A bankrupt politician rummages through history

Those who carry sufferings that were lived in the past, and that ought by now to remain in the past, into the present in the manner of a blood feud earn no respect for either their struggle for democracy or their human rights claims. Trying to conjure up cases for today out of events that took place in the past, whose perpetrators and victims alike belong to the past, is above all a bankrupt politics. Its bankruptcy lies of course in having nothing to say to humanity, in the pose of victimhood it adopts, or in the greed of producing cheap ammunition against a rival by way of the victim it appears to champion. The still more pitiable side is that nothing comes out of this discourse that serves either the victims or any human value, only a poison of grudge and hatred circulating in their own blood.

With 107 years having passed since the events of 1915 as of this year, the fact that we are witnessing the claims of an Armenian genocide becoming even more politicized does not stem from the discovery of new information on this subject that no one knew. Indeed, the information that has emerged or accumulated on the subject is of a kind that offers data that would weaken the genocide claims about what happened in 1915 even further.

But of course there is no need to go into any detail, because it is not documents or data that keep the debate going in the first place. Had it been so, there would have been more applications to the archives that President Erdoğan has opened for years.

Even before 1915 took place, the Armenian Dashnak and Hunchak gangs, on the one hand, targeted the stability of the Ottoman state with acts of terror, and on the other were busy vilifying the Ottomans with domestic and international propaganda apparatuses. For these gangs the events of 1915 constituted only one stage in their own history of struggle. They chose to use in the most effective way, for their own propaganda, these events too, which they themselves had also helped bring about.

Hence there is such an evident difference between how the event looks from the standpoint of Muslim Turks and Kurds and how it looks from the standpoint of the Armenian gangs. This was repeated in exactly the same way in what took place in the Balkans and in the Caucasus.

Although Muslims, in their own history, were subjected to far greater sufferings and far more horrific attempts at genocide than what the Armenians experienced, they did not much pursue a blood feud over it. Even if they raise how millions of Muslims were liquidated from the Balkans, which were conquered and settled before Istanbul, they raise it not to produce a discourse of grudge and hatred but, in the end, as history. Yet against the genocide actually carried out there, the alleged Armenian genocide would not even be mentioned.

It certainly does not follow from this that Muslims and Turks should look at history in a similar way. What is healthy is the Muslims' outlook. Muslims do not hold people living today responsible for what happened in the past and for events that have neither perpetrator nor victim left. What happened in the past stays in the past. Of course it is remembered and lessons are drawn, but there is nothing healthy or just in deriving a creditor-debtor relationship for today.

The shortest way is in fact to test those who advocate bringing up, in the name of justice and humanity, events that took place 107 years ago, by their view of similar events taking place right next to them today.

US President Joe Biden, for example, has said: "On April 24, 1915, Ottoman officials arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul. Thus began the Armenian genocide, one of the greatest mass atrocities of the 20th century. Today we commemorate the 1.5 million Armenians who were expelled, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination, and we mourn the loss of lives." What is this same Joe Biden doing about the Syrians who have been "deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination" right now, who number 15 million, that is, exactly ten times the number of Armenians alleged?

Oh yes, he is doing something: on the lands emptied by the deported and exterminated Syrians, he is trying to set up a little state under his own tutelage out of the perpetrators of this genocide. He is trying to grab the share of spoils that falls to him from the genocide of the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad regime, and shamelessly gets up and remembers sufferings from 107 years ago. Could a mind like this possibly remember such a suffering?

What the same USA has made of Afghanistan and Iraq is plain to see. I wonder how many Armenian genocides the number of Muslims it has killed there with its own hands would equal?

Those who tried to bring the 107-year-old genocide claims to the agenda of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, and who all but sanctify the reaction they met as freedom of expression, can still say what they want in Turkey. The real test of freedom of expression is to go into Europe's so-called libertarian milieus and say the exact opposite. In a debate in which saying "there was no Armenian genocide" is excluded from the scope of freedom of expression, whose freedom, and freedom of what, can be spoken of?

Hrant Dink was objecting precisely to this hypocrisy: closing 1915 to debate, moreover through parliament and law, in favor of the Armenian genocide claims, and banning the expression of a particular view. This is not something Turkey has done, despite all its defensive posture; it is something Europe has done in the supposed name of owning the Armenians' sufferings of 107 years ago.

Are they thereby serving reason, law or conscience, or is what they display a Crusader solidarity of the most archaic kind? Does going back 107 years, because they cannot see the genocide right under their own noses, give them some relief?