‘It is a kind of self-centeredness for any people to believe that what has happened to them is the worst tragedy ever suffered by mankind’
Gündüz AKTAN
Facing up to the past and apologizing to the injured party is the latest fad in our day. Germany and some other European countries have done this regarding the Holocaust. Now the Armenians and the Western countries that support them are demanding that we, too, take that path.
Leaving alone the calculations involving political interests, one could say that if one faced up to the past, took the responsibility for it and apologized, that move would satisfy a psychological need on the part of the genocide victims.
It is a kind of self-centeredness for any people to believe that what has happened to them is the worst tragedy ever suffered by mankind. In this context, the Armenians set as a condition the acceptance of the term “genocide” — so as to allow us to share their grief. Yet, the amount of pain felt by individuals or groups is not related to whether or not the incidents had been genocide.
In the case of the Holocaust, it may have been easy to apologize unilaterally since the Jews were absolutely the innocent party, having done the Germans no harm at all. They had not even defended themselves. However, in other cases, the losing (and, consequently, supposedly the more acutely suffering) side in a political struggle had inflicted suffering on the other side. Therefore, the pain has to be shared — albeit asymmetrically. This is what the Armenians are avoiding.
For erring individuals it would be a meaningful act to admit a mistake and to apologize to the victim. It would not be as meaningful, as some are inclined to think, for an entire society to do the same due to events of the past. Confessing and apologizing 90 years after the incidents, that is, no less than three generations later, could be possible only with the assumption that society has a collective continuity that is not time bound. That assumption is not realistic.
The kind of society that considers itself to be the victim “knows” about its sufferings due to the “memory” passed down from one generation to another. And this “transmitted memory” leads to exaggeration of the incidents and forgetfulness about one’s own mistakes.
Future-oriented societies such as ours, on the other hand, tend to forget about the persecution they have undergone. That, in turn, causes an unequal situation when it comes to feeling the pain caused by the incidents of the past. In such a case confession and apology could cause the incidents to be moved even further away from historical reality.
EU societies believe that if one admits one’s responsibility in the Holocaust and apologizes, that will effectively prevent a recurrence of incidents of that kind. That is not a highly realistic expectation, either.
What lay at the roots of the political culture that led to the Holocaust was a thousand-year-old (maybe even older) current of anti-Semitism. To prevent the recurrence of these incidents, a kind of catharsis would be needed. In other words, one would have to make a profound analysis of the culture in question to identify the pathological part of it and then cut it out. Yet, no such work is under way. They are hoping that this extremely well-rooted current would disappear one day as a result of confession and apology. That is not realistic.
Societies that confess and apologize come to believe that they have rid themselves of their own crimes; they start claiming that the same crime had been committed by other societies as well. In reality, that means that they are now projecting onto new targets — the Turks and Turkey, for example — the unwanted parts of their identity they had once projected onto the Jews via anti-Semitism.
Is it accidental that anti-Semitism and racism are on the rise in Germany and in many other societies? Anti-Semitism exists even in places where there are no Jews left anymore — for example, in Poland. Is the recognition of the “Armenian genocide” by Poland’s Parliament completely unrelated to this bizarre anti-Semitism there? In other words, the same old illness is continuing in a new form though it has lost its intensity.
Those leftist-turned-liberal intellectuals in Turkey who do not know about the genocide issue and are in no hurry to become well versed in it accept these projections as the truth without any questioning. They think what happened in 1915-16 was genocide according to Article 2 of the [Genocide] Convention. They want us to confess and apologize. Their stance is similar to the Jewish Haskala intellectuals who easily admitted to each and every projection Christian Europe had made onto the Jews. It must not be forgotten that these Jews’ inability to defend their own identity played a great part in their becoming victims of genocide.
Our “intellectuals” suffered from a major trauma in the hands of this state. For this reason they are against the founder of this state, Ataturk, and the Union and Progress Party, from the ranks of which they believe Ataturk had sprung. They identify themselves with the Armenians because they believe Armenians were the victims of genocide perpetrated by Union and Progress circles. Thus, they see their own nation as a “genocider” despite the fact that Turks have been — not counting the Jews — subjected to more acts of genocide than any other nation.
When will this masquerade come to an end?
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