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Title: The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response by Peter Balakian ISBN: 0-06-019840-0 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (63 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great new scholarship on Armenian Genocide!
Comment: Balakian does it again! Having come off the success of 'Black Dog of Fate' this eminent researcher now adds essential new scholarship to the Armenian holocaust. Sometimes called the 'secret genocide' or 'forgotten genocide' Mr. Balakian seeks to explore not only the Armenian massacres and extermination campaign of the Turkish government but also American and European response.
Balakian takes us on a tour de force as he first analysis American human rights campaigns that culminated in the hundreds of front page stories about the armenian massacres that ranged from the 1890s to 1917 and the subsequent armenian famine. Balakian shows how noted womens rights figures like Julia Ward Howe dedicated themselves to saving the remaining Armenians. Balakian reveals the essential humanism of ambassador Morgenthau whose clear understanding and indignation helped form the basis for essential documents explaining the TRUTH behind the Turkish governments campaign to 'end the Armenian question once and for all". Also revelaed is the betrayel of the armenians by Wilson(who originally envisioned an armenian state) for Arab oil, something history has seen repeated again and again but with different victims.
The Author details the early Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and shows how the culture of genocide became the norm in Turkey as turks were exhorted to do unspeakable acts of cruelty to their fellow man, convinced they were carrying out yet another Islamic Jihad.
This wonderful account adds another volume to the paucity of books on this essential overlooked subject. The land cries out for justice for the Armenians, a people overlooked by history, forgotten, brushed away to the dustbin, but the lord reaches out through men like Balakian to bring the worlds attention to this hidden holocaust, something far to many people have worked far to hard to make us forget!
The only misgiving I have is that once again we are treated to the maps of turkey but no maps of the genocides path, no maps of the war, no maps showing figures of Turkish armenians and their deportaiton and how some eventually did survive to live in America, France, Uruguay and Lebanon. This is one of those windows of scholarship, never tackled to my knowledge, the neccesity to document the armenian diaspora and show the extent of the slaughter with graphs and maps.
A must read for anyone interested in human rights, the development of war crimes, Armenians, Jews, American middle east policy and genocide in particular.
Rating: 5
Summary: Where's The Paper Trail?
Comment: This book was very informative and worth reading. I found it to be a straightforward, carefully written history book with a concise, meticulous bibliography. According to a 'lover of history" January 1 below (whose review, use of capitals, and writing style sounds very much like it was written by the same writer of Holdwater Nov 12) this book is "factually flawed."
After reading Peter Balakian's book, and as a lover of history myself who reads as much about World War I and World War II as possible, I wish to dispute a particular claim. I would like to address the claim that 3.5 million Turks were massacred by the Armenians, and the laughable statement that this is well known, and accurate by most estimates. Having read over two hundred well known and well respected books on World War I - British, American and French accounts - I have never read one single memoir, account, telegraph, or letter from any country - be it infantry-soldier, commanding officer, missionary, tourist, businessman, politician, ambassador, diplomat, or historian - that corroborates such an incredible bloodletting and slaughter. On the contrary, letters by individual soldiers, sailors, missionaries and businessmen all give eye-wittness testimony to the murder of innocent Greek and Armenian civilians.
In addition, one would think that the slaying of 3.5 million people could not simply happen in a random haphazard fashion.
Certainly such a massive killing would require planning and organization, it would require horses and feed for the horses, and guns and ammunition, and food for the army that one would certainly need in order to carry out such an amazing expedition. One Question: where's the paper trail?? Such a massive number of murders would have certainly left a contemporary paper trail of some sort somewhere in England or France or America. How is it possible that the Armenians - whose total population numbered around two and a half million and was spread out over a huge vast rugged mountain territory - could have planned, mounted, and executed such an incredible expedition that arguably must have required careful logistical planning?
If the lack of physical evidence and the improbability-factor are not enough, where are the newspaper accounts, the magazine articles, the diplomatic correspondences? It is impossible to believe that the murder of 3.5 million people would not have gotten some coverage in the New York Times. There is no contemporary trustworthy evidence to support this claim (at least none that I am aware of.) Even Hemingway never once wrote of such a bloodletting.
On the other hand and in great contrast the paper trail left by the Committee of Union and Progress and all the physical evidence - be it thousands of contemporary news paper and magazine articles, diplomatic correspondences and memoirs by Ambassador Bryce, Ambassador Morgenthau, Arnold Toynbee and the legions of diplomats strewn all over Anatolia from Cilicia to Smyrna to Van to Moush to Marash to Trebizond, along with the dozens of heart wrenching memoirs by American and European missionaries and businessmen living in the Ottoman Empire - all seem inexplicably to point in one direction and are all evidence in favor of one thing being more likely than another.
The question is simple: based on the totality of the contemporary evidence of the time, which is more likely - that an unorganized minority Armenian population of about 2.5 million killed 3.5 million people, or an organized Ottoman Army under the careful planning and direction of Talat and Enver killed 1.5 million people? Also what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Smyrna and Cilicia and the hundreds of small villages that dotted the western countryside of Anatolia? For those of you who are not aware, Smyrna and Cilicia are a thousand miles from Russia -- the Armenians in Smyrna and Cilicia had nothing to do with Russia....Question: where are they? Human beings don't just disappear, they were killed, almost all of them, and it had nothing to do with the Russians. They were driven away from their homes and they were killed and there is no way to soften the truth of this. Instead of hiring people like Bernard Lewis and Stanford Shaw and others in an attempt to rewrite history, Turkey needs to boldly and courageously face its past. Peter Balakian's excellent book provides the paper trail, and this is what makes readers like Holdwater so irate.
Rating: 5
Summary: The loving heart of a grandmother.
Comment: May God Bless you forever Professor Peter Balakian. Thank you for telling our family's story, and thank you for your open sorrowful heart and your honest elegant pen.
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Title: Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian ISBN: 0767902548 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 04 May, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title:Ararat ASIN: B00005JLR5 Publisher: Buena Vista Home Vid Pub. Date: 22 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $26.99 |
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Title: Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian ISBN: 0440229170 Publisher: Laure Leaf Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, Peter Sourian ISBN: 0786711388 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 22 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Road From Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl by David Kherdian ISBN: 068814425X Publisher: HarperTrophy Pub. Date: 24 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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