Overcoming Laziness With The Word

Gunaysu: Denial Is a Hate Crime and Denialist Discourse Is Hate Speech

“It is as if a general orphan-like spirit floats over the [Muslim] quarter. Laziness, an apathetic attitude toward life is the character that appears among the Muslims. In contrast, if you enter the quarter of the Christians, your heart feels happiness; you find superbly constructed houses, which testify to the proprietors’ interested in life, and to their beautiful disposition, and clean and broad streets. In contrast to the immobility of the Muslims, the Christians are always on the move. In this respect, they enjoy the good things of life much more… The difference is even more obvious in regard to education. Whereas the Christian citizens generally know how to read and write, more or less, the Muslims are very much behind.” , a paper close to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The year was 1911—four years before the world’s first “modern” genocide was set into motion with a carefully designed plan.

And how did Ahmet Serif feel about the picture he vividly illustrated? “From the faces of the schoolgirls and schoolboys, life and vitality burst forth. Let us not lie: I did not feel admiration for this, but jealousy. I did not want to see this. Men were coming from America and I don’t know where, and creating in the most remote villages of Turkey models of civilization. Sad and ashamed as an Ottoman, I left,” he wrote after his visit to the American school in the town of Hajin in Adana. There was a significant Armenian population in Hajin, and the school was established by American Protestant missionaries like many others in old Armenia.

I am thankful to Hans-Lukas Kieser for bringing these quotations to light, for showing an Ittihadist intellectual’s outrageously blatant, audaciously straightforward, and unreservedly heartfelt confession of hate for everything good that did not belong to the Ottoman Muslims.

In his 2010 book Nearest East of the Ottoman Empire, where Armenian communities were ready to absorb and learn for social, intellectual, emotional, religious, and historical reasons. What struck me the most, however, was that unreserved expression of jealousy that, as we know, paved the way to hatred: “I did not feel admiration for this, but jealousy. I did not want to see this.”

It was hate, stemming not only from religious or ethnic reasons, but for social and economic reasons, that played a great part both in the genocidal will among large parts of the establishment and of the local population.