MJ

Armenian committee to implement national unity programme 16 Feb 2001 Snark [FBIS Translated Text] Armenian committee to implement national unity programme Text of report by Armenian news agency Snark Yerevan, 16 February: More than 1m dollars are needed to implement the Armenian national unity programme. Talking about the said sum at a news conference today, the head of the Armenian Ayrenik-Spryuk (motherland-diaspora) committee, Grach Ter-Yeseyan, made the above statement, when asked about the prospects of the programme by a Snark correspondent. He said that the programme, which aims at bringing together all the Armenians, will be implemented in several phases. He added that, without an expectation, offices of the Ayrenik-Syuprik committee for rasing money will be established in all Armenian provinces and among diaspora. One of the main tasks of the committee is to create an all-Armenia bank and a parliament. About 100,000 dollars are needed for the registration of an all-Armenian bank alone, Ter-Yesayan said. At present the Ayrenik-Syuprik committee, which includes 170 political and social organizations, is using its own fund. Ter-Yeseyan said that 20,000 dollars have already been spent on the preparatory work. The committee is counting on the Armenian diaspora for the necessary fund.

There is a material in today's Critical Corner of Groong by Eddie Arnavoudian on Ani. I am not pasting it here due to Copyright issues that Groong maintains for that section of its Digest. You can find material at http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg27623.html .

Dear Ali, Sorry, I had missed your previous note addressed to me. Talking about academic career – hopefully you have ended up with a better career path. The culture of free speech doesn’t come overnight. In some ways, our nation has to learn it, too. But first, we have to establish a culture of free thinking. If this culture exists, the culture of free speech may come easier. The better Turkey will be in the best interests of both Turks and Armenians, as well as all other nations of the region.

quote:Originally posted by Nvard: BTW, Martin,thanks a lot for the Vampiric studies My pleasure, Nvard. But don't you get carried away.!

Kazza, The suffix "ian" is not necessarily indicative of Armenianness. It may very well be Iranian. It may even be Moldavian, Hungarian, etc. There are also a lot of Indian last names with a suffix "yan." Additionally, there are Armenian last names, which don’t end with "ian" or "yan" - primarily of Eastern Armenian origin. Examples are Bakunts, Akunts, Adonts,Hainuni, Bznuni, Rshtuni, etc. Some Eastern Armenian last names end with "iants" or "yants." I am told, and I don't know how valid that argument is, that these last names are indicative of either nobility or cleric dynasty

Mike, These are two different articles on the subject of Armenian Protestants. Did you mean Vahan is your cousin?

quote:Originally posted by dragon: Dear MJ ''Bavlikianner'' are the same ''bavghikianniar'' in Armenian culture. L and GH are ldzort kirer. They replace each oter, as YEROUSAGHEM for JERUSALEM. Thanks Dragon It seems like you don't want to let it go. I have to just tell you that this is the least of the things I would like to engage in. It is not worth the while. Additionally, I have more than sufficient knowledge of, both, Eastern and Western Armenian dialects. I am sure you know what I would've claimed next, was I intended to continue discussion of something which is not warranted.

THE GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS AND THE SILENCE OF THE TURKS. Taner Akçam The genocide of the Armenians has been a taboo topic for us Turks for eighty years. The eighty-year-old silence has produced such tension and a mountain of prejudice, not only between the two societies , i.e. the Turkish and the Armenian, but also in the academic world, that even the development of a common language in which the subject could be discussed is becoming a serious problem. For this reason, the fact that I, a Turkish historian, am critically approaching this subject for the first time is more important perhaps than the content of my speech. There is not only the risk that I may be accused of treason in Turkey, but also the risk that you may want to perceive me on this podium as the corporate representative of the Turks, expecting from me an account for the Turkish stance of the last eighty years. Conscious of all these problems, I ask you to listen to me, a historian who is about to speak to you solely in his own name. My purpose is neither to hide behind the "pretext of having been born too late" nor to assert that I do not have my share in the "collective responsibility." Quite the contrary, independent of what position I personally may take, I am aware that I am a member of that collectivity which produced "the perpetrators" (or that I belong to a group of perpetrators). Precisely for this reason, I would like to explore the topic fully conscious of the fact as to what it means in this sense "being a member" and "bearing collective responsibility." It is easier for our generation, which cannot be held directly responsible for the events, to reflect upon the past and to define it as an essential element in our collective identity. This "haughtiness," this vantage of my generation perhaps could help to finally achieve a breakthrough. On the other hand, the meaning of the passage of eighty years cannot be underestimated. It is incumbent upon us to "remember" a reality that was treated in our history as a non-event, one which was simply denied, to "recover it in our consciousness," and to assign to it the proper significance, But what shape can or will this recovered memory take? What does it mean "to incorporate the fact of the genocide in our historical present, and what will be the result? A start can only be made by way of discovering the meaning of belonging to the perpetrator group and of bearing collective responsibility. We have these and many other questions to answer. At this juncture I would like to explain just how the Turks view or do not view the Armenian Genocide and how they have made it a taboo topic. The question to which I am seeking an answer may be formulated in the following way: why is it that a calm discussion of the subject is not possible, even if we proceed from the premise that there has not been any occurrence of genocide? Wherein lie the reasons for reacting to the topic with an agitation rarely observed elsewhere? I do not claim that I can answer this question in all its aspects. I will merely list some points that I consider meriting discussion. I am of the opinion that the formation of the Turkish national identity played a decisive role not only in the decision to commit genocide but also in the current denial and tabooing of it. It is therefore indispensable that I first delve into the peculiarities of the origin of national identity and some of the related factors. I proceed from a concept that the well-known sociologist Norbert Elias has framed. He spoke of "national habitat,"' linking it firmly with the process of the formation of nation states. The concept epitomizes some of the peculiarities which were formed during the creation of a nation state. These peculiarities reflect a common mentality, an ethos permeating the psyche of the entire nation and help to explain why in certain situations general patterns of behavior emerge. In other words, a direct link is being established between national identity and the rise of a nation state, at the same time recognizing the central role of the nation state in the evolution of national identity. 1. UNDERSTANDING THE PERPETRATORS AND THEIR VIEWS Generally speaking, we are inclined to characterize as "inhuman" acts that we consider morally reprehensible because of their dreadfulness. The revulsion we feel against these acts obviates any need to understand them. This attitude is well suited to engender a distance between us and the act in question, thereby preventing us from identifying with "what is bad." We can perhaps assuage our consciences by this means, but we must recognize that this does not help us to achieve "understanding" or to "evaluate" adequately. Adomo called our attention to the fact that beyond a moralistic attitude, the need "to understand" is absolutely necessary. He offered the following observation: In the final analysis, the issue concerns the manner in which the past is recalled and integrated into the present; whether we stop at mere reproach or resolutely withstand the sense of horror in order to be able to comprehend even the incomprehensible. On the other hand, however, difficulties likewise arise with the so-called scientific objective approach. In the first place, the scientific language that can be defined as a "dictionary intended for non-humans," because of its capability to objectify the events, is handicapped in terms of establishing a distance from the language used by the "perpetrators." Every attempt "to understand" has the potential of relativizing and justifying the act of perpetration. We must see to it that every historical reconstruction that "wants to know how events have transpired," as Walter Benjamin maintained, uses the method of introspection when analysing the perpetrator, and consequently becomes guilty of moral indolence.' For this reason, perhaps it is better not to create a common perspective while analysing a phenomenon such as genocide, but to rely instead on two different perspectives, the perspective of the "perpetrators" and that of the "victims."' These two distinct perspectives bring to the fore distinctly different material for the reconstruction of historical events. The works that have been produced up to today about the genocide of the Armenians have essentially emanated from the perspective of the "victim group." My attempt in this regard can be understood as an investigation of the subject from the viewpoint of the "perpetrator group," a venture that could not be undertaken until now because of the past history of denial and tabooing. The most important point in which the "perpetrator perspective" differs from the "victim perspective" is the predominance of the factor of historical continuity. In this perpetrator perspective, genocïde appears neither as an "unintended accident" nor as an "aberrant phenomenon" free from the exertions of a cultural/ political background, and not likely to repeat itself. This argument does not suggest that events such as genocide are the inevitable result of the sway of certain cultural/political conditions. Certainly, genocide is afforded only by virtue of the existence of a set of very specific conditions that coincide in a special way with the dynamics of a compatible cultural/political background. By sensitizing ourselves to their significance we can better understand and define those special conditions that lead to genocide and determine the extent to which those factors that constitute the above-mentioned cultural/political background are still in effect today. While I maintain that past events have shaped Turkish national identity and do even determine our present behavioral patterns, others may object that this "has nothing to do with modem times," because the events took place in a "past era." Thus it can be argued from a modem viewpoint that the consequences of the events of a hundred years ago have no great significance insofar as their relationship to the marks they left behind is concerned. Instead of initiating a discussion on these ideas, I would like to limit myself to adducing here a statement by Norbert Elias: It is always amazing to ascertain the remarkable degree of persistence with which certain patterns of thinking, feeling and acting can endure in one and the same society over many generations, even though the members of that society do make specific adjustments to changing circumstances.' This is also my thesis with reference to Turkey. If, for example, we examine the arguments that are being advanced with regard to the Kurds, we can recognize evidence of the surprising degree to which the state of mind, the model of thinking that dominated in the decade after 1 91 0, persists today. I do not want to be understood as saying that there is a simple "danger of recurrence." But before we take shelter behind such an easing of the emotions, we would do well to inquire whether the social conditions and the mentality from which the act of genocide has sprung still persists. This is the only way in which we can understand and combat the presence of a barbaric potential, however in different forms, at the core of societies. If in given societies certain destructive potentials exist as peculiar ingredients of national identity, as a type of mentality, then we must make a conscious effort toward reckoning with these. One of the most important ways to confront a mentality that directs, to a great extent, subconscious processes entailing, almost automatically, spontaneous reactions, consists of bringing this mentality to the conscious level. This is the method that Adomo called "confronting the subject."' If you want "to understand" and analyze collectively committed cruelty, and you wish to prevent the repetition of such events, then you will not find a solution if you direct your attention primarily to the group of "victims." Attention must be directed to the "perpetrators" in order to uncover a series of "conscious or unconscious" mechanisms which underlie their actions, for it is the activation of these mechanisms that makes these people "perpetrators." Following this general introduction, I would like to list below, in the form of a thesis, a few fundamental features of Turkish national identity that have played an important role in the decision to commit genocide as well as in the subsequent tabooing of the topic. 11. SOME CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS OF TURKISH NATIONAL IDENTITY 1. Compared to France, Germany and other European states, Turkish nationalism and Turkish national consciousness entered the historical stage very late. There are different reasons for this belatedness. Special significance attaches to the influence of Islam and the cosmopolitan character of the Ottoman Empire. Because of its late development, Turkish nationalism was strongly influenced by Social Darwinism and racist ideologies. This intellectual background of Turkish nationalism, combined with the urgent need to catch up, made that nationalism aggressive. 2. Turkish nationalism arose as a reaction to the experience of constant humiliations. Turkish national sentiment constantly suffered from the effects of an inferiority complex. Various factors played a role in this. Critical, however, was the fact that the Turks not only were continuously humiliated and loathed, but they were conscious of this humiliation. The Turkish political elite had clear ideas as to what people thought of the Turks, and this knowledge became an important determining factor for their actions. One of the consequences was a strong "sense of being misunderstood" and a fear of being isolated. A nation that was humiliated in this way in the past and is also conscious of that experience, will try to prove its own greatness and importance. As Elias noted: The established feeling of inferiority ... and the resentment, the sensitivity to the humiliation, often connected with it was countered [and compensated] with the preoccupation with its own greatness and power. The result is a penchant for power. 3. Turkish national identity evolved in conditions in which the fear of annihilation and dissolution was omnipresent. The process of disintegration afflicting the Ottoman Empire was of such gravity that it produced a traumatic anxiety among Ottoman leaders. The fear of annihilation and disintegration, fed by a deep consciousness of weakness and helplessness, is "the midwife" of Turkish national identity. One result of this mental attitude was to reflect upon the possible reasons, persons and circles of political operatives that could have caused these negative developments. Seen through the prism of Turkish national identity, the Christian minorities were viewed as one of the primary factors responsible for the decline and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians were, therefore, stigmatized as enemies. This enmity was rendered all the more intense by the fact that some imperial powers used the Christians as a lever in order to realize the partition of the empire consistent with their own power interests. The Christians hereby obtained certain economic and social privileges. Another factor which created an image of hostile Christians was the role Islam played in this connection. On the basis of Islamic culture and its system of laws, the Moslems have always considered the Christians as an inferior minority group and have never viewed them as being equal to themselves. Thus the Christians did not enjoy equality in the Ottoman Empire. But during the stages marking the disintegration of the Empire, the reforms and economic privileges led to a change in the position of the Christians. The Turks gradually lost their social status as a superior class. They could not reconcile themselves to the idea of equality with the Christians by way of reforms, or that a Christian minority should attain a better economic position than they. This loss of status led to the rise of hate-revenge sentiments against those who were seen as responsible. The Moslems did not "peacefully" accept their steadily weakening position. This awareness of loss of status played a significant role in the enactment of the massacre against Christians, and the history of the nineteenth century provides much evidence for this. 4. The psychology of those found on the brink of disaster and dying a slow death was shaped through two peculiarities. First, the rebellious Christian minorities lived in the fringe areas of the empire. Continual losses of territory on the fringes of the empire had created among the Turks a siege mentality, that is, the feeling that the empire was encircled by enemies. Elias points out certain features in the development of the German nation state, the incidence of which may be observed in the development of the Turkish nation state also: The process of state development for the Germans was deeply influenced by their position as a central block in the configuration of those three ethnic blocks. The Latinized and Slavic groups again and again felt threatened by the populous German state. Representatives of the nascent German state simultaneously felt threatened from different sides. All parties quite recklessly availed themselves of every opportunity for expansion that presented itself. The pressures stemming from this configuration of states in the center led to a continuous crumbling of the peripheral regions that separated from the German union of states and established themselves as independent states. Second, this "crumbling" of the fringes was not the result of the military defeats of the Ottoman leadership. The insurrections of the minorities could almost always be crushed. It was pressure from abroad that forced the Ottomans to make political concessions to those they defeated militarily. Thus a nation and its elite, who were accustomed to dominating others over the course of centuries, were shocked by the ability of others to toy with and degrade their honor. One way that nations under pressure from above and reduced to whipping boys tend to react is by way of avenging themselves against those they hold responsible for their misfortune. Elias captures the essence of this dynamic when he writes: A state's relative weakness vis-à-vis other states creates specific crises for the people involved. They suffer physical insecurity, doubt their own worth, feel degraded and disgraced and are prone to indulging in wishful thinking about revenge that they would like to inflict on those they hold responsible for the situation. 5. Another characteristic of Turkish national identity is the fact that the Turks consider themselves the actual, true victims of history. "We are the nation upon whom actual injustice was inflicted. We are a persecuted nation, but no one recognizes that. We are treated as the "'stepchildren' of history." Two factors have contributed to the evolution of this mental attitude. First, throughout the nineteenth century, the national wars of liberation of Christian groups in the Balkans (Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, etc.) were experienced as massacres of the Moslem population. Secondly, Europe paid no attention to the massacres of Moslems, although European nations were highly sensitive to the massacres of Christians and utilized every occasion to interfere. It is not an exaggeration to say that in the minds of the Moslems had entrenched itself the firm belief that the entire world was poised against them; they considered themselves the victims of history. 6. Two essential factors are responsible for the difficulty of the Turks in coping with this sentiment of collapse and worthlessness. First, there was the deeply rooted belief in the superiority of the Turks over other peoples and the right of Turks to dominate them. There is still talk today of erecting a world empire and of dominating other nations as signposts of Turkish superiority and historical uniqueness. The most important reason for this attitude lies in the fact that the Turks, as a ruling stratum, (even though they themselves were not conscious of their Turkishness), and under the influence of Islamic thought, identified themselves with Islam and felt superior to the empire's other religious groups. The idea of the " ruling nation" (Millet-I Hakime) dominated the thinking of the Ottoman-Turkish ruling elite. At the same time, the Ottoman-Turkish ruling elite was overwhelmed by the greatness of its own past. There was really an enormous gap between the sense of belonging to an empire that ruled over three continents and the current situation, in which national honor was being dragged through the mud. The conflict between these past and present realities intensified the need to 1) reject the present, 2) return to the old days of imperial glory, and 3) punish those who were accused of being responsible for the current malaise. It is possible, even necessary, to introduce here additional factors for consideration. The decision to commit genocide can be understood only against this background, but I do not claim that the genocide is a direct result of this frame of mind. Needed were additional conditions which, however, could lead to genocide only in this context. One of these conditions was that the Turks were the heirs to a sublime and glorious past but were steadily growing weak and were suffering from the ills of the exaltation of their past. The demise was unavoidable in the event of a war. The decision for genocide arose within the purview of this assumption. Generally speaking, nations that have a "great and glorious" past live in the shadow of and under the burden of this past. When such nations lapse into a position of weakness, when they are repeatedly wounded in their sense of honor and degraded and have a premonition of ruination, the burden of the awareness of the past, its ballast, becomes even greater. The stronger the feeling of loss of worth and the level of humiliation, the more forcefully is the past idealized and its recovery made a priority. Depending on how strongly it is believed that the glorious past could become the ideal future, the potential for violent action, which is deemed to be needed, will be increased. A wounded national pride, a national identity unsure of itself, and a national ideal looking backwards to the past were the cumulative effects of the troubled German history (which can also be read as OttomanTurkish history-T.A.), which in the long-run is punctuated by defeats and an ensuing loss of power. The vision of a greater past projected into the future provided a fertile environment for the rise of especially vicious forms of behavior and credos. As a rule, the desire to apply power against those who are held responsible for the loss of strength and power, humiliation, and the loss of worth is the result of these developments. Parallel to this debacle and loss of self-worth, one has to consider other occurrences. Accelerated disintegration and fragmentation of the national state give rise to feelings of fear of "annihilation"," siege by enemies," and "a war of naked survival fought with one's back to the wall" in the later stages of this process. When the situation is seen as increasingly hopeless, those in power who cannot prevent this decline become increasingly aggressive. When the national elite sees it as less and less probable that a great and ideal future can be created and that the goal appears in jeopardy and the process of decline is unstoppable, the countermeasures meant to stop this process acquire a more and more barbaric character. The resort to genocide stands at the apex of this process. If this process of decline is erratic, and now and then hopes spring up that one can find a way out, the end result promises to be even more painful. When a nation has a premonition of downfall it will never concede that it is at the edge of such a downfall and will stubbornly focus on the dream of a great future. In such a situation, the dreams become even more unrealizable. The force of the downward trend was reflected in the extreme brutality of the means with which they tried to stop it .... With their backs to the wall, the defenders easily become the destroyers of civilization. They easily become barbarians. This was the history of the Turks before World War 1. PanTuranism and the ideal of a great Turkish empire became stronger as the disintegration and partition of the empire progressed and the situation grew more hopeless. While the quest for a collective identity that would hold the empire together proved abortive, the leadership turned farther toward the East, to regions and peoples where the ideal of empire could be realized. The Turks perceived the First World War as an historical opportunity. Those who had suffered defeat and lived through a painful process, including degradation and loss of honor, for years, now saw the looming on the horizon of an historical opportunity to stop the decline from which there was otherwise no escape. The Turks' bad fortune, it was thought, could now be reversed and the disintegration stopped. The great Turkish empire could be recreated; not on all the same lands, but on another expanse inhabited by loyal Turkish people worthy of trust. It was as if the clouds had unexpectedly lifted to reveal the contours of a glorious sun. The rapid succession of military debacles the Turks suffered during the first months of World War I had a very sobering effect however. Especially the defeat at Sarikamish, near Kars, in the Anatolian east, in December 1914 and January 1915, burst the Turanian-lslamic dream like a soap bubble. The Ottoman-Turkish rulers could, however, assign blame and identify those responsible for this defeat. The Turks had not really lost; they had been betrayed. Elias' description in the German context is apt here: "[The defeat] had been caused by cunning deception, by criminals, by means of a conspiracy, by a 'stab in the back' administered by internal traitors in the rear of the combat troops." This quote from Elias, though describing the Nazi case, can not only logically be extended to the rationale advanced for the case of the Armenian Genocide, but it can literally be seen as a general accusation levelled against the Armenians in some studies of the genocide. The sudden loss of an historical opportunity that had resulted from the constant military setbacks, humiliations, and losses of self-worth coincided with another historical event. Enemy forces stood at the entrance of the Dardanelles in March, 1915, and with that, the end of the empire was in sight. Without a doubt, this cast a special dark pallor over the mood of the Ottoman leaders. The land, (Anatolia), so quintessential for the survival of the Turks, would be handed over to the Armenians after the defeat. There had been a corresponding plan for reform even before the war. In order to avert such a possible outcome, the Turks had resort to the most ruthless and daring action. "When a chronic feeling of sinking, of being driven into a corner and encircled by the enemy awakens the belief that only absolute ruthlessness can rescue the vanishing power and glory..." then one does not recoil before the idea of using the most barbaric methods. The dimensions of the sense of loss of self-worth and of meaning, and the fact that the Ottoman Empire stood at the doorstep of defeat led rapidly to desperate actions that were "insane" and reckless. Ottoman-Turkish ruling circles were gripped by the great fear that the end of the empire could become a reality. Their refusal to accept this led to the brutality of the measures they undertook for deliverance. It is probably not incorrect to consider the Armenian Genocide as a product of this frame of mind. The battle for the Dardanelles lasted 259 days and represented a kind of "purgatory."" Death and resurrection were being lived every day. It is probably no accident, however, that the genocide of the Armenians became a compelling issue after the defeat at Sarikamish and at a time when the war for the Dardanelles had become a struggle for life and death. 111. THE REASONS FOR TURKISH SILENCE Why is discussion of the Arrnenian Genocide a taboo? Why do we Turks have the feeling that lightning has struck our bones whenever the theme is addressed? What are the reasons for this sensitivity and indisposition? At first these reactions appear difficult to comprehend. If it wishes, Turkey can recognize the fact of genocide, at the same time asserting that it had no connection to the act. There is sufficient material available to justify doing this. Turkey maintains that it is a completely new state. Official history propounds the thesis that the war of liberation was also directed against the Ottoman rulers. Moreover, a few members of the Ittihad party that organized the genocide were brought before the court in 1926, and some of them were executed. Even if an explanation along the lines of "it is indeed regrettable, but we did not do it, it was the Ottomans" would meet with strong objections, it could be seen as a normal, expected pattern of response. Since the possibilities of a discussion free from portentous problems are not being pursued, there must be deeper underlying reasons for the extreme reactions, evasions, and denials. In the form of a preliminary thesis, I would suggest for consideration the following points, fully cognizant of the fact that they are rudimentary points and need to be developed further. 111 A. LACK OF HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS The first and most important point concerns the lack of historical consciousness in Turkish society. I would characterize amnesia as a social disease in Turkey. The inability to remember refers not only to the period of World War I but also to incidents from the 1860s and 1870s that have long since been forgotten. To begin with, the founders of the Turkish Republic have severed our connections and bonds to history. Each state that asserts itself as a new entity must provide a basis for its legitimacy and predicate that legitimacy on the historical past. The Kemalist cadres of the republic had serious difficulties with this issue. Islam had consigned everything that was called Turkish to oblivion over the entire course of Ottoman history. For that reason, the rulers of the new republic had no possibility of linking their newly established nation state, which they fashioned on the principle of Turkish national identity, with the Ottomans. They had to find a new Turkish history for themselves. They had to skip backwards six hundred years, past the Ottomans, who had repressed the idea of Turkishness, and who had even degraded it. As a final result, this long time span of history was treated as non-existent. Through a series of reforms, this time interval, intended or not, was stricken from memory. The Latin alphabet was introduced with the "revolution" of 1928. Thus future generations were barred access to the written testimony of the past. The Turkification of the language was carried out in such an extreme and rapid fashion that the younger generations can no longer understand the language of the 1930s. Consequently, the relationship to the past and to history became circumscribed by the manner in which a few officially approved history professors defined it. It is difficult to conceive of a society that has no access to what has occurred before 1928. Yet it is true that people cannot even read the diaries of their parents and forebears. As a society, we are dependent today on what is etched in our memory, what we have ourselves experienced and what has been conveyed to us by our family members. 111 B. THE REASONS FOR "WANTING TO FORGET" Lack of historical consciousness is a common problem. However, there are still more direct reasons for fearing the discussion of the Armenian Genocide as if one feared "a monster." I hereby maintain that the "wish to forget history" is directly related to the genocide of the Armenians. In order to be freed from the connotations of the term genocide, the founders of modem Turkey undertook a kind of cleansing as they ushered in the republic. The slow but continuous disintegration of the great empire, the military defeats in wars that continued over the years, the loss of tens of thousands of people, a society whose dignity was scorned along with the constant loss of self-worth, overwhelmed by the imagery of a great history, fantasies about recreating the past, the terminal bursting of these dreams, and the inability to absorb and integrate these numerous contradictions, and ... finally, the genocide: that constitutes a social trauma of major proportions. As is the case with individuals, so it is also with societies that they experience difficulty in incorporating in their own living history events that produce crises. Mechanisms of blocking out and forgetfulness intrude and encumber the effort to overcome the difficulty. The reason why the republic is described as a new birth, as a zero point, lies in the psychological crises generated by the legacy of the past and the desire to not remember it. The republic believes that the entire dismal image can be suddenly erased and that the Turks can thus be delivered from a nightmare, from an extremely dangerous, fatal illness. I believe that this frame of mind plays an important role in steering all discussion away from the genocide. To raise the issue is akin to telling someone who was miraculously delivered from a fatal illness that the disease is not really in remission and that he should brace himself for a relapse. Not only do people not want to think of decline, humiliation, and disgrace, but people do not want also to be reminded of them. We like to believe that we have recovered and that we have acquired a new persona. Therefore, the official line is that Turkey emerged from a period of upheaval in history from which "a new personality was created from nothing." I maintain here that we have not yet recovered, that we have not yet acquired the "new personality that has divested itself of the spell of the old crises," and that as long as we do not talk about the Armenian Genocide, our chances of creating a new "other" remains rather tenuous. As long as the act of perpetration is not consciously accounted for, all peculiarities of this event will live on in the unconscious. If, as Turkey maintains, a decisive turning point really occurred and a completely new element emerged, then there should be a link to the past that would be free of the problems prevalent today. The desperate effort to avoid any discussion about the genocide is the most telling proof that the assertion regarding the rise of a "completely new and other element" is not a valid one. A society, a state does not like to confront an imagery that is at variance with its self imagery, and, as such, is likely destroy its world of fantasies. Herein lies the reason for our sharp reaction to those who call our attention to that reality. 111 C. "WANTING TO FORGET" IS A KIND OF SEQUEL Another question that must be addressed is what do we expect if we "forget" the genocide or drive its reality into the inner recesses of the unconscious? My suggestion at this point is a kind of "historical quest for the traces." To be sure, it is not just a matter of repressing the memory of a historical period. Through such repression, even the conditions that led to the Armenian Genocide are relegated to the unconscious. However, they are not destroyed, but live on in another form. The Turks were gripped by powerful impulses of wishful thinking during the years of World War 1. They wanted to free themselves from the shackles of their weak and powerless position, They wanted to establish a new strong hegemony and thereby cast off their feelings of humiliation and disgrace. We can speak of the fact that a strong collective narcissism was developed, primarily through the vehicles of Pan-Turanism and Pan-lslamicism. These needs remained unsatisfied as a result of the Ottoman defeat. Collective narcissism suffered hard blows and neither the community that perceived itself as such a collective, nor individuals have come to terms with this frustration. The relinquishing of the goals to which the elite aspired was not an act that could be compared to a reckoning with the past, but a mere "swallowing." In this respect, the words of Mustafa Kemal are very instructive with regard to Pan-Turanism and Pan-lslamism. It was essential for him not to turn against them, but to choose not to deal with what could not be achieved, given Turkey's insufficient resources. In the final analysis, the past was not shut off, it is waiting in the unconscious to be summoned up again. "Social-psychologically, it is to be expected that the damaged collective narcissism is lying in wait for a chance to be repaired. It grasps for whatever brings the past consciously into harmony with the narcissistic wish, but there is also the possibility that reality can be modeled in such a way as if there was no damage in the first place. I do not assert at this juncture that collective narcissism will again manifest itself in Pan-Turanic goals. That can occur in yet another way. The underlying drive, however, is the desire to again dominate other nations and to again become a great power. I will not go into how this affects the unfolding of the present day realities in Turkey. There are, however, a series of indications that we have begun to recover from the shock of the debacles of World War 1. Fundamental changes in world structure and the relative economic strength of Turkey compared to its neighbors reinforce the desire in Turkey to return to the old powerful days of empire. It can be argued that this condition accounts for one of the essential reasons for the strengthening of nationalistic and fundamentalist forces in Turkey. The desire to be a great power and to return to the old days does not derive from a psychology of disintegration and decline, but from a belief that it can be fulfilled through modem Turkey's own resources and strength. 111 D. OUR SELF IMAGE AND THE GENOCIDE One of the most important reasons for the tabooing of the Armenian Genocide lies in the coupling of this event with the establishment of the republic. To a certain extent, the establishment of the republic depended heavily on the genocide. The founders of the republic knew that, and they were not averse to expressing it openly. For example, one of the leaders of the Ittihad ve Terakki stated: "If we had not cleaned up the eastern provinces of Armenian militia who were cooperating with the Russians, there would have been no possibility of founding our national state." A speech was delivered in the first parliament of the young republic, the thrust of which was that we accept the label of "murderers" since it served the purpose of saving the fatherland: You know that the problem of [Armenian] deportations threw the world in an uproar and all of us were labeled murderers. We knew before this was done that world opinion would not be favorable and this would bring loathing and hatred upon us. Why have we resigned ourselves to being called murderers? Those are things that have only happened in order to secure something that is more holy and valuable than our own live at the future of the fatherland. These "brave" words that the Turkish Republic was built on the genocide of the Armenians were reflections of the enthusiasm of the years during which the Turkish Republic was founded. In the course of time, however, we have sketched out an entirely contrary portrayal. Our nation state "had been created from nothing and in opposition against the imperial forces," an achievement of which we could be proud. The Turkish state was the symbolic proof of a national existence, that "we had dug ourselves" out of the national void "with our fingernails." Anti-imperialism was an indispensable component of our national identity. One aspect of national identity of which we were obviously proud was the organizing of the "National Forces" (Kuvayi Milliye) that had helped us obtain our independence. The "spirit" of these fighting forces, which originally were part of the first guerrilla units of the Turkish national movement, was still inspiring the generation of 1968 as a symbol of anti-imperialist identity. One of the most important reasons we go out of our way not to discuss the Armenian Genocide is, therefore, the fear that our faith in ourselves would collapse. The model, the structures of thought that we use to explain the genocide to the world and in Turkey could collapse through such discussions. A discussion of the Armenian Genocide could reveal that this Turkish state was not a result of a war fought against the imperial powers, but, on the contrary, a product of the war against the Greek and Armenian minorities. It could show that a significant part of the National Forces consisted either of murderers who directly participated in the Armenian Genocide or of thieves who had become rich by plundering Armenian possessions. Three different aspects can be discussed with respect to the connection between the Armenian Genocide and the establishment of the Turkish republic. First, the Turkish national movement was organized by the Ittihad ve Terakki party that had carried out the wartime genocide. It is known that the plans for this movement were already drafted during the First World War. In case of military defeat, preparations were made to organize a long lasting resistance. These plans were carried out in the Armistice of 1918 and thereafter. An important point is that organizations, such as the "Society for the Defense of the Rights..." and "Rejection of Occupation," that were the mainstay of the forces supporting the national movement in Anatolia, were formed either directly on the order of Talaat ***** or with the aid of the Karakol (Police Station) organization connected to Talaat and Enver. If we look at the regions in which those organizations were established and the sequence of the acts of their founding, it becomes clear that these events initially took place everywhere a perceived Armenian or Greek danger existed. Of the first five resistance organizations that were founded after the Mudros Armistice agreement, from the 30th of October,1918 to the end of the year, three were directed against the Armenian and two against the Greek minorities. The local cadres of Ittihad ve Terakki constituted the main elements among the founders of these associations. This overlap of membership was so great that when later the central organization "A-RMHC" (Society for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia) formed a party, it was stipulated that no one from the "Freedom and Accord Party," seen as an enemy of Ittihad ve Terakki, could become a member." An important mission of the Karakol movement, which organized the national movement in Anatolia, was to arrange the escape to Anatolia of those Ittihadists who had been involved in the Armenian Genocide and who were then being sought by the British. To some extent the organization was a symbol of the nexus linking the Armenian Genocide to the resistance movement in Anatolia. The second important connection between the genocide and the national movement concerned the formation of a new class of wealthy men in Anatolia who had enriched themselves thanks to the genocide. Even Turks point to the fact that the economic motive played an important role in the Armenian Genocide. An important figure in the national movement, Halide Edip, said, "...there was a strong economic one ... this was to end the economic supremacy of the Armenians thereby clearing the markets for the Turks and the Germans." The prominent people who had enriched themselves through the genocide feared that the Armenians could return to avenge themselves and reclaim their goods. After all, this was part of the Allied agenda. These nouveaux riches were drawn even closer to the national movement on those occasions when Armenians did return with occupying forces to reclaim their goods and carry out a few acts of revenge, especially in the Çukorova (Adana, transl.) region. The newly rich thus became an integral part of the national movement. In many areas the resistance was directly organized by these newly rich elements. It was not an accident but rather a necessity that in many regions members of the governing bodies of the organizations for the protection of rights were those whose fortunes had been made as a consequence of the genocide of the Armenians. Among those who had been enriched through the genocide were some who served directly at the side of Kemal himself. Topal Osman, for example, was one who later advanced to the rank of commander of the guard battalion, (protecting the institution of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, and the person of Mustafa Kemal-transl.), and Ali Cenani, who had been exiled to Malta, later became the Minister of Commerce in the new republic. The list can be expanded. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 22, 1922, the national government repealed a January 8, 1920 law of the Istanbul government concerning the restitution of Armenian goods. This change served to reinstate the law of September, 1915 concerning the Abandoned Goods [of the Armenians]. The government in Ankara knew it had to take into account the interests of those who had a share in the founding of the republic. The third important link between the genocide of the Armenians and the republic is a natural outcome of the first. The initial organizers of the national movement were people who had directly participated in the enactment of the genocide. Those who set up the first units of the National Forces in the Marmara, Aegean, and Black Sea regions and held important posts in these units were for the most part people sought by the occupation forces and the government in Istanbul for their participation in the genocide. When Kemal began to organize the resistance in Anatolia, he received the strongest support from the Ittihadists for whom there were arrest warrants on account of their role in the genocide. Many who were sought or were actually arrested and deported to Malta for their role in the genocide, but fled or escaped later, received important posts in Ankara. There are many examples, but a few should suffice here. Sükrü Kaya became the Interior Minister and held the office of Secretary-General in the Republican Peoples Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), founded by none other than Mustafa Kemal. During the deportations of Armenians he was "Director General of the Office for the Settlement of Nomadic Tribes and Refugees." This was attached to the Interior Ministry and was officially responsible for the implementation of the Armenian "deportations." For this reason Sükrü Kaya was also known as "Director General for Deportation" (Sevkiyat Reis-i Umumisi). Mustafa Abdülhalik (Renda) was the governor of Bitlis and later Aleppo during the genocide. Rossler [Germany's veteran consul at Aleppo-trans.) said of him that: "[He] works inexorably on the annihilation of the Armenians. In an affidavit prepared by Vehip Pahsa, the commandant of the Third Army (during the war, in February, 1916) the special role of Abdülhalik Renda in the genocide is being emphasized. According to General Vehip's testimony, thousands of human beings were burned alive in the region around Mush, a district under the control of Mustafa Abdülhalik. This event is mentioned in German consular reports as well as by eyewitnesses. There are others, for example, Arif Fevzi (Prinçcizade), who was a deputy from Dlyarbekir during the war years. He was suspect number 2743 in the warrant prepared by the British for the detainees in Malta, was assigned to the group implicated in the genocide, and was to be charged as such. He held the office of Minister of Public Affairs from July 21, 1922 to October 27, 1923. Ali Cenani Bey, the Ittihad ve Terakki deputy for Aintep, was suspect number 2805. He had enriched himself from the loot and spoils associated with the genocide. "In the English archives ... a very dirty file exists on him." He was the Minister of Commerce between November 22, 1924 and May 17, 1926. Dr. Tevfik Rüstü Aras was also one of those who held important political posts in subsequent years. During World War I he was a member of the High Council on Health, which was responsible for the burial of the dead Armenians. Between 1925 and 1938, he served as Foreign Minister of the Republic of Turkey. This list could be extended by several pages. It can be stated conclusively that Mustafa Kemal led "the war of liberation ... with Ittihadists who were sought for Greek and Armenian incidents and ... was supported by and relied on prominent persons who carried the ghost of the Greeks and Armenians into the subculture of the resistance movement. Participation in the national war of liberation was a vital necessity, a last refuge for all members of Ittihad ve Terakki and especially the special organization that masterminded the organization of the genocide. Only two alternatives existed for them. Either they surrendered to be sentenced to hard labour or death, or they fled to Anatolia and organized the national resistance. A well-known journalist and close friend of Mustafa Kemal, Falih Rifke Atay, expressed this quite clearly: When the English and their allies began to demand an accounting from the Ittihadists and especially of the murderers of the Armenians after the end of the war, everyone who had something to hide armed himself and joined a gang. I think that the tabooing of the Armenian Genocide in a republic whose foundation was created in this way is "understandable." The devastation that would ensue if we had to now stigmatize those whom we regarded as "great saviors" and "people who created a nation from nothing," as "murderers and thieves" is palpable. It seems so much simpler to completely deny the genocide than to seize the initiative and face the obliteration of the ingrained notions about the Republic and our own national identity. I would like to conclude my talk at this point with an open question: What significance do the effects of such a policy have for society today and in the future, especially when such "denial" means that the frame of mind and the pattern of behavior that led to the genocide against the Armenians continue to exist? http://www.omroep.nl/human/tv/muur/artikel2.htm

OK.

quote:Originally posted by TigrannesIII: MJ- Don't say 'us', you and I didn't fight, out of respect for those who did fight, I have now begun to refrain from saying 'us' (as of yesterday). 6 years does not equal one battle. It was war, and it was won by the Armenians. If a war can last only 6 days, then 6 years is definitely a war. If the Azeris think that it 'was only a battle' then let them come again, they were routed last time, and this time the Diaspora will be much more aware. Azerbaijan can't win. The Azeris are in no position to start a new mission of conquest. Dear Rich, I choose not to reply on the first part of your argument. However, I will formulate my answer to your subsequent statements as a question: Don't you think that if Azerbaijan had lost a war it would've known about it? I think there is no need to negate your last statement, either.

Simply put - they don't have to. A war was not won by us - only a battle.

St. John's Armenian Church and the Armenian Research Center, The University of Michigan-Dearborn present Dr. George Bournoutian Who will present a special lecture entitled The Armenian Liberation Movement in the 18th Century Friday, March 16 7:30 PM St. John's Armenian Church 22001 Northwestern Highway Chapel Dr. Bournoutian will examine documentary evidence of the Armenian liberation movement during the 18th century, a critical period for the development of Armenian national consciousness. Bournoutian is a Professor of Middle Eastern and East European History at Iona College. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He has taught Armenian history at Columbia University, New York University, Tufts University, the University of Connecticut, and Rutgers University. Bournoutian's lecture will include material from his new book, Armenians and Russia, 1626-1796: A Documentary Record. Copies of the book will be available at a discount price at the lecture. We urge all faculty and students to take advantage of this dynamic speaker who has impressed audiences with his previous lectures in this area.

Dear Levon, Like an Armenian poem says "The unfurtunate days will come and go like the winter does..." God lift your spirit up...

Just wanted to bring to your attention a new material I have posted in the "Vahakn N. Dadrian's research on the subject of Genocide" thread of this forum.

The Key Elements in theTurkish denial of the Armenian genocide: A case study of distortion and falsification By Vahakn N. Dadrian The Key Distortions and Falsehoods in the Denial of the Armenian Genocide. (A Response to the Memorandum of the Turkish Ambassador in Washington) Prepared by the Zoryan Institute June 1999 Introduction The Turkish government through its ambassador in Washington, D.C. once more has ventured to intervene in the American legislative process with a view to blocking the passage of a Resolution that proposes to utilize for purposes of research and scholarship the holdings of a strictly American institution, the National Archives, which contain the World War I and post-World War I documentary records of the U.S. State Department that are at issue here. That department was entrusted with the task of collecting, through its officials and functionaries stationed in wartime Turkey evidence on the decision-making, organization, and implementation of the mass murder of the Ottoman Armenian population. One would think and hope that a government claiming to be infused with democratic principles would only welcome such a move. For decades now the world, especially the academic world, has been told by successive Turkish governments that only solid and reliable research based on primary sources and official documents can resolve the ongoing dispute they themselves have generated about the Armenian genocide. Obviously, and regrettably, the quest for truth in this connection is, and remains, a hollow pretense. Indeed, a state system that for more than eighty years withheld authentic material on this matter by selectively denying access to its archives to a host of researchers through resort to a variety of excuses, can hardly be expected to favor a Congressional Resolution that proposes to recharge the quest for truth by introducing new mechanisms of access to similar sets of primary sources and official documents. The overriding question, however, is not the attempt of the Turkish state to mobilize its vast resources in order to defeat this Resolution, but the quality of the impending response of the majority of the U.S. Congressmen and Congresswomen confronting this curious situation. What follows is an effort to examine with as little bias as possible the objections and sets of allegations put forward in a lengthy Memorandum by the ambassador, and to demonstrate the spurious character of some of them, and the untenable nature of most of them. In fact, practically all of these objections and allegations are part and parcel of the standard repertoire of Turkish denials that are repeated time after time blandly and almost ritually. It is as if none of them had been effectively rebutted and discredited by eighty years of research and publication by scholars not identified with Armenian interests. Given the critical importance of the problem at issue here, however, the need arises to confront this ill-founded and ill-advised challenge once more and deal with it appropriately. This is a response that transcends the particularity of the present case of denial and may well have application for other, future manifestations of denial by Turkish authorities. Alternate Use of the Words "Ottoman" and "Turkish" In the period in question here, all diplomatic correspondence as well as publications by many historians and political scientists continued the tradition of previous centuries to use the words "Ottoman" and "Turkish." and "Ottoman Empire" and "Turkey" interchangeably, nor were officials and learned men of the Ottoman Empire itself always exempt from this practice. The objection to this practice is in this sense, therefore, unwarranted. Moreover, the ostensible effort to dissociate the Turkish Republic of today as a new and separate entity from the imagery one has about the Ottoman Empire is contradicted by the recent statements of a Turkish Minister of Culture, Istemihan Talay. In an interview with two Turkish journalists he publicly declared that "the Republic of Turkey is the continuation of the Ottoman Empire whose legacy is part of our history." He was speaking on the occasion of the festivities celebrating the 700tb anniversary of the founding of the Ottoman Empire. He further stated that "to be embarrassed on account of that empire's legacy is tantamount to denying one's very own being."(1) The Allegation of "Inter-Communal Clashes" This description denotes the idea of a kind of civil war supposedly resulting from the relative collapse of the authority of the central government. It implies that the Armenians, an impotent defenseless minority, were able to engage in armed conflict with the omnipotent and dominant Turks and the other Muslims ruling over them. The patent fallacy of such an allegation can be recognized by considering the following facts. On August 3, 1914, i.e. three months before Turkey precipitated the war with Russia, all able-bodied Armenian men in the 20-45 age categories, and later in sequences those in the 18-20 and 45-60 categories. were conscripted in the Ottoman army. What was left behind in the Armenian community was a mass of frightened. if not terrorized, old men, women and children still haunted by the memories of the cycle of the massacres that were committed in the decades preceding World War I. The question poses itself: how could these wretched people be in a position to contemplate, let alone mount, armed clashes against a population identified with and supported by a mighty empire, the Ottoman Empire? The might of that Empire was manifested in its ability to wage for four years a relentless multi-front war in alliance with two other mighty empires the German (Hohenzollern, and the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg). According to Vice Marshall Pomiankowski. Austro-Hungary 's military plenipotentiary, who throughout the war was attached to Ottoman General Headquarters, the Young Turk regime first liquidated the able-bodied Armenian men "in order to render defenseless the rest of the population" which, according to him, paved the ground for "their annihilation."(2) The Redundancy of the Argument of Armenian Rebelliousness The four instances of uprising were not only isolated, local, and disconnected incidents but, above all, they were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation and thereby avert annihilation. Being strictly defensive undertakings, practically all of the insurgents involved perished in the course of the operations regular Turkish army units launched against them to suppress the insurgency. By sheer chance and fortuitous circumstance only the insurgents of the Van uprising managed to survive when at last they were liberated by the advance units of the Russian Caucasus Army, which overwhelmed the surrounding Turkish defense positions and captured the city of Van. The term "chance" calls for emphasis, for but for the timely arrival of the Russian military units, the insurgents of Van were likewise doomed, given the inevitable depletion of their meager resources of defense, including ammunition and weapons, and the mounting casualties they were sustaining. A delay of two or three days in the arrival of the Russians would surely have sealed the fate of the desperate defenders. The following testimony of Vice Marshal Pomiankowski, mentioned above, succinctly encapsulates this plight of the Armenians. He characterized the Van uprising as "an act of despair" because the Armenians "recognized that the general butchery had begun in the environs of Van and that they would be the next victims."(3) A similarjudgment was expressed by Mettemich, German ambassador to Turkey. and a Venezuelan military officer of Spanish extraction who was in charge of the artillery battery relentlessly bombarding and reducing the Armenian defense positions in Van. His eyewitness testimony has extraordinary value because, as he put it, he was "the only Christian who witnessed the Armenian massacres and the deportations in an official capacity...."(4) The Charge of Armenian Treachery Reference is made to "the Ottoman Armenians' violent political alliance with the Russian forces." One is prompted to ask. "what alliance" and "by which Ottoman Armenians?" In the annals of violent behavior inflicted upon defenseless human groups by tyrants, apologists have often taken refuge behind such utterly senseless generalizations. It is a matter of historical record that the leaders of the major Armenian political party, the Dashnaktzoutiun, as early as August 1914, publicly declared their allegiance to the Ottoman state and vowed as citizens of the state to fight for the defense of the country should the government, against all advice, decide to intervene in the war. It is likewise a historical fact that the religious head of Turkey's Armenian community, the Patriarch, through an encyclical, enjoined all the Armenian faithful in the provinces as well as the Ottoman capital to obey the governmental officials everywhere and loyally discharge their duties as Ottoman subjects. Nor can one dismiss the ancillary fact that the leaders of the above-cited Armenian political party did all they could to stop the Armenian volunteer movement that was gaining momentum in the adjoining Russian Trans-Caucasus, but failed. Still, the fact remains that the bulk of these volunteers eager to fight against the Turks in the ranks of the Russian army were either Russian subjects or citizens of various countries in Europe and North America. In any event, how could the presence of some Ottoman subjects, past and present, among these volunteers in any way justify the resort to the sweeping indictment of "Ottoman Armenians?" By the same token, why is the fact being ignored that thousands and thousands more Azeris and Kurds were likewise fighting against the Turks in the ranks of the Russian army? The same may be said about thousands of Jews from Russia and Europe who in 1915 served in the columns of the British Expeditionary Force at the Dardanelles and again in 1918 in the army of British General Allenby at the Palestine front. Does it not follow that there were other abiding and strategic considerations, than the participation of contingents of Armenian soldiers on the side of the Russians in the war against Turkey, in the genocidal selection and targeting of the Armenians? Against this backdrop, the assertion that the anti-Armenian measures were but limited to the eastern theaters of war, and as such were strictly regional in thrust and scope, is simply astounding. It is belied by the grim realities of the Armenian genocide. whose sweeping compass engulfed Armenian population clusters in all corners of the vast Ottoman Empire. As one high-ranking wartime Turkish counter-intelligence officer in his post-war memoirs movingly lamented, "among those Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskisehir, and Konya"(5) These involved regions and provinces that were far removed from the war zones! The Utter Fiction of the Claim of "Relocation" The U.S. Congress is invited to lend credence to the transparently incredible assertion that the deported Armenian population was being merely exiled to the deserts of Mesopotamia where they were being "relocated." The brutal and utter cynicism of this assertion is exceeded only by the insolence with which the intelligence of the Congressmen, for that matter the intelligence of any thinking person, is thereby being insulted. Responding to this official claim at the time, Lewis Einstein, the Special Agent of the U.S. State Department at the American Embassy in Istanbul, mocked this brand of"official euphemism.. the grim humor of paternal solicitude which usually covers the most barbarous massacres in Turkey. . . . an armed policy of deportation, and the implied sequel of extermination."(6) Another US. official, Leslie Davis, wartime American consul at Harput, in his report to the State Department described how huge clusters of Armenian deportee convoys on their way to Mesopotamia were rerouted to Harput "only to be butchered in this province...the Slaughterhouse Province."(7) The candid testimony of a Turkish general with military jurisdiction over the Mesopotamia regions in question is even more telling in this respect. In his post-war memoirs he emphatically declared that "there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees.(8) Disloyal Ottoman Armenians killed 1.1 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews" The recklessness of this statement is matched by the sordidness attending it. More important, it reveals and unctuates the ineptness with which the picture of 100,000 entirely invented Jews is injected into the controversy. It is most significant also that the "1.1 million Muslims" figure roughly corresponds to the total number of the Ottoman Armenian population as presented by several Turkish sources! As Montaigne once observed: no one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly. Essays v. 111, i. On the Number of Armenian Victims Without providing specifics, the Memorandum states that "the number of Armenians claimed to have perished has tripled over the last 80 years." Far from such being the case, however, that number more or less remains constant as far as credible sources are concerned. In March 1919 the then Ottoman Interior Minister relying on statistical data which the staff of the ministry had been compiling during the previous two months, publicly declared that "during the wartime deportations some 800,000 Armenians were killed."(9) Excluded from this figure are the Armenian conscripts who, in the wake of their conscription, were liquidated in stages by fellow Turkish soldiers, and countless children, young girls, and brides who were forcibly Islamised and absorbed into the mainstream of the Turkish national entity. If one discounts French and British sources, identified as they were with the enemy camp, the available German and Austro-Hungarian sources involving civilian and military officials of all ranks, and serving as wartime allies of Turkey, supply much more inclusive figures. According to these sources, the number of victims of the Armenian genocide ranges between 1.2 and 1.5 million.(10) The Legal and Political Import of the May 24,1915 Declaration of the Allies (The Entente Powers) In that declaration France, Great Britain and Russia accused the Young Turk regime of "connivance and often assistance" in the perpetration of the mass murder of the Armenians, at the same time warning that "in view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity..."(11) the Allies propose to prosecute and punish after the war all the perpetrators involved. This declaration is dismissed out of hand as wartime propaganda. Quoting author David Fromkin, the ambassador likewise dismisses "the British official accounts" as untruthful propaganda reflecting the exigencies of the war. Yet historian Arnold Toynbee, who in 1916 produced the official and most comprehensive British documentation of the Armenian genocide, some half a century later in his memoirs reconfirmed his findings and reaffirmed the historical reality of that genocide. Re wrote, "the massacre of Armenian Ottoman subjects [during the Sultan Abdul Hamit era, 1894-1896] was amateur and ineffective compared with the largely successful attempt to exterminate...in 191 5...[That undertaking] was carried out...under the cloak of legality, by cold-blooded governmental action."(12) The depositories of the state archives of the German Federal Republic and of Austria are replete with official documents attesting to the complicity of the Young Turk regime in the enactment of the genocide.(13) The Non-Existence of "Malta Tribunals" In the Memorandum in question, on three different occasions reference is made to so-called "Malta Tribunals" which in fact never existed and accordingly are nowhere in the respective literature cited. The British camp and affiliated domiciles were strictly a detention center where the Turkish suspects were being held for future prosecution on charges of crimes perpetrated against the Armenians, Ottoman citizens. The envisaged international trials on the new penal norm "crimes against humanity" never materialized, however - largely because of political expediency. The victorious Allies, lapsing into dissension and growing mutual rivalries, chose to strike separate deals with the ascendant Kemalist insurgents in Anatolia. One such deal concerned the recovery of some British subjects who were being held hostage by the Kemalists and who were to be released in exchange for the liberation of all Malta detainees. Commenting on this deal for the exchange which he later deplored as "a great mistake," British Foreign Affairs Minister Lord Curzon wrote the following, "The less we say about these people [the Turks detained and Malta] the better.. .1 had to explain why we released the Turkish deportees from Malta skating over thin ice as quickly as I could. There would have been a row I think...The staunch belief among members [of Parliament is] that one British prisoner is worth a shipload of Turks, and so the exchange was excused."(14) It is, therefore, inaccurate to state that they were released because "the charges were exhaustively probed, investigated, and studied." Nothing of the sort happened. The Allies, especially the British, studiously avoided getting judicially involved at that juncture of developments. Everything was deferred for an eventual, anticipated international trial. To an incidental, single inquiry from London, Aukland Geddes. the British ambassador in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1921 responded saying that the U.S. archives at that time already contained "a large number of documents on Armenian deportations and massacres"(15) but that under existing conditions it was not possible to assign and charge specific culpabilities to the Turkish detainees at Malta as the Allies were not involved in the specific task of prosecution that would require pre-trial investigations, the administration of interrogatories, and the application of other methods of evidence gathering. Nor did the British "exhaustively search the archives of many nations," not in 1919, not in 1920, or ever! Like so many other statements noted above, these are purely fabricated declarations to confuse the issue and confound third parties. The Juxtaposition and Equating of Armenian Losses with Turkish Warfare Losses Turkish historians and others identified with Turkish interests continue to resort to this artful device in order to minimize the scope and import of the Armenian catastrophe. Two distinct and separate categories of losses are cleverly collapsed into a single and undifferentiated category where one may readily play the numbers game through simple additions and subtractions and come up with wholly deceptive figures. What is involved here is, on the one hand, the category of victims of organized mass murder and, on the other hand, essentially the dead resulting from warfare with foreign armies and from other war-related causes. This is clearly stated in the report of American Major General Harbord, to which reference is made in the ambassador's Memorandum. Harbord stated that "Not over 20 percent of the Turkish peasants who went to war have returned. ..Six hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone...and insufficient hospital service and absolute poverty of supply swelled the death lists." Counterposed to this account is Harbord's other account dealing with the conditions ofthe Armenian victims. He referred to "the wholesale attempt on the [Armenian] race...," at the same time underscoring "the evidence of this most colossal crime of all ages [involving] mutilation, violation, torture and death.. Testimony is universal that the massacres have always been ordered from Constantinople." After announcing that "the official reports ofthe Turkish Government show 1,100.000 as having been deported," Harbord estimated the number of the Armenian victims of the genocide to be "about 800,000."(16) The Legitimacy of the Turkish Military Tribunal Prosecuting the Authors of the Armenian Genocide This tribunal was created through a series of Imperial Rescripts in late December 1918 and early January 1919. The issuing of them was an exercise of the type of sweeping powers with which reigning sultans were invested by the Ottoman Constitution. It was only natural that the occupants of the many Cabinet posts of successive post-war Turkish governments were enemies of the defunct Young Turk regime. So were those sitting in judgment of the Nazis at Nuremberg. One cannot just dismiss the resulting findings and judgments simply because of the presence of an animus of hostility against the accused. Given the enormity of the crimes involved, such hostility often simply becomes inescapable, but there are other yardsticks with which to assess findings and judgments in judicial proceedings. The statement "why a government allegedly intent on eliminating a portion of its citizenry would try and convict those who committed crimes against those very citizens" is an exercise in sophistry. One needs only consider the fact that not one unitary government but disparate governments identified with disparate regimes are at issue here. Indeed those trying to administer retributive justice in the post-war era were in design and function the very antithesis of those who enacted the genocide during the preceding war. Moreover, several aspects of the court-martial proceedings merit attention for their quality of judiciousness, despite the consideration of the fact that these trials were urged on by the victorious Allies under whose shadow they took place. a. Using judicial discretion, the panel of judges decided to hold public trials in order to "help the defendants and facilitate their defense" and, "in a spirit of impartiality and lofty justice"(17) as avowed by this panel. b. Led by Istanbul University law professor and president of the Turkish bar association, C. Ant, a battery of sixteen lawyers was engaged as defense counsel. These attorneys frequently and vigorously challenged the prosecutors, their witnesses, and often the panel of judges, at the same time raising many constitutional questions."(18) It is, therefore, astonishing that the ambassador, through the Memorandum, dares to declare that the defendants were tried "with almost no presentation of evidence." One wonders indeed whether he and/or his staff had ever heard of Takvimi Vekayi and if so, had ever perused its many issues. The official gazette of the Ottoman government, its supplements regularly carried many portions of the proceedings of the court martial, including the presentations of the defense counsel. c. Before being introduced as accusatory exhibits, each and every official document was authenticated by the competent staff personnel of the Interior Ministry who thereafter affixed on the top part of the document the notation: "it conforms to the original."(19) d. The series of verdicts pronounced by the Tribunal were based almost entirely on these authenticated official documents which had a wartime provenance and had, therefore, nothing to do with post-war "politics." As at Nuremberg, so at Istanbul, courtroom testimony was given minimal significance. This deliberately designed procedure was announced by the Deputy Attorney General on March 29, 1919, at the 16ih sitting of the Yozgad trial series.(20) The Conviction of Top Young Turk Leaders by the Turkish Military Tribunal The categorical declaration that "according to the trial transcripts" none of these leaders "were convicted of organizing and executing massacres against the Armenian people," is again belied by the text of the verdict. As principal ground for conviction and sentencing, which was death on the gallows, the Tribunal cited "the massacres against the Armenians" in various parts of the Ottoman Empire. Continuing, the Tribunal further asserted that these bloodbaths were "organized and executed" by "the Ittihadist [the Young Turk] leaders," a fact which was "investigated and ascertained" by the Tribunal. Among those convicted and sentenced to death were Interior Minister, later Grand Vizier, Talat, and the two top military leaders, War Minister Enver. and Minister of Navy and Commander-in-Chiefofthe Ottoman lVth army, Cemal.(21) It is likewise untrue that the "Tribunal did not convict Dr. Behaeddin Sakir and Cemal Azmi." The former was convicted and sentenced to death at the end of the Harput trial series.(22) the latter, who was governor-general of Trabzon province, was convicted and sentenced to death at the end of the Trabzon trial series.(23) On the Value of the Turkish State Archives Relative to the Task of Documenting the Armenian Genocide It is maintained by Turkish authorities that the evidence contained in these archives, civilian as well as military, does not in any way support the charge of genocide. Before accepting such a conclusion, however, one has to ask the cardinal question: how reliable, intact, and complete are these depositories that purportedly cover the entire evidence on the wartime treatment of Ottoman Armenians. The facts listed below cast in stark relief the dubious aspects of these archives, especially those of Yildiz, the Prime Ministry, and the General Staff. a. For more than six decades the Turkish authorities had made these depositories containing material on the Armenian question inaccessible to most researchers. In fact a regime ofpreferential treatment was instituted. Those well-known for their pro-Turkish proclivities or open partisanship were allowed access, others were denied it.(24) b. After the archives, i.e., some parts of them, were finally opened up to the public with great fanfare in January 1989, access to them remained, and still remains, restricted through the imposition of a host of conditions. Indeed, the government, i.e., the authorities administering the archives, reserve the right to control and, when necessary, to deny access on three grounds: 1) risk to national defense, 2) risk to public order, and 3) danger to Turkey's relations with other states, or to the need for maintaining normal relations between two foreign countries.(25) c. Beyond these restrictions. deliberately framed general and vague terms to allow the indulgence in arbitrary interpretations, there is the practice of selectively withholding documents under a variety of excuses. This practice is applied to those researchers who are suspected of not being in line with Turkish national interests.(26) d. Despite great impediments, the post-war Turkish Military Tribunal had been able to seek, locate, and secure an array of documents, including formal and informal orders for the elimination of the bulk of the empire's Armenian population. These documents implicated the Ottoman High Command, the Ministers of Interior and Justice, and the top Young Turk leadership.(27) Yet, nowhere can one find a trace of these archives of the Military Tribunal, which seem to have simply vanished. Nor is there any credible account as to who made the vast documentary corpus attesting to the facts of the Armenian genocide disappear, and how. The conclusion becomes inescapable that what one may be able to glean from the Turkish archives is circumscribed and limited by what the authorities involved are arbitrarily and selectively willing to offer. Did the Ottoman Authorities Really Punish the Perpetrators of the Massacres of the Armenians During the War? The Turkish Memorandum sent to the U.S. Congressmen maintains that '1,376 individuals were sentenced to varying degrees of punishment...62 officials were sentenced to death and were executed...." As far as it is known former Turkish diplomat Kamuran Gürün who, citing documents from the archives of the Ottoman Interior Ministry, released these figures for the first time in his book denying the Armenian genocide. He was persuasive enough to induce noted Ottomanist and Arabist Bernard Lewis to embrace this claim in his latest work, presumably in an effort to fortify the rationale for the revising, if not retracting, of his earlier recognition of the Armenian genocide which he had seen fit to characterize as a "holocaust."(28) In advancing this argument an obvious effort is made to once more deny the reality ofthe Armenian genocide by denying the rationale of it. Indeed, why would a government organize a mass murder and then turn around and punish some of the actual perpetrators? To the extent that there is some truth to it, the argument is neither baffling, nor devoid of an explanation. But, as explained below, the greater truth is that the limited trials that were set in motion were nothing short of being farcical. Here are the reasons. a. Following the completion of their criminal deeds against their Armenian victims, many of the perpetrators began to be viewed as distinct liabilities for the regime. For one thing, they knew too much regarding the lethal secret operations conducted against the victim population, and some of them started to drop hints that unless they were accommodated in certain respects, they may "spill the beans." Referring to the decision of the Central Committee of the Young Turk Ittihad party to hang two such prominent mass murderers, actually a major and a lieutenant who were part of the Special Organization's killer squads, a Turkish general in his post-war memoirs confirms this occurrence. Describing them as "bloodthirsty brigands," he offers this explanation for their demise through hanging. "When deciding to get rid of them, the party's Central Committee most probably reasoned as follows: 'Indebtedness to [recruited] executioners and murderers is bound to be heavy.. Those who are used for dirty jobs are needed in times of necessity [in order to shift] responsibility. It is likewise necessary, however, not to glorify them but to dispose of them just like toilet paper, once they have done their job."(29) On the same occasion, party boss and then Interior Minister, Talat. in a cipher telegram is quoted as having declared with respect to the execution of one of them, Major Ahmed – "His liquidation in any case is necessary. Otherwise he will prove very harmful at a later date. Talat."(30) There were several such cases where top Young Turk leaders are seen ordering the liquidation of all kinds of massacres on account of the same, or similar considerations.(31) b. Far more significant were the circumstances under which the authorities did indeed conduct investigations and trials with a view to punishing the offenders only, however, in the end to reduce these trials to sheer travesty. A Muslim witness i.e., a Turkish peasant, for example, who insistently wanted to describe the scenes of the massacres he personally had witnessed, was put down and summarily dismissed by the presiding judge with the swear word "dog." Furthermore, those gendarmes who were less cruel towards the Armenians but still robbed them, were found guilty and were punished. "Their cases served as the basis of embellished reports about the punishment of the perpetrators who had victimized the Armenians."(32) This fact was confirmed and became public at the 11th sitting of the Yozgad trial series (March 3, 1919). Aziz Nedim, an Ottoman civil inspector, and a personal friend of Talat from the earlier days of Saloniki, had been sent to Bogazliyan, a county in Yozgad district in Ankara province, to investigate the abuses against Armenian deportees. But, in his testimony he admitted that he had received specific orders not to investigate the incidence of massacres but to limit himself to economic crimes. Attorney General Sami in that sitting concluded that "when inspectors came to the area, they confined their investigations to...plunder and fraud."(33) In other words, the authorities were not in the slightest interested to prosecute and punish massacrers, but to stop the massive embezzlements. By virtue of these abuses the vast riches of the Armenian victim population were being personally appropriated by the organizers and executioners of the massacres instead of being transferred. as was their duty to do, to the Treasury of the state. The whole picture is summed up by a noted Turkish publicist with a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University. He had close ties with the Young Turk leaders during the war, and for two years after the war in Malta where he, along with the former, had been detained by the British. He wrote, "a commission of investigation composed of inspectors of the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, was formed.. to punish those guilty of excesses. Some minor offenders were really punished, but those favoring the deportations being very influential in the Government, the whole thing amounted more to a demonstration rather than a sincere attempt to fix complete responsibility."(34) Hitler, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials and the Armenian Genocide Hitler's reported reference to "the annihilation of the Armenians," the veracity of which is being questioned in the Memorandum, is but one of the indices that describe the historical and legal interconnections between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.(35) Nor is that reference the only one that portrays Hitler being inspired and encouraged by the impunity accruing to the authors ofthe Armenian Genocide. Eight years earlier, in June 193 1, Hitler is reported to have included in his list the case of "the extermination of the Armenians," among the mass murders in history that he perceived to have been successful operations.(36) Even though it is true that the 1939 document in question was not ultimately used at Nuremberg, where it was introduced as a prosecution exhibit, because of strong objections by German defense counsel, that does not mean that it is invalid. At the time of the Nuremberg trials there were uncertainties regarding the provenance and venue of the document containing Hitler's statement. However, noted American specialist in this field, Gerald L. Weinberg, explained in his book and subsequently in a communication to the New York Times that the provenance and the source of the document was later identified to be the main note taker of Hitler's secret speech, namely, Admiral Canaris, the chief of the Counter-Intelligence Department of the German Armed Forces High Command (Abwehr). Weinberg gives credence to the authenticity of the document by emphasizing the more solid reliability of Canaris as a source compared to the other two sources in which Hitler's respective words are missing.(37) The organic character of the links between the two foremost genocides of this century is a recurrent theme in the works of some prominent experts of international law. These links are treated as the byproduct of the failure to prosecute the first of the two genocides. But as Bassiouni pointed out, "the fact that a crime is not prosecuted does not negate its legal existence."(38) Still, through this type of existence it may help generate and sustain the existence of other crimes emulating it. This is the sense in which Bassiouni links the mass murder of the Armenians "now commonly referred to as genocide [and which] remained unpunished," to the calamity of World War II. "The crimes against the laws of humanity" attending the World War I Armenian genocide, were "prosecutable and punishable international law crimes.. .The reluctance [to deal with them] came back to haunt" the world.(39) The summary judgment of another international law expert is more trenchant as it links the two genocides even more closely by suggesting that the second genocide was conditioned, if not pre-conditioned, by the first genocide, on account of it having remained unpunished. He wrote, "Nothing emboldens a criminal so much as the knowledge he can get away with the crime. That was the message the failure to prosecute for the Armenian massacre gave to the Nazis. We ignore the lesson of the Holocaust at our peril."40 Middle East historian Howard M. Sachar concurred when in his respective book he wrote, "The [Armenian] genocide was cited approvingly twenty-five years later by the Führer... who found the Armenian 'solution' an instructive precedent."(41) Raphael Lemkin, International Law and the Armenian Genocide One of the signal after-effects of the Nuremberg trials was the general realization that, irrespective of the impact upon the rest of the world of their punitive thrust, Nuremberg rendered paramount service to humankind by directing attention to the fact that a crime of that magnitude should never be left untreated but should rather be fully exposed. In a sense the degree to which such a crime is exposed is a condition that often determines the scope and effectiveness of the ensuing punishment. Conversely, the impunity renders the crime debatable, infects its legacy with contagiousness and tends to make it for others with comparable propensities a venture worth emulating. These possibilities were underlined by none other than Albert Speer, who was one of the most trusted cohorts of Hitler and who with great competence ran the affairs of the Nazi munitions and armaments industry. After serving some time in Spandau prison as a Nazi war criminal - the charges against him were "war crimes "and "crimes against humanity" - he came up with a volume containing his memoirs. In it he wrote that the war criminals of World War I were allowed to escape punishment. Yet, punishment "would have encouraged a sense of responsibility on the part of leading political figures if after the First World War the Allies had actually held that trials they had threatened."(42) The Turkish ambassador's Memorandum disputes that the U.N. ever recognized the Armenian Genocide. But the fact is that the very crystallization of the new international legal norm "crimes against humanity," long before Raphael Lemkin conceived and developed its equivalent, "genocide," has its origin in the public recognition of the Armenian genocide by the three principal Allies in World War I, Great Britain, France and Russia. These three Entente powers, by their May 24, 1915 declaration threatening the Turkish officials with prosecution and punishment, ushered in the new doctrine that made the notion of crimes against humanity synonymous with that of genocide. The Turkish perpetrators were officially and publicly threatened with punishment on grounds of the charge of the then evolving, organized mass murder of the Armenians. i.e., the empire-wide massacres, which for the first time were defined as "crimes against humanity." The development of this doctrine into a legal norm to be embodied in the 1919 Report of the Commission on the Responsibilities of the Authors of War and on Enforcement of Penalties for Violations of the Laws and Customs of War, then in the Nuremberg Charter, and subsequently into the Preamble and the main body of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, are topics fully covered in the respective literature focusing on the international law aspects of the problem.(43) As to the question of a specific recognition of that genocide, these are the facts. The Subcommission on Human Rights, a vital component of the U.N., in August 1985, after having been deadlocked for more than fourteen years, finally decided to vote on the respective Resolution contained in the special rapporteur's report that had been in preparation for several years. In it, Benjamin Whitaker, the British specialist and its author. after eight years of meticulous research, had concluded that the World War I Armenian experience at the hands ofthe Turks was a case of "genocide" as defined by the U.N. Convention on Genocide.(44) Despite insistent and persistent TurLie 5 May 98/ ht 4ebThe construction of a meaning system to legitimize a new social order: the case of ArtsaxThe collapse of the Soviet Union triggered unprecedented processes of rapid and long-term transitions in virtually all aspects of life -- social, political, economic, religious, cultural, and territorial -- in what is now known as former Soviet space.The case of Nagorno Artsax serves as an example of how a former Soviet-society is creating a new social order through a process of multi layerverwhelming vote opted to accept it. Of all the members of the U.N.. as far as it is known, it is only Turkey that is continuing to interpret this outcome as meaning that the U.N. "never recognized" the Armenian genocide!(45) In line with this stance, it is further maintained that the Nuremberg trials "were not genocide trials" but trials prosecuting only war crimes. This fallacy too requires correction. The Nuremberg Charter, as a new code of international law, clearly states that "crimes against humanity" are "crimes against peace." or are "war crimes." The tribunal consistently tried to link together these three forms of offenses. As Bassiouni pointed out, "the inclusion of 'crimes against humanity' in both the Nuremberg Charter and the indictment represented a significant.. advance in international criminal law.. it was intended to include offenses committed by a state against civilians, including its own nationals, during the preparation and the waging of war."(46) In other words, in Nuremberg military aggression and wartime domestic genocide were inter-linked. This is a condition that aptly fits the Turkish model of genocide. Without provocation. but under German prodding and generous promises of rewards, the Ottoman Turks intervened in the war by attacking Russia unilaterally, thereby provoking the intended Russo-Turkish war. Nor can one easily dissociate the circumstances of that war from the circumstances of the likewise provoked and intended Armenian genocide. A related misstatement attaches to the declaration that "the crimes against humanity punished under the Nuremberg Charter were not required to be directed against a particular national, ethnic or racial group. Article 6c of that Charter in plain English refers to the condition: "persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds...."(47) If an individual is persecuted for belonging to a racial or religious group, does it not follow then that the essential target of the persecution is the racial or religious group and that against this central fact the persecution of the individual is merely an incidental fact? The Relevance and Significance of the U.S. Archives Unlike the three Entente Powers who were allies, Great Britain, France and Russia, the United States had the distinct advantage of having in wartime Turkey a network of consuls in such cities in the interior as Harput, Trabzon, Aleppo, Mersin (Adana), and, of course, in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul; at different times it also maintained consular agents in Urfa, Samsun and Erzurum. Therefore, the U.S. government was in a unique position to observe at close hand and record through these American diplomats and functionaries the events in question up to April 1917, when the U.S. joined the above-cited Allies to wage war against the opposing Central Powers and accordingly broke off diplomatic relations with Ottoman Turkey. This fact renders the American archives highly relevant for the thorough study ofArmenian deportations and massacres. That relevance is matched by the significance that attaches to the neutrality the U.S. government maintained for three years. During this period American representatives stationed in various parts of Turkey ended up becoming an invaluable resource as they were afforded the singular opportunity to document through the prism of neutrality the origin and evolution of a major case of centrally organized mass murder. In questioning the reliability of the testimony provided by these American officials, aspersions are cast upon the latter's presumed sources, in the process blaming "missionaries,t' the incidence of "anti-Muslim bigotry," and above all, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. Within the confines of this mind-set, it is as if the stories of the Armenian genocide are just an array of falsehoods maliciously fabricated by the representatives of the U.S. government who, in reckless disregard of the mandates of their official duties, deliberately misinformed and misled their superiors in Washington. Space limitations prevent tackling every one of these arguments, but a brief review of the deprecations leveled against Ambassador Morgenthau may suffice to exemplify the questionable premises of this attitude of discrediting the U.S. archives dealing with the fate of the Armenians in World War I. What is at issue here is the nature, dimensions, and above all the outcome of the wartime treatment of the Ottoman Armenian population by the Young Turk regime in power during that war. Compared to this central concern, everything else remains incidental. Morgenthau's numerous reports to the State Department and his post-war memoirs unambiguously confront and tackle this central concern. As pointed out by a few detractors, he may have erred in some respects, blundered in other respects, and in the description of some events in his book he may have submitted to the impulses of his ghostwriter to embellish certain points, and yielded to the pressures of a superior at one point or other. But two paramount facts more than offset these shortcomings, which are endemic in all such cases. I. In terms of authenticity and utmost reliability, his wartime reports take precedence over the import of his book. 2. Nevertheless, both source entities, i.e., the ensemble of his wartime reports, and his book, do converge in the crystallization of a quintessential theme that constitutes Morgenthau's central message: He emphatically confirms the genocidal intentions of the leaders of the Young Turk regime and equally emphatically affirms the reality of the intended genocidal outcome. He summarized his wartime findings by incorporating in his book a chapter that bears the title, The Murder of a Nation.(48) These facts clearly signal the extraordinary value of the U.S. archives in terms of resolving the controversy on the Armenian genocide. Anyone who may have any doubts on this may consult the following references in the U.S. National Archives. R.G. 59.867.4016/74 (July 10, 1915) R.G. 59.867.4016/70 (August 11, 1915) R.G. 59.867.4016/117 (September 3,1915) R.G. 59.867.4016/162 (October9, 1915) R.G. 59.867.4016/797.5 (November 4, 1915) R.G. 59.867. 00/798 1/2 (November 18, 1915) R.G. 59.867.4016/799.5 (December 1, 1915) Moreover, Morgenthau's successor continued to report "the horrors of the anti-Armenian campaign" about which the U.S. Embassy was "in receipt of ample details." On Oct. 1, 1916, U.S. Charge Hoffman Philip advised the State Department to "threaten to withdraw our diplomatic representative from a country where such barbarous methods are not only tolerated but actually carried out by order of the existing government." (R.G. 59.867.4016/297). Abram Elkus, the next U.S. Ambassador, on Oct.17, 1916, in a cipher telegram reported to Washington that "...deportations accompanied by studied cruelties continue.. forced conversions to Islam perseveringly pushed, children and girls from deported families kidnaped... Turkish officials have now adopted and are executing the unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history." (R.G. 59.867.4016/299). And yet, the assault against Morgenthau continuous unabated. The Turkish ambassador's Memorandum describes him as a man who "sought to vilify the Ottoman Empire." His motives are questioned because in a letter to President Wilson he admitted that he wanted to go public with the evidence he had gathered during his ambassadorship on the fate of the Armenians and thereby "win a victory for the war policy of the government." Through the misuse of this quotation an important ancillary fact is being ignored, however. That letter was written on November 26,1917, eighteen months afier the Ambassador had lefi his post in Turkey and the material he proposed to use for his book was essentially of wartime provenance. Given these facts, a brief review of the work (that is included in the ambassador's brief bibliography) of an author who has been leading the assault against Morgenthau may be called for. He is recognized as a principal source for the attempts to discredit Morgenthau and thereby give impetus to the Turkish endeavor to deny the Armenian genocide. The reference is to Heath Lowry who, by questioning the reliability of Morgenthau as a source, is believed to be trying to indirectly invalidate the Armenian genocide story that is anchored on the accounts of Morgenthau. Lowry's preoccupation, if not obsession, with the goal to undermine the testimony of Ambassador Morgenthau apparently has driven him to remain fixated with the image of a few ailing trees - the purported flaws of Morgenthau's book - thereby ignoring the robustness of the forest - the fundamental truth about the extermination of the Ottoman Armenian population punctuating the book as a whole. Lowry observes, for example, that a particular passage in Morgenthau's book cannot be found in his diary, the accounts ofwhich avowedly are reflected in his book. Suspecting contrived fictiveness, he promptly accuses Morgenthau of "slander." In that passage Talat is reported to have declared to Morgenthau, who once more had tried to intercede on behalf of the Armenians, that "We are through with them. That's all over."(49) Yet, German ambassador Bern storff in his memoirs quotes Talat almost in identical terms. As Bern storff wrote, "When I kept pestering him about the Armenian Question, he once said, What on earth do you want? The question is settled, there are no more Armenians?"'50 Moreover, Lowry in his further effort to disparage Morgenthau reproduces excerpts from a letter by George Schreiner who, for nine months in 1915, had served as Associated Press correspondent in Turkey. In those passages Schreiner attacks Morgenthau for being critical of the Turks and some of their leaders. And yet his book, itself, has many accounts of atrocities committed against the Armenians, who "are going through hell again. I have heard that some have been burned alive. ..Massacres are said to continue. . . . that shocking phase of barbarity. . . . It is out in the open. in the waste places, that the worst comes to pass...My efforts to do my duty[to get out a story on the Armenian outrages] have prejudiced the Turkish censors against me."(51) So much for Lowry's quest for discernment with respect to rectitude and forthrightness. Despite all this, however, Lowry felt constrained to make an admission at the end of his respective booklet. He declared that Morgenthau's "wartime dispatches and written reports...submitted to the U~S. Department of State," rather than his book are "the real" material on which to base any pertinent study, including the wartime Armenian experience.(52) It may, therefore, be appropriate at this juncture to end this segment of the discussion with the adducing of excerpts from a nine-page "Private and Confidential'9 letter Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Robert Lansing on November 18, 1915. The significance ofthese statements is accented by the fact that for unknown reasons they are excised from the printed version of the document in the respective volume put out by the State Department in 1939. These excerpts succinctly encapsulate Morgenthau's verdict on "the Murder of [the Armenian] Nation." I am firmly convinced that this is the greatest crime of the ages...massacres accompanied with rape, pillage and forced conversions.. Unfortunately the previous Armenian massacres were allowed to pass without the great Christian Powers punishing the perpetrators thereof,' these people believe that an offense that has been condoned before, will probably be again forgiven.. It was a great opportunity for them to put into effect their long cherished plan of exterminating the Armenian race and thus finish once for all the question of Armenian reforms which has so often been the cause of European intervention in Turkish affairs.(53) Conclusion In the history of human conflicts, including international conflicts with outcomes involving capital crimes. one may rarely see a perpetrator who, for a variety of reasons managed to escape punishment, voluntarily come forward and admit guilt. More often than not, such admissions are exacted either by total defeat and surrender at the end of a military conflict, or by circumstances affording a trial in a court of law where the availability of compelling evidence may preempt the possibility of routine denial. In the case of a capital crime of the type of genocide, power relations are of dual import. One needs superior power to overwhelm and decimate an impotent and vulnerable victim group but, perhaps equally important, one may proceed to deny that crime if in the aftermath of it one's power position continues to hold or even increases. The persistent and often truculent denial of the Armenian genocide for more than eight decades by the Turks and their few partisan advocates is a function of this type of power leverage. One remedy or antidote against this posture is less equivocation or verbal gymnastics, and more firmness of purpose that is anchored on the twin pillars of American democracy and civilization: truth and justice. For too long American men of politics, largely influenced by the guardians of military and commercial interests, have opted to accommodate, at almost any price, the Turks, some of whom these days are wont to brag that they are "the spoiled brats of the Americans!" But are commerce and politics and military procurement everything? Are there not thresholds which, when crossed, one should have the fortitude to say no and call the bluff in face of the type of warnings and threats for which the Turks have special aptitudes? Political alliances as a rule are temporary arrangements and are, therefore, unstable combinations, always liable to transformation and even reversal. But a nation's ascendancy to a high level of self-fulfillment needs to be energized by a commitment to more abiding principles and ideals than the proclivities for dollar diplomacy and the skill to calibrate political interests that are often ephemeral. America's destiny is foreshadowed in the legacy of such pillars of political idealism as Jefferson and Lincoln. who knew how to be mindful of the binding constraints of probity in the regulation of national and international affairs. In the context of this essay it is worth focusing in particular on Jefferson. whose love for organizing a library was emblematic of his passion for accumulating and transmitting knowledge over many generations. He helped found the Library of Congress and, after fire destroyed its collection, he offered his own library to the Congress. Just as libraries are much cherished as fertile grounds for the pursuit of knowledge and truth. so are national archives. The resolution before the Congress will serve as a crucible for those Congressmen and Congresswomen who may prefer to adhere to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson by granting the mandate this resolution is seeking. Let the National Archives serve the lofty purpose for which they were created. Let the truth emerge, shine through and liberate us all from the ongoing scourge of a corrosive denialism. Notes 1. Türkye (Turkish newspaper in Istanbul), March 1, 1999. The interviewers are identified as Nihat Kasikci and Hasan Yilmaz. 2. Joseph Pomiankowski, Der Zusamnzenbruch des Ottonianischen Reiches (The collapse of the Ottoman Empire). Graz, Austria, 1969, p.160. 3. Ibid. 4. German Foreign Ministry Archives. A.A. Türkei 183/40, A25749, September 18, 1916 report, p. 25. This source contains Ambassador Metternich's reference. For the Venezuelan officer's account, see Rafael de Nogales. Four Years Beneath the Crescent. M. Lee, trans. New York: Scribner's. 1926, pp. 1, 72-97. 5. Ahmet Refik (Altinay), Iki Komite, Iki Kital (Two committees, two massacres). H. Koyukan, ed. Ankara: Kekibec Publications. 1994, p.27. 6. Lewis Einstein, "The Armenian Massacres." Contemporary Review 616 (April 1917): 490. 7. Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province. An American Diplomat 's Report on the Armenian Genocide 1915-J9]7. Susan K. Blair. ed. New Rochelle. NY: Caratzas. 1989, p.181. 8. Orgeneral Ali Fuad Erden, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Suryec Hatiralari (Syrian memoirs of World War I), vol.1. Istanbul, 1954, p.122. 9. Alemdar (Turkish newspaper in Istanbul), March 15, 1919. Takvimi Vekayi No. 3909, July 21, 1920, pp. 3, 4. The minister in question was Cemal. 10. According to German Interim Ambassador to Turkey, Radowitz, 1.5 million Armenians died and 425,000 survived. A.A. Türkei 183/44. A27493, October 4, 1916 report. The German parliamentarian, Foreign Office Intelligence Director, and later Cabinet minister, Erzberger, estimated 1.5 million victims. A.A. Tükei 183/42, A] 3959, May27, 1916 report. German major Endres, serving in the Turkish army, estimated that "1.2 million Armenians perished in Turkey during the war." Die Türkei. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1918, p. 161. Austrian Vice Marshal Pomiankowski declared that "approximately one million Armenians perished," [n. 2], p.160. Austrian consul at Trabzon and Samsun, Dr. Kwatkiowski, reported to Vienna on March 13, 1918 that "in round figure 1 million Armenians were with studied cruelty deported from the six eastern Anatolian provinces as well as from Trabzon province and Samsun district. From these only a fraction could escape death." Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives 12 Türkei/380, ZI.l7/pol. Austria-Hungary's Adrianople (Edirne) consul Dr. Nadamlenzki reported that from the entire realm of the Ottoman Empire, including its European part, by October29, 1915 "already 1.5 million Armenians were deported." 12 Türkei /463. Z.94/P. 11. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Historical and Legal Interconnections Between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: From Impunity to Retributive Justice." Yale Journal of International Law 23, no.2 (Summer 1998): 504. 12. Arnold Toynbee, Experiences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp.241,341. 13. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources." In I. Charny, ed., The Widening Circle of Genocide. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Pub., 1994, pp.77-125. 14. British Foreign Office Archives. FO 371/7882/E4425. folio 182. 15. FO 371/6503/E631 1, folio 34. 16. Harbord Report to the U.S. Secretary of State, "American Military Mission to Armenia." International Conciliation, CLI (151), [New York] (June 1920): 280,281,282. 17. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications." Yale Journal of International Law 14, no.2 (Summer 1989): 297. 18. Ibid. pp.304-307. 19. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal." International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no.4 (November 1991): 563. 20. Ibid. 21. Takvimi Vekayi no.3604, p.219, right hand column. The verdict was issued on July 5, 1919 and the text of the conviction and sentence rendition was published on July22, 1919. 22. Takvimi Vekayi no. 3771, p.2, lefi hand column. Conviction was announced on January 13, 1920, the text of the conviction and sentence rendition was published on February 9, 1920. 23. Takvimi Vekayi no. 3616, p.3. left hand column. Conviction was announced on May 2, 1919, the text of the conviction and sentence rendition was published on August 6, 1919. 24. For example, author Ulrich Trumpener was denied such permission. Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, Preface, pp. vii i-ix; Stanford Shaw, on the other hand. had all this time free access to the same archives. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol II, Reform, Revolution and Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, Preface, pp. viii, xvii. 25. Resmi Gazete (Official Gazette), no.20163, May 12, 1989, Cabinet Council's no.89/14028 decision, pp. 1-6; the three conditions are contained in article 10, subsections a and b. 26. In an interview with the editor of an Armenian newspaper in the United States, Ara Sarafian, a doctoral candidate of history at the University of Michigan, recounted the vexing problems of this type he had in the Yildiz archives in Istanbul. Three prominent authors, Justin McCarthy, Kemal Karpat, and Mim Kemal Oke, known for their works categorically denying the Armenian genocide, had had free access to the documents ofthis archive. When Sarafian proposed to check some of their published claims, statistical figures and other data, he was invariably prevented from doing so by a variety of pretexts, including the occasional assertion that no such documents exist, or that they can not be found. In one particular instance involving Karpat's treatment of the Yildiz Perakende collection, Sarafian tried to check some material cited by Karpat, but was told that the collection was "closed" and had never been "open." Hairenik, (May 13, 1993): 5. A summary of that account also appeared in Zeitschrift für Türkeistudien issue no. 1(1993). 27. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series.'1 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11, no.1 (Spring 1997): 32. 28. Kamuran Gurun, Ermeni Dosyasi. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983, pp. 221-222. The English translation is in The Armenian File. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985, pp.212-213. 29. Erden, Birinci Dunya Harbinde [n. 8], p.217. The brigands involved were Major Ahmed and Lieutenant Halil in whose belongings were found, among other things, "blood-stained ornamental gold coins." (p.218). 30. Ziya Sakir, Yakin Tarihin Üc Büyük Adami (The three great men from the recent past). Istanbul: A. Sait Pub., pp.57-59. Falih Rilki (Atay), Zeytindagi (Mount Olive). Istanbul: Ayyildiz, 1981, p.67. It should be recognized in this respect that not only IVth Army Commander Cemal in Syria and Palestine, but also Ill~ Army Commander Vehib Pasa in eastern Turkey, despite their strong ties to the Ittihad Party, refused to embrace the secret genocidal agenda of the party's top leadership and whenever they could they tried to resist and discourage the attendant massacres. In 1916, for example, Vehib court-martialed and hanged a gendarmery commander and his accomplice for organizing the massacre of some 2,000 disarmed Armenian labor battalion soldiers. He subsequently issued a proclamation threatening similar swift retribution against any and all who might be tempted to attack and harm the Armenians in the process of being deported. Ariamard (Istanbul), December 10, 1918. Cemal Pasa acted similarly. In 1916, for example, he executed a gendarmery officer on charges of rape and assault. Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives, Consul Ranzi's February 15, 1916 report to Vienna. 12/463. No.4/P 31. See a brief account of these operations of post-crime liquidation, including those undertaken by the Kemalists in Vahakn N. Dadrian. "A Twist in the Punishment of Some of the Arch Perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide." The Armenian Cause 10, no.2 (May 1993): 2E-5E. 32. Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate Archives, Series 17, file Ho, pp.37, 38, and p.163 of report no.67 relayed to the Interior Minister by one of the four commissions which Minister Talat had sent to Anatolia to investigate the abuses committed

Despan News What Does Common-State Mean? (2/21/01) "Nagorno Artsax is a state and territorial entity with the status of a republic and forms a common state with Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders. In order to promote relations and coordinate joint activity, representations of Nagorno Artsax and Azerbaijan will be opened in Baku and Stepanakert. Nagorno Artsax will participate in the implementation of Azerbaijan's foreign policy on issues of interest to it. Decisions with regards to such issues may be adopted without the agreement of both sides. "The borders of Nagorno Artsax will correspond to the boundaries of the former Nagorno Artsax Autonomous Region. Their corrections or alterations may become a subject of special mutual agreements between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Artsax. Borders between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Artsax will be bilaterally open for the free movement of unarmed citizens. "Force or threats of use of force shall not be applied in the settlement of disputes between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Artsax. In the event of unresolved disputes or disagreements within the framework of the joint commission, the sides may ask for the opinion of the OSCE chairman-in-office, which will be taken into account during the adoption of a final decision. "Nagorno Artsax will have its own constitution adopted in a referendum by the people of Nagorno Artsax. Citizens of Nagorno Artsax will have Azerbaijani passports with the special designation Nagorno Artsax. Only the government of Nagorno Artsax will have the right to issue such passports. Nagorno Artsax will have a National Guard (security force) formed on a voluntary basis and a police force. These forces may not act outside of Nagorno Artsax without the consent of Azerbaijan's government. "Armenian is the main state language of Nagorno Artsax and Azerbaijani is the second official language. About the Lachin Corridor "The use of the Lachin corridor for free communication between Nagorno Artsax and Armenia will become a subject of agreement if according to the agreement between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Artsax no other decisions are adopted on the special regime of the Lachin region. The Lachin area must remain a demilitarized zone. About Shushi and Shaumyan "The sides agree that all Azeri refugees may return to their homes in Shushi. The relevant authorities of Nagorno Artsax will guarantee their security. They will have equal rights with all other citizens of Nagorno Artsax, including the right to create political parties, participate in elections at all levels, elect and be elected in state and legislative bodies and in local and juridical bodies, and work in state services, including law enforcement agencies. Such rights will also be granted to Armenian refugees returning to the town of Shaumyan. Agreement On Cessation of Armed Hostilities "Any Armenian forces deployed outside the borders of the Republic of Armenia must return to within its borders. Nagorno Artsax forces must withdraw to the borders of the Nagorno Artsax Autonomous Region of 1988, except for the Lachin area, until the adoption of an agreement on free communication between Nagorno Artsax and Armenia. The territory vacated as a result of this withdrawal will become a buffer zone and a separation zone. After the withdrawal of forces a buffer zone will be created around the boundaries of the Nagorno Artsax Autonomous Region. In the event of an additional arrangement, it can also pass along the boundaries of the Lachin area. The buffer zone shall be unpopulated and must be fully demilitarized, excluding OSCE peacekeeping forces". 10 November 1998 The National Security Ministry responded to our query: "Since 1998 until today no changes have been made to the document. Armenia and Artsax adopted the document as grounds for the resumption of negotiations, while Azerbaijan did not".

Ali, I am not aware of an Armenian connection there.

Cramp, J. M., D.D Baptist History CHAPTER III. THE OBSCURE PERIOD. FROM A.D. 604 TO A.D. 1073. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SECTION I. The Manichaeans—Cautions to the Student—All Opponents of Infant-baptism not Baptists—Account of the Paulicians—Their Views of Baptism. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some may wonder that we have as yet said nothing about the Manichæans, a sect which first came into notice about the latter part of the third century, and continued in existence, if historians are to be believed, a thousand years or more. They were charged with denying infant-baptism. But we wish it to be understood that we consider those only as Baptists, in the New Testament sense of that term, who hold baptism as an ordinance binding on all believers, and refuse it to all other persons. Now, Manichæism was a compound of Oriental philosophy and Christianity. The fanciful and wild speculations in which Manes indulged were as ill-founded in reason as in Scripture, and justly entitled their author to the appellation “fanatic.” He incorporated sundry portions of Christianity into his incongruous system, and therefore the party has been ranked among the heretics, though, as we think, with little propriety. The heretics, as they are called, were seceders from the established or Catholic Church. Manes originated an independent body, on entirely original principles, and ought to be placed in the same list as Mohammed and other founders of systems. It is said that he admitted baptism and the Lord’s Supper among the services enjoined on his followers; but the Supper was celebrated with water instead of wine, and baptism was optional; those only who wished it were baptized; those who did not desire it were not debarred from membership on that account, and infants were excluded from participation in the rite. After these explanations it will not be deemed strange that we have refrained from classing the Manichæans with the revivers of primitive religion.[1] We are now entering on the period which we have denominated “obscure.” It is so called because the information is generally scanty, and sometimes of very doubtful character. We may begin by remarking that the student of ecclesiastical history must beware lest he be led astray by the misrepresentations of bigoted historians. Manichæism was soon looked on as a concentration of all that was outrageous and bad in religious opinion, and it became the fashion to call all heretics “Manichæans.” Hence many excellent men have been so stigmatized, whose views and practices accorded with the Word of God. It is necessary to repair to the original sources of history, and even then to scan very closely the statements handed down to us, that they may be disentangled, as far as possible, from mistake or misrepresentation. Further: it is not safe or proper to report all opponents of infant-baptism as Baptists, in our sense of the word. Throughout the middle ages there were many dissenters from the Catholic faith, as it was called, who rejected baptism altogether, holding sentiments respecting that ordinance which much resemble those of the Quakers in these times. Possibly they were driven to those extreme views by contemplating the absurd ceremonies connected with baptism, and the superstitious notions entertained by the majority. It seemed to them better to have no baptism at all than to countenance such follies. Doubtless they were wrong, although much might be offered in excuse for them. But when these parties are adduced as witnesses for infant-baptism, an unfairness is sometimes committed. Their opposition was against all baptism, and not against infant baptism only. We are not disposed to regard any persons as Primitive Baptists unless they practiced the baptism of believers; their rejection of infant-baptism will not warrant the imposition of that worthy name on them. Mr. Orchard’s “History of Foreign Baptists,” and other works of a similar kind, have now and then fallen into this error.[2] At the same time it must be confessed that there is often the utmost difficulty in forming a satisfactory judgment in regard to the opinions held by the reformers of the Middle Ages. We know nothing of them but by the reports of their adversaries, who were predisposed against them, and who, for want of religious sympathy, were unable to appreciate or even to understand their peculiar views. The same words were sometimes used by opposing parties in different senses, and truths were seen in different aspects. Hence the confusion and contradictoriness which are too often apparent. These observations apply to the case of the Paulicians. They first appeared about the middle of the seventh century, in Armenia, and soon spread wonderfully, till they were numbered by hundreds of thousands. Their enemies accused them of Manichæism, which accusation they indignantly repelled. The only ancient authorities whence we can derive a knowledge of their sentiments are Photius and Petrus Siculus, who wrote against them with great bitterness, and on that account can scarcely be considered as worthy of entire credence. Photius was Archbishop of Constantinople, and died A.D. 890; Petrus Siculus, a learned nobleman, died a few years later. He was sent by the Emperor Basil to Tibrica, a Paulician town, in the year 870, to negotiate an exchange of prisoners. He remained there seven months, and availed himself of the opportunity of learning the opinions and practices of the Paulicians, both by disputing with them and by instituting inquiries among the Catholics in the neighborhood. It is unfortunate that there is no better authority to consult, for Petrus Siculus was so bitterly prejudiced against the people that his statements cannot be received without doubt and distrust. The only safe course is to endeavour to disentangle facts from opinions, insinuations, and invectives, and thus to ascertain the truth. Yet even then it is impossible to furnish a complete picture. Petrus Siculus deals chiefly in negatives. He tells us what the Paulicians denied, and rails at them for presuming to differ from the Catholic party, but he leaves us to guess what they really believed, in many important particulars. We mention these things that the reader may perceive the difficulty which lies in the way of an impartial narrator. About the year 653, during the reign of the Emperor Constans II., a young man named Constantine, resident at Mananalis, in Armenia, rendered hospitable attentions to a stranger whom misfortune had brought under his roof. The stranger proved to be a deacon of a Christian Church, and he had in his possession a precious treasure, which he gave to Constantine on his departure, in return for the kindness shown him. It was a copy of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Constantine read, believed, and obeyed. Manichæism, by which he had been deluded, was immediately renounced. His Manichæan books were thrown aside, and the sacred writings were exclusively studied. Shortly afterwards he removed to Cibossa, where he lived and laboured for twenty-seven years. He was a diligent and successful preacher. Great numbers received the truth. In what manner he proceeded to form them into societies or churches, and how they were governed, we have not the means of knowing. We may conjecture and infer, but inference is not history. If the report of Petrus Siculus be correct, they lay under considerable disadvantage in not having the Book of the Acts in their hands, from which they would have gathered the practices of the Apostolic churches, and perhaps this circumstance exerted an unfavorable influence on their arrangements. But we must not affirm positively on this subject. Constantine died the death of a martyr. The Emperor Constantine Pogonatus sent Simeon, one of his officers, to Cibossa, with a military detachment. He apprehended Constantine, compelled the congregation to present themselves before him, and ordered them to stone their minister. They stood in silence for a while, no one lifting up his hand in obedience to so cruel a command. At length a man named Justus stepped forward, and the murderous deed was done. Simeon then undertook the work of conversion. He disputed with the followers of Constantine, and laboured hard to restore them to the Catholic Church. But he laboured in vain. Not only so, the arguments used on the other side were too powerful for him. He yielded to the force of truth, and returned to Constantinople a Paulician in heart. At first he did not avow the change that had taken place, but at length he found it impossible to conceal it, and consequently he left the Imperial service, retired to Cibossa, joined the persecuted sect, and became the successor of the very man whom he had murdered by the hand of Justus. After several years of usefulness, Justus, who had professed repentance and had been restored to the Church, quarreled with him and betrayed him to a neighboring bishop, by whose means all the members of the Church then resident in Cibossa were seized and burned alive in one vast pile. Paulus only escaped. He fled to Episparis. His two sons, Genesius and Theodotus, became Paulician ministers. Genesius was on one occasion apprehended as a heretic and taken to Constantinople, where he underwent an examination before the Patriarch. It is thus reported by Petrus Siculus: Patriarch.—“Why hast thou derided the orthodox faith?” Genesius.—“Anathema to him who denies the orthodox faith” (meaning thereby his own heresy, which he boasted of as the true “orthodox faith”). Patriarch.—“Wherefore dost thou not believe in and adore the venerable cross?” Genesius.—“Anathema to him who does not adore and worship the venerable and life-giving cross” (meaning Christ Himself, whose outstretched arms present the figure of the cross). Patriarch.—“Why dost thou not worship and adore the holy mother of God?” Genesius.—“Anathema to him who does not adore the most holy mother of God, the common mother of us all, into whom our Lord Jesus Christ entered” (meaning the heavenly Jerusalem, into which Christ has entered, as our Forerunner). Patriarch.—“Why dost thou not partake of the immaculate body and precious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, but dost rather despise the same?” Genesius.—“Anathema to him who despises the body and blood of Jesus Christ” (meaning thereby the words “ body and blood,” and nothing more). “In like manner,” says Petrus Siculus, “he spake of baptism, saying that Jesus Christ Himself is baptism, and that there is no other, because He said, ‘I am the living water.’ And thus, perverting everything by his own false interpretations, he was acquitted and honorably dismissed.” After this, Mananalis was again the headquarters of the Paulicians. Genesius lived there thirty years, and died in peace. Various troubles and disasters followed. Joseph, who seems to have succeeded Genesius, withdrew to Episparis, and afterwards to Antioch, in Pisidia, where he laboured thirty years. He was succeeded by Bahanes. But there must have been many more engaged in the work besides these, for the imperfect notices that are left indicate an extensive series of operations, embracing a large number of churches, and a powerful body of adherents. About the year 810 the Paulicians were joined by Sergius, who became one of the most eminent men of their community. The account of his conversion is exceedingly interesting. He was an intelligent, well-educated young man, and much esteemed for his many excellent qualities; but he was profoundly ignorant of religion. One day a Christian woman (evidently a Paulician) met with him and entered into conversation. “Why,” said she, “do you not read the Holy Gospels?” “Because,” he replied, “it is not lawful for us laymen, but only for the priests.” “You are altogether mistaken,” she rejoined, “for there is no respect of persons with God; He will have all men to be saved.” She then proceeded to expose the priestly tyranny of the age, and the gross superstitions by which the people were deluded, urging the young man to examine the matter for himself. He did so. He read, and thought, and prayed, and became a Christian “in deed and in truth.” The genuineness of his conversion was proved by his eminently holy life and incessant zeal. He traversed a large part of Western Asia, preaching everywhere, and calling on the people to abandon the follies of a corrupted Christianity, and “worship God in the spirit.” Thirty‑four years were thus spent, and marvelous results accompanied his efforts. Multitudes were converted. So general was the defection from the established Church, that the Greek emperor was greatly alarmed, and adopted the severest measures for the suppression of the Reformation. The Paulicians had endured persecution from the beginning, and had “increased and multiplied” under it. But the storm raged with such terrific fierceness during the first half of the ninth century, that utter extermination seemed inevitable. It is affirmed that under the auspices of the Empress Theodora, who held the regency during the minority of her son Michael, from A.D. 832 to A.D. 846, no fewer than one hundred thousand Paulicians were put to death, “by the sword, the gibbet, or the flames.” Sergius was one of the victims. He and his brethren went to join those of whom it is said that they constantly cry, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on those that dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10) “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” There is a point at which resistance becomes venial, if not obligatory. Imperial cruelty provoked retaliation and revenge. The Paulicians took up arms in defense of their families and their homes. The transition from self-defense to active rebellion is easy, and the provinces of the East were convulsed with civil war, for all the miseries of which the persecutors were responsible. It continued many years. The co-operation of the Saracens was sought, and many provinces of the Empire were desolated. But we will not pursue the history further. It is difficult to trace the progress of religion when carnal weapons have been taken up. We will only observe that the Paulician revival had early extended to Thrace, now the Turkish province of Roumelia that in the tenth century a large number of Paulicians were removed to Philippoplis in that country, and also to Bulgaria, the adjoining province; and that in the following age they began to migrate into Italy, France, and other parts of Europe.[3] When Petrus Siculus sat down to write his history, he was predetermined to blacken the Paulicians to the utmost. Consequently, he maintained that they were Manichæans, notwithstanding the disclaimer of Constantine, their founder; and having taken that position, he was resolved to hold it. We shall not think it worth while to discuss the question. There may have been some among them who still retained a regard to the philosophic speculations with which they were familiar before conversion, and which had for many ages proved very injurious to spiritual Christianity; and that unworthy persons sometimes crept in among them may be readily admitted. That is the fate of all parties. But here was their distinction;—they withdrew from the Greek Church because that Church had abandoned the high ground of Gospel truth and spiritual worship. They asserted the right and duty of searching the Scriptures, and would admit no other rule. They abhorred saint-worship. They would not adore the cross, nor bow down before images. They abjured the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In a word, they appear to have been Protestants before the Reformation, and even before those who have been commonly reckoned as its precursors. The meager accounts of them which remain, tinged as they are with obstinate prejudice, fail to give us satisfaction. Had we the letters of Sergius, which Petrus Siculus tells us his followers valued highly, we should be able to obtain full and accurate information. This, however, is certain, that a religious movement, springing from God’s word, and so firmly maintained against opposition, that two hundred years after its rise the astonishing number of one hundred thousand of its adherents were cut off without destroying the body, must have possessed a mighty influence. We agree with Joseph Milner, the ecclesiastical historian, who observes that in this case we have “one of those extraordinary effusions of the Divine Spirit by which the knowledge of Christ and the practice of godliness is kept alive in the world.”[4] But we cannot agree with that writer in the statement, that the Paulicians “were simply scriptural in the use of the Sacraments.” Neander says, more truly, that “they combated the inclination to rely on the magical effects of external forms, particularly the Sacraments: indeed, they went so far on this side as wholly to reject the outward celebration of the Sacraments.”[5] On the question of baptism, Photius writes to this effect that though the Paulicians despise “saving baptism,” they pretend that they have received it, inasmuch as they received the Gospel, wherein Christ declares that He is the “living water;”[6] and he adds, that they are willing that the priests should baptize their children, notwithstanding their disbelief in any saving benefit accompanying the rite. Admitting the correctness of this account, the Paulicians rejected water-baptism, teaching that the knowledge of Christ, which is spiritual baptism, is sufficient. If they allowed the priests to baptize their children, as Photius states, it was probably to save themselves from annoyance, perhaps from persecution; and as, in their opinion, the baptism did the children neither good nor harm, it was looked on as a matter of indifference. We do not justify or commend them. Whatever their views were, the priests judged that they had saved the children by baptizing them, and there should not have been any opportunity given for cherishing that anti-Christian notion. Still it is to be remembered that we are by no means certain of the truth of the statement, as the writer was a virulent opposer of the Paulicians, and aimed to excite hatred against them. The same remark will apply to Petrus Siculus, who, as Gibbon very properly says, wrote “with much prejudice and passion.” Some maintain that the Paulicians did not reject either baptism or the Lord’s Supper (which also they are said to have held in a spiritual sense only), but the unauthorized additions that had been made to the ordinances, and the current opinions respecting their design and efficacy. In other words, they rejected baptismal regeneration, and transubstantiation. The progress of perversion, it is truly affirmed, had brought men to this point, that baptism was no longer regarded as a profession of Christ, nor the Lord’s Supper as a memorial of His love; the former was held to be the instrument of regeneration, and in the latter there was said to be an actual reception of the Savior’s body and blood. Whoever refused to acquiesce in these representations was reproached as a denier of the ordinances, whereas his opposition was confined to corruptions and abuses. This is not an improbable supposition, but we have not the means of verifying it, for want of historic materials. It is, however, to be considered, that the Paulicians were not altogether agreed among themselves. There were divi­sions and parties. It may possibly be that Photius and Petrus Siculus designedly referred to those of them whose opinions were, in their judgment, the farthest removed from Catholic verity, and that while some wandered into errors and excesses, the remainder pursued a scriptural course. Photius himself states that some of them observed the Lord’s Supper, though, as he affects to believe, they did it “to deceive the simple.” This indicates the existence of two parties. Those who observed one ordinance were not likely to neglect the other. We are therefore not indisposed to believe that there were among the Paulicians many who preserved the truths and worship of Christianity, as derived from the New Testament. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ENDNOTES: [1] Manes was a Persian. He was put to death by order of Varanes I., King of Persia, in the year 278. Se Beausobre’s Histoire Cyitique de Manichee et du Manicheisme, and Mosheim’s De Rebus Christianis, &c., p. 728-903. [2] It is not pleasant to be compelled to make any statements calculated to throw discredit on other writers ; but the interests of truth are paramount to all other considerations, and Baptists ought to be especially careful in this matter Gibbon writes thus: “In the practice, or at least in the theory, of the sacraments, the Paulicians were inclined to abolish all visible objects of worship, and the words of the Gospel were, in their judgment, the baptism and communion of the faithful.”—Decline and Fall, chap. 54. The Rev. W. Jones, referring to Gibbon as his authority, says: “The sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper they held to be peculiar to ‘the communion of the faithful,’ that is, ought to be restricted to believers.” —Lectures on Ecclesiastical History, ii. p. 181. It will be observed that this is not by any means a correct representation of Gibbon. It is quoted by Orchard as an independent testimony. Mr. Orchard (History of the Baptists, p. 130) gives the following as a quotation from Mosheim: “It is evident they [the Paulicians] rejected the baptism of infants. They were not charged with any error concerning baptism.” We are sorry to say that the first part of this alleged quotation is not to be found in Mosheim. The second part is a mutilation. The words of the historian, which occur in a note, are here copied: “The Greeks do not charge the Paulicians with any error in respect to the doctrine of Baptism. Yet there is no doubt that they construed into allegory what the New Testament states concerning this ordinance. And Photius (Contra Manich. lib. i. p. 29) expressly says, that they held only to a fictitious baptism, and understood by baptism, i.e., by the water of baptism—the Gospel.”—Ecclesiastical History, cent. ix. part 2. chap. v. sect. 6. Mr. Orchard gives also the following, as a quotation from Dr. Allix: “They, with the Manichæans, were Anabaptists, and were consequently often reproached with that term.” We have looked in vain for this quotation. Dr. Allix, speaking of the Manichees, says: “In those barbarous and cruel ages, a small conformity of opinion with the Manichees was a sufficient ground to accuse them of Manicheism who opposed any doctrines received by the Church of Rome. Thus would they have taken the Anabaptists for downright Manichees, because they condemned the baptism of infants.”—Remarks upon the Ancient Church of Piedmont, chap. xv. Mr. Orchard says (p. 300), Ecbertus Schonaugiensis, who wrote against this people, declares, “They say that baptism does no good to infants; therefore, such as come over to their sect they baptize in a private way, that is, without the pomp and public parade of the Catholics.”—Wall’s History, part 2, p. 228. This seems to be clear and explicit testimony. According to the statement, as here presented, the Cathari not only rejected infant-baptism, but also baptized adults, “in a private way.” The reader will be astonished to learn that the very opposite was the fact. These people, according to Eckbert, as very fairly quoted by Wall, rejected baptism altogether. Here is the entire passage, copied from Wall. He is speaking of Eckbert, or, as be calls him, Ecbertus Schonaugiensis: He says, Sermon I. “They are also divided among themselves; for several things that are maintained by some of them, are denied by others.” And of baptism particularly, he says, “Of baptism they speak variously; that baptism does no good to infants, because they cannot of themselves desire it, and because they cannot profess any faith. But there is another thing which they more generally hold concerning that point, though more secretly, viz., that no water baptism at all does any good for salvation. And therefore such as come over to their sect, they re‑baptize by a private way, which they call baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” This was the “ consolamentum.” It is described in the next chapter. Mr. Benedict copies Orchard, and thus unwittingly propagates the mistake.—History of the Baptists, p. 67, edit. 1848. The original passage, translated by Wall, is in Biblioth. Maxim. Lugdun. xxiii. p. 601. [3] The “Historia” of Petrus Siculus is printed in the sixteenth volume of the Biblioth. Maxim. Lugdunens. Gieseler has given an abstract of the statements of Photius in his Ecclesiastical History, ii. pp. 209-212. [4] History of the Church, cent. ix. chap. ii. [5] History of the Church, iii. p. 263. [6] Ibid, i. p. 9. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Providence Baptist Ministries © 1999 - 2001 Baptist Trumpeter Publications © 1999 - 2001 All rights reserved. Revised: January 27, 2001 http://www.pbministries.org/History/J.%20M...ist_history.htm [ May 09, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

Reading over the highlighted material above, I recalled a story that my paternal grandfather has told me when I was a youngster. He told me that there has been a Christian priest of Armenian origin, with a name Menas, who has traveled with Mohammed, and has taught him much. That Mohammed has come up with his prophecy in the result of Menas’ teachings. Later, Menas has been killed - don't remember the circumstances. He has also told me that there is an Islamic tradition preserved all the way to our days, of throwing stones to the grave of Minas on a special day of the year, not far away from Mekka. I wonder if Menas has been Paulician, and has been (one of) the person(s) who is referred in the material above. Does anybody know any details about this story?

Steve, I didn't say that the "skull and Cross-bone" is an Armenian symbol. But rather, according to the legend, the cross-bones represent the legs of the Armenian lady subject to discussion, and the skull represents her "child." This is the underlying Armenian motif that I have referred to.

Dear Ali, I am anxiously waiting for your posting on the subject of the seminar you have attended with Prof. Berktay. And don't feel bad about the "interrogation," please. Our people are just not used to coming across with your type of Turks.

Steve, My eternal gratitude to you, if you can do it for me.

Manichæism Manichæism is a religion founded by the Persian Mani in the latter half of the third century. It purported to be the true synthesis of all the religious systems then known, and actually consisted of Zoroastrian Dualism, Babylonian folklore, Buddhist ethics, and some small and superficial, additions of Christian elements. As the theory of two eternal principles, good and evil, is predominant in this fusion of ideas and gives color to the whole, Manichæism is classified as a form of religious Dualism. It spread with extraordinary rapidity in both East and West and maintained a sporadic and intermittent existence in the West (Africa, Spain, France, North Italy, the Balkans) for a thousand years, but it flourished mainly in the land of its birth, (Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Turkestan) and even further East in Northern India, Western China, and Tibet, where, c. A.D. 1000, the bulk of the population professed its tenets and where it died out at an uncertain date. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. LIFE OF THE FOUNDER Mani (Gr. Manys, gen. usually Manytos, sometimes Manentos, rarely Manou; or Manichios; Lat. Manes, gen. Manetis; In Augustine always Manichaeus) is a title and term of respect rather than a personal name. Its exact meaning is not quite certain, ancient Greek interpretations were skeuos and homilia, but its true derivation is probably from the Babylonian-Aramaic Mânâ, which, among the Mandaeans was a term for a light-spirit, mânâ rabba being the "Light King". It would therefore mean "the illustrious". This title was assumed by the founder himself and so completely replaced his personal name that the precise form of the latter is not known; two latinized forms, however, are handed down, Cubricus and Ubricus, and it seems likely that these forms are a corruption of the not unusual name of Shuraik. Although Mani's personal name is thus subject to doubt, there is no doubt concerning that of his father and family. His father's name was Fâtâk Bâbâk (Ratekios, or the "well preserved"), a citizen of Ecbatana, the ancient Median capital and a member of the famous Chascanian Gens. The boy was born A.D. 215-216 in the village of Mardinu in Babylonia, from a mother of noble (Arsacide) descent whose name variously is given as Mes, Utâchîm, Marmarjam, and Karossa. The father was evidently a man of strong religious propensities, since he left Ecbatana to join the South Babylonian Puritans (Menakkede) or Mandaeans and had his son educated in their tenets. Mani's father himself must have displayed considerable activities as a religious reformer and have been a kind of forerunner of his more famous son, in the first years of whose public life he had some share. It is not impossible that some of Patekios' writing lies imbedded in the Mandaean literature which has come down to us. Through misunderstandings the Aramaic word for disciple (Tarbitha, stat abs. Tarbi), Greek and Latin sources speak of a certain Terebinthos, Terebinthus of Turbo, as a distinct person, whom they confound partially with Mani, partially with Patekios, and as they also forgot that Mani, besides being Patekios' great disciple, was his bodily son, and that in consequence the Scythian teacher, Scythianus, is but Fatak Babak of Hamadam, the Scythian metropolis, their account of the first origins of Manichæism differs considerably from that given in Oriental sources. Notwithstanding Kessler's ingenious researches in this field, we cannot say that the relation between Oriental and Western sources on this point has been sufficiently cleared up, and it may well be that the Western tradition going back through the "Acta Archelai" to within a century of Mani's death, contains some truth. Mani's father was at first apparently an idolater, for, as he worshipped in a temple to his gods he is supposed to have heard a voice urging him to abstain from meat, wine, and women. In obedience to this voice he emigrated to the south and joined the Mughtasilah, or Mandaean Baptists, taking the boy Mani, with him, but possibly leaving Mani's mother behind. Here, at the age of twelve Mani is supposed to have received his first revelation. The angel Eltaum (God of the Covenant; Tamiel of Jewish Rabbinical lore?), appeared to him, bade him leave the Mandaeans, and live chastely, but to wait still some twelve years before proclaiming himself to the people. It is not unlikely that the boy was trained up to the profession of painter, as he is often thus designated in Oriental (though late) sources. Babylon was still a center of the pagan priesthood; here Mani became thoroughly imbued with their ancient speculations. On Sunday, 20 March, A.D. 242, Mani first proclaimed his gospel in the royal residence, Gundesapor, on the coronation day of Sapor I, when vast crowds from all parts were gathered together. "As once Buddha came to India, Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the lands of the West, so came in the present time, this prophecy through me, the Mani, to the land of Babylonia", sounded the proclamation of this "Apostle of the true God". He seems to have had but little immediate success and was compelled to leave the country. For many years he traveled abroad, founding Manichæan communities in Turkestan and India. When he finally returned to Persia he succeeded in converting to his doctrine Peroz, the brother of Sapor I, and dedicated to him one of his most important works, the "Shapurikan". Peroz obtained for Mani an audience with the king and Mani delivered his prophetical message in the royal presence. We soon find Mani again a fugitive from his native land; though here and there, as in Beth Garmia, his teaching seems to have taken early root. While traveling, Mani spread and strengthened his doctrine by epistles, or encyclical letters, of which some four score are known to us by title. It is said that Mani afterwards fell into the hands of Sapor I, was cast into prison, and only released at the king's death in 274. It seems certain that Sapor's successor, Ormuzd I, was favorable to the new prophet; perhaps he even personally released him from his dungeon, unless, indeed, Mani had already effected his escape by bribing a warder and fleeing across the Roman frontier. Ormuzd's favor, however, was of little avail, as he occupied the Persian throne only a single year, and Bahram I, his successor, soon after his accession, caused Mani to be crucified, had the corpse flayed, the skin stuffed and hung up at the city gate, as a terrifying spectacle to his followers, whom he persecuted with relentless severity. The date of his death is fixed at 276-277. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- II. SYSTEM OF DOCTRINE AND DISCIPLINE Doctrine The key to Mani's system is his cosmogony. Once this is known there is little else to learn. In this sense Mani was a true Gnostic, as he brought salvation by knowledge. Manichæism professed to be a religion of pure reason as opposed to Christian credulity; it professed to explain the origin, the composition, and the future of the universe; it had an answer for everything and despised Christianity, which was full of mysteries. It was utterly unconscious that its every answer was a mystification or a whimsical invention; in fact, it gained mastery over men's minds by the astonishing completeness, minuteness, and consistency of its assertions. We are giving the cosmogony as contained in Theodore Bar Khoni, embodying the results of the study of Francois Cumont. Before the existence of heaven and earth and all that is therein, there were two Principles, the one Good the other Bad. The Good Principle dwells in the realm of light and is called the Father of Majesty (Grandeur or Greatness, Megethos, Abba D'rabbutha), or the Father with the Four Faces or Persons (tetraprosopon), probably because Time, Light, Force, and Goodness were regarded as essential manifestations of the First Being by the Zervanites. Outside the Father there are his Five Tabernacles or Shechinatha, Intelligence, Reason, Thought, Reflection, and Will. The designation of "Tabernacle" contains a play on the sound Shechina which means both dwelling or tent and "Divine glory or presence" and is used in the Old Testament to designate God's presence between the Cherubim. These five tabernacles were pictured on the one hand as stories of one building -- Will being the topmost story -- and on the other hand as limbs of God's body. He indwelt and possessed them all, so as to be, in a sense, identical with them, yet again, in a sense, to be distinct from them. They are also designated as aeons or worlds, beata secula, in St. Augustine's writings. In other sources the five limbs are: Longanimity, Knowledge, Reason, Discretion, and Understanding. And again these five as limbs of the Father's spiritual body were sometimes distinguished from the five attributes of His pure Intelligence: Love, Faith, Truth, Highmindedness, and Wisdom. This Father of light together with the light-air and the light-earth, the former with five attributes parallel to his own, and the latter with the five limbs of Breath, Wind, Light, Water, and Fire constitute the Manichæan pleroma. This light world is of infinite exrtent in five directions and has only one limit, set to it below by the realm of Darkness, which is likewise infinite in all directions barring the one above, where it borders on the realm of light. Opposed to the Father of Grandeur is the King of Darkness. He is actually never called God, but otherwise, he and his kingdom down below are exactly parallel to the ruler and realm of the light above. The dark Pleroma is also triple, as it were firmament, air, and earth inverted. The first two (Heshuha and Humana) have the five attributes, members, aeons, or worlds: Pestilent Breath, Scorching Wind, Gloom, Mist, Consuming Fire; the last has the following five: Wells of Poison, Columns of Smoke, Abysmal Depths, Fetid Marshes, and Pillars of Fire. This last five fold division is clearly borrowed from ancient Chaldean ideas current in Mesopotamia. These two powers might have lived eternally in peace, had not the Prince of Darkness decided to invade the realm of light. On the approach of the monarch of chaos the five aeons of light were seized with terror. This incarnation of evil called Satan or Ur-devil (Diabolos protos, Iblis Kadim, in Arabic sources), a monster half fish, half bird, yet with four feet and lion-headed, threw himself upward toward the confines of light. The echo of the thunder of his onrush went through the blessed aeons until it reached the Father of Majesty, who bethinking himself said: I will not send my five aeons, made for blessed repose, to engage in this war, I will go myself and give battle. Hereupon the Father of Majesty emanated the Mother of Life and the Mother of Life emanated the first man. These two constitute, with the Father, a sort of Trinity in Unity, hence the Father could say: "I myself will go". Mani here assimilates ideas already known from Gnosticism (q.v., subtitle The Sophia Myth) and resembling Christian doctrine, especially when it is borne in mind that "Spirit" is feminine in Hebrew-Aramaic and thus could easily be conceived as a mother of all living. The Protanthropos or "First Man" is a distinctly Irani an conception, which likewise found its way into a number of Gnostic systems (q.v.), but which became the central figure in Manichæism. The myth of the origin of the world out of the members of a dead giant or Ur-man is extremely ancient, not only in Iranian speculations but also in Indian mythology (Rig-Veda, X, 90), Indeed if the myth of giant Ymir in Norse Cosmogonies (see Cosmogony) is not merely a medieval invention, as is sometimes asserted, this legend must be one of the earliest possessions of the Aryan race. According to Mani the First-Man now emanates sons as a man who puts on his armor for the combat. These five sons are the five elements opposed to the five aeons of darkness: Clear Air, Refreshing Wind, Bright Light, Life-Giving Waters, and Warming Fire. He put on first the aerial breeze, then threw over himself light as a flaming mantle, and over this light a covering of water; he surrounded himself with gusts of wind, took light as his lance and shield, and cast himself downward toward the line of danger. An angel called Nahashbat (?), carrying a crown of victory, went before him. The First-Man projected his light before him, and the King of Darkness seeing it, thought and said: "What I have sought from afar, lo, I have found it near me." He also clothed himself with his five elements, and engaged in combat with the First-Man. The struggle went in favor of the King of Darkness. The First-Man when being overcome, gave himself and his five sons as food to the five sons of Darkness, "as a man having an enemy, mixes deadly poison in a cake, and gives it to his foe." When these five resplendent deities had been absorbed by the sons of Darkness, reason was taken away from them and they became through the poisonous admixture with the sons of Darkness, like unto a man bitten by a wild dog or serpent. Thus the evil one conquered for a while. But the First-Man recovered his reason and prayed seven times to the Father of Majesty, who being moved by mercy, emanated as second creation, the Friend of the Ligh t, this Friend of the Light emanated the Great Ban, and the Great Ban emanated the Spirit of Life. Thus a second trinity parallel to the first (Father of Light, Mother of Light, First-Man) comes into existence. The first two personages of the latter trinity have not yet been explained and particularly the meaning of the Great Ban is a puzzle, but as in the former trinity, it is the third person, who does the actual work, the Spirit of Life (To Zon Pneuma), who becomes the demi-urge or world former. Like the First-Man he emanates five personalities: from his intelligence the Ornament of Splendour (Sefath Ziva, Splenditenens, phegotatochos in Greek and Latin sources), from his reason the Great King of Honour, from his thought Adamas, Light, from his self reflection the King of Glory, and from his will the Supporter (Sabhla, Atlas and Omothoros of Greek and Latin sources). These five deities were objects of special worship amongst Manichæans, and St. Augustine (Contra Faustum, XV) gives us descriptions of them drawn from Manichæan hymns. These five descend to the realm of Darkness, find the First-Man in his degradation and rescue him by the word of their power; his armour remains behind, by lifting him by the right hand the Spirit of Life brings him back to the Mother of Life. The fashioning of the world now begins. Some of the sons of the Spirit of Life kill and flay the archons or sons of Darkness and bring them to the Mother of Life. She spreads out their skins and forms twelve heavens. Their corpses are hurled on the realm of Darkness and eight worlds are made, their bones form the mountain ranges. The Ornament of splendour holds the five resplendent deities by their waist and below their waist the heavens are extended. Atlas carries all on his shoulders, the Great King of Honour sits on top of the heavens and guards over all. The Spirit of Life forces the sons of Darkness to surrender some of the light which they had absorbed from the five elements and out of this he forms the sun and the moon (vessels of light, lucidae naves in St. Augustine) and the stars. The Spirit of Life further makes the wheels of the wind under the earth near the Supporter. The King of Glory by some creation or other enables these wheels to mount the surface of the earth and thus prevents the five resplendent deities from being set on fire by the poison of the archons. The text of Theodore bar Khoni is here so confused and corrupt that it is difficult to catch the meaning; probably wind, water, air, and fire are considered protective coverings, encircling and enveloping the gross material earth and revolving around it. At this stage of the cosmogony the Mother of Life, the First-Man, and the Spirit of Life beg and beseech the Father of Majesty for a further creation and for a third creation he emanated the Messenger; in Latin sources this is the so-called Legatus Tertius. This Messenger emanates twelve virgins with their garments, crowns, and garlands, namely, Royalty, Wisdom, Victory, Persuasion, Purity, Truth, Faith, Patience, Righteousness, Goodness, Justice, and Light. The Messenger dwells in the sun and, coming toward these twelve virgin-vessels he commands his three attendants to make them revolve and soon they reach the height of the heavens. All this is a transparent metaphor for the planetary system and the signs of the zodiac. No sooner do the heavens rotate than the Messenger commands the Great Ban to renovate the earth and make the Great Wheels (Air, Fire, and Water) to mount. The great universe now moves but as yet there is no life of plants, beasts, or man. The production of vegetation, animal, and rational life on earth is a process of obscenity, cannibalism, abortion, and prize-fighting between the Messenger and the sons and daughters of Darkness, the details of which are better passed over. Finally, Naimrael, a female, and Ashaklun, a male devil, bring forth two children, Adam and Eve. In Adam's body were imprisoned a vast number of germs of light. He was the great captive of the Power of Evil. The Powers of Light had pity an d sent a Savior, the luminous Jesus. This Jesus approached innocent Adam, awoke him from his sleep of death, made him move, drew him out of his slumber, drove away the seductive demon, and enchained far away from him the mighty female archon. Adam reflected on himself and knew that he existed. Jesus then instructed Adam and showed him the Father's dwelling in the celestial heights, and Jesus showed him his own personality, exposed to all things, to the teeth of the panther, the teeth of the elephant, devoured by the greedy, swallowed by gluttons, eaten by dogs, mixed with and imprisoned in all that exists, encompassed by the evil odours of Darkness. Mani's weird but mighty imagination had thus created a "suffering Savior" and given him the name of Jesus. But this Saviour is but the personification of the Cosmic Light as far as imprisoned in matter, therefore it is diffused throughout all nature, it is born, suffers, and dies every day, it is crucified on every tree, it is daily eaten in all food. This captive Cosmic Light is called Jesus patibilis. Jesus then made Adam stand up and taste of the tree of life. Adam then looked around and wept. He mightily lifted up his voice as a roaring lion. He tore his hair and struck his breast and said, "Cursed be the creator of my body and he who bound my soul and they who have made me their slave." Man's duty henceforth is to keep his body pure from all bodily stain by practicing self-denial and to help also in the great work of purification throughout the universe. Manichæan eschatology is in keeping with its cosmogony. When, mainly through the activity of the elect, all light particles have been gathered together, the messenger, or Legatus Tertius appears, the Spirit of Life comes from the west, the First Man with his hosts comes from north, south, and east, together with all light aeons, and all perfect Manichæans. Atlas, the World Supporter throws his burden away, the Ornament of Splendour above lets go, and thus heaven and earth sink into the abyss. A universal confla gration ensues and burns on till nothing but lightless cinders remain. This fire continues during 1486 years, during which the torments of the wicked are the delights of the just. When the separation of light from darkness is finally completed, all angels of light who had functions in the creation return on high; the dark world-soul sinks away in the depth, which is then closed forever and eternal tranquillity reigns in the realm of light, no more to be invaded by darkness. With regard to the after-death of the individual, Manichæism taught a threefold state prepared for the Perfect, the Hearers, and the Sinners (non-Manichæans). The souls of the first are after death received by Jesus, who is sent by the First-Man accompanied by three aeons of light and the Light Maiden. They give the deceased a water vessel, a garment, a turban, a crown, and a wreath of light. In vain do evil angels lie in his path, he scorns them and on the ladder of praise he mounts first to the moon, then to the First-Man, the Sun, the Mother of Life, and finally the Supreme Light. The bodies of the perfect are purified by sun, moon, and stars; their light-particles, set free, mount to the First-Man and are formed into minor deities, surrounding his person. The fate of the Heavens is ultimately the same as that of the Perfect, but they have to pass through a long purgatory before they arrive at eternal bliss. Sinners, however, must, after death wander about in torment and anguish, surrounded by demons, and condemned by the angels, till the end of the world, when they are, body and soul, thrown into hell. Discipline To set the light-substance free from the pollution of matter was the ultimate aim of all Manichæan life. Those who entirely devoted themselves to this work were the "Elect" or the "Perfect", the Primates Manichaeorum; those who through human frailty felt unable to abstain from all earthly joys, though they accepted Manichæan tenets, were "the Hearers", auditores, or catechumens. The former bear a striking similarity to Buddhist monks, only with this difference that they were always itinerant, being forbidden to settle anywhere permanently. The life of these ascetics was a hard one. They were forbidden to have property, to eat meat or drink wine, to gratify any sexual desire, to engage in any servile occupation, commerce or trade, to possess house or home, to practice magic, or to practice any other religion. Their duties were summed up in the three signacula, i.e. seals or closures, that of the mouth, of the hands, and of the breast (oris, manuum, sinus). The first forbade all evil words and all evil food. Animal food roused the demon of Darkness within man, hence only vegetables were allowed to the perfect. Amongst vegetables, some, as melons and fruit containing oil were specially recommended, as they were thought to contain many light particles, and by being consumed by the perfect those light particles were set free. The second forbade all actions detrimental to the light-substance, slaying of animals, plucking of fruit, etc. The third forbade all evil thoughts, whether against the Manichæan faith or against purity. St. Augustine (especially "De Moribus Manich.") strongly inveighs against the Manichæan's repudiation of marriage. They regarded it as an evil in itself because the propagation of the human race meant the continual imprisonment of the light-substance in matter and a retarding of the blissful consummation of all things; maternity was a calamity and a sin and Manichæans delighted to tell of the seduction of Adam by Eve and her final punishment in eternal damnation. In consequence there was a danger that the act of generation, rather than the act of unchastity was abhorred, and that his was a real danger Augustine's writings testify. The number of the Perfect was naturally very small and in studying Manichæism one is particularly struck by the extreme paucity of individual Perfecti known in history. The vast bulk of Mani's adherents -- ninety-nine out of every hundred -- were Hearers. They were bound by Mani's Ten Commandments only, which forbade idolatry, mendacity, avarice, murder (i.e. all killing), fornication, theft, seduction to deceit, magic, hypocrisy, (secret infidelity to Manichæism), and religious indifference. The first positive duty seems to have been the maintenance and almost the worship of the Elect. They supplied them with vegetables for food and paid them homage on bended knee, asking for their blessing. They regarded them as superior beings, nay, collectively, they were thought to constitute the aeon of righteousness. Beyond these ten negative commandments there were the two duties common to all, prayer and fasting. Prayer was obligatory four times a day: at noon, late in the afternoon, after sunset, and three hours later. Prayer was made facing the sun or, in the night, the moon; when neither sun nor moon was visible, then the North, the throne of the Light-King. It was preceded by a ceremonial purification with water or for lack of water with some other substance in the Mohammedan fashion. The daily prayers were accompanied by twelve prostrations and addressed to the various personalities in the realm of light: the Father of Majesty, the First-Man, the Legatus Tertius, the Paraclete (Mani), the Five Elements, and so on. They consist mainly of a string of laudatory epithets and contain but little supplication. As time and attitude of prayer were intimately connected with astronomical phenomena, so likewise was the duty of fasting. All fasted on the first day of the week in honor of the sun, the Perfect also fasted on the second day in honor of the moon. All kept the fast during two days after every new moon; and once a year at the full moon, and at the beginning of the first quarter of the moon. Moreover, a monthly fast, observed till sunset, was begun on the eighth day of the month. Of rites and ceremonies among the Manichæans but very little is known to us. They had one great solemnity, that of the Bema, the anniversary of Mani's death. This was kept with a vigil of prayers and spiritual reading. An empty chair was placed on a raised platform to which five steps led up. Further details are as yet unknown. St. Augustine complains that although Manichæans pretended to be Christians, their feast of the death of Mani exceeded in solemnity that of the Death and Resurrection of Christ. Manichæans must have possessed a kind of baptism and eucharist. The epistle on baptism, which occurred among the sacred literature of the Manichæans, is unfortunately lost, and in Oriental sources the matter is not referred to, but Christian sources suppose the existence of both these rites. Of greater importance than baptism was the Consolamentum or "Consolation", an imposition of hands by one of the Elect by which a Hearer was received amongst their number. The Manichæan hierarchy and constitution is still involved in obscurity. Mani evidently intended to provide a supreme head for the multitude of his followers. He even decided that his successor in this dignity should reside in Babylon. This high priesthood is known in Arabic sources as the Imamate. In the East it seems to have possessed at least some temporary importance, in the West it seems hardly known or recognized. No list of these supreme Pontiffs of Manichæism has come down to us; hardly a name or two is known to history. It is doubtful even whether the chair of Mani did not remain vacant for long periods. On the duties and privileges of the Imamate we possess at present no information. According to Western and Eastern sources the Manichæan Church was divided into five hierarchical classes; St. Augustine names them magistri, episcopi, presbyteri, electi, and auditores; this Christianized terminology represents in Manichæan mystical language the sons of meekness, of reason, of knowledge, of mystery, and of understanding. Mani's astrological predilections for the number five, so evident in his cosmogony, evidently suggested this division for his Church or kingdom of the light on earth. The Teachers and Administrators (magistri and episcopi) are probably an adaptation of the legontes and drontes, the speakers and the doers, known in Greek and Babylonian mysteries; and the name "priests" is probably taken over from the Sabian Kura. With regard to the relation of Manichæism to Christianity two things are clear: (a) Some connection with Christianity was intended from the very first by Mani himself, it was not an after-thought, introduced when Manichæism came in touch with the West, as is sometimes asserted. Christianity was the predominant religion in Osrhoene, and perhaps the principle religion in all Mesopotamia in Mani's time. Mani, whose object was to found a system, comprehensive of all religions then known, could not but try to incorporate Christianity. In the first words of his proclamation on the coronation day of Sapor I, he mentioned Jesus, who had come to the countries of the West. ( The connection was purely external and artificial. The substance of Manichæism was Chaldean astrology and folklore cast in a rigid dualistic mould; if Christianity was brought in, it was only through force of historical circumstances. Christianity could not be ignored. In consequence Mani proclaimed himself the Paraclete promised by Jesus; rejected the whole of the Old Testament, but admitted as much of the New as suited him; in particular he rejected the Acts of the Apostles, because it told of the descent of the Holy Ghost in the past. The gospels were corrupted in many places, but where a text seemed to favor him the Manichee knew how to parade it. One has to read St. Augustine's anti-Manichæan disputes to realize the extreme ingenuity with which scripture texts were collected and interpreted. Though Mani called himself the Paraclete he claimed no divinity but with show of humility styled himself "Apostle of Jesus Christ by the providence of God the Father"; a designation which is obviously adapted from the heading of the Pauline Epistles. Mani, however, was the Apostle of Jesus Christ, i.e. the messenger of Christ's promise, that Paraclete whom he sent (apostolos from apostellos, to send) Mani's blasphemous assumption was thus toned down a little to Christian ears. Jesus Christ was to Mani but an aeon or persistent personification of Light in the world.; as far as it had already been set free it was the luminous Jesus, or Jesus patibilis. The historical Jesus of Nazareth was entirely repudiated by Mani. "The son of a poor widow" (Mary),"the Jewish Messias whom the Jews crucified", "a devil who was justly punished for interfering in the work of the Aeon Jesus", such was, according to Mani, the Christ whom Christians worshipped as God. Mani's Christology was purely Docetic, his Christ appeared to be man, to live, suffer, and die to symbolize the light suffering in this world. Though Mani used the term "Evangel" for his message, his Evangel was clearly in no real sense that of the Christians. Mani finally beguiled the unwary by the use of such apparently Christian terms as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to designate divine personalities, but a glance at his cosmogony shows how flimsy was the disguise. Nevertheless, spoke so cautiously, urging only faith in god, His light, His power, and His wisdom (in reality" the Father of Majesty"; the sun and moon; the five blessed aeons, his sons, and the Manichæan religion), that they deceived many. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- III. HISTORY IN THE EAST Notwithstanding the bitterest persecution by the Sassanides in Persia as well as by the emperors at Rome, Manichæism spread very rapidly. Its greatest success was achieved in countries to the east of Persia. In A.D. 1000 the Arab historian Al-Beruni wrote: "The majority of the Eastern Turks, the inhabitants of China and Tibet, and a number in India belong to the religion of Mani". The recent finds of Manichæan literature and painting at Turfan corroborate this statement. Within a generation after Mani's death his followers had settled on the Malabar Coast and gave the name to Minigrama, i.e. "Settlement of Mani". The Chinese inscriptions of Kara Belgassum, once thought to refer to the Nestorians, doubtless have reference to the existence of Manichæism. The great Turkish tribe of the Tuguzguz in 930 threatened reprisals on Mohammedans in their power if the Manichæans in Samarcand were molested by the Prince of Chorazan, in whose dominion they were very numerous. Detailed information on the extreme Eastern Manichæans is still lacking. In Persia and Babylonia proper, Manichæism seems never to have been the predominant religion, but the Manichæans enjoyed there a large amount of prosperity and toleration under Mohammedan rule. Some caliphs were actually favorable to Manichæism, and it had a number of secret sympathizers throughout Islam. Though not numerous in the capitol, Bagdad, they were scattered in the villages and hamlets of the Irak. Their prosperity and intimacy of social intercourse with non-Manichæans aroused the indignation of the Puritan party amongst Mani's followers, and this led to the formation of the heresy of Miklas, a Persian ascetic in the eighth century. As Manichæism adopted three Christian apocrypha, the Gospel of Thomas, the Teaching of Addas, and the Shepherd of Hermas, the legend was soon formed that Thomas, Addas, and Hermas were the first great apostles of Mani's system. Addas is supposed to have spread it in the Orient (ta tes anatoles), Thomas in Syria, and Hermas in Egypt. Manichæism was certainly known in Judea before Mani's death; it was brought to Eleutheropolis by Akouas in 274 (Epiph., "Haer.", LXVI, I). St. Ephrem (378) complained that no country was more infected with Manichæism than Mesopotamia in his day, and Manichæism maintained its ground in Edessa even in A.D. 450. The fact that it was combated by Eusebius of Emesus, George and Appolinaris of Laodicea, Diodorus of Tarsus, John (Chrysostom) of Antioch, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Titus of Bostra shows how early and ubiquitous was the danger of Manichæism in Western Asia. About A.D. 404, Julia, a lady of Antioch, tried by her riches and culture to pervert the city of Gaza to Manichæism, but without success. In Jerusalem St. Cyril had many converted Manichæans amongst his catechumens and refuted their errors at length. St. Nilus knew of secret Manichæans in Sinai before A.D. 430. In no country did Manichæism enter more insidiously into Christian life than in Egypt. One of the governors of Alexandria under Constantine was a Manichæan, who treated the Catholic bishops with unheard-of severity. St. Athanasius says of Anthony the Hermit (330) that he forbade all intercourse with "Manichæans and other heretics". In the Eastern roman Empire it came to the zenith of its power about A.D. 375-400, but then rapidly declined. But in the middle of the sixth century it once more rose into prominence. The Emperor Justinian himself disputed with them; Photinus the Manichæan publicly disputed with Paul the Persian. Manichæism obtained adherents among the highest classes of society. Barsymes the Nestorian prefect of Theodora, was an avowed Manichæan. But this recrudescence of Manichæism was soon suppressed. Soon, however, whether under the name of Paulicians, or Bogomiles, it again invaded the Byzantine Empire, after having lain hidden for a time on Musselman territory. The following are the Imperial edicts launched against Manichæism: Diocletian (Alexandria, 31 March, 296) commands the Proconsul of Africa to persecute them, he speaks of them as a sordid and impure sect recently come from Persia, which he is determined to destroy root and branch (stirpitus amputari). Its leaders and propagators must be burnt, together with their books; the rank and file beheaded, people of note condemned to the mines, and their goods confiscated. This edict remained at least nominally in force under Constantine, and Constantius. Under Julian the Apostate, Manichæism seems to have been tolerated. Valentinian I and Gratian, though tolerant of other sects, made exception of the Manichæans. Theodosius I, by an edict of 381, declared Manichæans to be without civil rights and incapable of testamentary disposition. In the following year he condemned them to death under the name of Encratites, Saccophores, and Hydroparastates. Valentinian II confiscated their goods, annulled their wills, and sent them into exile. Honorius in 405 renewed the edicts of his predecessors, and fined all governors of cities or provinces who were remiss in carrying out his orders; he invalidated all their contracts, declared them outlaws and public criminals. In 445 Valentinian III renewed the edicts of his predecessors; Anastasius condemned all Manichæans to death; Justin and Justinian decreed the death penalty, not only against Manichæans who remained obstinate in their heresy, but even against converts from Manichæism who remained in touch with their former co-religionists, or who did not at once denounce them to the magistrates. Heavy penalties were likewise decreed against all State officials who did not denounce their colleagues, if infected with Manichæism, and against all those who retained Manichæan books. It was a war of extermination and was apparently successful, within the confines of the Byzantine Empire. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV. HISTORY IN THE WEST In the West the special home of Manichæism was in Proconsular Africa, where it seems to have had a second apostle inferior only to Mani, a further incarnation of the Paraclete, Adimantus. Previous to 296 Julian the Proconsul had written to the emperor that the Manichæans troubled the peace of the population and caused injury to the towns. After the edict of Diocletian we hear no more of it until the days of St. Augustine. Its most notorious champion was Faustus of Mileve. Born at Mileve of poor parents, he had gone to Rome, and being converted to Manichæism he began to study rhetoric somewhat late in life. He was not a man of profound erudition, but he was a suave and unctuous speaker. His fame in Manichæan circles was very great. He was a Manichæan episcopus and boasted of having left his wife and children and all he had for his religion. He arrived at Carthage in 383, and was arrested, but the Christians obtained the commutation of his sentence to banishment and even that was not carried out. About A.D. 400 he wrote a work in favor of Manichæism, or rather against Christianity, in which he tried to wrest the New Testament to the support of Manichæism. St. Augustine answered him in thirty-three books embodying verbally much of his teaching. On 28 and 29 August 392, St. Augustine had refuted a certain Fortunatus in public discussion held in the Baths of Sossius. Fortunatus acknowledged defeat and disappeared from the town. On 7 Dec., 404, St. Augustine held a dispute with Felix, a Manichæan priest. He convinced him of the error of his ways and he made him say: Anathema to Mani. St. Augustine knew how to use severity to extirpate the heresy. Victorinus, a deacon had become an auditor and propagandist of the Manichæans. He was discovered, upon which he apparently repented and asked for reconciliation, but St. Augustine punished him and banished him from the town, warning all people against him. He would not hear of his repentance unless he denounced all the Manichæans he knew in the province. St. Augustine did not write against Manichæism during the last twenty five years of his life; hence it is thought that the sect decreased in importance during that time. Yet in 420, Ursus, the imperial prefect, arrested some Manichæans in Carthage and made them recant. When the Arian Vandals conquered Africa the Manichæans thought of gaining the Arian clergy by secretly entering their ranks, but Huneric (477-484), King of the Vandals, realizing the danger, burnt many of them and transported the others. Yet at the end of the sixth century Gregory the Great looked upon Africa as the hotbed of Manichæism. The same warning was repeated by Gregory II (701), and Nicholas II (1061). The spread of Manichæism in Spain and Gaul is involved in obscurity on account of the uncertainty concerning the real teaching of Priscillian. It is well known how St. Augustine (383) found a home at Rome in the Manichæan community, which must have been considerable. According to the "Liber Pontificalis" Pope Miltiades (311-314) had already discovered adherents to the sect in the city. Valentinian's edict (372), addressed to the city prefect, was clearly launched mainly against Roman Manichæans. The so called "Ambrosiaster" combated Manichæism in a great many of his writings (370-380). In the years 384-388 a special sect of Manichæans arose in Rome called Martari, or Mat-squatters, who, supported by a rich man called Constantius, tried to start a sort of monastic life for the Elect in contravention of Mani's command that the Elect should wander about the world preaching the Manichæan Gospel. The new sect found the bitterest opposition amongst their co-religionists. In Rome they seem to have made extraordinary endeavors to conceal themselves by almost complete conformity with Christian customs. From the middle of the sixth century onward Manichæism apparently died out in the West. Though a number of secret societies and dualistic sects may have existed here and there in obscurity, there is apparently no direct and conscious connection with the Prophet of Babylon and his doctrine. Yet when the Paulicians and Bogomili from Bulgaria came in contact with the West in the eleventh century, and eastern missionaries driven out by the Byzantine emperors taught dualist doctrines in the North of Italy and the South of France they found the leaven of Manichæism still so deeply pervading the minds of the many that they could make it ferment and rise into the formidable Catharist heresies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- V. MANICHÆAN WRITERS Manichæism, like Gnosticism, was an intellectual religion, it despised the simplicity of the crowd. As it professed to bring salvation through knowledge, ignorance was sin. Manichæism, in consequence, was literary and refined, its founder was a fruitful writer, and so were many of his followers. Of all this literary output only fragments are at present extant. No Manichæan treatise has come down to us in its entirety. Mani wrote in Persian and Babylonian Aramaic, apparently using either language with equal facility. The following seven titles of works of his have come down to us: "Shapurakan", I.e. "Princely", because it was dedicated to Peroz, the brother of Sapor I (written in Syrian). It was a kind of Manichæan eschatology, dealing in three chapters with the dissolution of Hearers, Elect, and Sinners. It was written about A.D. 242. "The Book of Mysteries", polemical and dogmatic in character. "The Book of the Giants", probably about cosmogonic figures. "The Book of Precepts for Hearers", with appendix for the Elect. "The Book of Life-giving", written in Greek, probably of considerable size. "The Book of Pragmateia", contents totally unknown. "The Gospel", written in Persian, of which the chapters began with successive letters of the alphabet. Besides these more extensive works, no less than seventy-six letters or brief treatises are enumerated, but it is not always clear which of these are by Mani himself, which by his immediate successors. The "Epistola Fundamenti", so well known in Latin writers, is probably the "Treatise of the Two Elements", mentioned as first of the seventy-six numbers in Arabic sources. Small and often unintelligible fragments in Pahlevi and in Sogdian(?) have recently been found in Chinese Turkestan by T.W.K. Mueller. The "Epistola Fundamenti" is extensively quoted in St. Augustine's refutation and also in Theodore bar Khoni, and Titus of Bostra, and the "Acta Archelai". Of Manichæan writers the following names have come down to us: Agapius (Photius, Cod. 179), of Asia Minor; Aphthonius of Egypt (Philostorgium, "Hist. Eccl.", III, 15) Photinus refuted by Paul the Persian (Mercati, "Per la vita de Paulo il Persiano"), Adimantus, refuted by Augustine. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI. ANTI-MANICHÆAN WRITERS St. Ephraem (306-373); his treatise against the Manichæans was published in poems (59-73) in the Roman edition with Latin translation and again by K. Kessler in his "Mani", I, 262-302; Hegemonius is said by Heracleon of Chalcedon to be the author of the "Acta disputationis Archelai episcopi Mesopotamiae et Manetis haeresiarchae". This important work on Manichæism, written originally in Greek or perhaps in Syriac, between A.D. 300 and 350 has come down to us only in a Latin translation, though small fragments exist in Greek. The most recent edition is that of M. Beeson (Berlin, 1906). It contains an imaginary dispute between Archalaus, Bishop of Charcar, and Mani, himself. The dispute is but a literary device, but the work ranks as the first class authority on Manichæism. It was translated into English in the Ante-Nicene library. Alexander of Lycopolis published a short treatise against Manichæism, last edited by A. Brinkmann (Leipzig, 1895). Serapion of Thmuis (c. 350) is credited by St. Jerome with an excellent work against Manichæans. This work has recently been restored to its original form by A. Brinkmann "Sitz. ber der Preuss. Acad. Berlin"(1895), 479sqq. Titus of Bostra (374) published four books against the Manichæans, two containing arguments from reason and two arguements from Scripture and theology against the heresy. They have come down to us complete only in a Syriac version (LaGarde, "Tit. Bost. contra Manichaeos Libri IV", Berlin, 1859), but part of the original Greek is published in Pitra's "Analecta sacra. et class." (1888), I, 44-46. St. Epiphanius of Salamis devoted his great work "Adversus Haereses" (written about 374) mainly to refutation of Manichæism. The other heresies receive but brief notices and even Arianism seems of less importance. Theodoret of Cyprus (458), "De haereticorum fabulis", in four books (P.G. LXXXIII), gives an exposition of Manichæism. Didymus the Blind, president of the catechetical school at Alexandria (345-395), wrote a treatise in eighteen chapters against Manichæans. St. John Damascene (c.750) Wrote a "Dialogue against Manichæans" (P.G. XCIV), and a shorter "Discussion of John the Orthodox with a Manichæan" (P.G. XCVI); Photius (891) wrote four books against the Manichæans, and is a valuable witness of the Paulician phase of Manichæism. Paul the Persian (c.529) "Disputation with Photinus the Manichæan" (P.G. LXXXVIII, 528). Zacharias Rhetor (c.536), "Seven theses against Manichæans", fragments in P.G. LXXXV, 1143-. Heraclian (c.510) wrote twenty books against Manichæans (Photius, Cod. 86). Amongst Latin writers St. Augustine is foremost, his works being "De utilitate credendi"; "De moribus Manichaeorum"; "De duabus animabus"; "Contra Fortunatum"; "De actis cum Felice", "De Natura Boni", "Contra Secundinum", "Contra Adversarium Legis et Prophetarum" in "Opera", VIII (Paris, 1837). Some in English. "De Genesi contra Manichaeos lib. II." Ambrosiaster (370-380): for his commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles and his "Quaestiones V. et N. Testamenti" see A. Souter, "A Study of Ambrosiaster" (1907); Marcus Victorinus (380), "Ad Justinum Manichaeum". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCES Theodore bar Khoni, Nestorian Bishop of Cascar (c. end of sixth century), wrote a book of "Scholia" or Memoirs. Book XI of this work contains a list of "sects which arose at different times"; among these he gives an account of the Manichæans and relates at length the Manichæan cosmogony. This is especially interesting and valuable as he retains the original Syriac designations of the cosmogonic figures and probably gives Mani's own account verbally from the Fundamental Epistle; in Pognon, Inscriptions mandaites des coupes de Khouabir (Paris, 1898), French tr. (see also M. Noldere Wiener, Zeitsch. Kund. Morg., XII, 355); Abu' Lfaradsh usually called En Nadim ("The Shining One"), an Arab historian who in A.D. 908 wrote his Firhist al'ulum or Compendium of Sciences". The chapters dealing with the Manichæans were published in German tr. by Fluegel in his Mani. Al Biruni, an Arabic chronologist (A.D. 1000), in his Chronology of Eastern Nations, Eng. ed. Sachau, Or transl. Fund (London, 1879), and India, Eng. ed. Sachau, truebn, Or. ser. (London, 1888) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LITERATURE DuFurcq, Etudes sur les Gesta Martyrum Romains, IV; Le Neo-Manichæisme et la legende chret. (Paris, 1910); Idem, De Manichaismo apud Latinos quinto sextoque seculo, etc. (Paris, 1910); Cumont, Recherche sur les Manecheisme, I; La Cosmogonie Manecheenne (Brussels, 1908); In course of publication, II; Fragments syriaques d'ouvrages manichiens; III; Les formules grecque d'abjuration; De Stoop; La diffusion du Manicheisme dans l'empire Romain (Ghent, 1908); Kessler, M ini Forschungen ueber die mani-chaeische Religion, I, (Berlin, 1889); II (1903); Idem in Acts of Internat. Congress of History of Religion (Basle, 1905); Idem in Realencyckl. fur Prot. Theol., s.v. Mani, Manichaer; Fluegel, Mani, seine Lehre und seine Shriften (Leipzig, 1862); Mueller, Handschr. Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift aus Turfan. Chin-Turkestan (Berlin, 1904); Salemann, Eine Bruchstuck man. Schrifftums in Mem. Acad. S. Petersburg, 1904.; Bischoff, Im Reiche der Gnosis (Leipzig, 1906). 40-104; Bruckner, Faustus von Mileve, Ein Beitrag sur Geschichte des abendl. Manich. (Leipzig, 1901); Beausobre, Hist. crit. de Manichee et du Manicheisme (Amsterdam, 1734); Bousett, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (Goettingen, 1907); Salemann, Maniscaeische Studien (Petersburg, 1908); Casartelli, La Philosophie du Mardeisme; Rochat, Essai sur Mani et sa doctrine (Geneva, 1897); Newmann, Introd. Essay on Manisch. Heresy (1887); Ter-Mekertschian, Die Paulicianer (Leipzig, 1893); Doellinger, Geschichte der gnost-manisch. Secten (Munich, 1890); Geyler, System des Manichæismus (Jena, 1875) - J.P. ARENDZEN; From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright © 1913 by the Encyclopedia Press, Inc. http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/heresy03.htm

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Uniform title: Key of truth. English & Armenian Title: The key of truth a manual of the Paulician church of Armenia : the Armenian text / edited and translated with illustrative documents and introduction by Fred. C. Conybeare. Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1898. Description: cxcvi, 201, [2] p. ; 22 cm. Notes: Errata slip inserted. Bibliography: p. [203] Microfiche. Chicago : American Theological Library Association, 1986. 1 microfiche ; 11 x 15 cm. High reduction. Silver based film. (ATLA monograph preservation program ; ATLA fiche 1986-2803) Language: English Subjects: Paulicians--Doctrines ATLA Monograph Preservation Program (Phase II, 1986) Other entries: Conybeare, F. C. (Frederick Cornwallis), 1856-1924 SP12119900824ILAT19862803B Other Series: ATLA monograph preservation program ; ATLA fiche 1986-2803. 4004301405 Print Access: GTU http://128.48.120.7/mw/mwcgi?sesid=5537100...(1,1lon,abbrev) Is it possible to check this article out? It appears to be a microfilm, though.