TURKEY SHOOT
Anthony Daniels says that European breast
beating over the Armenian massacres is part of the Dianafi cation of our moral lives
I HAPPENED to be in Istanbul on the day the French senate passed its resolution recognising the massacre of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 as a genocide. That evening I dined with a member of the Turkish elite — which, as I had noticed before, is vastly better-educated, bettermannered, and more cultivated and urbane than our own boorish simulacrum of an elite.
One of my host's other guests was a grand and amusing Turkish lady, who arrived in a lather of indignation against the French. Naturally, she was herself a great Francophile and was speaking in perfect French. What did the French think they were playing at? Didn't they have enough skeletons in their own cupboard to be getting on with?
There followed a brief and passionate discussion of the Armenian massacre. One had to remember that the Armenians had lived happily with the Turks for hundreds of years before the advent of nationalism; that, during the massacre, the very large Armenian community in Istanbul (still, to this day. 150,000-strong) was virtually untouched; that it was wartime, and the Russians were trying to turn the Armenians against the Ottoman state; that Turks had suffered at the hands of Greeks and other Christians; that many of the 600,000 who died were not killed deliberately, but as a consequence of the confused circumstances of the time.
Well, it seemed to me that, even if the figure of 600,000 were accepted as the true one (and no figure has ever been more disputed than the number of Armenians who died in 1915), it was a very large one indeed, particularly in relation to the population at risk. And the tu quoque argument, that you are just as bad as me and therefore in no position to criticise, usually indicates a conscience that is not entirely clear.
That the French have recently pretended to rediscover with shock what was already well known both to them and others, namely that their forces used torture on a large scale in Algeria; that the re-revelation of the fact that up to 40,000 psychiatric patients in Vichy and occupied France died of starvation without a peep • of protest either from the medical profession or the laity had jolted memories that would rather not have been jolted; that tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up with unseemly enthusiasm and deported to certain death in the same years; that the French had de facto colluded with the undoubted recent genocide in Rwanda: does not in the least bring comfort to the Armenians who died, much less justify their deaths. But it does raise questions about the wave of self-righteousness that is sweeping Europe, including Britain, about Turkey and the Turks just at the moment. Why now, and why the Turks?
In part, no doubt, it is because there is an atavistic Gladstonian stereotype of Turkish cruelty and barbarity that persists in European consciousness. It is conveniently forgotten that, for some hundreds of years, it was better to be a Jew in the Ottoman lands than in most of Europe — a fact of which I was reminded when I met a shopkeeper in Istanbul who still spoke Ladino, or mediaeval Spanish, at home, being a descendant of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1493 and who sought refuge in Turkey. Even now, there are some 25,000 Ladino speakers in Istanbul and if, half a millennium later, the language is at last dying out, it is not because of official persecution.
The sudden wave of condemnation of the Turks is also, in part, attributable to the Dianafication of our moral and emotional lives. We think that if only we emote enough, about the right subjects, we are good people. What counts is not what we do, but how we feel — or rather, how we say we feel, since in this shallow world of constant emoting it is difficult or impossible to tell the real from the fake. There is a kind of Gresham's law of emotion, whereby the fake drives out the real; and this, in turn, sets up a kind of arms race in the expression of compassion or sorrow, so that ever greater and more extravagant expressions are needed to prove one's moral worth in contradistinction to others'.
Our very own Prime Minister finds it much easier to express suitably pious feelings about genocide than to ensure financial and other forms of propriety among his colleagues. But then he is a typical modern man: he feels deeply about things in inverse proportion to his real moral responsibility for them. The further away they are, the more he feels; and so it is easier for him to condemn the Turks — or, rather, the great-grandfathers of the Turks — than to refrain from causing cluster bombs to be dropped in various countries at the behest of the Americans. That would take real courage.
Is it too much to say that modern man feels deeply about large but distant events, the better to excuse his own immorality in small but near ones? I think not.
Far be it from me to subscribe to the materialist theory of history, but could it not also be that the resuscitation of the image of the hook-nosed, scimitar-bearing, baby-murdering Turk (there is no racist like an antiracist) in part stems from a desire to keep Turkey out of Europe? The population of Turkey is 70 million and rising. The sudden arrival of so many poorly-paid people on the European labour market might upset the cosy relations currently existing between welfare state, employers and employees. The depiction of the Turks as eternal mass murderers provides the perfect excuse for keeping them out, without having to reveal the real reason.
Man, however, is a symbolic animal. The manipulation of symbols has, as all history shows, real, and not usually benign, consequences. Men have died in huge numbers not merely over symbols, but over symbols of symbols. Of course, that hardly bothers modern man, who is far more concerned to feel good than to do good: the world for him is but a form of psychotherapy.
But I can hardly think of a better way of stirring up trouble in the region than by taunting the Turks in an irresponsible and fundamentally self-indulgent fashion. The only Armenian beneficiary of such a policy would be Charles Aznavour. Let us use our reflections upon genocide and mass murder — than which there is no subject worthier of being reflected upon — to worry less about feeling good, and more about behaving well.
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