Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians. And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.
Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was ‘sad and sorrowful’ in view of the ‘strong links’ Turkey maintained with its NATO partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then ‘our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot.’
Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. ‘We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.’ I loved the last bit about the ‘global war on terror’. Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered ‘terror’ more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that NATO should matter more than the integrity of history – that NATO might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world might have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.
Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusionary US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would ‘harm the war effort in Iraq’. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial. Former Representative Robert L. Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12 million from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik air base through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey. In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was even more craven – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, ‘believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…’
How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very ‘roads and so on’ down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge air base which Mr Bush is so frightened of losing. Had the genocide which Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same ‘roads and so on’ which so concern the gutless Mr Gates.
But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he’s still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they’re ‘interested in preventing World War Three’, he has warned us. What piffle. Bush can’t even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One. Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world – he who would protect us against ‘world terror’ – would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?
The Independent, 10 November 2007
The misuse and manipulation of language – the worthless semantics of journalists and politicians and even academics – is becoming ever more frequent and ever more dangerous. It’s not just the clichés we are taught to use when we are cub reporters, nor the banal language of our pseudo-statesmen nor the secretive language of anthropologists; nor the politically ‘correct’ message of advertisers, company executives and diplomats. In the Middle East, our weasel words can be lethal, especially when they are subtly intended to define the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’, to undermine the humanity of one race of people at the expense of another. Our journalism is already biased – the initial response of French writers and intellectuals to the 1967 Middle East war is proof enough of this – without resorting to subterranean words that ‘key in’ our prejudice. Perhaps we now ‘experience’ language rather than listen to it. Over the years, I have more and more studied the Babel of lies that we produce, and the few – the pitifully few – writers who believe, like Victor Klemperer, in ‘the truth of language’.
I was seventeen when I first arrived in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was a city of heavy, black, nineteenth-century buildings, a spider’s web of iron bridges and smouldering steam locomotives, the air thick with coal smoke and red haze from the steel works at Consett. The news editor of the Evening Chronicle, John Brownlee, did his best to cheer me up. ‘You’ll be in our Blyth office, Bob, a bustling little coal town on the coast with plenty of life and lots of news.’ Brownlee was in estate-agent mode. Blyth was a down-at-heel collier harbour, smothered in the dust of doomed mines and a thousand coal fires. The slagheaps glowed red at night, the dying shipyards were bankrupt, pools of vomit lay splashed over the pavements outside the Blyth and Tyne and two dozen other pubs and clubs every Sunday morning. Even in summer, a kind of North Sea mildew settled over the town, a damp, cold cloth mixed with coal smoke that smothered all who lived there.
I was homesick and lonely and I was paid £17.50 a week, a third of which I handed over to Mrs Hamilton, my landlady at 82 Middleton Street, where I slept in a room 7 ft in length and just 5 ft wide with a single tiny gas fire. When I came home one day I found the Gas Board asking my landlady why there was no money in the meter; I had to explain that I didn’t earn enough to pay for the heating. So I spent all evening in front of the fire in the rotting old back-to-back Chronicle office in Seaforth Street, then walked home through the smoke at midnight and cowered under my blankets for warmth. I used to read history books on Sunday afternoons, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, sitting in the overgrown Victorian beach garden near the port.
But there were stories. I shared my digs with the gloriously named Captain Fortune, deputy harbour-master of Blyth, whose moment of glory arrived when a Cold War Polish fishing- fleet put into port during a storm. And stayed. And stayed. When Fortune boarded the first trawler to demand its immediate departure, the Polish captain slapped him round the face with a massive, sharp-finned fish. I warned readers that the Victorian wooden staithes from which freight trains would unload coal into the colliers were in danger of collapse. I staggered through feet of water deep under the Tyne to watch two teams of miners hack their way through to each other in the first stage of what was to be Newcastle’s first under-river motorway. I catalogued the massive overspending on Blyth’s spanking new power station. I recorded the classical learning of the Blyth town clerk as he used quotations from mythology to defeat motorway extension