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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Steven Shapin on Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map."
John Updike on "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a House resolution--later to be known as H.R. 596--on the slaughter of the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the matter, to demonstrate "appropriate understanding and sensitivity." It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the atrocities as "genocide." The bill was sent to the International Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to "respect the Turkish government's assertions that, although many ethnic Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place." Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while he in no way wanted to "downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in the region." After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a half billion dollars' worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy. On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S. access to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol northern Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R. 596 was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that passage of the resolution could "risk the lives of Americans."
The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush continues to "respect the Turkish government's assertions" and to issue Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite acknowledging what it is that's being remembered. If in Washington it's politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey's leading author, Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject in a press interview. "A million Armenians were killed and nobody but me dares to talk about it, " he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish penal code, which outlaws "insulting Turkishness." (The charge was eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul," declare, "I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide." The charges...
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