Book Review: "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else"

“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”:A History of the Armenian Genocideby Ronald Grigor SunyPrinceton University Press, 2015“The only weapon against bad history deployed for political or personal vindication is scrupulous investigation that results in evidence-based narration and analysis of what it is possible to know,” Ronald Grigor Suny writes at the beginning of his landmark new history of the Armenian Genocide, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else. “The proliferation of useable pasts and preferred realities is a challenge to historians. They can take some comfort in the thought that dangers lurk when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful and accurate readings of the world. Reality has a nasty habit of biting back.”That nifty phrase “preferred realities” strikes a resonant chord in any discussion of the Armenian Genocide, since its narrative has been the subject of infamous wrangling for 100 years, with vocal factions characterizing the whole event along nationalist lines, with the Young Turks of the rapidly-decaying Ottoman Empire increasingly coming to look upon the sizable population of Armenians among them as somehow enemies of the state – and equally-vocal factions seeking to overturn what Suny rightly mocks as the standard “denialist” summary: “there was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it.”Drawing on a vast array of archival material and eyewitness accounts of the Empire's persecution of its Armenian subjects in 1915-16, Suny paints a marvelously detailed picture of the complicated world from which the genocide eventually arose:

The elevation of the word Turk into a proud, national designation occurred quite rapidly. A Turkish novelist recalled, “In our childhood, Turk meant vulgar and wild (kaba ve yabani). We were of the community of Islam and Ottoman. In the books explaining the principles of Islam (ilmihal), our principal lesson [to learn] was that religion and nationality was one and the same. The word fatherland (vatan) was forbidden … We had been subjects of the Sultan. At the end of the school week, we lined up and shouted 'long live our sultan!'”

Suny's book is a comprehensive narrative of events and makes for grand, if grim, historical reading. By following events week-by-week and sometimes day-by-day, he's able to avoid the cast-in-stone sense of inevitability that wide-scale tragedies often invite. “The choice of genocide was not inevitable,” he insists. “Predicated on long-standing and ever more extreme affective dispositions and attitudes that had demonized the Armenians as a threat that needed to be dealt with, the ultimate choice was made by specific leaders at a particular historical conjuncture when the threat seemed to them most palpable.”And the most melancholy observation of the book is also every bit as pointed for the present era as it was a century ago:

Reversing an older image of ethnic violence as bubbling up from the masses below, this book locates the initiative and initiation of the Armenian Genocide in the highest levels of the state. The decisions, permission, and encouragement of a few in power provoked and stoked emotional resonance below. It turns out that a few killers can cause enormous destruction. Thugs, sadists, fanatics, and opportunists can with modern weaponry (or even with axes, clubs, and daggers) slaughter thousands with little more than acquiescence from the surrounding population.

“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else” will very likely be the standard account in English for the 21^st Century of the Armenian Genocide and its broader setting. The event itself was the first major genocide in what was to be an entire century of genocides, and Suny is keenly aware of the lessons it can teach about the horrors it initiated. The book is strongly recommended.