Diana Muir Appelbaum

Is a law against denial really necessary?  Facts are facts, and the facts of genocide speak for themselves.

Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Kharpert to a prison in the nearby Mezireh district, April 1915

The founding crime of the Turkish nation was genocide.   A deliberate, and thoroughly effective genocide of Turkey’s indigenous Armenian Christians and  a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Syrian Christians was carried out in 1915.   The genocidal ethnic cleansing of Greek Christians peaked just after the First World War.   These were  genocides of forced marches, starvation, and Einsatzgruppen, not gas chambers.   But they were directed from the highest level of the government, carried out by military and civilian officials, and they were thoroughly effective.

Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity; The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire is a landmark in genocide scholarship, and a fitting successor his two earlier books on the subject, his  2004 From Republic to Empire; Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, and his 2006  The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility .    Akçam’s goal in Crime Against Humanity is to refute the denialist claim that the only evidence of genocide comes from biased sources: Armenians and their Western supporters, and, therefore, that nothing has been proven.   Some scholars have assumed that Turkish concealment and destruction of government records makes countering this argument directly impossible.   Akçam used Ottoman files that do survive and are open to scholars to demonstrate that the deliberate and official nature of the “ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Greeks and the genocidal policy against the Armenians can be demonstrated through these documents alone.”[1]   Case closed.

A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, (Oxford, 2011) is a different kind of book, the product of a ten-year series of meetings convened by historians from Turkish and Western universities to produce a shared understanding of the events of 1915.   Among Turkish scholars willing to attend and to contribute chapters, “There was no dispute that deportations and massacres had occurred, that the forced movement of the Armenians had been ordered by the Young Turk government, that the mass killing was the result of both government and party actions, and that while there were several moments of Armenian resistance (most notably at Van), there was no civil war. The two opposing nationalist narratives were replaced by a single shared account based on evidence.”[2]

These two books settle the debate over whether the events of 1915 were a deliberate, officially ordered genocide for everyone except politically inspired denialists and members of the Flat Earth Society.

China is is building an enormous theme park in Tibet avowedly to “showcase Tibetan arts and medicine”.

Chinese imperialism operates  by offering material benefits to the peoples it has conquered if they  convert to Chineseness.   In China, the Tibetans who play along can send their children to schools where they will be remade into Chinese, and be eligible for good jobs and housing.  Tibet used to be one of the poorest places on earth; under Chinese rule it is becoming part of the modern world, with railroads, roads, electricity and jobs.  It comes with only one catch: Tibetans will cease to be Tibetans and become Chinese.   And there is no option.   Tibetans cannot possibly avoid becoming Chinese.    China  insures that Sinicization will take place  by swamping the peoples it conquers with large numbers of Chinese immigrants.   The indigenous culture shrivels up and, after a few centuries, dies.   In the case of Tibet, a bit of the ancient culture may survive for a while outside the motherland – like the Parsis of India – but, like the Parsis, the Tibetan diaspora will eventually assimilate and disappear.

The modern wrinkle is that while conquered peoples are being assimilated, they put them on display in a human zoo.   It allows China to look multicultural and tolerant, while boosting a Tibetan economy in which the good jobs go to Chinese, who can be moved to Tibet in larger numbers if more tourists come to enjoy the theme park.

Human zoos that used to be popular in Western cities.     Tourists flocked to see real, live, exotic Africans and wild Indians with their strange barbaric customs.   The last human zoo closed in 1958.

Americans who have visited  Tibet’s neighbors Yunnan and Sichuan have probably  been to a modern Chinese human zoo, a theme park, ethnic town or culture show where modern Bai    dress up in gaudy versions of their ancestor’s holiday clothes to dance, sing and work at ancient crafts for the amusement of tourists.  They advertise on Youtube.  It’s not the same as being a living culture, and nothing at all like having a future together as members of an ancient culture.   It’s just a way of earning a living while they and their children become Chinese.

This is how Chinese imperialism operates.

Below: Photos of a human zoo, the Xiagei Tibetan Culture Village.