To understand Turkish nationalism and how it contributed to the perpetration of the genocide, it must be compared with Ottomanism and the Islamic tendency. In the nineteenth century, Ottomanism was the dominant ideology during the era of reform, the "Age of the Tanzimat." Ottomanism preserved the territorial unity of the empire by granting the minorities autonomy and by offering certain liberal reforms to all Ottoman Turks, regardless of their religious or national affiliation, under the "millet system." This idea found fertile ground and won acceptance among some of the minorities, such as the Armenians — and especially the Dashnak party, and the liberal wing of the "Young Turkey" society led by Sultan Sabahaddin.

Sultan Abdul Hamid succeeded in his attempt to preserve the empire by calling for Islamism, which enjoyed popular currency even after the revolution of 1908. But the success of the revolution and the secession of Islamic provinces — especially in Albania and Macedonia — dashed the hope that Islam would serve the unity of the empire. Islamic rule then faded away with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. The Arabs stood alongside England and attacked their Turkish rulers, and it became clear that Islamic unity was nothing but a mirage, and that Islamism had no value as a founding principle. The Minister of War, Enver Pasha, says:

This frightful, fanciful heresy that they call the Islamic nation, which has remained a dam standing in the way of our progress and the achievement of Turanian unity, is on its way to extinction and disintegration.

The Turanian doctrine, then, stands in opposition to what the call to Islam represents. For this reason the Sharif of Mecca opposed it on March 5, 1917, and called upon the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, and especially the army, to rise up against those he called "the band of infidel Turanians." Turkish policy later proved its contradiction of the Islamic message; the decrees of Mustafa Kemal — Atatürk, the father of the Turks — to translate the Qur'an into Turkish, to abolish the veil, to ban Islamic outward signs and replace them with European ones, are but clear evidence of Turkish hostility toward Islam. In early 1914 the "Young Turkey" government moved swiftly toward Turanian nationalism and abandoned Ottomanism and Islamism.

Turkish nationalism appeared as a rebellious creed with revolutionary teachings and purely Turkish principles, expressed by Ziya Gökalp as follows:

All individuals who speak the Turkish language, who share a single civilization, who receive a single culture, and who have one common religion, must unite in a single political homeland encompassing the Russian Caucasus, Asia Minor, Kazan, and Crimea, and all the regions that have the same ethnic background.

In theory, Turanism aspired to become the Ottoman Empire, but without the problems and irritations of the minorities. The chief aim to which it aspired was to increase the national feeling of the Ottoman Turks and to work to weaken this feeling among the minorities — especially the Armenians — and to make them (that is, the minorities) feel that there was no place for their members to live within the borders of the new state. The theoretical foundations laid down by Ziya Gökalp may be the essential pillars upon which this nationalism was built, whose features it drew, and which were put to use in the Turkish struggle. Here Uriel Heyd, who wrote a biography of Ziya Gökalp, says the following:

In his writings Gökalp laid down the foundations of the nationalism and of the modern Turkish state — the state that was finally realized at the hands of Mustafa Kemal. Beyond his intellectual influence on Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha, Gökalp was a member of the Committee of Union and Progress. He was appointed to the Council of State and was asked to investigate the conditions of the minorities, especially the Armenians, and to find suitable solutions to their problems. The party approved a large portion of his proposals and carried them out during the First World War.

In 1919 Allied forces entered Constantinople and arrested Gökalp along with a number of members of the Committee of Union and Progress. At his trial he was asked about his role in the massacres, and he refused to acknowledge that there had been any massacres. Rather, he regarded them as a war between the Turks — "who were stabbed in the back" — and the Armenians who were killed in that war. Yet he admitted without hesitation his approval of the operation to deport the Armenians and to expel the minorities from Turkish soil.

In an attempt to define Gökalp's ideas, Heyd says:

The Turkish Republic tried to realize Gökalp's idea of the homogeneity of the single Turkish nation. Gökalp found in Turkish history — not in Ottoman history — a golden age preceding the coming of Islam. He glorified the feats of military heroism among the Turkish conquerors, men such as Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hulagu, and others. He emphasized the national bond and the moral teachings of the Turkish people, among them good hospitality, humility, faith, courage, uprightness, its strong love for its own members, and its non-oppression of the peoples it subjugated.

Gökalp defines the nation as follows:

A society composed of a people who speak one language, united in their religion and their morality, and whose supreme ideal is beauty.

On the surface this definition is more or less harmless, but it stands in opposition to the substance of Ottoman pluralism on the religious, historical, and dynastic level, and it therefore led to the isolation of the Armenians, the Syriacs, and the rest of the minorities from the body of Turkish society. Gökalp did not hesitate to portray the minorities as an alien body when he said:

The Greeks, the Armenians, and the rest of the minorities are Turks in identity only, not in Turkish national belonging. They will remain an alien member in the body of the Turkish nation.

Heyd says:

For Gökalp the nation is not an ingenious construction in psychological analysis, but a fundamental basis for moral conduct. Endless giving is the giving of the nation, and for the sake of its survival everything is bearable and permissible.

The father of Turkish nationalism, in his approval — without hesitation — of the deportation of the Armenians and Syriacs and their expulsion from the soil of the homeland, and then his exclusion [?] of the minorities from his moral concerns, confirms that his conception of nationalism and his moral premises differ greatly from Ottomanism, which — even though it had carried out the massacres of 1894–1896 — nonetheless granted the minorities a place in the empire and set out certain moral conduct and political duties for all the millets, and even for the rulers themselves. In another manner, it isolated the formula of "the minorities" from the Turks and drew the fine lines for their elimination. Perhaps the greatest example of the Turkish nationalists' view of the Armenians and the minorities, and of the extent of their conception of the morality they received from the teachings of their nationalism, is what Talaat Pasha said to the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau when the latter asked him why he had not separated the loyal Armenians from the disloyal ones. He answered:

It has pained us not to make a distinction between the innocent and the guilty, but the truth is that the one we call innocent today may be the guilty one tomorrow.

More dangerous than this statement, which reveals Talaat Pasha's morality, Morgenthau wrote:

One day Talaat Pasha made of me a request that was the strangest I have heard in my life. Several life insurance companies, among them the New York company, had over the years done fruitful and successful business with the Armenians. "I wish," Talaat says here, "for you to persuade [?] — if you can — these companies to send us a list of the names of the Armenians holding policies. They are practically dead, and they have no one now to inherit from them and collect these funds. And of course all of them will revert to the state, for it is now the only beneficiary of these policies. Can you fulfill this wish?"

Of course, the American ambassador refused this request. And how astonishing was this radical shift of the Turkish nationalists away from traditional Islam in the Ottoman period and its view of the Armenians as "a people of the Book" and "the most loyal millet," compared with Talaat Pasha's view, in which he regards the Armenians as strangers even in their death and puts their role to use only in order to obtain their money.

Lewis says: the idea that "the Turks are a people who speak the Turkish language and live in Turkey" gave birth to grievous circumstances that the minorities could not understand and that even the Turks themselves did not grasp. For the transformation of national identity among the majority requires a change in the way the minorities are viewed. And when the Turks become nationalists like Gökalp, Enver, and Talaat, it would be natural for them to see the Armenians, the Syriacs, and the other minorities in a new light — not as an ancient millet, but as strangers who ought not to live among them.

The massacres of the Armenians and Syriacs must be understood not merely as a response to Armenian incitement and provocation, but as a reaction to the Turkish losses and as one of the steps of the Turkish nationalist revolution. The revolution succeeded in bringing modern Turkey into being, but in the course of its progress it was on the verge of annihilating ancient peoples possessing their own authenticity and history.

The Allied powers intervened the moment they heard the news of this tragedy, on April 24, 1915. They declared that "in their investigation of the new crime [?] that the government of the Ottoman state (the Sublime Porte) is committing against civilization and humanity, they had resolved to arrest all members of the Turkish government and the officials who took part in these massacres, because they are personally responsible for them." In January 1918 the Prime Minister of Britain, Lloyd George, declared that "Mesopotamia, Armenia, Syria, and Palestine are worthy of having their national independence recognized." Other declarations were issued by France, Italy, and the United States of America, the last of which, through its president Woodrow Wilson, urged:

"the offering of assistance to the two peoples, the Syriac and the Armenian, in this ordeal of theirs."

Then came the Treaty of Sèvres on August 10, 1920, which included President Wilson's Fourteen Points, among them:

The freedom and independence of the Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire must be guaranteed. The protection of the minorities who are under Turkish rule must be guaranteed, and they must not be harassed in developing and growing their opportunities for independence. And Greece is to be recognized as ruling over certain parts of Anatolia.

But when Mustafa Kemal came in July 1925 [?] at the head of Turkish armies, backed by Russia, he openly defied the Treaty of Sèvres. He was able to persuade the European states and America to sign the Treaty of Lausanne, which was a revised image of the Treaty of Sèvres and whose amendment Mustafa Kemal himself oversaw.

What is astonishing is that the Treaty of Lausanne came without a single remark, reference, or even a word about the Armenians, the Syriacs, or Armenia in the new version — as though they had no existence in history. This is despite the fact that the Western states that had signed the Treaty of Sèvres and demanded of the Ottomans the independence of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and others, are the very ones that took part in signing the Treaty of Lausanne. If this discrepancy points to anything, it points, quite clearly, to the West's abandonment of the promises it had made to the minorities in the Treaty of Sèvres — perhaps because its vital interests required an alliance with the Turks at the expense of the minorities.

In the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, the page of the 1915 massacre was folded shut. The cause of the minorities and what they had suffered at the hands of the Ottoman authorities was no longer a cause that concerned the West. The rights of the minorities were blacked out in Western circles, whose interests and interim strategy required drawing closer to Turkey as a new ally. Even the Western media avoided delving into the subject of the massacre, to the point that it became a forgotten matter.

After this survey and historical analysis of the global, regional, and Ottoman situation, the reader will surely have reached the conclusion that the massacres to which the Armenians, the Syriacs, and others were subjected are not the product of a religious dispute — even if religious incitement was exploited — and that they cannot be reduced to the Armenian provocations against the Ottomans, even if these were a cause in creating tension between the Armenians and the Ottomans. But when these massacres are placed within a comprehensive historical framework, it enables us to grasp countless factors, each of which contributed, directly or indirectly, to preparing the conditions for these massacres.

There is no doubt that the emergence of national consciousness as a phenomenon and the demand for independence at the dawn of the twentieth century played an important role in the disintegration and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and encouraged the Armenians and other groups toward independence from the Ottoman state. Likewise the challenges posed by the Western peoples (the Balkans) to the Ottomans and their independence from them, as well as the Arab peoples who stood in the face of the Ottomans demanding their independence — all of this sowed panic in the souls of the Ottomans, whose influence had begun to shrink day after day.

In addition to these external challenges, there was also the problem of the Christian minorities, whom the Europeans used to pressure the Ottomans in order to realize their interests and consolidate their influence in the region. This redoubled the Ottomans' fears about internal challenges arising from the Armenians in particular, by virtue of the historical tension between the two. Although the West's raising of the problem of the minorities' right to independence was in keeping with the general spirit of national independence at the time, the strange thing about the matter is that the European West, which had officially demanded of the Ottomans that they grant the minorities independence, did not stir a muscle when the Turkish forces began liquidating the Armenians and the Syriacs — bearing in mind that the West was well aware of the massacres, because the ambassadors of the Western states informed their governments of what was taking place. As for the radical reversal in the national outlook brought about by the Young Turkey movement, it played a fundamental role in inciting Turkish public opinion against the Christian minorities and paved the way for the massacres of 1915. All these factors, taken together without distinction, furnish us with a comprehensive and realistic knowledge of the nature of those massacres and their historical backgrounds, and free us from the hazy and fragmentary view that prevailed for a long time as a result of the absence of scientific thought and historical consciousness.

To be continued — Men and Events