I recently received offers to translate my book, A Short History of the World, into Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Korean and Portuguese, but what I was not prepared for, rather naively, was the request by several of the publishers to change the facts to suit that particular country’s view of history.
The Chinese Publishers said that my book would not get past the censors unless I edited the section on the great famine of 1958-1962; the Turks denied the Armenian Genocide; and the Japanese, under the pretext of 'Geo-political correctness' requested editing rights to reduce the text, mentioning among other things my perceived over-estimation of the number of Chinese soldiers and civilians murdered by Japanese imperial troops at Nanking during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s.
Interestingly, none of these countries objected to me mentioning massacres or mass deaths in the histories of other nations, which they deemed a fair and correct representation of history. Outright denial, even when all the facts lead to only one conclusion, seems to be the default response to an inconvenient truth.
The facts of the matter are these:
In 1915 there were some two million Christian Armenians in Ottoman lands. By the end of the first world war, around 90% had disappeared, either massacred, deported from their homes or forcibly converted to Islam. They were killed with blunt instruments, hacked to pieces, mutilated, herded into barns and burned, thrown into wells, loaded onto ships and drowned, bayonetted, and flayed alive. Thousands of women were raped and infants were thrown of bridges to prevent them enacting revenge for the murder of their parents. Those that survived the long treks into the Syrian Desert to where they were driven, were either murdered, died of disease, hunger and thirst or, unable to cope, simply committed suicide.
Ottoman mistreatment of its Armenian population was not new; it began already at the end of the 19th century when Sultan Abdul Hamid encouraged attacks on Armenian communities throughout the empire. The early 20th century saw the Ottoman Empire suffer a series of major political and military defeats with the result that the Empire lost almost all its territory in Europe. The loss of the Balkans – previously the core of the Ottoman Empire – was seen as a particularly disastrous, and resulted in a huge influx of Muslim emigrants who made there way eastward into Anatolia in 1912/1913.
Worried about further disintegration of the empire, a small group of nationalists – the Young Turks – led by Enver Pasha, Talat Bey and Jemal Pasha, seized power. They were convinced they had to reform the empire along more ethnically and religiously homogeneous lines and eliminate non-Muslims from the future empire.
When WW1 broke out, the Ottoman army performed poorly. Various defeats and setbacks were attributed by the leadership to the treachery of the Armenians. Now that they had become ‘a threat’ to the security of the state, the Armenians needed to be dealt with and what better time to do this than under the fog of war? The scene was set for the final solution of the Armenian Problem. It was a disastrous defeat against the Russians in December 1914 (The Battle of Sarıkamı) that provided the impetus to act.
In Feb 1915, the government ordered the disarming of Armenian soldiers and their transfer into labour battalions. Shortly thereafter Armenian intellectuals and politicians were arrested for no reason whatsoever. Later that year and the following year, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were driven out of their ancestral lands in the east into the burning heat of the Syrian Desert. Many of them were massacred along the way as part of an overall plan to reduce the Armenians to impotence.
The Armenians became a very convenient scapegoat for the all the nation’s woes. The tragedy was that in most cases they were led like lambs to the slaughter as a result of not wishing to antagonize the Turkish government; many Armenians were told to fulfill their duty to the fatherland and not attract suspicion. Despite all the signs to the contrary, although quite understandably, they believed that law and order might prevail and that the government might undertake actions to protect its citizens, as all benevolent governments should. They had no way of knowing that the government at the time was led by a small group that planned a state-targeted killing and would justify the massacres as a legitimate means to preserve the integrity of the state.
Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. There can be absolutely no doubt that there was a clear, deliberate and pre-meditated plan by the highest echelons of power – supported by the general population, if only by their silence – to rid the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire of its Christian Armenian population. Virtually every country in the world, with the US a notable exception, has accepted the term genocide for these terrible events yet the Turkish campaign of denial continues…
2. Mao’s Great Famine / The Great Leap Forward
According to his detailed analysis of Chinese Communist party archives, Frank Dikötter, author of ‘Mao’s Great Famine’, estimates that between 1958 and 1962, over 45 million Chinese people were worked starved or beaten to death as a direct result of absurdly unrealistic policies that Chairman Mao instigated in order to catch up and overtake the Western world.
On the declaration of the People’s Republic of China on 01 Oct 1949, Mao inherited a backward and poor country which he was determined to drag into to the 20th century – regardless of the consequences. Mao was deeply impressed, during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1957, with the Soviet Union’s launch of a satellite (sputnik) into space and with Khruschev’s statement that the Soviet Union would overtake the USA in steel production within 15 years. Mao returned to China with a new enthusiasm, determined that China also would catch up with the west. His efforts to achieve this caused one of the most deadly mass killings in human history.
Displeased with slow pace of economic development, Mao pushed for increases in production of grain, cotton, coal and steel. Communities countrywide were pushed to agree to totally unrealistic grain targets – houses of mud and straw were even destroyed to provide nutrients for the soil – and pots, pans and important tools were smelted in an utterly fruitless attempt to hit steel targets.
Vast swathes of forests were cut down to feed the furnaces and untold environmental damage occurred as a result of mass irrigation projects. Worse, national targets were consistently revised upwards as it became a matter of local party pride to provide the most grain and steel even though there was no chance at all that these targets would be hit. As the state commandeered all the available food, people simply starved to death.
Those suggesting that the targets might not be reasonable were imprisoned or run out of town, seen as ‘rightist’ revolutionaries and class enemies. Hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens were tortured and executed as a result. The greatest tragedy was that while the Chinese people starved, the communist leadership continued to export grain to developing and Eastern Bloc countries to ‘save face.’ The country would honor contracts with foreigners even if it meant that the people would not eat. As with the Armenians under Talat Bey, (and the Russians under Stalin, the Cambodians under Pol Pot, etc.) the Chinese peasants simply put their trust in the wrong man.
In July 1937 Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China that started the second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War in Asia. Invading China gave Japan much needed natural resources and arable land, and was the first step in its master plan to become the dominant power in Asia. The ill-equipped and badly led Chinese troops were no match for the well-trained Japanese imperial army, and within 5 months the Japanese had captured much of China’s eastern seaboard.
In December 1937, after having subdued Shanghai, Japanese forces proceeded to march on the Chinese capital city of Nanking (present day Nanjing). After a mere four days of battle, some 50,000 Japanese troops entered the city on 13th December and the vast majority of the Chinese troops – numbered in tens of thousands – surrendered. On 17th December orders were received to ‘kill all captives’, with detailed instructions on how this should be achieved. Over the course of the next weeks, up to three hundred thousand Chinese troops and civilians were indiscriminately massacred in the most horrendous circumstances. Some were mowed down by machine guns, some used for live bayonet practice, others were tied-up, soaked with gasoline and burned alive or decapitated in beheading contests. Still others were buried alive or buried to their waists and then torn apart by dogs. In fact, so many people were killed that the imperial army ran out of ditches and gasoline to burn the bodies and resorted to dumping them in the Yangtze River, which flows past the west side of the city. Both the streets and the river are said to have run red with blood for days. This was without a doubt one of the greatest atrocities to have occurred in the 20th century. But it gets even worse.
The Japanese troops then proceeded to rape, torture and kill up to 80,000 women and girls. Neither were pregnant women spared; after being raped, their bellies were cut open and foetuses torn out and impaled. Women who were not killed were forced to become ‘comfort women’ to serve the Japanese troops in sexual slavery.
But nailing down the numbers is not the point here. The point is that many conservative Japanese and revisionists have made a conscious attempt to deny outright or downplay the involvement of the Japanese military in these and other atrocities during World War II. These same people pressure publishers of history books – including mine – to remove any evidence that places the Japanese army in a bad light. For those of you wondering, Japan’s official position on Nanking is that it admits that it was an aggressor state and that the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred but that ‘it is difficult to determine the correct number of victims’, i.e. that deaths did occur but nowhere near on the scale believed in China and in the West.
So why is it that nations feel they have to deny their history? There are several answers ranging from shame and fear of having to pay vast sums in reparations to national pride. Turkey most definitely does not want to be seen as the country that killed 1.5 million predominantly peaceful citizens and neighbours based on nothing more than religion and culture. As Taner Akçam, the Turkish historian of the genocide, said: 'It's not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves.’ The same applies for the Chinese. How can they look at the face of Mao everyday on their banknotes or at Tiananmen Square when tens of millions of Chinese died as a direct result of his incompetence and idiocy? What does this mean for the Communist Party? How can they possibly admit that they got it so terribly wrong? As for the Japanese, it is difficult to preserve their pride for their soldiers who died in WW2 when it’s clear that so many of them were guilty of rape, torture and other bestial acts. Where does that stand with the concept of an honest soldier giving his life for his country? It’s much much easier just to dig one’s head in the sand and deny it ever happened.
The attempt to whitewash history is clearly not culture or country specific. The French even have a word for the denial of historic crimes: Négationnisme, which, incidentally, is now illegal in France. There are, no doubt, a vast number of countries that have a part of their history about which to be shameful; after all, man's inhumanity to man seems to be fairly consistent throughout history. But how are we to avoid making the same mistakes if we are not ready to acknowledge our past errors. As Cicero wisely said, ‘To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child.’
Instead of downplaying the events for the sake of misplaced national pride, these states bear a moral obligation to acknowledge the evil that was perpetrated in their name and with their express authority. Instead of pressuring publishers and journalists to downplay the atrocities, these states should admit that these crimes were not isolated incidents but were committed as part of a deliberate and systematic state-sanctioned policy. At some point these countries will face the truth of history – as western nations have done with their appalling record of slavery, as the Germans have done with the Holocaust – and they will feel a lot healthier for it.
If you would like to learn more about these events then I recommend the books below, all classics on their subject:
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chan
Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter
vaporwave
germansingergirl
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
dededos
baratheonpilled