Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • March 17, 2010 estimate the death toll at over a million. The denial of the Armenian massacre has unsavory and absurd overtones of Holocaust denial of the Nazi era. No exact census of the dead was taken or possible during either mass murder campaign, especially in the Turkish slaughter, so people who do not want to accept the facts can dispute the numbers. Some Armenians had intrigued against Turkish rule and hoped for at least regional autonomy – so the Turks could concoct the false legend of a vast Armenian conspiracy, along the lines of the “Stab in the Back” attributed originally – and somewhat plausibly -- to communists but then gradually to Jews under the Nazi regime. The Turkish atrocity was different in that the Turks were aiming at the destruction of the Armenians as a culture rather than as a race. Some girls were dragged off to harems where their children would be raised as Muslims so their own heritage would be irrelevant. Islam, focused intensely on strict religious observance, is not a racist cult like Nazism whose adherents cited Darwin to purport that all history was the result of race conflict. Jewish girls did not go to harems. They went to gas chambers if they could not be worked to death. Conversely, crippled German-Jewish war veterans and nonpolitical German-Jewish types over the age of 65 were left in place rather than dragged off to camps. They were considered too old to “breed” and, therefore, no threat. Turkish mass murder was based on twisted religion, while Nazi mass murder was based on twisted science in the absence of religion. Both mass murder campaigns featured the use of helots from outsider groups to handle the slaughter. Turks and Nazis both released convicts from prison and pressed them into service as executioners. Many of the Nazi murderers were Ukrainian or Latvian ethnics working under the supervision of Germans and Austrians. Many of the “Turkish” death squad members were Kurds or Circassians, people who had, like the Armenians, been second-class (but Muslim) citizens of the Turkish community. Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, probably got it right when he said the Armenian and Jewish genocides were not precisely the same, but that they contained more similarities than differences. One principal difference was that the Turkish genocide was less of a surprise: The Turks had killed Armenians in large numbers before, they had killed large numbers of Bulgarians in the 19th century, and they had killed or enslaved the entire population of the Greek island of Chios – the home of Homer. The Germans had not done that sort of thing for hundreds and hundreds of years before 1939. Viscount Bryce, a British statesman, investigated the Armenian massacres of 1915 and proclaimed that they had taken place. Bryce also examined the atrocities charged against the Kaiser’s Germans in Belgium in 1914, once the war was safely over, and reported that mass shootings of suspected snipers were a reality, but the really lurid reports of the rape of nuns and the hand-lopping of babies, was entirely false. Bryce did not talk to a single raped nun or find a single toddler with both hands missing. Some of the hokum churned up about Belgium may even have convinced the reading public that the Armenian massacres reported a year later were fake – but they weren’t. A German medic named Armin Wegner became a hero of the Armenians by documenting the whole thing with photographs he was ordered not to take. Twenty years later, Wegner urged Hitler not to disgrace the Germans by persecuting the Jews as the Turks had persecuted the Armenians to the horror and indignation of the world. Hitler threw Wegner in jail and threw his photographs into a bonfire. Then he remarked that the world had already forgotten the Armenians. When Franz Werfel, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army – same side as the Turks – wrote “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” a story of Armenian resistance and tragedy, Hitler burned that book, too. Werfel’s book, however, came out in 38 different translations. Several of Werfel’s other novels were made into successful motion pictures by major American studies. Hollywood was about to make a movie of “The Forty Days of Musa Daugh” and Clark Gable was signed to play the Armenian hero, a former officer in the Ottoman Army who leads his people in resisting extermination. The Turkish government of 1935 warned the Hollywood studios that anybody who made a movie out of Werfel’s book would face a boycott – or worse. Louis B. Mayer knuckled under, and the “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” never became a major motion picture under the Hollywood studio system. A British film from 1935, “The Last Outpost,” used the Armenian massacres as part of the backdrop to a love triangle story featuring Cary Grant, but the people being slaughtered are never clearly identified as Armenians, a Russian agent is living among them, and the killers who machine-gun the screaming civilians offcamera are described as “Kurdish irregulars.” There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind that, based on the definition of genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the antiNazi and anti-Stalinist who coined the term, what the Turks did to the Armenians was genocide. What needs to be questioned was why so many other countries were so cautious about using a term only the perpetrators found offensive. The term genocide is most generally linked to the Nazi Holocaust, with references also to the Ukrainian planned famines of 1932, the African slave trade, and the destruction of the American Indians. The irony of history is that the use of the term to describe the atrocity that gave the deed a name did not come around – at least in the official version – until just a few weeks ago. Turkey recalled its ambassador when President Obama used the term “genocide” to describe the documented massacres of Armenian men, women, and children during World War I. The massacres took place, and even the Turks themselves admitted that mass killings happened, and sentenced some of the perpetrators to death. The sticking point was the use of the word “genocide” – a term that was first used to describe what happened inside the crumbling Turkish Empire during and just after World War I. Raphael Lemkin, a law professor, coined the term “genocide” to describe what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 and what he feared might be happening to the European Jews in 1943. “It happened so many times…First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.” Lemkin was a Polish Jew who lost relatives both in the Nazi Holocaust and the Stalinist Gulag. He had been wounded in the German invasion of Poland in 1939, escaped to Sweden, and became a college professor at Duke University and a consultant to the United States government. He had no trouble defining what had happened to the Armenians in World War I as genocide. Briefly, the Armenians, who had long been restless under Turkish rule, became the target of violent Turkish suspicion when the British and French landed at Gallipoli in 1915 in an attempt to knock Turkey out of the war. The arrest and mass execution of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople sent a wave of terror through the Armenians living in the northern part of what was then the Ottoman Turkey. Those who could fled or attempted to defend themselves. At a place called Van, Armenian men were told to give themselves up for “military service.” They saw this as a pretext to massacre and they were almost certainly correct. The Armenians at Van, armed with weapons they had been previously issued as soldiers for the Turks and a collection of antique guns and hunting weapons, were able to defend themselves until the Tsarist Russians arrived. The heroic resistance at Van was all the Turkish government needed to “prove” the treason of the Armenians. Wholesale round-ups began all over the country. Men were often killed on the spot and women and children were marched toward a holding area in Syria – except that most of them were murdered or died of exhaustion on the road. Death toll estimates vary widely. Modern Turks who retain some objectivity admit that about 100,000 Armenians died during a misguided response to the British and French landings on Turkish territory, which ultimately failed. The British and French could not make any headway against the fierce Turkish resistance and were forced to evacuate. Armenian scholars estimate the death toll at 1.5 million, and most scholars who are neither Turkish nor Armenian The Armenian genocide gave the deed a name Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: On March 2, at a Franklin Lakes Council meeting, Frank Bivona said the chain of command at recreation was broken. There is no one making decisions and no one knows who is in charge. Having spent several weeks doing pro bono analysis of Franklin Lakes work practices, I agree. The managers to whom we pay high salaries do not manage, do not measure, and do not set goals. I believe the mayor knows where the problems lie, but the council lives in its own world and does not support her having dynamic volunteerism and active taxpayer advisers. It is necessary to turn to our own professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs to step forward and offer their services. Through them, we can fulfill the town’s potential to become a unique community through their deep and broad Encourages citizen participation skills. Volunteers are needed in various areas: quality control and resident service, since there are no measurements, and resident orientation has a ways to go. Business process analysts would find plenty that could be better in looking at methods used in the department of public works, recreation, and construction departments. Human resource professionals are needed to review personnel policies, job descriptions, and performance evaluation systems. Public relations and marketing people could help with communication strategies effectively linking all members of the 11,000-person community. All the knowledge needed is here, within reach. We can make Franklin Lakes the standard for effective government in New Jersey. Joan Mokray Franklin Lakes communication, collaboration and commitment to success, vesting in the community and in the schools. She also said she is committed to using technology to enhance instruction and make it more meaningful for the students. She called the Midland Park district “fantastic,’ noting that she thought its small size was its strength and commended the board for its focus on its mission. She said if selected, she would “help the board attain its goals as laid out in the strategic plan, work on passing the school budget, help solve facilities issues and acquire the technological resources the community wants for its children.” A Woodland Park resident, Dr. Cirasella has a B.S. in communications and journalism from William Paterson University, master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction and in education administration from Caldwell College, and her Ed.D. in educational leadership management and policy from Seton Hall University. (continued from page 3) there is not much room for creativity in budgeting,” but he added that he has experience with “flat budgets” and how to maintain services under those conditions. Dr. Cirasella has been the assistant superintendent of the Bloomfield School System in Essex County since 2006, a position to which she was promoted after serving as principal of Brookdale School in the same district for five years. She also taught fifth grade in Berkeley Heights, where she was responsible for many innovative programs. Among her accomplishment in her current post, Dr. Cirasella lists helping bring the district’s middle and high school out of failing status and the establishment of an all-day kindergarten. She said that her leadership style revolves around Superintendent