Replacing the invisibility of genocide remembrance with indivisibility
Greece should advocate a new approach to genocide remembrance. Currently genocides are memorialized on a parochial basis. Different days throughout the year commemorate different genocide victims: January 27 for the Jewish holocaust, April 7 for the Tutsi genocide, April 24 for the Armenian genocide, May 19 for the Pontic Greek genocide, May 20 for the Cambodian genocide, August 2 for the Roma genocide, August 7 for the Assyrian genocide, September 14 for the Asia Minor Greek genocide, etc. These days of remembrance pass by unrecognized for the most part by anyone other than the victims’ descendants. Thus, in effect, the parochial approach promotes the “invisibility” of genocide and does little to make genocide less likely.
Israel Charny, the renowned genocide scholar, well explained the limitations of a proprietary and parochial approach to genocide. Using poignant examples from multiple groups, he demonstrated the tendency of genocide victim groups to:
1) assert moral superiority and refuse to believe their kind could be capable of atrocities.
2) “obscure, ignore, conceal, or at least minimize awareness of other victims who died alongside ‘their’ ‘preferred’ victim group in a given genocide.”
3) dispute and deny well-documented cases of genocide other than their own as if doing so makes their group’s suffering less significant.
Charny argues we need to recognize “all victims of each genocidal event,” a position that seems self-evident. Yet, as he relates, there is intense resistance to such an inclusive approach. Individual scholars and advocacy groups fervently want to focus just on the suffering of their own kind. This attitude has greatly complicated widespread recognition of well-documented genocides, so much so that the world does not currently recognize genocide based on best evidence. Instead, it does so based on narrow political calculations of national advantage.
The result is that even countries with populations that have suffered genocide often ignore the same horrors elsewhere. Armenia did not recognize the Greek and Assyrian genocides until 2015, almost a hundred years after they took place. Greece still recognizes only the Pontic Greek genocide even though authoritative scholarship demonstrates it is “incontrovertible” that Turkish leaders planned, orchestrated, and executed the genocide of all Asia Minor Christians. And, despite lobbying from Charny and others, Israel does not recognize these other genocides. Wikipedia charts “genocide recognition politics” country by country, but it all boils down to elevating marginal political interests above a common concern for genocide recognition, restitution, and prevention.
Individual genocides vary by numbers of victims and the means of their demise, but all genocides are attempts to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. They all entail large-scale mass murder of innocents. They all unfold in a common pattern that makes them predictable. Scholars label the stages differently, but the overall process is the same. Thea Halo offers a simple formulation that is easy to remember. She emphasizes three “Ds” of genocide: dehumanization, demonization, and destruction. She notes a likely fourth “D” is denial, as most perpetrators try to avoid accountability for their deeds.
Halo is the author of a riveting memoir (“Not Even My Name”) of her mother, Sano, and her escape from genocide. Sano’s experience speaks eloquently to the commonalities of genocides. First, she lost all the members of her Pontic Greek family. An Armenian family took her in, and they fled ongoing massacres too. Then, at age 15, she was wedded to an Assyrian Christian who also fled from genocide, and that enabled her escape to safety in the United States. Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were distinctly different ethnic groups, but they all shared the common experience of being targeted for extinction because they were Christians.
Even the labels used to identify genocides help illustrate their fundamental similarities. The Nazi genocide of Jews is called “the holocaust,” which is derived from the Greek word for “conflagration.” However, as two Israeli scholars note, the annihilation of Asia Minor Christians was also called a “holocaust.” Moreover, the culminating event in the Asia Minor genocides, the destruction of Smyrna and its accompanying conflagration, was widely called “the Smyrna holocaust.” “Catastrophe” is also a shared label. Greeks refer to their Asia Minor genocides as, “the catastrophe,” and many Jews use “Shoah,” the Hebrew word for catastrophe, to describe their holocaust. “Holocaust,” “conflagration,” and “catastrophe,” whether expressed in Greek or Hebrew, all communicate the same horrific, widespread desolation, and all peoples who have suffered genocide share a common interest in ensuring it never happens again.
That day will never come unless the world resolves to punish genocide. In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt decried the Armenian genocide as “the greatest crime of the war” and argued “the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense” and just so much “insincere claptrap.” Roosevelt was proven right. The great powers that won World War I failed to punish Turkey for committing genocide, even though it was one of their explicit wartime objectives. They were too focused on Germany and conflicted and exhausted by war to impose peace terms. The Germans watched with amazement as the Turks transformed their defeat into an unprecedented victory by continuing the war, defeating the Allied powers, forcing them to renegotiate their peace treaty, and wiping out their “internal enemies” to produce a homogenous Turkish national entity. The Nazis admired the Turks for this, and later emulated their model of genocide against Jews and other “undesirables.”
The world needs a broader consensus on the critical importance of making genocide counter-productive, and thus less likely. One hundred years ago, George Horton, an American diplomat, sacrificed his career to combat the cover up of the Asia Minor genocide of Christians. Eighty years ago, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish resistance, risked his life to reveal the Nazi genocide of Jews. Recently, a Turkish basketball player in the NBA, Enes Kanter Freedom, sacrificed his career to protest China’s ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims. Sadly, such heroic protests are not widespread. Activists of all stripes are more willing to protest much lesser injustices or even poor policies while ignoring the much greater evil of genocide. They prove Soviet leader Joseph Stalin right when he cynically observed: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
It is time to emphasize a different approach, one that will replace the “invisibility” of genocide with the “indivisibility” of genocide; that is, a common recognition that all genocides must be punished wherever they occur. It would help if a country showed the way forward. Why not Greece? Ancient Greeks pioneered Western civilization and the concept of individual liberties. During the Asia Minor genocides, modern Greeks gave the world a wonderful example of forbearance and generosity, as Horton noted:
“The conduct of the Greeks toward the thousands of Turks residing in Greece, while the ferocious massacres [in Asia Minor] were going on, and while Smyrna was being burned and refugees, wounded, outraged and ruined, were pouring into every port of Hellas, was one of the most inspiring and beautiful chapters in all that country’s history. There were no reprisals. The Turks living in Greece were in no wise molested, nor did any storm of hatred or revenge burst upon their heads. This is a great and beautiful victory that, in its own way, rises to the level of Marathon and Salamis…witness also its treatment of the Turkish prisoners of war, and its efforts for the thousands of refugees that have been thrown upon its soil.”
Dr Esther Lovejoy, who was also present at Smyrna, agreed. She noted Greece accepted all Asia Minor refugees – Greek and non-Greek – when other European nations would not accept any. “The Golden Age of Greece in art and literature was over two thousand years ago,” she argued, “but the Golden Age of Greece measured by the Golden Rule” was evident in the universal Greek response to “the catastrophe.” Just as Greece once accepted all the surviving Christians from Asia Minor, it should now formally recognize them all as victims of genocide.
Greek leaders have been encouraged to do this before, but Greek diplomats worry it would irritate Turkey. That is a concern, but it is doubtful that refusing to acknowledge the Asia Minor genocides will make Greece safer. Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Erdogan, promotes neo-Ottoman rhetoric and makes the risible claim that his country was disadvantaged by the Lausanne treaties. If he thinks he can get away with attacking Greece, he will do so whether Greece recognizes the Asia Minor genocides or not. America, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy all played roles in helping cover up Turkish atrocities. The sooner Greek allies in Europe and the United States understand the true history of genocide in Asia Minor, the more likely they will be to punish past genocides and resist new acts of aggression, and the safer Greece and all peace-loving people will be. In that regard, taking a stand on behalf of genocide recognition is the prudent as well as the right thing to do.
Ismini Lamb is the director of Modern Greek Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her article on Europe’s role in covering up and then rewarding the Asia Minor genocides, “Europe’s Killing Fields,” was published by The New European on April 4, 2023, and her co-authored biography of George Horton, “The Gentle American,” was published in 2022.
