To blame and what to blame?

Meditation No. 5, 2006, from the Capri Philosophical Park, on the Orhan Pamuk Nobel Prize.

Man has two dangerous weaknesses. His perspective is extremely limited to here-and-now. For everything that goes wrong, he also has an intense desire to find a scapegoat.

The Swedish Academy has given the 2006 Noble Prize for literature to a Turkish author. Except for the excellent literary merits of Orhan Pamuk there is also a political reason behind it, it has been insinuated[i]. Namely that Pamuk has tried to open a most infected Turkish wound, the genocide of Armenians.[ii]

The desire to find a scapegoat is, of course, intense in the Armenians. The Turks did it! The Turks are to blame! Hate them! However human that may be, does the Swedish Academy really want to nurture such feeling?

In the sciences the difficulty of pinpointing any deep explanation is well recognized. Close and easy ones are called “proximate”. The first and distant one is named the “ultimate”. Between the two, there may be so many steps that analysts complain about “infinite regress”.

To blame the genocide of the Armenians on the Turks is surely the simplest of “proximate” explanations. A somewhat more complex one would put the blame on the English, French and Russian attacks on the Ottoman empire in the second half of the 1800’s.

A third try may even put some blame on Alfred Nobel, who at this time was inventing dynamite and land mines[iii], utterly useful in this hot area. A fourth may go back to 1453.

There is much talk about the necessity to remember, so as not to repeat. We can hardly believe much in that. Our problem, in the nuclear age, is to give up ruminating what can be seen as claims for revenge. Instead we should devote our efforts to stop things like what right now is happening in Darfur, irrespective of all Noble Prize activities.

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If you do not look at history only with the here-and-now perspective, it can also be useful to go forward in time and ask how a given event, such as the Armenian disaster, can become a “proximate” cause for future events.

Have a look at the map, see how close Armenia is to Georgia, refresh your memory, and consider the fact that from that nation came a “Man of Steel”. It was in the same month of 1912 that the European powers forced the Turks to give up their beloved Adrianopolis that Stalin took that name. How much he, a leading Bolshevik, then an editor of revolutionary Pravda, was imprinted by all this West Asian mass murder, that we will never know.

Surely, however, when they took power, only half a dozen years later, these memories persisted in Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and other Bolsheviks. They may have increased the mental preparedness to commit mass murder. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy we manage to shoot, the better”, said Lenin.

Any genocide should, indeed, be strongly condemned. But there are degrees also in hell, and communists killed at least fifty times as many as the Turks killed Armenians.

The need for concentration camps was discussed by Lenin and Trotsky already in 1918[iv], years before Stalin became dictator. Already in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the sign “Through labour – freedom” was hanging in the Solovetsky concentration camp in the middle of the ice cold White Sea, “a slogan which is about as uncomfortably close as it is possible to get to the slogan that hang over the gates of Auschwitz: ‘Arbeit mach frei’- ‘Work Makes You Free.’”[v].

This pre-Stalin period is the beginning of the world’s most numerous holocaust.[vi] But, for some reasons it is not much discussed. Possibly because it demonstrates that all types of people, even, to our deep regrets, the Jewish minority in Russia could fall down to most brutish levels. This is what an equally honest as tragic study by a Russian-American Jew, Yuri Slezkine, recently has shown.[vii]

Hitler, like the early Churchill, was much scared by these early Bolshevik brutalities. Hitler instrumentalized them as his “proximate” reason for an abominable industrialized murder of Jews, Gipsies and other “Untermenschen”.

If you write in “holocaust” on Google, you get some 27 million items. The memorials to this horror are immensely numerous. The sitting President of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy has also made a contribution to this field.

Hitler’s murder of six million Jews then became the “proximate” reason for the founding of Israel in 1948.[viii] Which event tragically has given the world 58 years of continuous wars in the Middle East, just now culminating in the chaos of Iraq and the threat of another, in Iran.[ix] This time around the proliferation of nuclear weapons, arguably mankind’s most important problem.

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I doubt the usefulness, for anybody, of blowing up the memories of all the ugly things that human beings have done to each other since long before Alexander, Genghis Khan and Timurlane.. Especially when they are coupled with threats of revenge “...upon the children unto the third and fourth generation…”, thus justifying new genocides in aeternitatis.

What is more, all this blame may also be wrong and unjustified. After an “infinte regress” we may find it all to be the result of an “ultimate” biological explanation.

During the first six million years of mankind’s existence life was extremely precarious. Some twenty prototypes of modern man have disappeared. The Neanderthals were the latest. The average growth of human beings during these 99,8 percent of our life as non-chimps - that is before agriculture - was less than two individuals per year. In the unlikely case that two brothers reached adulthood together, Cainesque fratricide was necessary for survival. Life was brutal. Very brutal! And such is still some part of our biological inheritance.

If the Noble Prize Committee wants to continue fiddling with politics, it should at least try to find authors who strive to reveal and to soften the most brutishly predatory parts of our common human nature.

Thinks Gunnar Adler-Karlsson

www.philosophicalpark.org

adler.karlsson@capri.it

 

If any reader is interested in my sources, here are a few:



[i] See e.g. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Dead Reckoning.”, The New Yorker, Nov. 6, 2006, p. 120.

[ii] Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act. The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Metropolitan Books, New York 2006.

[iii] Nils K. Ståhle, Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm 1993, p. 7.

[iv] Dmitry S Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Soul. A Memoir. CUE Press, Budapest 2000, p. XI.

[v] Anne Applebaum, Gulag. A History of the Soviet Camps. Penguin Books 2004. (p. 173 on Arbeit macht frei.)

[vi] Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press, 2002.

[vii] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century. Princeton University Press, 2004.

[viii] A moving, classic book on the struggle to found Israel is Larry Collins and Dominque Lapierre, O Jerusalem. Simon & Schuster, New York 1972.

[ix] On the “proximate” cause of the present Middle Eastern chaos, see J.J.Mearsheimer & S.M. Walt in Foreign Policy, May/June and July/August 2006, with comments for and against; Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945. See especially the “Epilogue”, p. 803: “From the House of the Dead. An Essay on Modern European Memory.”, Heineman, London 2005.





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