In Defense of Ethnic Cleansing

The Hutus claimed, as the Nazis had claimed about the Jews and the Turks had claimed about the Armenians, that the Tutsi were a mortal threat to their survival. There was nothing new in this: the great genocides have always been justified by those who initiate them as somehow pre-emptive.
David Rieff, Author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, etc.; Princeton Class of 1978

Had Turkification and Moslemization not been accelerated there by the use of force, there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, ...
Lewis V. Thomas (see below)

The following is an excerpt from the book The United States and Turkey and Iran, pp 60-61, written by the late Princeton professor Lewis V. Thomas along with Richard N. Frye in 1951. Thomas is fondly remembered by Princeton's current Department of Near Eastern Studies and is also the mentor of NES professor Norman Itzkowitz.

With Armenian nationalism the case was quite the opposite. Nineteenth-century Armenian nationalism produced supporters as fanatic as did Greek, but they never were able to achieve any comparable success, any sovereign Armenian nation-state which, however small for the time being, still could give them status among the nations of the world for today and tangible hopes for tomorrow. Instead, this unfortunate people dwelt either under the Sultan or under the Tsar, neither of which powers was in any sense willing to give the least real satisfaction to Armenian claims, although the Armenians' and Russians' common Christianity (albeit of hostile sects) did sometimes enable the Tsar to appear in the guise of the Armenian's protector.

Much of American missionary activity in the Ottoman world, a movement which began in the earlier nineteenth century and thereafter expanded with great rapidity and success, was directed to the Armenians. One of its major results--perhaps one should instead say "major by-products," for it was certainly not an intentional result and it horrified those keen-sighted missionaries who understood the ultimate implications of what was going on--was to strengthen Armenian nationalist hopes, or (to put it from the point of view of the Turks) to help transform young Armenians into potential revolutionaries against the Ottoman state. As the years went past, more and more of Anatolia's still large non-Moslem population thus became at least potential rebels while the impact of westernization and especially of western nationalism worked relentlessly upon them. And it was the Anatolian Armenians who, beyond all others, came to be regarded as "the" revolutionaries "par excellence," Only some of them merited this title, but events were moving too rapidly, and the region concerned was in every respect too backward, for careful distinctions of dispassionate judgment to be expected on the spot. History had transformed Anatolia into a tragic cockpit, a land inhabited by three mutual hostile parties, by three parties each of whom sensed that its eventual security could only be assured by obliterating the other two. No one has yet suggested any "practicable" way by which the forces leading to struggle could have been curbed, and few western critics have yet realized that those forces were, at base, themselves preponderantly "western" derived rather than local.

In this struggle, the Turks naturally held and eventually always maintained the upper hand. We ordinarily call the long series of events which by 1918 had resulted in the almost total excision of the Armenians from Anatolia "the Armenian massacres" and "the Armenian deportations." These terms are fully justified as they evoke a realization of the unrelieved tragedy which the Armenian Christian population of Turkey suffered under Abdul-Hamid II and the Young Turks. By nineteen-eighteen, this population had been almost totally liquidated: slain on the spot, or converted to Moslem faith and assimilated (many Anatolian Armenians had already long been wholly Turkified in language), or expelled beyond the frontiers. At the time, the western world professed to be, and in many cases unfeignedly was, deeply shocked at these events. They retain the power to shock us even today, although they dwindle into a sort of melancholy insignificance when compared with more recent happenings among the "thoroughly civilized" peoples of Europe. At least one may recall that the excision of Anatolia's Armenians occurred in a milieu where the masses of people on both sides still lived on a low, frequently even on a primitive, cultural level.

Recounting this grim story simply as a series of "massacres" and "deportations" would, however, tell only part of the tale. What the Ottomans had to deal with was unquestionably a slow-burning rebellion. The Armenians' suffering do not cancel out the facts that many of them were potential rebels against the state and that final disaster did not overtake them until when, during the first World War and with a Russian army deep within Turkey, many Moslem Turks finally became convinced that their Armenian "fellow-citizens" were serving as an active fifth column delivering them over to their greatest and most merciless foe. That conviction was doubtless greatly exaggerated, but it had enough basis in fact that one can only dismiss it if one is willing to argue that the Turks should not have moved to save themselves.

By 1918, with the definitive excision of the total Armenian Christian population from Anatolia and the Straits Area, except for a small and wholly insignificant enclave in Istanbul city, the hitherto largely peaceful processes of Turkification and Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force. How else can one assess the final blame except to say that this was a tragic consequence of the impact of western European nationalism upon Anatolia? Had Turkification and Moslemization not been accelerated there by the use of force, there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.