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Armenians And Orthodoxy

In an otherwise superb piece on the (often cynical) political and lobbying battle over the Armenian genocide resolution, Michael Crowley has this unfortunate line: Most Armenian-Americans are descended from survivors of the slaughter and grew up listening to stories about how the Turks, suspecting the Orthodox Christian Armenians of collaborating with their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians [bold […]

In an otherwise superb piece on the (often cynical) political and lobbying battle over the Armenian genocide resolution, Michael Crowley has this unfortunate line:

Most Armenian-Americans are descended from survivors of the slaughter and grew up listening to stories about how the Turks, suspecting the Orthodox Christian Armenians of collaborating with their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians [bold mine-DL] during World War I, led their grandparents on death marches, massacred entire villages, and, in one signature tactic, nailed horseshoes to their victims’ feet.

This is almost entirely right, which makes the mistake all the more glaring.  Diasporan Armenians often do talk of nothing else when it comes to politics, and the official Turkish line is that Armenian collaboration with the Russians was the “justification” for the deportation of Armenians “away from” the front lines.  However, the main descriptive error here is obvious, or should be, since Armenian Apostolic Christians are of a different confession from the Russians and have been for a very, very long time.  Ironically, this allowed the Armenians inside Russia to enjoy relatively greater ecclesiastical independence as a non-Orthodox church than other non-Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Georgian, but that is a different matter.  The difference here is crucial because the genocide occurred against the “loyal” millet, the one Christian community that could not be directly implicated in the designs of Russian or Greek or some other Orthodox state’s foreign policy, because they were not Eastern Orthodox and were under their own religious authority that had no ties to Moscow or any other center of Orthodoxy.  There were some Armenian revolutionaries who sided against the Central Powers in the war, but they were not representative of Armenians in general, much less could the entire community be reasonably held responsible for the actions of a relative few.  This is what made the genocide that much more shocking and terrible to the Armenians–unlike the other Christian minorities, they had by and large remained loyal and law-abiding subjects.  For the ideologues of the CUP, however, one Christian minority was as much of a threat as any other.  To do full justice to the history of the genocide, it is exactly the difference between Armenian and Orthodox Christians that must be kept in mind.

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