The twentieth century’s first genocide began a hundred years ago, when the ruling party in Turkey started targeting the Armenian population under the pretext that Armenians were a fifth column supporting the Allies against the Central Powers, led by Germany, with which the Ottoman empire had aligned. By the time the First World War ended, somewhere between 5,00,000 and 1.5 million Armenians out of a total population of a little over two million had perished in massacres, deportations and forced marches into the Syrian desert.
Turkey does not recognise the Armenian killings as genocide, claiming the deaths occurred as a natural corollary of war and not an organised push to extirpate a community. Surprisingly, the United States refuses to call it genocide as well, although the then US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau cabled Washington as early as July 1915 that, “a campaign of race extermination is in progress”. Among the many other countries giving more weight to practical politics than historical truth is Israel, contradicting its emphasis on nations acknowledging the fact of the Holocaust.
Even as Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were being rounded up in Istanbul on April 24, 1915, the Allies were preparing a massive operation to secure the Dardanelles, a narrow strait dividing Europe’s Gallipoli peninsula from Asian Anatolia. The ultimate aim of the invasion, planned substantially by Winston Churchill who was then Lord of the Admiralty, was to move north and take Istanbul. A multinational force landed on April 25, 1915, and might have achieved its objective, had it not been for the vision and determination of a young colonel named Mustafa Kemal who, 20 years later, would be bestowed the honorific Atatürk, meaning Father of the Turks. The lightning strike turned into a drawn out confrontation and ended with a humiliating retreat.
The carnage at Gallipol
Although the vast majority of those who died on the Allied side were British or French, the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) lost more soldiers at Gallipoli than in any other battle in their history, marking the event as a coming of age for the two nations. The deaths are commemorated on April 25 each year as ANZAC day. India hasn’t bothered officially acknowledging our soldiers’ contribution to the Allies, but the fact that Indians fought and died at Gallipoli, and in other battles on various fronts, is being belatedly recognised by the media.
A young French medical officer named Jean Verdenal was killed in Gallipoli on May 2, 1915, while treating a wounded soldier. A few years previously, while studying at the Sorbonne, he had befriended an American student, Thomas Stearns Eliot. Eliot dedicated his first published book, Prufrock and Other Poems, to Verdenal, with the simple inscription, “For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915 mort aux Dardanelles.” Eliot’s great poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which lent its name to the title of that volume, was published in June 1915, soon after Verdenal’s death at Gallipoli.
In 1922, Eliot produced his masterpiece, The Waste Land, which alludes briefly to Anatolia in a passage about a homosexual proposition by a character named Mr Eugenides:
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
Smyrna was an Ottoman city dominated by Greek merchants, but it was changing fundamentally when Eliot wroteThe Waste Land. At the end of the First World War, the Allies dismembered the Ottoman Empire, with Britain and France gobbling up the Middle East and North Africa, and throwing chunks of what is now Turkey to Armenia and Greece. Greece’s portion included Smyrna and the Gallipoli peninsula. Mustafa Kemal, who had been promoted to general in the years since Gallipoli, resigned his commission, organised a nationalist army, ended the 600-year reign of the Ottomans, and fought off adversaries on many fronts to create the borders of Turkey we recognise today. One of the final battles of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 involved Smyrna, which became known by its Turkish name Izmir after the Greek army was defeated.
Most Greeks in Izmir had been driven out in the course of the war, and the remnants left as part of a co-ordinated exchange of populations between the new republic of Turkey and Greece. It foreshadowed an exchange of populations on a greater scale on the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which went off rather less peacefully.
In 1945, the city of Danzig witnessed a similar population expulsion/exchange and name alteration. Danzig was a German-dominated city-state, where the Nazis won elections in 1933. Germany annexed it in 1939 at the start of the Second World War, but in Potsdam six years later, the defeated Germans handed it over to Poland. The city became known by its Polish name, Gdansk, famous as the birthplace of the Solidarity movement.Among the evacuees from Danzig in 1945 was a teenager named Günter Grass, who went on to become a world-famous novelist and Nobel laureate. Grass died earlier this month. His first three novels, collectively known as The Danzig Trilogy, encouraged Germans to face their past rather than evade it. The combination of history and fantasy in his debut, The Tin Drum,has been tremendously influential.
Perhaps no important contemporary novelist owes more to Grass than Salman Rushdie, whose first novel in seven years is due out in September, and had the release of its cover last week. There are profound resemblances between The Tin Drum and Rushdie’s most famous work, Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, which was published in March 1981.
March 1981 also witnessed the first Raspberry awards, given annually to the worst films and performers of the year. A movie titled Can’t Stop the Music, featuring the disco group Village People, won the inaugural Raspberry for worst film. The Village People were a band composed of gay fantasy figures: army man, construction worker, dude with handlebar moustache wearing leather, and so on. Contrasting with those camp figures was Bruce Jenner, 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medallist. Nobody remembers who wins the decathlons at Olympics these days but when Jenner and later Daley Thomson were in their prime, the jack-of-all-spades discipline gained enormous attention.
Gender reassignment surgery
We learned recently that Jenner was engaged in a far more radical questioning of convention than the outrageous Village People. The ultimate symbol of masculinity saw himself as a woman, and wanted to rid himself of body hair, grow breasts and wear frocks. Last week, he finally spoke in detail about his life as a woman in a man’s body.
Jenner may have had gender reassignment surgery years ago, had he not fallen in love with Kris Kardashian, whose former husband, Robert Kardashian, was one of O.J. Simpson’s defence lawyers. Kris and Robert had four children, the most famous of whom is Kim Kardashian.
The Kardashian family are of Armenian origin, and came from an Armenian dominated region of Turkey, leaving tosettle in the United States before the pogroms of 1915 began. Earlier in April, Kardashian, her sister Khloe, and two cousins visited Armenia for the first time, as the nation commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the genocide.
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Turkey does not recognise the Armenian killings as genocide, claiming the deaths occurred as a natural corollary of war and not an organised push to extirpate a community. Surprisingly, the United States refuses to call it genocide as well, although the then US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau cabled Washington as early as July 1915 that, “a campaign of race extermination is in progress”. Among the many other countries giving more weight to practical politics than historical truth is Israel, contradicting its emphasis on nations acknowledging the fact of the Holocaust.
Even as Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were being rounded up in Istanbul on April 24, 1915, the Allies were preparing a massive operation to secure the Dardanelles, a narrow strait dividing Europe’s Gallipoli peninsula from Asian Anatolia. The ultimate aim of the invasion, planned substantially by Winston Churchill who was then Lord of the Admiralty, was to move north and take Istanbul. A multinational force landed on April 25, 1915, and might have achieved its objective, had it not been for the vision and determination of a young colonel named Mustafa Kemal who, 20 years later, would be bestowed the honorific Atatürk, meaning Father of the Turks. The lightning strike turned into a drawn out confrontation and ended with a humiliating retreat.
The carnage at Gallipol
Although the vast majority of those who died on the Allied side were British or French, the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) lost more soldiers at Gallipoli than in any other battle in their history, marking the event as a coming of age for the two nations. The deaths are commemorated on April 25 each year as ANZAC day. India hasn’t bothered officially acknowledging our soldiers’ contribution to the Allies, but the fact that Indians fought and died at Gallipoli, and in other battles on various fronts, is being belatedly recognised by the media.
A young French medical officer named Jean Verdenal was killed in Gallipoli on May 2, 1915, while treating a wounded soldier. A few years previously, while studying at the Sorbonne, he had befriended an American student, Thomas Stearns Eliot. Eliot dedicated his first published book, Prufrock and Other Poems, to Verdenal, with the simple inscription, “For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915 mort aux Dardanelles.” Eliot’s great poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which lent its name to the title of that volume, was published in June 1915, soon after Verdenal’s death at Gallipoli.
In 1922, Eliot produced his masterpiece, The Waste Land, which alludes briefly to Anatolia in a passage about a homosexual proposition by a character named Mr Eugenides:
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
Smyrna was an Ottoman city dominated by Greek merchants, but it was changing fundamentally when Eliot wroteThe Waste Land. At the end of the First World War, the Allies dismembered the Ottoman Empire, with Britain and France gobbling up the Middle East and North Africa, and throwing chunks of what is now Turkey to Armenia and Greece. Greece’s portion included Smyrna and the Gallipoli peninsula. Mustafa Kemal, who had been promoted to general in the years since Gallipoli, resigned his commission, organised a nationalist army, ended the 600-year reign of the Ottomans, and fought off adversaries on many fronts to create the borders of Turkey we recognise today. One of the final battles of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 involved Smyrna, which became known by its Turkish name Izmir after the Greek army was defeated.
Most Greeks in Izmir had been driven out in the course of the war, and the remnants left as part of a co-ordinated exchange of populations between the new republic of Turkey and Greece. It foreshadowed an exchange of populations on a greater scale on the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which went off rather less peacefully.
In 1945, the city of Danzig witnessed a similar population expulsion/exchange and name alteration. Danzig was a German-dominated city-state, where the Nazis won elections in 1933. Germany annexed it in 1939 at the start of the Second World War, but in Potsdam six years later, the defeated Germans handed it over to Poland. The city became known by its Polish name, Gdansk, famous as the birthplace of the Solidarity movement.Among the evacuees from Danzig in 1945 was a teenager named Günter Grass, who went on to become a world-famous novelist and Nobel laureate. Grass died earlier this month. His first three novels, collectively known as The Danzig Trilogy, encouraged Germans to face their past rather than evade it. The combination of history and fantasy in his debut, The Tin Drum,has been tremendously influential.
Perhaps no important contemporary novelist owes more to Grass than Salman Rushdie, whose first novel in seven years is due out in September, and had the release of its cover last week. There are profound resemblances between The Tin Drum and Rushdie’s most famous work, Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, which was published in March 1981.
March 1981 also witnessed the first Raspberry awards, given annually to the worst films and performers of the year. A movie titled Can’t Stop the Music, featuring the disco group Village People, won the inaugural Raspberry for worst film. The Village People were a band composed of gay fantasy figures: army man, construction worker, dude with handlebar moustache wearing leather, and so on. Contrasting with those camp figures was Bruce Jenner, 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medallist. Nobody remembers who wins the decathlons at Olympics these days but when Jenner and later Daley Thomson were in their prime, the jack-of-all-spades discipline gained enormous attention.
Gender reassignment surgery
We learned recently that Jenner was engaged in a far more radical questioning of convention than the outrageous Village People. The ultimate symbol of masculinity saw himself as a woman, and wanted to rid himself of body hair, grow breasts and wear frocks. Last week, he finally spoke in detail about his life as a woman in a man’s body.
Jenner may have had gender reassignment surgery years ago, had he not fallen in love with Kris Kardashian, whose former husband, Robert Kardashian, was one of O.J. Simpson’s defence lawyers. Kris and Robert had four children, the most famous of whom is Kim Kardashian.
The Kardashian family are of Armenian origin, and came from an Armenian dominated region of Turkey, leaving tosettle in the United States before the pogroms of 1915 began. Earlier in April, Kardashian, her sister Khloe, and two cousins visited Armenia for the first time, as the nation commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the genocide.