Scholarship, Manufacturing Doubt, and Genocide Denial (1)
The Armenian Weekly April 2013 Magazine
(Download in PDF)
Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with
the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.
It is also the means of establishing a controversy…
– Brown & Williamson tobacco company memorandum (1969) (2)
Denial of the Armenian Genocide began concurrently with the execution
of the Armenian Genocide. As the Ottoman-Armenian population was
massacred and deported, the Ottoman leadership constructed a narrative
that, with periodic revisions and refinements, remains in place today:
Armenians were disloyal and rebellious, a threat to security and the war
effort; it was therefore necessary to temporarily relocate them; and
measures would be taken to protect them and safeguard their property and
assets.
Each element of this narrative, and each measure taken to give it
substance, was a fabrication. What was important, however, was that each
part of it could be made to appear true. The fabrications came to be
accepted as truth in Turkey as Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the new
Turkish Republic, institutionalized the official narrative about the
Armenians that had already been drafted by the Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP) leadership that planned and implemented the genocide. (3)
This was all well and good for Turkey, but it was one thing to
manufacture a fake history for the consumption of its own people, and
quite another to export it to foreign markets such as the United States,
where the genocide had been heavily reported in the press and public
sentiment aroused to assist survivors. (4)
Today, nearly 100 years on, there is a large and constantly growing
body of research and documentation of the Armenian Genocide that
increasingly draws on previously inaccessible Ottoman-Turkish archival
sources. Even in Turkey, a growing number of people question the
government-mandated version of events. An observer could be forgiven for
supposing that denial of the Armenian Genocide must be nearly
non-existent at this point.
And yet denial of the Armenian Genocide is seeping into academia and
mainstream discourse. In an earlier article, (5) I explored “how
genocide denial has evolved a more effective model that seeks to
establish itself as the legitimate ‘other side of the story.’” I would
like here to delve further back and look at the potential roots of some
of the modern strategies used by the Turkish state and those who aid its
efforts to “manufacture doubt” about the Armenian Genocide. This calls
for an examination of the cigarette industry’s 50-plus-year effort to
create a permanent smokescreen of controversy around the “alleged” link
between smoking and cancer, as Big Tobacco provided a paradigm for other
large-scale efforts to deny unpleasant truths—including modern denial
of the Armenian Genocide.
***
How it came to pass that Armenian Americans began to raise the issue
of recognition of and justice for the Armenian Genocide, particularly
after 1965 and with increased intensity in the 1970’s, is a complex
story. (6) In brief, a generation of scholars and activists began an
effort to educate the wider American public about the crime that had
been committed decades before, and to work for recognition and
ultimately justice.
By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Turkey was on the defensive in
this public relations war in the U.S. (7) Even though Turkey had, for
decades, relied on state-to-state contact with the U.S. and called upon
the U.S. Department of State to represent its interests (8) in the name
of preserving good relations with an important trading partner and
post-World War II military ally, this was no longer sufficient in the
public realm. For Turkey, the solution was to try to
win the public relations war. (9) This required expanding its range of responses to the problem.
The renewed vigor and relative success of Armenian-American activism
after 1965 must have taken Turkey by surprise. In this period, it was
not until 1975 that Federal Foreign Agents Registration Act reports show
Turkey engaging public relations firms for purposes other than travel
and tourism promotion. (10) In 1975, Turkey began working with Manning,
Selvage, & Lee, Inc., “a public relations firm [that] disseminates
material on behalf of the Government of Turkey for the purpose of
influencing ‘the attitude of the public and the Congress toward
Turkey.’” In the following years, other firms would be added: Edelman
International Inc., Doremus, and most importantly, Gray & Co., (11)
and Hill & Knowlton.
***
In establishing a relationship with Hill & Knowlton, Turkey
attached itself to one of the largest and most influential public
relations firms in the world, with considerable experience in the kind
of narrative re-framing that Turkey needed. It was Hill & Knowlton
that in the 1950’s had devised a PR strategy for Big Tobacco when it was
confronted with mounting scientific evidence of the direct tie between
smoking and lung cancer. (12) Articles had appeared in scientific
journals and widely read popular pieces were spreading the news to a
broader readership. The industry faced a public relations nightmare and
falling stock prices. (13)
On Dec. 15, 1953, the heads of the major tobacco companies held an
unprecedented summit to address these developments which threatened
their lucrative businesses. In attendance was John Hill of Hill &
Knowlton, who formulated a plan that would allow the industry to stall
for decades and to shape the discussion around a manufactured
“controversy” rather than the emerging scientific consensus. In the
words of author and cancer researcher Devra Davis, this plan:
can be summed up very simply: create
doubt. Be prepared to buy the best expertise available to insist that
more research is needed before conclusions can be reached. [The tobacco
industry] would marshal its own experts to magnify the appearance of a
scientific debate long after the science was in fact unequivocal. John
Hill’s brilliant innovation remains a staple for those who would fight
the conclusions of science even today. (14)
One of Hill’s immediate recommendations was “a public statement by
cigarette makers” that would “clarify the problem and reassure the
public that: (a) the industry’s first and foremost interest is the
public health; (b) there is no proof of the claims which link smoking
and lung cancer; and (c) the industry is inaugurating a joint plan to
deal with the situation.” (15)
Less than a month after the meeting, an ad appeared in the New York
Times and more than 400 other newspapers over the names of the
presidents of most of the major cigarette manufacturers and tobacco
growers entitled, without apparent irony, “A Frank Statement to
Cigarette Smokers.” Admitting that recent reports “have given wide
publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with
lung cancer in human beings,” the statement cautioned that the recent
findings “are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer
research” and “eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly
questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.” Finally, they
announced the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee
(TIRC), (16) headed by “a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and
national repute” and guided by “an Advisory Board of scientists
disinterested in the cigarette industry.” (17)
Historian of science Robert N. Proctor notes that the TIRC, later
renamed the Council for Tobacco Research, for decades “was the world’s
leading sponsor of (what appeared to be) tobacco and health research.”
(18) However, “[t]he goal was really to look in such a way as not to
find, and then to claim that despite the many millions spent on ‘smoking
and health’ no proof of harms had ever been uncovered.” (19)
Through a combination of its influence as a major American industry
and the credibility by association generated by funding research at
institutions of higher learning, “the industry was able to clog
congressional hearings, to distort popular understanding, and to delay
or weaken legislation designed to regulate smoking. … Tobacco charlatans
gained a voice before the U.S. Congress and were often able even to
insinuate themselves into peer-reviewed literature.” (20)
A 1972 memo by Fred Panzer, vice president of public relations of the
industry-run Tobacco Institute, offered qualified praise for the nearly
20-year-long strategy of “creating doubt about the health charge
without actually denying it,” but cautioned that this commitment “to an
ill-defined middle ground which is articulated by variations on the
theme that, ‘the case is not proved’” has “always been a holding
strategy.” (21)
“Manufacturing doubt” may have been only a “holding strategy,” but it
worked for over half a century. In the end it could not prevent the
onslaught of costly legal actions, resulting, most notably, in the 1998
Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (22) and a 2006 court ruling that
“found 11 of America’s major Tobacco Companies and related entities
guilty of nearly 150 counts of mail and wire fraud in a continuing
‘pattern of racketeering activity’ with the ‘specific intent to defraud’
under the Racketeer Influence Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.” (23)
As part of the 1998 settlement, the Tobacco Institute and the Council
for Tobacco Research were shut down.
***
The Turkish state did not learn denial from the American tobacco
industry or American public relations firms. But by the early 1980’s, it
had reached a moment of crisis analogous to that of the tobacco
industry ca. 1953-54, and new conditions required new methods of
obfuscating the truth. Some of these new methods were old hat for
Turkey’s PR advisors.
Speros Vryonis has written of the impact of the appointment of Şükrü
Elekdağ as Turkish ambassador to the United States in 1980, of the
“profuse” and “organized” public relations and propaganda output during
his tenure, and in particular of his inauguration of “a new policy in
the vast world of American academe.” (24) The public relations push was
multifaceted. (25) An immediate need was to become more effective in
countering Armenian-American efforts to secure U.S. recognition of the
genocide, and here the expertise and connections of Turkey’s new PR and
lobbying partners would prove invaluable in defeating Congressional
resolutions, most dramatically in 1990, as well as preventing any
recurrence of a sitting president publicly uttering the words, “Armenian
Genocide.” (26)
Another component was to present a more appealing image of Turkey in
order to counter the reality of the genocide, ongoing abuses of human
rights, the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the brutality of the 1980
military coup, and the violent repression of the Kurds. A major effort
on this front was the 1987 “Age of Süleyman the Magnificent” exhibition
at the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and
Metropolitan Museum of Art—an exhibition underwritten by American
tobacco giant Philip Morris at a cost of close to $1 million. (27)
Of particular interest to Turkey was “to rectify substantial factual
errors about contemporary Turkey and Turkish history contained in
secondary school social science textbooks…[and] standard reference
encyclopedias.” (28) Just as the tobacco companies viewed children as
potential future customers, Turkey understood the value of exposing
students to their version of history. Such an effort would be
facilitated by having work at hand by credentialed Western scholars
presenting a version of history sympathetic to Turkey’s official
narrative.
Thus a key element of Turkey’s long-range plan was to expand upon the
small group of American scholars producing work that emphasized in a
positive sense Turkey’s role in the world. By funding and encouraging
further scholarship, it would be possible to cultivate academics who
could produce a credible-looking body of Turkey-friendly and, in some
cases, genocide-denying scholarship.
It may be that with its increased influence in the world, the Turkish
state wanted more than simply to get its way by asserting its will: It
wanted its narrative to be
believed and legitimized.
Bobelian writes that “[a]fter the 1990 confrontation in the Senate, the
tide turned against Turkey’s distortions of history. … As time went on,
fewer and fewer elected officials maintained their faith in Turkey’s
position,” (29) even if they continued to vote for it. In 2000, Şükrü
Elekdağ observed that a Congressional genocide resolution failed “mainly
because the winds of war began to blow in the Middle East.” (30) In
2007, after the House Foreign Relations Committee voted on another
resolution, the late Turkish commentator, diplomat, and Member of
Parliament Gunduz Aktan understood that even those “supporting the
Turkish case…said loud and clear that the events of 1915 amounted to
genocide,” and only “because of the strategic importance of Turkey,
because of the national interest of the U.S., they are voting no.” For
Aktan, this realization was “unbearable.” (31) Once, it might have been
sufficient simply to prevail, but no longer. Genocide denial needed to
be made respectable, pedigreed, and not simply something one voted for
while holding one’s nose.
Taking a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, Turkey created its own
version of the Council for Tobacco Research—the Institute of Turkish
Studies, directed by Ottoman scholar Heath Lowry—to boost Turkey’s
scholarly bona fides. Established in 1982 through an initial grant of $3
million from the Turkish government, ITS generated prestige by
association, disbursing funds to scholars associated with many
illustrious American colleges and universities.
Vryonis, as well as, most vividly, Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and
Robert J. Lifton (32) have shown that ITS also served the interests of
the Turkish Embassy (the Turkish ambassador serves as “honorary
chairman” of its board of governors); and, as the late Donald Quataert
would learn, breaking with Turkey’s official line carried with it
serious consequences, as he was forced out as chairman after
acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. (33)
Like the Tobacco Industry Research Committee/Council for Tobacco
Research, ITS has funded many entirely legitimate scholars and projects.
But just as the TIRC “didn’t pay a lot of attention to tobacco and
tended not to fund research that might cast cigarettes in a bad light,”
(34) so, too, ITS-supported scholarship has not paid much attention to
the Armenians, much less the Armenian Genocide. (35) Surely, this is
what Quataert had in mind when he wrote (in the review that sealed his
fate at ITS) that a “heavy aura of self-censorship” prevails among
Ottoman scholars, who “fall into a camp of either silence or denial—both
of which are forms of complicity.” (36)
By the year 2000, Şükrü Elekdağ would complain that ITS had “lost its
function and its effectiveness,” from which one infers that he
conceived of its function being something more than funding scholarly
research. Instead, he urged the creation of a “project to make it quite
clear that [Turkey] is not at all afraid to confront the realities of
its past, a project aimed at shedding light on the historical facts in
the course of academic research.” (37)
Turkey’s version of Big Tobacco’s “Frank Statement” took the form of
the notorious 1985 advertisement in the New York Times and Washington
Post urging the U.S. Congress
not to pass a resolution
recognizing the genocide as such—with the names of 69 scholars who
questioned the appropriateness of using the word “genocide” to refer to
“Armenian suffering” during World War I.
The ad, taken out by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations
(ATAA) but co-authored by Heath Lowry, (38) argued that “the weight of
evidence so far uncovered points in the direction of inter-communal
warfare. … But much more remains to be discovered before historians will
be able to sort out precisely responsibility between warring and
innocent, and to identify the causes for the events…” (39)
As Proctor writes of Big Tobacco, for decades it “urged the need for
‘more research,’ with the claim sometimes even made that it was
dangerous to jump to conclusions, given that the case was not yet
closed. And that, of course, is how the industry wanted the health
‘question’ kept: forever open.” (40)
Turkey deployed the “69 scholars statement” in much the same manner
as the tobacco companies used the “Frank Statement” and similar
documents: “to clog congressional hearings, to distort popular
understanding, and to delay or weaken legislation.” But it, too,
eventually exhausted its usefulness; and Elekdağ would complain that
“[u]nfortunately this document cannot be used effectively now. Many of
the people who signed it are now hesitant or afraid to come out and
declare their continuing support for it. … With the exception of Justin
McCarthy none of them is prepared to sign a similar communique today.”
(41)
Since 2000, when Elekdağ voiced his discontent with what might be
called the “holding strategy” employed up to that time, the Turkish
state and those who support it have ratcheted up their efforts. (42)
When the creation of the “Turkish Studies Project” (funded not by the
Turkish government but by the Turkish Coalition of America) at the
University of Utah was announced, (43) it was hardly surprising that
Şükrü Elekdağ was on its advisory board, since the effort could be seen
as the fulfillment of his vision.
In future articles, I will take a closer look at the rhetoric and
techniques of this ongoing and evolving academic campaign to roll out a
“counter-genocide narrative” for the purpose of creating a permanent
haze of doubt around the Armenian Genocide, and normalizing and
legitimizing the Turkish state’s narrative of genocide denial.
Doubt is Turkey’s product, too, and the factory is humming.
Notes
(1) The author wishes to thank Armenian Weekly Editor Khatchig
Mouradian, Michael Bobelian, Ayda Erbal, Richard Hovannisian, and Roger
Smith for their helpful comments, and Lou Ann Matossian for her
important research and contributions.
(2) Quoted in,
inter alia, David Michaels,
Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), x. For original document, see Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/nvs40f00.
(3) Cf. Taner Akçam,
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 184; Fatma Ülgen, “Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian Genocide of 1915,”
Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 44, no. 4 (2010), p. 390, and see also Ülgen,
Sabiha Gökçen‘s 80-Year-Old Secret: Kemalist Nation Formation and the Ottoman Armenians (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2010), pp. 290ff.
(4) See Richard D. Kloian,
The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press, 1915-1922, 4th ed. (Richmond, CA: Heritage Publishing, 2007).
(5) “Tlön, Turkey, and the Armenian Genocide,”
Armenian Weekly, April 2012
(6) See Michael Bobelian,
Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), for an in-depth account.
(7) For example, Congressional resolutions were passed in 1975 (House
Joint Resolution 148) and 1984 (House Joint Resolution 247), and
President Ronald Reagan referred to “the genocide of the Armenians” in a
proclamation of April 22, 1981.
(8) Most famously in the 1930’s when MGM’s plans to film Franz Werfel’s
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh were quashed. See Edward Minasian,
Musa Dagh (Cold River Studio, 2007).
(9) This was not an entirely new concept for Turkey. In the 1920’s
and 1930’s Turkey worked to create a favorable image of itself in the
United States, especially through the efforts of Admiral Mark Bristol
and the American Friends of Turkey. See Bobelian, p. 77; Levon
Marashlian,
The Armenian Question from Sevres to Lausanne (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA, 1992); Roger R. Trask,
American Response to Turkish Nationalism and Reform 1914-1939 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1971), p. 244.
(10) See
www.fara.gov/annualrpts.html.
(11) On Robert K. Gray and Gray and Co., see Susan Trento,
The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Gray was an executive at Hill &
Knowlton from the early 1960’s until spinning off his own firm, Gray
& Co., in 1981; and in 1986 Gray & Co. merged with Hill &
Knowlton.
(12) See “The Hill & Knowlton Documents: How the Tobacco Industry
Launched Its Disinformation Campaign,” a Staff Report, Majority Staff
Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, U.S. House of
Representatives, May 26, 1994, at
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ehb20d00; Stanton A. Glantz, John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, and Deborah E. Barnes, eds.,
The Cigarette Papers (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2005); David Michaels,
Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert N. Proctor,
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), etc.
(13) Proctor, p. 222.
(14) Devra Davis,
The Secret History of the War on Cancer (New York: Basic Books, 2007), pp. 150-151.
(15) See
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/brd30f00/pdf.
(16) Hill himself suggested that the word “research” to appear in the
name, presumably to bolster the appearance of scientific objectivity.
(17) For the full “Frank Statement,” see
www.tobacco.neu.edu/litigation/cases/supportdocs/frank_ad.htm.
(18) Proctor, p. 260.
(19)
Ibid., p. 261.
(20)
Ibid., pp. 278-279.
(21) See
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/quo14e00.
(22) See
http://oag.ca.gov/tobacco/msa.
(23) Ronald Goodbread, “RICO Convictions of Major Tobacco Companies Affirmed,” in
The Daily Washington Law Reporter, May 12, 2011; see
www.dwlr.com/blog/2011-05-12/rico-convictions-major-tobacco-companies-affirmed.
(24) Speros Vryonis, Jr.,
The Turkish State and History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf, 2nd edition (Thessalonike: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1993), p. 86.
(25) See Vryonis, pp. 115-116.
(26) See Bobelian, esp. chapter “Legislating History.”
(27)
Ibid., p. 87, and see exhibition book
The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New
York, 1987). Philip Morris International is a member of the American
Turkish Council and reportedly lobbied against the 2007 Congressional
genocide recognition resolution; see Kate Ackley, “Companies Line Up
With Turkey: Many Fear Impact of Resolution on 1915 Killing of
Armenians,”
Roll Call, March 28, 2007.
(28) Vryonis, p. 116.
(29) Bobelian, p. 206.
(30)
Turkish Daily News, Oct. 24, 2000.
(31) Quoted in “Turkish MPs: Bush Administration Must Make Goodwill Gesture to Compensate for US House Committee Vote,”
www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav101107a.shtml.
(32) “Professional Ethics and Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed.,
Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).
(33) See Lou Ann Matossian, “Institute of Turkish Studies Chair was Ousted for Acknowledging Genocide,”
Armenian Reporter, May 31, 2008.
(34) Proctor, p. 260.
(35) A review of ITS grants on its website, which covers 1993 to the present, supports this.
(36) Donald Quataert, “The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 37, no. 2 (Autumn 2006), pp. 249, 258.
(37)
Turkish Daily News, Oct. 24, 2000.
(38) Vryonis, pp. 110-111.
(39) For a great deal more information, Vryonis’s lengthy discussion of the advertisement in
The Turkish State and History and “U.S. Academicians and Lobbying: Turkey Uses Advertisement as a Political Tool” (
Journal of the Armenian Assembly of America, vol. 14, no. 1 [Spring 1987]) are recommended.
(40) Proctor, pp. 262-263.
(41)
Turkish Daily News, Oct. 24, 2000.
(42) To date, the most detailed examination of this is Jennifer
Dixon, “Defending the Nation? Maintaining Turkey’s Narrative of the
Armenian Genocide,”
South European Society and Politics, vol. 15, no. 3, September 2010, pp. 467–485.
(43) See
http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/031009-1.html.
The formal name of the project is “The Origins of Modern Ethnic
Cleansing: The Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of
Nation States in the Balkans and Caucasus.”
By
Marc Mamigonian
