The Armenian Tragedy is a sin crying to the Heavens for vengeance. Not only a horrible crime was committed, but there has been no contrition to speak of. This answers one question: What happened? But the matter is not closed. Christian understanding of the horror is not enough for scholarly and legal reasons. We have usually referred to the Armenian Tragedy as “genocide.” This concept is inadequate for it is not commodious enough to convey the scale of the horror and its driving forces. Clarity is sorely needed when talking about the Armenian Tragedy which was the portent of the horrors of the 20th century and initially served as our paradigm of mass murder. With a view to re-conceptualize the catastrophe, to accommodate a multitude of factors and narrations, we shall ask: Why? Who? And How? And we shall also elaborate more on: What happened?

To be sure, mass murder is nihil novi sub sole. In antiquity the Assyrians pursued wholesale slaughter as state policy in the Fertile Crescent. The extermination of the inhabitants of Jericho is only the first example of killing of an alien people in the Bible. The killing of the worshipers of the Golden Calf in the desert is the first political purge recorded in the Old Testament. Here the Hebrews killed their own. The list of perpetrators and victims in history is nauseating. In his Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) Ben Kiernan attempts to conceptualize and chronicle the horrors. The magnitude and persistence of mass murder boggles the mind. Kiernan is just one example, if a woefully flawed one, for selecting politically correct massacres by “imperialists,” “racists,” and “colonialists,” while depicting “The Other” solely as victims and dismissing human nature in favor of post-modernist musings. Fortunately, there are other scholars, for example the magisterial Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), which turns the sociologist’s lens to the problem of mass murder comprehensively.

Why start with the Armenians then? In the 20th century the Herrero people were the first to go under the knife wholesale in Germany’s South-Western Africa (contemporary Namibia). The Herreros rebelled; they were suppressed, rounded up, chased into the desert, and prevented from returning to civilization. Some were shot for attempting to break through. Most perished of thirst, hunger, and exposure. Hermann Goering’s father presided over the killing. But this horrific extirpation receded into history. Fortunately, the opposite is true about the Armenians. We know and remember much more, mainly thanks to the victims themselves. The perpetrators, however, first denied the mass murder by pretending it had never happened and now they deny it by relativizing the crime in congruence with the spirit of the times.

Who were the perpetrators of the Armenian Tragedy? Generally, they were Ottoman subjects. At the helm, there was the decreasingly relevant and rapidly diminishing old elite of the Sublime Porte. Only in the remotest corners of the Empire, where the old relationship of submission had not been violated by modernity, there remained a few exceptional chieftains and sheiks who took their lordly duties vis-à-vis the Armenians seriously and protected them throughout the carnage. But both at the periphery and the center, the old guard was being overshadowed by Turkish folk nationalists, or ethno-nationalists. Although largely secular, these radical Young Turks stressed the Muslim religion as well as common Turkish folk heritage and language as a binding element of their project. Yet, they also were capable of working with various post-Ottoman people so long as they were Muslims: Kurds, Azerbaijanis, and others. They were soldiers, paramilitaries, auxiliaries, policemen, bureaucrats, and assorted civilian opportunists. The logic of modern nationalism would set the perpetrators at the loggerheads soon but not before the Christians, chiefly Armenians (and the Assyrians and Greeks), were taken care of. Not everyone was slated to be exterminated, however. Women who were willing to submit to their tormentors were sometimes spared at the price of conversion and sexual degradation. Children slated for Turkification and Islamisation could live as well, often robbed of their identity.

More specifically: Who were the victims? They were the Armenians both conscious and unconscious. All were perceived as Armenians by the outside world. Probably most had an Armenian sense of identity. They were also Christians; most of them were Orthodox. Some, Armenian Catholics, were in communion with Rome. A few were Protestant. One can assume that most had a religious sense of understanding themselves but also a historical one as heirs to Christendom’s eldest kingdom. One can speculate that most may have had, therefore, a pre-modern sense of nationality or ethnicity, rather than a modern, constructed, ideological one. Their identity as Christian Armenians set them apart from their Muslim – Turkic, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, and Arab – surroundings.

In addition, there was the legal dimension of inequality. They were ostensibly the dhimmi, “the protected people.” At the same time, in the realm of the Sublime Porte they knew their place. Within and without their curia they were still subject to the scourge of the sharia and to the whims of the caliphate. Their archaic legal status was infused with modern legal meaning as the Ottoman Empire experimented with constitutionalism. Ostensibly, in theory, the Armenians became equal before secular law. But in practice, this was largely ignored. And any attempts to invoke constitutionalism infuriated the Turkish masters. The whole legal system, thus, both old and new, only served to solidify the separation and self-separation of the Armenians within the Ottoman body politics. It also cut them off from the majority adherents of modern folk nationalism that emerged in the Empire in the second half of the 19th century.

Further, they were perceived not only as traditionally lowly Armenian Christian dhimmis and modern nationalist aliens, but also as an object of envy. And envy is mediocrity craving success it can’t have. After all, some Armenians were successful in business, trade, finance, industry, agriculture, professions, crafts, and arts. Their success was projected at the Armenian community at large. This gave mass murder a class struggle dimension. It fanned the flames of resentment and hatred. The Armenians did not deserve their success because they did not deserve to reap the benefits of living in the realm that hosted them as they were unworthy. This somewhat circular and self-contradictory proposition applied equally to the historical Armenian domicile and to relatively new centers of Armenian settlement. They did not deserve success and prosperity, whether rural or urban. Thus, there was also a spatial dimension to the anti-Armenian animus. The political factor reflected a conviction that anything the Armenians demanded was uppity, presumptuous, treasonous, and, sometimes, terroristic and revolutionary. True, the Armenians were unhappy with their status in the Ottoman Empire. They tried to alleviate it. A few even turned to revolution and terrorism to the detriment of the majority of their community. As we see, multifarious, poisonous factors negatively impacted the lot of the Armenians. But no single cause, not even Armenian terrorism, was the reason for the mass murder. It was, rather, the decline, disintegration, and, finally, collapse of the Ottoman polity and the birth pangs of a new Turkish order. This massively monstrous process brought about mass death that astounded humanity.

For it was the Armenian Tragedy that entered into the collective consciousness of the world’s elite, in particular in the West, as a ruthless crime that required a category of its own. This arduous process of communicating and absorbing the horrible required a radical agent to be triggered. Armenia was not liberated; the burial grounds were ensconced in inaccessible territory; the survivors were traumatized and scattered; the witnesses were mostly silent; and the perpetrators were in denial. Yet, the Armenian Tragedy did enter our consciousness rather early (unlike The Holocaust) because an Armenian nationalist assassinated one of the perpetrators in the West, more precisely in Berlin, in the 1920s. During his cathartic trail public opinion was exposed to the horrors of what had transpired a few years prior: first, Germany, then, Europe, next, the United States, and, finally, the rest of the world.

The astonished public learned about a morbid progress of mega death. Only a few Armenians resisted, arms in hands. The bulk of them were killed in an astonishing variety of ways. Many of the able bodied males died in a rather orderly and premeditated fashion. In particular the community leaders and the draftees in the Ottoman military perished in well-organized shootings. Elsewhere, savage primordial chaos of mass murder replaced the apparent order of modern executions. The rest of the Armenian people, including elderly, women, and children, were driven into the wilderness, exposed to the elements in the mountains and deserts, starved to death and denied water. Some were isolated in makeshift camps, or herded in forced marches, where they sometimes perished of diseases and exhaustion. Most were shot, bayonetted, stabbed, slashed, burned, impaled, mutilated, tortured, beaten to death, buried alive, and driven off the cliffs. Before they were dispatched, they were routinely despoiled. Their real estate was confiscated; they were forced to make contributions to their captors; their households were looted and their personal belongings were stolen from them. This was one of the greatest thefts in 20th century history, soon to be overshadowed, first, by Nazi Germany, in particular as far as the Holocaust of the Jews, and, of course, by the total extermination and expropriation of the Communist revolution.

Whether or not there was a comprehensive plan or a central order given to murder the Armenians, very few survived. There has not been no contrition, no reconciliation, and no restitution. The Armenians wield the most powerful weapon available to the victims: memory. They remember the Hayots Tseghaspanutyun. But they are scared others will forget. Hence, we can see an occasional tug of war between Armenian and Jewish scholars. The former attempt to translate the Armenian Tragedy into the framework of the Holocaust of the Jews (e.g., Vahakn. N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 1995/2004). The latter endeavor to defend the idea of the uniqueness of the Shoah which, nowadays, serves as the iridium-platinum standard for our understanding of mass murder or, more precisely, genocide (e.g., Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2005).

The conceptualization of the Holocaust as the paradigm for mass extermination is a new phenomenon, however, dating from the 1960s. Initially, the Armenian portent of the unveiling horrors of the 20th century shocked humanity to such an extent as to command its imagination almost absolutely. There were several reasons. From the vantage point of the 1920s and 1930s, the Armenian suffering clearly overshadowed anything else, including even the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Intermarium, the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. Arguably, the cognizance of the Armenian Tragedy continued briefly into the Second World War and its aftermath. Obviously, the horrific fate of Jews, Christian Poles, and other victims of the Third Reich was mirror imaged, even grafted onto the Armenian experience. Also, the public discourse of the time was nationalist. Thus, it preferred conceptualizing both victims and perpetrators in nationalistic terms.

Last but not least, other forms of mass murder concerned the Communist perpetrators. Progressive intellectuals who dominated the narrative in the West avoided such unpleasant topics. On the other hand, the detractors of the Communists usually failed to conceptualize the Red extermination actions properly. Most also preferred to resort to the nationalist discourse and referred to the Bolshevik mass slaughter as “murder by the Jews” who, of course, as the canard went, invented Communism and controlled the Soviet Union to take over the world. Thus, no all-encompassing narrative of mass murder emerged to do justice to the Armenians or anyone else.

The most successful narrative, arguably, was Poland’s brilliant Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin’s concept of genocide, the killing of a gens, or nation/ethnicity. His idea clearly stemmed from the mass murder of the Armenians. Lemkin began his work on the legal concept of genocide already in the 1920s and continued furiously into the 1940s. He absolutely based himself on the Armenian predicament. His original Armenian model easily accommodated the murderous actions of Hitler and his minions as well as such Nazi policies which, while not lethal, Lemkin still subsumed under “genocide”. Thus, for instance, he included the kidnapping and Germanization of Polish children as well as looting and fencing of cultural treasures. He further saw the murder of the Polish elite as a facet of genocide. Obviously for him, killing need not embrace the entire people to be classified as genocide. Murdering the elite decapitates the nation. Lemkin could easily relate to those shocking Nazi practices precisely because they were not new: the Armenians were the first to bear their brunt in the 20th century.

Yet, the concept of genocide is inadequate to express and explain the phenomenon of the Armenian suffering comprehensively. First, it obsesses with the 20th century’s favorite designation: ethnicity. Since nationalism was, arguably, the greatest force and the greatest concern, Lemkin and others concentrated on a narrow definition of mass murder, only as it applied to ethnicity. Instead of a multifarious definition and explanation, we received an unvaried narrative. Further, second, applying the term genocide interchangeably and synonymously to mass murder tends to imply that the perpetrators not only focused solely on their victims’ nationality, thus projecting a rather unidimensional picture of the tragedy, but also that this was in essence an aggression of one ethnicity against another one. This means collective responsibility of anyone who is perceived to be of the perpetrator or the victim nationality. It is sometimes not clear whether the aggressor’s unique brand of nationalism was particularly to blame, or was nationalism, in general, the trigger. What about the nationalism of the victims then? Is it to blame, too? If so, isn’t it blaming the victim? What if the victim managed to avenge himself by unleashing genocide against the erstwhile perpetrator?

Third, and most importantly, genocide is a preferred term among those who try to ignore or deny the unspeakable crimes committed explicitly for other than ethnic reasons. Namely, the term genocide excludes or at least obfuscates the mass extermination record of the Communists. In fact, the Communists liked to harp on the Armenian Tragedy, including abusing its memory in their propaganda, precisely because talking about the murder of the Armenians (or the pogroms of the Jews) deflected the public’s attention from the Communist crimes.

What is the solution so that the truth is told and the victims properly honored? The most commodious term is democide: killing of people by government for political reasons. This has been introduced by R.J. Rummel in his Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transactions Publishers, 2005). This is flexible enough to account for almost all reasons for mass murder, including genocide. It should, however, be reconceptualized to accommodate mass slaughter by non-state agents. As we see, for instance, both ISIS and Boko Haram are perfectly capable of democide. They are also equal opportunity, avaricious killers. They murder for no apparent reason at all and for all sorts of reasons. And this is exactly what also happened to the Armenians. To call it genocide would be shortchanging, even disrespecting the victims. Their suffering and deaths were comprehensive. So should be our understanding of them.