Peter Balakian’s ‘The Burning Tigris’

By Tatul Sonentz-Papazian

America, as a novel experiment in human history, has come a long way since the 1890s, when it was flexing its muscles as a budding major power and aspiring empire, getting involved with the zeal of missionary enthusiasm and optimism in old world affairs—run, at the time, by imperial powers in various stages of corruption and decay. Undoubtedly, the most putrid of those empires was the shrinking realm of the Ottomans, still stretching from southeastern Europe to the sun-scorched valleys of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and beyond.

Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris focuses on the first attempt in modern times to annihilate an entire nation within its historic patrimony. With ample documentation and a keen eye for detail, the author of Black Dog of Fate—another memorable volume haunted by collective memory—re-depicts the gruesome crime that links the 19th and 20th centuries with an indelible river of blood, kept bubbling to this day through an ongoing policy of denial (the last stage of all genocides) openly promoted and perpetuated by the US State Department.

In tandem, The Burning Tigris also presents America’s journey from the stately halls of puritan idealism to the shores of a nascent wave of human rights activity destined, in time, to crest and crash, beguiling a lone superpower with the lure of a well-oiled, star-spangled, unipolar world.

Indeed, America has come a long way from the days of Spencer Trask and Clara Barton.

One must cover a long, tortuous distance, from unequivocal statements, such as the one appearing on page 72 of this book, made in January 1896 by Senator Shelby Moore Cullom, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to the innocuous verbiage of present day political pronouncements.

Here is what the Senator stated more than a century ago: "We believe…that ‘of one blood God made all the nations of the earth,’ but…my faith is somewhat shattered…when I see the soldiers of an organized and recognized government, where there is no war and no enemy, killing, bayoneting, and outraging an unarmed and unoffending people—a Turkish army, under the pay of the Turkish government…Has it come to this, that in the last days of the 19th century humanity itself is placed on trial?"

And here is what, only three years ago, presidential candidate, George W. Bush solemnly promised: "…to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people."

Needless to say, in his April 24 statements over the past three years, George W. Bush, a born-again ideologue of sorts, has repeatedly broken his pledge made in February 2000, to recognize the "tragic suffering of the Armenian people" as the direct result of well documented acts of genocide; an irrefutable fact that emerges, once more, in all its awesome dimensions, as one proceeds through the 476 meticulously researched, austerely written pages of Balakian’s first foray into the realm of historians.

As opposed to this distinctive volume’s non-Armenian readers—who will surely rediscover a significant segment of their own country’s history linked, for a short while to that of the Armenians and their nightmare world—for the well informed diasporan Armenian reader, born and brought up in the ever extending shadow of the Metz Yeghern, this book offers some relief from the deep rooted feelings of collective isolation and alienation that the status of "genocide victim" imposes on the descendents of those who, by now—dehumanized through a perpetual process of denial—have become debatable statistics, collectively reduced or enlarged by specialists on either side of the issue.

A sense of recognition and communality with the rest of humanity emerges through the revived panorama of publicly expressed concern and grief, and attempted healing of mortal wounds, by American and European political, religious, and intellectual luminaries of the 19th century.

The perception that the wanton murder of over 200,000 Armenians, more than a 100 years ago "…could prompt a new age of American international leadership…" places the mass bloodshed at a distinct spot in history, giving it a new dimension of historical relevance as a watershed of some significance in the meandering progress of civilization.

One can safely say, that it was this turning point that made it possible for the elite of the American establishment, leading or involved in women’s and human rights movements, to raise, between 1896 and 1920, the impressive sum of $110,300,000—over $2.5 billion, in today’s terms—for the effort to rescue the Armenians.

However, as the author stated in a November 13 interview with the Aztag newspaper: "The powerful record of moral response and opinion on the Armenian massacres, in many ways, forecast the century of genocide to come. But for all the public opinion about the massacres, and for all the philanthropic efforts and missions to save the Armenians, there was no justice meted out to the Ottoman government, and no political solutions to the Armenian Question put in place by the powers." Obviously, the political will, or interest, to create conditions conducive to a secure and viable future for the Armenians was simply not there.

While the cultural, religious, and intellectual elite of the Christian West was basically motivated by professed moral values and ethical standards in their philanthropic zeal to help a threatened Christian culture of the East, their governments’ motivations remained purely pragmatic and unprincipled, allowing their most notable spokesmen to come up with well turned phrases of sympathy, concern, shock, rebuke, meaningless threats, and hollow promises.

Perhaps the one noticeable difference with today is the glaring absence of the concerned elite that, some 90 years ago, made the word Armenia a household word in America. They have been largely replaced by professional public relations people and lobbyists, ready to lend their skills to the highest bidder. Here and there, individual scholars and writers—like Professor Balakian—come out of their ivory towers of intellectual detachment and are counted in the defense of the truth, itself in mortal combat with the "virtual reality" forces deployed by the corporate masters and manipulators of mass media.

On the road to the first genocide of the 20th century, the book covers in some detail the Balkan Wars, leading to the global tragedy of World War I when the racist pan-Turanian visions of the wartime Turkish leadership, in an unholy and unnatural alliance with Islam, was to result in a frenzy of blood lust directed against the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, spiritual leader of all the Sunni Moslems of the empire.

Opening the road to genocide, some 30 years before the word was coined, Mustafa Hayri Bey, the Young Turk Sheikh-ul-Islam came up with a formal declaration of jihad, inviting all Mohammedans, in the name of Allah, to fulfill their duty in the extermination of all Christians…

This brazen recruitment of one of the world’s most color-blind, race-tolerant faiths as a lethal weapon to be used for the creation of a racist-based super Turkic empire by a few ruthless, agnostic adventurers constitutes a historic degradation of a major religion.

Perhaps a serious study of the effects of the Turkish crucible on Islam and the Islamic world, marked by the centuries-long hegemony of the Ottomans’ brutal, chauvinistic practices, would shed some light on the present day confrontational crises, radically threatening the moral and spiritual fabric of human civilization.

After the collapse of pan-Turanian pipe dreams, the Kemalist Turks, promoted and actively assisted by "Christian" powers of both West and East, remained in fantasy land by taking refuge in the mythology of a monolithic Turkish state whose components—human, animal, or inanimate, living or dead—were indiscriminately declared "Turkish" for all time, including the past, remodeled to suit this latest fantasy, where the Latin alphabet and Western garb barely covers a still-born identity, misshapen and torn between East and West, Europe and Asia, Secularism and Islam. This chimera, based on the untold sufferings of indigenous peoples and the wanton destruction and robbery of their patrimony, remains, to this day, the eye of the storm that threatens the entire region.

Reading Balakian’s The Burning Tigris, one’s historical memory is refreshed with a new, distinctive approach to a century old problem that begs closure. In this book, the talents of a distinguished writer manage to bring together the disparate experiences of the victim, the perpetrator, and the spectator, melding them into one overwhelming panorama of an enormous human tragedy created by man’s inhumanity to man.

In the concluding remarks of his interview with Aztag, Balakian sums up the intended impact of The Burning Tigris with these words: "The Armenian Genocide often seems like Middle Eastern history that happened long ago in another place, now Americans and Europeans have the chance to see how deeply the Armenian catastrophe affected the West, and in the case of my book, the USA in particular."