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  • Do you know the difference between a Holocaust and a holocaust? The

    http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/robert-fisk
    Robert Fisk
    Sunday 30 November 2014

    Do you know the difference between a Holocaust and a holocaust?
    The Armenians do

    Despite what some sub-editors might think, the genocide of 1.5m Armenian
    Christians in 1915 was not a holocaust
    1 / 1
    Soldiers standing over skulls of victims from the Armenian village of
    Sheyxalan in 1915, believed to be victims of the Armenian Holocaust
    AFP

    What's in a name? Let's start with the Persian Gulf. Or the Arabian Gulf.
    Or just the Arab Gulf. I'm indebted to reader (and surgeon) Ross Farhadieh
    for complaining to me last week about my use of "The Gulf"

    -
    bland, dull and historically anaemic - in a column on Iran and its possible
    return to geopolitical power in the Middle East
    .
    Historically, legally - and in the UN - Ross told me, it should be called
    the Persian Gulf. It was Gamal Abdul Nasser's nationalism which renamed it
    the "Arabian Gulf".

    And Ross is right. And I think I know the background to this slippage in
    nomenclature. When I worked in the Middle East for* The Times* - long
    before Murdoch emasculated the paper - we found that whenever we referred
    to the Persian Gulf, Arab states would refuse to let the paper go on sale
    in Dubai or Cairo. But whenever we called it the Arabian Gulf, the paper
    was not allowed into Iran.

    So we went for "The Gulf". Maybe this was a bit cowardly - I wasn't
    involved in the decision - but many other papers followed suit. The British
    press was not going to be censored in the Middle East if a little
    historical obfuscation could be built in to our copy. The Independent,
    still unborn at the time, referred quite innocently to The Gulf once it
    began publication - probably without the slightest idea of why it didn't
    carry the Persian or Arabian appellation.
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    We'd always had a faintly similar problem with Northern Ireland. In the
    worst days of the war there, we on The Times often used "Ulster" as
    shorthand for the six-county province - only to find that Irish readers in
    the Republic took great exception to the name. Ulster, they rightly pointed
    out, historically contained nine counties, which included the three
    counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, which the Protestant seigneurs of
    the north declined to accept in Northern Ireland because (of course) these
    three counties had too many Catholics. Irish republicans - or just plain
    Irish citizens - preferred the "Six Counties" or, at a push, Northern
    Ireland. They were right. But since The Times still sold in the Republic,
    we went on using Ulster when we felt like it. Indeed, my first book on
    Irish history included the word Ulster in the title. And it meant six, not
    nine, counties.

    I tended to take a harsher view of countries whose titles began with the
    words "the People's Democratic Republic of" - mainly because they
    invariably belonged to their dictators rather than their people, and were
    neither popular nor democratic. Yemen - or the PDRY - for example. So we
    called it just Yemen - or Algeria, which also likes to call itself popular
    and democratic.

    Then we had to acknowledge Father Time. My dad, a veteran of what he called
    "The Great War" of 1914-18, went on calling it that long after the second
    and even more titanic bloodbath had been fought around the world. The Brits
    officially decided to call the Great War the First World War - in, I think,
    1948 - because they had to yield to history. My dad's war had not proved to
    be the war to end all wars after all, and we had to acknowledge that. I
    still like the epic ring of The Great War - but by 1945, the Great bit
    simply didn't work any more.

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    Other Great War events remain contentious, not least what I always refer to
    as the Armenian Holocaust (with a capital "H"), the genocide of 1.5m
    Armenian Christians at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman government in 1915.
    It was the first industrialised genocide of the last century - the second
    being the Jewish Holocaust - and the two mass acts of slaughter had clear
    historical connections. The Turks suffocated thousands of Armenians in
    caves - by blowing smoke from bonfires into the cavities where they had
    imprisoned them in the Syrian desert - and thus created the first primitive
    gas chambers.

    Armenian men were sometimes taken to their execution in railway goods
    wagons. And junior members of the German Kaiser's army who were training
    the Turkish army at the time witnessed the genocide; more importantly, some
    of the names of these Germans turned up less than a quarter of a century
    later as members of Hitler's Wehrmacht in the Ukraine and Belarus, where
    they were helping to organise the mass killing of Jews. There's no doubt
    where they learned how to do that.

    [image: An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian
    population; many were either killed or died of starvation during the
    journey]
    An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian population;
    many were either killed or died of starvation during the journey Many years
    ago, therefore, I used the phrase "Armenian Holocaust" in The Independent.
    A sub-editor immediately changed the capital H to a lower-case h. My phone
    did not stop ringing. Armenians were outraged. Why did they not deserve a
    capital H, they demanded to know? Didn't the Turks murder enough Armenians
    to qualify them for a capital H? I wrote a long memorandum to my then
    editor, Simon Kelner, explaining that it was racist to make a distinction
    between two genocides; we could not base our definition on the numerical
    difference between 1,500,000 and 6,000,000. Besides, Israelis (as opposed
    to the state of Israel, which doesn't even regard the Armenian catastrophe
    as a genocide) refer to the Armenian massacres as the Armenian Shoah -
    using the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Kelner later published my memo as an
    article in The Independent - and it won the DC Watt journalism award.

    But we newspaper folk have poor institutional memories. Earlier this month,
    I again referred to the Armenian Holocaust - and a sub-editor, unfamiliar
    with the expression, innocently downgraded the poor old Armenians again. He
    changed the capital H into h! My phone trilled once more. The same
    unanswerable arguments. Didn't the Turks kill enough of us, my Armenian
    callers asked again? So of course we sheepishly upgraded the Armenians on
    the website version of my report and returned to them their capital H...

    And of course, I haven't even begun to address today the use of that
    generic, racist (in its use), pejorative and repulsive word "terrorist". I
    only use it in inverted commas for direct quotations. But what can we do
    when the masters of the universe - America and that dreadful chap who's
    just won a Save the Children award - long ago embarked on an everlasting
    "War on Terror"?

    Give me the Persian Gulf any day.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/do-you-know-the-difference-between-a-holocaust-and-a-holocaust-the-armenians-do-9894346.html

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