Commemorating the Martyrs of a Genocide

On Friday, it was the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest atrocities ever committed against humanity, ranking up there with the Holocaust that came 26 years after.   This atrocity was the Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which upwards of 1.4 million Armenians were slaughtered in cold blood by the Ottoman Turks for simply being Christians.  Ironically, as this is commemorated, in the past year or so we see evil raising its ugly head in the same region again now, as ISIS is committing the same sort of atrocities.  In addition to Armenians, about a half-million or more each of Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred, and also several foreign aid workers - the total deaths calculated by those who chronicled the barbarity of the Turks then may have reached 2 million or more people.  Many Americans don't know (or simply don't even care these days) about these events, and if you ask the average person on the street, they probably would not have the foggiest idea of what an Armenian even is.  Yet, this atrocity serves to remind us that we as Christians are in a hostile world, dealing with "powers and principalities" which work through human mechanisms, and those mechanisms would like nothing more than to see all Christian civilization wiped off the map.   The enemies are varied, but they share the same goal - radical Islamists, communism, secularists, the "evangelists" of the "political-correctness gospel." etc.  Therefore, what happened to Armenian Christians and others one hundred years ago may not mean much to many, and many even reading this may not even be aware of what that horrific time was, but it nonetheless has implications for us today.

The ruins of Ani Cathedral - an ancient Armenian church 

First off, who are the Armenians?   The Armenians are an ancient Indo-European people who have been native to the area since probably Hellenistic times.  They once ruled a great kingdom that dominated much of Asia Minor, and although I personally am not sure of their exact origins, opinions have offered that they are descendants of the ancient Hittites, Phyrgians, or Hurrians that lived in the same area.  Perhaps that is so, but the fact is the Armenians have an ancient history connected to the region that comprises their homeland, and their history is also deeply entwined with Biblical and Church history in two important ways.

The Biblical Mount Ararat, with an ancient Armenian church in the foreground

The first example is the fact that Mount Ararat is at the heart of the Armenian homeland, and people who read the Bible know that this is the traditional place where Noah's Ark landed after the flood.  Even today, the evidence of the Ark's presence is still on that great mountain, and as far as the Armenians are concerned, Ararat represents the national soul of their people.  Unfortunately, today this great wonder of nature is in the hands of the Turks, even though the modern nation of Armenia still lies in its shadow.  

St. Gregory the Illuminator preaching to the ancient Armenian king Trdat (Tiradates)

The second major tie that Armenia has to Christianity is that the Armenians lay claim to being the first Christian kingdom on earth (although this is contested by their Assyrian neighbors, who believe that King Abgar Ukomo of the ancient Kingdom of Oeshrene was the first).  Armenia was indeed converted early in the history of the Church, as in the third century the evangelist St. Gregory the Illuminator brought the message of Christ to the Armenians, even converting their king, Trdat, and exorcising an evil spirit from him, as the tradition goes.  As one of the oldest of Christian civilizations, the Armenians hold a special mercy I believe with God for their perserverance in keeping the faith all these centuries, despite the constant onslaught by radical Islam and years of repression by Soviet communism.  That all says much for their testimony, which indeed confirms the miraculous survival of this special people. 

Armenians, like many other Christian communities in the Middle East over the centuries, have always been subject to Islamic oppression, but this culminated just after the turn of the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire due to a variety of factors.  At the end of the 19th century, change was afoot, and as European powers began to expand and build colonial empires, the "glory" of Islamic "civilization" began to fade, so much so that the Ottomans were slipping quickly into obscurity.  As a matter of fact, a prominent European politician referred to the Ottomans at the time as the "sick man of Europe."  However, were the Ottomans really European.  Sure, in the years leading up to the collapse and conquer of the Christian Byzantines in 1453, many parts of the Balkans had already been subjugated by the Ottomans (Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, etc.) and for the first time since the Moors held Spain a couple of humdred years earlier, Islamic powers had a toehold in Europe. However, in the 1800's. many of these people in the Balkans began to declare their independence, most notably the Greeks in 1821.  Additionally, the Ottomans were being chipped away at by rival Islamic kingdoms - specifically the Persians - and the French, Russians, and British began colonial expansion into what were lands held by the Ottoman Sultan.   By the end of the 1800's, the Ottoman Empire was but a shell of its former self, and the reactionary elements among its leadership, led by a sadistic butcher by the name of Abdul Hamid, used Islamic Sharia to subjugate those - namely non-Muslim minorities such as the Armenians - whom it believed to be enemies of the Empire which were "collaborating" with its enemies, and that subjugation led to a revival of an evil practice called dhimmitude, which in essence reduced Christians and others to second-class status.  The demonic drive behind radical Islam also inflamed local Turks as well as Kurdish collaborators, and the result was barbarous massacres of whole Christian villages in the remote areas of Asia Minor.  When Turkey entered WWI in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers, a type of xenophobia set in which led to the events of the 1915 Genocide that claimed so many lives.  I know this is an inadequately brief historical synopsis of the situation, but it is meant to give you an idea of the factors that led up to this atrocity in the preceding years, as it had been building for about 100 years previous or more. 

Lest you think all of this is just some emotional appeal by the Armenians to advance an agenda (as the Turks continue to baselessly accuse them even today) there are eyewitnesses to these atrocities from that time.  One of them was British Viscount James Bryce, who published a compilation work entitled The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-19.  On pages 594-595 of that book, Bryce records the systematic way these Ottomans carried out their atrocities, and he notes that there were several things they did:

1.  The population of the village was disarmed by the gendarmerie (local Ottoman cops), aided by criminals they released from the prisons to assist them.

2.  The mass imprisonment of the Armenian residents of that village, on trumped-up pretexts of possession of firearms, contraband literature, etc. 

3.  The Armenians were deported from their homes.  Money and valuables were confiscated, the people were shackled sometimes in gangs of five or ten, and women and young girls were forcibly abducted, raped, and molested by the local Muslim population.  After the Muslim locals had their way with these unfortunate people, they were marched away usually into the desert, where many of them died of starvation or were attacked by bands of brigands. (V.L. Parsegian, preparer.  Human Rights and Genocide, 1975.  New York:  Diocese of the Armenian Church in America, 1975.  pp. 19-20.)

The Italian Consul-General at Trebizond at the time, G. Gorrini, confirmed that the execution of these atrocities came directly from the Sultan's own government, and he even noted that these actions were even opposed by some Muslims too (Parsegian, p. 20).  Further, Dr. Martin Niepage, a German ambassador and teacher at a German school in Aleppo, wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Horrors of Aleppo" in which he documented this:  "Such monstrous news left me incredulous.  I was told that, in various quarters of Aleppo, there were lying masses of half-starved people, the survivors os so-called 'deportation convoys.' In order, I was told, to cover the extermination of the Armenian nation with a political cloak, military reasons were being put forward, which were said to be necessary to drive the Armenians out of their native seats, which had been theirs for 2500 years, and to deport them to the Arabian deserts....I came to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to exterminate the whole nation." (Parsegian, p. 21).  However, some of the most graphic reports came from American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who documented much of these atrocities in his work Secrets of the Bosphorus 1918.  What Morgenthau reported, if it were on film, would be so graphic that it would turn the strongest stomach, as what the Ottomans did ranks up there with the mass exterminations of Jews that Hitler would carry out some 20 years later.  The Turkish troups would seize Armenian women, and then would indiscriminately open fire on a village shooting everything and everyone in it.  Elderly Armenian men and women, on these forced marches into the desert, would be strewn on the path in the death throes of typhus, dysentery, and other disease, while little children would be seen lying on their backs wailing for food or water.  Women would beg strangers to take their babies, and if that failed, mothers would actually throw them into wells or leave them in brush patches that they at least might die undisturbed.  Soldiers would force young Armenian girls into sex slavery, and the way-stations (read concentration camps) along the march route were littered with the unburied and half-buried bodies of the dead, and buzzards were constant companions of these unfortunate people. However, it was especially horrific along river banks, when either soldiers would push people into the water to be "target practice" or those who would seek to preserve what little dignity they still possessed would jump in themselves, including women with their young babies (Parsegian, pp 21-22).  

The infamous "death marches" of Armenian exiles, this one possibly taken in the Syrian desert

A sadistic Turkish official teasing starving Armenians by waving bread at them

Armenian casualties of a massacre by Ottoman soldiers in a remote village

An artist rendering of Turks ravaging Armenian women and slaughtering their children

The most ridiculous thing about all this is that despite the unprecedented number of eyewitness accounts by Western officials and aid workers of these events, the Turkish government to this day denies and refuses to take responsibility for it.  Even the Germans have come to terms with the Holocaust, but the Turks have yet to atone to the Armenians and others for their sins.  That is not to say all Turks are bad though by any means, as over the years there have been honorable Turkish individuals who have spoken out about this, and who want to reach out to the Armenians - those people are true heroes for their efforts, and should be commended, because they too face obstacles in their home country.  It is a crime punishable by imprisonment in Turkey even today, as a matter of fact, to even mention the Armenian Genocide,   And, what is worse is the chicanery of our own elected officials in Washington - despite many efforts to push for a recognition of the Armenian Genocide, it seems that President after President (Republican and Democrat) ignores this historical fact, and although other nations - recently both Pope Francis and Vladimir Putin recognized the Armenian Genocide and commemorated its victims - have had no problems with this, our government (which, off the record, is made up of worthless career politicians too lazy to do their jobs although they love to lie and make a lot of promises) still stupidly tries to placate the Turks!  Bill Clinton, as an example, will bomb innocent Serbs to defend KLA terrorists (which he did in 1999 to deflect from the fact he couldn't keep his pork-sword in his pants and was molesting his interns, so bombing Serbs was his way to distract the public from that!) and our current President, Barack Obama, is increasingly friendly to our enemies in the Middle East while alienating our allies - both of them, ironically, made hollow campaign promises to cater to Armenian-American voters in California to give national recognition, and both failed.   And, now you have ISIS and its kind, committing the same atrocities a hundred years later, and our leadership does nothing!  Then there is this Erdogan guy  (who I call Gog, due to his similarity with the leader it talks about in Ezekiel 38) who is the leader of Turkey - he has been becoming increasingly more Islamist in his tenure as President of Turkey, and the man has the potential to become another Abdul Hamid or Talaat Pasha, yet our lazy bureacratic fat-cats in Washington are letting that all happen too.   The Armenians and others have suffered enough over the years, and it is time they be vindicated, and if our government is too chicken to do it, we must do so as individuals.

As mentioned, other victims of the Genocide also included Greeks and Assyrians, and one in particular was the late Assyrian Patriarch Benyamin Shimun, who in 1918 was assassinated in cold blood by a Kurdish thug named Simkoo, who was in the employ of the Turkish government.   Mar Shimun's famous quotation in regard to this atrocity sums up the sentiment of the resolve these courageous people had, and it was:

"It is imposible for me and my people to surrender after seeing the atrocities done to my Assyrian people by your government; therefore my brother is one, my people are many, I would rather lose my brother but not my NATION"

Mar Benyamin Shimun (1887-1918), sainted Assyrian patriarch assasinated in cold blood.

Christians around the world today need to heed the lessons of the Armenian Genocide, as there is a growing hostility even in America toward people of faith.  Forces out there, demonically driven, are attacking Christian-owned businesses, as well as even trying to dictate to pastors what they can and cannot say in their sermons (a clear Constitutional violation).  That, coupled with the continued persecutions that barbarians like these ISIS clowns are inflicting upon Christians in the Middle East, should be getting our attention.  It was the philosopher George Santayana I believe who said that "those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it," and we need to take that to heart even today.  This is why it is important that we commemorate the lives of many innocent Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians who were killed simply for who they were by an oppressive, monstrous regime that had demonically-possessed leaders who drank gleefully of the blood of their victims, and we need to be prepared, because who knows - in the future, we could be next!  My prayers for both the Armenian and Assyrian families in the US in particular, as they mourn the loss of their loved ones who were martyred in the Genocide.