Crime/s against mankind, humanity and civilisation

“To realize that the sky is blue everywhere - and all over - one need not travel around the world.”

J. W. Goethe “Maximen und Reflexionen”

Under the title „CRIME/S AGAINST MANKIND, HUMANITY, AND CIVILISATION" which includes historical crimes as criminis magna against hu manity and civilisation within the 20th century, the author, an experienced political scientist, and social psychologist, presents the grounded concept of his approach to what he identified as the three basic genocidal events during the World Wars in Europe: Armenocide, Serbocide, Holocaust.

The first essay is the printed version of Richard Albrechts paper which was delivered to the “Second International Meeting on Genocidal Social Practices” (November 20-24, 2007), at Universidad de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentinia, focussing on the continuity on Genocidal Social Practices including relevant aspects of preventing genocidal actions, too.

According to the printed version of this GRIN-booklet, Richard Albrecht wrote two specific appendices: (i) under the title “On Genocidal Affairs or What Had Happened” the author publishes three very short notes on what stayed in his mind, to be remembered by a produc­tive anti-genocidal memory, as Ernst Bloch puts it, “which does not only remember what hap­pened but also what still is to be done“; (ii) under the title ""Murder(ing) Jews - secondly, academically, coldly ...The “finalsolution” in Germany, 1941-45, as “realizing Utopia”: On the false world of a prominent German tenure-historian the author as scholarly as thoroughly reviews, as a radical critic, the long-living, and most effective, complete reversal (“Umwer­tung aller Werte” [Friedrich Nietzsche]) Hans Mommsen (*1930) did the last forty years in his various publications, which were - and are - widely accepted as legitimate contributions of a genocide scholar in that Gebilde named international “scientific community”.

Richard Albrechts booklet also presents the authors c.v. and short notes on the books the au­thor published the last years, 2005-07.

Murder(ing) People Genocidal Policy Within 20th Century. Description, Analysis, and Prevention: Armenocide, Serbocide, Holocaust As Basic Genocidal Events During the World Wars*)

“Nothing but a memory is productive which does not only remember what happened but also what still is to be done“

(Ernst Bloch)

In this smart piece the author, an experienced German social psychologist, and political scien­tist, tries to sum up the very content of his own approach to genocide, genocidal action, geno­cidal policy, and genocidal mentality as a general pattern which was worked out, at first, in his inaugural lecture February 1st, 1989 (Albrecht 1989), and which the author recently pub­lished in his books on Genocide and Armenocide when discussing comparative and theoreti­cal aspects of genocidal policy within 20th century (Albrecht 2006); the third volume of the authors trilogy on genocidal policy within 20th century (“Genozidpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert’), presenting the first scholarly verification of the notorious speech Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), as chancellor of the German Reich and Führer of the German people, delivered to his Supreme Commanders at Obersalzberg, on August 22nd, 1939 is actually prepared: the key sentence can be valued as a sort of “genocidal connection” between Armenocide and Holocaust:

„Who [the fuck] is, after all, today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians ?“¹

Needlessness to state that the author, who, as a scholar of genocide², recently published a short piece summing up the second genocide during World War II - named Serbocide³ - is by no means one of that dubious guys self-naming 'genocide scholar' but, in fact, either ou­vert or covert, proclaiming such cloudy issues like hierarchies of the three genocidal victim- groups during the two World Wars - the Ottoman Armenians (1915/16), the European Jews, and the Serbs in “Satellite Croatia” (1941/45) which the author looks upon as the three basic genocidal events during the two World Wars.

Whenever looking on genocide politically, the author feels that the best anti-genocidal per­spective in fact is an anti-fascist and anti-racialist one - although whenever looked upon the genocidal phenomenon as a scholar that cannot be regarded as a vital essential condition or conditio sine qua non: according to the dialectics of general and special features of the geno- cidal field and its sufficient condition(s), empirical details, and random aspects, a society must neither be classified as a 'fascist' one to be regarded as a 'genocidal' society: the Italian soci­ety between the World Wars indeed was a 'fascist' but by no means a genocidal one like the South African, which basically was a racial one (like some of the Southern US-states were at that time). Any genocidal society is a racial one but non vice versa: not any racialist society is a genocidal or a fascist one. Moreover, the German society since 1933 soon became both a fascist and a racial societal basic structure causing another Great War (like in 1914) which also belongs to the historical context in which both the very genocidal crimes committed in Ottoman Turkey (1915/16) during the First and in Satellite Croatia (1941/45) during the Sec­ond World War - another feature which demonstrates the very meaning of the event Great or World War within 20th century either caused by a genocidal regime like the German or ac­tively using the given occasion (in the meaning of opportunity structure/s) either by Young Turk or by Ustase leadership in 1915 and 1941 under the umbrella of the German Reich as the most powerful ally. presses the victory of the former genocidal violators as another final solution ... I may also remind me readership of three facts of life the German poetical playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) had worked out in other contexts: (i) whenever injustice happens too often it will not become justice because it happens very often; (ii) in the last instance the truth cannot be suppressed but must be publicly repeated again and again even after it had been once recog­nized as the very truth; (iii) within the intellectual field democracy indeed means transforming the small circle of connoisseurs towards the large circle of connoisseurs - a 'sociological ex­perience' which should never be forgotten by any genocidal scholar whenever engaged in preventing genocidal action/s, too, for a basic virtuality must be taken into consideration: “Human actions are not destined be the very facts but by the perceptions of the facts acting humans have got.” (Alexander v. Humboldt)

I. Genocide is not only mass killing and killing masses as traditionally well-known like massacres, mass atrocities, pogroms, riots, and slaughter, but 'modern' serial killing, strategi­cally planned and organized, not only of masses but of peoples as entire populations for racial, religious, ethnic, political, and even ideological reasons: neither traditional massacres and atrocities nor well-known mass slaughters, pogroms, and riots, and also not only administra­tive murder of masses (as a conventional measure applied by absolute rulership, dictatorship, tyranny, colonialism etc. before World War I.), but of people. After World War I. traditional „administrative mass-murder” (Al. Carthill) became modern „administrative mass-murder as organised by a state” (Hannah Arendt) which later on was described as “policy of extermina­tion” (Majorie Housepian), and as „organized state murder” (Helen Fein), and defined as „structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus” (Irving Louis Horowitz), indeed, as an outstanding „crime against mankind and civilisation as planned and organized by a state” (Richard Albrecht)⁴, “the blackest page in history” (H.A. Gibbons).

II. Needlessly to stress that not only these but all the pieces on genocide worked out and published by the author within the last two decades are lead by a central principle according to a grounded problem of any research work on genocide which the author himself once na­med, in summer 1989, the urgent „development of an early warning system against genocidal tendencies” („Entwicklung eines Frühwarnsystems gegen Völkermordtendenzen. Pilotstudie zu einem unbearbeiteten Grundproblem einer kultur-, sozial- und politikwissenschaftlichen Friedensforschung“ 1989, 2 p., not printed [in German]). Given this setting, the author em­phasizes the very meaning of a basic 'historical memory' (Jorgé Semprún) which inevitably also includes „what still is to be done” (Ernst Bloch) as one of the central presuppositions and conditio sine qua non for preventing genocide.

III. According to me own research work on genocide as the most destructive event in the history of mankind and state-sponsored 'crime against humanity and civilisation' (as pub­lished in 1989) I take the liberty - if I may - and quote the basic definition of genocide as worked out by Raphael Lemkin:

„In this respect genocide is a new technique of occupation, aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.” (Lemkin 1944: chp. XI: Genocide, 81)

Following this concept means that within 20th century there do exist until now three out­standing events, two of them well-documented as genocides and crimes against humanity and civilisation: 'Armenocide' (1915/18) and 'Holocaust' (1941/45), the third, 'Serbocide' (1941/45), still under-documented. Any specific silence as practised by German historians traditionally and actually until the first 'colonial genocide' in German South West Africa (GSWA), 1904-07, is also a relevant subject: this „smart genocide” (Micha Brumlik) started when the German representative declared the native ethnic group (Nama) no longer as sub­jects of His Majesty, The German Kaiser William II (v. Trotha, October 2nd, 1904):

„ The Herero people is no longer subject of the German crown. They have murdered and sto­len [...] The Herero people has to leave this country. If the Herero people will not follow this order, I will force the Herero people by using my Great Fire Gun.” (Bley 1968, 204)

This specific command, which indeed did exist, and its consequences, and very meanings ex­press of what can be regarded as 'genocidal mentality' due to the mainstream of German co­lonial and imperial ideology before World War I. (Herrenmenschen, later on Herrenvolk) ac­cording to the whites as the mastery race (Herrenrasse). Moreover, another relevant aspect of this early annihilation order given in 1904 lays in its very secrecy as a general feature of all genocidal actions within 20th-century-genocides. Finally, the image and the perception of German rules in GSWA as mirrored in diary and letters written by the Nama-leader Captain Hendrik Witbooi, 1884-1894, are of scholarly relevancy, too. This native individual indeed felt military measures against his people as, in the last instance, both destructive and lethal policy of the German occupants. In a way the Witbooi-writings can be regarded as the first (written) document which gave testimony of the underlying concept of any 'modern' geno­cide and genocidal action within 20th century at all: the very destruction of an entire popula- tion as planned and organised by a state and his (military, administrative, cultural, medical, ideological etc.) officials.

IV. The mass murdering of about one and half a million Armenians (fifteen hundred thou­sand humans) in the Ottoman/Turkish State 1915-1922 was „the first planned and organized genocide within 20th century” (Edgar Hilsenrath). Moreover, without studying this out­standing destructive event as the most nasty crime a state can ever commit any scholarly un­derstanding of genocide is hardly possibly. Finally, the Armenocide (in German: Armenozid) was, in fact, not only an outstanding crime but also the „essential prototype of genocide in the 20th century” (Irving L. Horowitz) applying modern techniques, too. The former (West) German Federal Chancellor, Dr. phil. Helmut Kohl, stressed, in April 1987, the very argument his ghost-writer at that time, Dr. phil. Klaus Hildebrandt, gave according to the uniqueness of the Holocaust, his instrumental modernity and economic efficiency, following Hannah Ar­endts consideration on the Holocaust as state-sponsored killing:

„The crime of the Holocaust named genocide is indeed unique within human history whenever looking on the cold inhuman planning and its lethal efficiency ’.

Meanwhile there does exist a translation of relevant documents of the Turkish post-War mili­tary trials into German, and also into American English. In 1919, the Stambul Trial con­demned to death 17 Young Turk politicians - one of them the prominent CUP-leader Talaat Pasha, the former Ministry of the Interior (1913-1918) - as responsible for the destruction of the Armenian people as „organised by a united state-power”. Moreover, the genocidal actions followed the official order as given against „persons acting against the Ottoman government at war times” (Akcam 2004, 178)

The Ottoman Ministry of the Interior and member of the most powerful triumvirat, Talaat Pa­sha, declared, in August 1915, that the ’’Armenian Question” does not exist any longer (Lep- sius 1919, 146):

„La question arménienne n'existeplus“

In so far Talaat followed Abdul Hamid II who was as the absolute ruler until the Young Turks overtook political power in 1908 responsible for two well-know atrocities against and massa­cres of Armenians in 1895/96 and in 1903/04. This man publicly stated in 1896 [The Nation, 14th January, 1897]:

„The way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians“

The interview Talaat gave in 1916, two decades later, expresses the specific modernity of the first genocide within 20th century. In his statement the most prominent CUP-leader publicly declared on „the Armenian question” (Morgenthau 1918, p. 336)⁵

„We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow”

To quote a legitimate US-scholar (of religious history) commenting the Talaat-interview (Rubinstein 1983, 19):

„The Armenians were slaughtered not for what they did but for what the Turks suspected some of them might do in the future.”

What Talaat expressed in 1916 when he stresses „that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow” anticipates possible developments, created (what Hannah Arendt later on identified as) 'the objective enemy' (Arendt 1989, 654), and expresses the modern scientific idea of latent potentiality (as worked out by theoretical physics, especially the 'quantum the­ory'). As the author mentioned when looking on relevant documents according to the Croatian genocide of the Serbs living in the Ustase state 1941/45 (Albrecht 2006, Völkermord[en]: 71­93), the principal concept of 'the objective enemy' was also graphically applied by the mur­derous perpetrators and Croatian elitist political figures as a sort of “lumpen-intelligentia” (Yehuda Bauer): on November 26, 1941, the Croatian government ordered that repressive measures are to be applied against those “unwanted persons who might threaten the very achievements of the Croatian Ustase Movement for liberation.” (quoted in ibid: 89) Given this setting, the concept “objective enemy” as, at first, scholarly sketched by Hannah Arendt (1951) might serve as a relevant key feature for scholars whenever analysing 'modern' geno­cide under comparative aspects and perspectives (Albrecht 1989).

V. The intellectual political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German emigré to the United States of America (USA) in the Second World War, sketched her basic concept of “the objective enemy” (“objektiver Gegner”) as part of her 'diagnosis of our time' at the be­ginning of the 1950's. Every totalitarian regime applies an ideology due to that leading figure which the author filtered out of the fascist “juridical” writings highly powerful German politi­cians like Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) and Werner Best (1903-1989) did when stigmatiz­ing humans publicly naming as the “objective enemy” and the very “people's enemy” - “an everlasting enemy” of the German people: “the very enemy of the racial, cultural, and spiri­tual being, and substance, of our people.” (Heydrich 1936: 121-123) Moreover, it is one of the main tasks of the totalitarian political police within the nationalsozialistische Führerstaat as a specific institution “which is thoroughly, and permanently, monitoring the body of the Ger­man people, which is timely detecting every symptom of illness, and her destructive germs, and which is eliminating all of it totally by applying effective methods” - “ferretting out and monitoring the enemies of the state for disposing them of at the right moment - that is the preventive-police task of a political police.” (Best 1936: 125-128)

Of course those “preventive-police task” does mean the complete reversal of any rule of law and her leading principles - “nullum crimen sine lege“ [no crime without law], “nulla poena sine lege” [without law no punishment], and “nulla poena sine culpa” [no punishment without guiltiness] - which basically guarantees not only the presumption of innocence - nobody who is accused has to establish the innocence of the defendant in general - but also “fair trial” es­pecially. According to the political system of historical Stalinism in the 1930's, Susanne Leonhard (1895-1984), in the end of 1918 a founding mother of the authentic Communist Party in Germany (SPARTAKUSBUND), who became, as an emigré to the USSR, a political prisoner from 1935 to 1948, later remembered the way the secret police oppressed its “pre­sumptive enemies” (Leonhard 1959):

“There was no individual guiltiness at all - on the contrary: any individual 'crime' was con­structed lateron to that end that the individual 'case' could be classified under the given cate­gory of political suspect persons [...] That the secret police will arrest somebody because this person belonged to a specific group whose members are looked upon as potential rebels by the government was a specific insight” - the author added - “which most of us unfortunately realised much more later.”

VI. The very 'modernity' of the Genocide against the Armenians 1915/16 is also expressed within the forms of genocidal actions Ottoman Turks really did. Mass killing as serial killing was organised in an highly efficient manner due to the logic of economic efficiency whenever executing the genocidal business. When during World War II. in Europe gas-chambers were economically the most efficient instrument of mass-killing Jews - mass-killing Armenians during World War I. in Minor Asia complied another economic rationality according to any logic of saving material: they did not involve the waste of powder and shell (Morgenthau 1918, 321):

„ As the Turks themselves boasted they were more economical since they did not involve the waste ofpowder and shell.”

In a specific way the most destructive event during the First World War, the „administrative holocaust” (Winston Churchill) called Armenocide, which began in April 24th, 1915, in Con­stantinople as the first „modern“ genocide within 20th century, expresses, although until now not mentioned at all, what the encyclia „Evangelium vitae“, eighty years later, emphasised as the very „value and inviolability of human life“ in general, when characterising any „culture of death“, whenever „taken as a whole“, as the result of a policy of „the strong“ against the weak who have no choice but to submit“ (Ioannes Paulus PP. II [Carol Woytila, 1920-2005]: Evangelium vitae To the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women religious lay, Faith­ful and all People of Good Will, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life [March 25th, 1995]), cpt. 19).

VII. In June 2005, the German Federal Parliament („Bundestag”) made up her mind and decided a modest critique of the Turkish denial of what happened but neither used the expres­sion „genocide” nor „Armenocide”. Like all governments of the Turkish Republic since 1923, the current one denies not only any Turkish Genocide but also continues that as official as rubbish talk on „tragic events during the war”. Moreover, and as far as I know, a chequered group, politically unified under the umbrella that an Turkish Genocide in 1915/16 is the very fiction of a so-called plot or conspiracy of the world-wide Armenian community, when organ­ising her „March Towards Berlin” where the official Turkish community hold a demonstra­tion on March 18th, 2006, the day Talaat died of an assassination an Armenian student exe­cuted, 85 years ago (in Berlin, 1921), demanding that the German Federal Parliaments (for one voice) declaration is to cancel (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: February 4th, 2006, 39). Obviously these daisy bones do not at all know that Kemal Pasha („Atatürk”), the founding father of the Turkish Republic, before the Lausanne Treaty (1923), in 1920, several times talked on „the Armenian catastrophe”. Moreover, in October, 1920, Kemal mentioned about 800.000 killed Armenians and damned the act (Akcam 20042, 123-125).

VIII. One of the central topics of any profound definition of genocide within 20th century as crimen magnum is not only the very fact the taking-lives-actor is a state but also that any destructive acts like expelling, prosecuting, and killing people are undertaken by a the state as the most powerful national institution executed after a central governmental plan. Although is was not the main task of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in 1945-46, this in­ternational court which was often, and not only by the victims, scorned as the winners tribu­nal, in fact did a great juristic job when, in the general field of war of aggression, proofed, and verified, the central plan of the Nazi figures when attacking Poland on September 1st, 1939, as a sort of conspiracy against peace.

Moreover, not only a central plan guiding the action/s undertaken is basically required, but at least one command, expressing the destructive will of the Führer and his intension to kill an entire social group, collective, or people, for ethnic, religious, political, economic, or ideo­logical reasons structurally belongs to any 'modern' genocidal business, too.

When looking on the Armenocide, at first glance a central plan for the total annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians during World War I seems to exist: the Andonian documents, published, as evidence of 'The Great Crime', in Armenian language under the titleMedz Vojeeru (1921), as well as in French (Documents officiels concernant les massacres arméniens, 1920) and in English (The Memoirs of Naim Bey, 1920). Some sixty years later, one of the leading scien­tific experts, the US-scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian, in 1986, verified the documents as authentic telegrams send out by the CUP-leader and central figure within the ruling political elite, the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior, Talat Pasha, in 1915, to instruct his followers within the state bureaucracy in the very province how to handle their genocidal business in an efficient manner. According to genocidal research, the existence of a central plan whenever expressed in orders, or commands, written down is, in fact, as conditio sine qua non, not one of various sufficient conditions, but a necessary condition and insofar essential according to any scien­tific definition of genocide as such, it is by no means surprising that 'the other side', above all representatives of the Turkish state, her political elite, and her relevant institutions⁶ do not accept this perspective but declare these documents either at best as “Armenian fiction” (Orel; Yuca 1986) or at worst as “forgeries” (Ataöv 1984; 1986).

For until now nobody has seen the original telegrams send out by Talat from Constantinople in Osmanian language (Osmanli)⁷, there is, indeed, a heavy problem not only due to any scholarly work but also opening the road to denial the Armenocide in general, classifying what happened either as tragic war-events with mutual perpetrators and victims on both sides or as an effective “Armenian fiction” particularly created by the world-wide Armenian com­munity plotting against Turkey and the Turks.

Be it as it ever may be: first of all for nearly fifty years a central command, or order, by Adolf Hitler as a necessary condition for recognizing, and accepting, the historical fact of the Holo­caust as the destruction of the entire European Jewry during World War II with between five and six million humans as empirical victims has, until now, never scholarly been disputed. Moreover, until now a written source of evidence produced by Hitler himself could not be found, and it is, indeed, doubtable whether such a document exist at all. Christian Gerlach, at that time a German student of the Holocaust, read, however, as the first historian at all, in 1986/87, two well-known diaries of politically relevant figures within the German genocidal elite thoroughly, and this enabled him to work out the meaning of a secret speech Hitler gave, on December 12th, 1941, above all to some of his high-ranked party functionaries proclaim­ing the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe as his basic “political decision” (Gerlach 1997; 20013).

The second argument lies not in the field of comparative genocidal research like the first one but has to do with the situation of official Ottoman documents and its highly selective use. Nevertheless another student of genocide in general, and of the Armenocide 1915/16 espe­cially, found out when investigating the relationship between the very political centre as rep­resented by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior in Constantinople, and his close CUP- follower Dr. Mehmed Resid, in March 25th, 1915, freshly established as the new regional governor in Anatolian town Diyarbekir.

Presenting an excellent scholarly piece when describing what another investigator called the “cumulative radicalization” within the murderous Armenocidal process itself (Bloxham 2003), the Dutch junior scholar Ugur Ü. Üngör (2006) not only identifies more than a dozen official Ottoman documents, most of them produced by Talat and send to his vicegerent in Diyarbekir (and to the provinces of Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, and others, too), but also analyses the various steps on the road to Armenocide identifying both the second half of March, 1915, as the crucial date leading to a certain 'point of no return'. Finally, after having looked on the special archive in Istanbul (“Baçbakanlik Osmanli Ardivi“ [Ottoman Archives under the Prime Ministry]) which has got more than hundred millions of files⁸, Üngör presents the command as given by Talat on May 23rd, 1915, to all the provinces when ordering “the wholesale deportations of all Armenians to Deyr-ul Zor, starting with the northeastern prov­inces.”

This official Ottoman document (as to be found in the Ottoman Archives under BOA, DH.SFR, and not within the central register BOA, MV) is, as Üngör points out, until now “the single instance in which the empire-wide nature of the deportations is reflected in one order at the most central level.” (Üngör 2006, 187; 195, note 131) In the very meaning of quod-erad- demonstrandum, and even when comparing to the situation according to the Holocaust in 1941 without any written order from the very top, any dispute on “the Andonian documents” indeed is a yesterday discussion (in spite of the fact that the Talat telegrams at first were men­tioned from H.A. Gibbons [1916]).

In his outlook U.Ü. Üngör reminds us on the public declaration of the three Entente powers dated May, 24th, 1915, condemning “these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civili­zation”, promising that “all members of the Ottoman government and those of her agents who are implicated in such massacres [...] will hold personally responsible.” Having realized their projective fate, “the CUP leaders, especially Talat, panicked”, creating immediately, for cov­ering the beginning genocide, an emergency decree on the deportations as a sort of pseudo­law (May 29th, 1915). Later on an ideological pamphlet above all to be distributed among the diplomats at Pera⁹ was produced in French, denying that Armenocide had well-started, us­ing pseudo-arguments picked up by all post-Ottoman true-believers and fanatics, either mili­tant Kemalists or not, till nowadays.

IX. Whenever scholarly looking on what could be named Serbocide (“killing Serbes”) as a specific way of mass killing during World War II as planned and organized serial killing by the political leadership of “Satellite Croatia” (1941-1945) which started in summer 1941 it is clear that this was not only mass slaughter at hardcore-level of cruelty but, in fact, and strictu sensu, another genocide with about one million victims within nearly four years. What might appear, at the first glance, as Balkan atrocities - or just another balkanized massacre happen­ing - was, in fact, the murder of that part of the Serbs as a people living, in 1941, as citizen in the newly created Croatian state (about 1,5 million humans at all belonged to that ethnic, reli­gious, and cultural minority). Remembering the very historical context of that specific geno- I take the liberty - if I may - and address me scholarly readers, she or he, that I will, for rea­sons, not name what happened in 1915 “the Armenian Genocide” as “the terrible Holocaust” (Bernard Lewis) with about one and half a million Ottoman Armenians exterminated - “un­questionable the greatest crime of the First World War” Hirschfeld/Gaspar 1929: 510). For I know, of course, that not only in the so called 'scientific community' this terrible slang­version is more and more used instead of what must be precisely indicated, like the Encyclo­paedia Britannica does in her latest CD-Rom version (2004I 2), “the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915”. Insofar I agree to distinguished genocidal scholars like Irving Louis Horowitz and Vahakn N. Dadrian when talking about the “Turkish Genocide” and the “Geno­cide against the Armenians”. Moreover, I feel that as rubbish as moronic talk - “Armenian Genocide” - is, indeed, not only as confusing as cretinous but also a sort of complete reversal in the very sense of Umwertung aller Werte (Friedrich Nietzsche) under most relevant moral, intellectual, political, historical, and linguistic aspects, declaring victims for perpetrators, and perpetrators for victims.

[...]

¹ Richard Albrecht, „Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier ?“ – Adolf Hitler zweite Geheimrede am 22. August 1939 [“Who is, after all, today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians ?“ – What Hitler really said when talking to his Supreme Commanders, August 22nd, 1939]: Genozidpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, Band 3, 104 p. (Aachen: Shaker, 2007 [= Allgemeine Rechtswissenschaft]); summary and table of contents -> http://www.shaker.de/shop/978-3-8322-6695-0; a short scholarly prospect is to be found online at GRIN-community: http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/76273.html. - I really don´t want to coin out another definition of Armenocide (in German: Armenozid) but take the liberty, however, to use, even in German, that artificial word which at first was used as Armenocide within the US-Armenian community and her scholars. The word and its meaning alludes to the fate of the Ottoman Armenians above all in 1915/16, expressing both the victimized group and what happened (cidere means killing). Neither the word nor the concept Armenocide implies anything about the way of murder(ing), in spite of the well-known, and as well artificially created, word Holocaust, which mirrors in its all-around meaning the form of the deliberate extermination of a people: holokaustos means totally burning humans when still living (Albrecht 1989, 69). Whenever looking on the way both genocides were executed, not Jews in 1941/45, but Armenians in 1915/16 were burnt when still living, having fled expecting shelter within their churches. In September 1922, when Kemalist militia occupied the Smyrna city, both Armenian, and Greek quarters were set in fire. Genocide means, stictu sensu, killing what was traditionally named a tribe or a race (genus cidere), typically nowadays named an ethnic group. Whenever any scholar uses the wide-spread expression “Armenian Genocide” (instead of correctly naming the subject “Turkish Genocide”), he or she should know that this term is a complete and horrifying reversal of the historical events and their genuine meaning, turning around the very relationship as if, in 1915/16, Armenians were the very perpetrators and Turks were their innocent victims. Moreover, as far as I know, until now no scholar, he or she, had lost his/her “tenure” because he/she publicly named what really happened correctly as “Turkish Genocide.” – Finally, there is good reason for understanding that what is named Holocaust virtually expresses the special German way (deutscher Sonderweg) of historical genocidal policy (Völkermord): a people self-naming the masterrace, organising in a fascist manner, and trying to set up a world-wide imperial(istic) dictatorship.

² The German sociologist Werner Hofmann (1968, 49-66) had characterized science formally as „the way of seeking knowledge in a methodical (as systematic as critical) way“ under two basic aspects: “(i) the general content of science has to be worked out (by collecting, describing, classifying the subjects, leading to any morphology, typology etc.); (ii) under theoretical aspects the very context and meaning of all appearances of the subjects and the underlying basic relations must be defined as rules belonging to reality. [...] At first comes the image of the real world as given by her empirical nature founding the empirical nature of reality. […] Any theoretical work of a scientist expresses the structural contradictory relationship of registering and interpreting of reality: reality can be understood without theory, but without theory sciences is not at all possible.” Whenever looking at sociology in particular, the sociologist Theodore Geiger (1948/49, 292-302) stressed: “Sociology cannot restrict her work to pure registration of human acting but must try to detect the basic underlying subjective processes, and describe the very meaning of human action.” – According to any scientific definition of genocide any rational logic has to apply the well-known principle definitio per genus proximum et differentiam specificam to differentiating between general and specific aspects within societal action, or to express the methodological principle that racism is as conditio sine qua non an essential precondition for genocide graphically: not every racialist society is essentially a genocidal society – but, however, every genocidal society is essentially a racialist society (Barth 2006, 172-199). For meanwhile racism is by no means what it was at first: methodologically spoken the mechanistic dissolution of the highly contradictory unit (named dialectics) of the biological and the social for the sole benefit of the biosphere. Moreover, whenever discussing human action/s and the mentality of the actors, I may remind my scholarly readership to what William I. Thomas, with Dorothy S. Thomas (1928², 571/572), accurately formulated as one of the basic theorems whenever describing human action/s: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences". Finally, W.I. Thomas (1967³, 42) later on pointed out: "gradually a whole life-policy and the personality of the individual himself [...] will be influenced by a series of definitions the individual is involved in“. According to small social worlds of every-day life – named intimacy – in particular W.I. Thomas stressed the very meaning of subjective impressions and feelings leading to definitions of the situation/s constituting another ´real´ social world of the acting individual/s: „subjective impressions can be projected onto life and thereby become real to projectors.” (Volkart 1951, 14)

³ Richard Albrecht, Serbozid. Über den Dritten Europäischen Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert; in: Kultursoziologie, 15 (2006) 2, 37-56; an enlarged version was published under the title: Serbozid, 1941-1945 (Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 71-93).

⁴ In German/y since 1915 until now typically played down whenever named „Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit” and not correctly called „Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit” - a sort of Newspeak which Hannah Arendt reviewed as „the understatement of the 20th century” at all; a brief case-study gives Albrecht (2004: Verbrechen). - For good reasons censorious measures as run by military dictatorship in Germany during World War I – especially when oppressing any facts on what was going on ´backwards down in the very Turkey´ - were of hard-core character and part of a policy later on named “the crime of silence”. The German churchman Dr Johannes Lepsius (1858-1926), a prominent so-called “friend of the Armenian people”, at first in 1916 detected the very character of “these new crimes against humanity and civilisation” when clearly naming that massacres, slaughters, and mass murders, as part of the “annihilation of the Armenian nation” (“Vernichtung der armenischen Nation”), and, finally, “murder of a nation” (“Völkermord, den die Jungtürken auf dem Gewissen haben.” (Albrecht, Völkermord[en], 2006, 117)

⁵ Berliner Tageszeitung und Handelszeitung 4.5.1916: Wilhelm Feldmann, Unterredung mit Talaat: „Man hat uns vorgeworfen, daß wir keinen Unterschied zwischen den schuldigen und den unschuldigen Armeniern gemacht hätten. Daß war unmöglich, da bei der Lage der Dinge morgen schuldig sein konnte, wer heute vielleicht noch unschuldig war.“ I overtook the wrong German „daß“ of the text-version as an original source.

⁶ The Turkish Historical Society (founded in 1931) does not belong to that in contemporary Turkey small sector of the ´civil society´ but is part of the state apparatus, forming particularly what Louis Althusser once classified as “ideological state apparatus”. To up-value history is until now part of the ideology, and policy, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Pasha, later on Atatürk (“the father of all Turks”), proclaimed in 1931: “Writing history is as important as making it.” („Tarih yazmak, tarih yapmak kadar önemlidir“). Howsoever political analysts may value basic power structures within Turkey Today, a sustainable feature is not to overlook: the “state within the state”, the “deep”, “parallel” or “arcane” state 22 as having developed from oriental “secret society” (Georg Simmel). In his latest book, Rudolf J. Rummel (2006, chp. XXIII, 152-159) also mentioned “the deep society” as an aggressive feature of traditional elites to be fought against.

⁷ One of the most relevant political measures to modernize every-day-life in Turkey as run by early Kemalism was, in 1928, replacing the old Arab way of writing by a new quasi-Latin alphabet which, however, lead to that bizarre situation that the old language and writing – Osmanli – meanwhile, in modern Turkey, is in fact a matter of a few specialists, leading to the well-know situation of “expropriated language – expropriated culture” (Ernst Bloch).

⁸ A short description in modern Turkish is online: http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar%C5%9Fiv; an English text placed by the Turkish Minstry of Culture & Tourism, too: http://goturkey.turizm.gov.tr/Yonlendir.aspx?17A16AE30572D313D4AF1EF75F7A7968F9F 8102006DD7892, but is, for any student/scholar/researcher, as worthless as that two volumes of “Documents on Ottoman-Armenians” (n.d., 317 [and] xi/188 p.) Turkish authorities distributed. An as systematical as critical overview on (after the armistice in 1918 ´cleaned´) Ottoman Archives in Turkey, which cleary shows the “genocidal intention” of the CUPleadership, gives, most recently, Akcam (2006).

⁹ Vérité sur le Movement Révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales/ Journal de guerre [...] / Notes d´un officier superieur russe [...]. (Constantinople 1916; 1919², 54 p.) - Aspirations et agissement révolutionnaires des Comité Arméniens avant et après la proclamation de la Constitution Ottomane (Istanbul 1917, 290 p.)