The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response

by Peter Balakian

Overview

A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes

In this national bestseller, the critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.

Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly book on genocide by the Institute for Genocide Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060558703
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/05/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	1,108,529
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.19(d)
Lexile:	1400L (what's this?)

About the Author

Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and a New York Times Notable Book, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

Read an Excerpt

The Burning Tigris
The Armenian Genocide and America's Response

Chapter One

A Gathering at Faneuil Hall

Ah, Mrs. Howe, you have given us a prose Battle Hymn.
-- Frederick Greenhalge,
governor of Massachusetts

The light in New England in late fall is austere and clean and rinses the white steeples of Boston's Congregational and Unitarian churches, the red brick of the State House, and the gray stone of the Back Bay town houses. Even the gold dome on the white cupola of Faneuil Hall reflects its luster. It's November 26, 1894, the Monday before Thanksgiving, a windy and clear evening, as men and women file into Faneuil Hall from all over Boston and from the suburbs of Cambridge, Watertown, Winchester, and as far out as Quincy and Andover. They have come to this public meeting place near the harbor to talk about the most pressing international human rights issue of the day.

Schooners and sloops and oyster scows make a grid of rigging that glows in the sunset. The sound of squawking gulls. Buckets of cod and haddock on the docks. The outline of the giant masts of the USS Constitution fading in the twilight of the Charlestown Naval Yard. Across the street the stalls of Quincy Market are closed, the awnings rolled up for the night.

Faneuil Hall was known as the Cradle of Liberty because Samuel Adams and James Otis and the Sons of Liberty had met here in the decade before the American Revolution to form their opposition to the sugar tax, the stamp tax, and other forms of British oppression. The Boston Tea Party was conceived here. The space itself was made even more dramatic when the architect Charles Bulfinch redesigned it in 1805. Even after government by town meeting ended in Boston in 1822, the hall continued to be the main forum for political and social debate. Here in the 1840s William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass gave some of their most important antislavery speeches to overflowing crowds.

By 1873 women were speaking from the podium, and suffragists Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe were among the first to address the movement for woman suffrage on that stage beneath George A. Healy's dramatic painting of Daniel Webster exhorting, "Liberty and union, now and forever" on the Senate floor. In keeping with that spirit of reform, a group of prominent New Englanders filled Faneuil Hall on that blustery late-November evening.

All that summer and fall, news of the massacres of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks in the Ottoman Empire reached Americans through news reports and bold headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the nation's leading magazines -- The Nation, The Century, and Harper's. The news came from American missionaries who were teaching Christians at missionary colleges all across the Anatolian plain of central and eastern Turkey; it came from American and British diplomats stationed in the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, from European and American journalists, and from Armenian survivors and refugees. And recently it came by way of a new invention -- the wireless telegraph.

The outrage over the Armenian massacres emerged in a culture that was just beginning to look outward to the international arena in which the United States would define a global identity in the coming decade. In the first years of the 1890s, there had been a near war with Chile over the killing of two American sailors in Valparaiso, and U.S. involvement in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela that brought jingoism to a new level. Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt began to broadcast their feeling that the country needed a war. The question of annexing the Hawaiian Islands dominated a tug-of-war between the imperialists and anti-imperialists that lasted throughout the decade.

Americans also expressed great sympathy for the Cubans in their struggle for independence from Spain. By 1895, when Cuban rebels rose up against the deplorable conditions to which they were subjected by their Spanish rulers, the Cuban crisis became a Western Hemisphere liberation cause for Americans. By 1898 the Cuban struggle would lead to the Spanish-American War -- the war that consummated the jingoist spirit and launched the United States as a colonial force in the world. With the defeat of Spain, in a war that lasted ten weeks and gave Cuba its independence, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, giving the nation a rising sense of global power.

The 1890s were a transformative time for U.S. foreign policy -- a decade in which it would embrace imperialism and assert itself, at times, with a rhetoric of Protestant Anglo-Saxon superiority over the "backward" peoples of the world. The Armenian Question emerged, in some ways uniquely, as a humanitarian project at a time when imperialist designs were governing most American international interventions.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the Turkish caliph, had begun to implement his solution to what was now internationally known as the Armenian Question. In short, the Armenian Question revolved around the issue of much-needed reform for the oppressed Armenians -- the largest Christian minority living under Ottoman Turkish rule in Anatolia. As the British journalist and longtime resident of Constantinople -- Sir Edwin Pears -- put it, all the Armenians "desired was security for life, honour, and property." But, the sultan's lifetime friend and confidant, the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vambery, wrote, the sultan had decided that the only way to eliminate the Armenian Question was to eliminate the Armenians themselves. The means would be government-sanctioned mass murder on a scale never before seen.

The Turkish massacres of some fifteen thousand Bulgarians in 1876 (a response to the Bulgarian uprising for independence) had been an unprecedented act of state-sponsored mass murder that riveted Europe and the United States ...

The Burning Tigris
The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. Copyright © by Peter Balakian. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Deborah E. Lipstadt

“Peter Balakian tells the powerful and largely unknown story of [Armenian Genocide]. This important and compelling book is long overdue.”

Martin Gilbert

The terrible fate of the Armenians... is brilliantly described. A great service to the history of the Armenians.”

Paul Fussell

“A gripping treatment of the official Turkish mass murder...a masterpiece of moral history...it needs to be widely read.”

Jean Bethke Elshtain

“Balakian tells a story long ripe for the telling.... He writes with grace and power.”

James Carroll

“The Burning Tigris is an act of acute historical memory, of personal testimony, of prophetic witness - and of high art.”

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

The Burning Tigris tells the story of Turkey's attempt to destroy the Armenian people, the 20th century's first genocide, and America's response to it -- this country's first entry into the arena of international human rights. Balakian's beautifully researched narrative guides the reader through eyewitness accounts, documentation, and the Turkish government's continued denial of historical fact. The book allows the reader an in-depth look into the truth of history and human nature at its best and worst. Balakian's restrained and eloquent prose reminds us that by looking accurately into history we can change the present and the future.

Armenia is one of the oldest Christian civilizations in the world, and its people had lived in what became the Turkish Ottoman Empire long before the OttomanTurks arrived. By the end of the 19th century, the Armenians were a thriving and complex society of professionals; artists, writers, farmers, and craftspeople, and were adapting to a modern and cosmopolitan worldview. But as a minority in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians endured years of discrimination. One of the most important themes in The Burning Tigris is the examination of the subtle ways in which years of cultural and religious prejudice, unchecked and unexamined, laid the ground for genocide. A lethal combination of political and religious fanaticism became the basis for an ideology that made it not only acceptable -- but practically mandatory -- to torture, massacre, and finally attempt to completely annihilate an entire people. Balakian's detailed and unflinching presentation of the story shows the many results of xenophobia taken to its most shocking extreme.

The "Young Turk" regime in 1915 initiated a systematic program to exterminate the Armenian people, and word of the horrors reached the United States. The response of leaders such as Henry Morganthau, American Ambassador to Turkey, and many humanitarians in the U.S. was powerful and immediate. The result was an unprecedented grassroots campaign involving everyone from ordinary Americans to missionaries to the wealthiest business moguls and several Presidents, all of whom cared greatly and wanted to help. The movement to save the Armenians was defeated by the growing U.S. dependence on oil and what Balakian calls "dollar diplomacy." This, combined with the ongoing denials by the Turkish government, led to the failure of the relief effort to result in justice for the Armenians after World War I and to the cultural amnesia that persists today. Where once the plight of the "starving Armenians" was familiar to every schoolchild in America, today few of us even realize that genocide was committed before the attempted extermination of the Jews in Hitler's Germany. This erasure is, as this book powerfully demonstrates, the final step in genocide. Hitler himself was inspired by what happened in Turkey, and asked, eight days before the Nazis invaded Poland, "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Although Balakian's book is a story of enormous human suffering, it is also an important testimony to the power of truth, to the human will to survive against great odds. In exploring the danger of fanaticism in all forms, it is -- an important book written on how ideology can result in unthinkable crimes against humanity.

Questions for Discussion

1. The Armenian Genocide raises a question about how Turkish society used Islamic religious ideology for the purpose of committing massacre and then genocide against the Armenians. Was this use of violence -- torture, rape and murder -- part of the Islamic belief system, or was Islam distorted and put in contradiction with its own teachings? Discuss the ways in which religion is made an ally of politics, throughout history and today.


2. How did American feminism of the 19th century lay a foundation for a larger commitment to human rights? What means did these women use to get their message across? In what ways were their efforts both effective and ineffective?


3. Discuss the concept and consequences of nationalism, as it figured in the Armenian genocide, and as it might have figured in other such extreme episodes of race killing in modern history, right down to today. What ways of thinking might lead the government of a given country to decide that "ethnic purity" is a necessary element of nationalism? Why do countries that are undergoing hard times and crises of national self-esteem tend to scapegoat an ethnic minority? What other examples in history can you think of?


4. "The movement brought together Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, Christians and Jews -- all believing in their own Victorian American way that each individual could make a difference; each person could be -- as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it -- a vehicle for 'the triumph of principles '" (Page 69). Has this belief in the power of the individual changed since then? If so, why? Did it turn out to be effective in American efforts to help the Armenians?


5. In 1896, British Prime Minister Gladstone saw the Turkish massacres a "betrayal of civilization itself" (Page 123). He criticized what he saw as their inability to learn, saying, "The very least that can be expected is that the conquerors should be able to learn civilization from the conquered as the Romans from the Greeks" (Page 122). What might Gladstone mean by "learning civilization"? What might the Turks have learned from the Greeks and the Armenians? When such learning does not take place, what is the effect on the conquerors?


6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1903 founded the journal Armenia, believed that individual sympathy for the Armenian cause was not enough, and that "National crimes demand international law, to restrain, prohibit, punish, and best of all, to prevent" (Page 131). In her inaugural essay, she discussed the behavior of a nation as if it were an individual and a member of a family or community. "If a nation is bankrupt, it should be put in the hands of a receiver and forcibly improved. If it is frankly criminal, it should be restrained. If it is simply ignorant, it should have compulsory education, and if it has senile dementia it should be confined under treatment, and the estate administered in the interests of the heirs" (Page 132). Discuss how this statement might have forecast some of our modern ideas of international human rights? Do you think the United Nations meets such a need today? In 1915, were other nations, such as the U.S., complicit in the Armenian genocide because of their refusal to go to war with Turkey? Is the concept of an international policing system viable today? Do the recent genocides in Rwanda and now in the Sudan dramatize this dilemma?


7. Richard Rubenstein described the Armenian Genocide "as the first full fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined, methodically organized genocide" (Page 180). Discuss the ways that the Young Turk government organized and implemented its plan to exterminate the Armenian population. How was World War I a factor in this plan? What comparisons can you make with how the Nazis exterminated the Jews and how Word War II was a factor in their plan?


8. Why was President Wilson unable to convince the Senate to accept the American Mandate for Armenia after World War I? Why did the new Republican leadership in 1919-1920 turn its back on Armenia after Americans had fought so hard to help Armenia for decades? How has the pursuit of oil diplomacy in the Middle East become a pattern in U.S. foreign policy ever since?


9. In 1919-1920 in Constantinople, after World War I, the Turks were compelled by the British to put on war crimes tribunals in order to bring to justice those who had abused prisoners of war and those who had carried out the massacres of the Armenians. What did these trials tell us about the Armenian Genocide? Why did the trials fall apart? Why is the implementation of justice so important after such crimes against humanity? What did the Nuremberg Trials do after WWII that the Constantinole Trials of 1920 failed to do?


10. The Armenian Genocide has been called a landmark in the modern history of international human rights. It spawned the term "crimes against humanity," it contributed to Raphael Lemkin's pioneering coinage of the term and concept "genocide," and it helped to define World War I, and it gave rise to America's first international human rights movement. Discuss.

11. Balakian closes his narrative by retelling the many failed attempts of a Congressional resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide as fact. The Turkish government continues to threaten any government that wants to pass such a resolution, and Presidents Carter and Clinton were forced to comply. France, however, passed a resolution in 2001. Why is the Turkish government still unwilling to admit what happened? Why do you think the U.S. government gives in to this kind of pressure?

About the Author

Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and a New York Times Notable Book, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

Editorial Reviews

In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy.” — Booklist

The terrible fate of the Armenians... is brilliantly described. A great service to the history of the Armenians.” — Sir Martin Gilbert, author of The Righteous: the Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

“An eloquent account of Turkey’s long campaign to rid itself of Armenians....Thoroughly convincing.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Peter Balakian tells the powerful and largely unknown story of [Armenian Genocide]. This important and compelling book is long overdue.” — Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D., Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Director, Emory University

“The Burning Tigris is an act of acute historical memory, of personal testimony, of prophetic witness - and of high art.” — James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword and Secret Father

“A gripping treatment of the official Turkish mass murder...a masterpiece of moral history...it needs to be widely read.” — Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“Balakian tells a story long ripe for the telling.... He writes with grace and power.” — Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, The University of Chicago, author of Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World

“[A] fascinating and affecting memoir.” — New York Times Book Review

“Richly imagined and carefully documented.” — The New Yorker

“[An] engrossing and poignant memoir.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship...compelling.” — Forward

From the Publisher

A gripping treatment of the official Turkish mass murder...a masterpiece of moral history...it needs to be widely read.

Paul Fussell

[An] engrossing and poignant memoir.

San Francisco Chronicle

Peter Balakian tells the powerful and largely unknown story of [Armenian Genocide]. This important and compelling book is long overdue.

Deborah E. Lipstadt

[A] fascinating and affecting memoir.

New York Times Book Review

The terrible fate of the Armenians... is brilliantly described. A great service to the history of the Armenians.

Sir Martin Gilbert

The Burning Tigris is an act of acute historical memory, of personal testimony, of prophetic witness - and of high art.

James Carroll

In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy.

Booklist

Richly imagined and carefully documented.

The New Yorker

Balakian tells a story long ripe for the telling.... He writes with grace and power.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy.

Booklist

[An] engrossing and poignant memoir.

San Francisco Chronicle

Richly imagined and carefully documented.

The New Yorker

A mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship...compelling.

Forward

The terrible fate of the Armenians... is brilliantly described. A great service to the history of the Armenians."

Sir - Martin Gilbert

… The Burning Tigris does succeed in resurrecting a little-known chapter of American as well as Armenian history. It also underscores a crucial point about humanitarian responses to violations of human rights: outrage and outpourings of sympathy and aid may save some lives, but -- as the 20th century would show time and again -- they have little real impact in the face of state interests that militate against intervention. With The Burning Tigris Peter Balakian forcefully reminds us that almost a century after the Armenian genocide, the international community has yet to find a means of implementing Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision, as pertinent today as it was in 1903: ''National crimes demand international law, to restrain, prohibit, punish, best of all, prevent.'' — Belinda Cooper

The New York Times

It is a mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship. Balakian's training in English literature and American studies has served him especially well, since a large part of the book is dedicated to the stupendous and nearly universal outpouring of sympathy for the Armenians and condemnation of Ottoman barbarity throughout the nightmare years among American and British writers, intellectuals, clergymen and politicians.
j—The Forward

James R. Russell

Now faded from memory in the shadow of the Holocaust, the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenians in 1915-1916 was a virtual template for the 20th-century horrors that followed, and much of what Balakian describes so powerfully is now chillingly familiar: inhuman brutality; mass deportations of helpless civilians (often in overcrowded railroad boxcars); headlines screaming of "systematic race extermination"; activists and intellectuals calling for intervention; and, most devastatingly, the lack of political will in the West to intervene to stop the slaughter. Balakian exposes the roots of the genocide in the "total war" atmosphere of WWI, which combusted with the pan-Turkish nationalism of the Young Turk government, inflamed Muslim rage against "infidel" Armenian Christians, and a long-simmering Ottoman hatred of the Armenians dating to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his slaughters in the 1890s. Balakian, who wrote so movingly of the impact of the genocide on his own family in Black Dog of Fate, also underscores how well known the Armenian destruction was in America through detailed reports by U.S. consuls throughout Turkey and steady newspaper reporting, and how great the response was in providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and survivors. In a horrifying account, city by city, region by region, Balakian quotes firsthand testimony about the decimation of the Armenian population and their towns and culture. Yet he retains the measured tone of a historian throughout; if anything, he lets Woodrow Wilson off too easily for not declaring war on Turkey. But readers will come away sadly convinced that Armenians' brave but doomed stand in Van should be as celebrated as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the corpse-strewn Lake Gaeljak as well known as Babi Yar. 16 pages of b&w photos and maps not seen by PW. (Oct. 7) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Author of the award-winning Black Dog of Fate, Balakian explores America's efforts to save Armenians from genocide. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

An eloquent account of Turkey’s long campaign to rid itself of Armenians—and far longer campaign to disavow any responsibility for crimes against humanity. During the 1890s, writes memoirist (Black Dog of Fate, 1997) and poet Balakian, Sultan Abdul Hamid II launched a campaign of extermination against Armenia’s Christians, killing about 200,000 in a two-year period and setting "the template for most of the genocide that followed in the twentieth century." The Ottoman Empire’s resorting to state-sponsored murder against the Armenians was not without precedent; a few years earlier, the same sultan had ordered the massacre of thousands of Bulgarians who had been pressing for independence. Yet this crime was unprovoked, and it outraged the world; in the US, millions of dollars were raised for Armenian relief, and at the turn of the century nearly every American schoolchild could find Armenia on the map. The fall of the Ottomans and the rise of the Young Turks brought further troubles for the Armenians, for whereas the Ottomans had ruled a multiethnic empire, the Ataturk regime championed Turkish nationalism. Faced with revolutionary movements in the Balkans, the Young Turks justified oppression of the Armenians as a measure to stave off a two-front attack; "in the Turkish mind," writes Balakian, "the struggle to keep the Balkans was never far from the Armenian Question." This time the death toll was far higher; Balakian estimates that between 1.2 and 1.3 million Armenians were killed in the years between 1915 and 1922, though some historians put the figure at 1.5 million. Again, writes Balakian, American sentiment was with the Armenians, many survivors among whom emigrated to the US. Butin the years since, despite the Turkish government’s crimes against its people, the Armenian genocide has been gone unacknowledged, the product of a "sinister . . . Turkish campaign of denial . . . that is perhaps singular in the annals of history"—a campaign that, Balakian says, successfully persuaded Bill Clinton to kill a House measure to commemorate the genocide "for the sake of ‘national security.’ " Thoroughly convincing—and one more reason for the governments of the West, including the Clinton administration, to be ashamed.

Kirkus Reviews