The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (Hardcover)

But how many of us are aware of the magnitude of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians that took place in 1915? Or of the massacre of Armenians in the 1890's that became an Amnerican focus for humanitarian concerns, advancing Clara Barton and the Red Cross into action with all the backing of the press and religious support that was readily mustered? The time has come to set the record straight on this submerged tragedy in hopes that bringing attention to this omission from American history books will alert the people of the world (and especially America) just how powerful our government's preoccupation with OIL and the countries that supply truly is.

Peter Balakian has written the definitive book THE BURNING TIGRIS: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE - A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes and I would urge everyone to read this enormously well researched, documented, and readable volume. Balakian starts his history with the early 1890's and traces the ever-increasing degradation of Armenians in Turkey by the Ottoman Empire. The strangest aspect of this ongoing murder of innocents is that for many years it was a cause celebre in the USA. The Women's Rights Movement led by such luminaries as Grace Kimball, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Alice Stone Blackwell gave of their time, money and personal commitment to send relief to the Armenians and to keep the tragedy before the public eye. Great thinkers and writers of the day like William M. Ramsey wrote " Turkish massacre...does not mean that thousands are killed in a few days by the sword, the torture, or the fire. It does not mean merely that everything [the Armenians] possess is stolen, their houses and shops looted and often burned, every article worth a halfpenny taken, the corpses stripped. It does not mean merely that the survivors are left penniless - without food, sometimes literally stark naked...Sometimes, when the Turks have been specially merciful, they have offered their victims an escape from death by accepting Mohammedanism." Yet this massacre was only a prelude to the Genocide that occurred in 1915.

The real horror of this history is the absolute drive of the Turks toward annihilation of the Armenians in 1914 - 1915. This genocide was a mirror image of the Nazi Final Solution for Jews in WW II complete with ghettos, mass murders, camps, slaughter of all men below age 50, then mass slaughter of the women and children. A particularly heinous note is that the Turks identified, isolated and then exterminated most of the great philosophers, teachers, artists, writers, and thinkers - leaving few to transmit the horror of the genocide to the future generations.

But despite the initial care and concern of the USA in sending aid to the Armenians and accepting thousands into the country here, the actual events of treaty signing, accords, agreements, and political stands at the close of WW I and WW II focused on the need to pacify Turkey in order to keep the flow of OIL almighty flowing. The embarrassment of this lack of courage to punish violations of Human Rights is now felt acutely as we are left to view our country's errors in Vietnam, the Middle East, our own 'ethnic cleansing' of the American Indians and our history of supporting slavery of the African Americans. Where in 1915 the New York Times wrote daily about the Armenian atrocities, equating the words 'Armenia' with 'atrocities', 'massacre', deportaion', 'outrage', 'race extermination', when it came time in 1918 for President Wilson to revitalize the need to bring justice to the Armenian human rights violations by declaring war on the Ottoman Empire he elected to ignore history and make the table of negotiation safe for Turkey. Balakian is careful to footnote and give direct evidence for every statement he makes, harsh though they may be to read. In his Epilogue he quotes Judith Herman: "Criminal behavior is always defined by the perpetrator's compulsion to 'promote forgetting' ". For this reader the might and power of this book is summarized by this quotation. Balakian is careful to concede that men like Presidents Carter and Clinton have made public statements in support of keeping the Armenian Genocide by the Turks in the public eye. It has not been enough. With this book perhaps we as a nation will read and hear about one of the greatest tragedies of history - and one of the most ignored. Highly Recommended for students, for historians, and for everyone who believes in Human Rights.

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