By Ara Sanjian

BEIRUT, Lebanon—On April 30, professor Henry C. Theriault presented a lecture titled “The Armenian Genocide and the Comparative Dimension of Denial” at Haigazian University in Beirut.

Theriault has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts and serves as assistant professor of philosophy. He also coordinates the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Worcester State College in Massachusetts. His research focuses on genocide, nationalism, and the philosophy of history, with particular emphasis on issues of genocide denial.

Theriault first described the active, state-sponsored denial of the Armenian Genocide. In the United States alone, the Turkish government pours millions of dollars into its denial campaign, hiring lobbyists like Bob Livingston and Steven Solarz to defeat congressional recognition legislation, as well as public relations firms to put out its version of the events. Ankara also uses its own diplomatic personnel, funds different initiatives, prints denialist books, which are then send out for free to school districts and newspapers.

When the French Parliament was voting to recognize the Genocide, the Turkish government threatened to shut French companies out of billions of dollars of contracts. “The explicitness, the extent, and the state sponsorship of denial of the Armenian Genocide make it perhaps the great example of denial,” concluded Theriault.

He pointed out that the Turkish campaign is happening on almost every level and appears to encompass every feature of similar denialist attempts, including state sponsorship and the targeting of media, educational institutions, and the political realm.

Theriault said that the appointment of Heath Lowry, an American denier of the Genocide, as tenured professor at Princeton shows that joining the denialist bandwagon often has its rewards. The struggle against denial, therefore, has to be constant for positive signs in this regard are often counterbalanced by negative developments.

After asserting that the Turkish campaign is not the only case of denial, Theriault dealt at length with two other similar examples. The first was the attempt by some Japanese circles to deny the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in Asia between 1931 and 1945, including the Nanking massacre of 1938, when between 100,000 and 260,000 of the total 600,000 inhabitants of the then capital of Nationalist China were killed in extremely brutal means.

Although the Japanese government burned a tremendous amount of evidence related to its military activities in 1945, a great deal of indirect evidence is still available on the Nanking massacre. The latter has been brought together and used by a number of Japanese scholars. There are also many eyewitness accounts by Westerners, some of whom tried to set up safe zones for refugees fleeing the Japanese.

Nevertheless, attempts to deny this particular massacre and Japanese wartime atrocities in general have heated up significantly since the end of the Cold War.

While this denial is not state sponsored per se, many important Japanese government officials, including the current mayor of Tokyo and functionaries in the Ministry of Education, are either outright deniers or very sympathetic to denial efforts. There are also deniers in well-placed university positions, including the prestigious Tokyo University.

The deniers are also usually advocates of the remilitarization of Japan. They see the Japanese defeat in World War II and also the claim that Japan committed atrocities as the major hindrance for the re-assertion of Japanese power in Asia. It is evident, said Theriault, that their sophisticated campaign has considerable effect on young people. In 2001, deniers attempted to enforce in Japanese schools the use of a new textbook reflecting their views. Theriault added that this effort was opposed by local grass-roots movements of average citizens, an important sign of the strength among the Japanese population of the kind of full recognition movement absent in Turkey.

Within the Japanese context, Theriault also referred to the denial of the ordeal of about 200,000 Asian (and some Dutch) women and girls, the so called “comfort women,” who were used as sexual slaves by the Japanese military. Some of these women were raped 30 times a day, six days a week. Many of them lasted for only a few months, while others were massacred at the end of the war because the Japanese government feared that their plight might lead to yet another war crimes trial. Among other arguments, denialist historians in Japan have resorted to relativism to undermine the credibility of the stories of these women.

Theriault’s second example was related to denialist attempts in the US. After referring briefly to Holocaust denial attempts by neo-Nazi groups, he stated that “the real strong denials, beyond the Armenian Genocide, happen with what the US has done in its own past and present.” He argued that “the US was founded by genocide, through slavery.”

Theriault’s focus was on the genocide of the Native Americans. He said that something like 9 million natives lived on the territory of the US before the European influx. By 1890, however, the US government recognized that only approximately 200,000 natives remained.

Theriault said that exterminatory deportation, like that of the Cherokee and the Navajo, was a common tool used to get rid of the natives. Even in their designated points of arrival and resettlement, conditions of starvation were often imposed. Many continued to die of disease, because they were extremely weak and starving.

Nevertheless, denial of the genocide of Native Americans is still very strong. It works primarily through omission; people just refuse to talk about the issue. There was a strong backlash to newspaper editorials urging free discussion of this topic, which were published in 1992, the fifth centenary of the European discovery of the Americas. That denial has continued in the past decade, and deniers try to explain the extermination of the Native Americans as just an unfortunate event.

Even when Native Americans sue the government to reclaim their lands on violated treaty grounds, the courts usually throw these cases out. Moreover, when uranium was discovered in the 20th century in Native American reservations, the US claimed the uranium in the name of national security, without proper compensation.

Theriault then briefly pointed out a few other instances of genocide denial. He discussed the German genocide of the Herero in South West Africa in the first decade of the 20th century and said that it is still more or less omitted from German and world history. The Herero refused to leave their land and resisted German colonial expansion. They were defeated, however, and massacred; out of 80,000 Herero, only an estimated 10,000-15,000 escaped. Recent calls by their survivors for some kind or recognition and reparation have been ignored.

In the modern era, the Indonesian, Australian, British, American, and other governments denied the atrocities committed during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 because of oil interests in the region and Indonesia’s value as a Cold War ally.

The US was the main arms supplier to Indonesia and aborted all attempts to have the East Timor issue discussed at the United Nations. Finally, the United Nations, the US, France, Belgium, and others covered up the Rwandan genocide as it was happening in 1994.

The United Nations headquarters ignored requests from its personnel on the ground to increase the number of its peace keeping troops in Rwanda and actually cut the number down. Even after the genocide began, the American media presented the violence as an ongoing ethnic conflict, rather than a case of orchestrated genocide by a perpetrator group against a victim group. Over 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in just 100 days.

Theriault closed the first section of his presentation by arguing that denial of past and ongoing genocides allows other perpetrators to come along; “the strength of denial and the willingness maybe to give in to denial ourselves allows us to think that it’s not happening again and we don’t have any responsibility.”

Although each genocide had its particular characteristics, Theriault stated that denials of various genocides sound exactly alike; deniers of different genocides usually use the same types of arguments again and again.

In the second and concluding part of his lecture, he mentioned some of these arguments. He explained the “civil war” thesis; that the violence was not committed by a perpetrator group against a victim group; instead, the two groups were both combatants. Then he said how denialists blame the victims by arguing that through their behavior and actions they provided the initial cause of violence.

Another denialist argument is that there was an absence of any central plan or intent on the side of the perpetrator; the acts of violence were spontaneous. Then there are the “wartime propaganda” arguments which say that the enemies of the perpetrator group exaggerated and even fabricated the evidence in order to mobilize public opinion for their war effort.

Denialists play the “numbers game” where they manipulate pre-genocide population figures, the number of casualties, and the causes of death to make it appear that the mass violence did not amount to genocide. This argument usually does not work alone Theriault said, but can be very effective if used together with other arguments.

Next he discussed the argument of “insufficient evidence.” However, this line of reasoning is becoming increasingly untenable in light of new historical research.

Lastly, Theriault talked about the “definitionalism” argument, or the claim that a particular instance of mass violence does not fit the United Nations 1948 definition of genocide. Sometimes the definition itself is manipulated and misrepresented to attain the desired goal of denial.

Theriault argued, however, that “if a lot of people are killed unjustly by a government, the labeling is not as important.” Deniers who resort to definitionalism often mislead people into thinking that these are “either/or” cases and that people should not care if a particular case of group violence is not a genocide.

In the lively question-and-answer session that followed, Theriault expressed anxiety that “the rhetoric of human rights is now very clearly being used by the US and others as a tool for violating human rights.”

He said that people in the US and elsewhere have an arrogance about their susceptibility to propaganda; they think that they are not susceptible to propaganda and do not realize that their minds are being manipulated in certain ways.

Hence, they are not critical towards what they are being told. Theriault also mentioned that he was working on a book on the subject of his lecture.

Theriault’s lecture at Haigazian University was part of his first-ever lecture tour in Lebanon, initiated by the Lebanese-Armenian Heritage Club of the American University of Beirut. He also gave public lectures on genocide-related themes at the American University of Beirut, the Hagop Der Melkonian Theatre, and at the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia in Antelias.