Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("It has often been argued that Armenia was 'sold out' for oil. The loudest voice here belonged to Vahan Cardashian, who made it his ronal crusade to let the world know how Standard Oil and the Harding administration had colluded to abandon the Armenian cause in their drive to acquire a foothold in the Middle East. And as it became more and more clear that Turkey was digging in its heels and would fight to keep its last territories (namely, eastern Asia Minor, what many Armenians call 'western Armenia'), all parties understood implicitly that what was important was Iraq. To sum up, by 1923, the Armenians didn't have anything that the West desired, but the Republic of Turkey did." "What made [Iraq] so very valuable now was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact. Speaking in 1922, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn't have made it more clear that Britain's seizure of Mesopotamia/Iraq was not about oil: 'I do not know how much oil there ma be in the neighborhood of Mosul or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to have been a fraud.' It is doubtful that Curzon was unaware of the value of northern Iraq." "Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the 'Armenian mandate,' or the genocide itself, and the world's appetite for oil and other mineral rights. But once the war was over, once the territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone's satisfaction, any lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight for Armenian rights simply evaporated. Now that the exploitation of Turkey was a fait accompli and access to oil (guaranteed by international agreements) enriched all the parties involved, the tragedy of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire became a footnote of history, one that many would work hard to erase altogether." Id. at 273-274.).
Stefan Ihrig, Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, Massachussets, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("This analysis of Ataturk in the Nazi imagination thus illustrates the flux in images about Turkey in Germany and the very specific societal and political factors that always influence such kinds of perception: Our national, societal, and personal views and discourses about the 'Other' are much more about us than about any actual 'Other'; they are dependent on time and place, on fears, expectations, plans, and dreams. We must always be wary of alleged traditions and continuities. More often than not they are construed and imagined rather than real. There is no 'eternal Turk' in the German national psyche or in German history. The image of 'the Turk' has often changed over the course of the centuries--massively so in the twentieth century--and it will change again." Id. at 230.).
Laure Marchand & Guillaume Perrier, Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, foreword by Taner Alcam, translated by Debbie Blythe (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens's University Press, 2015) ("Is it best to legislate against historical revision or to fight it on the field of ideas, as suggested by the great historian Pierre Vidal-Naqurt? The purpose of this book is not to answer this somewhat philosophical question: both options are valid. While clearly acknowledging the historic lie, Vidal-Naquet declared himself to be against the passing of memory laws. 'In the case of the massacre of the Armenians, the Turkish state is clearly revisionist,' he wrote. That is the only intellectually valid argument in the face of opponents of legislative intervention." "By exploring the living reality of the genocide and its consequences for Turkish and Armenian societies by a century of denial, and by following the twisted pathways of the memory of this 'great crime' still denied by its perpetrators, this collection of our reports and inquires gives the lie to all those who accept historical revisionism or take lightly this 'ancient history.'" Id. at 5.).
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belkap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) (From the bookjacket: "The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascionating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile, the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey's hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decisionmakers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I--Turkey's entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution--are illuminated as never before." From the text: "Since the martyrdom of Muhammad's nephew and son-in-law Ali, slain while praying in a mosque in 661, 'Shiat Ali', or Ali's followers, have believed that only Ali's descendants can be true Caliphs--with the implication that the Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman Caliphs recognized by orthodox Sunnis were never accepted as such by Shia Muslims. In most of the Islamic world, Shias have remained a small minority sect, which helps explain why they were largely invisible to Western policy-makers like Kitchener, whose own experience with Islam was confined to Sunni-dominated British Egypt and India." "Shiites were not invisible, howeve, in southern Mesopotamia, where Ali's son and heir, Hussein, was slain and gruesomely decapitated at the battle of Karbala in 680. Contrary to common belief today, Persia was never the symbolic centre of Shia Islam, with most of the lands comprising today's Iran won over for the Shiat Ali only under the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century. Iraqi Karbala, not Iranian Tehran, Qom or Meshed, is the second Mecca of Shia Muslims, Just as Sunnis must, if physically and financially able, make the hajj to Mecca once before they die, so, too, are the Shia faithful expected to make the 'Karbalajj' to the tomb of Hussein in lower Mesopotamia. . . . Until Britsih vessels took over Indian hajj traffic in the modern era, it was much easier for Shias from the subcontinent to make a sacred prigrimage to Mesopotamia than for Sunnis to reach the distant Hejaz. With Persia perched in between Karbala and India, Shias dominated the shortest land route between Asiatic Turkey and thge subcontinent." Id,. at 201-202.).
Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("To make sense of all this human loss, to find meaning in the plight of millions of forced refugees, and in nearly as many painful and agonizing military and civilian deaths, is surely impossible. At the least, after the passage of a century we can begin to reckon with the geopolitical consequences. The Ottoman Empire had limped into the twentieth century still standing--if not tall, then as some passable facsimile of its earlier fearsome self. Despite European encroachment into his empire in the form of the Capitulations and financial oversight, Abdul Hamid II was still recognized as sultan by millions of Ottoman subjects, Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike, and million more Muslims farther afield looked on him as caliph of the Islamic world. True, the upheaval of 1908-9 had toppled the Hamidian regime and shaken the sultanate to its foundations, but, judging from reports filed from as far away as the Raj in India, some kind of homage was still paid by global Muslims even to the Young Turks' puppet sultan Mehmed V (Reshad) until 1917, and then to Mehmed VI (Vahdettin) until he was deposed by Kemal on November 1, 1922--to be replaced as caliph if not sultan, by Abdul Mecid II, until Turkey abolished the caliphate itself in March 1924. Of all the enduring changes brought about by the wars of the Ottoman Succession, this must rank as among the most important. For the abolition of the caliphate, Mustafa Kemal has often been given credit--or the blame (in the latter case notably by, among many others, Osama bin Laden). But in truth it was the empire's crushing defeat in 1918 that had destroyed the prestige of the Ottomans, no less than defeat put paid to the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, and Romanovs in Europe. The difference, in the Turkish case, is that the fall of the dynasty also destroyed the last institution uniting the world's (Sunni) Muslims--and linking them by extension to the caliphs of Islam's classical age. As if to give the point emphasis, King Hussein proclaimed himself caliph of all Muslims upon hearing the news from Turkey in March 1924--only to lose control of Mecca to the Wahhabi Ikhwan warriors of Ibn Saud scarily six months later. Because Ibn Saud himself has no claim to legitimacy other than his own puritanical ferocity, since 1924 there has been no caliph to unite the world's Muslims. The Islamic world has never been the same." Id at 284-485. "After two ulf wars and now a third pitting the United States and its allies against the Islamic State, Iraq has arguably become an even greater geopolitical sore point than Israel/Palestine. Clearly the borders established by British diplomats after the First World War . . . have not held up we.., Ottoman Mosul and the other Kurdish (and Turkish) areas of the north were never meant to be yoked together with the predominately Arab Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Basra in the south. Owing to the close proximity of he Sunni triangle near Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the Sunni-Shite divide in Iraq is more volitile in Iraq than anywhere else in the Islamic world, leading to dangerous centrifugal tendencies among Shiites looking east to Iran and Sunni Muslims looking south into Arabia for succor and sponsorship. In the sectarian warfare between these groups, as in the ethnic struggle between Iraq's Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen, Iraq's smaller minorities of Christians and Jews have mostly tried to keep their heads down and avoid the crossfire. The horrendous violence in Iraq, which followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in 2003, has taught the world, among other bitter lessons, that it had taken one of history's most brutal dictators to keep a lid on seething tribal, inter-ethnic and interfaith tensions of this fragile country cobbled together by British imperialists. Serious civil violence in post-Ottoman Iraq began as soon as 1920 and continues to this day." Id. at 493.).
Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belkap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).
Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("The centenary of the Great War attracted little commemoration in the Middle East . . . [Yet,] in the Middle East more than any other part of the world, the legacies of the Great War continue to be felt down to the present day." Id. at 406. "The deportation of Armenians was conducted openly by government orders. The Young Turk leadership had decreed an early recess of the Ottoman parliament on 1 March 1915, which left Interior Minister Talat Pasha and his colleagues a free hand to enact law without parliamentary debate. . . " "Alongside the publicly declared measures f forced displacement, the Young Turks issued secret orders for the mass murder of Armenian deportees. The extermination orders were not written down by there communicated orally to provincial governors either by their author, CUP Central Committee member Dr Bahaeddin Sakir, or by other CUP officials, Any provincial governor who asked for written conformation of the orders or otherwise opposed the mass murder of unarmed civilian faced dismiss and even assignation, When one district governor in Diyarbakir Province demanded written notice before carrying out the massacre of Armenians from his district, he was removed from office, summoned to Diyarbakir, and murdered en route." Id. at 172-173.).
Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (Rationalizing brutality, cruelty, deportation and genocide in the name of security: "Through April, May, and June, the principal reason given for arresting, deporting, or killing Armenians was because of desertion and rebellion, the two connected intimately with the underlying apprehension that the Armenians were fundamentally disloyal and prepared to aid the Russians given the chance. Deportation descending into massacre was rationalized as a military necessity. The massacres were no longer simply spontaneous or local but part of an overall plan to reduce the Armenians to impotence, to make any resistance impossible, and to Islamize eastern Anatolia as much as possible, For Ottoman officers and officials state security and defense of the Muslim population made any excess in treating Christians reasonable and justified." Id. at 280. Stereotyping as a prelude to genocide: "Genocide involves not only physical destruction of a people--although that is its fundamental definition--but also its cultural annihilation. The identity of Armenians for the Ottomans was not as indelibly fixed as the identity of Jews would be in the racist imagination of the Nazis. Still, the collective stereotypes of Armenians as grasping and mercenary, subversive and disloyal, turned them into an alien and unsympathetic category that then had to be eliminated." Id. at 285. "By the end of the war 90 percent of Ottoman Armenians were gone, killed, deported to the deserts of Syria, ore refugees in the Caucasus or Middle East, The number of dead is staggering--somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million killed in the more conservative estimates--and the event shocked European and American opinion. . . . The Armenian Genocide was a central event in the last stages of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the foundational crime that along with the ethnic cleansing and population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks made possible the formation of the ethnonational Turkish republic." Id. at 348-349.).
Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), based on the translation from the German by Geoffrey Dunlop, revised & expanded by James Reidel, with a preface by Vartan Gregorian (Boston: A Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 2012) (From the back cover: "[This is the novel that] drew the world's attention to the Armenian Genocide. This is the story of how the inhabitants of several Armenian villages chose not to obey the deportation order of the Turkish government. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh--Mount Moses--and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope for the Allies to save them." From the text:
"The privy councilor, back at his desk again, took another brief glance at the map on the wall. 'The Armenians perish because of their geographical position. It's the fate of the weak, the fate of the hated minority.'
'Every man and every nation at one time or another becomes "the weak." That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent.'
'Have you never, Herr Lepsius, asked yourself whether national minorities may not cause unnecessary trouble--whether it might be better that they should vanish?'
Lepsius took off his glasses and polished them hard. His eyes peered and blinked wearily. Their myopic look seemed to give his whole body something courageous.
'Her Geheimrat, are not we Germans in a minority?'
'What do you mean by that? I don't understand?'
'In the middle of a Europe united against us, we're a damnably imperiled minority. It only needs one bad breakthrough, An we've not chosen our geography so brilliantly either.'
The privy councilor's face had ceased to be kindly, it looked sharp and pale. A whiff of dusty midday heat beat in through the window."
Id. at 581.).
