaust before the holocaust”, Joseph Guttmann,
an exiled European Jew surviving the Holocaust, reminds us, some sixty years
ago, that beyond all “uniqueness” of the Holocaust setting, especially given
with the murderous German industry placed in occupied ´Eastern´ Europe using
gas chambers, several common features of Armenocide and Holocaust as
successfully “organized attempt[s] to exterminate a whole ethnic group” could
be detected (Guttmann 1948, 3). Moreover, Guttmann worked not only out the opportunity
structures for genocidal policy as given by the historical situation/s of World
War and also points out the meaning of plundering acts, robbery of money,
goods, property, and fortunes of the (expelled and) murdered victims for
sponsoring the genocidal system and its war machinery, but also stresses
relevant differences between the methods applied: when comparing genocidal actions
and policy – a legitimate method even in the eyes of Daniel J. Goldhagen (who
was wrongly attributed a ´true believer´ of the uniqueness-dogma for
years) - the German genocidal business was valued as ´scientific´ whereas the
Turk one used more primitive, simple methods of traditional slaughter when
executing their mass murder/s – an overwhelming aspect Michael J. Arlen (1975,
243/244) describes as a technological paradigm (Albrecht [2002]):
“Hitler´s
Germany was to perfect the process of railway deportation and to develop the
gas chamber and the crematoria [...] But in virtuality every modern instance of
mass murder, beginning, it appears with the Armenians, the key element – which
has raised the numerical and physic levels of the deed above the classic terms
of massacre – has been the alliance of technology and communication.”
When combined
with a historical view which looks upon the Holocaust as ´the last stage´ of a
process which started with the 30th of January, 1933, when the state
power was given over to the Nazi gang (Wendt 2006), not only the very lethal result
– mass/serial killing in murder-factories down in the “wild” East since the
autumn 1941 – can be of scholarly interest but also alls the steps
foreshadowing and leading to the Holocaust 1941 must be: sterilization under
pressure, killing living human beings (children, oldies, gypsies, and others)
arrested in clinics, and concentration camps, defined as ´not worth´ to live
any longer …
The German-American Historian of World War II, Gerhard
Weinberg, stressed this aspect as the general one according to the historical
situation (Weinberg 1995: 16):
„Der
Zweite Weltkrieg war […] Kampf darum, wer auf dieser Welt leben und über ihre
Ressourcen verfügen sollte. Zugleich sollte entschieden werden, welche Völker
völlig ausgelöscht werden würden, weil die Sieger sie als minderwertig oder
störend ansahen.“ („World War II […] was
the struggle for life in the sense of who should live on this planet and who
should command its very resources. At the same time the decision should be made
which peoples would have been annihilated completely because they were regarded
as inferior and troublesome by the winners.“)
XIII. What the
world-wide Armenian community names “the white massacre” was, for decades,
called “the forgotten genocide”, too. From a certain sociological standpoint
any communication on genocide is formally regarded as a “second order”-phenomenon
(Dammann 2001), basically including relevant communication strategies of either
denial or apologizing genocide as the main forms of defending against any
involvement within genocidal action and policy, and its consequences, applied
by the perpetrator-group. Some twenty years ago, Richard G. Hovannisian (1986,
111-133), a prominent US-scholar of the Armenocide, sketched a historical
five-step-model to describe the efforts of any Turkish state (whosoever may be
her leading political figures), at that time ending with scholarly historian
“revisionism” created for “clouding the past” – a defensive slogan which was in
the last years since the beginning of the 21st century transformed into the
Turkish demand for establishing a committee formed by governmentally selected Turkish
and Armenian historians (of the two states) to detect whether the Armenocide
1915/16 was genocidal policy as planned and organized by the Ottoman State - or
not … indeed nothing else than an as cretinistic as bullshit idea.
Most recently,
the German researcher Mihran Dabag (2006) publicly accented that one of his own
important – as scholarly as human – tasks as a student of genocide is to counter
any denial of the crime:
“This is a
relevant aspect for developing effective strategies for preventing and blocking
collective violence. Surprisingly, at a first glance, that potential genocidal
actors will not be to deter as perpetrators from committing the crime by legal
consequences. Because the crime of genocide develops its destructive
effectiveness not primarily for the generation of the perpetrators but for the
following generations aiming the societal future of the perpetrator-group.”
Given this
matter of fact, there is still a lot to be done according to Armenocide and Serbocide:
For since the still existing “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti” was founded in
[October 29th] 1923, every Turkish government and her (post-) Kemalistic
policy, and ideology, sustainable denied the Armenocide as genocidal policy[12]
in the sense and meaning of the UN-convention (1948). “Hrvatska”, the
follower state of historical fascist Croatia (1941-45) as founded in [October 8th]
1991, in fact two generations after her predecessor, is also - if not basically
denying the fact of mass-murdered Serbs during World War II in general – particularly
playing down what really happened in a manner of extremely hard-core obscurity.
XIV. Denying genocide is, indeed, not only „a kind of double killing“: „the physical deed“
is „followed by the destruction of remembrance of the deed“ (Smith et.al. 1995)
but in a way also the very last stage of any genocidal action and one of
its structurally incorporated elements as a policy planned, and organized, by a
state and not by true believers and other fanatics, militant liars, cultural
desperadoes, psychopathic Lumpenintellektuelle, superfluous Mobführer,
political and war criminals, criminal underworld, white trash (with or without
cash) self-fancying as Herrenrassse, in short: all of that rabble scum
of the earth as more or less small social groups and/or societal organizations
belonging to the civil sectors of every - and above all the “hidden” – society[13],
but the policy of denial of empirical states like Croatia and Turkey
(independently whether classified as potential “failed states” - or not -
whenever valued by political sociologists).
Given this
setting, a lot remains to do, above all to make sure that Turkey and Croatia,
both former political allies of Germany 1914-18 and 1941-45, actually knocking
on the EU´s door as potential new members, will accept, acknowledge, and
recognize both crimenis magna - Armenocide and Serbocide -
as genocidal policy planned and organized by their predecessor/s in state: ni
más, ni menos.
*) Enlarged version of a paper of
mine which was, under the title Murder(ing) People - Genocidal Policy
Within 20th Century in Europe, prepared for the “Second International Meeting on Genocidal
Social Practices” (November 20-22, 2007), at Universidad de
Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentinia, focussing on the continuity of
Genocidal Social Practices including also relevant aspects of preventing
genocidal actions (http://www.catedras.fsoc.uba.ar/feierstein/mis_documentos/feierstein/Programa.pdf).
[1] Richard Albrecht, „Wer redet heute noch von der
Vernichtung der Armenier ?“ – Adolf Hitler zweite Geheimrede am 22. August 1939 [“Who is, after all, today
speaking about the destruction of the Armenians ?“ – What Hitler really said
when talking to his Supreme Commanders, August 22nd, 1939]: Genozidpolitik
im 20. Jahrhundert, Band 3, 104 p. (Aachen: Shaker, 2007 [= Allgemeine
Rechtswissenschaft]); summary and table of contents -> http://www.shaker.de/shop/978-3-8322-6695-0; short scholarly prospects are to be
found as well as at H-Net: http://www.h-net.msu.edu:80/announce/show.cgi?ID=160809)
and at GRIN publication house: http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/76273.html.
– I really don´t want to coin out another definition of Armenocide
(in German: Armenozid) but take the liberty, however, to use, even in
German, that artificial word which at first was used as Armenocide within the
US-Armenian community and her scholars. The word and its meaning alludes to the
fate of the Ottoman Armenians above all in 1915/16, expressing both the
victimized group and what happened (cidere means killing). Neither the
word nor the concept Armenocide
implies anything about the way of murder(ing),
in spite of the well-known, and as well artificially created, word Holocaust,
which mirrors in its all-around meaning the form of the deliberate
extermination of a people: holokaustos means totally burning humans when
still living (Albrecht 1989, 69).
Whenever looking on the way both genocides were executed, not Jews in
1941/45, but Armenians in 1915/16 were burnt when still living, having fled
expecting shelter within their churches. In September 1922, when Kemalist
militia occupied the
[2] The German
sociologist Werner Hofmann (1968, 49-66) had characterized science formally
as „the way of seeking knowledge in a methodical (as systematic as critical)
way“ under two basic aspects: “(i) the general content of science has to be
worked out (by collecting, describing, classifying the subjects, leading to any
morphology, typology etc.); (ii) under theoretical aspects the very context and
meaning of all appearances of the subjects and the underlying basic relations
must be defined as rules belonging to reality. [...] At first comes the image
of the real world as given by her empirical nature founding the empirical
nature of reality. […] Any theoretical work of a scientist expresses the
structural contradictory relationship of
registering and interpreting of reality: reality can be understood without
theory, but without theory sciences is not at all possible.” Whenever looking
at sociology in particular, the sociologist Theodore Geiger (1948/49, 292-302)
stressed: “Sociology cannot restrict her work to pure registration of human
acting but must try to detect the basic underlying subjective processes, and
describe the very meaning of human action.” – According to any scientific
definition of genocide any rational logic has to apply the well-known principle
definitio per
genus proximum et differentiam specificam to differentiating between general
and specific aspects within societal action, or to express the methodological
principle that racism is as conditio sine qua non an essential precondition
for genocide graphically: not every racialist society is essentially a
genocidal society – but, however, every genocidal society is essentially a
racialist society (Barth 2006, 172-199). For meanwhile racism is by no means what it was at first:
methodologically spoken the mechanistic dissolution of the highly contradictory
unit (named dialectics) of the biological and the social for the sole benefit
of the biosphere. Moreover, whenever discussing human action/s and the mentality
of the actors, I may remind my scholarly readership to what William I. Thomas,
with Dorothy S. Thomas (1928², 571/572), accurately formulated as one of the
basic theorems whenever describing human action/s: "If men define
situations as real, they are real in their consequences". Finally, W.I.
Thomas (1967³, 42) later on pointed out: "gradually a whole life-policy
and the personality of the individual himself [...] will be influenced by a
series of definitions the individual is involved in“. According to small social
worlds of every-day life – named intimacy – in particular W.I. Thomas stressed
the very meaning of subjective impressions and feelings leading to definitions
of the situation/s constituting another ´real´ social world of the acting
individual/s: „subjective impressions can be projected onto life and thereby
become real to projectors.” (Volkart
1951, 14)
[3] Richard Albrecht, Serbozid. Über den Dritten
Europäischen Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert; in: Kultursoziologie, 15 (2006) 2,
37-56; an enlarged version was published under the title: Serbozid, 1941-1945
(Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 71-93)
[4] In German/y since 1915 until
now typically played down whenever named „Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit”
and not correctly called „Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit” - a sort of Newspeak
which Hannah Arendt reviewed as „the understatement of the 20th
century” at all; a brief case-study gives Albrecht (2004: Verbrechen). - For
good reasons censorious measures as run by military dictatorship in Germany
during World War I – especially when oppressing any facts on what was going on
´backwards down in the very Turkey´ - were of hard-core character and part of a
policy later on named “the crime of silence”. The German churchman Dr
Johannes Lepsius (1858-1926), a prominent so-called “friend of the Armenian
people”, at first in 1916 detected the very character of “these new crimes
against humanity and civilisation” when clearly naming that massacres,
slaughters, and mass murders, as part of the “annihilation of the Armenian
nation” (“Vernichtung der armenischen Nation”), and, finally, “murder of a
nation” (“Völkermord, den die Jungtürken auf dem Gewissen haben.” (Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 117)
[5] Berliner Tageszeitung und Handelszeitung 4.5.1916:
Wilhelm Feldmann, Unterredung mit Talaat: „Man hat uns vorgeworfen, daß
wir keinen Unterschied zwischen den schuldigen und den unschuldigen Armeniern
gemacht hätten. Daß war unmöglich, da bei der Lage der Dinge morgen schuldig
sein konnte, wer heute vielleicht noch unschuldig war.“ I overtook the wrong German „daß“
of the text-version as an original source.
[6] The Turkish
Historical Society (founded in 1931) does not belong to that in
contemporary
[7] One of the
most relevant political measures to modernize every-day-life in Turkey as run
by early Kemalism was, in 1928, replacing the old Arab way of writing by a new quasi-Latin
alphabet which, however, lead to that bizarre situation that the old language
and writing – Osmanli – meanwhile, in modern Turkey, is in fact a matter of a
few specialists, leading to the well-know situation of a specific expropriation
process the German emigré Ernst Bloch (1939) named “Disrupted Language –
Disrupted Culture”
[8] A short
description in modern Turkish is online: http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar%C5%9Fiv; an English text placed by the
Turkish Minstry of Culture & Tourism, too: http://goturkey.turizm.gov.tr/Yonlendir.aspx?17A16AE30572D313D4AF1EF75F7A7968F9F8102006DD7892, but is, for any
student/scholar/researcher, as worthless as that two volumes of “Documents on
Ottoman-Armenians” (n.d., 317 [and] xi/188 p.) Turkish authorities distributed.
An as systematical as critical overview on (after the armistice in 1918
´cleaned´) Ottoman Archives in Turkey, which cleary shows the “genocidal
intention” of the CUP-leadership, gives, most recently, Akcam (2006).
[9] I take the liberty, if I may, and give a brief insight
to my own experience according to the way German authorities actually dealing
with relevant sources: After having finished my latest research work on Hitlers
second secret speech to his Supreme Commanders at Obersalzberg August 22, 1939
(as published in the third volume on genocidal policy within 20th century: Albrecht
2008; abriged versions in “Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte” [2008]; “Zeitschrift
für Genozidforschung” [2008]) I realized that the papers of Dr Armin T. Wegner
(1886-1978; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_T._Wegner; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_T._Wegner)
are kept on file at the Central German Literary Institute at Marbach, including
an unpublished “war-diary” this important German eye-witness of the Armenocide,
in 1916, at this time Second Lieutenant within the military staff of Major General
v.d. Goltz (“Goltz Pasha”) (http://www.dla-marbach.de/index.php?id=59042),
has written. But I really did not succeed in getting hold of the very text I
asked for thrice: I did not get any answer. In other words, in the case of the
Wegner “war-diary” (1916) as a most relevant
“historically credible sourse” (Tamcke 1996: 238) my own research work was not
only handicapped but completely inhibited
[10] Vérité sur le Movement
Révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales/Journal de guerre
[...]/Notes d´un officier superieur russe [...]. (Constantinople 1916; 1919²,
54 p.)
[11] Aspirations et agissement
révolutionnaires des Comité Arméniens avant et après la proclamation de la
Constitution Ottomane (Istanbul 1917, 290 p.)
[12] Bayraktar & Seibel (2004)
sketched a respectable description of that phenomenon of serial
hard-core-abnegatiation naming both historical facts and ideological fictions
since 1918; a critical view on (Post-) Kemalism gives
[13] Given the actual status of
factual decomposition of (any image/s of) society in her “late
modern age” (Anthony Giddens) - often most superficially described as
´postmodernity´ - as the very age of “individualization” and “globalization”, I
may, as a social scientist and an “old”
European egg-head, emphasize at least three basic topics against such as
bizarre as absurd ideas whenever proclaimed, expressing an terrifying engineer
(mis)understanding not only of society but also of human acting and/or acting
human/s as expressed extremely plastically in a phrase a former British
Prime-Minister affirmed: “There is no such thing as society, only men and women
and their families" (Margaret Thatcher): (i) first, society does exist,
however, “does not exist of individuals but expresses the sum of relationships
[and] conditions that the individual actor is forming” (Marx 1857/58, 176);
(ii) moreover, whenever looking on consciousness, "it is in fact not the consciousness
dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness" (Marx [and]
Engels 1845/46, 27); and (iii) finally, the term technology as sketched
by Carl Marx in his radical critique of the economical anatomy of capitalism in
a footnote (1867) when describing, in his “Capital” (13th chapter:
"Machinery and Great Industry") annotated on both conceptual
and methodological aspects of any critical social science quite sophistically
according to a grounded societal theory, and is by no means expressing mere
(modern, applied etc.) engineering, mechanics, techniques, in short: a technical
dimension, but, as technology, “discloses the active relation of man towards
nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and
thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, and of his
own mentality and his images of society, too." (Marx 1867, 392/393)
Select
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Weltgeschichte, 9 (2008) 2: 115-132; “Logik der Gewalt“; in: Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und
Politik, 20 (2008) 2: 102-108; „Opfer des Hasses”; Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, 12 (2008) 2: 183-187 – Anderson, Perry:
Kemalism, in: London Review of Books, Sep. 11th, 2008: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/print/ande01_.html;
same, After Kemal, in: London Review of Books,
Sept. 25th, 2008: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n18/print/ande01_.html
– Arendt, Hannah: Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft; new German
edition: München-Zürich: Piper, 1986, 758 p. [=Serie Piper/SP 645]; Eichmann in
Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen; m.e. Essay von Hans
Mommsen, aus dem Amerikanischen von Brigitte Granzow; München-Zürich: Piper,
1986, XXXVII/358 p; new German edition [= Serie Piper/SP 308] – Arlen, Michael J. [i.e. Dikran Koyundijan]:
Passage to Ararat.
Völkermord(en)
Völkermordpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert - Beschreibung, Analyse,
Verhinderung.
Armenozid, Serbozid und Holocaust als entscheidende Völkermorde zweier
Weltkriege
In diesem
englischen Text versucht der Autor als erfahrener Sozialwissenschaftler,
Sozialpsychologe und Politikforscher nicht nur eine Zusammenfassung seiner
eigenen Genozid- oder Völkermordforschungen der letzten zwanzig Jahre, sondern
auch eine systematisch-kritische Übersicht zur vergleichenden Völkermord- oder
Genozidforschung in völkermord-aufklärerischer und genozid-verhindernder
Absicht. Ausgangspunkt ist der „Armeniermord“ oder Armenozid als der historische
„Völkermord,
den die Jungtürken auf dem Gewissen haben“ (Johannes Lepsius) und der erste staatlich „organisierte und geplante Völkermord des 20.
Jahrhunderts“ (Edgar Hilsenrath). Dieser wird im Anschluß an politiksoziologische
Studien von Irving Louis Horowitz als „Prototyp“ staatlich geplanter
und organisierter genozidaler oder Völkermordhandlungen verstanden.
© by the author (2009)
The
Author
Richard Albrecht is not only a scholar
of the Armenocide but also that
investigative social scientist currently living in Germany who found, verified,
contextualized, discussed, and at first published, in the third volume of his study
“Völkermord(en)” [Murder/ing People. Genocidal Policy Within 20th
Century], the L-3-version of Reichskanzler Hitlers notorious second secret
speech delivered to his High Commanders, August 22, 1939, which includes “The Armenian
Quote”: “Who is, after all, today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians
?“ (Cutting the Gordian Knot: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=160809)
The author graduated in social
psychology/sociology (1971), got his first PhD. in Cultural Studies (1976), and
his second one in Political Sociology (1989). 1986/91 an associated professor,
the last two decades Richard Albrecht works as a free-lancer, scholarly publishing
on (i) historical social science, class structure, and societal theory &
methodology1, (ii) genocide/s & genocidal
acting within 20th century2; (iii) the
sociology of our time, esp. the social psychology of current German society and
her development3. - Recent publications: rechtskulturaktuell
(Unabhängiges online-Magazin für Bürgerrechte [2002/07, Editor]: http://www.rechtskulturaktuell.de);
moz.art1 (Unabhängiges HalbWochenMagazin [2007/09, Editor]: http://www.mozart1.de).
– StaatsRache. Justizkritische
Beiträge gegen die Dummheit im deutschen Recht(ssystem) (2005; ²2007). - Genozidpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert (2006/07,
three vol.es). - Crime/s Against Mankind, Humanity, and Civilisation
(2007). - „Demoskopie als Demagogie“ – Kritisches aus den achtziger Jahren“ ([incl.
CD], 2007) - SUCH LINGE. Vom Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln zu google.de.
Sozialwissenschaftliche Recherchen zum langen, kurzen und neuen Jahrhundert
(2008). – Forthcoming: (2009) Textsoziologie als praktische JustizKritik –
am Beispiel des deutschen Familien- und Jugendrechts(systems). – (2010) Rosenholtz.
Geschichte einer Fälschung4.
