There is nothing to see and is not on anyone’s tourist destinations. But in 1915 it was the centre of one of history’s greatest crimes and there to witness and document it was a courageous Norwegian missionary, Bodil Biorn.
Mus, or Mush, was an Armenian town with an estimated 75,000 residents; but 1915 wasn’t a happy time to be Armenian.
In its pursuit of ethnic homogeneity the slowly disintegrating Ottoman Empire had embarked on a campaign of purification.
Most foreigners fled. Biorn did not. She stayed. She photographed. She kept a journal. In one of the hundreds of images that survived is a photo of a woman, surrounded by a litter of children.
Biorn’s notation read: “Heghin with her 5 sons, two were received in our orphanage. They were burnt in their house during the murders in Mush in 1915. She helped us in the orphanage with her son. She was a good woman of faith.”
A million Armenians are understood to have been murdered during 1915 to 1916. Burnt to death like Heghin and her children. Starved in the Syrian desert. Hanged in vast numbers or simply shot, and their bodies let to rot by the side of the road.
The National Socialists drew inspiration from this crime some decades later. Humanity had no noun to apply to such incomprehensible activity, and it fell to Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to, in 1944, come up with one.
He drew on the Greek word for race, or people, with the Latin one for killing. Genocide. To kill a people.
In 1948, the Genocide Convention was established, being formally ratified three years later. The crime was defined as an action committed with “...intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…”
Genocide was the worst crime in the human imagination. To seek to destroy a people. This was not a term to be applied easily and there was, and still is, debate if the mass starvation of as many as five million Ukrainians by Moscow in the inter-war period qualified.
Some academicsbelieved that the famine was due to incompetence, not malice.
One wrote as recently as 2018: “The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding was evident.”
Lemkin believed that the Ukrainian famine was genocide. He was more nuanced, seeing the Soviet plan as not only the death of vast number of individuals, but the destruction of the very soul of Ukraine.
“This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”
Perhaps we have lost the understanding of what is involved in murdering people in the millions.
Maybe our minds will not allow us to comprehend what drives a politician to propel his nation into an orgy of collective madness that sees over half a million of his countrymen hacked to death with machetes in less than four months; as occurred in Rwanda within my lifetime.
Language matters. Words need meaning, or they lose their power to convey information. English, like most languages I guess, evolves. Egregious is from the Latin egregius, meaning illustrious. Its use as irony caused its meaning to flip over time; a common journey for many of our words.
Genocide is not an ancient word. It is not used ironically. But it is being misused.
Contemporary politicians are reaching for it, as the most depraved human activity, and applying it to events very different from which Raphael Lemkin sought to describe.
The term has been used in New Zealand recently, both in terms of the war in Gaza and, absurdly, in respect to a new government’s policy.
I realise some have come to accept uncriticially Israel’s policy is maximum civilian death in Gaza, but a brief look at similar conflicts show that the casualty level is consistent with other urban conflicts.
Gaza is, of course, brutal but should not be compared to what occurred in Mus in 1915, or the many mass exterminations that have followed it.
The term genocide has a clear meaning and when we use it for theoretical or rhetorical flourish it contributes to the downgrading of our historical understanding of the truly exceptional sins of our collective past and allows us to imagine that the great misdeeds of history are comparable to the events of the modern day. They are not.
It is inexcusable for those who do not understand this history, or worse who do, to seek the cheap validation of attention that is the reward for using inflammatory language.
It is possible to critique Israel’s conduct, or that of Mr Luxon’s administration......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
Most foreigners fled. Biorn did not. She stayed. She photographed. She kept a journal. In one of the hundreds of images that survived is a photo of a woman, surrounded by a litter of children.
Biorn’s notation read: “Heghin with her 5 sons, two were received in our orphanage. They were burnt in their house during the murders in Mush in 1915. She helped us in the orphanage with her son. She was a good woman of faith.”
A million Armenians are understood to have been murdered during 1915 to 1916. Burnt to death like Heghin and her children. Starved in the Syrian desert. Hanged in vast numbers or simply shot, and their bodies let to rot by the side of the road.
The National Socialists drew inspiration from this crime some decades later. Humanity had no noun to apply to such incomprehensible activity, and it fell to Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to, in 1944, come up with one.
He drew on the Greek word for race, or people, with the Latin one for killing. Genocide. To kill a people.
In 1948, the Genocide Convention was established, being formally ratified three years later. The crime was defined as an action committed with “...intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…”
Genocide was the worst crime in the human imagination. To seek to destroy a people. This was not a term to be applied easily and there was, and still is, debate if the mass starvation of as many as five million Ukrainians by Moscow in the inter-war period qualified.
Some academicsbelieved that the famine was due to incompetence, not malice.
One wrote as recently as 2018: “The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding was evident.”
Lemkin believed that the Ukrainian famine was genocide. He was more nuanced, seeing the Soviet plan as not only the death of vast number of individuals, but the destruction of the very soul of Ukraine.
“This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”
Perhaps we have lost the understanding of what is involved in murdering people in the millions.
Maybe our minds will not allow us to comprehend what drives a politician to propel his nation into an orgy of collective madness that sees over half a million of his countrymen hacked to death with machetes in less than four months; as occurred in Rwanda within my lifetime.
Language matters. Words need meaning, or they lose their power to convey information. English, like most languages I guess, evolves. Egregious is from the Latin egregius, meaning illustrious. Its use as irony caused its meaning to flip over time; a common journey for many of our words.
Genocide is not an ancient word. It is not used ironically. But it is being misused.
Contemporary politicians are reaching for it, as the most depraved human activity, and applying it to events very different from which Raphael Lemkin sought to describe.
The term has been used in New Zealand recently, both in terms of the war in Gaza and, absurdly, in respect to a new government’s policy.
I realise some have come to accept uncriticially Israel’s policy is maximum civilian death in Gaza, but a brief look at similar conflicts show that the casualty level is consistent with other urban conflicts.
Gaza is, of course, brutal but should not be compared to what occurred in Mus in 1915, or the many mass exterminations that have followed it.
The term genocide has a clear meaning and when we use it for theoretical or rhetorical flourish it contributes to the downgrading of our historical understanding of the truly exceptional sins of our collective past and allows us to imagine that the great misdeeds of history are comparable to the events of the modern day. They are not.
It is inexcusable for those who do not understand this history, or worse who do, to seek the cheap validation of attention that is the reward for using inflammatory language.
It is possible to critique Israel’s conduct, or that of Mr Luxon’s administration......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
14 comments:
Unfortunately for Damien the world isn’t fooled by his semantic argument. Plainly Israel is conducting war crimes and ethnic cleansing. They want to destroy the Palestinian population in Israel. Just look at the settlements in the West Bank.
Except that the ravaged were racially the same, the 1830s extermination campaigns by Nga Puhi, and by Te Rauparaha and others would have qualified for the definition.
I recently read a book about a Ukranian "employed" by the Germans during WW2 and who ended up in Mt Albert. Of 7 close relatives killed mid 30s to post war, only one died fighting the Germans. Russia accounted for the rest. In the 30s farms were stripped of tractors and labour for the Russian industrialisation move. Ukraine was occupied during WW2 and after were regarded as collaborators.
It is just possible that the Israeli programme against Hamas is excessive but let us not forget that they lost 6,000,000 (that is six million) during the second world war in a genocide, now known as a holocaust. It is possible that modern Israel wants to let other nations know what to expect the next time they try lobbing 5000 missiles in their direction. This is what happens when tiffs between brothers gets out of hand and hatred which is handed down from father to son becomes a vast consuming cancer.
A politician stated in Parliament that a holocaust was committed against the "peaceful" settlement of Parihaka, Taranaki, when solders encircled the camp without a shot being fired. The holocaust occurred when a 12-year-old boy's foot was trodden on by a horse! Excessive use of language don't you think? It is about time to get all hate out of our hearts!
Kevan
The exhaustive 84-page brief submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide is hard to refute. Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate killing, wholesale destruction of infrastructure, including housing, hospitals and water treatment plants, along with its use of starvation as a weapon, accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from its political and military leaders who speak of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing the 2.3 Palestinians, makes a strong case for genocide.
Damian, I think you have made a very good point. Thank you. Genocide has a very specific meaning, you are correct ... or it loses its force. The current misuse of this word by the left runs the grave risk of understating some of the most incomprehensibly wicked events in history. As a person of Jewish descent I have pleaded numerous times for Te Pati Maori to cease using this word in respect of colonization ... but to no avail, they know this word carries weight, and using it with abandon frees them from having to balance their grievances with facts. In part, this reflects a distorted view of our own history and an absolute ignorance of some of the world's most egregious atrocities. If they would only visit the death camps or a holocaust museum they would surely hang their heads in shame. This is a whole different category of event that deserves its own name.
Words matter. Playing with them like this is dangerous. It is a form of holocaust denial.
I am here, and my family are likely here, only because they left Europe before the holocaust and because the Nazis were stopped in their tracks.
Many words might be used concerning Gaza but by no means is genocide one of them!
We have also seen and heard the words "genocide" and "holocaust" misused by the Waitangi Tribunal and Debbie Parker to describe the effect of European civilization on Maori. This is truly egregious !!
Thank you for this very informative and thought-provoking read Damien. It's a keeper. Makes me think quite a lot about whether modern societies want peoples inconvenient to them just 'out of the way' or gone! There has never been any indication from Israel that they expect Arabs, or Muslims, to cease to exist, but I'm not at all so sure that Hamas does not want Jews, not just to depart, but to be wiped from the face of the Earth.
I suppose I can have some understanding of how it is that this minute piece of land has been so contested, but I cannot be on the side of Islam when I see how much of the globe is coloured in for them and learn how Jews previously inhabiting those countries have been ousted. What I find so extraordinary is the fervour exhibited by the thousands of ignorant credulous people around the 'western' world (your first commenter) who have been shouting and demonstrating in favour of Palestinians. Less diplomatic than you Damien, I despise them.
Israel is the outgrowth of a militarized settler colonial movement that seeks its legitimacy in Biblical myth. It has always sought to solve nearly every conflict -- the ethnic cleansing and massacres against Palestinians known as Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1947-49, the Suez War of 1956, the 1967 and 1973 wars with Arab neighbors, the two invasions of Lebanon, the Palestinian intifadas and the series of military strikes on Gaza, including the most recent. The long campaign to occupy Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse Palestinians was rooted in the Zionist paramilitaries that formed the Israeli state and continues within the IDF. The overriding goal of settler-colonialism is the total conquest of Palestinian land. The few Israeli leaders who have sought to reign in the military, such as Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, have been pushed aside by the generals.
Well said, Damien.
Fortunately, Anon@7.37, the thinking, informed world isn't fooled by the genocide promoted by Hamas and their ilk and semantics are important.
As for Anon@8.55, South Africa would do well to look first at its own backyard before casting aspersions about others.
And finally, Anon@12.30, you would do well to remember that, yet again, it wasn't Israel that started this conflict.
To Anonymous
Your biased narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood is based on misinformation and historical distortion.
Reasoned debate is fine. Social media can be a force for good. But some people use it solely for the purpose of spreading hate and inciting violence.
Take time out and consider the fact that threats and arguments based on falsehoods usually end up doing more harm than good
How about a new word then? Gazacide.
The peo Israel propoganda campaign is second only to the pro maori campaign.
I think you need to do a bit more reading before you weigh in on this
https://www.academia.edu/109625293/Genocide_is_the_Necessary_Word_in_Palestine
Anon - Gazacide. an attack on defenseless people, using inhumane methods to defile and debase the victims, especially females, that the world hasn't seen for a very long time. All to provoke a reaction, where you can pretend the animal is the one that fights back.
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