News (Psycho)analysis: On Turkey, Trauma, and the Armenian Genocide
Last Friday the New York Times published a surprising article by Sabrina Tavernise and Sebnem Arsu. Headlined “Inside Turkey’s Psyche: Traumatic Issues Trouble a Nation’s Sense of Its Identity,” the article came on the heels of a House of Representatives committee vote that condemned the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. The article was packaged under a “News Analysis” overline, but “News Psychoanalysis” would have been more appropriate.
Tavernise and Arsu start by asking the question:
If most of the rest of the world argues that the Ottoman government tried to exterminate its Armenian population, why does Turkey disagree?
Their answer, they say, “is hidden deep inside the Turkish psyche.” It begins with the suggestion that the construction of the new Turkish state after World War I required the creation of a new Turkish citizen. In writer Ali Bayramoglu’s words, “The identity of a Turk was very much an engineered one in order to form a unified nation.” Tavernise and Arsu then argue that this new Turkish identity “was built on a painful foundation.” They quote sociologist Fehat Kentel, who readily describes this this formation as “traumatic.”
As the words I’ve italicized suggest, Tavernise and Arsu put forth a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation of Turkish history. The history of Turkey is the history of the Turkish citizen, the history of the Turkish citizen is the history of the Turkish psyche, and the history of the Turkish psyche is a history of trauma.
It was Freud himself who, in Moses and Monotheism, most famously tried to apply psychoanalytic categories to sociology-sized groups of people. But the more relevant work in this context is Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud began to develop the theory that the psychic subject was in some way or other brought into being by an original trauma. This, according to Freud, is why memories of traumatic events are difficult, if not impossible to recall; the original trauma is inaccessible not because is repressed, but because it exists in some sense before the subject does. The archetypal model of this trauma is, of course, birth.
So far, it’s easy to see why Tavernise and Arsu would be attracted to the theory of trauma as a way to explain Turkish history. But the first sign of trouble shows up when we consider the terms of their analogy. In its major development, the psychoanalytic theory of trauma was concerned with the victims of trauma. (For example, famous papers by Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi sought to explain why victims of trauma so often identified with their agressors.) Thus philosopher Ian Hacking could write, “Traumatology has become the science of the troubled soul, with victimology one of its bitter fruits” (Historical Ontology, 18).
But in Tavernise and Arsu’s article, it is the aggressor (the Turkish state) not the victim (the Armenian people) whom the trauma of the massacre is said to create. On this point they are clear, and they bring in further examples of aggression as well:
Beyond the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey were killed, there were mass deportations of Greeks and executions of Islamic leaders and Kurdish nationalists.
The problem with invoking trauma as an explanation lies not only with the terms of the analogy but also with the ends to which it is deployed. Hacking offers the necessary reminder that “at the moral level, events…presented as trauma, experienced as trauma, exculpate…. A traumatic childhood is used to explain or excuse a later antisocial person.” (15). By shifting the terms of the massacre from genocide to trauma, Tavernise and Arsu suggest that moral and political condemnations of the massacre are misplaced. They come close to saying so explicitly when they write,
Measures like the genocide bill in the United States Congress serve only to complicate the work of those trying to open society, Ms. Cetin [a historian] and Mr. Kentel said. It was not an honest attempt to heal, as lawmakers who supported it argued, they said, but a political statement issued to prove a point, which creates a highly charged, unfriendly atmosphere.
In fact, from everything that Tavernise and Arsu write, it would seem that the real category they ought to use to talk about the Armenian massacre is not trauma but shame. As Primo Levi famously argued, shame is not the same thing as guilt. One feels guilt for the things one has done, but one can feel shame for the deeds of others. Levi wrote in The Reawakening that shame is what
the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense.
Granted that the motives of the U.S. House of Representatives probably have more to do with political grandstanding and self-righteousness than justice, the resolution passed this week is still important. It is not a question of attacking Turkey—nearly every modern nation has a similar enormity buried somewhere in its near or distant past. Nor is it a question of hunting down the criminals; the genocide happened more than ninety years ago and no one alive could possibly be guilty of it. It is a question, simple but crucial, of that first step toward justice: naming the crime.
I think you’re misunderstanding the history, and thus why Turkey endured a trauma.
More Muslims than Armenians (or Assyrians for that matter) died during the war. More Muslim civilians died during the war.
The 1800 and 1900’s saw horrible mass killings of Turks in Bulgaria (about 260,000) and in Greece (tens, if not hundreds, of thousands) in purposeful campaigns.
After the Armenians — a group which prospered in the Ottoman Empire to a degree which far outstripped their Muslim neighbors — rebelled on a massive scale — actually, they prepared for rebellion long before the war by arming systematically, yet did so with impunity — and joined the Russian invaders, deportation orders were signed, and the Armenians suffered greatly, starving, being slaughtered by irregular troops and Kurdish bandits.
Yet, after all this time, and after all the effort put into it — **and after all the orders found from the Young Turk leaders which order deportation AND protection of the deportees** — not a *single* order to kill the Armenians has ever been found.
Thus, your analysis of “victim” and “aggressor” is so out of whack, it’s unbelievable. Loser does not equal victim, and the eventual winner is not always the aggressor.
I suggest you watch this video from Bernard Lewis — the most eminent Islamic historian of our lifetimes — and think on this subject again. If you don’t follow the relevant history (and it appears you don’t) just understand that he’s literally at the very top of his field. Try to reconcile this fact with the claim the Armenian diaspora likes to make that only the government of Turkey disagrees with the characterization of the events as genocide.
Note that I, like Lewis, am willing to call anything at all a genocide — so long as we agree on what the word means. It is generally supposed to mean a government *ordered*, systematic killing. Again, not a single shred of evidence indicates that the government ordered killing (as Bernard Lewis clearly states), and there’s much evidence that they ordered the opposite!
If we relax this requirement, and openly and plainly state that, unlike the holocaust, a genocide need not have a component of governmental intent, then we can begin to call this event a genocide.
Of course, the Armenian diaspora wishes to have their cake and eat it to: this must be a genocide, and there must be no clear recognition of exactly what that means, nor what evidence is available — they instead only provide a horrific narrative of what (they say) happened. As Lewis says, very clearly, there was no government intent, and this was no Holocaust.
I could go on. It’s absurd. If you want a real, government intended genocide (note that this genocide [a real one, this time] occurs for no reason at all, rather than after a massive armed rebellion during war time [and after all that, no genocide, as we understand it, did occur in Ottoman Turkey]): the Circassian Genocide.
Who committed this genuine genocide? Russians and Armenians. Why? Russians wanted a good, Christian people settled on their borderlands. They chose the Armenians for this job, and the Armenians obliged.
Just under 400,000 Circassians died. About the same number of Armenians died according to the best estimates. (Their are patent absurdities in the numbers you’ve no doubt heard.)
All *that* said (whew!), I hate bulls**t labels being put on people, ridiculous victim stories, etc. The Turks were triumphant at the end of the more than a decade of war as long-time Christian friends (Armenians) as well as Greeks, Russians, and the British alternately attempted to kill every Turk on the Aegean coast and Anatolia, respectively, and then tried and failed to strip from the Turkish men and women the land they have occupied for a thousand years. They were hard times, and certainly an stunning series of events shook their world (we’re not even getting into how they suffered, part of which would include the tale of absurd atrocities committed by Greeks and Armenians against unarmed civilians).
A side-note: when investigating interactions between the Ottomans and the rest of Europe, you must think critically: consider the bias of reports. Propagandists supplied Western papers. The most prominent British propagandist even disavowed some of his own work, after the war — and he hated Turks! Consider Bulgaria, years earlier: Britain had raged against the atrocities committed by Turks against Bulgarians during a war in the Balkans. Do you know how many Turkish civilians died in that war, in Bulgaria, at the hands of Bulgarians? 260,000. They far outstripped the number of Bulgarian civilians dead by violence or forced starvation, yet the plight of the Bulgarians was the only one cared for. Why? They were Christian.
In the Greek War for Independence, the Greeks called out in song, “Not a Turk left in the Morea!” This is (actually, was) a clear call to genocide — something which was never heard among Turkish troops during WW1 about Armenians. The Greeks were not singing about future population exchanges, or potential expulsions of the Turkish population — they were singing of killing.
Even British observers — the British weren’t impartial: Lord Byron, a British politician, even came to the aid of the Greeks with his physical presence as a soldier! — commented on the barbarity the Greeks displayed, in an organized fashion. (As organized as rebels are, at least. But a disorganized government can perpetrate genocide, just as a real government, like the Ottomans, can be innocent of committing genocide regardless of what mayhem is wrought far from their centers of power.
On this point, it is useful to make one thing clear: ****Not a single Armenian church closed during the “genocide”!!!!! The Armenians of Istanbul weren’t killed, or even deported (which is all the government ordered for any Armenian)!!!!!***** As Lewis makes so clear, this would be like the Jews having attended synagogue in Berlin throughout the Holocaust!
The Armenian genocide claims are an absurdity, unless we redefine the word genocide to mean “a bunch of people died” and their great-great-grandchildren want revenge, regardless of who their grandparents were busy trying to kill when they died, regardless of how it happened, when, etc. Regardless, even, of *if* it happened. (Sometimes the Armenian half-truths begins to feel like no truth at all.)
Here’s the Lewis video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCYz3IigNE0
By the way, naming the crime is important.
However, the name for this crime is not genocide. (Unless we phone Webster’s — and I’m all for it — but people are going to have to drop Holocaust comparisons in any case, because they are absurd to the nth degree.)
Otherwise, we should focus on the tragedy of what actually happened to the Turks and the Armenians, and focus on *mending* relationships between the two, while allowing history to be studied by historians.
If we wish to make a giant hoopla about genocide, I suggest we focus on real genocides, genocides which have some analogy to the Holocaust and which can be acted on now, e.g. the recent events in Darfur.
If we wish to dredge up the past to attempt to “shame” some perfectly decent race of men, like the Armenians or the Russians, we can dig up the corpse of the the 19th century Circassian Genocide committed by Armenians and Russians.
Does it seem worthwhile? I’d rather let bygones be bygones — I’d rather focus on peace. All of this rhetoric about genocide and the import of its recognition is empty academic rhetoric. The Armenians and Russians should recognize and apologize, sure. Will they? No. Is it important to avoiding future genocides? No. The Russians are still committing nasty mass killings in their neighborhood. They won’t stop, and it’s not because they are unaware of genocide — they built a god**** memorial to the Armenian “genocide” in Russia, and the highest officials attended!
Honestly, I find it ridiculous to think of how General Dro — and Armenian “resistance” fighter in WW1 (how are you resisting when you’re an armed rebel?!?!) — *****went, with his men, to aid Germany during WW2****. He earned the title “Jew Killer”. Seriously.
Obviously, his awareness of what happened to the Armenians — tragic, but non-genocidal, but nevertheless horrific as any genocide, I’m sure — did nothing to help him.
In any case, the Armenians have never known genocide as victims — only as the complicit perpetrators and beneficiaries of the Russian genocide against the Circassians.
Genocide goes on until people get the kind of morals which prevent them from doing such things. Hearing about a false genocide and calling it such, or even reading Ann Frank doesn’t do it.
I feel sorry for people who invest their lives in genocide studies — not history, but genocide studies. It’s an invented and empty field. It’s the kind of academic branch which is filled with bizarre, self-aggrandizing rhetoric, and the sort of touchy-feely psychobabble which plagues this article by Arsu.
Arsu’s wrong — but not because the Turks committed a genocide. She’s wrong because all such explanations are overly facile and simplistic.
Justin,
Sorry, but I don’t buy it–or at least, I don’t buy most of it. Most importantly I don’t believe that “all of this rhetoric about genocide and the import of its recognition is empty academic rhetoric.” In fact I’d say almost the opposite: recognizing historical crimes is a crucial effort of justice. No doubt it’s justice of the most limited kind, one that is always insufficient to the wrong it addresses, but it’s justice nonetheless. If we can’t agree about that then the prospects for this discussion probably aren’t great. Nevertheless, let me try to address a few specific points.
First, I just want to note that we’re not really talking anymore about what I wrote about in my post. You disagree with Tavernise and Arsu’s diagnosis of trauma because you don’t think there’s any reason for Turks to feel traumatized. I disagree with it because I don’t think trauma’s the right conceptual model for the Turkish response to the 1915 massacres.
Now on to your comments. You make a big deal about the definition of genocide, arguing (as I did) that “naming the crime is important.” But who says we need to phone Webster’s or dither about semantics? The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide for us. You may disagree with it, but it’s the working definition in international law, one that both Turkey and the US have accepted. Here it is, straight from Article 2:
I suspect from what you’ve written that you’d want to deny that any of these conditions apply to the Turkish-Armenian situation. If so, you’ll have to find someone else to argue with. For my part, I’m convinced by evidence like this July 10, 1915 cable from US Ambassador Henry Morganthau, who initially doubted the accounts of Turkish atrocities:
Again, I’m not in the mood to argue about whether this is Western propaganda. (For his part, Bernard Lewis seems to agree that the massacres occurred.)But the cable brings up another point you make repeatedly: the extent of the Turkish government’s involvement in the massacres. (Morganthau clearly thought that Constantinople was involved; he said that Mehmed Talaat boasted that he had “accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid [who’d killed 200,000 Armenians in 1895-96] accomplished in thirty years!”) For you–as, it seems, for Bernard Lewis–government organization is a necessary characteristic of genocide. But look again at the Genocide Convention, this time to Article Four:
In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the government is involved or not for something to count as genocide. The crime, not the criminal, is the determining factor.
If there’s one point we can agree on, it’s that the Armenian genocide wasn’t the same thing as the Shoah. Unlike some people, I don’t think that there’s any kind of metaphysical uniqueness to what happened to Jews in Germany in the ’30s and ’40s, but there are clearly enough differences between that event and the Armenian massacres to hold open some kind of distinction between them. For me, however, that’s a distinction without much of a moral difference. The Genocide Convention doesn’t say we have to wait for another Shoah to happen; it “just” has to meet the criteria I quoted above.
Finally, I’d insist that trying to get the history right is certainly not about trying “to ’shame’ some perfectly decent race of men,” if by “shame” you mean demanding culpability. Obviously today’s Turks are no more responsible for what happened in 1915 than today’s Germans are responsible for the Shoah or today’s Americans are responsible for the slavery of blacks and eradication of Native American societies that took place in our early history. (We have our own crimes to answer for.) And yet all of us–Turks, German, Americans–should, I’d say, recognize a shame of another kind, which is the shame that we feel when a person affiliated with us–in this case, by citizenship–has done something wrong. This latter kind of shame clearly doesn’t entail the same kind of responsibilities as the first kind, but a minimum responsibility it does entail is to remember what happened as accurately as we can.
Sebnem Arsu needs only to suggest to the Turkish foreign minister that he reply to the U. S. House of Representatives as follows: when the United States aplogizes for the attempted genocide of American Indians over the course of nearly 400 years, Turkey will give thought to apologizing for the massacre of Armenians in 1915.
Airheads in both the American Congress and the Turkish Parliament might just be bright enough to appreciate the comparison and proceed to bury the hatchet. Meanwhile, both legislative bodies might give a thought to remedying the economic malaise they have helped to create during the past generation of their damn-fool so-called policy actions.